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Poor Amazi-girl, all of the responsibility and yet none of the perks. At least she still seems to be the most content of the pair, if increasingly frustrated with her counterpart.
I hope that discontent doesn’t drive her to evil. Everybody knows the slide to the darkside begins with fear of vegetables. That is why the darkside has cookies.
she got to punch criminals/ppl who deserved it, that’s more than other ppl their age get but i’d totally read an ‘amazigirls day off’ oneshot/spinoff/arc llol
Given the sudden craving for donuts, I kind of suspect that this IS the “Amazi-Girl’s Day Off” arc. At last, we get to see what happens when the world”s most law-abiding citizen really cuts loose and goes wild!
Just in case anyone doesn’t get the reference: Elliot Dunkel is a character from El Goonish Shive, another comic on Hiveworks, who,
1. Has anger issues in his backstory, but supresses it.
2. At least once, performed a walljump mid-conversation and apparently without effort.
3. has a superhero alter-ego.
I’m gonna tread carefully here, but I don’t think you’d be as happy about the usual(?) prerequisites for getting one of those. Not really the kind of environment one tends to deliberately seek out, I imagine.
That’s a grey area. Adventure of Dai has basically that situation, with a 1989-1996 manga, a 1991 anime, and a 2020 anime, so I guess it’s only cringe if it’s a reference to something that’s original to the latest adaptation.
I don’t know which anime version I saw in passing and dismissed as a Dragon Ball knock-off, though I don’t remember why now. With three versions, is the manga worth going back and searching for?
I’ve only seen the 2020 version (up to episode 80, so no spoilers plz), but I’d say it’s 100% worth checking out. It has that old Toriyama flair to it, and feels a lot older than it is, in a really cozy way.
When I was a kid– around four and a half, I think– I had dinner over at my neighbors’ house one night, and they had broccoli, which I guess I wasn’t used to… and I really liked it and came home like, “How come we never have broccoli?”
The first time I consciously and intentionally ate broccoli, far as I recall, was at some hole-in-the-wall buffet that probably doesn’t exist anymore, and it was at the salad bar, raw and all that. I thought it was spicy, because kids that young don’t typically have an intricate lexicon for flavors and whatnot, and I said as much to… I think probably a grandparent, and then the next thing I remember, we were leaving the restaurant.
It makes sense to a young person’s palate that broccoli could be spicy. Many closely related plants are, and there’s a wild plant that I can never remember the American name for* that in Britain is called ‘rocket’ that looks a lot like broccoli but has a spiciness like radish.
That is also in the same family, I believe, but not the plant I am thinking of.
I tried looking it up and was unsuccessful. I went on a plant walk years ago where it was shown to me as a plant that grows wild in my area. I can’t remember the common American name – which the walk leader shared – but for some reason the British name stuck with me: “rocket.” However, apparently “rocket” is also a common name for arugula. But I’ve seen and grown arugula, and the planet I’m thinking of is not the same, although they are similar in flavor and clearly closely related.
I’ll have to get a picture sometime and do a reverse image search. It’ll still probably bring up a bunch of broccoli and arugula.
Broccoli is an MCU variant of wild mustard. So, yeah, to a kid’s developing and sensitive palate, the plant’s inner tanginess might be detected as spicy.
Not exactly. It’s related, but Broccoli is actually one of many cultivars of wild cabbage, along with cabbage, red cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kale, collards, kohlrabi, and several other vegetables. They’re all human-bred cultivars of the same species (Brassica oleracea). The mustards belong to the same family, and brown mustard, specifically, belongs to the same genus, but it’s a different species.
I love broccoli – preferably well-steamed, with butter or sometimes cheese – but am “meh” on cauliflower, go fig. (Maybe it’s that I tend to only encounter the latter raw, intended for dipping in ranch or the like.)
Steam the cauliflower, preferably with some garlic (fresh or powdered, either is great) and lemon juice. Or roast it next to a bit of red meat and let it soak up the juice. Trust me, I’m a stranger.
…Great, I just realized even if I was full blown DID instead of OSDD where I remain aware while the others do stuff, the only one of us three who’d eat healthy would end up not doing it out of spite of being expected to
It is interesting to see AG more actively thinks of herself as part of a system. She really talks a lot about Amber and how her actions affect Amber. She puts Amber first in a way we never really see Amber do. Kind of like Amber owns their body and AG is a guest. I don’t know much of anything about DID mind you. Just an observation.
I mean, a huge part of the point is that AG is “the responsible one”. Amber can shove a lot of responsibility onto AG because AG is there to shoulder it, for better and worse. In a lot of ways, AG exists to be the grownup in the room head.
DID mostly just specifies that AG and Amber are cohabitants. Modern methods of therapy would probably recommend that AG and Amber chat with each other and negotiate what they each want to give and have. Which they’ve done increasingly over the course of the comic, but the core of the dynamic is still “Amber is gremlin; AG is adult” and they both kinda resent each other for it while recognizing each other’s validity.
The real question is whether or not Phantom Mike is still there.
Re-reading that, I think I’m overselling the “adult”-ness of AG. It’s more of a “oldest sibling forced into the parental role because of absentee parents” deal: it’s extremely trying-very-hard to be responsible despite being not ready for it rather than a healthy version of responsibility. Hence why AG overreacts constantly.
It’s really a pity that Amber and Amazigirl can’t do family therapy together. (Or maybe couples therapy? Or any therapy that helps the two of them as two individuals, I mean.)
I’d actually be very interested in Amazi-Girl talking with her mom. Stacy doesn’t seem aware of her daughter’s disassociation at all to the point Amber flat out told her and I think she said Amber was just hungry or something like that. I don’t know if we’ve ever seen them interact at all. It might be good for AG to be acknowledged by her parent.
I looked it up and remembered that wrong. Amber kind of told Richard about it sarcastically while Stacy was next to her. I don’t think they took it seriously.
DID is a specialization that therapists will advertise their qualification in handling. As with all therapists, YMMV, but it’s a thing you can filter on when looking them up.
Most people think donut is like a river that flows swift and sure in one direction. But I have seen the face of donut, and I can tell you… they are wrong.
Their relationship has always been fairly contentious, but with Amber keeping her “retired” and also being particularly maladaptive lately, I think Amazi-Girl is losing her patience with her more than usual.
It is funny, cos I have always read that differently. Amazi-girl is where they put all the parts of themselves that the host alter (? If that is the right term) didn’t think they deserved.
These are saying the same thing. Amber thinks she’s a piece of shit and AG is her “good side.” The rest is semantics about which came first, the chicken or the egg?
That’s mostly right. But that makes it safe for AG to get the violence, because it’s constrained principled violence. Ryan saw what happens when Amber gets the violence.
well if you have to share a body with someone that doesn’t have the best diet i can imagine a lack of nutrients would make you cranky
(altho other than some after school/out of campus training i’m surprised she’d be in good shape after ‘retiring’ amazigirl duties [https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/04-time-keeps-on-slippin/crosscountry/ unless she disassociated and amazigirl took over then too, i find it hard to believe that past amber’s social anxiety issues with other ppl would’ve even had her be a part of a school club , let alone anything athletic])
After they retired, they took up roller derby.
Before they retired, they trained a lot.
So there was probably more exercise and less socializing with people other than Ethan and Mike before retiring and the opposite after retiring.
Either way, still in shape to some degree.
I liked donuts. Then, I got a job where I get to sometimes eat donuts that people would bring in and I often would have had like, a single banana for breakfast. let me tell you, I now *love* donuts.
Careful. Back when I was a Poor College Student Graduate, I made a habit, for about a year, of substituting free (leftover) muffins and donuts for actual food. I can’t say it’s the only thing that ended up screwing my metabolism – turning 18/21 and no longer putting it all toward height probably did most of that – but it didn’t help.
..is he? other than pointing out that dorothy already(?) missed a class, it’s not as if he’s said anything else that implied he wasn’t gonna also gonna go somewhere whether he tagged along with amber or not
Character development! Dorothy has always been the responsible one in the past, and that recently caused her to have a complete mental breakdown, so now she’s (semi-subconsciously) trying to be the irresponsible one. Walky has always been the irresponsible one in the past, and that recently cost him his girlfriend, so now he’s trying to be the responsible one. They are both…only partially succeeding, I think.
You know, I was about to inquire whether Amazi-girl doesn’t need glasses like Amber does but then I decided to look back at old strips and found my ‘answer’. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/astigmatism/ AKA as long as Amazi-girl isn’t looking at a screen or doing something that requires reading she’s good.
This reminds me that it was pretty sweet being a 90’s kid. That ruled. Until you realized you had to grow up to be a 2010’s adult and try to build a life and survive a pandemic and a Trump presidency at the same time. That fucking sucked.
Oh yeah, being a kid in the 90’s was great. Running around with friends and looking forward to summer break. Watching cartoons during the weekend. The worst part of being a 2010’s adult, along with the pandemic and the Trump presidency is also the feeling when you graduate college, but can’t get a job with a Bachelor’s degree because you don’t have experience in your field yet, and constantly fielding questions from family that are like “why don’t you have a job yet???”
You poor summer children. Imagine being a child in the 70’s, and thinking the Atari 2600 and the microwave oven were the pinnacle of entertainment/food.
Wasn’t that bad really, though there would definitely have been issues for those not cis and het.
It’s just funny because the OPs description was so generic: “Running around with friends and looking forward to summer break. Watching cartoons during the weekend.”
Like that was the classic old school childhood. That goes back to the 50s or whenever you had TVs to watch cartoons on.
I don’t have to imagine. I liked it.
And the 80s were pretty great too … aside from having both AIDS and nuclear war hanging over my head for the whole decade.
Broccoli is one of those foods I have a weird relationship with, in that I actually really enjoy it (rather than simply tolerate it) when it’s prepared in a very specific way, but in any other form I find it nauseating. What’s really weird is that I actually had better tolerance for it when I was a kid, to the point that it was basically the only vegetable I’d regularly eat.
I don’t have a weird relationship with broccoli simply because you can’t have a weird relationship with something you have no relationship with, which is how I (and probably broccoli) like it.
The AG/Amber split has always been contentious. Remember “I’m stuck living with tomes of Stucky fanfic” or whichever it was? AG has always been frustrated that Amber is less serious about taking care of herself. Which — similar to ghost Mike — is Amber’s self hate working itself out.
Imagine what it would feel like if your roomate get to enjoy all the junk food and you have to do the diet and exercising to stay in the shape needed to be a street caped-crusader…
Not just this, but also whenever your roommate ate junkfood it actively affected your body and made you work twice as hard doing the difficult things to outweigh their choices.
it’d be hilarious of that made Carla have the hots for Amber/Amazigirl. Charlie just ignored her, Amazigirl straight up parkoured to not interact with her.
To be clear, Amber’s DID only started to manifest after she started college, didn’t it? With it only clearly manifesting after Mike’s death.
So, unless I am mistaken, Amber was still considering herself to be Amazi-Girl before that and thus at least had through the years made herself used to the diet/exercise regime needed to be a vigilante…
Then again, I personally know how quickly you can lose good habit the moment you no longer feel the need to maintain it, but Amazi-Girl might still be able to negotiate with Amber for the habit she was used to. Maybe.
It’s not entirely clear. Partly because early on Willis hadn’t committed to writing it as DID, but kind of hedged around it just being a secret identity thing.
That said, it was definitely clearly defined well before Mike’s death. After the Ryan stabbing incident the two were not communicating at all and were shown several times as fighting for control. AG was only able to come out while Amber was sleeping, which also played into why she was so exhausted for the kidnapping. The lack of communication was also why Amber didn’t know about Mike being in the hospital or Blaine and Ross being up to something.
Before the Ryan incident they’d been show as slowly drifting apart. Moving from just sharing memory and swapping back and forth pretty casually to having explicit conversations with each other. We see several times AG take control when Amber’s confronted with something she can’t deal with, usually Sal, but I think the first is when Blaine shows up on parent’s day.
So, circling back around, I think the split existed before college, even if it wasn’t as clearly defined as it later became. I don’t think any of the childhood flashbacks are tagged AG, but then we don’t actually see her practicing parkour or martial arts, only the aftereffects.
Here’s the most blatant early one
If you look through the strips tagged with both of them, there are some other candidates, though most of them are her transitioning from one to the other.
re: the horizontal space…. doing that takes less than people think, dodging around someone like this makes perfect sense
what’s more worrying is the ceiling, amazi-girl and amber are lucky they’re short
if joe was capable of this trick he’d hit his head
All this time with Amazi-girl dealing with everyday life is making me yearn for a storyline where Amber refuses to take back control for a while, and Amazi-girl has to learn how to navigate all the bits of life she’s normally not in control for. Makes me wonder, has Amazi-girl ever been in control for an entire day?
Amazi-Girl’s body moves on its own to dodge incoming attacks, and also Carla specifically. The two things are not connected, AG simply has Ultra Instinct.
These ads are getting weirdly horny again. I’ve got half a dozen for “Hims Sex RX + Climax Control”. It’s better than random snapshots of people’s diseased, rotting feet, at least. That got old.
I don’t even access anything that seems like it would give me these ads, is the truly baffling part. Maybe I should shop more or listen to less breakcore.
something I’ve been wondering about, does Amazi-Girl wear contacts? Or is Amber’s sight good enough that she doesn’t need glasses for non-reading stuff?
OK ok donuts, coding, and typing/using fanfic all day mean you’re only really good at parkour instead of excellent sure fine but if THAT’S supposed to be Amazi-Girl then WHY ain’t her speech balloons BLUE?
Because that’s an affectation she only does when she’s being all “I am vengeance! I am the night!” and she hasn’t done that for a while.
Checking the Amazi_Girl tag, it seems like the last time she used the Christian Bale Voice was Jun 8 2020. Since then she has appeared in 27 strips where she hasn’t used the voice (admittedly, in some she’s not talking at all, but not all of them).
There’s also a strip somewhere where Amber uses the voice, but I’m not sure how long it would take for me to dig that up.
Basically, the Voice is a disguise used to keep people who know Amber from recognizing her voice when she’s Amazi-Girl.
Both of them have used it, almost always in costume and both of them have appeared without it.
The tags are more reliable, but if they’re confusing because both of them are in the same strip, Amber’s cheek blushes are the real key.
Ok that’s pretty well reasoned but that line belongs to good Kevin Conroy and not wooden-ass Chris Fale. If all this time Amazi-Girl was doing Bale’s ridiculous growly bear voice I will become filled with sadness and shame.
She’s gonna get so bored. I mean, normally she’s around for fun action times. Or maybe she’s been around for more than shows up on camera, but that’s not my impression. And she’s gonna get so bored.
Maybe she wants to relax once in a while. A life of almost nonstop action has to be stressful. Maybe she’ll find a girlfriend and have to navigate that with Amber, who doesn’t seem particularly womensterested.
Hmm, I can’t help but wonder – is Amber coming back anytime soon?
In particular, in her last strip (https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/04-for-me-it-was-tuesday/badinheritedthoughts/), where she talks a lot about staying away from people for safety, and observing from a distance. Sure it’s about sex, but what if Amber/Amazi-girl decided it would be best to just have Amazi-girl be in control for an extended period of time (or even forever!), and just “observe from a distance”.
IIRC, Amazi-girl has never spent that might time dressed as Amber, or living Amber’s life as much as she is now.
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*plays “Kryptonite” by Three Doors Down on hacked muzak*
Ooh! Haven’t heard that in awhile. Thanks!
hmm this was not the first comment when I checked last – I can only assume you’ve begun world domination.
maybe I have…
or maybe one too many earthlings accidentally clicked “Report comment” on the original first comment too many times XD
Poor Amazi-girl, all of the responsibility and yet none of the perks. At least she still seems to be the most content of the pair, if increasingly frustrated with her counterpart.
I hope that discontent doesn’t drive her to evil. Everybody knows the slide to the darkside begins with fear of vegetables. That is why the darkside has cookies.
Yeah, she doesn’t even get to fuck Danny anymore. I guess she at least gets to roller derby, that’s probably fun.
she got to punch criminals/ppl who deserved it, that’s more than other ppl their age get but i’d totally read an ‘amazigirls day off’ oneshot/spinoff/arc llol
Given the sudden craving for donuts, I kind of suspect that this IS the “Amazi-Girl’s Day Off” arc. At last, we get to see what happens when the world”s most law-abiding citizen really cuts loose and goes wild!
Carla being included here feels very deliberate. Not sure what’s coming next.
I’m trying to imagine what accidentally including Carla in a comic would look like
There are no accidents with Carla. She’s like a Wizard; she appears in the comic precisely when she means to.
thank you for getting there before me. ~<3
It could just be that Amazi-Girl next runs into Joyce, Ethan, and Asher, who Carla just skated by, establishing visual continuity.
Clearly it’s setting up a long term ‘Carla attempts to learn to wall-skate’ arc since she can’t risk anyone upstaging her.
lol she has charlie but i wonder if carla considers it a ‘flex’ and is gonna have some kinda rivalship to ‘compete’ with amber/amazigirl lol
Good enough, welcome Elliot Dunkel.
Lol, German Dark.
Glad I’m not the only one who thought of that
He’s starting college soon. Maybe they’ll meet?
Just in case anyone doesn’t get the reference: Elliot Dunkel is a character from El Goonish Shive, another comic on Hiveworks, who,
1. Has anger issues in his backstory, but supresses it.
2. At least once, performed a walljump mid-conversation and apparently without effort.
3. has a superhero alter-ego.
Other Rachel: “How’d all this shit fall off my shelf?”
Okay so reloading the page does not in fact reset where a comment goes, even if it resets where the comment box goes. Good to know.
I’m gonna be honest, I completely forgot about the superhero connection when I made that comment, I just focused on the wall jump lol.
Someday, Amazi-Girl will have to beat Amber in a junkyard.
So Tyler Durden scenario ?
Superman 3
Got, Amazi-Girl is so cool I wish had an alternate superhero personality who could take over for me when life gets too “nope”.
I’m gonna tread carefully here, but I don’t think you’d be as happy about the usual(?) prerequisites for getting one of those. Not really the kind of environment one tends to deliberately seek out, I imagine.
I love that we’re actually seeing Amazi-Girl out and about.
Oh this REALLY seems like it’s gonna be a full Amazi-Girl front today. :DDD that’s SO fucking hype tbh
IU has very wide and very short ceiling hallways.
This is getting out of hand. Now there are four of her.
Would it be too cringe to make a Naruto reference?
Anime references are only cringe if the show started airing after 2013.
Amazi-Girl is clearly a fighting dreamer.
What if the show started airing in 2019, but it was a new adaptation and the previous anime version of the series had come out in 2001?
That’s a grey area. Adventure of Dai has basically that situation, with a 1989-1996 manga, a 1991 anime, and a 2020 anime, so I guess it’s only cringe if it’s a reference to something that’s original to the latest adaptation.
I don’t know which anime version I saw in passing and dismissed as a Dragon Ball knock-off, though I don’t remember why now. With three versions, is the manga worth going back and searching for?
I’ve only seen the 2020 version (up to episode 80, so no spoilers plz), but I’d say it’s 100% worth checking out. It has that old Toriyama flair to it, and feels a lot older than it is, in a really cozy way.
Dragon quest original art was made by the creator of dragon ball so probably that’s why you fell that.
That doesn’t sound right but I don’t know enough about cringe culture to dispute it.
Wait! There’s an entire culture based around cringe now?
Of course there is.
There been for as long as fandom has existed. It just people telling others that their interest are lame.
When I was a kid– around four and a half, I think– I had dinner over at my neighbors’ house one night, and they had broccoli, which I guess I wasn’t used to… and I really liked it and came home like, “How come we never have broccoli?”
The first time I consciously and intentionally ate broccoli, far as I recall, was at some hole-in-the-wall buffet that probably doesn’t exist anymore, and it was at the salad bar, raw and all that. I thought it was spicy, because kids that young don’t typically have an intricate lexicon for flavors and whatnot, and I said as much to… I think probably a grandparent, and then the next thing I remember, we were leaving the restaurant.
Grandparent to.the rescue
Shows what they knew. I’ll gladly vore an entire head of raw broccoli now, without a hint of remorse.
It makes sense to a young person’s palate that broccoli could be spicy. Many closely related plants are, and there’s a wild plant that I can never remember the American name for* that in Britain is called ‘rocket’ that looks a lot like broccoli but has a spiciness like radish.
*despite being American
Arugula?
That is also in the same family, I believe, but not the plant I am thinking of.
I tried looking it up and was unsuccessful. I went on a plant walk years ago where it was shown to me as a plant that grows wild in my area. I can’t remember the common American name – which the walk leader shared – but for some reason the British name stuck with me: “rocket.” However, apparently “rocket” is also a common name for arugula. But I’ve seen and grown arugula, and the planet I’m thinking of is not the same, although they are similar in flavor and clearly closely related.
I’ll have to get a picture sometime and do a reverse image search. It’ll still probably bring up a bunch of broccoli and arugula.
Raw Broccoli is quite bitter, so I’m not surprised it felt “spicy” to you.
Broccoli is an MCU variant of wild mustard. So, yeah, to a kid’s developing and sensitive palate, the plant’s inner tanginess might be detected as spicy.
Not exactly. It’s related, but Broccoli is actually one of many cultivars of wild cabbage, along with cabbage, red cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kale, collards, kohlrabi, and several other vegetables. They’re all human-bred cultivars of the same species (Brassica oleracea). The mustards belong to the same family, and brown mustard, specifically, belongs to the same genus, but it’s a different species.
I love broccoli – preferably well-steamed, with butter or sometimes cheese – but am “meh” on cauliflower, go fig. (Maybe it’s that I tend to only encounter the latter raw, intended for dipping in ranch or the like.)
Steam the cauliflower, preferably with some garlic (fresh or powdered, either is great) and lemon juice. Or roast it next to a bit of red meat and let it soak up the juice. Trust me, I’m a stranger.
I trust you explicitly.
You may be a stranger, but you’re our stranger.
You’re definitely strange, but that does sound like a good recipe and/or flavor combo. Thanks.
Roasted broccoli is also quite good.
Steam broccoli and cauliflower. Coat both in a cheese sauce with garlic, herbs, etc to taste. Top with more cheese. Bake in oven until browning.
Chilled, or soaked in terriyaki, or I’ll pass.
Carla and Amazi-Girl should get a dedicated team-up sometime
PARKOUR
BRAZIL
…Great, I just realized even if I was full blown DID instead of OSDD where I remain aware while the others do stuff, the only one of us three who’d eat healthy would end up not doing it out of spite of being expected to
It is interesting to see AG more actively thinks of herself as part of a system. She really talks a lot about Amber and how her actions affect Amber. She puts Amber first in a way we never really see Amber do. Kind of like Amber owns their body and AG is a guest. I don’t know much of anything about DID mind you. Just an observation.
I mean, a huge part of the point is that AG is “the responsible one”. Amber can shove a lot of responsibility onto AG because AG is there to shoulder it, for better and worse. In a lot of ways, AG exists to be the grownup in the
roomhead.DID mostly just specifies that AG and Amber are cohabitants. Modern methods of therapy would probably recommend that AG and Amber chat with each other and negotiate what they each want to give and have. Which they’ve done increasingly over the course of the comic, but the core of the dynamic is still “Amber is gremlin; AG is adult” and they both kinda resent each other for it while recognizing each other’s validity.
The real question is whether or not Phantom Mike is still there.
Re-reading that, I think I’m overselling the “adult”-ness of AG. It’s more of a “oldest sibling forced into the parental role because of absentee parents” deal: it’s extremely trying-very-hard to be responsible despite being not ready for it rather than a healthy version of responsibility. Hence why AG overreacts constantly.
It’s really a pity that Amber and Amazigirl can’t do family therapy together. (Or maybe couples therapy? Or any therapy that helps the two of them as two individuals, I mean.)
I’d actually be very interested in Amazi-Girl talking with her mom. Stacy doesn’t seem aware of her daughter’s disassociation at all to the point Amber flat out told her and I think she said Amber was just hungry or something like that. I don’t know if we’ve ever seen them interact at all. It might be good for AG to be acknowledged by her parent.
I looked it up and remembered that wrong. Amber kind of told Richard about it sarcastically while Stacy was next to her. I don’t think they took it seriously.
DID is a specialization that therapists will advertise their qualification in handling. As with all therapists, YMMV, but it’s a thing you can filter on when looking them up.
they can! family systems therapy, it’s really neat
Most people think donut is like a river that flows swift and sure in one direction. But I have seen the face of donut, and I can tell you… they are wrong.
She should Mario noises when she does that.
“Ya! Hoo! WooHOOO!”
So AG is just constantly shitting on Amber, I’ve noticed.
Their relationship has always been fairly contentious, but with Amber keeping her “retired” and also being particularly maladaptive lately, I think Amazi-Girl is losing her patience with her more than usual.
Amber is where they put all the parts of themself they don’t like.
It is funny, cos I have always read that differently. Amazi-girl is where they put all the parts of themselves that the host alter (? If that is the right term) didn’t think they deserved.
These are saying the same thing. Amber thinks she’s a piece of shit and AG is her “good side.” The rest is semantics about which came first, the chicken or the egg?
That’s mostly right. But that makes it safe for AG to get the violence, because it’s constrained principled violence. Ryan saw what happens when Amber gets the violence.
But Sal also saw when they fought and Amber stayed controlled there.
well if you have to share a body with someone that doesn’t have the best diet i can imagine a lack of nutrients would make you cranky
(altho other than some after school/out of campus training i’m surprised she’d be in good shape after ‘retiring’ amazigirl duties [https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/04-time-keeps-on-slippin/crosscountry/ unless she disassociated and amazigirl took over then too, i find it hard to believe that past amber’s social anxiety issues with other ppl would’ve even had her be a part of a school club , let alone anything athletic])
After they retired, they took up roller derby.
Before they retired, they trained a lot.
So there was probably more exercise and less socializing with people other than Ethan and Mike before retiring and the opposite after retiring.
Either way, still in shape to some degree.
She’s been like that since day one, really.
I liked donuts. Then, I got a job where I get to sometimes eat donuts that people would bring in and I often would have had like, a single banana for breakfast. let me tell you, I now *love* donuts.
Careful. Back when I was a Poor College
StudentGraduate, I made a habit, for about a year, of substituting free (leftover) muffins and donuts for actual food. I can’t say it’s the only thing that ended up screwing my metabolism – turning 18/21 and no longer putting it all toward height probably did most of that – but it didn’t help.how is walky the responsible one i dont understand this what is happening
..is he? other than pointing out that dorothy already(?) missed a class, it’s not as if he’s said anything else that implied he wasn’t gonna also gonna go somewhere whether he tagged along with amber or not
Dorothy came up with the brilliant idea that if she can’t be perfect, it means she must be anti-perfect or she has to hit rock bottom to bounce back
Perfectly imperfect, as it were.
Character development! Dorothy has always been the responsible one in the past, and that recently caused her to have a complete mental breakdown, so now she’s (semi-subconsciously) trying to be the irresponsible one. Walky has always been the irresponsible one in the past, and that recently cost him his girlfriend, so now he’s trying to be the responsible one. They are both…only partially succeeding, I think.
You know, I was about to inquire whether Amazi-girl doesn’t need glasses like Amber does but then I decided to look back at old strips and found my ‘answer’. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/astigmatism/ AKA as long as Amazi-girl isn’t looking at a screen or doing something that requires reading she’s good.
This reminds me that it was pretty sweet being a 90’s kid. That ruled. Until you realized you had to grow up to be a 2010’s adult and try to build a life and survive a pandemic and a Trump presidency at the same time. That fucking sucked.
Oh yeah, being a kid in the 90’s was great. Running around with friends and looking forward to summer break. Watching cartoons during the weekend. The worst part of being a 2010’s adult, along with the pandemic and the Trump presidency is also the feeling when you graduate college, but can’t get a job with a Bachelor’s degree because you don’t have experience in your field yet, and constantly fielding questions from family that are like “why don’t you have a job yet???”
Well at least you don’t have Russians blowing things up across the border so that’s gotta count for something!
You poor summer children. Imagine being a child in the 70’s, and thinking the Atari 2600 and the microwave oven were the pinnacle of entertainment/food.
What surpassed the microwave oven?
The sun.
“Imagine being a child in the 70’s”
Ew, no thank you.
All the free weed and disco you could want, though.
Wasn’t that bad really, though there would definitely have been issues for those not cis and het.
It’s just funny because the OPs description was so generic: “Running around with friends and looking forward to summer break. Watching cartoons during the weekend.”
Like that was the classic old school childhood. That goes back to the 50s or whenever you had TVs to watch cartoons on.
I don’t have to imagine. I liked it.
And the 80s were pretty great too … aside from having both AIDS and nuclear war hanging over my head for the whole decade.
Broccoli is one of those foods I have a weird relationship with, in that I actually really enjoy it (rather than simply tolerate it) when it’s prepared in a very specific way, but in any other form I find it nauseating. What’s really weird is that I actually had better tolerance for it when I was a kid, to the point that it was basically the only vegetable I’d regularly eat.
I don’t have a weird relationship with broccoli simply because you can’t have a weird relationship with something you have no relationship with, which is how I (and probably broccoli) like it.
Broccoli yearns for you.
Broccoli is pretty good for little kids because it holds butter well, and you’re eating little trees, like a giant monster.
It worries me that AG is still blaming Amber for stuff.
well, i imagine they’d avoid self harm(other than maybe emotionally or with junk food) tho not like they’d have many chances to ‘chat’ with each other
imagine a therapy session with booster. they might make things worse tbh but might make for good comics
Amber’s in charge like 90% of the time. If assigning blame is the game of the day, Amazi-Girl definitely has more to work with than Amber has.
The AG/Amber split has always been contentious. Remember “I’m stuck living with tomes of Stucky fanfic” or whichever it was? AG has always been frustrated that Amber is less serious about taking care of herself. Which — similar to ghost Mike — is Amber’s self hate working itself out.
Imagine what it would feel like if your roomate get to enjoy all the junk food and you have to do the diet and exercising to stay in the shape needed to be a street caped-crusader…
Yeah, I’d be slightly contentious too.
Not just this, but also whenever your roommate ate junkfood it actively affected your body and made you work twice as hard doing the difficult things to outweigh their choices.
it’d be hilarious of that made Carla have the hots for Amber/Amazigirl. Charlie just ignored her, Amazigirl straight up parkoured to not interact with her.
Damn… if you combined their tech skills they’d become unstoppable Science girlfriends
Lord help the students of IU if that happened
This reminds me that I have broccoli in the fridge that I was going to cook with pasta and olives tonight. Now I’m hungry.
[ bionic_noise.wav ]
Stealth and subtleness are overrated
The way to prepare broccoli is to boil it, blend it, and eat it as a very flavorful soup.
Cauliflower was a nice try.
To be clear, Amber’s DID only started to manifest after she started college, didn’t it? With it only clearly manifesting after Mike’s death.
So, unless I am mistaken, Amber was still considering herself to be Amazi-Girl before that and thus at least had through the years made herself used to the diet/exercise regime needed to be a vigilante…
Then again, I personally know how quickly you can lose good habit the moment you no longer feel the need to maintain it, but Amazi-Girl might still be able to negotiate with Amber for the habit she was used to. Maybe.
It’s not entirely clear. Partly because early on Willis hadn’t committed to writing it as DID, but kind of hedged around it just being a secret identity thing.
That said, it was definitely clearly defined well before Mike’s death. After the Ryan stabbing incident the two were not communicating at all and were shown several times as fighting for control. AG was only able to come out while Amber was sleeping, which also played into why she was so exhausted for the kidnapping. The lack of communication was also why Amber didn’t know about Mike being in the hospital or Blaine and Ross being up to something.
Before the Ryan incident they’d been show as slowly drifting apart. Moving from just sharing memory and swapping back and forth pretty casually to having explicit conversations with each other. We see several times AG take control when Amber’s confronted with something she can’t deal with, usually Sal, but I think the first is when Blaine shows up on parent’s day.
So, circling back around, I think the split existed before college, even if it wasn’t as clearly defined as it later became. I don’t think any of the childhood flashbacks are tagged AG, but then we don’t actually see her practicing parkour or martial arts, only the aftereffects.
I don’t remember any instances of them arguing with each other?
Here’s the most blatant early one
If you look through the strips tagged with both of them, there are some other candidates, though most of them are her transitioning from one to the other.
The van incident during the kidnapping had them negotiating who was doing what and when.
It’s probably an effect of when Willis realized they were writing her with DID, but it feels like it’s Danny’s fault
re: the horizontal space…. doing that takes less than people think, dodging around someone like this makes perfect sense
what’s more worrying is the ceiling, amazi-girl and amber are lucky they’re short
if joe was capable of this trick he’d hit his head
Is this the day the Amazigirl blows their cover to everyone in the dorm?
All this time with Amazi-girl dealing with everyday life is making me yearn for a storyline where Amber refuses to take back control for a while, and Amazi-girl has to learn how to navigate all the bits of life she’s normally not in control for. Makes me wonder, has Amazi-girl ever been in control for an entire day?
Amazi-Girl’s body moves on its own to dodge incoming attacks, and also Carla specifically. The two things are not connected, AG simply has Ultra Instinct.
These ads are getting weirdly horny again. I’ve got half a dozen for “Hims Sex RX + Climax Control”. It’s better than random snapshots of people’s diseased, rotting feet, at least. That got old.
Huh. I get ads for Alexa, Go Daddy, Direct Energy, and recently stuff in Spanish that I can’t read except for the word Amazon.
I don’t even access anything that seems like it would give me these ads, is the truly baffling part. Maybe I should shop more or listen to less breakcore.
Dorothy isn’t going to leave Walky alone with AG. I don’t think it’s just donuts that are attracting him here.
As someone with alters, I can confirm that the other mes will also not eat the broccoli. Its a point of contention among us.
Haha, same, as the one who eats the broccoli, that exchange of “maybe today *I’m* going to eat the donuts” is very very relateable.
something I’ve been wondering about, does Amazi-Girl wear contacts? Or is Amber’s sight good enough that she doesn’t need glasses for non-reading stuff?
Second one.
Thanks
Does Carla eat broccoli?
(or donuts or pizza? have we ever seen her eat -anything-?)
WHAT WILL YOU BECOME?
FOR THE LEFT HAND IS DONUTS.
BUT THE RIGHT HAND IS BROCCOLI
OK ok donuts, coding, and typing/using fanfic all day mean you’re only really good at parkour instead of excellent sure fine but if THAT’S supposed to be Amazi-Girl then WHY ain’t her speech balloons BLUE?
Because that’s an affectation she only does when she’s being all “I am vengeance! I am the night!” and she hasn’t done that for a while.
Checking the Amazi_Girl tag, it seems like the last time she used the Christian Bale Voice was Jun 8 2020. Since then she has appeared in 27 strips where she hasn’t used the voice (admittedly, in some she’s not talking at all, but not all of them).
There’s also a strip somewhere where Amber uses the voice, but I’m not sure how long it would take for me to dig that up.
Basically, the Voice is a disguise used to keep people who know Amber from recognizing her voice when she’s Amazi-Girl.
Both of them have used it, almost always in costume and both of them have appeared without it.
The tags are more reliable, but if they’re confusing because both of them are in the same strip, Amber’s cheek blushes are the real key.
Ok that’s pretty well reasoned but that line belongs to good Kevin Conroy and not wooden-ass Chris Fale. If all this time Amazi-Girl was doing Bale’s ridiculous growly bear voice I will become filled with sadness and shame.
Fair. I went for Bale because it’s the most extreme example of Bruce Wayne having a Special Batman Voice, but yeah.
She’s gonna get so bored. I mean, normally she’s around for fun action times. Or maybe she’s been around for more than shows up on camera, but that’s not my impression. And she’s gonna get so bored.
Maybe she wants to relax once in a while. A life of almost nonstop action has to be stressful. Maybe she’ll find a girlfriend and have to navigate that with Amber, who doesn’t seem particularly womensterested.
Would be interesting to see both of them navigate having different partners.
Kinda specific. Who do you think Amazi-girl would date? I don’t think she has much chemistry with anyone… Maybe Dorothy?
Brianne, obviously.
i mean, mazi and danny dated. so i think dorky nerds with good hearts could very easily be her type
Hmm, I can’t help but wonder – is Amber coming back anytime soon?
In particular, in her last strip (https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/04-for-me-it-was-tuesday/badinheritedthoughts/), where she talks a lot about staying away from people for safety, and observing from a distance. Sure it’s about sex, but what if Amber/Amazi-girl decided it would be best to just have Amazi-girl be in control for an extended period of time (or even forever!), and just “observe from a distance”.
IIRC, Amazi-girl has never spent that might time dressed as Amber, or living Amber’s life as much as she is now.
And then there’s the chapter title