I think we have heard it a couple of times? “Dana’s mom died, and instead of being there for her when she was feeling bad, her roommate Sarah called her dad and got her taken out of college and ruined her life.” Ignore everything that doesn’t make Sarah look as bad as possible, and tell it to everyone she meets at the slightest provocation.
Sarah did it first. No reason to keep around someone who does stuff like that when it clashes with the rest of the group’s sensibilities and priorities that hard.
You mean that time Sarah first went to Raidah & Co. to try to get them to find a way to help Dana other than just waiting for everything to blow over, and then when they flat-out refused, she finally resorted to contacting Dana’s father about the situation?
Because that’s what happened. I’m sure Sarah wasn’t the best person to be Dana’s roomie at that point–hell, Sarah’s sure of it, too, for that matter–but I don’t see her actions as deliberately ‘jettisoning’ anyone. Dana’s father was the one who decided to remove Dana, presumably so he could help her get well again with a bit more direct supervision.
Yeah, I think Carl’s very (stoned) words were “I know Dana, she will bounce back” – this after he had not had one sober conversation with Dana after her mom died. None of them had any idea what was happening or any interest in doing anything to support their friend who, to reiterate, was grieving for her mom.
It’s interesting that they still aren’t curious. They have apparently never even considered if Sarah might have had other reasons for taking action besides being a narc and a life-ruiner who takes pleasure in spoiling everyone’s fun so they stop bothering her. They have the narrative of Sarah being a villain and that’s all they need.
Or, as we have seen, it’s all they need until they start gossiping about Sarah to people who then get to hear her version. That’s so going to blow up in Raidah’s face and I can’t wait for it.
Okay, correction, Carl’s very words were “Don’t worry, I know her. She will snap back to normal eventually”. And he wasn’t stoned. Don’t put me in webcomic jail for slander your honor.
She deliberately jettisoned Dana from her life. That’s what happened. I’m not saying it wasn’t justified, but that’s what happened. When someone does that to a member of your friend group, jettisoning them is a completely valid response. Especially if from jump that person made it as difficult as possible to be friends with them. There was no earthly reason to keep Sarah around after what she did. You may not have noticed, but this is a comic where tattling to Dads usually breaks pretty badly for the daughter.
Sarah did what needed to be done for her, and that’s valid. The friend group she burned doing the same in return is equally valid. Sarah was toxic for that friend group, and that friend group was toxic for her. Joyce loves Sarah as she is, which none of that old friend group seemed to do.
It is completely valid to remove from your life someone who takes executive decisions over other people’s lives without their consent. It feels fucking bad. Developing a weird multi-step plan to ruin any attachments that person has primarily via the medium of passive-aggressive brunches is less valid.
Unless, of course, that person purposefully weaponized her new roommate to ruin your romantic relationship with an absolute catch of a man. Then ruining her close relationships might make more sense. Good thing Sarah never did that!
This read only works if you believe Sarah had the ability to know exactly what Dana’s father would do. That’s a pretty hefty level of omniscience you’re putting on her–knowing the psyche of a man she’d probably never met, nor heard much about.
And calling Dana’s father was NOT her first choice–her initial effort was at getting Dana into therapy, but Dana’s oh-so-dedicated friends did jack-fucking-shit to help on that front. Sarah had no resources of her own to call on, so yes, she reached out to the one person she knew was responsible for Dana’s well-being. (If she’d just wanted Dana out of school, she could have just called the campus administration–“My roommate is doing drugs and it’s interfering with my studies” would’ve been a much surer way to get Dana booted from school in a heartbeat.
As for “tattling to Dads” in this comic… First off, Sarah doesn’t actually read this comic. She has no idea she’s in a constructed narrative where ‘being a parent’ and ‘being a monster’ are damned near synonymous. In the real world, calling Dana’s father was the right freaking call, even if it led to less than ideal consequences (which is something we still don’t really know for sure–we only have Raidah’s word for it that Dana isn’t doing well, and that was from months ago).
Now, since the flashback era, Sarah’s done some deeply and profoundly messed-up crap, it’s true. Both assaulting Raidah and then the whole Jacob mess are on her, 100%.
But we’ve also seen her try to be better–she actually listened when Joyce asked her to NOT call her parents, even though she was seriously worried about Joyce’s health. And she’s taken a big sister role in Joyce’s life since then, even taking it so far as to be a better sibling to her actual little sister.
Raidah, meanwhile, seems to actually be getting worse than her first-semester self.
My read is that Sarah should have assaulted Raidah earlier. 🙂
But I read those initial couple incidents of harassment of Sarah we saw at the start of the comic as something that had been going on all last year, since the Dana incident and were starting up again with the new semester. They stopped cold after the punch.
Maybe that’s not the intent, but that’s how I read it.
Trying to break up Jacob and Raidah was bad, but she did try to stop it. Joyce was already too invested for herself by then though.
Yeah, I’m pretty much non-violent in most circumstances, but if my read on events is at all accurate, it seems to have worked here when nothing else had.
Sarah did not make the choice to remove Dana from school. And of the options available, we don’t know whether removing Dana from school was the best option or not but notifying Dana’s father was certainly one of the only options available to Sarah, the other one being reporting Dana’s substance use to the school. Your friend having to leave your friend group *so they can get help for their substance abuse problem* is not toxic. Getting your friend into treatment for their addiction is not toxic. What is toxic is doing nothing to help your depressed and drowning friend. If Dana had left school to be hospitalized instead of to get addiction treatment, Raidah and the others would’ve blamed Sarah just as much for not preventing Dana’s addiction from escalating.
I actually don’t think they would have blamed Sarah for that. It’s a trolley problem thing – action you DON’T take just doesn’t count as much, to most people’s ethics sense, as action you DO take. From their point of view Sarah overstepped. They themselves were holding back to not overstep. That is, for Raidah, the right thing to do.
That’s not what happened. Sarah wasn’t trying to get rid of Dana – she was trying to get Dana help. Because she had a problem. A problem that was so bad it affected other people around her – endangering Sarah’s ability to continue to BE at that school.
Yeah… the read being applied here to the Sarah/Dana situation is **very** biased and utterly lacks the insight Booster has for things. Probably time to turn in the username.
Char’s last name was Meleon. But she got married off screen to a man named Mr. Izard. After which some say she had somewhat of an evolution and she gained the ability to fly. On a plane. Out of Indiana. To live with her new husband. Who lives in Japan. Somewhere in the Kantou Region in Honshu.
Yeah honestly wish it wasn’t so hard to catch her. But ever since she went to Japan she stopped feeling Blue. Though since she’s new to the country she’s still a little Green.
I really hope Dana returns someday. I want to see her back and thriving to just really explode Raidah’s idea of what happened to her. Just completely shatter that reality.
I want this to be the case so much, I’m hoping the way Carla outing Billie and Ruth resulted in Ruth getting better even if it meant her horrible grandpa paying her a visit is foreshadowing.
That would be perfect actually. She returned after break and no one knows because she’s just been avoiding her old “peer group” as Raidah would say. Maybe she’s chilling with Alice. That one girl Jennifer was bffs with in high school, just living an interesting life away from the DoA cast until it’s dramatically appropriate.
There are so many similar characteristics between Radiah and Jennifer I would have no problem believing their former best friends see them the same way. Jennifer was so oblivious to being cut out of Alison’s life I could see Radiah being the same.
Walky and or Lucy are gonna cause shit with Sarah because they’ve been fed the Rad narrative, and then Dana rolls up and supports Sarah to reestablish the status quo.
Sarah verbally guts Jennifer when she tries to shame Sarah for what she did, drawing the line between her self destructive relationship with Ruth and how Dana’s probably not an Ominous Doom Foretelling Oracle like Ruth’s sliding into.
I know people have been hoping for this kind of twist ever since the first Dana Flashback but honestly it feels way too… emotionally and morally simple for a DOA storyline lol. Plus there’s that line from Raidah about how Dana is “not in a better place according to her”.
My best is that if Dana ever comes back she’ll be mad both at Sarah (cause she’s ‘not in a better place according to her’) AND at Radiah and Co. for not reaching out to her more or seeing past her phoney happy act better.
Honestly the outcome I want is “yeah my dad sucks and going home sucked, for all the reasons you know, but also it actually sucked less than staying here and literally saved my life probably”. The one where the information Raidah is implied to have is correct but also Sarah read Dana correctly, too.
I like this idea but don’t see it happening before an in-setting year has passed, at minimum. We’re in semester two, and do not yet know if there will be a semester three (summer classes) covered at this same week-a-year pace or not.
Yeah I’m gonna continue sitting here with my “Raidah has been systematically feeding Jennifer the idea that Joyce and co. are toxic for her” hat.
Also, weird of Raidah to apologize for Jennifer when Jennifer is, like… sitting right across the table. Jennifer can apologize for herself if she wants, and if she doesn’t, that’s fine to. I wonder what Jennifer’s face is like during this strip, if she’s confused, put out, or nodding along.
I dunno, I’ll give it to Raidah that last strip and this one are the first we’ve seen of her treating Jennifer like a child. Her behavior otherwise has been presenting herself as ‘saving Billie from a bad night by introducing her to new people’ and just sorta chilling around her. Definitely condescending in the first instance, but to Jennifer’s face she’s been cordial. Behind her back, that’s a different story.
Its just Radiahs way of turning the conversation towards bashing Sarah, she deliberately blamed walkys peers group for Jennifer gossiping so Walky would ask who she was talking about. As though Sarah had any influence of Jennifer, it’s a clumsy way to turn of conversation to jettsioning when nobody was talking about it.
Oh, I am agog, Raidah and Carl. Who exactly is Sarah meant to have ‘jettisoned’? Dana? That feels like a very… interesting… view of events, considering what Sarah did was reach out to get her suffering roommate help as best she could. Did that also help Sarah? You bet!
But I suspect that if Dana’s dad had been able to help her without taking her home, and Dana was still around, Sarah would have been fine with that. It wasn’t Dana she objected to but the disruptive habits.
This is the pattern I’m noticing actually: Raidah uses put-downs of other people to illustrate how good of a person she is. She does it to both Jennifer *and* Sarah, and, well, Joyce’s whole friend group by implication, in this comic.
Well, Sarah would have framed her explanation around her own needs, because her self-image is that she doesn’t need other people. Which feeds Raidah’s need to see the world as peopled entirely by heroes and villains. I don’t think that any amount of explanation by anyone is going to bring these two to the same page.
Not just that her self-image is that she doesn’t need other people, but that her projected image of a cranky misanthrope who doesn’t like or care about other people means she has to paint her interventions as selfish even when they’re not.
This works too well, since most people tend to go the other way, minimizing how much they’re driven by self-interest rather than exaggerating it.
It’s not entirely clear to me how much of Sarah’s narrative of “I am a misanthrope” predates Dana’s departure. Like, the seeds of it were certainly there according to Liz, but she also seemed happy with Dana and Raidah and co in the beforetimes.
I’m gonna be completely honest. WEIRD Flex to invite someone to Breakfast and then start shitting on their “Peer Group” to their face. Y’know…considering they are a part of their peer group.
Double Dick Move talking about Jennifer like she’s not sitting right fucking there.
Triple Dick move for whatever point you’re about to make about Sarah bee tee dubs.
does walky rly have a ‘friend’ group outside of dating Lucy now? I imagine he hasn’t spent time with the other cast much after breaking up with amber on halloween
He does walk to lunch with Joyce and Sarah, sometimes also with dina, is friendly with Becky and spends more time with his sister and is invited to Sarah and Joyce’s dorm party’s so yes I would call that a friends group.
Literally i had a 5 minute interaction with law students that felt exactly like this. These people are weeeeeird
There’s nothing like the feeling of realizing the people you’re talking to are actually just mean, even though they’re not being mean to you directly
I don’t think Danny does vengeance, but it would make sense. It is is very suspicious that both of Danny’s lovers just happened to shack up with Walky right after breaking his heart into a million tiny pieces. Come on Nightguy, that’s how you make super villains.
Or… Does Sal know that Danny’s bi and she and her twin are basically his version of the Kinsey scale, visualised, as the hovertext here puts it if I haven’t screwed that tag up..?
Coz that could open an interesting clusterfuck of chaos…
So is Raidah trying to take Walky away from Sarah/Sarah’s friend group? Rob Sarah of her friends or something?
…Why? Not only is this a pathetic amount of effort put into fucking with someone, but Walky and Sarah aren’t even that close, considering all the time they’ve spent together.
It’s funny cuz I don’t even think Sarah’s friend’s with Walky. Joyce is closer to being friends with Walky and Joyce seems cordial at BEST with him. He’s like…a friend of an acquaintance. It’s like trying to topple a building by breaking the antenna at the top.
As for Joyce, she said Sarah, Dorothy, Walky, and herself would be Becky’s new family when she invited Becky to live with them indefinitely.
Maybe that was because of Dorothy then dating him, but she did include Walky as integral to that while not mentioning Jennifer or Sal.
Perhaps that was just the heat of the moment, and everything doesn’t need to be said, but I’ve always considered this version of Walky and Joyce to be frenemies who would very much miss messing with each other if too much time passed, but not in the same way Walky likes picking with his sisters.
As for Sarah, we have another heat of the moment scenario when Raidah invited Walky to breakfast.
Raidah commented on the fact that Sarah managed to keep some friends and Sarah replied with a “yeah” confirming them to be friends, and then said she liked them.
Considering that said group consisted of Joyce, Lucy, Sal, and Walky, unless she was referring to Joyce as “them”, she was referring to more than one of them as her friend and gave no caveat (and I wouldn’t consider Sarah close with any of them besides Joyce).
Admittedly, neither of these examples are glowing recommendations of their strong feelings of friendliness towards Walky, so it seems like they’re all just used to being around each other.
Maybe that’s why Walky has been saying “peer-group” instead of “friends” or “friend-group”.
Joyce is definitively Walky’s friend. They have a weird relationship, but they consistently talk to each other since before Walky started dating Dorothy and continued thereafter.
I think it’s a two birds with one stone kind of deal, Raidah sees walky as a way to rub shoulders with the dean to benefit herself and also if it antagonizes Sarah no matter how minor she’ll take it. I don’t think she is putting in an actual effort to take all her friends away, she’s content with treating them like garbage as seen with Dorothy. Walky just has something that she wishes to acquire, so she’s going to play nice to get it as she’s already shown.
Probably doing the exact same to Jennifer for her rich parents.
i think she might also be aware that joyce and sarah are friends, or in the same friend group? if so, there’s the added bonus of getting back at joyce, who she blames for the end of her relationship with jacob
I’m pretty sure the only people Radiah can really ‘take away’ from Sarah in a way that will really hurt her are Joyce (which Radiah now hates just as much as Sarah if not more) and Dina (who greatly dislike Radiah).
That being said, Joyce might be more effected by this…
Sarah did use Joyce as a wedge to break up Jacob and Raidah by way of an emotional affair. (Even if Sarah tries to justify it as Joyce “deserving” him more than Raidah, it was a revenge plot to get back at her perceived slight in their freshman year.)
If Raidah has one legitimate grievance with either of them, that would be it. Unfortunately, she’s going to bite back in a roundabout, petty mean-girl way. Because that’s what she does.
A revenge plot for harassment continuing into the start of this year, but yes that was still a bad thing.
She also told Joyce not to do it before the plot finished. Joyce continued on her own though.
And Raidah shouldn’t know anything about Sarah’s part in that – though she could of course assume she was involved.
I think in her mind, it’s cosmic injustice for Sarah to have influential friends. They must have been suckered in by the evil her and need rescuing! So she’s doing the rescuing.
I don’t 100% agree with her actions, but I do understand them enough to not blame her. Which, considering Raidah probably never gave Sarah enough of a leeway to get to know what Sarah’s situation was (I’m still thinking that Raidah fully understood what the roommate’s issues were), she doesn’t know.
Nono you don’t understand Sarah should have just let Dana spiral and as a result continue to get no sleep and bomb her classes and lose her scholarship so she’s forced to drop out of University. Like a REAL friend 🙂
Both Radiah and Jennifer’s anger at Sarah for not just letting Dana be reeks of entitlement and privilege. They think because Sarah was an outcast who Dana went out of her way to include she owed her unconditional obedience or as I’m sure Radiah would call it loyalty and neither appreciate how screwed Sarah would be with no scholarship because they take money for granted.
Forgot how to direct link but after the mall incident when radiah shared her story Jennifer later confronted Sarah in the cafeteria asking If she’s going to do the same thing to joyce(call her dad on her about being drugged) saying ‘you really don’t like people. Then after Ruth was in the hospital there was a strip with walky and Sarah where Sarah made an unrelated comment to Walky and Jennifer who was walking up ahead made an angry comment about how Sarah gets rid of people.
I always come back to the line Raidah said in the flashback.
“She was getting better.”
Dana was definitely in a spiral, but that phrase always sticks in my head.
Raidah KNEW Dana was in a bad spot, and honestly, in groups, the only way Sarah saw her interact with people, she put on a smile.
It’s possible though that Raidah and her were genuinely close and she knew Dana was recovering, or because of her prodding Dana felt compelled to lie to her too.
In either case, Raidah’s perception was that Dana was cutting back and her issues were being mitigated with the help of others. Until Sarah intervened.
I don’t blame Raidah for hating Sarah, at least based on what we know of her perspective. Though some of that probably IS what she saw as betrayal of their mutual friend, who went out of their way to include her.
Wait wasn’t Billie/Jennifer *there* when Sarah was talking about what went down with Dana? Is B’Jennifer gonna say anything about it or has she fully drank the Raidah koolaid?
Jennifer has always blamed Sarah despite Sarah’s side of the story making it clear it was a hard decision that she felt she had to make. I belive there’s an underlying assumption from Jennifer that as an unpopular misfit Sarah should have been eternally grateful to the popular Dana. Same reason she expected Carla to just go along with enabling her an Ruth and got mad when Carla “disobeyed” her i think.
I would think saying ableists slurs and being a dick in general is more than just ‘inconvenient’ (tho having a friend stay in a group no matter how toxic doesn’t seem like it’d help things either) Unless she somehow manuveued it into introducing them into a new ‘friend group’ yet keeping their contacts on the backburner if they still had good connections
Raidah was with both of them weeks after the incident with Dina, so, unless it was a slow burn, that’s not the reason Char is gone.
In fact, I believe Chan disappeared before Char since the last time we saw Char was Halloween and the last time we saw Chan was when she and Char were saying Raidah might need to watch out for Joyce and Raidah saying Joyce wasn’t a threat.
Haha wow she’s awful. Raidah. you are what. 20? Twenty years old. It is EARLY to join the Awful DoA Parents board. What is this mean-mom energy you’re bringing.
This probably IS how Jennifer’s parents spoke about her right in front of her tho. Friends and kids are for showing off, not, like, growing relationships with.
ugh. ugh.
Much to her own long-term benefit. Being jettisoned from that group is a bit like being exiled from Putin’s Russia. There’s worse places you could land, but not many.
Also in a way since Walky has also had an arc where he regrets not being there for people close to him when they needed him most and had to learn to be better on that it would be kind of hypocritical for him to suddenly start acting like “that could never me.”
Walky had to learn to stand up for and stand with Sal.
But he never tried to remove her from his presence and had pretty much been the one trying to get closer to her during the first semester and not the other way around as Sal felt he didn’t try to reach her while she was gone and also resented him for having it easy and being the favorite.
It’s not the same situation.
In fact, Walky has made a habit of trying to be around both his sisters when they weren’t all that enthusiastic to see him, just more so with Jennifer, but then again, he also had the last 5 years with Jennifer.
Side note: do we know if Sal ever came home for Christmas or summer when she was in Tennessee? I would normally assume she had, but I also got the impression that Walky hadn’t even seen or heard from her for five years before she showed up at college.
Well he didn’t no, but their parents sort of did in a way and he kind of went along with it in that period of time. Sure it’s most likely it was court ordered to send her away but from what I heard they kept complete radio silence for all that time and Walky sort of went along with it, and he feels guilty about it.
I can’t believe their parents had no contact with Sal during that time – even if only to check up on her and lecture her.
It’s not a surprise Walky feels guilty about not finding a way to keep in touch with her, but he was 13 when it started and in an abusive family situation where going against Linda would definitely have been high risk, so I really can’t blame him too much.
According to Sal it sounded like the case, maybe they sent a postcard and couple of packages every now and again but I don’t think they wrote to her on a constant basis.
I can barely comes to grips with a family sending their 13 year old to a year round boarding school for 5 years with no summers or school break at all, but going complete no contact is unimaginable.
Even in an abusive family – that’s giving up control
The game is LA Noir.
You play an LA cop who gets promoted to detective and you solve multiple cases from different dolice divisions in the years immediately after WWII.
It has the noir or neo noir aesthetic (I don’t know the difference) with the dogged detective, damsels in the distress, tommy guns, and car chases you’d expect from a detective movie or book from that time.
It wa made by Rockstar and unfortunately never got a sequel.
I hope Carl has something to say next strip. This at least implies he’s going to elaborate. As the guy who dated Dana, he’s most likely the one to have some solid information on her status. If he cared about her that is. Like he is the guy who would have the most contact with her. It’s really convenient he’s just a glorified background character.
Well, according to Sarah’s flashback, Dana ditched him soon after her downward spiral started, so I dunno how serious that relationship was or how much info he’ll have.
“We don’t jettison them, we do something much worse. Pretend to keep being their friend in case they become useful but still talk to them like we’re the parents and they’re a small, rude child we deign to continue caring for.”
…honestly, for as much as an absolute prick Raidah has been throughout this whole storyline (and in general), I am genuinely curious to hear Raidah’s side of the whole Dana story, and how she thinks it all went down. And hell, Carl’s side, as well, given that he was Dana’s boyfriend.
Of course, I’m also curious about where the hell Chan and Char are, if Raidah’s so strongly against getting rid of people when they become inconvenient to her. And in whether Dana would think Raidah’s a good friend to her after seeing she’s shacked up with her ex in Dana’s absence.
re-reading i saw that dana told sarah that her dad ran a lawfirm, and while i want to believe that raidah was her friend for being her *friend* we’ve seen tons of evidence for years of raidah using people for their connections 🙁
Agreed. This is probably the best chance to hear whether, for example, Dana’s home situation was safe or not. Which is one of the biggest remaining sticking points of whether or not what Sarah did was, in all, okay. (I’m going to say Raidah’s response passed out of “justice” and into “bullying” well before what we saw at the start of semester one either way since she DID go out of her way to repeatedly harass Sarah, but continuing to hold a grudge would be a lot more justifiable if she knows or suspects Dana’s dad isn’t safe. That said, it would be way easier to get the moral high ground back by telling Sarah that fact, so I assume that even if he is, she didn’t have that information up until Sarah snapping and punching her at the mall or else why the hell wouldn’t she bring it up.)
That said, even if Dana’s dad is abusive, that doesn’t mean the situation was necessarily sustainable, especially because Sarah would’ve been at WAY higher risk if that weed had been found by an authority – both as a student there on scholarship and because of her race. (Which, incidentally… Raidah? You could stand to be a BIT more cognizant of the inherent risk there to both of them because of Sarah and Dana’s respective races, for all your progressive talk.) And it would’ve fucked Dana over, too, if she’s the one who actually got in trouble for it – as it stands now, she might be considered a drop out, but she could be considered a withdrawal (which may have gotten her – read, her dad – partial tuition refund, given the circumstances, so I’d bet he would have tried for that over dropping out) or on an extended leave of absence. Even dropping out’s a step up from expulsion. She didn’t get arrested, also good. This means even if her father’s abusive, she’s in a better position to get back to school and away from him than she would’ve been in the “someone finds out about the weed” timeline where expulsion very much WAS on the table and so were charges. And in that case, her dad finds out anyway and is probably even WORSE than it would be when things can be privately swept under the rug.
In fairness to Raidah if she is dating Carl, it has been well over a year. And I’m not sure it’s been established she’s dating Carl, has it? And he’s bringing her up now. I’m perfectly willing to give her that one if she is. But I do also wonder about Chan and Char’s absence right now.
What always bothered me about the Dana situation is that Sarah didn’t KNOW her home life was safe. And it seemed to be like she emphasized the drug aspect rather than the depression, which increases the chances of punishment rather than sympathy. I really wish she’d tried to get a counselor or other neutral adults involved, like Carla did with Ruth. It was illegal for Ruth to be drinking at that point but I don’t think she got in trouble, because she was in a clinical setting where the adults had an interest in helping her, not punishing her.
Sarah, I think, was in the wrong? A lot of her character development and relation to Joyce centers around learning from that, I think. I think she’s someone who would handle it way better if she was in that situation again. She’s demonstrated that. To us. The audience. Not to Raidah??
Way better how? It definitely haunts her, but it’s not at all clear to me that she was wrong or what she should have done instead.
Just followed Raidah and Carl’s lead and assume Dana would get over it eventually?
Both illegal, but drug use tends to get treated much more harshly, even for underage drinkers. Not a lot of kids doing hard time for drinking.
Also, Carla didn’t turn Ruth in for drinking. (Or at all really – Rachel called Chloe after she was revealed to the dorm.) Ruth was depressed to the point of being almost non-responsive except to talk about wanting to die.
Dana was apparently still able to front well enough that it’s unlikely that calling in someone like Chloe would lead to more than “Yeah, she’s still sad about her mother. Give her sometime.” Rather than to an involuntary commitment on suicide watch. U
nless you bring up the drugs. And bringing up the drugs to any legal authority is far riskier than bringing them up to family.
Yeah, and not to say involuntary commitment or suicide watch are without issues – but Ruth was clearly in such bad state that calling authorities was a reasonable call EVEN THOUGH it got back to her abusive grandfather. A line clearly does exist there.
Dana probably wasn’t that dangerously depressed yet, and it’s hard to say if she would have gotten that dangerously depressed with only Sarah’s POV to judge from, but it’d be entirely possible she COULD have reached the suicidal point and still maintained just enough of a front that the others wouldn’t know.
Most people whose home situation IS safe assume that home = safe for other people, too. After all it’s all that’s blasted all over media, they’re surrounded with reassurances that mom and dad might be embarrassing but they just love you very much and you can always come to them with everything, and horrible scary abuser situations are horror movie exceptions that don’t really happen in real life.
And frankly, it mostly is. Paralyzing yourself by acting as if all homes are unsafe when there isn’t any specific reason to think so isn’t really much better than ignoring clues that one isn’t.
We really don’t have much in the way of red flags for Dana’s home situation.
Out of all available options available to Sarah Dana’s father was the one most likely to be on her side, and least likely to ruin her life.
Plus its not like her father actually had the power to force her back beyond cutting her off.
Some caution is fair, and if Danah said her father wasn’t great Sarah should have believed her, but lets not start making parents guilty until proven innocent.
While I get emphasizing the drug use is more likely to get Danah punished, its also more likely to get her father to actually act instead of assuming its proberly not that bad.
It was a situation where there were no good answers, Sarah likely chose the least bad answer.
She may have a corporate model of getting rid of people. Never fire, just get them to quit so you’re the one who looks innocent. (I mean, in corporate it’s also a way of getting out of paying unemployment but you get the idea)
If that’s her model on friendship things are looking bad for Jennifer who has quickly become the unfavorite. The only slight positive I can see is maybe down the line jennifer will look back at this and wonder if this is how Sal felt being constantly overlooked and talked downd to by her parents in favor of Walky.
I’m getting really seriously burnt out on trying to engage here at all. I like trying to analyze antagonists and find ways to interpret them that don’t require me to read them like supervillains. That’s increasingly… just not feeling like an approach the comic itself wants me to take, and it’s *definitely* not an approach a lot of commenters are willing to tolerate from me.
I literally got accused of having a Christian persecution complex yesterday for mentioning offhandedly that Mary and Blaine are fairly irredeemably bad people without any sympathetic traits, and that I hoped Raidah might be different.
There are no brakes on this train, so I am *begging* some of y’all to try slowing down a little bit.
I’ve noticed a lot of people say things like, “sorry I bit your head off, this character just reminds me a lot of someone I used to know who hurt me”. I totally believe that’s true, and I understand that defensive impulse! Believe it or not, I felt it with Lucy for a while, of all characters. But I wish people would realize that they’re emotionally raw about the issue before they lash out at other commenters who lack that context, and not after.
This is not about anybody in the Raidah talks; honestly, I’m thinking of some arguments about Malaya. Also, it’s worth remembering that there’s a gray area between openly flaming and being friendly/constructive, and just because a post doesn’t directly attack someone doesn’t mean it won’t come across as heated or hostile. Arguments are inherently stressful, and going to extra lengths to make sure you’re keeping the argument civil–“I see what you’re saying,” “I’m not sure I understand, could you clarify?”–goes a long way towards making this community better.
I used to consider this comments section something of a community. That was a few years ago, though. Nowadays I tune in to see what wild and outlandish things people dream up from these characters’ brief interactions. Some of that discussion is even worth sticking around for, and I’ll say that much without sarcasm. A lot of it in the past year or two has been outright fucking vicious though, and people need to remember themselves before they go biting somebody else’s dick off for saying “Becky cussed in panel 3”.
I find the strips (or at least, the comments) a lot easier to just binge-read nowadays. Watching a 30-minute conversation play out over weeks in real-life as people overanalyze every part is just exhausting.
It’s been like this for a long time really. Worse sometimes.
Look back to the fights about how Mary just wanted to study in peace. Or about how horrible Becky was for spending $20 dollars on a haircut rather than using it to find a place to live.
There’s a lot of good discussion in the comments and I definitely see the comic itself with more depth and nuance because of these discussions, but damn does it get toxic in here sometimes.
You’ve gone and done the worst thing you could’ve done. It’s a crime to ask for basic civility, in a room full of people who are sure you’ve got a dagger in your sleeve and a gun in your mouth.
It’s just something that happens when a group swings towards an extreme. It can blind you to other perspectives.
If you don’t believe strongly in at least Some things, nothing ever gets done, so. Best we can do is check ourselves. Strong convictions should be balanced by equal amounts of chill.
If this helps, I enjoy reading your comments! comment-reading is an essential part of the webcomic experience for me. it’s really fun to read varying interpretations, observations and reactions. so i’m sorry that you feel burnt out
Imagine after that Carl keeps going on about his gripe with Sarah without introducing himself and then Walky is like “oh OK that sucks I’m sorry that happened to you…who the fuck are you?”
It would be hilarious if instead of asking about Sarah Walky started talking about Carl’s cap instead. WALKY: nice hat, i wonder if I should were one? I’m already hoodie bros with Asher, we could be hat bros! You think Carl’s hat is nice right Jennifer? CARL: about Sarah… WALKY: I don’t think she wears caps.
Going to be honest, Carl seems to have the same issue people keep saying Danny has that his hat is more memorable if not the most memorable thing about him.
Raidah, I’d be almost impressed by your manipulation skills if you hadn’t set up this entire cloak and dagger operation over just the pettiest shit imaginable.
This entire breakfast could have been saved if Raidah had answered “Your mom” instead of her useless, cloying little bait of a non-response. Nobody cares about her stupid one-sided feud* with Sarah except her.
*Well, I say “feud”. What I really mean is “open and shameless bullying”. She’s fucking obsessed with Sarah, to the point of forgetting how to be a person.
She wears a lot of skin-colored makeup on her arms, because she never learned how to let go of things, so she winds up squeezing them into a 2D plane and they look like tattoos on her skin. Give her a wash and her biceps will look like a rummage sale.
Destructive Power: E
Speed: B
Durability: A
Precision: D
Developmental Potential: E
Stand Ability: This Stand feeds on its User’s hatred for a target, and can only be activated when that hatred is their focus. When active, it increases its User’s talent and charisma in any given social activity by a hundredfold or more; it can even compel others to join the User’s “peer group”.
My dream that girl Dana to come back and hug Sarah for looking out her when no one else did. For not ignoring her problems like others did. And then Radiah’s head explodes.
It’s not unlikely. The only thing we know about how Dana is doing post-intervention is that according to Raidah’s posse her life is ruined, which I figure 80% odds it means “her dad won’t let her smoke pot or hang with her pot enthusiast friends anymore”.
Would be interesting to hear anything from her really.
I’m not sure how one-sided it is. Sarah’s tipping point for deciding to pursue her own happiness, however briefly, was to prove Raidah wrong by succeeding at something social.
Everything we’ve seen Sarah do, has been done after Raidah started up on her shit. I don’t care about any paranoid “what happened before hmmmmmm?” hypothetical things we haven’t been shown.
Not saying Sarah engaging was morally right but it is understandable for a bully victim to desire some comeuppance for their abuser after just sitting there at taking it for so long. Not to mention Joyce kept at it for reasons unrelated to radiah so as far as engaging from Sarah goes it was pretty short lived.
I understand both of them. With Raidah having the dubious honor of being the one villain in this story I kind of, sort of understand. So I speak with that in mind.
The idea the conflict only exists in Raidah’s head is kind of disingenuous. Sarah’s put her foot down. And I guess people supporting her occasional potshots is a sorta kinda defensible position to take?
I’m more leaning towards the idea Sarah’s “better” than Raidah by most measures. She’s done the right thing by our moral framework when the situation called for it. Even when she hated doing it. But we are not comparing apples to oranges here. If there are no Lives on the line, Sarah’s gonna step on you, sometimes just because she feels misanthropic that day.
By acting like the animosity is one-sided, Taffy attempts to present Raidah in an even worse light than Raidah already presents herself. And honestly, she’s horrible enough without a smear campaign. You don’t need to make stuff up.
You’re right, I don’t need to make stuff up. And so far, I haven’t. I’ve simply perceived the situation differently than you. I don’t see Sarah’s meager retaliations as anything more than that, she’s just reacting to what Raidah started.
i think it depends on a lot of things, from the situation to the people etc. these are people aged 18-20 and aren’t known for making the best decisions. you’re right, plenty of times helping IS hurting. sarah could’ve taken other actions
but i don’t think it’s fair to make an overall statement that helping is worse than deliberately hurting. and even those of us who are “insane” are able to provide help
You misunderstand. I said it’s often considered worse, not that I agree with that sentiment. Helping and hurting are different things. I don’t really understand why you put scare quotes on “”insane””, though.
I honestly don’t know what I would’ve done in that situation, and I’m in my late 30s. I definitely wouldn’t expect a college student to know exactly the right way to handle a situation like that.
Sometimes there are no right answers, or it’s impossible to know the right answer because we don’t have all the information and can’t predict the future.
I went back and re-read the Dana flashback, and what I get from it is: Sarah was a bit unfairly judgmental of Dana from the start (looking down on her for not using her college time wisely) but what we know about Sarah also makes her attitude somewhat understandable, her own position in college is contingent on being a good student. She doesn’t have the privilege of family wealth/connections to fall back on like Dana and many of her former friends did.
Once Dana’s mom died, she immediately violated the boundaries of their room mate agreement. She may have been grieving, but that doesn’t automatically mean she should get a free pass to cross Sarah’s boundaries. Sarah tried talking to their other friends about the problems Dana was having and they shut her down, insisting it wasn’t a problem, dismissing both Sarah’s feelings/how it was affecting her and dismissing her concerns about how Dana was coping, basically being bad friends to BOTH of them and leaving Sarah to deal with the problem completely alone.
Sarah was basically in an impossible situation. Ignoring the problem was quite literally putting her own future at risk (and again, she didn’t have a privileged background that might provide her with free second chances) and it didn’t seem to actually be doing Dana any good either. She’s right that she had to do SOMETHING, the question is what the right option would’ve been.
I can’t remember if we ever get any more of the story beyond Sarah’s retelling to Joyce in that one storyline. But based on that, it’s hard to judge whether Sarah made the right or wrong choice. If Dana had a good dad, who was understanding and supportive and would make sure she got the proper kind of help, then Sarah made the right choice in calling him. Maybe he found her a good therapist, maybe they both decided taking time off from school was what she needed at that point, and Raidah was being completely unfair in getting upset with Sarah, and not actually being realistic about the situation.
If on the other hand Dana’s dad is awful (we don’t know either way) then calling him was the wrong choice, and may have only made the situation worse. She may have been pulled out of school and taken home to an even worse environment where her mental health deteriorated further and she didn’t get the help she needed. In that case, the better choice would’ve been to maybe try to encourage Dana to talk to a therapist. I’m unclear if the school has on campus free counseling (is that what Ruth went to? She seemed to be staying in an actual hospital so I’m not sure). The issues with this of course are: if the school doesn’t offer free counseling options, Dana would have to pay out of pocket (likely more than a college student could afford on their own), or perhaps rely on insurance (if it even covered this) which could mean her dad would find out. Plus it would only work if Dana was willing to participate. Sarah can’t FORCE her to go to therapy, and if she refused, Sarah would be still stuck in the same untenable situation.
Ignoring it forever and just hoping Dana got better (which seemed to be what Raidah thought she should do) *might* have worked, but based on how it was going, it’s more likely it would’ve continued to be bad until either Dana flunked out or Sarah’s grades slipped so much she lost her scholarship, forcing her to drop out, or worst case scenario, Dana’s mental health getting so bad she became increasingly self destructive or did something drastic. Or some combination (or all) of the above.
Given all the possible outcomes and based on what limited info we were given, it’s hard to fault Sarah for making the choice she made, and even possible it was entirely the best choice given the circumstances (and if it wasn’t, it’s hard to know what Sarah could have/should have done instead). Either way, I definitely feel Raidah has been extremely unfair to Sarah in all of this, unless there’s some key piece of info we’re still missing. Even if Dana’s dad were awful and abusive and Raidah knew this but Sarah didn’t, it would be an understandable mistake on Sarah’s part, that she felt backed into when none of her other friends were willing to help, so Raidah’s continued insistence that Sarah was being callous and just discarding “inconvenient” people is cruel and unfair.
There’s also the fact that at a certain point, Sarah has to do something so her, uh, life isn’t in danger. Because I cannot imagine anything good happening to a young Black woman who “let Dana be”, the way Raidah wanted, and had the school or God forbid the police find out about all the illegal drug she was smoking. Or worse!
Like, Sarah could say “I had nothing to do with it” all day long and she’d still end up collateral damage. In the best-case scenario her dreams of law school are dead, forever, and staying at IU is probably not happening.
And Raidah has to know this, given she’s up on current politics, right?
I think there’s another issue on top of it – as the story was framed, and that might need to be retconned someday but it hasn’t as of March 2023, the boundary violation is a drug that’s still fully criminalized in Indiana.
And while Sarah doesn’t bring it up there as such, that adds a whole second issue and set of worst case scenarios – one where the weed gets found out and someone faces criminal charges or expulsion. At best, Dana takes the fall, her dad bails her out, MAYBE she can continue but it seems at least as likely she leaves college, probably under worse standing with the college, and if her dad IS a problem, he’s probably angrier than before because now it’s a scandal. At worst, SARAH is the one getting in trouble (either because the authority assumed so because racism or because Dana blamed her in desperation*,) and will be facing much, MUCH worse trouble because she lacks the class privilege AND race privilege Dana does.
And with that in mind, the situation gets even worse and even more untenable to simply ignore, and much harder for Sarah to navigate on her own the way she had to. Now, granted, the counseling center almost certainly does have free therapists, but in reality college therapists tend to be VERY overwhelmed because there are too many students needing services relative to the therapists, and the advice they offer can be… hit or miss. So Sarah probably should have suggested it/pushed a bit if Dana rejected it once, but even if Dana had gone, it may or may not have solved anything. Even assuming Sarah made a wrong choice, I agree with you – I don’t think there were good ones available, and it’s hard to fault Sarah for information she didn’t have against the information she DID have.
* We don’t know enough about Dana to say she would try to blame it on Sarah, but Becky and her first roommate seem to have genuinely been friends, not just attracted to each other, and Caitlin still threw Becky under the bus – under what I am CERTAIN was immense pressure from parents and/or faculty, but still, Becky got thrown under the bus. If Dana was scared and facing trouble – and she would very much be both of those things – I can see her doing it just because she was an eighteen-year-old who wasn’t thinking about how much worse this would be for Sarah, no matter how nice she might be otherwise. And Sarah kind of has to be aware of that knowledge, too.
Again, Sarah doesn’t bring it up, but it is THERE, and that makes it an even thornier situation.
Both you and Sajuuk add excellent points above! I didn’t go into the drug use aspect as much because I never know how receptive people will be to these discussions, but yeah, that’s a pretty major boundary to violate. I 100% respect people’s right to decide what goes into their own bodies but if you are also exposing someone else to it without their consent? NOT okay. I know people often think it’s nbd with this drug in particular (it’s completely legal in my state and honestly I forget sometimes it’s still not legal in many states) but speaking as someone who has adverse reactions to it, along with lung issues, I would probably be in a state of panic if I were Sarah in that situation. I have zero issues with others partaking but I cannot be around them while they’re smoking without having some really unpleasant physical symptoms. (Same goes for tobacco too). A good friend/room mate would keep it outside if asked, period.
And I didn’t even consider the legality context because again, I forget sometimes it’s not legal everywhere. That adds a whoooole extra layer, especially for Sarah as someone on a scholarship and a black woman.
People who think Sarah should have tried other actions never seem to say what those actions ARE.
1) Therapists are great, but Sarah cannot MAKE Dana see one. Dana won’t go.
2) Talking to Dana “probably made things worse” according to Sarah.
3) Reporting her to the school will bring all sorts of shit down on Dana because they’d almost certainly find out about the drugs just from when they walk in and get punched in the face with the smell of weed. And as mentioned above, there’s a non-zero chance that Sarah is in trouble too for not reporting it.
4) Dana’s friends refuse to even SUGGEST seeing a therapist on the grounds that they know her and she’ll be fiiiiiiiiiine.
5) The professors can’t give Sarah grace for tests and assignments forever, even if they wanted to. Professors aren’t unfeeling monsters but they’re people on a deadline.
So, assuming calling Dana’s dad wasn’t a good option, what should she have done instead?
Obviously Sarah should have just failed out of school due to not being able to sleep and hope Dana’s next roommate would be better disposed to help her and/or she would eventually smoke the grief out of her system as – as Raidah and gang would tell you – she has always done before. Totally the most mature and considered solution.
I imagine there was a conversation along the lines of “Dana needs help, that’s my observation as the one who’s living with her day and night, but you guys have known her longer than I have, so do you think we should call her dad, call the cops, or call the administration and let them decide to call her dad or call the cops?” “Noo bruh just chill, it’s only been half a semester.” But where Sarah should then have probably explained more of Dana’s situation she ended up just talking about her scholarship situation because, oh the irony, Sarah didn’t want to gossip.
That’s pretty much exactly what happened, but instead of asking them which authority she should call, she asked if any of them suggested seeing a therapist to Dana.
Oh, my. IU’s mental health support system is extensive. Dunno how much you can get for free, but possibly enough experts to get her father involved in a constructive way regardless how he would have reacted otherwise.
But, as someone pointed out, Dana resisted seeking help, so Sarah needed some power to get her that help.
I think I’d have asked a trusted prof. “hey, someone I know is in a bad situation and won’t get help. Who can I talk to, to get her that help?”
All of the options have upsides and downsides, most of them fairly significant. Pick one and hope you picked the right one.
Professors can’t make her see one either though. The school might be able to but they’re also going to check in on her and see whether the report is true – at which point they’ll get punched in the face by the smell of weed because Dana lights up in their room all the time. At that point, Dana and Sarah are both in trouble. And then, even if the school doesn’t go the disciplinary route for the illegal drugs, Dana still has to WANT therapy to work for it to be effective. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
I’ve said this before, but our perspective is also skewed by seeing it through Sarah’s reporting – which in most cases would suggest what we’ve seen is more favorable to Sarah than it really was, but in Sarah’s case we know that she covers up concern for others with a pretense that it’s all just self-serving.
I think that Sarah likely overemphasized her worries about her own grades and scholarship and minimized her actual concerns for Dana.
I’m sure there is a real post limit and I seem to remember it’s 10,000 characters, though maybe more habitual commenters will know for sure. Still, I think as long as your posts get through they’re an accepted length.
Yeah, I hope Jennifer also recognizes that this is uncool, but uh… I don’t think Jennifer really has a lot of experience with healthy social dynamics to begin with.
Walky is a very smart and perceptive lad, and very protective of those he cares about. I really wonder how much he is masking here, initially to help Lucy fit in when she wants this so badly, but at this point he might be using it to bring out all this information and toxicity and will figure out exactly what Raidah’s deal with.
If he does figure it out, his next battle is going to be outplaying Raidah to keep Lucy away from her and to bring B’Jennifer back from the dark side.
I like the commenters above hoping Dana shows up happy and healthy. That’s one potential route Walky could try to research if he really is that disturbed by any of this.
Personally even if Dana wasn’t doing well I couldn’t blame Sarah for doing what she felt she had to. She tried to get Dana’s friends and boyfriend on board to get Dana professional help, they refused to step up and didn’t want to hear about any of Sarah’s troubles related to Dana as long as it wasn’t their problem. Even if they didn’t want to acknowledge Dana had a problem they could have even offered Sarah another room to study but they just didn’t care.
Yeah I’m 100% sure Walky is seeing and hearing ALL of Raidah’s shit and possibly keeping a mental tally. He’s just being non-confrontational about it, relatively speaking.
Walky, Lucy: stay right there, gather as much intelligence as they’ll reveal, enjoy lunch, distribute thanks, walk away better informed about these people’s character and intentions.
Also, yes, Sarah jettisons people who are socially inconvenient. This is why she willingly hangs out with Joyce, who as we all know is the most convenient person to have around. No neuroses there!!! Zero!!! Absolutely none!!!
Me when Raidah invites Jennifer into their friend group: “Because Raidah has consistently been framed as The Worst, I’m sure we’re all meant to take this as her trying to get back in Sarah in some way. But I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt and not assume that’s front and center in her mind with every action she takes.”
Raidah, in her first thirty minutes interacting with Walky: “I am doing this do get back at Sarah in some way, because that is front and center in my mind with every action I take.”
Here’s this godforsaken hat thing again. I know it’s a tradition and considered “polite” but…why? Everything comes from something, but all I’ve ever seen about the hat thing is “People did it hundreds of years ago out of politeness”. Okay, but WHYYYYYY?? What, SPECIFICALLY, is “rude” about having a thing on your head indoors? People say “It’s disrespectful” HOW?? IN WHAT WAY? Shoes can track mud. Coats get hot. Gloves are generally kind of dirty. Hats????? They sit there, minding their own business.
I’ve never gotten a satisfying answer to this question, and I don’t think I ever will.
Some of it comes back to when the ‘hats’ were actually helmets and to identify yourself, you had to take it off. For Americans though, the general idea seems to come from the Flag Code. The Flag Code specifies men should take off their hats to show respect for the flag and even though that’s not a law, the hat etiquette apparently stuck.
I have two possible explanations why keeping your hat on inside is impolite:
– You imply you don’t trust the host’s hat rack with your posessions.
– You imply you want to be ready to leave at the drop of a hat: i.e. you really don’t want to be there a second longer than you have to.
Wearing your hat indoors indicates you are in a hurry to leave, which was generally considered rude. Most people don’t keep flags in their house, so I’m a little skeptical of that explanation.
The explanation was that was how the idea of taking hat off = respect became more accepted in America. The oldest reason I can find goes back to hats being helmets and needing to take ’em off to identify yourself.
Does it? I’ve worn plenty of hats and stuck around for hours or days, with nobody ever indicating they thought I was about to walk out the door at any moment. I’ve heard “Take your shoes off, stay a while” hundreds of times, but never “Take your hat off, stay a while”. It doesn’t really make sense to me to think “hat = leaving soon”.
I’m Ukranian and we have the exact same rule about hats indoors. I don’t think it’s about USA’s flags at all. “Implying you’re in a hurry to leave” seems about right.
(Though, there’s also the church rule of “men must have their heads uncovered, women must have their heads covered”, which feels related)
It may have a practical origin, but these days it’s just a convention. In some cultures you take your hat off in church; in others you make sure to have it on. It doesn’t have to make sense, to be a useful symbol. In hat-off-indoors cultures, removing your hat indoors shows respect for the culture. So, if you want to be considered respectful, and respectable, this is one way you can make that happen.
Any convention can be considered a useless imposition, or a useful tool. Which would you prefer?
Better make sure my great-great-great-great-grandpappy sees me observing the social customs of his completely different notch in time, or else [???????] could happen.
Okay, but that’s not actually a reason. It’s just another adjective. What’s douchey about it? What specific qualities of indoor hattery are obnoxious, offensive, or disgusting, or suggest that the wearer is any of those things? Why do they suggest it? How? It’s all circular.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s rich that Raidah – a person Walky has just met – is “apologizing” to him for Jennifer, someone he’s known practically his whole life?
Jennifer is definitely the scapegoat here even if she has nobody to blame but herself for acting like a jerk. And ofcourse Radiah would change the topic the moment Lucy turns it towards something positive.
“I mean, Jennifer kinda jettisoned everybody from Lucy to myself the moment she decided we weren’t good enough to be her friends so that’s debatable” is a line I would really like to see walky use in response to Radiahs ‘we don’t jettison people here’ comment.
Well. That sheds quite a lot of light on Raidah’s view of events. Not prepared to exonerate her (due to the aggravating circumstances of her being a generally social climbing manipulative dick), but it helps to see why she thinks she’s in the right. And why she’s so vehement about it.
This is the kind of character development I like. The kind that makes me say, “I understand, and furthermore, fuck you”.
After Jacob broke up with her I was wondering if we’d only seen one side of Raiders (still?).
Between Failures is a favorite comic of mine. Two of the more prominent characters, and one of the minor ones, were introduced in layers, like the proverbial onion. The first impression to the reader was recolored by further relevation and watching them in other settings.
So I was waiting to find out if we just saw Raidah in the worst light and other qualities would come to the fore.
Ah, you don’t jettison people you say? So Sarah left on her own of her own free will then and it had absolutely nothing to do with you bullying her and treating her like a monster for making a hard call with the limited ability and information she had?
didn’t she only keep Dana around cuz her dad is a lawyer? if he was the one that died instead of her mom, how long would have it taken them to throw her into the sewege??
Honestly I always had a lot of sympathy for Raidah being angry about Dana. It’s clear that she didn’t understand the extent of the problem and was bitter about losing her friend. Seeing her describe it in this way makes me rethink things a bit.
Ah, I suppose Walky wouldn’t know this story, would he? Neither would Lucy.
I do hope they don’t take the bait. Also, I have to wonder how angry Jennifer is, being used as a pawn here. Jennifer’s impulsive, but she isn’t outright stupid. She has to see something’s up here.
I hope they take the bait, then ask enough questions about what Sarah said and did – and Raidah reproduces the answers faithfully enough, because she’s angry and thinks she’s genuinely in the right – to then point out that Sarah is 0% to blame there.
On one hand, everything we’ve seen of Char and Chan (espacially Char) indicates that removing them from a friend group (any friend group) is an understandable and moral thing to do.
On the OTHER hand, it sure is interesting that Raidah hang out with her constantly for weeks AFTER she said the r-slur in public and it’s only after we started making comments about Jennifer’s (AKA Raidah’s new valuable connection) weight that she suddenly poofed out of the friend group.
Well, Chan didn’t directly say the r-slur and seems uncomfortable when Char did but she still laughed at Dina to her face for being ‘mentally challenged’.
And while haven’t had, like, characters SAY they don’t hang out with Char and Chan anymore – we haven’t seen them at ALL since the Time-Skip – even though Radiah and her social circle are now more plot-relevant than ever. And it can’t be just that they were just forgotten from an out-of-universe standpoint cause Char WAS in that Halloween Flashback at least.
Narratively, I feel like the implication is that they and Radiah don’t hang out anymore. If this is not really what’s going on and Char and Chan are just constantly Off Screen, it’ll be a Reveal, cause that’s not really what the Story wants us to think right now… At least that’s my read.
Sometimes it can take weeks or even months to decide to unfriend someone who’s consistently problematic. I don’t think that’s a decision to take lightly, so it makes sense. If you get the timing wrong, it can make a lot of drama.
Ugh, I’m gonna be so annoyed if this shitty little middle-school manipulation works on Walky. He was co-HOSTAGES with Sarah for fuck’s sake.
But then again, he also let Raidah say all that mean crap to Dorothy unchallenged, so who knows. Dude hasn’t got a ton of experience standing up for the people he cares about.
I still disagree about “unchallenged.” If Walky’s rejoinders had been aimed at me, I’d definitely feel I’d been brushed back.
I think he was being polite, in an emotionally charged scene with someone he hardly knew. That seems appropriate. After the current encounter, the rules of engagement may change.
Raidah that was… Really inappropriate. Why do you feel the need to apologize for Jennifer. That feels intrusive to the dynamic. Did she ask you? No. Why are you psychoanalyzing her like that. Raidah is acting like Booster but with less self awareness.
waiting for the day sarah’s old roommate comes back and is like “thank you, sarah. i was going down a dark path and you saved me. i know it wasn’t easy but i got the help i needed thanks to you!” and raidah and them all HAVE to apologize to sarah
I’m going to revise my opinion on Dorothy’s advice. She was right (but maybe for not exactly the right reasons). Someone may not like him for his goofiness, but when they don’t, to hell with them. Which is along the lines of what Danny is telling Joe currently, which I am realizing was probably Willis’ intention.
Anyways, Walky’s attempt to derail this passive aggressive spiel they’ve got planned is an appropriate response. And incidentally, seeing Walky reject a ‘popular’ clique would give Lucy something good consider.
With all their limits, Lucy and Walky look like a wise couple of young adults while, with her tortuous speeches to finally start insulting Sarah, the Fearsome and Machiavellian Raidah seems more and more childish! The only good thing is Lucy’s idea to go on a double date with Sal and Danny. I hope they’ll do it and Walky will talks about this breakfast to warn Sal in case Raidah try to do the same with her.
I wonder if it just rankles Jennifer than she’s gone from ‘alpha cheerleader’ to a less sympathetic Gretchen Wieners, yes-manning for a mediocre antagonist who’s almost as bad at pretending to be mature as she is.
how is it less salacious gossip to propose Sal is getting better grades for having sex with her tutor than is it to propose she only got into college in the first place because her mom at one point had sex with the dean???
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incoming Dana lore?!?
(Carl To Adventure! Defeating College With A Skill Board)
broke my tags, dang
(shoulda had hovertext “Carlaboshi Haruki lol”)
Very badly want to hear Raidah’s version of this story.
*Does the I was Right dance to the horror of all involved*
I think we have heard it a couple of times? “Dana’s mom died, and instead of being there for her when she was feeling bad, her roommate Sarah called her dad and got her taken out of college and ruined her life.” Ignore everything that doesn’t make Sarah look as bad as possible, and tell it to everyone she meets at the slightest provocation.
I’d like to hear Dana’s version, though.
Carl is Dana’s ex boyfriend https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/05-saturdays-all-right-for-slighting/carl/
Ahhhhh yes let’ssssssss
hahah just noticed the poll
I dunno, they sure as heck jettisoned Sarah when she became “inconvenient.”
Yes. How does it go? Ah… Gas-light, Obstruct, Project
Sarah did it first. No reason to keep around someone who does stuff like that when it clashes with the rest of the group’s sensibilities and priorities that hard.
You mean that time Sarah first went to Raidah & Co. to try to get them to find a way to help Dana other than just waiting for everything to blow over, and then when they flat-out refused, she finally resorted to contacting Dana’s father about the situation?
Because that’s what happened. I’m sure Sarah wasn’t the best person to be Dana’s roomie at that point–hell, Sarah’s sure of it, too, for that matter–but I don’t see her actions as deliberately ‘jettisoning’ anyone. Dana’s father was the one who decided to remove Dana, presumably so he could help her get well again with a bit more direct supervision.
Yeah, I think Carl’s very (stoned) words were “I know Dana, she will bounce back” – this after he had not had one sober conversation with Dana after her mom died. None of them had any idea what was happening or any interest in doing anything to support their friend who, to reiterate, was grieving for her mom.
It’s interesting that they still aren’t curious. They have apparently never even considered if Sarah might have had other reasons for taking action besides being a narc and a life-ruiner who takes pleasure in spoiling everyone’s fun so they stop bothering her. They have the narrative of Sarah being a villain and that’s all they need.
Or, as we have seen, it’s all they need until they start gossiping about Sarah to people who then get to hear her version. That’s so going to blow up in Raidah’s face and I can’t wait for it.
Nope. Sharah must be evil because Raidah’s narrative says she is.
If you could please point out the indications in this strip that Carl is currently very stoned, that would be great: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/05-saturdays-all-right-for-slighting/grieve/
Okay, correction, Carl’s very words were “Don’t worry, I know her. She will snap back to normal eventually”. And he wasn’t stoned. Don’t put me in webcomic jail for slander your honor.
She deliberately jettisoned Dana from her life. That’s what happened. I’m not saying it wasn’t justified, but that’s what happened. When someone does that to a member of your friend group, jettisoning them is a completely valid response. Especially if from jump that person made it as difficult as possible to be friends with them. There was no earthly reason to keep Sarah around after what she did. You may not have noticed, but this is a comic where tattling to Dads usually breaks pretty badly for the daughter.
Sarah did what needed to be done for her, and that’s valid. The friend group she burned doing the same in return is equally valid. Sarah was toxic for that friend group, and that friend group was toxic for her. Joyce loves Sarah as she is, which none of that old friend group seemed to do.
It is completely valid to remove from your life someone who takes executive decisions over other people’s lives without their consent. It feels fucking bad. Developing a weird multi-step plan to ruin any attachments that person has primarily via the medium of passive-aggressive brunches is less valid.
Unless, of course, that person purposefully weaponized her new roommate to ruin your romantic relationship with an absolute catch of a man. Then ruining her close relationships might make more sense. Good thing Sarah never did that!
This read only works if you believe Sarah had the ability to know exactly what Dana’s father would do. That’s a pretty hefty level of omniscience you’re putting on her–knowing the psyche of a man she’d probably never met, nor heard much about.
And calling Dana’s father was NOT her first choice–her initial effort was at getting Dana into therapy, but Dana’s oh-so-dedicated friends did jack-fucking-shit to help on that front. Sarah had no resources of her own to call on, so yes, she reached out to the one person she knew was responsible for Dana’s well-being. (If she’d just wanted Dana out of school, she could have just called the campus administration–“My roommate is doing drugs and it’s interfering with my studies” would’ve been a much surer way to get Dana booted from school in a heartbeat.
As for “tattling to Dads” in this comic… First off, Sarah doesn’t actually read this comic. She has no idea she’s in a constructed narrative where ‘being a parent’ and ‘being a monster’ are damned near synonymous. In the real world, calling Dana’s father was the right freaking call, even if it led to less than ideal consequences (which is something we still don’t really know for sure–we only have Raidah’s word for it that Dana isn’t doing well, and that was from months ago).
Now, since the flashback era, Sarah’s done some deeply and profoundly messed-up crap, it’s true. Both assaulting Raidah and then the whole Jacob mess are on her, 100%.
But we’ve also seen her try to be better–she actually listened when Joyce asked her to NOT call her parents, even though she was seriously worried about Joyce’s health. And she’s taken a big sister role in Joyce’s life since then, even taking it so far as to be a better sibling to her actual little sister.
Raidah, meanwhile, seems to actually be getting worse than her first-semester self.
My read is that Sarah should have assaulted Raidah earlier. 🙂
But I read those initial couple incidents of harassment of Sarah we saw at the start of the comic as something that had been going on all last year, since the Dana incident and were starting up again with the new semester. They stopped cold after the punch.
Maybe that’s not the intent, but that’s how I read it.
Trying to break up Jacob and Raidah was bad, but she did try to stop it. Joyce was already too invested for herself by then though.
TV lied. Sometimes hitting the bully DOES work.
Sometimes it makes things way worse but that’s true with all methods of dealing with a bully.
Yeah, I’m pretty much non-violent in most circumstances, but if my read on events is at all accurate, it seems to have worked here when nothing else had.
Agreed. Most people need a good punch or smack to the face at least once in their lives. Especially a bully.
Sarah did not make the choice to remove Dana from school. And of the options available, we don’t know whether removing Dana from school was the best option or not but notifying Dana’s father was certainly one of the only options available to Sarah, the other one being reporting Dana’s substance use to the school. Your friend having to leave your friend group *so they can get help for their substance abuse problem* is not toxic. Getting your friend into treatment for their addiction is not toxic. What is toxic is doing nothing to help your depressed and drowning friend. If Dana had left school to be hospitalized instead of to get addiction treatment, Raidah and the others would’ve blamed Sarah just as much for not preventing Dana’s addiction from escalating.
I actually don’t think they would have blamed Sarah for that. It’s a trolley problem thing – action you DON’T take just doesn’t count as much, to most people’s ethics sense, as action you DO take. From their point of view Sarah overstepped. They themselves were holding back to not overstep. That is, for Raidah, the right thing to do.
That’s not what happened. Sarah wasn’t trying to get rid of Dana – she was trying to get Dana help. Because she had a problem. A problem that was so bad it affected other people around her – endangering Sarah’s ability to continue to BE at that school.
LOL
Lmao even
Yeah… the read being applied here to the Sarah/Dana situation is **very** biased and utterly lacks the insight Booster has for things. Probably time to turn in the username.
Agreed. The almost seem to be defending Raidah of all people
Walky’s really gonna flip when he realizes Lenny is right next to Carl, as always.
Nice
Carl is actually nothing. Also what happened to Char and…the other Char. They both sucked and are no longer around as if maybe they’d been jettisoned.
They were ejected not jettisoned
Other girl is Chan (or Chanise).
Char’s last name was Meleon. But she got married off screen to a man named Mr. Izard. After which some say she had somewhat of an evolution and she gained the ability to fly. On a plane. Out of Indiana. To live with her new husband. Who lives in Japan. Somewhere in the Kantou Region in Honshu.
I sincerely wish her well. Sounds like she chose to be the very best, like no one ever could be.
Yeah honestly wish it wasn’t so hard to catch her. But ever since she went to Japan she stopped feeling Blue. Though since she’s new to the country she’s still a little Green.
A heard you can catch her at a mall, but I don’t remember which one.
She were even more toxic than this group.
Carl is very important. He’s been assigned to say the things that Raidah probably shouldn’t say.
Both Char and Chan were actually bigger jerks than Raidah, which is kinda impressive.
raidah your jettison count is 3
Welp, that’s the third strike, she’s OUTTA THERE! 😤
There is no comment I could make that could top the hovertext, fuck. That is kinda-sorta-not-really exactly what Danny did!
Danny’s been playing the long game all this time.
Everyone dances on strings! Ukulele strings!
(Obligatory “I accidentally hit the Flag while replying” apology. )
This whole conversation has been hinting at the eventual spiral down to a Danny and David dating scenario.
During the double date, the girls go to the restroom, and the question and answer happen. Then Danny Danny continues with, “I’m bi, you see.”
Walkie’s all “Oh? OH!” Danny gets that grin. And, in two shakes of a bag of tacos, they are making out.
The girls come back to this.They look at one another, and one says, “Ah ain’t inta girls, ya know.”
“I’m not either.”
They look back at the boys, each other, and shrug. Then proceed to make out too.
Later, they will all form an ouroboros.
“we were already Eskimo bros, we just cut out the middle man.”
That was his exact plan the first time he flirted with sal.
And then he seduced her by being the biggest fucking dork softie alive
I really hope Dana returns someday. I want to see her back and thriving to just really explode Raidah’s idea of what happened to her. Just completely shatter that reality.
I’ve been secretly rooting for a cameo from Dana for a while now tbh, so if it somehow happens in this arc I’d be very happy 🙂
I’m of the opinion that if Dana ever comes back she’s going to thank Sarah for what she did
Itd be a nice way to close out that plot thread whenever Willis decides to
I want this to be the case so much, I’m hoping the way Carla outing Billie and Ruth resulted in Ruth getting better even if it meant her horrible grandpa paying her a visit is foreshadowing.
Yes! Ha ha… YES.
I hope she’s just returned to campus this semester and is avoiding Raidah because she realized Raidah is awful
That would be perfect actually. She returned after break and no one knows because she’s just been avoiding her old “peer group” as Raidah would say. Maybe she’s chilling with Alice. That one girl Jennifer was bffs with in high school, just living an interesting life away from the DoA cast until it’s dramatically appropriate.
There are so many similar characteristics between Radiah and Jennifer I would have no problem believing their former best friends see them the same way. Jennifer was so oblivious to being cut out of Alison’s life I could see Radiah being the same.
Maybe, for a little added tension, she’s enrolled at Purdue now, and just came down to watch a Hoosiers/Boilermakers game.
Walky and or Lucy are gonna cause shit with Sarah because they’ve been fed the Rad narrative, and then Dana rolls up and supports Sarah to reestablish the status quo.
Sarah verbally guts Jennifer when she tries to shame Sarah for what she did, drawing the line between her self destructive relationship with Ruth and how Dana’s probably not an Ominous Doom Foretelling Oracle like Ruth’s sliding into.
I know people have been hoping for this kind of twist ever since the first Dana Flashback but honestly it feels way too… emotionally and morally simple for a DOA storyline lol. Plus there’s that line from Raidah about how Dana is “not in a better place according to her”.
My best is that if Dana ever comes back she’ll be mad both at Sarah (cause she’s ‘not in a better place according to her’) AND at Radiah and Co. for not reaching out to her more or seeing past her phoney happy act better.
That I could live with. I’d really hate to see Raidah be right about this. It would devastate Sarah and not in a good character growth kind of way.
Honestly the outcome I want is “yeah my dad sucks and going home sucked, for all the reasons you know, but also it actually sucked less than staying here and literally saved my life probably”. The one where the information Raidah is implied to have is correct but also Sarah read Dana correctly, too.
I like this idea but don’t see it happening before an in-setting year has passed, at minimum. We’re in semester two, and do not yet know if there will be a semester three (summer classes) covered at this same week-a-year pace or not.
So, giving it a decade or two.
Yeah I’m gonna continue sitting here with my “Raidah has been systematically feeding Jennifer the idea that Joyce and co. are toxic for her” hat.
Also, weird of Raidah to apologize for Jennifer when Jennifer is, like… sitting right across the table. Jennifer can apologize for herself if she wants, and if she doesn’t, that’s fine to. I wonder what Jennifer’s face is like during this strip, if she’s confused, put out, or nodding along.
Yeah, that was super awkward. I was reading this and thinking “What, did Jennifer go to use the restroom or something?”
Seriously – apologizing for her *in her presence.* What is she, her mommy?
Either like she’s her mom, or like Jennifer is some, like, misbehaving pet. Very condescending.
Jennifer wishes.
She’s in charge because she’s the one all the hangers-on hang onto in this group.
Jennifer is not the head cheerleader, she shuts her mouth and follows the momm-*coughs* Leader…
She’s been treating Jennifer like a child the entire time.
I dunno, I’ll give it to Raidah that last strip and this one are the first we’ve seen of her treating Jennifer like a child. Her behavior otherwise has been presenting herself as ‘saving Billie from a bad night by introducing her to new people’ and just sorta chilling around her. Definitely condescending in the first instance, but to Jennifer’s face she’s been cordial. Behind her back, that’s a different story.
Its just Radiahs way of turning the conversation towards bashing Sarah, she deliberately blamed walkys peers group for Jennifer gossiping so Walky would ask who she was talking about. As though Sarah had any influence of Jennifer, it’s a clumsy way to turn of conversation to jettsioning when nobody was talking about it.
How is everybody going to know that Jennifer is in a subordinate role, if Raidah doesn’t point it out?
Yeah that was so weird. And slightly ironic because I think Jennifer had planned to apologise for Walky.
I’m still getting cult vibes here, it feels like there about declare Sarah the anti-christ.
Everytime Raidah speaks, I wanna use a Mallet on her face to see how many swings it takes to break that mask she has on.
Genuinely insufferable attitude.
Oh, I am agog, Raidah and Carl. Who exactly is Sarah meant to have ‘jettisoned’? Dana? That feels like a very… interesting… view of events, considering what Sarah did was reach out to get her suffering roommate help as best she could. Did that also help Sarah? You bet!
But I suspect that if Dana’s dad had been able to help her without taking her home, and Dana was still around, Sarah would have been fine with that. It wasn’t Dana she objected to but the disruptive habits.
I wonder if Raidah just can’t frame other peoples’ actions in a way that isn’t self-centered…
Then again, Sarah also didn’t frame it that way when they confronted her about calling Dana’s father.
This is the pattern I’m noticing actually: Raidah uses put-downs of other people to illustrate how good of a person she is. She does it to both Jennifer *and* Sarah, and, well, Joyce’s whole friend group by implication, in this comic.
There’s definitely a degree of “I know how people work and it’s always self-centered at the end” going on.
Well, Sarah would have framed her explanation around her own needs, because her self-image is that she doesn’t need other people. Which feeds Raidah’s need to see the world as peopled entirely by heroes and villains. I don’t think that any amount of explanation by anyone is going to bring these two to the same page.
Not just that her self-image is that she doesn’t need other people, but that her projected image of a cranky misanthrope who doesn’t like or care about other people means she has to paint her interventions as selfish even when they’re not.
This works too well, since most people tend to go the other way, minimizing how much they’re driven by self-interest rather than exaggerating it.
It’s not entirely clear to me how much of Sarah’s narrative of “I am a misanthrope” predates Dana’s departure. Like, the seeds of it were certainly there according to Liz, but she also seemed happy with Dana and Raidah and co in the beforetimes.
Nevermind. I just went back into the archives and she introduces herself as a misanthrope to Raidah.
I’m gonna be completely honest. WEIRD Flex to invite someone to Breakfast and then start shitting on their “Peer Group” to their face. Y’know…considering they are a part of their peer group.
Double Dick Move talking about Jennifer like she’s not sitting right fucking there.
Triple Dick move for whatever point you’re about to make about Sarah bee tee dubs.
Get out your Raidah’s “Friend”-Group Dick Move Bingo Card (-_-)
Bongo bingo!
BTW I did not mean to “flag” this, the two clickables are right next to each other and I hit the wrong one by mistake.
No worries, happens to everyone! 😊
The “as you say, your ‘Peer Group'” is killing me, I hate it so much.
does walky rly have a ‘friend’ group outside of dating Lucy now? I imagine he hasn’t spent time with the other cast much after breaking up with amber on halloween
He does walk to lunch with Joyce and Sarah, sometimes also with dina, is friendly with Becky and spends more time with his sister and is invited to Sarah and Joyce’s dorm party’s so yes I would call that a friends group.
I think the idea is to get Walky more involved with Her peergroup by distancing him from his current one.
I mean, that is literally the reason they invited him.
Literally i had a 5 minute interaction with law students that felt exactly like this. These people are weeeeeird
There’s nothing like the feeling of realizing the people you’re talking to are actually just mean, even though they’re not being mean to you directly
“We don’t jettison people when they become inconvenient.”
Charlie Cale: “Bullshit.”
I don’t think Danny does vengeance, but it would make sense. It is is very suspicious that both of Danny’s lovers just happened to shack up with Walky right after breaking his heart into a million tiny pieces. Come on Nightguy, that’s how you make super villains.
Night Guy meet your villain.
Day MAN. 🎶aaaaAAAAAAAaaaAAA!🎶
Day Dude
The sun sets on his affairs.
Next issue will be that one comic release where the writer awkwardly shoehorned in their fetish for sibling-cest, and fans pretend it doesn’t exist.
Ah the old Ultimates take on Scarlett Witch and Quicksilver.
Fighter of the Night-Man! 🎶aaaaAAAAAAAaaaAAA!🎶
Or maybe not even vengeance, but going for the one girl Walky will *definitely* not go for in any way.
Or… Does Sal know that Danny’s bi and she and her twin are basically his version of the Kinsey scale, visualised, as the hovertext here puts it if I haven’t screwed that tag up..?
Coz that could open an interesting clusterfuck of chaos…
So is Raidah trying to take Walky away from Sarah/Sarah’s friend group? Rob Sarah of her friends or something?
…Why? Not only is this a pathetic amount of effort put into fucking with someone, but Walky and Sarah aren’t even that close, considering all the time they’ve spent together.
It’s funny cuz I don’t even think Sarah’s friend’s with Walky. Joyce is closer to being friends with Walky and Joyce seems cordial at BEST with him. He’s like…a friend of an acquaintance. It’s like trying to topple a building by breaking the antenna at the top.
As for Joyce, she said Sarah, Dorothy, Walky, and herself would be Becky’s new family when she invited Becky to live with them indefinitely.
Maybe that was because of Dorothy then dating him, but she did include Walky as integral to that while not mentioning Jennifer or Sal.
Perhaps that was just the heat of the moment, and everything doesn’t need to be said, but I’ve always considered this version of Walky and Joyce to be frenemies who would very much miss messing with each other if too much time passed, but not in the same way Walky likes picking with his sisters.
As for Sarah, we have another heat of the moment scenario when Raidah invited Walky to breakfast.
Raidah commented on the fact that Sarah managed to keep some friends and Sarah replied with a “yeah” confirming them to be friends, and then said she liked them.
Considering that said group consisted of Joyce, Lucy, Sal, and Walky, unless she was referring to Joyce as “them”, she was referring to more than one of them as her friend and gave no caveat (and I wouldn’t consider Sarah close with any of them besides Joyce).
Admittedly, neither of these examples are glowing recommendations of their strong feelings of friendliness towards Walky, so it seems like they’re all just used to being around each other.
Maybe that’s why Walky has been saying “peer-group” instead of “friends” or “friend-group”.
Joyce is definitively Walky’s friend. They have a weird relationship, but they consistently talk to each other since before Walky started dating Dorothy and continued thereafter.
i think at most they just happen to have a few classes together
I think it’s a two birds with one stone kind of deal, Raidah sees walky as a way to rub shoulders with the dean to benefit herself and also if it antagonizes Sarah no matter how minor she’ll take it. I don’t think she is putting in an actual effort to take all her friends away, she’s content with treating them like garbage as seen with Dorothy. Walky just has something that she wishes to acquire, so she’s going to play nice to get it as she’s already shown.
Probably doing the exact same to Jennifer for her rich parents.
Yes. This is literally her entire plan.
i think she might also be aware that joyce and sarah are friends, or in the same friend group? if so, there’s the added bonus of getting back at joyce, who she blames for the end of her relationship with jacob
I’m waiting for Walky to just report all this back to them.
I’m pretty sure the only people Radiah can really ‘take away’ from Sarah in a way that will really hurt her are Joyce (which Radiah now hates just as much as Sarah if not more) and Dina (who greatly dislike Radiah).
That being said, Joyce might be more effected by this…
Sarah did use Joyce as a wedge to break up Jacob and Raidah by way of an emotional affair. (Even if Sarah tries to justify it as Joyce “deserving” him more than Raidah, it was a revenge plot to get back at her perceived slight in their freshman year.)
If Raidah has one legitimate grievance with either of them, that would be it. Unfortunately, she’s going to bite back in a roundabout, petty mean-girl way. Because that’s what she does.
A revenge plot for harassment continuing into the start of this year, but yes that was still a bad thing.
She also told Joyce not to do it before the plot finished. Joyce continued on her own though.
And Raidah shouldn’t know anything about Sarah’s part in that – though she could of course assume she was involved.
I think in her mind, it’s cosmic injustice for Sarah to have influential friends. They must have been suckered in by the evil her and need rescuing! So she’s doing the rescuing.
*or any friends, really. The influential ones are just an additional spit in justice’s face.
I know Raidah’s the more compelling person to shit on for plot reasons but yeah, Carl! He stinks !!! We hate that guy !!!
Carl is CRAPPY
“…Yeah, fuck
GokuCarl.”Carl Whatshisface: all the crappiness of Radiah, none of the stuff that makes her actually compelling or memorable!
Ivehadenoughofthisdude.jpg
Oh hey look at that we’re already gossiping about our peers like they said they don’t do.
It’s more like Sarah had to make severe choices because she couldn’t afford to take any chances.
I don’t 100% agree with her actions, but I do understand them enough to not blame her. Which, considering Raidah probably never gave Sarah enough of a leeway to get to know what Sarah’s situation was (I’m still thinking that Raidah fully understood what the roommate’s issues were), she doesn’t know.
Nono you don’t understand Sarah should have just let Dana spiral and as a result continue to get no sleep and bomb her classes and lose her scholarship so she’s forced to drop out of University. Like a REAL friend 🙂
Both Radiah and Jennifer’s anger at Sarah for not just letting Dana be reeks of entitlement and privilege. They think because Sarah was an outcast who Dana went out of her way to include she owed her unconditional obedience or as I’m sure Radiah would call it loyalty and neither appreciate how screwed Sarah would be with no scholarship because they take money for granted.
Jennifer is angry at Sarah now? Links?
Forgot how to direct link but after the mall incident when radiah shared her story Jennifer later confronted Sarah in the cafeteria asking If she’s going to do the same thing to joyce(call her dad on her about being drugged) saying ‘you really don’t like people. Then after Ruth was in the hospital there was a strip with walky and Sarah where Sarah made an unrelated comment to Walky and Jennifer who was walking up ahead made an angry comment about how Sarah gets rid of people.
*when Sarah shared her story* bot radiah
When you view relationships as purely transactional, you have to turn a profit somewhere.
Isn’t that how it works in Raidah-land?
I always come back to the line Raidah said in the flashback.
“She was getting better.”
Dana was definitely in a spiral, but that phrase always sticks in my head.
Raidah KNEW Dana was in a bad spot, and honestly, in groups, the only way Sarah saw her interact with people, she put on a smile.
It’s possible though that Raidah and her were genuinely close and she knew Dana was recovering, or because of her prodding Dana felt compelled to lie to her too.
In either case, Raidah’s perception was that Dana was cutting back and her issues were being mitigated with the help of others. Until Sarah intervened.
I don’t blame Raidah for hating Sarah, at least based on what we know of her perspective. Though some of that probably IS what she saw as betrayal of their mutual friend, who went out of their way to include her.
Wait wasn’t Billie/Jennifer *there* when Sarah was talking about what went down with Dana? Is B’Jennifer gonna say anything about it or has she fully drank the Raidah koolaid?
Ehhh, Jennifer always seemed kinda on Raidah’s side on that. I don’t think it’d take much Kool-Aid.
I didn’t really get that impression, felt more like she just didn’t overall care (and thought that Raidah and Sarah should bone).
It’s the way she accused Sarah of just wanting to get rid of her roommates when Sarah wanted to report what happened to Joyce.
Jennifer has always blamed Sarah despite Sarah’s side of the story making it clear it was a hard decision that she felt she had to make. I belive there’s an underlying assumption from Jennifer that as an unpopular misfit Sarah should have been eternally grateful to the popular Dana. Same reason she expected Carla to just go along with enabling her an Ruth and got mad when Carla “disobeyed” her i think.
There’s jettisoned (Dana, Sarah) and then there’s cameo-ed (Char, Chan)
Time for some clique war, Raidah v. Dotty.
So, uh, how come you don’t seem to hang out with Chan and Char anymore, Raidah?
But I agree with a double date. Do it, Lucy!
I would think saying ableists slurs and being a dick in general is more than just ‘inconvenient’ (tho having a friend stay in a group no matter how toxic doesn’t seem like it’d help things either) Unless she somehow manuveued it into introducing them into a new ‘friend group’ yet keeping their contacts on the backburner if they still had good connections
That’s fair for Char but where did Chan evaporate off to?
Maybe they were a package deal; if Chan was Char’s friend before, when one got spaced they both had to go.
Or they just plain outlived their usefulness.
Raidah was with both of them weeks after the incident with Dina, so, unless it was a slow burn, that’s not the reason Char is gone.
In fact, I believe Chan disappeared before Char since the last time we saw Char was Halloween and the last time we saw Chan was when she and Char were saying Raidah might need to watch out for Joyce and Raidah saying Joyce wasn’t a threat.
Clearly, Sarah and Joyce stole them too.
and i do like sal/danny together but danny probably would be a good boyfriend type for Lucy too
He would be!
hope they can at least befriend each other at some point
My assumption is that she still does, but not with Jennifer around. Maybe they’re not subtle enough to avoid spoiling the plan.
Interestingly, we never saw either of them interact with Jacob either
Haha wow she’s awful. Raidah. you are what. 20? Twenty years old. It is EARLY to join the Awful DoA Parents board. What is this mean-mom energy you’re bringing.
This probably IS how Jennifer’s parents spoke about her right in front of her tho. Friends and kids are for showing off, not, like, growing relationships with.
ugh. ugh.
Friends are for growing relationships with, which is why Sarah had to be jettisoned.
Much to her own long-term benefit. Being jettisoned from that group is a bit like being exiled from Putin’s Russia. There’s worse places you could land, but not many.
DANNY/WALKY NOW
Yeah Lucy has the right idea.
I’m like…40% sure I drew something like that.
90% I drew it with both twins though.
I remember that one fondly. Might still have it on my phone.
Also in a way since Walky has also had an arc where he regrets not being there for people close to him when they needed him most and had to learn to be better on that it would be kind of hypocritical for him to suddenly start acting like “that could never me.”
Walky had to learn to stand up for and stand with Sal.
But he never tried to remove her from his presence and had pretty much been the one trying to get closer to her during the first semester and not the other way around as Sal felt he didn’t try to reach her while she was gone and also resented him for having it easy and being the favorite.
It’s not the same situation.
In fact, Walky has made a habit of trying to be around both his sisters when they weren’t all that enthusiastic to see him, just more so with Jennifer, but then again, he also had the last 5 years with Jennifer.
Side note: do we know if Sal ever came home for Christmas or summer when she was in Tennessee? I would normally assume she had, but I also got the impression that Walky hadn’t even seen or heard from her for five years before she showed up at college.
Well he didn’t no, but their parents sort of did in a way and he kind of went along with it in that period of time. Sure it’s most likely it was court ordered to send her away but from what I heard they kept complete radio silence for all that time and Walky sort of went along with it, and he feels guilty about it.
Sure though when she reapered back in his life he went right back to trying to make up for lost time and that’s good.
I can’t believe their parents had no contact with Sal during that time – even if only to check up on her and lecture her.
It’s not a surprise Walky feels guilty about not finding a way to keep in touch with her, but he was 13 when it started and in an abusive family situation where going against Linda would definitely have been high risk, so I really can’t blame him too much.
According to Sal it sounded like the case, maybe they sent a postcard and couple of packages every now and again but I don’t think they wrote to her on a constant basis.
I can barely comes to grips with a family sending their 13 year old to a year round boarding school for 5 years with no summers or school break at all, but going complete no contact is unimaginable.
Even in an abusive family – that’s giving up control
It’s completely fucked, but it’s does happen from time to time. It’s the the closest thing they have to outright legal abandonment.
So raidah’s saying she’s still gonna try to ‘befriend’ walky even if he has no ‘real’ connections? 😛 Press x to doubt
And tbf at this point sarah would just straight up say “stay outta my life” as opposed to needing to get rd of ppl lol
What game reference is this 😅
The game is LA Noir.
You play an LA cop who gets promoted to detective and you solve multiple cases from different dolice divisions in the years immediately after WWII.
It has the noir or neo noir aesthetic (I don’t know the difference) with the dogged detective, damsels in the distress, tommy guns, and car chases you’d expect from a detective movie or book from that time.
It wa made by Rockstar and unfortunately never got a sequel.
It’s almost endearing how completely transparent Raidah is about schmoozing. There is zero subterfuge about the game that is being played
She’s super bad at this.
I hope Carl has something to say next strip. This at least implies he’s going to elaborate. As the guy who dated Dana, he’s most likely the one to have some solid information on her status. If he cared about her that is. Like he is the guy who would have the most contact with her. It’s really convenient he’s just a glorified background character.
Well, according to Sarah’s flashback, Dana ditched him soon after her downward spiral started, so I dunno how serious that relationship was or how much info he’ll have.
Urrgghhhh this is triggering me
“We don’t jettison them, we do something much worse. Pretend to keep being their friend in case they become useful but still talk to them like we’re the parents and they’re a small, rude child we deign to continue caring for.”
This is kinda like when Scar is telling Simba about the elephant graveyard
That would make Chan, Char, and Carl the hyenas (Char is Ed).
I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard at this comic than Walky being jumped scared by Carl’s presence 🤣🤣🤣
…honestly, for as much as an absolute prick Raidah has been throughout this whole storyline (and in general), I am genuinely curious to hear Raidah’s side of the whole Dana story, and how she thinks it all went down. And hell, Carl’s side, as well, given that he was Dana’s boyfriend.
Of course, I’m also curious about where the hell Chan and Char are, if Raidah’s so strongly against getting rid of people when they become inconvenient to her. And in whether Dana would think Raidah’s a good friend to her after seeing she’s shacked up with her ex in Dana’s absence.
re-reading i saw that dana told sarah that her dad ran a lawfirm, and while i want to believe that raidah was her friend for being her *friend* we’ve seen tons of evidence for years of raidah using people for their connections 🙁
Agreed. This is probably the best chance to hear whether, for example, Dana’s home situation was safe or not. Which is one of the biggest remaining sticking points of whether or not what Sarah did was, in all, okay. (I’m going to say Raidah’s response passed out of “justice” and into “bullying” well before what we saw at the start of semester one either way since she DID go out of her way to repeatedly harass Sarah, but continuing to hold a grudge would be a lot more justifiable if she knows or suspects Dana’s dad isn’t safe. That said, it would be way easier to get the moral high ground back by telling Sarah that fact, so I assume that even if he is, she didn’t have that information up until Sarah snapping and punching her at the mall or else why the hell wouldn’t she bring it up.)
That said, even if Dana’s dad is abusive, that doesn’t mean the situation was necessarily sustainable, especially because Sarah would’ve been at WAY higher risk if that weed had been found by an authority – both as a student there on scholarship and because of her race. (Which, incidentally… Raidah? You could stand to be a BIT more cognizant of the inherent risk there to both of them because of Sarah and Dana’s respective races, for all your progressive talk.) And it would’ve fucked Dana over, too, if she’s the one who actually got in trouble for it – as it stands now, she might be considered a drop out, but she could be considered a withdrawal (which may have gotten her – read, her dad – partial tuition refund, given the circumstances, so I’d bet he would have tried for that over dropping out) or on an extended leave of absence. Even dropping out’s a step up from expulsion. She didn’t get arrested, also good. This means even if her father’s abusive, she’s in a better position to get back to school and away from him than she would’ve been in the “someone finds out about the weed” timeline where expulsion very much WAS on the table and so were charges. And in that case, her dad finds out anyway and is probably even WORSE than it would be when things can be privately swept under the rug.
In fairness to Raidah if she is dating Carl, it has been well over a year. And I’m not sure it’s been established she’s dating Carl, has it? And he’s bringing her up now. I’m perfectly willing to give her that one if she is. But I do also wonder about Chan and Char’s absence right now.
What always bothered me about the Dana situation is that Sarah didn’t KNOW her home life was safe. And it seemed to be like she emphasized the drug aspect rather than the depression, which increases the chances of punishment rather than sympathy. I really wish she’d tried to get a counselor or other neutral adults involved, like Carla did with Ruth. It was illegal for Ruth to be drinking at that point but I don’t think she got in trouble, because she was in a clinical setting where the adults had an interest in helping her, not punishing her.
Sarah, I think, was in the wrong? A lot of her character development and relation to Joyce centers around learning from that, I think. I think she’s someone who would handle it way better if she was in that situation again. She’s demonstrated that. To us. The audience. Not to Raidah??
Way better how? It definitely haunts her, but it’s not at all clear to me that she was wrong or what she should have done instead.
Just followed Raidah and Carl’s lead and assume Dana would get over it eventually?
Both illegal, but drug use tends to get treated much more harshly, even for underage drinkers. Not a lot of kids doing hard time for drinking.
Also, Carla didn’t turn Ruth in for drinking. (Or at all really – Rachel called Chloe after she was revealed to the dorm.) Ruth was depressed to the point of being almost non-responsive except to talk about wanting to die.
Dana was apparently still able to front well enough that it’s unlikely that calling in someone like Chloe would lead to more than “Yeah, she’s still sad about her mother. Give her sometime.” Rather than to an involuntary commitment on suicide watch. U
nless you bring up the drugs. And bringing up the drugs to any legal authority is far riskier than bringing them up to family.
Yeah, and not to say involuntary commitment or suicide watch are without issues – but Ruth was clearly in such bad state that calling authorities was a reasonable call EVEN THOUGH it got back to her abusive grandfather. A line clearly does exist there.
Dana probably wasn’t that dangerously depressed yet, and it’s hard to say if she would have gotten that dangerously depressed with only Sarah’s POV to judge from, but it’d be entirely possible she COULD have reached the suicidal point and still maintained just enough of a front that the others wouldn’t know.
The whole situation just sucked.
She DID try to get Dana a therapist. She wasn’t going and her friends refused to help Sarah on that front.
Most people whose home situation IS safe assume that home = safe for other people, too. After all it’s all that’s blasted all over media, they’re surrounded with reassurances that mom and dad might be embarrassing but they just love you very much and you can always come to them with everything, and horrible scary abuser situations are horror movie exceptions that don’t really happen in real life.
And frankly, it mostly is. Paralyzing yourself by acting as if all homes are unsafe when there isn’t any specific reason to think so isn’t really much better than ignoring clues that one isn’t.
We really don’t have much in the way of red flags for Dana’s home situation.
Out of all available options available to Sarah Dana’s father was the one most likely to be on her side, and least likely to ruin her life.
Plus its not like her father actually had the power to force her back beyond cutting her off.
Some caution is fair, and if Danah said her father wasn’t great Sarah should have believed her, but lets not start making parents guilty until proven innocent.
While I get emphasizing the drug use is more likely to get Danah punished, its also more likely to get her father to actually act instead of assuming its proberly not that bad.
It was a situation where there were no good answers, Sarah likely chose the least bad answer.
She may have a corporate model of getting rid of people. Never fire, just get them to quit so you’re the one who looks innocent. (I mean, in corporate it’s also a way of getting out of paying unemployment but you get the idea)
If that’s her model on friendship things are looking bad for Jennifer who has quickly become the unfavorite. The only slight positive I can see is maybe down the line jennifer will look back at this and wonder if this is how Sal felt being constantly overlooked and talked downd to by her parents in favor of Walky.
Hey Raidah. Everyone sees what you’re doing. “Oh, I reeeaaally shouldn’t saaaaay” fuck off. Get hit by a car. Worthless.
Walky’s prank in last panel is the most perfect payback for Raidah dissing Joyce in her face.
I’m getting really seriously burnt out on trying to engage here at all. I like trying to analyze antagonists and find ways to interpret them that don’t require me to read them like supervillains. That’s increasingly… just not feeling like an approach the comic itself wants me to take, and it’s *definitely* not an approach a lot of commenters are willing to tolerate from me.
I literally got accused of having a Christian persecution complex yesterday for mentioning offhandedly that Mary and Blaine are fairly irredeemably bad people without any sympathetic traits, and that I hoped Raidah might be different.
There are no brakes on this train, so I am *begging* some of y’all to try slowing down a little bit.
This, severely. I would dearly love it if some of y’all would pull your teeth out of each other’s throats. Nobody here is your fucking enemy.
I’ve noticed a lot of people say things like, “sorry I bit your head off, this character just reminds me a lot of someone I used to know who hurt me”. I totally believe that’s true, and I understand that defensive impulse! Believe it or not, I felt it with Lucy for a while, of all characters. But I wish people would realize that they’re emotionally raw about the issue before they lash out at other commenters who lack that context, and not after.
This is not about anybody in the Raidah talks; honestly, I’m thinking of some arguments about Malaya. Also, it’s worth remembering that there’s a gray area between openly flaming and being friendly/constructive, and just because a post doesn’t directly attack someone doesn’t mean it won’t come across as heated or hostile. Arguments are inherently stressful, and going to extra lengths to make sure you’re keeping the argument civil–“I see what you’re saying,” “I’m not sure I understand, could you clarify?”–goes a long way towards making this community better.
I used to consider this comments section something of a community. That was a few years ago, though. Nowadays I tune in to see what wild and outlandish things people dream up from these characters’ brief interactions. Some of that discussion is even worth sticking around for, and I’ll say that much without sarcasm. A lot of it in the past year or two has been outright fucking vicious though, and people need to remember themselves before they go biting somebody else’s dick off for saying “Becky cussed in panel 3”.
I find the strips (or at least, the comments) a lot easier to just binge-read nowadays. Watching a 30-minute conversation play out over weeks in real-life as people overanalyze every part is just exhausting.
It’s been like this for a long time really. Worse sometimes.
Look back to the fights about how Mary just wanted to study in peace. Or about how horrible Becky was for spending $20 dollars on a haircut rather than using it to find a place to live.
There’s a lot of good discussion in the comments and I definitely see the comic itself with more depth and nuance because of these discussions, but damn does it get toxic in here sometimes.
You’ve gone and done the worst thing you could’ve done. It’s a crime to ask for basic civility, in a room full of people who are sure you’ve got a dagger in your sleeve and a gun in your mouth.
The gun fires bees. The bees are racist and have guns also.
Bees. My God.
Sounds like a job for Doctor Bees.
A doctor? Rassilon worships bees as his god and is consequently beyond saving.
It’s just something that happens when a group swings towards an extreme. It can blind you to other perspectives.
If you don’t believe strongly in at least Some things, nothing ever gets done, so. Best we can do is check ourselves. Strong convictions should be balanced by equal amounts of chill.
If this helps, I enjoy reading your comments! comment-reading is an essential part of the webcomic experience for me. it’s really fun to read varying interpretations, observations and reactions. so i’m sorry that you feel burnt out
I can sympathize. I’m sorry to hear you’re burnt out and I hope you feel better soon but if not I can understand.
I dunno if this helps or if it’s feasible for you, but the patreon comment section is often more relaxed.
Who jettisons people when they become inconvenient? Astrotrain.
Facts.
Spacely Space Sprockets
Not fair, he’s just the transport, it’s the guys on board who do the jettisoning when there’s too much weight
in space
hmm
Imagine after that Carl keeps going on about his gripe with Sarah without introducing himself and then Walky is like “oh OK that sucks I’m sorry that happened to you…who the fuck are you?”
It would be hilarious if instead of asking about Sarah Walky started talking about Carl’s cap instead. WALKY: nice hat, i wonder if I should were one? I’m already hoodie bros with Asher, we could be hat bros! You think Carl’s hat is nice right Jennifer? CARL: about Sarah… WALKY: I don’t think she wears caps.
Going to be honest, Carl seems to have the same issue people keep saying Danny has that his hat is more memorable if not the most memorable thing about him.
Who the fuck is Carl?
He dated Dana. Sarah has seen his bare ass. That is Carl.
A rich tapestry for a storied existence, to be sure. Song will surely be sung of Carl.
Carl is prophesied to kill Sarahgandr, the World Serpent Who Jettisons, at Ragnarok
Ragnarok is a bar in Cissly.
Carl’s bare ass is more deserving of a tag than Carl is
Bull-CRAP you don’t jettison people Raidah, I haven’t seen Chan all day! She make one too many bigoted comments for ya?
Raidah is majoring in Hollywood science. She accidentally erased Chan from existence.
Think that was Char, Chan seemly left the group before Halloween. Which just Radiah Radiahs friendship retention look even worse.
*Makes Radiahs*
Radiah is a verb unto herself
Radiah gonna Radiah
Raidah, I’d be almost impressed by your manipulation skills if you hadn’t set up this entire cloak and dagger operation over just the pettiest shit imaginable.
It’s like she’s preparing for a career in academics.
“Why are the fights so ferocious?”
“Because the stakes are so amall.”
This entire breakfast could have been saved if Raidah had answered “Your mom” instead of her useless, cloying little bait of a non-response. Nobody cares about her stupid one-sided feud* with Sarah except her.
*Well, I say “feud”. What I really mean is “open and shameless bullying”. She’s fucking obsessed with Sarah, to the point of forgetting how to be a person.
I would ask Raidah very rhetorically if she knows about how to let go of anything, except I am 90% certain she doesn’t.
She wears a lot of skin-colored makeup on her arms, because she never learned how to let go of things, so she winds up squeezing them into a 2D plane and they look like tattoos on her skin. Give her a wash and her biceps will look like a rummage sale.
Sounds like a Stand power. She even talks like she’s an enemy Stand User (O_o)
STAND:「THE GRUDGE」
STAND MASTER: RAIDAH
Destructive Power: E
Speed: B
Durability: A
Precision: D
Developmental Potential: E
Stand Ability: This Stand feeds on its User’s hatred for a target, and can only be activated when that hatred is their focus. When active, it increases its User’s talent and charisma in any given social activity by a hundredfold or more; it can even compel others to join the User’s “peer group”.
Thal’s balls, even her Stand is pathetic and extremely situational.
I was actually thinking more like turning physical objects into tattoos on her skin, but hey this sounds menacing too 😮
My dream that girl Dana to come back and hug Sarah for looking out her when no one else did. For not ignoring her problems like others did. And then Radiah’s head explodes.
Dana’s a very convenient object for Raidah to use against others right now, so I think you’re right that her head would explode.
It’s not unlikely. The only thing we know about how Dana is doing post-intervention is that according to Raidah’s posse her life is ruined, which I figure 80% odds it means “her dad won’t let her smoke pot or hang with her pot enthusiast friends anymore”.
Would be interesting to hear anything from her really.
This should happen even if Raidah never learns about it.
Yeah 😀
I’m not sure how one-sided it is. Sarah’s tipping point for deciding to pursue her own happiness, however briefly, was to prove Raidah wrong by succeeding at something social.
oh, and there was this one time when she shot down Raidah’s budding relationship using a Joyce-shaped missile.
To be fair, while she did start that, she also tried to call it off, though it was too late by then.
Everything we’ve seen Sarah do, has been done after Raidah started up on her shit. I don’t care about any paranoid “what happened before hmmmmmm?” hypothetical things we haven’t been shown.
…Neither do I. The point I’m making is you can’t really call it one sided if Sarah engages in it.
Not saying Sarah engaging was morally right but it is understandable for a bully victim to desire some comeuppance for their abuser after just sitting there at taking it for so long. Not to mention Joyce kept at it for reasons unrelated to radiah so as far as engaging from Sarah goes it was pretty short lived.
I understand both of them. With Raidah having the dubious honor of being the one villain in this story I kind of, sort of understand. So I speak with that in mind.
The idea the conflict only exists in Raidah’s head is kind of disingenuous. Sarah’s put her foot down. And I guess people supporting her occasional potshots is a sorta kinda defensible position to take?
I’m more leaning towards the idea Sarah’s “better” than Raidah by most measures. She’s done the right thing by our moral framework when the situation called for it. Even when she hated doing it. But we are not comparing apples to oranges here. If there are no Lives on the line, Sarah’s gonna step on you, sometimes just because she feels misanthropic that day.
By acting like the animosity is one-sided, Taffy attempts to present Raidah in an even worse light than Raidah already presents herself. And honestly, she’s horrible enough without a smear campaign. You don’t need to make stuff up.
You’re right, I don’t need to make stuff up. And so far, I haven’t. I’ve simply perceived the situation differently than you. I don’t see Sarah’s meager retaliations as anything more than that, she’s just reacting to what Raidah started.
Yeah, that’s fair. We don’t really agreed on definitions or anything, either.
didn’t really agree*
Well, there is engaging in it and responding when provoked. In my view, the later does not prevent the one-sidedness of the “feud”.
There’s the other shoe.
i will forever feel bad for sarah’s situation with dana because i truly believe that she was genuinely trying to help, not hurt
Trying to help is often considered worse than deliberately harming somebody. Because people are almost universally insane and stupid.
i think it depends on a lot of things, from the situation to the people etc. these are people aged 18-20 and aren’t known for making the best decisions. you’re right, plenty of times helping IS hurting. sarah could’ve taken other actions
but i don’t think it’s fair to make an overall statement that helping is worse than deliberately hurting. and even those of us who are “insane” are able to provide help
You misunderstand. I said it’s often considered worse, not that I agree with that sentiment. Helping and hurting are different things. I don’t really understand why you put scare quotes on “”insane””, though.
Oh, no! Not “scare” quotes.
Those are “the” wors”t”.
I honestly don’t know what I would’ve done in that situation, and I’m in my late 30s. I definitely wouldn’t expect a college student to know exactly the right way to handle a situation like that.
Sometimes there are no right answers, or it’s impossible to know the right answer because we don’t have all the information and can’t predict the future.
I went back and re-read the Dana flashback, and what I get from it is: Sarah was a bit unfairly judgmental of Dana from the start (looking down on her for not using her college time wisely) but what we know about Sarah also makes her attitude somewhat understandable, her own position in college is contingent on being a good student. She doesn’t have the privilege of family wealth/connections to fall back on like Dana and many of her former friends did.
Once Dana’s mom died, she immediately violated the boundaries of their room mate agreement. She may have been grieving, but that doesn’t automatically mean she should get a free pass to cross Sarah’s boundaries. Sarah tried talking to their other friends about the problems Dana was having and they shut her down, insisting it wasn’t a problem, dismissing both Sarah’s feelings/how it was affecting her and dismissing her concerns about how Dana was coping, basically being bad friends to BOTH of them and leaving Sarah to deal with the problem completely alone.
Sarah was basically in an impossible situation. Ignoring the problem was quite literally putting her own future at risk (and again, she didn’t have a privileged background that might provide her with free second chances) and it didn’t seem to actually be doing Dana any good either. She’s right that she had to do SOMETHING, the question is what the right option would’ve been.
I can’t remember if we ever get any more of the story beyond Sarah’s retelling to Joyce in that one storyline. But based on that, it’s hard to judge whether Sarah made the right or wrong choice. If Dana had a good dad, who was understanding and supportive and would make sure she got the proper kind of help, then Sarah made the right choice in calling him. Maybe he found her a good therapist, maybe they both decided taking time off from school was what she needed at that point, and Raidah was being completely unfair in getting upset with Sarah, and not actually being realistic about the situation.
If on the other hand Dana’s dad is awful (we don’t know either way) then calling him was the wrong choice, and may have only made the situation worse. She may have been pulled out of school and taken home to an even worse environment where her mental health deteriorated further and she didn’t get the help she needed. In that case, the better choice would’ve been to maybe try to encourage Dana to talk to a therapist. I’m unclear if the school has on campus free counseling (is that what Ruth went to? She seemed to be staying in an actual hospital so I’m not sure). The issues with this of course are: if the school doesn’t offer free counseling options, Dana would have to pay out of pocket (likely more than a college student could afford on their own), or perhaps rely on insurance (if it even covered this) which could mean her dad would find out. Plus it would only work if Dana was willing to participate. Sarah can’t FORCE her to go to therapy, and if she refused, Sarah would be still stuck in the same untenable situation.
Ignoring it forever and just hoping Dana got better (which seemed to be what Raidah thought she should do) *might* have worked, but based on how it was going, it’s more likely it would’ve continued to be bad until either Dana flunked out or Sarah’s grades slipped so much she lost her scholarship, forcing her to drop out, or worst case scenario, Dana’s mental health getting so bad she became increasingly self destructive or did something drastic. Or some combination (or all) of the above.
Given all the possible outcomes and based on what limited info we were given, it’s hard to fault Sarah for making the choice she made, and even possible it was entirely the best choice given the circumstances (and if it wasn’t, it’s hard to know what Sarah could have/should have done instead). Either way, I definitely feel Raidah has been extremely unfair to Sarah in all of this, unless there’s some key piece of info we’re still missing. Even if Dana’s dad were awful and abusive and Raidah knew this but Sarah didn’t, it would be an understandable mistake on Sarah’s part, that she felt backed into when none of her other friends were willing to help, so Raidah’s continued insistence that Sarah was being callous and just discarding “inconvenient” people is cruel and unfair.
There’s also the fact that at a certain point, Sarah has to do something so her, uh, life isn’t in danger. Because I cannot imagine anything good happening to a young Black woman who “let Dana be”, the way Raidah wanted, and had the school or God forbid the police find out about all the illegal drug she was smoking. Or worse!
Like, Sarah could say “I had nothing to do with it” all day long and she’d still end up collateral damage. In the best-case scenario her dreams of law school are dead, forever, and staying at IU is probably not happening.
And Raidah has to know this, given she’s up on current politics, right?
I think there’s another issue on top of it – as the story was framed, and that might need to be retconned someday but it hasn’t as of March 2023, the boundary violation is a drug that’s still fully criminalized in Indiana.
And while Sarah doesn’t bring it up there as such, that adds a whole second issue and set of worst case scenarios – one where the weed gets found out and someone faces criminal charges or expulsion. At best, Dana takes the fall, her dad bails her out, MAYBE she can continue but it seems at least as likely she leaves college, probably under worse standing with the college, and if her dad IS a problem, he’s probably angrier than before because now it’s a scandal. At worst, SARAH is the one getting in trouble (either because the authority assumed so because racism or because Dana blamed her in desperation*,) and will be facing much, MUCH worse trouble because she lacks the class privilege AND race privilege Dana does.
And with that in mind, the situation gets even worse and even more untenable to simply ignore, and much harder for Sarah to navigate on her own the way she had to. Now, granted, the counseling center almost certainly does have free therapists, but in reality college therapists tend to be VERY overwhelmed because there are too many students needing services relative to the therapists, and the advice they offer can be… hit or miss. So Sarah probably should have suggested it/pushed a bit if Dana rejected it once, but even if Dana had gone, it may or may not have solved anything. Even assuming Sarah made a wrong choice, I agree with you – I don’t think there were good ones available, and it’s hard to fault Sarah for information she didn’t have against the information she DID have.
* We don’t know enough about Dana to say she would try to blame it on Sarah, but Becky and her first roommate seem to have genuinely been friends, not just attracted to each other, and Caitlin still threw Becky under the bus – under what I am CERTAIN was immense pressure from parents and/or faculty, but still, Becky got thrown under the bus. If Dana was scared and facing trouble – and she would very much be both of those things – I can see her doing it just because she was an eighteen-year-old who wasn’t thinking about how much worse this would be for Sarah, no matter how nice she might be otherwise. And Sarah kind of has to be aware of that knowledge, too.
Again, Sarah doesn’t bring it up, but it is THERE, and that makes it an even thornier situation.
Both you and Sajuuk add excellent points above! I didn’t go into the drug use aspect as much because I never know how receptive people will be to these discussions, but yeah, that’s a pretty major boundary to violate. I 100% respect people’s right to decide what goes into their own bodies but if you are also exposing someone else to it without their consent? NOT okay. I know people often think it’s nbd with this drug in particular (it’s completely legal in my state and honestly I forget sometimes it’s still not legal in many states) but speaking as someone who has adverse reactions to it, along with lung issues, I would probably be in a state of panic if I were Sarah in that situation. I have zero issues with others partaking but I cannot be around them while they’re smoking without having some really unpleasant physical symptoms. (Same goes for tobacco too). A good friend/room mate would keep it outside if asked, period.
And I didn’t even consider the legality context because again, I forget sometimes it’s not legal everywhere. That adds a whoooole extra layer, especially for Sarah as someone on a scholarship and a black woman.
People who think Sarah should have tried other actions never seem to say what those actions ARE.
1) Therapists are great, but Sarah cannot MAKE Dana see one. Dana won’t go.
2) Talking to Dana “probably made things worse” according to Sarah.
3) Reporting her to the school will bring all sorts of shit down on Dana because they’d almost certainly find out about the drugs just from when they walk in and get punched in the face with the smell of weed. And as mentioned above, there’s a non-zero chance that Sarah is in trouble too for not reporting it.
4) Dana’s friends refuse to even SUGGEST seeing a therapist on the grounds that they know her and she’ll be fiiiiiiiiiine.
5) The professors can’t give Sarah grace for tests and assignments forever, even if they wanted to. Professors aren’t unfeeling monsters but they’re people on a deadline.
So, assuming calling Dana’s dad wasn’t a good option, what should she have done instead?
Obviously Sarah should have just failed out of school due to not being able to sleep and hope Dana’s next roommate would be better disposed to help her and/or she would eventually smoke the grief out of her system as – as Raidah and gang would tell you – she has always done before. Totally the most mature and considered solution.
I imagine there was a conversation along the lines of “Dana needs help, that’s my observation as the one who’s living with her day and night, but you guys have known her longer than I have, so do you think we should call her dad, call the cops, or call the administration and let them decide to call her dad or call the cops?” “Noo bruh just chill, it’s only been half a semester.” But where Sarah should then have probably explained more of Dana’s situation she ended up just talking about her scholarship situation because, oh the irony, Sarah didn’t want to gossip.
That’s pretty much exactly what happened, but instead of asking them which authority she should call, she asked if any of them suggested seeing a therapist to Dana.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/05-saturdays-all-right-for-slighting/grieve/
Oh, my. IU’s mental health support system is extensive. Dunno how much you can get for free, but possibly enough experts to get her father involved in a constructive way regardless how he would have reacted otherwise.
But, as someone pointed out, Dana resisted seeking help, so Sarah needed some power to get her that help.
I think I’d have asked a trusted prof. “hey, someone I know is in a bad situation and won’t get help. Who can I talk to, to get her that help?”
All of the options have upsides and downsides, most of them fairly significant. Pick one and hope you picked the right one.
Professors can’t make her see one either though. The school might be able to but they’re also going to check in on her and see whether the report is true – at which point they’ll get punched in the face by the smell of weed because Dana lights up in their room all the time. At that point, Dana and Sarah are both in trouble. And then, even if the school doesn’t go the disciplinary route for the illegal drugs, Dana still has to WANT therapy to work for it to be effective. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
I’ve said this before, but our perspective is also skewed by seeing it through Sarah’s reporting – which in most cases would suggest what we’ve seen is more favorable to Sarah than it really was, but in Sarah’s case we know that she covers up concern for others with a pretense that it’s all just self-serving.
I think that Sarah likely overemphasized her worries about her own grades and scholarship and minimized her actual concerns for Dana.
Oh wow that ended up being really long. Oops! Sorry about that 😅
I hope you know there’s a shared character limit in these comments. Now my starving daughter won’t be able to type up her comment about Lucy’s socks.
Why should she be starving when she has all the socks she can eat?
Those are Lucy’s socks. The starving is a coincidence though. She got into the Can’t Eat Food powder again, the silly girl.
Oh no! I’m so sorry…I will be sure not to type any more wo
No worries, love seeing NDs post mega paragraphs like this! Regalli does it every time she’s here! 😊
I like how all it takes is a “I want to type some analysis of this fictional media!” post and instantly my ND brain is obvious. XD
Sometimes I have no social energy at all but then sometimes I write a novel about a comic strip.
I’m sure there is a real post limit and I seem to remember it’s 10,000 characters, though maybe more habitual commenters will know for sure. Still, I think as long as your posts get through they’re an accepted length.
I’m relieved I have yet to ever encounter that. XD
I’m withholding judgment on the Dana situation since we might be getting the Raidah side of it shortly, but…
“I apologize for Jennifer”????
Regardless of how she’s acting, Walky’s known her a whole hell of a lot longer than Raidah has!
I REPEAT: WALKY, LUCY, GET OUT
I do actually ship Walky and Lucy, I think they’re very cute together, but man she is aimed directly at a disaster and she needs to change course.
Raidah’s vibes are so cult-like L. Ron Hubbard covets
Yeah, I hope Jennifer also recognizes that this is uncool, but uh… I don’t think Jennifer really has a lot of experience with healthy social dynamics to begin with.
Hoo boy, there’s a lot going on here.
Walky is a very smart and perceptive lad, and very protective of those he cares about. I really wonder how much he is masking here, initially to help Lucy fit in when she wants this so badly, but at this point he might be using it to bring out all this information and toxicity and will figure out exactly what Raidah’s deal with.
If he does figure it out, his next battle is going to be outplaying Raidah to keep Lucy away from her and to bring B’Jennifer back from the dark side.
I like the commenters above hoping Dana shows up happy and healthy. That’s one potential route Walky could try to research if he really is that disturbed by any of this.
Personally even if Dana wasn’t doing well I couldn’t blame Sarah for doing what she felt she had to. She tried to get Dana’s friends and boyfriend on board to get Dana professional help, they refused to step up and didn’t want to hear about any of Sarah’s troubles related to Dana as long as it wasn’t their problem. Even if they didn’t want to acknowledge Dana had a problem they could have even offered Sarah another room to study but they just didn’t care.
Oh yes, absolutely
Yeah I’m 100% sure Walky is seeing and hearing ALL of Raidah’s shit and possibly keeping a mental tally. He’s just being non-confrontational about it, relatively speaking.
I ship Walky and Lucy because all the characters keep telling them not to date each other to the point of literal insult in some cases.
Spite motivates all.
I was mostly ambivalent on Walky/Lucy until she grabbed his shirt and licked the sauce stain off.
They’re a wonderful match.
Walky, Lucy: stay right there, gather as much intelligence as they’ll reveal, enjoy lunch, distribute thanks, walk away better informed about these people’s character and intentions.
Also, yes, Sarah jettisons people who are socially inconvenient. This is why she willingly hangs out with Joyce, who as we all know is the most convenient person to have around. No neuroses there!!! Zero!!! Absolutely none!!!
Me when Raidah invites Jennifer into their friend group: “Because Raidah has consistently been framed as The Worst, I’m sure we’re all meant to take this as her trying to get back in Sarah in some way. But I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt and not assume that’s front and center in her mind with every action she takes.”
Raidah, in her first thirty minutes interacting with Walky: “I am doing this do get back at Sarah in some way, because that is front and center in my mind with every action I take.”
Oh my god the embarrassing typos maybe I shouldn’t post comments at 1:30 am blegh.
is Carl related to Dina somehow?
Carl. Take your hat off indoors.
Here’s this godforsaken hat thing again. I know it’s a tradition and considered “polite” but…why? Everything comes from something, but all I’ve ever seen about the hat thing is “People did it hundreds of years ago out of politeness”. Okay, but WHYYYYYY?? What, SPECIFICALLY, is “rude” about having a thing on your head indoors? People say “It’s disrespectful” HOW?? IN WHAT WAY? Shoes can track mud. Coats get hot. Gloves are generally kind of dirty. Hats????? They sit there, minding their own business.
I’ve never gotten a satisfying answer to this question, and I don’t think I ever will.
Some of it comes back to when the ‘hats’ were actually helmets and to identify yourself, you had to take it off. For Americans though, the general idea seems to come from the Flag Code. The Flag Code specifies men should take off their hats to show respect for the flag and even though that’s not a law, the hat etiquette apparently stuck.
Of course it would tie into that stupid Flag Code.
The Nordic countries also have this rule, so the tradition very likely goes way back, pre-USA.
It does, the helmet thing goes back to medieval times, but the Flag Code seems to be at least a major part of the American version of this.
I have two possible explanations why keeping your hat on inside is impolite:
– You imply you don’t trust the host’s hat rack with your posessions.
– You imply you want to be ready to leave at the drop of a hat: i.e. you really don’t want to be there a second longer than you have to.
The hat rack looked at me weird and grabbed my ass.
Wearing your hat indoors indicates you are in a hurry to leave, which was generally considered rude. Most people don’t keep flags in their house, so I’m a little skeptical of that explanation.
Ninjad.
The explanation was that was how the idea of taking hat off = respect became more accepted in America. The oldest reason I can find goes back to hats being helmets and needing to take ’em off to identify yourself.
See also the hand-to-forehead salute, which seems to be related to raising a helmet’s visor, again for recognition.
Does it? I’ve worn plenty of hats and stuck around for hours or days, with nobody ever indicating they thought I was about to walk out the door at any moment. I’ve heard “Take your shoes off, stay a while” hundreds of times, but never “Take your hat off, stay a while”. It doesn’t really make sense to me to think “hat = leaving soon”.
I’m Ukranian and we have the exact same rule about hats indoors. I don’t think it’s about USA’s flags at all. “Implying you’re in a hurry to leave” seems about right.
(Though, there’s also the church rule of “men must have their heads uncovered, women must have their heads covered”, which feels related)
It seems to be part of the reason for Americans. Church rules and practicality (like needing to ID someone) seems to be the root of the overall rule.
It may have a practical origin, but these days it’s just a convention. In some cultures you take your hat off in church; in others you make sure to have it on. It doesn’t have to make sense, to be a useful symbol. In hat-off-indoors cultures, removing your hat indoors shows respect for the culture. So, if you want to be considered respectful, and respectable, this is one way you can make that happen.
Any convention can be considered a useless imposition, or a useful tool. Which would you prefer?
I’d prefer a convention that makes sense and isn’t a vestigial remnant of a completely different time period.
“Peer pressure from dead people.”
Better make sure my great-great-great-great-grandpappy sees me observing the social customs of his completely different notch in time, or else [???????] could happen.
It makes you look like a douchebag
Okay, but that’s not actually a reason. It’s just another adjective. What’s douchey about it? What specific qualities of indoor hattery are obnoxious, offensive, or disgusting, or suggest that the wearer is any of those things? Why do they suggest it? How? It’s all circular.
Joe Cocker told me I could my hat on, and I trust him more than you.
There’s a lot of context to that statement, in that it involves taking off the rest of your clothes
“Minion, say the thing I shouldn’t say.”
(“I have a name.” “I don’t care.”)
“Pull the lever, Carlnk.”
“Push the button, Max.”
Am I the only one who thinks it’s rich that Raidah – a person Walky has just met – is “apologizing” to him for Jennifer, someone he’s known practically his whole life?
Everything Raidah says is rich, coming from her. She’s insufferable!
Nope, it is a bit of a weird vibe.
Powerplay passive aggressive galore.
I think Walky thinks it’s rich too…
It’s so rich that we should be calling the IRS to find out what tax bracket it’s under
Isn’t it a twin sister too? The next step is dating Walky himself.
Inevitable next step.
Fixed that for you.
Curse your sudden but inevitable next step!
Has Raidah been carefully putting Jennifer in this position so there was a reason to bring up Sarah the monster?
It seems too convenient.
Jennifer is definitely the scapegoat here even if she has nobody to blame but herself for acting like a jerk. And ofcourse Radiah would change the topic the moment Lucy turns it towards something positive.
“I mean, Jennifer kinda jettisoned everybody from Lucy to myself the moment she decided we weren’t good enough to be her friends so that’s debatable” is a line I would really like to see walky use in response to Radiahs ‘we don’t jettison people here’ comment.
I know that they know that Walky is in Sarah’s social group, but it’s odd to me that they’d just say Sarah and not which Sarah in this context
There can only be one Sarah in Indiana at a time. It’s the law.
There’s only one Sarah living rent-free in Raidah’s head.
Well. That sheds quite a lot of light on Raidah’s view of events. Not prepared to exonerate her (due to the aggravating circumstances of her being a generally social climbing manipulative dick), but it helps to see why she thinks she’s in the right. And why she’s so vehement about it.
This is the kind of character development I like. The kind that makes me say, “I understand, and furthermore, fuck you”.
Yeah. Raidah’s position is understandable, and also 100% insufferable and stupid.
Jennifer: Sorry Carl, the right answer is Ruth. I declare you officially jettisoned.
Panel 3 : take note Walky, sometimes Jennifer has to be reminded she’s not hanging with the likes of yous anymore, because that shit doesn’t fly here.
After Jacob broke up with her I was wondering if we’d only seen one side of Raiders (still?).
Between Failures is a favorite comic of mine. Two of the more prominent characters, and one of the minor ones, were introduced in layers, like the proverbial onion. The first impression to the reader was recolored by further relevation and watching them in other settings.
So I was waiting to find out if we just saw Raidah in the worst light and other qualities would come to the fore.
I’m not wondering any longer.
Raidah your obsession with Sarah is getting weird.
“Raidah and Sarah should just make out and get it over with. I’ve seen enough to know that bitter rivalries like these lead straight to bone town.”
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/05-saturdays-all-right-for-slighting/bonecity/
Oh please Raidah, that’s literally what your group is all about.
Ah, you don’t jettison people you say? So Sarah left on her own of her own free will then and it had absolutely nothing to do with you bullying her and treating her like a monster for making a hard call with the limited ability and information she had?
And Chan and Char disintegrated on their own?
How very convenient.
didn’t she only keep Dana around cuz her dad is a lawyer? if he was the one that died instead of her mom, how long would have it taken them to throw her into the sewege??
Honestly I always had a lot of sympathy for Raidah being angry about Dana. It’s clear that she didn’t understand the extent of the problem and was bitter about losing her friend. Seeing her describe it in this way makes me rethink things a bit.
Ah, I suppose Walky wouldn’t know this story, would he? Neither would Lucy.
I do hope they don’t take the bait. Also, I have to wonder how angry Jennifer is, being used as a pawn here. Jennifer’s impulsive, but she isn’t outright stupid. She has to see something’s up here.
I hope they take the bait, then ask enough questions about what Sarah said and did – and Raidah reproduces the answers faithfully enough, because she’s angry and thinks she’s genuinely in the right – to then point out that Sarah is 0% to blame there.
On one hand, everything we’ve seen of Char and Chan (espacially Char) indicates that removing them from a friend group (any friend group) is an understandable and moral thing to do.
On the OTHER hand, it sure is interesting that Raidah hang out with her constantly for weeks AFTER she said the r-slur in public and it’s only after we started making comments about Jennifer’s (AKA Raidah’s new valuable connection) weight that she suddenly poofed out of the friend group.
I remember one of them were super ableist but what did the other girl do?
Also was it confirmed that they were out?
Well, Chan didn’t directly say the r-slur and seems uncomfortable when Char did but she still laughed at Dina to her face for being ‘mentally challenged’.
And while haven’t had, like, characters SAY they don’t hang out with Char and Chan anymore – we haven’t seen them at ALL since the Time-Skip – even though Radiah and her social circle are now more plot-relevant than ever. And it can’t be just that they were just forgotten from an out-of-universe standpoint cause Char WAS in that Halloween Flashback at least.
Narratively, I feel like the implication is that they and Radiah don’t hang out anymore. If this is not really what’s going on and Char and Chan are just constantly Off Screen, it’ll be a Reveal, cause that’s not really what the Story wants us to think right now… At least that’s my read.
My feel is that they still hang with Raidah and Carl, but they’re inconvenient for Raidah’s plans for Jennifer. And now Walky.
Sometimes it can take weeks or even months to decide to unfriend someone who’s consistently problematic. I don’t think that’s a decision to take lightly, so it makes sense. If you get the timing wrong, it can make a lot of drama.
Ah yes, blatant lying, hallmark sign of someone who wants to be a public defender working for the good of society
Ugh, I’m gonna be so annoyed if this shitty little middle-school manipulation works on Walky. He was co-HOSTAGES with Sarah for fuck’s sake.
But then again, he also let Raidah say all that mean crap to Dorothy unchallenged, so who knows. Dude hasn’t got a ton of experience standing up for the people he cares about.
I still disagree about “unchallenged.” If Walky’s rejoinders had been aimed at me, I’d definitely feel I’d been brushed back.
I think he was being polite, in an emotionally charged scene with someone he hardly knew. That seems appropriate. After the current encounter, the rules of engagement may change.
I don’t think Walky’s buying ANY of this. He’s just non-confrontational.
I don’t think the manipulation is gonna take. Walky might be both too smart and too scatterbrained to let it work.
Raidah that was… Really inappropriate. Why do you feel the need to apologize for Jennifer. That feels intrusive to the dynamic. Did she ask you? No. Why are you psychoanalyzing her like that. Raidah is acting like Booster but with less self awareness.
Dang, it feels like Raidah and Carl rehearsed this. Lucy’s out of the loop, I think.
Riadah: I probably shouldn’t say…
Carl:
Riadah (kicking Carl under the table): I said “I probably shouldn’t say”
Carl: Huh? What? Now?
Riadah: “I probably shouldn’t say!”
Carl: Oh. Sarah.
“who jettisons people when they become inconvenient?”
Ripley XD
waiting for the day sarah’s old roommate comes back and is like “thank you, sarah. i was going down a dark path and you saved me. i know it wasn’t easy but i got the help i needed thanks to you!” and raidah and them all HAVE to apologize to sarah
IKR
First-panel Walky shows us that he possesses much wisdom.
Raidah sounds likes she’s trying to recruit Walky into a MLM scam
I’m going to revise my opinion on Dorothy’s advice. She was right (but maybe for not exactly the right reasons). Someone may not like him for his goofiness, but when they don’t, to hell with them. Which is along the lines of what Danny is telling Joe currently, which I am realizing was probably Willis’ intention.
Anyways, Walky’s attempt to derail this passive aggressive spiel they’ve got planned is an appropriate response. And incidentally, seeing Walky reject a ‘popular’ clique would give Lucy something good consider.
Yeah <3
Yeah, I’m hoping for a Lucy/Walky alone scene post-breakfast to debrief.
am i the only one who had to go back and check if dude was there the whole time lol
Wonder if we’re going to hear Raidah’s version of the story or Carl’s version now.
With all their limits, Lucy and Walky look like a wise couple of young adults while, with her tortuous speeches to finally start insulting Sarah, the Fearsome and Machiavellian Raidah seems more and more childish! The only good thing is Lucy’s idea to go on a double date with Sal and Danny. I hope they’ll do it and Walky will talks about this breakfast to warn Sal in case Raidah try to do the same with her.
I been sick of this plotpoint for years, I hope there’s finally a payoff for Raidah’s dumbassery
I wonder if it just rankles Jennifer than she’s gone from ‘alpha cheerleader’ to a less sympathetic Gretchen Wieners, yes-manning for a mediocre antagonist who’s almost as bad at pretending to be mature as she is.
Hoping Walky and Lucy enjoy their meal, at least.
I hope so too. To both things you said.
how is it less salacious gossip to propose Sal is getting better grades for having sex with her tutor than is it to propose she only got into college in the first place because her mom at one point had sex with the dean???
I mean more salacious I guess I got the order wrong. also i just flagged my own comment.
Because Raidah is always right
Man, I really wanted to like Raidah and assume the best of her. I wish I could. *Sigh.*