Oh my gods, a book title that was like
Dumbing of Age
“Schpoonman: That bar is at the geometric center of the Earth and you know it.”
That would be hilarious!
The phobes still think they’re doing the right thing for their kid. We’ve got more than a century of documentation from Conversion “Therapists” going “Well, we tried out hardest to ‘cure the patient, but in the end they took their own life. Clearly the ‘disease’ had progressed too far!”
It wasn’t the fact that their family signed off on them being tortured and it’s not the knowledge that if they can’t make themselves conform they -will- be tortured again that drove them to end their lives. It was “The Disease.” The poor doctors and their poor family members only wanted “what was best.”
It… depends. There are plenty of phobic parents who are more worried about how their child’s gender or sexuality reflects on the parents than about what is best for the child.
Yeah uhhh…I would argue there are *also* plenty of antivaxxer parents who are more worried about how a child’s autism reflects on the parents than about what is best for the child.
I get how it can SEEM like they’re always doing it because they (incorrectly) think it’s the “right thing” to protect their kid, but any parent who is more willing to risk their child dying than developing a disability isn’t really thinking about what’s best for their child and there’s a good chance that at least subconsciously they have a problem with how they think having a disabled/neurodivergent child will make THEM look.
A LOT of parents of disabled/neurodivergent kids are still incredibly ableist, unfortunately. It’s often less obvious to abled/neurotypical people, because these parents will say a lot of stuff that may SOUND like disability advocacy, but to those who ARE disabled/ND, it’s the sort of stuff that comes off as incredibly condescending/patronizing, self-serving, and performative.
In other words, it tends to be a combo of them using their kid’s disabled/ND identity for their OWN benefit (getting sympathy for their “struggle” as parents and praise for their “advocacy”) and a lot of still-deeply-rooted ableism (either trying to gloss over the kid’s disability by engaging in toxic positivity like treating “disability” like a dirty word and insisting it’s 100% a “superpower”, or going to the opposite extreme and treating their kid as inferior and/or underestimating their abilities).
So, yeah, disability and neurodivergence are certainly no exception to the issue of parents being not just misguided but also phobic/bigoted (even if they don’t see themselves that way). But unfortunately even in progressive circles, there’s still a lot of ignorance and ableism disguised as advocacy/acceptance, and a serious lack of informed advocacy, so I think people often don’t see it for what it is. :/
Yeah, that was the part that always got to me, as someone on the spectrum, even if they were right about vaccines causing autism, they’d rather their child die a slow, painful death to a preventable disease than be like me. They’d rather *I* died a slow, painful death to a preventable disease than exist as I am. Than be WHO I am.
Meanwhile my grandmother had polio at 13, spent a couple years in an iron lung, and then the rest of her life in a wheel chair. As much as she felt bad for my struggles, I can say with certainty we’re both glad I had my struggles and not hers, as at least my struggles came with benefits, IMO.
A friend of mine got her kid vaccinated today, and she was feeling really sorry for her kid. I know she’s 100% in favour of vaccines, but to further motivate her I convinced her to look up pictures of the diseases these vaccines would prevent. At pictures of Polio she turned the computer off so I reminded her that she just saved her child from all of that.
I’m not sure if I only hurt her, or if I motivated her to be an even bigger and louder proponent of vaccines. I hope it is the second. I feel somewhat conflicted, I hope I did something good.
If you confront people with reality, and they later choose to reject reality, then take solace in the fact that you have done all you can, and it’s not your job to control people’s choices, no matter how wrong they are. I think it’s more likely she took away a good lesson than a bad one from you, personally.
other than ‘personal choice/parental rights’, even if they don’t get arrested for child endangerment feels like they should at least be fined if their kid dies b/c of that versus only paying for the funeral (tho i wonder if there are fucked up parents out there and just take out life insurance on a kid and purposefully not vaccinate them)
i wonder if life insurance policies cover damage you do to yourself/your children by being bloody stupid. I’d put that in my policy: we don’t cover illness/death that’d be prevented by simple vaccines….
considering ppl don’t even consider it til they’re adults, i’m not sure how much a child payout would be as opposed to like, life insurance going to the kids if parents get in some kinda accident, tho idk how much access they’d have to it if they’re still young enough to just be put in a foster home
But i wouldn’t be surprised if some states would be like “your child only qualifies for health insurance after a full physical” or so
My only issue with that is it would mean the kids, who are the innocent victims of their parents’ stubbornness, would be denied treatment the parents couldn’t afford without the aid of insurance. Yes, it is entirely the parents’ fault for not vaccinating their kid that the kid caught an entirely preventable disease, but to make the kid’s suffering even worse by denying treatment is needlessly cruel.
it’s a stretch, but i’ve been wondering if her extreme fixation on the words “fuck,” “fucking,” and “fucker,” are subtle evidence of some underlying sexual obsession of her own that she’s hiding or denying, lmao. the woman truly makes everything about fucking.
Dang, I had completely forgotten that piece of dialog. I only had a vague “he’s nto OK with Ethan being gay” feeling. Had to used Naomi’s tag to find it and yuuuuuup, I now know what you mean and completely and absolutely regret my previous comment.
as long as you’re dependent on somebody for your food, shelter, and education, you kinda have to tolerate their bullshit. Once you get sick enough of it to take charge of those things for yourself (win or lose, you can still lose), then you’re an adult…or at least, then you’re adult enough to expect the respect of being an adult, even if you’re legally underage.
Having read a link somebody else provided further down in the comments, my weighting on the hypothesis of “just insecure” is probably way lower than “her husband is closeted”, which now seems much more likely.
The very definition of homophobic is that a person is explicitly disgusted by homosexual existence, believes that homosexuals should completely hide their queerness, and that they do not respect homosexuals as equivalently valuable people.
If you feel that way about someone, you cannot genuinely love them. It is a form of hate. There’s no way to describe that kind of person’s love as genuine, if you’re claiming they genuinely love a queer person. They’re a hateful person, and even their attempts at love, are usually just more forms of hate. Someone literally cannot love a person, who they both hate, and don’t respect, and don’t believe should be free. It disturbs me that some people think that could be love.
Humans are very complicated and love equally so. I agree that the love of my transphobic mother is deeply flawed and painful. I do also believe her feelings of love for me are genuine. She continues to do what she thinks is best for me. She often fails to listen or respect when I tell her she is wrong about what is best for me. It’s still an attempt to love, but love and horror are two sides of the same coin.
Naomi’s having a LOT of trouble meeting Ethan’s eyes right now, though. There’s something she’s not telling him – it could be just how much “allowing” her son’s gayness bothers her, or there’s more to it than that…
It’s been long enough that I forgot some of the shitty things she said before. She just has… Like a phenomenal ability to give possibly the worst comments every single time she opens her mouth. You know the writing is really freaking good when you find yourself genuinely hating a cartoon character.
Well, Naomi is as blunt as a baseball, whatever else she may be. I am wondering how many thousands of parents quietly think what she says out loud without a qualm.
She’s literally 10 for 10 on strips where she has a line, and all 10 of her lines are her being deeply narcissistic towards every other character she interacts with. The comic itself has shown us 100% complete terribleness from her in every interaction she’s been in, has framed her as terribly as possible, and somehow people are still jumping to her defense, or falling for her nice mom act. I don’t know where they’re getting the idea they can read any humanity into anything she does.
Eh, I kinda disagree with you there. It’s honestly not that hard to write a hateable character. It’s much harder to write characters with nuance and that have a realistic mindset with good and bad aspects than it is to just write them as easily hateable. Willis has the ability to do that, as evidenced by many of the protagonists, but for the most part for his adults he chooses not to. Sometimes you don’t want a nuanced antagonist. Sometimes you just want a simple hateable adult that you can project all your personal feelings of adults in your life onto. It helps the reader latch onto characters being affected by these adults because they have had similar experiences. It’s effective, but it’s not at all challenging to write because it doesn’t have to be balanced and sensible, and it can be as extreme as you want.
It’s also an interesting choice because that’s how adults tend to be in kid’s lives. Even college age kids. They’re just there. As they are. Forces to be dealt with, placated, confronted or maneuvered around, rather than nuanced people to be understood and sympathized with.
That’s starting to change at this age, but it’s still very common.
And, with all comments here, I’m also thinking about his father, he isn’t so lucky as Ethan and must have sex with someone he doesn’t want to.
I’ll stop here.
Used to live in Salt Lake City Utah, and 99% of the older gays there were heterosexually divorced. Being told fucking the right girl will fix you and keep you out of the fires of Hell is a powerful motivation.
Could be Ace, but a gay friend of mine back in college said something very similar.
Specifically, he considered themselves bi when I first met him. He’d not yet had sex with a woman (he had with a guy), and was super excited to hook up with this girl he’d hit it off with.
Afterwards, he stopped by my doom room with this to say:
“Yeah, no. I’m gay. Vaginas are gross and scary. I thought liking boobs meant I was bi, but clearly not.”
I was like: “Awesome! More for me then.”
But yeah, my point is that line felt very familiar.
I hear it happens a lot that people like boobs but aren’t in any other way interested in women or even sex in general. And I cannot blame them, I like boobs too.
It is a known constant of the queerniverse that everybody loves boobs. Straight men and lesbians love boobs. Straight women and gay men love boobs. Boobs are simply objectively grand.
On it’s own, that would be a real possibility.
In a narrative context, repressed gay makes more sense. And with her comment here, she seems to think so at least.
Oh most definitely. Someone linked the strip in the comments yesterday or the day before, where his dad compares sleeping with women to acquiring a taste for beer, where you just have to power through something you find disgusting until you can handle it.
That’s precisely why Naomi doesn’t want them communicating with each other. If they are there to offer each other support and understanding, it will undermine her control over them. Narcissism 101 is to split your accessories off from as many of their social groups as possible, and we have seen Naomi try to do this to Ethan with Amber, and Mike, and now his own Dad. Which, of course, means she’s also doing it to his dad, here…which means, she probably does it to Ethan’s dad far more frequently than just today. You gotta divide and conquer, or else you lose control of the people you “love.”
It’s called “triangulation”. Keep the other parties separate and tell each of them slight variations on the truth, so they’ll only trust you and not each other.
Fell like I should mention this since I been told multiple times that throwing the word “narcissist” around to refer to awful abusive people is kind of insensitive since that’s the name of a personality disorder that is already really demonized. I am not saying you mean it that way but I think it would be good to use a different term to refer to Naomi.
In general, I agree with your premise that it’s not right for uneducated rubes like me to go around diagnosing mental illnesses onto people casually; it’s not productive in social spaces, and it can be harmful to people with various mental disorders when incorrect understandings of those disorders are disseminated through pop psych musings of average people.
However, for one, somebody can have narcissistic tendencies, and not narcissistic personality disorder, for several reasons; often, people with these tendencies ingrained in their personality, are themselves long-term victims of narcissists, through their core developmental years. There are lots of reasons to be very sympathetic to people who are victims of narcissists, if they are going through the process of healing themselves, and they deserve support and love as much as anybody else does.
That said, the premise that it’s bad to criticize narcissistic behavior because “that’s a personality disorder” is actually very harmful. It’s accurate that we identify that extreme narcissistic tendencies lead to a disordered person, who struggles to form connections with others, and struggles to maintain stability in aspects of their lives. However, that’s because overt narcissists treat the people around them like shit, because they are self-centered, and do not process or value other individuals emotions and experiences in a meaningful way. That leads them to be generally manipulative and controlling, in any personal relationship where they will be allowed the leeway to do so.
This does not apply to every presentation of narcissistic tendencies! However, the most intense and obvious presentations of NPD, do lead to people acting in the fashion which Naomi consistently has, which is behavior that directly harms and traumatizes other people, with deliberate intent. It is accurate to describe this type of person as a serial abuser, and it would be incorrect to ignore that the personality feature of their narcissism contributes directly to their persistent behavior patterns and their worldview. That’s not the same thing as going after narcissists unfairly; that’s simply respecting objective reality.
Crucially, Naomi is a fictional character for whom, if anybody were to incorrectly describe her, there will be no tangible real world consequences. If the word of God comes down from Willis that she is, somehow, completely lacking any such features we describe her with, that’s his choice and his canon. But, he’s had complete control of her framing and dialogue in every single panel she’s appeared in, and the 100% consistent theme of everything she says and does (and even the subtext of how certain characters behave around her) is that she expects other people to fall completely in line with her desires, to best serve her wants and needs, in complete disregard to their feelings or personal agency.
Like, you can go back and check; she’s had significant appearance in 10 strips, and in literally every strip, she either undercuts, lashes out, emotionally punishes, or manipulates the person she is talking to. It is a persistent behavior pattern that is 100% consistently framed as being who she is, by the strip, itself.
You’re right that we should take accountability towards treating peoples’ psychological diagnoses with care in real life, because there are real consequences to that. But, in a work of fiction, if a character reads like the author themselves double-checked to tick every box telling the audience, that this character is a certain way…well, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, has feathers like a duck, swims fast like a duck, is aggressive like a duck, and has a weird prominent curved donger that it brandishes around aggressive like a duck…it’s probably a duck.
Even if Naomi does not, in fact, have Narcissistic Personality Disorder, that does not change the fact that 100% of her behavior is narcissistic as fuck. And it’s okay to identify that. Because that kind of narcissistic behavior directly harms people, and it’s a deliberate choice of the narcissist to act that way towards others. Lots of narcissistic people manage to get up every day, and be decent human beings.
But the ones who act like Naomi? They damage every person they interact with, and they don’t feel bad about it, because they are so self-centered that they cannot and will not put another person’s needs or feelings into consideration, when they are choosing how to behave. And they choose to behave in the most controlling fashion possible, that they can get away with, relative to the accessories they have kept around them.
Ultimately, I’m not gonna feel bad for accurately describing a fictional villain, who has been written to be as terrible as humanly possible, for 100% of their screen time. I’ll maybe stop calling her a narcissist, when she displays one modicum of behavior which deviates from the overt narcissist playbook. But, she is still batting 100.
Okay I can’t actually respond to this because it’s way too much text and it’s verwhelming but I did read it and I just gonna keep it that I don’t agree with you both in how your view Naomi, your take on narcissism disorder and interpretation of character as having and general all of your points. I’m gonna stay back from this for a bit because it is actually making me upset.
“I hear you saying this is a highly stigmatized disorder that real people have and that I shouldn’t use it as a synonym for Monster, but have you considered that people with NPD are monsters” is a take.
Reported on purpose. I hope you someday realize that actually we can just call abusive people “abusive” and there is actually no function whatsoever to using “narcissistic” as an adjective on abusive, apart from dragging a whole group of innocent people who have never hurt you or indeed often anyone into our trauma without their permission and contributing to making them out to be boogeymen to whom it’s okay to hurt, because if they’ve got NPD they deserve it.
And now I’m stepping back from these comments again. But I thought Jeremiah deserved backup, and I thought Willis should know that this flag was on purpose, for being really cruelly ableist on purpose after you were very very gently asked to stop.
I think so. Which kind of does explain her emotions about homosexuality. It might be strongly connected with her fear of being left by her husband for a man.
Still bigoted though.
As someone who was once in a long term hetero relationship with a closeted ie highly repressed gay man, I don’t see a need to wish her poorly. It’s not fun for anybody. I mean, she shouldn’t be repressive, but I also don’t blame her for hanging on for dear life. You don’t always know what you’re getting into. (Long story shorter: I left for other reasobs.)
Yeah. Honestly, with all this in mind, I’m reading a lot of fear and insecurity expressing itself through anger.
That’s not healthy for anyone, mind. I have pity for Naomi but she really is the villain in this particular situation and her attempts at maintaining her dignity aren’t a good look
I’m curious how this family happened. Naomi had a gay son with a closeted gay man. She could almost be seen as a dark reflection of Amber in that sense. Did she force her husband into marriage? Did he only realize his sexuality after they were committed to each other? She seems to at least suspect his true sexuality now, but what about when they were dating or first starting out. If Naomi weren’t so outwardly awful on the surface this would be quite the sympathetic story for her as well.
That’s my reading. They grew up in a more homophobic time, too. I’m assuming they’re around my age, and while there were worse times to be gay than my teenage years, it has gotten much, much better.
So Saul probably grew up in a far less healthy environment for a gay young man, and while I didn’t know for sure what his and Naomi’s courtship looked like, I bet there was a degree of understanding that he would fake heterosexuality until he made it, and Naomi would cover for him.
Again, *this is not and never was healthy*. But regardless, now Naomi is in the situation that if Saul becomes comfortable in a gay identity he would almost certainly leave her. Which sucks. I think she cares for both of them in her way, but (again, unhealthily) not in a way that releases them from herself. Eventually she won’t be and to sustain that, and she’ll be alone for real. But she’s bringing that on herself
And she’s acknowledging that her homophobia could be a factor in his negative mental state. She’s still shitty about things, but she’s reaching a place that some parents of LGBTQ+ kids don’t reach until their child is dead, if then.
My mother died in 2004, I’m thoroughly convinced she thought my religion was a “phase” that I would outgrow. Mind you I was 46 when I died and had been following my religion for 16 years at that point and I still follow it now, another 20 years later. I didn’t “outgrow” it.
Umbrella, actually, no. That’s the whole reason religion is grounds for asylum and refugee status under international law. Because people who deeply believe something cannot just “choose” to believe otherwise, any more than they could choose to see the sky as a different color or choose how they love. Nobody should ever have to “choose” not to have something fundamental to their sense of self be “changed” to fit social expectations.
I’m sorry, I’m not usually so blunt. I don’t mean to cause offense. But religion is not a choice for everyone. I’ve found it’s not so common, in this world, for people actually to feel that they have a choice over how they believe.
*”Umbrella, actually, no” should read, “Umm, actually, no.”
*”Nobody should ever have to ‘choose’ not to have something fundamental to their sense of self be “changed” to fit social expectations” should read instead, “Nobody should ever have to ‘choose’ *to have*…” Double negative!
I mean it’s a fundamental right to choose. If you could choose to switch to Shinto or atheism or Christianity but you’re being FORCED to, that’s a war crime.
This is a general issue with free will, actually. People massively underestimate how strongly their memories and other parts of their environment influence their behaviour. I’m not saying free will doesn’t exist, but I am definitely saying that people overestimate how much of it they have.
Religion is a weird category, since it’s more of a choice than things like race or sexual orientation, but it’s also very fundamental to many people’s identity and deeply tied to ethnicity. And it’s long been a flashpoint for prejudice and discrimination.
So we give it the same kind of protection we give those other categories, even if it’s not quite the same kind of thing.
It’s not like Ethan had any real hope of his mother deciding to be progressive and fully accepting. Among DoA parents who’ve appeared in-strip, she’s still doing relatively okay.
I will say that the gays I know tend to be less stressed in their day-to-day than other people in similar economic and employment conditions…but then, nobody I know works in Media or Government at this point…
As a depressed person I would appreciate it if that word didn’t get used as slang. I have a hard enough time talking about my emotions with it, I wouldn’t know where to start without.
Past imperfect — an action that began in the past and is not completed. Here I take it to be emphasizing past experience over instantaneous present condition.
What I can’t understand is why bother with all of this? She knew this all along yet they made them both keep up the act. Why, are they even happy if they haft to spend their whole marriage pretending there’s even a spark there and one of them is paranoid that the other will one day realize it was all a mistake?
Is it because they’re so far in and invested so much that they can’t back out? Like it’s a sunken coast fallacy?
They’re religious. Keeping up appearances is thus more important than any personal agency, happiness, or self-actualization.
Like, don’t get me wrong, I feel much less bad for Ethan’s dad than I do for Ethan; he at least chose to try to wear a beard and live in the closet, at least to some extent. His desire to be straight against his own nature, is bad for him, and it’s sad he has to endure it, but he doesn’t have to, it’s just a persistent bad decision he has been making. Whereas, Naomi is Ethan’s mother, and children feel compelled to listen to their mothers – especially when their mother raised them to be agreeable and obedient, in the first place.
Ethan’s dad is in control of his sexuality, even if the way he has chosen to repress it, and the awful, controlling partner he has chosen, is very sad for him. Ethan’s the one who has an authority figure whose approval he has spent his whole life seeking, trying to undermine his agency and autonomy, and trying to unfairly control deeply personal aspects of his life. Naomi is a awful, domineering person, but her husband ultimately has a choice who his partner is. Ethan doesn’t have a choice who his mother is, so Ethan’s the one who is experiencing something much worse.
I doubt Saul’s parents were any more supportive though. His decisions were probably made in an even less supportive context than Ethan has, given the advent of the internet and resultant access to online queer”community.”
Yeah. At least Ethan had his friends, and a safer culture to grow up in. But, at the same time, he’s been experiencing that same culture for as long as Ethan has, at this point, and he’s still choosing the familiarity of what he has, over the potential of what he could maybe have, if he made a change. But he’s a completely grown-ass man, so that’s ultimately his choice, and sometimes you just gotta let people make their own choices for themselves.
Unless you’re Naomi. Then, you nip that shit in the fucking bud. She didn’t marry a man to give him choices, she married a man, to have a man that belongs to her.
I don’t agree that Ethan’s Dad experiences the same culture Ethan does. There is a world of difference between what you experience as a young person (particularly in college) at any given time versus what an older person (particularly a religious older person) experiences. Saul is likely surrounded by people who do not support or even discuss sexualities outside heteronormative standards.
It’s not an unusual story among late-discovery queer people, and while I kind of get where you’re coming from, I don’t love the idea that he’s “choosing” abuse and to remain closeted when it’s very possible he doesn’t actually feel like he has a choice about leaving. Being completely grown doesn’t protect you from shit like that or make you automatically capable of leaving abusive situations, unfortunately.
I’m an Elder gay, and let me just say from personal experience that this community, unless you’re in a big city, has NO support for anyone over 40. “Dad bod” doesn’t cut it, you need “HOT” daddy energy.
People are missing that for gay men the age of Ethan’s father (depending on sliding comic time scale) that most of the active gay guys he knew in his own coming-of-age *are probably dead*.
HIV destroyed gay communities. It still has its scars even in active liberal communities. There’s a whole generation of men just *gone*. Survivors have talked about that being the time where they saw literally all of their friends and found family dying. It would have given even more life-or-death stakes to closeting. Ethan’s father could easily equate coming out as being literally death: in the news, in his peers, in the way his larger community spoke about them. Forming community from scratch over the internet is difficult and lonely even as a younger, net-savvy person.
You don’t shake off that kind of trauma just because there’s more diversity in tv shows these days.
He could, if he was part of that gay community at all. If he was still in the closet, even to himself, then he likely wouldn’t have know much of the devastated gay community.
Please don’t pin their wack decisions on their religion. They’re Conservative Jews, and there are plenty of Conservative Jewish communities where being gay is fine. (To say nothing of Reform, Reconstructionist, Renewal, and Humanist Jewish communities, where I’d be surprised to see a congregation be anything but welcoming.)
They could totally find an affirming Jewish congregation if they wanted. It’s not difficult. They’re choosing not to.
Are they Conservative Jews?
Is this tied to religion at all?
This seems to be more personal. Saul can’t accept his homosexuality and come out because it would end the marriage and Naomi doesn’t want that. Ethan can’t be openly gay because as she says here, it might give Saul ideas.
You gotta remember that religiously conservative Jews or not, no less than Linda and the rest of the bongos, Ethan’s parents are entrenched in the traditions, culture, language and customs of a religious red state.
Even tho they not Christians themselves, what they know as the Most Viable Paths To Success™ in this kinda environment are which the majority of money and opportunities for their son are ultimately in the hands of homophobic, really conservative Christians.
Naomi basically thinks/needs submission to “traditional” (bigoted) social expectations to be easier than changing a broken system.
I can recall similar stories in which Latino immigrant parents who had children born with darker skin tried DESPERATELY to lighten it with concoctions like diluted bleach and egg yolk, for they had just accepted the racism they had experienced in the United States as a Fact of Life™
As far as I’m concerned what Naomi thought of as doing her son a “favor” was no less okay.
Agreed. Heteronormatively is a powerful thing.
OTOH, while that’s all very reasonable and possible, I don’t think we’ve seen anything directly saying she’s thinking that way and we do see right here in this strip some other more personal reasons that might be more significant.
But mostly I was curious if there was any in-comic reason to think the Siegals were actually of the Conservative branch of Judaism.
Yeah, homophobes can hide behind religion but bigotry doesn’t need a justification. A lot of people simply have it and seek rationales. Which is f-ing depressing.
Sometimes you don’t realize the significance of things until you’re too deep. Like after you’ve been married for years or decades and start to put words to feelings. Then you might be: crap!!
It really explains how her gaydar was so precise that she realised it just from a wayward look Ethan gave Mike. It seems she successfully achieved what Joyce was trying to do with Ethan at the start of college and press-bench her own college gay sweetheart into straighthood and marrying her. Doubtless ever since, she has been painfully aware that for all his brainwashing, he keeps being gay, he keeps having to power through having sex with her and both are terribly unhappy.
To be a little more sympathetic, she might not have realized it until after they were married. Especially back then (whenever back then actually would have been in the weird sliding timescale, and how that ties to when decisions about this backstory were made.)
He might not even have accepted it about himself.
aaaaawwwwweee here we go there the other shoe
this really much surprise to you?
“…for now” she “allows” him what she sees as a blight
but being queer ain’t a privilege, it’s a right!
underneath she still the same ol’ fart,
who shoudla respect’ his lovin’ gay heart from the very start
she damn done bent and broke it, and gave no shit,
towards our queer brotha she been really hateful
when all this time she shoulda been grateful!
now he’s a real depressive case,
only now she busts in just for saving face,
after years of berating him towards fuckin “traditional”,
we reminded what her love is — CONDITIONAL
Awe thanks, and yeah I didn’t even intend it to be that long,
Naomi gets on my nerves, Ethan’s struggle is so fuckin real, I just felt the need to unleash my wrath through the power of rap.
And sure you can share it no problem! Although unless they also keep up with recent strips I’m not sure if it’ll make that much sense to them without context haha
Exactly. Once he’s happy again (from being a gay man), his free trial of homosexual will immediately expire. She’s moved from “my son can cure his gay if he fucks enough pussy, just like I fixed his useless dad” to “eh, everybody has a ‘phase’ in college, right? Once he grows out of it, he can get back to mashing sweet, sweet puss, like a real man who I can be proud of.”
Gay rights have often taken a harm reduction approach. See: the “I can’t help that I can only be happy with a same sex partner” argument, which throws bisexuals under the bus.
It’s not your right, if you need somebody’s permission to access it. What you’re describing is a privilege. Like, are you missing the part where she implies he will stop acting gay, as soon as she’s no longer scared that he’s gonna off himself?
Safe injection sites are harm reduction. Locking your addicted loved ones in your basement, so they can’t inject anything, is just taking control over your loved ones lives, because your fear that they might die, is more important to you than their personal autonomy. You’ll definitely reduce some harm! But also, you now have someone locked in your basement. And that’s not appropriate behavior.
It does seem like harm reduction and that’s not good enough, but sometimes that’s all you can get for the moment and the only way to make progress. Which sucks, but it’s the world we live in.
The “I can’t help that I can only be happy with a same sex partner” does throw bisexuals under the bus, but it also normalizes such relationships, makes it easier for people to come openly and makes it easier even for bisexuals in the long term.
Sure, but I don’t agree that bigots co-opting our slogans for their own selfish aims, is the same thing as us advocating for our basic right to exist safely. We can attack those premises when they are used by bad actors, the premises themselves will be fine. If we don’t go on the attack when bigots co-opt our messaging, then we run the risk of their framing of queerness being encountered and internalized by young queers.
You don’t just let bigots steal your hard-wrought and effective propaganda from you, because the words sound nice when they still remain in the order we put them in. When bigots co-opt your messaging, their goal is to pervert and twist it to their own ends…like Naomi guilt-tripping her son into doing what she wants, by saying words that sound supportive, but have nefarious intentions behind them.
It’s not about making perfect the enemy of good; it’s about keeping bad actors from poisoning the well, which we’ve worked so hard to establish and maintain.
knowing that ethan’s parents do grow to accept him in shortpacked and that willis said the reason they feel differently there is because of time it does give me some hope that this is moving towards a more permanent change
Exactly. But, I also woulda fell for that shit, when I was 20. I do take promises very seriously. Which is something that manipulators can clock, and will deliberately use to their advantage, if I am dumb enough to allow them.
I mean, even if he doesn’t say “mom visited me” he could just unprompted (?) just say/send a text “Hey dad, still gay, but don’t worry i won’t bring home my bf the next time i visit home” or something passive aggressive b/c other than living in a community/neighborhood similar to joyce’s statistically he’s gotta come across some other ppl in his life that aren’t 100% straight
Wish my mother had even gone this far, when I transitioned she made it clear “dead son” was a step up. She tried to have me committed, She even tried to stop the surgery. She waited till I was unconscious and told the nurses I “changed my mind” they had to wake me up again and ask………..
*hug* Frankly, it’s pretty disturbing they woke you up, that seems… not how consent works? Regardless, I’m sorry your mother sucks, and I hope you have found your people.
I was in a pre surgical sedative, not actually IN surgery. This was 2001. They were used to crazy mommies in that clinic. Hard to believe its been nearly a quarter century. Time flies. I understood they had to be sure, I told them my mother was pants crapping insane and just ignore her.
I’m sorry your mom did that. Mine is only supportive in as far that my sisters are supportive and will give her hell. She tried to follow me into the OR for my hystorectomy crying. I hadn’t told her when or where it was happening and I was thrilled, I’d been suffering from endometriosis for years and still in the closet. I’m two montha out from top surgery and swore my sisters to secrecy and told hospital staff mom was not allowed in. I did call her while in post op and druggedly appologized for keeping it a secret.
She took me to get masectomy binders and only said one off hand, “I wouldn’t go out without a shirt because I wouldn’t want to make people uncomfortable because of scars.” Her sister also said something weird to me about scars being bad when I was a kid.
She thought she could cry you out of it? As to being able to go out without a shirt, I assume that’s kind of one of the wanted benefits? If its done right the scars are not that bad. It took me forever to remember I had to put ON a shirt when I went outside. Heh, Estrogen really liked me.
My mom is not great at any medical or life or death things, but I think it was a combo of me not being able to have more kids and yhe whole me explaining I’m a boy when I was 3. And yeah my kids keep laughing at me for not having nipples 😅 It made me smile that estrogen liked you 😉 and having to remember shirts (everyone should have the amount of top covering they feel right with. The trans only pool parties in my city are such a sweet opportunity.)
I’m so sorry your mother put you through that! I hope you’ve found people who love the person you really are, and that you never have to go through that kind of shit again.
I am so glad to hear you made it through all that OK in the end.
I just had a bit of a “confrontation” over email with an adult who hurt me when I was a youngster (also 25-27 years ago) and I’m still kind of flattened. So I know the pain doesn’t always go away with time.
So, Dad can’t know because Mom fears it will encourage him to come out? I’m bi, so thinking straight is a wee bit outside my wheelhouse, but if I were straight and married to her—yeah—gay might seem like a reasonable option.
First sentence: yes. Second sentence: no – he doesn’t have options there: he’s either asexual or 6 on the Kinsey scale, and given his son it looks like he’s 6.
Believing that manipulative people are well-meaning-but-misguided is a serious trap that people fall into. The truth of the matter is, the people who act this way, know they are socially misbehaving. They simply believe it is their right to do so, because that’s how their worldview works.
She “thinks she is being nice,” in the sense that she is performing niceness, because she knows that in this specific interaction, niceness is the tool she can use to emotionally manipulate her target into actually doing what she wants him to do. There is no sincere emotion behind it, the way that you or I would recognize or feel, if we were being sincere and nice to someone we loved. She is purely calculating, and she knows which types of face to make at which times, to maximally affect the emotions of the person she’s talking to, to nudge them into the direction she wants them to go in.
Later, she will always throw it back in her victims’ face, that “she was so nice” to them, and look at how they’ve repaid her niceness! She wouldn’t have to be so mean to them, if they weren’t constantly doing things which she disapproves of, after all! It’s their fault she felt the way she did, and they need to deal with the consequences!
Aren’t someone people like this as a matter of course? I tried reading Portnoy’s Complaint once, because I’d heard so many references to it, I wanted to know what it was about. It wasn’t the author’s constant bemoaning his sex-crazed existence that made me eventually throw down the book (well, that too), but his descriptions about the constant in his parents engaged in. Which was one point of the book I guess. He represented that psychological torture pretty effectively. Naomi barely scrapes the surface if that horror, but she’s getting there.
feels like he should flip it back on her outta spite. like “Oh, you don’t approve of me being gay anymore? Guess i’ll go jump off the nearest bridge then”
although i wonder how she would’ve reacted to him being like “actually i’m trans and gonna have a sex change operation, if i date men then it’s technically not gay anymore” but i imagine any trans person actually getting far enough to do a procedure versus hrt would probably distance themselves from a parent so they can’t somehow sabotage it or whatever
Again, extremely shitty wording and her attitude sucks but I like this scene. “I’d prefer you be alive” is a start. (And I’m really hoping it continues and she drops the ‘for now’).
Yeah, I don’t think it’s fair to criticize her when both gay and trans rights activists have leaned *heavily* on this very same argument (better people be alive and gay/trans than dead). At least not without also rejecting that as n acceptable strategy for social acceptance.
I think the critic comes from the “for now” part of her statement and the use of the word “allowing” (rather than offering actual support, or at least actual acceptance). Like BBCC said, the “I’d prefer you be alive” part is a start, the fact that she believes she is owed control over her adult son’s life is what she’s being criticized for.
I doubt she’s truly capable of loving anybody but herself…and that’s even if she actually loves herself. She might not even love herself, to be honest with you.
It’s very much fair to criticize her. Homophobic parents don’t get an automatic pass for the shitty things they do and say just because they make a baby step for the very first time. And doing so very much doesn’t reject what you say it does, I don’t know how to argue that because it is just not something that is true.
that’s what having an interpersonal relationship with a narcissist is like: you are gradually trained to believe that the brief moments where they are sweet and kind to you, are the “real them,” and that if you just live up to their expectations well enough, then they’ll never need to start being the “bad them” to you. They normalize their shitty behavior to you, and will undercut you if you try to challenge them on it, gaslight you, and ultimately tell you that it’s your fault they acted shitty.
So yeah, narcissists are very capable of being extremely sweet. But it’s never sincere. It’s just that they know some amount of carrot is necessary, to keep you in line, and under their control. They’re smart enough to know that if they show you too much stick, you might wise up, and run away from the constant abuse. Then, they have to groom a new accessory for themselves, and that’s a ton of work they don’t want to have to go through, if they can avoid it.
The person they are when they’re hurting you, is the real them. When they show you who they are…please, for the love of God, believe them.
As much as Naomi’s stance on “allowing” Ethan to be gay still reeks of homophobia, and as shitty as this is towards Ethan AND Saul, I also really pity her here. We’re basically getting a glimpse here of the person Joyce would’ve become (a few decades down the line, anyway) if she hadn’t had Becky in her life, and it’s depressing. Stuck in a loveless sham relationship that she refuses to admit she’s wasted decades of her life on, and can’t bring herself to end it.
I hope we see Saul again sometime, because I really hope that he eventually comes to terms with who he really is.
i hope poor joyce never has this happen, she has been through enough.
though, then again, maybe someday, that realization might bring her some sense of joy, if she fully appreciates who and what it is she avoided becoming?
If I were here, I am not sure whether this realization would make me deeply depressed, or whether I’d cackle like a mad person at my outrageous fortune.
it doesn’t mean anything bad about you, it just means you have a type. a…concerning type, which you should be careful in pursuing! but it’s still just a type!
What I don’t understand is why so many people announce their personal tastes in public in the first place. What does it help almost anybody to know someone else’s personal taste?
I mean, it’s a comment section. That’s a comment. It’s no better or worse than any other opinion getting shared here so I’m not seeing why it’s an issue?
Is it like in the webtoon, I Spy A Married Life, where the FL thinks the ML is ridiculously cute/hot when he glares and makes a grumpy face getting ready to yell at her?
You know, i was gonna have some witty rejoinder about how webtoons are all exactly the same comic but i gotta dang admit that artist has much more advanced sexy glare powers than I…
I mean, hot ppl can still be terrible lol. tho i’m sure plenty of middle aged ‘hags’ that aren’t total monsters. i’m sure there are wiccans/goth teens that would’ve aged up to look similar to her
this is the point I don’t agree with, tho. it’s not progress, it’s just manipulation. she flat out says her support of him is temporary, and conditional, but then puts on the weepy-eyed mom act to guilt trip Ethan into acquiescing to her framing of the situation, which is that she has agency over who he dates and how he uses his body.
she’s just, very clearly not actually changing at all, but instead is just saying what she knows will be effective, to make it so her son is no longer withdrawn from her. because being withdrawn from her, is the first step of him reclaiming his own agency over his own life, and that’s the thing she is truly afraid of.
There isn’t one example of a line of dialogue or action she has had in any of the strips she has appeared in, where she isn’t directly undercutting, criticizing/disrespecting, or trying to domineer the person she is directly interacting with. If the comic tells me 10 times out of 10 that this person’s personality and behavior are consistently a certain way, I’m gonna believe the comic.
I think it’s fine for other people can have differing interpretations to you on the strip. This is something that I really dont like in this fandom where it seems to be normal to argue about the right way to interpret a strip and it gets really tiring
I genuinely think she’s come here because she is worried about Ethan and doesn’t want him to die, but that doesn’t mean she’s gonna do a 180 and no longer be the full garbage person that she was. I think this could be a step in the right direction – it’s showing that her views have changed (ever so slightly) to “allow” Ethan to be gay for a bit to cheer up, so who’s to say that this can’t change again further down the line to begrudging acceptance and then maybe one day actual acceptance? Obviously I’m not defending her actions, but I think this came from a genuine place instead of it being a manipulative tactic
The way I see this, there are two different axes in play.
As a suppressive, homophobic parent, this is a small wake-up call and minor progress, demonstrating she at least isn’t so bigoted and narcissistic that she’d rather her son be dead than with another man. A tiny improvement.
As a controlling parent, this is no progress at all. She’s behaving exactly as she has done all comic long: viewing Ethan as her personal property to control and mould as she desires, and everyone else around him as solely props to set him up in her perceived fantasy of his ideal state of being. She’s smashed through all potential boundaries yet again without even checking they existed by showing up unannounced, critiquing him immediately (even if from a place of fear for him as well), “relenting” to offer unasked “permission” on his own personhood’s validity, and finally reinforcing that this in no way means he or her other relatives are free.
Naomi is demonstrating the capacity to change her ethics and reconsider her personal stance on societal matters, based on reassessed priorities of what matters most to her. She *hasn’t* demonstrated self-awareness or any capacity to change her controlling mindset or behaviours as yet, nor to change her views based on what matters to Ethan or anybody else.
Well, not saying I completely disagree with you, but you sound like you are also implying a lot of things that are not actually in the comic, and preventing others to interpret the situation in a more favorable way is kind of uncool, especially since we don’t know yet how this is actually going to turn out.
I personnaly wouldn’t give Naomi the benefit of doubt in this situation, but I won’t chastise people who give it to her either given that it has no consequences whatsoever on our life.
I was referring to all the projections about the fact she doesn’t care about her son, that all that matters to her is appearing like a “good mother” and so on. What you see as the obvious reason for her behavior may or may not be her actual in-story motives, and may not even be what the author is trying to convey.
I understand that you disagree, but these are just opinions and in this instance yours is as good as mine. Neither of us know what Willis has planned for this character, we’re both just guessing with the information we have.
I’m not defending her, I don’t like her, but I think “I’d rather you were gay than dead” is a step up from “you fuck that girl right now”. Tiny step. Maybe an inch. But still a step. You don’t feel that way, and that’s fine <3 hope you have a good day.
It’s not, because this is purely conditional and still full of the delusion that she has control over her son’s sexuality. “For now” means “you must stop eventually.” It’s a stay of execution.
Exactly. The thing I take so much umbrage with, is people saying this is “progress” or “changing.” It just blithely, absolutely, is not. She doesn’t feel differently about accepting homosexuality. She’s still deeply, repugnantly disgusted by it. She doesn’t feel any differently about trampling over her loved ones’ agencies or sense of self. She still fully expects to be in control of who her loved ones interact with, and what they talk about, and she confirms that her love is fully conditional to her feelings, and that her feelings should come first when others make decisions, even decisions that have nothing to do with her.
It isn’t progress or change. She’s just come to the purely internal conclusion, that something she doesn’t want to happen, will happen, if she doesn’t do something to prevent it. So, she employs the same tactics she always employs on the people around her, to graciously steer them into what she deems to be correct behavior. Just because she half-ass put on a little sad face, does not make anything she has ever done more endearing. She’s just running her playbook, because her ultimate goal is to get the thing she wants (a living, eventually straight, son).
Again, this is my opinion about a thing neither of us know the future of. I understand that you disagree, I’m very happy with my opinion though. Thank you.
Yes. A terrible character changing means there’s multiple possibilities. Some of them are better.
I feel like an overarching message in DoA is that redemption/progress can be possible as long as a person is alive, but it’s not just a switch, and it’s not guaranteed or even likely.
Like, weren’t people complaining that antagonists in DoA are all just two dimensional? Here’s another one who isn’t. Not every antagonist’s decisions will be “what’s the best way to abduct someone from Indiana University?” Naomi’s decision is going to be if she’s going to keep reminding herself panel 5 until she gets it, or stay with her familiar attitude.
well yeah, a step in the right direction ain’t enough to win the race but again, perfect is the enemy of progress
she’s been against his sexuality unconditionally up until now, but now she’s allowed a condition; “it’s okay if you’re gay so long as X”. she might backslide, yeah, but she might also create a new condition, “it’s okay if you’re gay so long as Y”. it’s a lot easier to do a thing you’ve already done once; that’s how microtransactions work in mobile games.
she ain’t finished the race by a long shot but at least she’s off the starting line. the hard part’s over, all that’s left is to keep moving forward
(it is a reference to the original Heathers though- they murder two footballers and stage it as a gay double suicide. At the funeral the father says “I love my dead, gay son!” and JD whispers “How do you think he’d react to a son with a limp wrist and a pulse?”)
I hate this for you. I’m so sorry.
I hope your mum ends up having more capacity to change and cares enough about you in the end to put in the work to do so. And that you’re safe and happy either way.
She doesn’t want to lose him the same way someone wouldn’t want to lose their favorite coat. That’s not love, that’s just being possessive and self-centered. After all, think about how selfish it would be, for Ethan to kill himself? How would that make his poor mother feel? It’s not really about Ethan. It’s always going to be about her, and what she wants.
So, she’s gotta do what she always does, and make sure the boy doesn’t make any bad choices. By restricting his choices, within the limits of what she considers acceptable for him to experience.
I think you are right to hate Naomi, she is a very shitty person, but I also think some of the things you state about her like they are facts are just kind of guess work and assumptions that we don’t really know for certain because we can’t look into her mind and see her real motivation.
Naomi is a very interesting character right now, because she’s clearly left a very bad impression in her few brief appearances, yet because those appearances are so brief it’s hard to characterize her fairly because it’s impossible to fully understand her motivations beyond assumptions. It’s pretty safe to just assume the worst because she’s a parent in this comic specifically, but maybe for now she deserves a tiny bit of leniency even if her attitude is quickly spoiling any mercy on judgment. She could surprise us.
We can’t look into her mind, but this is a work of fiction, and so we can analyze how her behavior is framed and presented to glean things that are not directly said, because that’s how interpreting fiction works. I don’t think it’s guess work and assumptions, when a work has repeatedly been fully consistent about how it frames a specific character, and chooses to portray their behavior.
So, yes, she has a severe lack of situations where she comes out and flatly states unflattering things about herself as fact. But, she would never do that, anyway, unless she had something to gain from it. Nobody has any problem concluding that Raidah is an awful person, just because she never comes out and directly says “I am fully status-obsessed, and I view people and relationships primarily as objects and tools that I can use to achieve my future goals.” Because she doesn’t need to do that: she just consistently behaves in ways that show us as readers that this is what she internally believes, and we infer it from the text.
Raidah will never give us that moment, because what the fuck would be the use of her admitting that to anyone? It would be a net negative for her to be honest about who she is and how she feels, and she’s smart enough to know that. So, we have to read between the lines, and accept that she is a character who is being deliberately portrayed a certain way by the work. I don’t see how Naomi is any different.
I believe there is a limit to where an analyzis and theorizing of a fictional work is reasonable, as in, actually makes sense with the information provided by the narrative. We know that Naomi is pretty homophobic and wanted Ethan to be straight very badly and say as such bluntly and awfully, those are know things that we seen. We can reasonably take from his father dialogue and her reaction here that he is probably a closeted man and she knows it. I think when reaching the point where you are that she is an manipulator narcissist and nothing she says here can be genuine is where that analysis stop being completely reasonable and start being kind of a reach.
As I said yesterday, it is simultaneously true that this is garbage behavior, and that this is progress for her.
Someone else pointed out that progress should be encouraged, and that is true, while at the same it is also true that garbage behavior should be called out and criticized.
Yeah I’m not a fan of the kid-glove approach to this situation. If you’re really making progress away from bigotry, part of that is going to be accepting that your actions have consequences and can still suck even if you’re not “as bad” as before.
he’s probably gonna mention “hey ethan you know your mom is kind of an awful person, she shoudn’t treat you like that,” and ethan is going to have a blue screen error that will bring the strip somewhere else in the continuity for at least several days
I will say, I forgot to consider late last night, the potentiality that Asher actually could be a commiserative foil to Ethan on this issue. It’s entirely possible, if his family is mob connected, that his queerness is a problem to some people in his family, as well. If TV prestige dramas have taught me anything, patriarchal crime syndicates are generally very homophobic.
one thing i have not seen mentioned is the absolutely painfully sarcastic eye roll she has, when she finally acknowledges Ethan’s actual feelings for possibly the first time since she has been in the strip. Because she doesn’t actually care about his feelings.
She gives the same caliber of eye roll for “yeah, sucks your boyfriend was murdered” that a normal teenager would give when you tell them to do the dishes. Because that’s how irrelevant other peoples’ needs and emotions are, to her.
She doesn’t care about having a dead son, because her son would be dead, and his life and hopes and dreams would be extinguished tragically. She just cares about being a mother who has a dead son. So, since she doesn’t want that to happen, she’s going to do something about it.
That’s not what most of us would recognize as real, vulnerable, human love; she cares for Ethan, the way somebody might care deeply for an exotic plant. It’s very important to her, because she’d be sad that it died, and she wouldn’t want to be judged for failing to take care of it. But, it’s still ultimately an object to her, over which she expects to have absolute authority, because it is hers, above and before it can ever be anything else.
I would like to say to start that your read that this is 100% pure narcissist manipulation is a completely valid one. If that’s what she’s doing, this is what it would look like.
The thing is, this is also what it would look like if Naomi had a wake-up call that her son is in fact more important to her than her homophobia, and is taking one tiny, awkward step to fix that part of their relationship while also not being ready to let go of the entire tower built on the cornerstones of moral judgment and control that absolutely needs to be demolished. Where you see her rolling her eyes, I see her uncomfortably looking anywhere but directly at Ethan as she tries to save face.
BUT. Again, your read is a completely valid one that is at least as likely as mine. In fact if this were the real world, I’d put money on yours over mine. And even if this legitimately is a step, she has so many more miles to go to even just reach baseline decent human being, which she may or may not wind up taking. Either way this is not something to trust and breathe a sigh of relief and say “Okay, Naomi’s good now”.
I really appreciate this comment. I’m not remotely convinced, but you at least understand what it is I’m trying to convey, and that means a lot after the past couple of days. At the end of the day, it’s easy for me to be passionate about proselytizing warnings, meant to help others avoid being abused by people in their real lives.
I especially agree that, the fact that this is a work of fiction, actually makes it more likely than if it were reality, that Naomi could have good intentions. I can’t say I wouldn’t be happy to be wrong, purely for Ethan’s sake! It just doesn’t read to me like that is the story Willis is trying to tell.
This reads to me like someone who has been immersed in a sea of horrible horrible ideas all her life but who has finally, in panel 5, finally had a breakthrough insight with the potential to redirect her onto a better path. I am hopeful.
Exactly. She’s moved from “gay is curable with enough pussy” to “lots of people have a ‘phase’ in college,” and the ultimate implication of her being willing to make that shift purely temporarily, is that “the ‘phase’ can simply be cured at a later date.”
People are adamant she is trying to make a change. She is not. She is just manipulative, and doesn’t want her son to pull away from her control, so she’s throwing him a bone, so to speak. She’ll go back to being fully terrible to him, once she recognizes that he’s no longer withdrawing from her, anymore.
The underlying issue appears to be that she fears/knows her husband is gay from what I am reading, which means you’re likely right.
If the underlying cause of her homophobia is fear of losing her marriage and all that that entails (financially, socially, emotionally, ego, etc), then she’s not going to be able to exhibit the growth that is hoped for until she is willing to work through that first. I wonder if Ethan is about to raise this topic in the next strip… is his dad gay?
On a very much less serious note: This is where a Mike solution would have solved all! He was always going on about bangin’ people’s mothers. Mike showing love to Ethan by helping out Ethan’s sexually frustrated mother would be win-win-win!
“I’d prefer a son who’s gay and alive” is the first step of the one-two punch of “Okay I let you be gay for a bit, it’s time to grow up now.” Mom of the year.
Some people are also just incredibly bad at expressing any kind of emotion or affection, without it necessarily indicating actual hostility.
It seems somewhat unlikely in this case, but who knows, putting her son’s welfare over her IDpol crap might represent actually getting her priorities correctly in order. Having a family member or friend who is from a minority group is a known way to get even the reddest of hats to actually cool it for a second and think about what they’re actually on about, it’s how Dick Cheney got a heart.
I can only assume you weren’t alive during the Bush administration or you wouldn’t be suggesting Dick Cheney has anything inside him but a black pit.
The man started wars on the back of something he knew—for a fact—was a lie, leading to the invasion of multiple countries, an illegal torture program, ramping up of the U.S. security state and destruction of civil rights, rampant islamophobia, and the ruthless slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Oh, and it all happened due to them quite literally *stealing the election* from Gore. Cheney is an irredeemable psychopath.
Myeah there are many things to hate Trump for but starting massive wars ain’t one of them… though that may change depending on his attitude towards war in Ukraine will affect Russian imperialistic ideas.
Yeah on Iran but let’s be real, no matter who’d sit on the chair in the White House Afghanistan would go back to Taliban one way or another. US isn’t the first empire to get burnt while trying to tame that place.
The United States government support of the Saudi Royal family is quite literally the biggest reason why the Middle East went from being the prosperous center of civilization to the desolate war zone it is today.
Shit happening over there was our country’s fault to begin with, go fucking figure.
I’m honestly surprised that 9/11 is still being talked about THAT much nearly two and a half decades later, especially given the much more imminent threat of white domestic terrorists in the US.
No coincidence that Osama Bin Laden himself was a wealthy-ass nepobaby and fierce anti-socialist who weaponized his religion for that cause alongside US troops in the Soviet-Afgan War. 👀
Not sure about the ages on this site but I was a teen when it happened and it was basically watching a Historical Event happen in real time. It was a paradigm shift because it ended the era of peace after the fall of communism. There was a new massive threat and its name was Islamic Terrorism. Then you got invasion of Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq and all that other nonsense that followed. It was a really big event that changed the direction in which the world was going.
The United States’ so-called “War on Terror” is a monument to the politics of fear and absolutely horrific power of the military industrial complex.
By appealing to citizens’ fear and ignorance, conflating policing with military warfare and fostering impossible expectations for perfect security, our government both undermines our freedoms in the name of “protecting” us and has made the problem of terrorism here and abroad even WORSE.
It’s this same pattern that’s gone on since at least the Cold War. Nationalists in United States politics like sell themselves as the platform of careful economic planners who opt for limited government, but when they finally get into office they be like, “Now’s the time for us to TAKE FUCKING ACTION! We’re breaking all the rules, violating your privacy, and use even more of your tax money to start YET ANOTHER WAR with no exit strategy!”
Same fucking shit over and over again, The Korean War shit, the Vietnam War shit, War on Drugs shit, War on Terror shit, etc.
The only thing that ever changes is the country or thing they want us to go to war with, and thinking otherwise makes you “unpatriotic” and therefore EEEEVIIIILL
She said “you can have a little gay. As a treat. Until I don’t want you to, anymore, and then you’ll stop for me.”
I honestly think the way Naomi behaves, is substantially worse than if she simply disowned her son entirely. Nobody deserves to suffer through “love” like this.
So most of the comments I’ve seen are of the opinion that Naomi is the controlling one, and that she’s been keeping Saul in the closet. I’d like to present another theory. I don’t know exactly what year it is in comic time, but I’m going to assume that Naomi and Saul got married in the late 70s or early 80s. Saul may not even have told Naomi that he was gay before they got married, and she figured it out when he couldn’t get it up for her. So now she’s stuck. If she divorces him, then she risks outing him, which at that time could be life-ruining or even deadly. So she stays in a loveless marriage, getting more bitter, with only the hope of children to hang onto. And then she sees her son becoming just like his father, the one who got her into this situation, and she freaks out.
This is not to excuse any of Naomi’s behavior, she shouldn’t be taking her anger with her husband’s actions out on her son.
Just another explanation for why she’s suddenly OK with Ethan being gay, but not Saul. Saul is the reason she’s never had good sex, she doesn’t want him to get to go out and have gay sex after that.
This isn’t progress for Naomi but it will be for Ethan. He’ll see the cost his dad pays for being closeted. The problems that kind of relationship brings. How he can’t go back to high school and just be a clueless nerd kid. Plus maybe seeing Naomi will get roadblock out of his head, since he’s just a standin for her. Not the advice or intervention he needs but it’s the one he’s getting.
Now time for Naomi to leave and not come back for ten years / the end of the semester.
I think you’re overestimating how much he’s going to read into that last comment. Kids tend to have blinders when it comes to their parents, so it wouldn’t be unrealistic for Ethan to not pick up on the “your dad might not be straight either” subtext.
You know, this makes me think… obviously a major theme here is how much parents influence and control their children, and not infrequently prevent those children from growing because of the parents’ own issues.
It occurs to me that for many it would be perfectly reasonable to say “I’ll continue being closeted until I graduate because my parents would disown me and I can’t afford college without them.” Like it or not, it’s not a stupid decision for the college student.
However, young people are basically forced to continue relying on their parents well into adulthood – “I will just stay closeted until I graduate” becomes “I will stay closeted until I get a real job” becomes “I will stay closeted until I can move out on my own” &c. And eventually you just never have a chance to explore your own identity.
OTOH, how much of that is the CAUSE of all this trauma. Generations of people always smothered by the trauma of the generation before?
Generational trauma rolls downhill faster and harder than any snowball ever could. A single, fully sane human being, has likely never graced this Earth.
does she think her husband will turn gay if he realizes it’s an option? The general idea is that bigots are stupid of course but that’s just ridiculous…
The man has one line of dialogue in his entire existence and it goes “don’t worry son, I know having sex with women is disgusting and feels wrong, but if you just do it enough, it will eventually become tolerable.” I’d actually be less certain he was gay, if the character had come out and directly said it.
Good thing ethan isn’t a sociopath, i could totally imagine some alternate path where he basically pays a body double to committ suicide in front of her/fake his death or so
I would bet the latter. Naomi doesn’t want Saul thinking that being suicidal might get him out of enforced straightness. (He did refer to heterosexual sex as ‘gross and scary’ in his Freshman Family Weekend appearance.)
Akin to Linda and other bourgeois bongos, she basically thinks/needs giving a shit about her kid to be like a fitness exam or inconvenient chore she can easily and painlessly opt out of. (-_-)
I mean, is Ethan’s dad so amazing that he’d be worth clinging onto as opposed to just moving on/finding another man, unless she’d be humiliated among her neighbors/community if it was like “my husband left me for another man” (Because it’d be better for a breakup as opposed to him going to like, bathhouses or so and just cheat)
Even ‘terrible’ ppl are able to get married/find partners/success, etc, sometimes /because/ they’re terrible
Ok, so, yesterday i said i withhold judgment until i see her reasonings,
now i am ready for a verdict:
-25 points for coming unannounced, this screams entitlement
-10 points for not standing up to the dad (tbh i forgot/don’t know what the dad is like and if she’s safe if she does stand up to him)
– 35 points for thinking it’s her place to *allow* or *forbid* being gay
-5 points for saying “a homosexual“ instead of “gay“ as an adjective
+50 points for the outcome (Ethan for now has a mom he doesn’t have to hide being gay from. “feel accepted“ is not a given)
-45 points for thinking she can *temporarily* accept him to be gay, *as a treat/consolation*, only until he gets over the death of his friend…
+60 points for “i’d rather you are GAY AND ALIVE“, that is absolutely the best thing she’s said in this conversation.
This arbitrary judgment leaves her at -10 points. I’m not happy with her, but there are some small steps in the right direction. There is hope.
It’s possible he’s just ace/sex repulsed, it’s a bit more uncommon to see ace males even in fiction (tho i don’t consume much i admit) but i mean these days who has the time for a relationship , although it might be ideal for ‘marriages of conveniences’/lavender weddings or so to where you get along well as roommates/platonic partners while being legally married
This is still… progress… sort of. The bar really has been set low by Toedad and Carol so like… a parent who would rather their kid be alive and gay is scoring a solid C on the parent grading curve here. But yeesh
i mean, gotta have an outlet for complaining about parents, might as well be a webtoon tho i’m sure there are good parents besides dinas
And i suppose carla, even tho she kinda got a complex or so despite it
leslie might make a good mom. tho i imagine there’d be some adult charas who are self aware enough to be like “I would not make a good parent, so i won’t have one”
Imagine if that one old science prof despite being bitter in his work end upbeing some ‘amazing’ dad lol. or having like, some cryptid/alien hunter as a son
Secondly, I think a few people called this yesterday. Either y’all psychic or y’all from the future (Patreon). I don’t remember much about Ethan’s dad, so I’ll probably return to the past and check that out.
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oh good, at least she’s better than the parents who think their autistic child is better dead than vaccinated 😩
That bar is at the geometric center of the Earth and you know it.
Someone summon Hermes Conrad!
this comment reads like an eventual book title, and it’s not even a line from the strip
Oh my gods, a book title that was like
Dumbing of Age
“Schpoonman: That bar is at the geometric center of the Earth and you know it.”
That would be hilarious!
It would be epic, and I’d support it fully. But I could see one comment being favoured for a title leading to chaos in the forum.
What if….
…some one else used it as a title for something else?
There’s a restaurant at the end of the universe, and a bar at the center of the Earth.
And yet there are so many who fail to step over it.
Sadly it isn’t. If it were, no one could go under it, which they do.
There are parents out there who would rather have a dead son than a live trans daughter.
At least the anti-vaxxers, stupid as they are, think they’re doing the right thing *for the kid*
They’re still wrong and stupid.
“my baby died of [some disease we have a vaccine for..]. It must have been God’s will and nothing i could have done better.“
antivaxxers and anti science people scare me.
The phobes still think they’re doing the right thing for their kid. We’ve got more than a century of documentation from Conversion “Therapists” going “Well, we tried out hardest to ‘cure the patient, but in the end they took their own life. Clearly the ‘disease’ had progressed too far!”
It wasn’t the fact that their family signed off on them being tortured and it’s not the knowledge that if they can’t make themselves conform they -will- be tortured again that drove them to end their lives. It was “The Disease.” The poor doctors and their poor family members only wanted “what was best.”
It… depends. There are plenty of phobic parents who are more worried about how their child’s gender or sexuality reflects on the parents than about what is best for the child.
Yeah uhhh…I would argue there are *also* plenty of antivaxxer parents who are more worried about how a child’s autism reflects on the parents than about what is best for the child.
I get how it can SEEM like they’re always doing it because they (incorrectly) think it’s the “right thing” to protect their kid, but any parent who is more willing to risk their child dying than developing a disability isn’t really thinking about what’s best for their child and there’s a good chance that at least subconsciously they have a problem with how they think having a disabled/neurodivergent child will make THEM look.
A LOT of parents of disabled/neurodivergent kids are still incredibly ableist, unfortunately. It’s often less obvious to abled/neurotypical people, because these parents will say a lot of stuff that may SOUND like disability advocacy, but to those who ARE disabled/ND, it’s the sort of stuff that comes off as incredibly condescending/patronizing, self-serving, and performative.
In other words, it tends to be a combo of them using their kid’s disabled/ND identity for their OWN benefit (getting sympathy for their “struggle” as parents and praise for their “advocacy”) and a lot of still-deeply-rooted ableism (either trying to gloss over the kid’s disability by engaging in toxic positivity like treating “disability” like a dirty word and insisting it’s 100% a “superpower”, or going to the opposite extreme and treating their kid as inferior and/or underestimating their abilities).
So, yeah, disability and neurodivergence are certainly no exception to the issue of parents being not just misguided but also phobic/bigoted (even if they don’t see themselves that way). But unfortunately even in progressive circles, there’s still a lot of ignorance and ableism disguised as advocacy/acceptance, and a serious lack of informed advocacy, so I think people often don’t see it for what it is. :/
+1
It’s good to know that’s where the bar is at.
Yup, cause I’mma need a drink if she keeps talking.
Take my imaginary upvote!
Or that their child is better dead than autistic…
Yeah, that was the part that always got to me, as someone on the spectrum, even if they were right about vaccines causing autism, they’d rather their child die a slow, painful death to a preventable disease than be like me. They’d rather *I* died a slow, painful death to a preventable disease than exist as I am. Than be WHO I am.
Meanwhile my grandmother had polio at 13, spent a couple years in an iron lung, and then the rest of her life in a wheel chair. As much as she felt bad for my struggles, I can say with certainty we’re both glad I had my struggles and not hers, as at least my struggles came with benefits, IMO.
Two *years* in an iron lung? Good grief. Your grandmother’s a hell of a strong woman!
If I understand correctly, two years in an iron lung is the lucky outcome.
Some polio survivors never got to leave them.
A friend of mine got her kid vaccinated today, and she was feeling really sorry for her kid. I know she’s 100% in favour of vaccines, but to further motivate her I convinced her to look up pictures of the diseases these vaccines would prevent. At pictures of Polio she turned the computer off so I reminded her that she just saved her child from all of that.
I’m not sure if I only hurt her, or if I motivated her to be an even bigger and louder proponent of vaccines. I hope it is the second. I feel somewhat conflicted, I hope I did something good.
If you confront people with reality, and they later choose to reject reality, then take solace in the fact that you have done all you can, and it’s not your job to control people’s choices, no matter how wrong they are. I think it’s more likely she took away a good lesson than a bad one from you, personally.
You did a great thing opening her eyes like that!
other than ‘personal choice/parental rights’, even if they don’t get arrested for child endangerment feels like they should at least be fined if their kid dies b/c of that versus only paying for the funeral (tho i wonder if there are fucked up parents out there and just take out life insurance on a kid and purposefully not vaccinate them)
i wonder if life insurance policies cover damage you do to yourself/your children by being bloody stupid. I’d put that in my policy: we don’t cover illness/death that’d be prevented by simple vaccines….
considering ppl don’t even consider it til they’re adults, i’m not sure how much a child payout would be as opposed to like, life insurance going to the kids if parents get in some kinda accident, tho idk how much access they’d have to it if they’re still young enough to just be put in a foster home
But i wouldn’t be surprised if some states would be like “your child only qualifies for health insurance after a full physical” or so
My only issue with that is it would mean the kids, who are the innocent victims of their parents’ stubbornness, would be denied treatment the parents couldn’t afford without the aid of insurance. Yes, it is entirely the parents’ fault for not vaccinating their kid that the kid caught an entirely preventable disease, but to make the kid’s suffering even worse by denying treatment is needlessly cruel.
Holy shit, Jade called it.
Called it.
But who called her reclaiming the F-bomb lead from Malaya?
Yup called it. The baby steps were smaller than hoped for
I mean, “allowing you to be gay” isn’t much of a step.
More like she stayed put until continental drift moved her a centimeter.
can’t wait for him to be openly gay and happy for like 3 months
only for her to be like “your free trial of homosexuality has expired”
ahahaha thank you for the laugh I needed that badly this morning
Throwatron, you win this comic’s comment section. 🙂
Sure, but she called her husband a fucker, and that’s definitely a step in the right direction
Except this is another hint that she’s calling him that because he’s really gay himself.
I see I wasn’t the only one to pick up on that implication.
it’s a stretch, but i’ve been wondering if her extreme fixation on the words “fuck,” “fucking,” and “fucker,” are subtle evidence of some underlying sexual obsession of her own that she’s hiding or denying, lmao. the woman truly makes everything about fucking.
Mom will okay the fact you’re gay ’cause she wants you to live.
She still objects; her mind’s on sex; has all the fucks to give.
bravo!!
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/blunt/
Yeaaaah
Dang, I had completely forgotten that piece of dialog. I only had a vague “he’s nto OK with Ethan being gay” feeling. Had to used Naomi’s tag to find it and yuuuuuup, I now know what you mean and completely and absolutely regret my previous comment.
It’s halfway to “you’re an adult,” I guess. But legally and otherwise, the latter is very true.
as long as you’re dependent on somebody for your food, shelter, and education, you kinda have to tolerate their bullshit. Once you get sick enough of it to take charge of those things for yourself (win or lose, you can still lose), then you’re an adult…or at least, then you’re adult enough to expect the respect of being an adult, even if you’re legally underage.
Give him all the ideas…
So, the dad is closeted. She’s not allowing him out. Just her son.
This possibility adds a new level of horror to Saul’s one line dialogue…☹️
Might be. She might just be *heavily* insecure.
Having read a link somebody else provided further down in the comments, my weighting on the hypothesis of “just insecure” is probably way lower than “her husband is closeted”, which now seems much more likely.
I mean, that was obvious from his previous appearance, right? We knew that.
She’s phrasing it extremely badly but the sentiment feels genuine?
The words feel comedically deliberately chosen.
As someone who has been in a near identical situation, the sentiment is 100% not genuine.
I think it is, she is just also continuing to be homophobic about it.
The very definition of homophobic is that a person is explicitly disgusted by homosexual existence, believes that homosexuals should completely hide their queerness, and that they do not respect homosexuals as equivalently valuable people.
If you feel that way about someone, you cannot genuinely love them. It is a form of hate. There’s no way to describe that kind of person’s love as genuine, if you’re claiming they genuinely love a queer person. They’re a hateful person, and even their attempts at love, are usually just more forms of hate. Someone literally cannot love a person, who they both hate, and don’t respect, and don’t believe should be free. It disturbs me that some people think that could be love.
Humans are full of awful contractions that don’t really make any sense but exist anyway.
Like “ain’t”.
(Sorry, can’t let a good typo pun go to waste.)
I respect you but I also curse you.
y’all’ain’t’d’ve
Humans are very complicated and love equally so. I agree that the love of my transphobic mother is deeply flawed and painful. I do also believe her feelings of love for me are genuine. She continues to do what she thinks is best for me. She often fails to listen or respect when I tell her she is wrong about what is best for me. It’s still an attempt to love, but love and horror are two sides of the same coin.
Naomi’s having a LOT of trouble meeting Ethan’s eyes right now, though. There’s something she’s not telling him – it could be just how much “allowing” her son’s gayness bothers her, or there’s more to it than that…
Get any ideas? Is his father…
Odds are pretty good
It’s been long enough that I forgot some of the shitty things she said before. She just has… Like a phenomenal ability to give possibly the worst comments every single time she opens her mouth. You know the writing is really freaking good when you find yourself genuinely hating a cartoon character.
Well, Naomi is as blunt as a baseball, whatever else she may be. I am wondering how many thousands of parents quietly think what she says out loud without a qualm.
She’s literally 10 for 10 on strips where she has a line, and all 10 of her lines are her being deeply narcissistic towards every other character she interacts with. The comic itself has shown us 100% complete terribleness from her in every interaction she’s been in, has framed her as terribly as possible, and somehow people are still jumping to her defense, or falling for her nice mom act. I don’t know where they’re getting the idea they can read any humanity into anything she does.
Eh, I kinda disagree with you there. It’s honestly not that hard to write a hateable character. It’s much harder to write characters with nuance and that have a realistic mindset with good and bad aspects than it is to just write them as easily hateable. Willis has the ability to do that, as evidenced by many of the protagonists, but for the most part for his adults he chooses not to. Sometimes you don’t want a nuanced antagonist. Sometimes you just want a simple hateable adult that you can project all your personal feelings of adults in your life onto. It helps the reader latch onto characters being affected by these adults because they have had similar experiences. It’s effective, but it’s not at all challenging to write because it doesn’t have to be balanced and sensible, and it can be as extreme as you want.
It’s also an interesting choice because that’s how adults tend to be in kid’s lives. Even college age kids. They’re just there. As they are. Forces to be dealt with, placated, confronted or maneuvered around, rather than nuanced people to be understood and sympathized with.
That’s starting to change at this age, but it’s still very common.
What’s hard isn’t what you’re saying, what’s hard, is getting the audience to give a shit one way or the other about your characters AT ALL.
Now I got it.
And, with all comments here, I’m also thinking about his father, he isn’t so lucky as Ethan and must have sex with someone he doesn’t want to.
I’ll stop here.
It makes me wonder how they came to be married to each other.
Heteronormativity.
Plenty of closeted gay men used to get married. Less now.
Pretty much. Someone below posited that their relationship started out like Joyce and Ethan’s did, without the epiphany and healthy breakup
Used to live in Salt Lake City Utah, and 99% of the older gays there were heterosexually divorced. Being told fucking the right girl will fix you and keep you out of the fires of Hell is a powerful motivation.
It was giving ace to me personally but you never know.
Could also be a sex repulsed ace yeah.
Could be Ace, but a gay friend of mine back in college said something very similar.
Specifically, he considered themselves bi when I first met him. He’d not yet had sex with a woman (he had with a guy), and was super excited to hook up with this girl he’d hit it off with.
Afterwards, he stopped by my doom room with this to say:
“Yeah, no. I’m gay. Vaginas are gross and scary. I thought liking boobs meant I was bi, but clearly not.”
I was like: “Awesome! More for me then.”
But yeah, my point is that line felt very familiar.
Oh yeah, unlike Ethan it could go either way.
I hear it happens a lot that people like boobs but aren’t in any other way interested in women or even sex in general. And I cannot blame them, I like boobs too.
It is a known constant of the queerniverse that everybody loves boobs. Straight men and lesbians love boobs. Straight women and gay men love boobs. Boobs are simply objectively grand.
On it’s own, that would be a real possibility.
In a narrative context, repressed gay makes more sense. And with her comment here, she seems to think so at least.
Oooof, no wonder she is so bitter and nasty if this is the stuff he says around her because it IS about her
Reviewing that and the bracketting comics was a trip. People put their kids through hell. 💔
Oh most definitely. Someone linked the strip in the comments yesterday or the day before, where his dad compares sleeping with women to acquiring a taste for beer, where you just have to power through something you find disgusting until you can handle it.
“That’s how all men feel, son. They just pretend otherwise.”
“Dad, I think most men like sex with women.”
“Son, don’t be silly.”
Alan Keyes.
Ethan probably has more in common with his dad than he realizes.
That’s precisely why Naomi doesn’t want them communicating with each other. If they are there to offer each other support and understanding, it will undermine her control over them. Narcissism 101 is to split your accessories off from as many of their social groups as possible, and we have seen Naomi try to do this to Ethan with Amber, and Mike, and now his own Dad. Which, of course, means she’s also doing it to his dad, here…which means, she probably does it to Ethan’s dad far more frequently than just today. You gotta divide and conquer, or else you lose control of the people you “love.”
That’s not narcissism, that’s just plain abuse.
Sadly, when it’s someone like Naomi, one tends to lead directly into the other.
It’s called “triangulation”. Keep the other parties separate and tell each of them slight variations on the truth, so they’ll only trust you and not each other.
Fell like I should mention this since I been told multiple times that throwing the word “narcissist” around to refer to awful abusive people is kind of insensitive since that’s the name of a personality disorder that is already really demonized. I am not saying you mean it that way but I think it would be good to use a different term to refer to Naomi.
In general, I agree with your premise that it’s not right for uneducated rubes like me to go around diagnosing mental illnesses onto people casually; it’s not productive in social spaces, and it can be harmful to people with various mental disorders when incorrect understandings of those disorders are disseminated through pop psych musings of average people.
However, for one, somebody can have narcissistic tendencies, and not narcissistic personality disorder, for several reasons; often, people with these tendencies ingrained in their personality, are themselves long-term victims of narcissists, through their core developmental years. There are lots of reasons to be very sympathetic to people who are victims of narcissists, if they are going through the process of healing themselves, and they deserve support and love as much as anybody else does.
That said, the premise that it’s bad to criticize narcissistic behavior because “that’s a personality disorder” is actually very harmful. It’s accurate that we identify that extreme narcissistic tendencies lead to a disordered person, who struggles to form connections with others, and struggles to maintain stability in aspects of their lives. However, that’s because overt narcissists treat the people around them like shit, because they are self-centered, and do not process or value other individuals emotions and experiences in a meaningful way. That leads them to be generally manipulative and controlling, in any personal relationship where they will be allowed the leeway to do so.
This does not apply to every presentation of narcissistic tendencies! However, the most intense and obvious presentations of NPD, do lead to people acting in the fashion which Naomi consistently has, which is behavior that directly harms and traumatizes other people, with deliberate intent. It is accurate to describe this type of person as a serial abuser, and it would be incorrect to ignore that the personality feature of their narcissism contributes directly to their persistent behavior patterns and their worldview. That’s not the same thing as going after narcissists unfairly; that’s simply respecting objective reality.
Crucially, Naomi is a fictional character for whom, if anybody were to incorrectly describe her, there will be no tangible real world consequences. If the word of God comes down from Willis that she is, somehow, completely lacking any such features we describe her with, that’s his choice and his canon. But, he’s had complete control of her framing and dialogue in every single panel she’s appeared in, and the 100% consistent theme of everything she says and does (and even the subtext of how certain characters behave around her) is that she expects other people to fall completely in line with her desires, to best serve her wants and needs, in complete disregard to their feelings or personal agency.
Like, you can go back and check; she’s had significant appearance in 10 strips, and in literally every strip, she either undercuts, lashes out, emotionally punishes, or manipulates the person she is talking to. It is a persistent behavior pattern that is 100% consistently framed as being who she is, by the strip, itself.
You’re right that we should take accountability towards treating peoples’ psychological diagnoses with care in real life, because there are real consequences to that. But, in a work of fiction, if a character reads like the author themselves double-checked to tick every box telling the audience, that this character is a certain way…well, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, has feathers like a duck, swims fast like a duck, is aggressive like a duck, and has a weird prominent curved donger that it brandishes around aggressive like a duck…it’s probably a duck.
Even if Naomi does not, in fact, have Narcissistic Personality Disorder, that does not change the fact that 100% of her behavior is narcissistic as fuck. And it’s okay to identify that. Because that kind of narcissistic behavior directly harms people, and it’s a deliberate choice of the narcissist to act that way towards others. Lots of narcissistic people manage to get up every day, and be decent human beings.
But the ones who act like Naomi? They damage every person they interact with, and they don’t feel bad about it, because they are so self-centered that they cannot and will not put another person’s needs or feelings into consideration, when they are choosing how to behave. And they choose to behave in the most controlling fashion possible, that they can get away with, relative to the accessories they have kept around them.
Ultimately, I’m not gonna feel bad for accurately describing a fictional villain, who has been written to be as terrible as humanly possible, for 100% of their screen time. I’ll maybe stop calling her a narcissist, when she displays one modicum of behavior which deviates from the overt narcissist playbook. But, she is still batting 100.
Okay I can’t actually respond to this because it’s way too much text and it’s verwhelming but I did read it and I just gonna keep it that I don’t agree with you both in how your view Naomi, your take on narcissism disorder and interpretation of character as having and general all of your points. I’m gonna stay back from this for a bit because it is actually making me upset.
“I hear you saying this is a highly stigmatized disorder that real people have and that I shouldn’t use it as a synonym for Monster, but have you considered that people with NPD are monsters” is a take.
Reported on purpose. I hope you someday realize that actually we can just call abusive people “abusive” and there is actually no function whatsoever to using “narcissistic” as an adjective on abusive, apart from dragging a whole group of innocent people who have never hurt you or indeed often anyone into our trauma without their permission and contributing to making them out to be boogeymen to whom it’s okay to hurt, because if they’ve got NPD they deserve it.
And now I’m stepping back from these comments again. But I thought Jeremiah deserved backup, and I thought Willis should know that this flag was on purpose, for being really cruelly ableist on purpose after you were very very gently asked to stop.
Thanks I appreciate it.
I think so. Which kind of does explain her emotions about homosexuality. It might be strongly connected with her fear of being left by her husband for a man.
Still bigoted though.
Her husband should leave her for another man. Serve ‘er right.
As someone who was once in a long term hetero relationship with a closeted ie highly repressed gay man, I don’t see a need to wish her poorly. It’s not fun for anybody. I mean, she shouldn’t be repressive, but I also don’t blame her for hanging on for dear life. You don’t always know what you’re getting into. (Long story shorter: I left for other reasobs.)
Yeah. Honestly, with all this in mind, I’m reading a lot of fear and insecurity expressing itself through anger.
That’s not healthy for anyone, mind. I have pity for Naomi but she really is the villain in this particular situation and her attempts at maintaining her dignity aren’t a good look
I’m curious how this family happened. Naomi had a gay son with a closeted gay man. She could almost be seen as a dark reflection of Amber in that sense. Did she force her husband into marriage? Did he only realize his sexuality after they were committed to each other? She seems to at least suspect his true sexuality now, but what about when they were dating or first starting out. If Naomi weren’t so outwardly awful on the surface this would be quite the sympathetic story for her as well.
Maybe something like what would happen if Joyce and Ethan “relationship” actually continued like they first intended.
That’s my reading. They grew up in a more homophobic time, too. I’m assuming they’re around my age, and while there were worse times to be gay than my teenage years, it has gotten much, much better.
So Saul probably grew up in a far less healthy environment for a gay young man, and while I didn’t know for sure what his and Naomi’s courtship looked like, I bet there was a degree of understanding that he would fake heterosexuality until he made it, and Naomi would cover for him.
Again, *this is not and never was healthy*. But regardless, now Naomi is in the situation that if Saul becomes comfortable in a gay identity he would almost certainly leave her. Which sucks. I think she cares for both of them in her way, but (again, unhealthily) not in a way that releases them from herself. Eventually she won’t be and to sustain that, and she’ll be alone for real. But she’s bringing that on herself
Also gotta admit, as simple a statement as it is, telling someone as deeply depressed as Ethan is “I’d prefer you be alive” is very sweet.
And she’s acknowledging that her homophobia could be a factor in his negative mental state. She’s still shitty about things, but she’s reaching a place that some parents of LGBTQ+ kids don’t reach until their child is dead, if then.
I’m 60, my mother is 78. Still waiting.
My mother died in 2004, I’m thoroughly convinced she thought my religion was a “phase” that I would outgrow. Mind you I was 46 when I died and had been following my religion for 16 years at that point and I still follow it now, another 20 years later. I didn’t “outgrow” it.
I’m sorry. What religion?
Religion is a choise, sexual orientation isn’t.
Umbrella, actually, no. That’s the whole reason religion is grounds for asylum and refugee status under international law. Because people who deeply believe something cannot just “choose” to believe otherwise, any more than they could choose to see the sky as a different color or choose how they love. Nobody should ever have to “choose” not to have something fundamental to their sense of self be “changed” to fit social expectations.
I’m sorry, I’m not usually so blunt. I don’t mean to cause offense. But religion is not a choice for everyone. I’ve found it’s not so common, in this world, for people actually to feel that they have a choice over how they believe.
Sorry, typos / autocorrect:
*”Umbrella, actually, no” should read, “Umm, actually, no.”
*”Nobody should ever have to ‘choose’ not to have something fundamental to their sense of self be “changed” to fit social expectations” should read instead, “Nobody should ever have to ‘choose’ *to have*…” Double negative!
My apologies for the errors
I mean it’s a fundamental right to choose. If you could choose to switch to Shinto or atheism or Christianity but you’re being FORCED to, that’s a war crime.
This is a general issue with free will, actually. People massively underestimate how strongly their memories and other parts of their environment influence their behaviour. I’m not saying free will doesn’t exist, but I am definitely saying that people overestimate how much of it they have.
That’s the most succinct way I’ve seen that put tbh.
Religion is a weird category, since it’s more of a choice than things like race or sexual orientation, but it’s also very fundamental to many people’s identity and deeply tied to ethnicity. And it’s long been a flashpoint for prejudice and discrimination.
So we give it the same kind of protection we give those other categories, even if it’s not quite the same kind of thing.
So I know this is a serious personal story, but I had to stop and reread the phrase “Mind you I was 46 when I died” about three times and chuckled.
Further confused by my understanding that Opus did, in fact, die at one point, just maybe not then.
“I was 46 when I died[. . . .]”
And reincarnated, I presume?
(I think I know what you meant, but it just sorta stopped me in my tracks, is all).
You do have to wonder how long she had to think about it, and how much what her friends would say factored into the decision, though.
It’s not like Ethan had any real hope of his mother deciding to be progressive and fully accepting. Among DoA parents who’ve appeared in-strip, she’s still doing relatively okay.
Yeah this dialogue is sweet and sour at the same time.
Yeah, it was an unexpected surprise.
Not at all. If he dies, she looks like a bad mother. Can’t have that.
I’m glad at least a scant few people in these comments are capable of seeing Naomi for what she is.
Thumbs up.
“I know you’ve been depressed lately, have you just tried being gay instead?”
Decades ago gay meant the opposite of depressed, but the meaning has changed and it is no longer so. Unless depressed is slang for heterosexual now?
It definitely seems to be if you’re only going by the things male comedians say.
Great thread here.
🤌Better than great! Faaabulous!
I will say that the gays I know tend to be less stressed in their day-to-day than other people in similar economic and employment conditions…but then, nobody I know works in Media or Government at this point…
As a depressed person I would appreciate it if that word didn’t get used as slang. I have a hard enough time talking about my emotions with it, I wouldn’t know where to start without.
having been queer, i can confirm, its a hoot
”having been”… in the past tense?
Past imperfect — an action that began in the past and is not completed. Here I take it to be emphasizing past experience over instantaneous present condition.
“i used to be queer…i still do, but i used to be, too!”
So, Ethan’s Dad, who is just Ethan with a mustache is….not heterosexual?
:GASP:
And NAOMI KNOWS IT.
What I can’t understand is why bother with all of this? She knew this all along yet they made them both keep up the act. Why, are they even happy if they haft to spend their whole marriage pretending there’s even a spark there and one of them is paranoid that the other will one day realize it was all a mistake?
Is it because they’re so far in and invested so much that they can’t back out? Like it’s a sunken coast fallacy?
They’re religious. Keeping up appearances is thus more important than any personal agency, happiness, or self-actualization.
Like, don’t get me wrong, I feel much less bad for Ethan’s dad than I do for Ethan; he at least chose to try to wear a beard and live in the closet, at least to some extent. His desire to be straight against his own nature, is bad for him, and it’s sad he has to endure it, but he doesn’t have to, it’s just a persistent bad decision he has been making. Whereas, Naomi is Ethan’s mother, and children feel compelled to listen to their mothers – especially when their mother raised them to be agreeable and obedient, in the first place.
Ethan’s dad is in control of his sexuality, even if the way he has chosen to repress it, and the awful, controlling partner he has chosen, is very sad for him. Ethan’s the one who has an authority figure whose approval he has spent his whole life seeking, trying to undermine his agency and autonomy, and trying to unfairly control deeply personal aspects of his life. Naomi is a awful, domineering person, but her husband ultimately has a choice who his partner is. Ethan doesn’t have a choice who his mother is, so Ethan’s the one who is experiencing something much worse.
I doubt Saul’s parents were any more supportive though. His decisions were probably made in an even less supportive context than Ethan has, given the advent of the internet and resultant access to online queer”community.”
Yeah. At least Ethan had his friends, and a safer culture to grow up in. But, at the same time, he’s been experiencing that same culture for as long as Ethan has, at this point, and he’s still choosing the familiarity of what he has, over the potential of what he could maybe have, if he made a change. But he’s a completely grown-ass man, so that’s ultimately his choice, and sometimes you just gotta let people make their own choices for themselves.
Unless you’re Naomi. Then, you nip that shit in the fucking bud. She didn’t marry a man to give him choices, she married a man, to have a man that belongs to her.
I don’t agree that Ethan’s Dad experiences the same culture Ethan does. There is a world of difference between what you experience as a young person (particularly in college) at any given time versus what an older person (particularly a religious older person) experiences. Saul is likely surrounded by people who do not support or even discuss sexualities outside heteronormative standards.
It’s not an unusual story among late-discovery queer people, and while I kind of get where you’re coming from, I don’t love the idea that he’s “choosing” abuse and to remain closeted when it’s very possible he doesn’t actually feel like he has a choice about leaving. Being completely grown doesn’t protect you from shit like that or make you automatically capable of leaving abusive situations, unfortunately.
I’m an Elder gay, and let me just say from personal experience that this community, unless you’re in a big city, has NO support for anyone over 40. “Dad bod” doesn’t cut it, you need “HOT” daddy energy.
ALSO THIS!!!
People are missing that for gay men the age of Ethan’s father (depending on sliding comic time scale) that most of the active gay guys he knew in his own coming-of-age *are probably dead*.
HIV destroyed gay communities. It still has its scars even in active liberal communities. There’s a whole generation of men just *gone*. Survivors have talked about that being the time where they saw literally all of their friends and found family dying. It would have given even more life-or-death stakes to closeting. Ethan’s father could easily equate coming out as being literally death: in the news, in his peers, in the way his larger community spoke about them. Forming community from scratch over the internet is difficult and lonely even as a younger, net-savvy person.
You don’t shake off that kind of trauma just because there’s more diversity in tv shows these days.
He could, if he was part of that gay community at all. If he was still in the closet, even to himself, then he likely wouldn’t have know much of the devastated gay community.
Please don’t pin their wack decisions on their religion. They’re Conservative Jews, and there are plenty of Conservative Jewish communities where being gay is fine. (To say nothing of Reform, Reconstructionist, Renewal, and Humanist Jewish communities, where I’d be surprised to see a congregation be anything but welcoming.)
They could totally find an affirming Jewish congregation if they wanted. It’s not difficult. They’re choosing not to.
Are they Conservative Jews?
Is this tied to religion at all?
This seems to be more personal. Saul can’t accept his homosexuality and come out because it would end the marriage and Naomi doesn’t want that. Ethan can’t be openly gay because as she says here, it might give Saul ideas.
You gotta remember that religiously conservative Jews or not, no less than Linda and the rest of the bongos, Ethan’s parents are entrenched in the traditions, culture, language and customs of a religious red state.
Even tho they not Christians themselves, what they know as the Most Viable Paths To Success™ in this kinda environment are which the majority of money and opportunities for their son are ultimately in the hands of homophobic, really conservative Christians.
Naomi basically thinks/needs submission to “traditional” (bigoted) social expectations to be easier than changing a broken system.
I can recall similar stories in which Latino immigrant parents who had children born with darker skin tried DESPERATELY to lighten it with concoctions like diluted bleach and egg yolk, for they had just accepted the racism they had experienced in the United States as a Fact of Life™
As far as I’m concerned what Naomi thought of as doing her son a “favor” was no less okay.
Agreed. Heteronormatively is a powerful thing.
OTOH, while that’s all very reasonable and possible, I don’t think we’ve seen anything directly saying she’s thinking that way and we do see right here in this strip some other more personal reasons that might be more significant.
But mostly I was curious if there was any in-comic reason to think the Siegals were actually of the Conservative branch of Judaism.
Well, if they were Orthodox, they couldn’t have driven up to Family Weekend on Shabbos.
Busybody diet bigot parents stop conflating allyship with unsolicited “””helping”””:
Challenge Level IMPOSSIBLE
Naomi’s religion doesn’t seem to be the reason for her homophopbia necessarily.
Considering how hard she was pushing for Ethan to have sex it’s probably the Grandkids desire.
Yeah, homophobes can hide behind religion but bigotry doesn’t need a justification. A lot of people simply have it and seek rationales. Which is f-ing depressing.
Not trying to be mean, but “sunken coast fallacy” made me think of the legend of Atlantis.
what a coincidence! Atlantis is actually where the bar for parental behavior in this comic resides XD
Sometimes you don’t realize the significance of things until you’re too deep. Like after you’ve been married for years or decades and start to put words to feelings. Then you might be: crap!!
It really explains how her gaydar was so precise that she realised it just from a wayward look Ethan gave Mike. It seems she successfully achieved what Joyce was trying to do with Ethan at the start of college and press-bench her own college gay sweetheart into straighthood and marrying her. Doubtless ever since, she has been painfully aware that for all his brainwashing, he keeps being gay, he keeps having to power through having sex with her and both are terribly unhappy.
To be a little more sympathetic, she might not have realized it until after they were married. Especially back then (whenever back then actually would have been in the weird sliding timescale, and how that ties to when decisions about this backstory were made.)
He might not even have accepted it about himself.
Is this a Christopher Yuan reference?
Well, someone’s back on top of the chart. Sorry, Malaya. You need to swear more, apparently.
Naomi is making some sort of progress here so I’m trying not to snark ar her…
But if I was I’d say something along the lines of, “Hey guys did you know the sea is wet because Naomi allows it to be?”
Of course “for now” implies her “approval” will be withdrawn at an arbitrary point when she’s decided he’s healed enough
aaaaawwwwweee here we go there the other shoe
this really much surprise to you?
“…for now” she “allows” him what she sees as a blight
but being queer ain’t a privilege, it’s a right!
underneath she still the same ol’ fart,
who shoudla respect’ his lovin’ gay heart from the very start
she damn done bent and broke it, and gave no shit,
towards our queer brotha she been really hateful
when all this time she shoulda been grateful!
now he’s a real depressive case,
only now she busts in just for saving face,
after years of berating him towards fuckin “traditional”,
we reminded what her love is — CONDITIONAL
Allows it to be wet, for now.
Also, sorry, I accidentally reported your comment 🤦🏻♀️
Masterpiece! That was beautiful NG. You just thought of that? I am so impressed with your poetic skills!
✍️👏🙌🤜🤛✊️
That’s actually a poem for the ages. WOW. I know it sounds like I am being sarcastic but I’m not: I am genuinely rocked.
I’d love to repost that poem and share it with friends. May I have your permission to do so? If so, how would you like me to credit you?
Awe thanks, and yeah I didn’t even intend it to be that long,
Naomi gets on my nerves, Ethan’s struggle is so fuckin real, I just felt the need to unleash my wrath through the power of rap.
And sure you can share it no problem! Although unless they also keep up with recent strips I’m not sure if it’ll make that much sense to them without context haha
Thank you! I love this!
Yeah, or it’s okay if he’s gay when he’s in college as long as he still grows up and leaves that “phase” behind him.
“That’s enough – there’s the line. No more gay. Flip it light a lightswitch.”
Exactly. Once he’s happy again (from being a gay man), his free trial of homosexual will immediately expire. She’s moved from “my son can cure his gay if he fucks enough pussy, just like I fixed his useless dad” to “eh, everybody has a ‘phase’ in college, right? Once he grows out of it, he can get back to mashing sweet, sweet puss, like a real man who I can be proud of.”
Seems like harm reduction.
Gay rights have often taken a harm reduction approach. See: the “I can’t help that I can only be happy with a same sex partner” argument, which throws bisexuals under the bus.
It’s not your right, if you need somebody’s permission to access it. What you’re describing is a privilege. Like, are you missing the part where she implies he will stop acting gay, as soon as she’s no longer scared that he’s gonna off himself?
Safe injection sites are harm reduction. Locking your addicted loved ones in your basement, so they can’t inject anything, is just taking control over your loved ones lives, because your fear that they might die, is more important to you than their personal autonomy. You’ll definitely reduce some harm! But also, you now have someone locked in your basement. And that’s not appropriate behavior.
It does seem like harm reduction and that’s not good enough, but sometimes that’s all you can get for the moment and the only way to make progress. Which sucks, but it’s the world we live in.
The “I can’t help that I can only be happy with a same sex partner” does throw bisexuals under the bus, but it also normalizes such relationships, makes it easier for people to come openly and makes it easier even for bisexuals in the long term.
Sure, but I don’t agree that bigots co-opting our slogans for their own selfish aims, is the same thing as us advocating for our basic right to exist safely. We can attack those premises when they are used by bad actors, the premises themselves will be fine. If we don’t go on the attack when bigots co-opt our messaging, then we run the risk of their framing of queerness being encountered and internalized by young queers.
You don’t just let bigots steal your hard-wrought and effective propaganda from you, because the words sound nice when they still remain in the order we put them in. When bigots co-opt your messaging, their goal is to pervert and twist it to their own ends…like Naomi guilt-tripping her son into doing what she wants, by saying words that sound supportive, but have nefarious intentions behind them.
It’s not about making perfect the enemy of good; it’s about keeping bad actors from poisoning the well, which we’ve worked so hard to establish and maintain.
knowing that ethan’s parents do grow to accept him in shortpacked and that willis said the reason they feel differently there is because of time it does give me some hope that this is moving towards a more permanent change
Though the dynamics here are different, since I don’t think there were any of the hints about Saul being queer back in SP!
Note the total lack of eye contact on Naomi’s part? Yeah, there’s a ton she’s not saying here.
Well, you promised, Ethan.
I really hope Ethan is finally old enough to realize that promises only mean shit when you give them to people who respect you.
(i know he definitely is not, and I am very sad about it)
Does a promise count if someone voips in front of your door outta nowhere and starts yelling PROMISE ME PROMISE ME
Exactly. But, I also woulda fell for that shit, when I was 20. I do take promises very seriously. Which is something that manipulators can clock, and will deliberately use to their advantage, if I am dumb enough to allow them.
He promised, but the guy hiding in his closet at the moment didn’t
To be fair to Naomi, she’s awfully used to ignoring the guy hiding in his closet.
I mean, even if he doesn’t say “mom visited me” he could just unprompted (?) just say/send a text “Hey dad, still gay, but don’t worry i won’t bring home my bf the next time i visit home” or something passive aggressive b/c other than living in a community/neighborhood similar to joyce’s statistically he’s gotta come across some other ppl in his life that aren’t 100% straight
There’s the other shoe. I knew it.
Wish my mother had even gone this far, when I transitioned she made it clear “dead son” was a step up. She tried to have me committed, She even tried to stop the surgery. She waited till I was unconscious and told the nurses I “changed my mind” they had to wake me up again and ask………..
*hug* Frankly, it’s pretty disturbing they woke you up, that seems… not how consent works? Regardless, I’m sorry your mother sucks, and I hope you have found your people.
I was in a pre surgical sedative, not actually IN surgery. This was 2001. They were used to crazy mommies in that clinic. Hard to believe its been nearly a quarter century. Time flies. I understood they had to be sure, I told them my mother was pants crapping insane and just ignore her.
I’m sorry your mom did that. Mine is only supportive in as far that my sisters are supportive and will give her hell. She tried to follow me into the OR for my hystorectomy crying. I hadn’t told her when or where it was happening and I was thrilled, I’d been suffering from endometriosis for years and still in the closet. I’m two montha out from top surgery and swore my sisters to secrecy and told hospital staff mom was not allowed in. I did call her while in post op and druggedly appologized for keeping it a secret.
She took me to get masectomy binders and only said one off hand, “I wouldn’t go out without a shirt because I wouldn’t want to make people uncomfortable because of scars.” Her sister also said something weird to me about scars being bad when I was a kid.
She thought she could cry you out of it? As to being able to go out without a shirt, I assume that’s kind of one of the wanted benefits? If its done right the scars are not that bad. It took me forever to remember I had to put ON a shirt when I went outside. Heh, Estrogen really liked me.
My mom is not great at any medical or life or death things, but I think it was a combo of me not being able to have more kids and yhe whole me explaining I’m a boy when I was 3. And yeah my kids keep laughing at me for not having nipples 😅 It made me smile that estrogen liked you 😉 and having to remember shirts (everyone should have the amount of top covering they feel right with. The trans only pool parties in my city are such a sweet opportunity.)
I’m so sorry your mother put you through that! I hope you’ve found people who love the person you really are, and that you never have to go through that kind of shit again.
My partner, she talked me out of a VERY deep closet in 1999. Shes everything I ever wanted!
Oh, Dana. I AM SO SORRY. 😮💨😥
Thank you, it all worked out in the end. It was 24 years ago , and she did NOT get her way.
I am so glad to hear you made it through all that OK in the end.
I just had a bit of a “confrontation” over email with an adult who hurt me when I was a youngster (also 25-27 years ago) and I’m still kind of flattened. So I know the pain doesn’t always go away with time.
So glad you have good people around you now.
So, Dad can’t know because Mom fears it will encourage him to come out? I’m bi, so thinking straight is a wee bit outside my wheelhouse, but if I were straight and married to her—yeah—gay might seem like a reasonable option.
First sentence: yes. Second sentence: no – he doesn’t have options there: he’s either asexual or 6 on the Kinsey scale, and given his son it looks like he’s 6.
A wakeup call, perhaps? A reminder of mortality?
I guess any first step on a path of acceptance is a welcome one.
The only reminder of mortality Naomi needs is a city bus through her crosswalk.
“I think it might help you if I were less shitty, but don’t get used to it.”
she can’t possibly think she the only parent who tried this?
either way, a sober reminder of how conditional her love is
A rhyme reprise!
Oh, wow. She really goes on to say what she thinks is being nice in the shittiest way possible.
She isn’t even trying to be nice. She’s trying to be manipulative. Because she’s a manipulator.
Manipulative people can still think they are being nice.
Believing that manipulative people are well-meaning-but-misguided is a serious trap that people fall into. The truth of the matter is, the people who act this way, know they are socially misbehaving. They simply believe it is their right to do so, because that’s how their worldview works.
She “thinks she is being nice,” in the sense that she is performing niceness, because she knows that in this specific interaction, niceness is the tool she can use to emotionally manipulate her target into actually doing what she wants him to do. There is no sincere emotion behind it, the way that you or I would recognize or feel, if we were being sincere and nice to someone we loved. She is purely calculating, and she knows which types of face to make at which times, to maximally affect the emotions of the person she’s talking to, to nudge them into the direction she wants them to go in.
Later, she will always throw it back in her victims’ face, that “she was so nice” to them, and look at how they’ve repaid her niceness! She wouldn’t have to be so mean to them, if they weren’t constantly doing things which she disapproves of, after all! It’s their fault she felt the way she did, and they need to deal with the consequences!
Aren’t someone people like this as a matter of course? I tried reading Portnoy’s Complaint once, because I’d heard so many references to it, I wanted to know what it was about. It wasn’t the author’s constant bemoaning his sex-crazed existence that made me eventually throw down the book (well, that too), but his descriptions about the constant in his parents engaged in. Which was one point of the book I guess. He represented that psychological torture pretty effectively. Naomi barely scrapes the surface if that horror, but she’s getting there.
Sorry – accidentally deleted the part about the constant, emotionally fraught manipulative guilt ridden worrying at top volume.
feels like he should flip it back on her outta spite. like “Oh, you don’t approve of me being gay anymore? Guess i’ll go jump off the nearest bridge then”
although i wonder how she would’ve reacted to him being like “actually i’m trans and gonna have a sex change operation, if i date men then it’s technically not gay anymore” but i imagine any trans person actually getting far enough to do a procedure versus hrt would probably distance themselves from a parent so they can’t somehow sabotage it or whatever
Again, extremely shitty wording and her attitude sucks but I like this scene. “I’d prefer you be alive” is a start. (And I’m really hoping it continues and she drops the ‘for now’).
Yeah, I don’t think it’s fair to criticize her when both gay and trans rights activists have leaned *heavily* on this very same argument (better people be alive and gay/trans than dead). At least not without also rejecting that as n acceptable strategy for social acceptance.
I think the critic comes from the “for now” part of her statement and the use of the word “allowing” (rather than offering actual support, or at least actual acceptance). Like BBCC said, the “I’d prefer you be alive” part is a start, the fact that she believes she is owed control over her adult son’s life is what she’s being criticized for.
It’s definitely fair to criticize her, but also to acknowledge that bad as this is, it’s still progress.
That marriage needs to die though. In addition to just Saul being gay, her references to him here have not exactly been loving.
I doubt she’s truly capable of loving anybody but herself…and that’s even if she actually loves herself. She might not even love herself, to be honest with you.
It’s very much fair to criticize her. Homophobic parents don’t get an automatic pass for the shitty things they do and say just because they make a baby step for the very first time. And doing so very much doesn’t reject what you say it does, I don’t know how to argue that because it is just not something that is true.
Okay if you ignore the other panels panel 5 is honestly very sweet
that’s what having an interpersonal relationship with a narcissist is like: you are gradually trained to believe that the brief moments where they are sweet and kind to you, are the “real them,” and that if you just live up to their expectations well enough, then they’ll never need to start being the “bad them” to you. They normalize their shitty behavior to you, and will undercut you if you try to challenge them on it, gaslight you, and ultimately tell you that it’s your fault they acted shitty.
So yeah, narcissists are very capable of being extremely sweet. But it’s never sincere. It’s just that they know some amount of carrot is necessary, to keep you in line, and under their control. They’re smart enough to know that if they show you too much stick, you might wise up, and run away from the constant abuse. Then, they have to groom a new accessory for themselves, and that’s a ton of work they don’t want to have to go through, if they can avoid it.
The person they are when they’re hurting you, is the real them. When they show you who they are…please, for the love of God, believe them.
the “sweetness” is but a product of severely lowered expectations
her “allowance” sure as hell ain’t reparations
to one who’s starvin a crumb be like a feast
to one who’s abused, a shred of basic respect seem like love at the least
in this warped head-space, “heroes” are forged from the thinnest stuff
at some point we gotta sober up and say, we’ve had ENOUGH
Roadblock would be proud!
i don’t know how to do the raised fist emoji but this comment is hella that
no worries brotha, here imma do it for ya: ✊🏽
Oof.
As much as Naomi’s stance on “allowing” Ethan to be gay still reeks of homophobia, and as shitty as this is towards Ethan AND Saul, I also really pity her here. We’re basically getting a glimpse here of the person Joyce would’ve become (a few decades down the line, anyway) if she hadn’t had Becky in her life, and it’s depressing. Stuck in a loveless sham relationship that she refuses to admit she’s wasted decades of her life on, and can’t bring herself to end it.
I hope we see Saul again sometime, because I really hope that he eventually comes to terms with who he really is.
I’m glad you mentioned the Joyce parallels! I wonder if she’ll have a chance to look Naomi in the face and see what might have been.
i hope poor joyce never has this happen, she has been through enough.
though, then again, maybe someday, that realization might bring her some sense of joy, if she fully appreciates who and what it is she avoided becoming?
If I were here, I am not sure whether this realization would make me deeply depressed, or whether I’d cackle like a mad person at my outrageous fortune.
*if i were her
Will I be publicly stoned if I say Ethan’s horrible homophobic mom is kinda hot
You can get stoned in public all you want, as long as you aren’t driving or something.
Do you want to be?
Depends on if you say it while smoking a massive blunt in a city park!
it doesn’t mean anything bad about you, it just means you have a type. a…concerning type, which you should be careful in pursuing! but it’s still just a type!
depends on whether the attraction is physical or personality-based, I think
(whether concern is warranted, I mean)
What I don’t understand is why so many people announce their personal tastes in public in the first place. What does it help almost anybody to know someone else’s personal taste?
Well….
I mean, it’s a comment section. That’s a comment. It’s no better or worse than any other opinion getting shared here so I’m not seeing why it’s an issue?
Maybe I’m hot MILFs in your area and appreciate the knowledge. You don’t know.
You don’t ever just make conversation with people? It’s a mundane reality about the self, people share those with others all the time.
Look, everyone, I’m really sorry, I just felt summoned (and also that continuous judgmental glare is pretty cute)
SFW but pretty egregious Butts Disease
https://i.imgur.com/44ZE8WX.png
Oh neat, she can turn her head fully around like an owl!
There is now escaping the glower
it’s her most defining feature, you were right to include it
Is it like in the webtoon, I Spy A Married Life, where the FL thinks the ML is ridiculously cute/hot when he glares and makes a grumpy face getting ready to yell at her?
You know, i was gonna have some witty rejoinder about how webtoons are all exactly the same comic but i gotta dang admit that artist has much more advanced sexy glare powers than I…
I mean, hot ppl can still be terrible lol. tho i’m sure plenty of middle aged ‘hags’ that aren’t total monsters. i’m sure there are wiccans/goth teens that would’ve aged up to look similar to her
“Look you might be a homosexual, but atleast you’re alive.”
People have always been prejudiced against the dead.
For some reason made me think of this song
https://youtu.be/CTkw0PmKTTA?si=s9Dn5XTtCCGTW3qg
Hey, Arrogant Worms mention!
You mean the living impaired.
“You live-ies hate us dead-ies, admit it! If you were interviewing two candidates for a job, and one of them was DEAD, which one would you choose?”
“It would depend which one was better qualified.”
-Red Dwarf, Pilot episode. (Paraphrased)
Well. If you started out at the south pole, and you wanted to get somewhere warmer, you’d likely have to traverse some cold country on the way, right?
Only about 1,200 miles to Mount Erebus.
Which is an active volcano.
well that ain’t perfect, but it’s good enough. perfect is the enemy of progress, anyway
gold star, mom (-_-)b
It really isn’t anywhere NEAR good enough, but it’s definitely progress.
this is the point I don’t agree with, tho. it’s not progress, it’s just manipulation. she flat out says her support of him is temporary, and conditional, but then puts on the weepy-eyed mom act to guilt trip Ethan into acquiescing to her framing of the situation, which is that she has agency over who he dates and how he uses his body.
she’s just, very clearly not actually changing at all, but instead is just saying what she knows will be effective, to make it so her son is no longer withdrawn from her. because being withdrawn from her, is the first step of him reclaiming his own agency over his own life, and that’s the thing she is truly afraid of.
That’s one way of framing the situation.
There are others.
There isn’t one example of a line of dialogue or action she has had in any of the strips she has appeared in, where she isn’t directly undercutting, criticizing/disrespecting, or trying to domineer the person she is directly interacting with. If the comic tells me 10 times out of 10 that this person’s personality and behavior are consistently a certain way, I’m gonna believe the comic.
I think it’s fine for other people can have differing interpretations to you on the strip. This is something that I really dont like in this fandom where it seems to be normal to argue about the right way to interpret a strip and it gets really tiring
I genuinely think she’s come here because she is worried about Ethan and doesn’t want him to die, but that doesn’t mean she’s gonna do a 180 and no longer be the full garbage person that she was. I think this could be a step in the right direction – it’s showing that her views have changed (ever so slightly) to “allow” Ethan to be gay for a bit to cheer up, so who’s to say that this can’t change again further down the line to begrudging acceptance and then maybe one day actual acceptance? Obviously I’m not defending her actions, but I think this came from a genuine place instead of it being a manipulative tactic
The way I see this, there are two different axes in play.
As a suppressive, homophobic parent, this is a small wake-up call and minor progress, demonstrating she at least isn’t so bigoted and narcissistic that she’d rather her son be dead than with another man. A tiny improvement.
As a controlling parent, this is no progress at all. She’s behaving exactly as she has done all comic long: viewing Ethan as her personal property to control and mould as she desires, and everyone else around him as solely props to set him up in her perceived fantasy of his ideal state of being. She’s smashed through all potential boundaries yet again without even checking they existed by showing up unannounced, critiquing him immediately (even if from a place of fear for him as well), “relenting” to offer unasked “permission” on his own personhood’s validity, and finally reinforcing that this in no way means he or her other relatives are free.
Naomi is demonstrating the capacity to change her ethics and reconsider her personal stance on societal matters, based on reassessed priorities of what matters most to her. She *hasn’t* demonstrated self-awareness or any capacity to change her controlling mindset or behaviours as yet, nor to change her views based on what matters to Ethan or anybody else.
Well, not saying I completely disagree with you, but you sound like you are also implying a lot of things that are not actually in the comic, and preventing others to interpret the situation in a more favorable way is kind of uncool, especially since we don’t know yet how this is actually going to turn out.
I personnaly wouldn’t give Naomi the benefit of doubt in this situation, but I won’t chastise people who give it to her either given that it has no consequences whatsoever on our life.
I just went and checked and yep, “for now” is actually in the comic.
I was referring to all the projections about the fact she doesn’t care about her son, that all that matters to her is appearing like a “good mother” and so on. What you see as the obvious reason for her behavior may or may not be her actual in-story motives, and may not even be what the author is trying to convey.
I understand that you disagree, but these are just opinions and in this instance yours is as good as mine. Neither of us know what Willis has planned for this character, we’re both just guessing with the information we have.
I’m not defending her, I don’t like her, but I think “I’d rather you were gay than dead” is a step up from “you fuck that girl right now”. Tiny step. Maybe an inch. But still a step. You don’t feel that way, and that’s fine <3 hope you have a good day.
It’s not, because this is purely conditional and still full of the delusion that she has control over her son’s sexuality. “For now” means “you must stop eventually.” It’s a stay of execution.
Exactly. The thing I take so much umbrage with, is people saying this is “progress” or “changing.” It just blithely, absolutely, is not. She doesn’t feel differently about accepting homosexuality. She’s still deeply, repugnantly disgusted by it. She doesn’t feel any differently about trampling over her loved ones’ agencies or sense of self. She still fully expects to be in control of who her loved ones interact with, and what they talk about, and she confirms that her love is fully conditional to her feelings, and that her feelings should come first when others make decisions, even decisions that have nothing to do with her.
It isn’t progress or change. She’s just come to the purely internal conclusion, that something she doesn’t want to happen, will happen, if she doesn’t do something to prevent it. So, she employs the same tactics she always employs on the people around her, to graciously steer them into what she deems to be correct behavior. Just because she half-ass put on a little sad face, does not make anything she has ever done more endearing. She’s just running her playbook, because her ultimate goal is to get the thing she wants (a living, eventually straight, son).
Again, this is my opinion about a thing neither of us know the future of. I understand that you disagree, I’m very happy with my opinion though. Thank you.
Yes. A terrible character changing means there’s multiple possibilities. Some of them are better.
I feel like an overarching message in DoA is that redemption/progress can be possible as long as a person is alive, but it’s not just a switch, and it’s not guaranteed or even likely.
Like, weren’t people complaining that antagonists in DoA are all just two dimensional? Here’s another one who isn’t. Not every antagonist’s decisions will be “what’s the best way to abduct someone from Indiana University?” Naomi’s decision is going to be if she’s going to keep reminding herself panel 5 until she gets it, or stay with her familiar attitude.
well yeah, a step in the right direction ain’t enough to win the race but again, perfect is the enemy of progress
she’s been against his sexuality unconditionally up until now, but now she’s allowed a condition; “it’s okay if you’re gay so long as X”. she might backslide, yeah, but she might also create a new condition, “it’s okay if you’re gay so long as Y”. it’s a lot easier to do a thing you’ve already done once; that’s how microtransactions work in mobile games.
she ain’t finished the race by a long shot but at least she’s off the starting line. the hard part’s over, all that’s left is to keep moving forward
so she is okay with a son with a limp wrist and a pulse
but does the limpness of the wrist affect the strength of the pulse? we must do a study
depends what the wrist is doing heyoh
(it is a reference to the original Heathers though- they murder two footballers and stage it as a gay double suicide. At the funeral the father says “I love my dead, gay son!” and JD whispers “How do you think he’d react to a son with a limp wrist and a pulse?”)
oh shit, i am only familiar with that work in passing, and holy shit that is savage
it’s……………… it’s something. i have a jewish mom and i am transgender. it’s. i get it. ive heard these words
Aw, shit. Sorry from this nonbinary Jewish parent — because I wish your mom would apologize and change and not be crappy anymore.
I hate this for you. I’m so sorry.
I hope your mum ends up having more capacity to change and cares enough about you in the end to put in the work to do so. And that you’re safe and happy either way.
I guess… I mean, at least she *does* love her son? In her own way. She doesn’t want to lose him. So that’s nice…
She doesn’t want to lose him the same way someone wouldn’t want to lose their favorite coat. That’s not love, that’s just being possessive and self-centered. After all, think about how selfish it would be, for Ethan to kill himself? How would that make his poor mother feel? It’s not really about Ethan. It’s always going to be about her, and what she wants.
So, she’s gotta do what she always does, and make sure the boy doesn’t make any bad choices. By restricting his choices, within the limits of what she considers acceptable for him to experience.
I think you are right to hate Naomi, she is a very shitty person, but I also think some of the things you state about her like they are facts are just kind of guess work and assumptions that we don’t really know for certain because we can’t look into her mind and see her real motivation.
Naomi is a very interesting character right now, because she’s clearly left a very bad impression in her few brief appearances, yet because those appearances are so brief it’s hard to characterize her fairly because it’s impossible to fully understand her motivations beyond assumptions. It’s pretty safe to just assume the worst because she’s a parent in this comic specifically, but maybe for now she deserves a tiny bit of leniency even if her attitude is quickly spoiling any mercy on judgment. She could surprise us.
We can’t look into her mind, but this is a work of fiction, and so we can analyze how her behavior is framed and presented to glean things that are not directly said, because that’s how interpreting fiction works. I don’t think it’s guess work and assumptions, when a work has repeatedly been fully consistent about how it frames a specific character, and chooses to portray their behavior.
So, yes, she has a severe lack of situations where she comes out and flatly states unflattering things about herself as fact. But, she would never do that, anyway, unless she had something to gain from it. Nobody has any problem concluding that Raidah is an awful person, just because she never comes out and directly says “I am fully status-obsessed, and I view people and relationships primarily as objects and tools that I can use to achieve my future goals.” Because she doesn’t need to do that: she just consistently behaves in ways that show us as readers that this is what she internally believes, and we infer it from the text.
Raidah will never give us that moment, because what the fuck would be the use of her admitting that to anyone? It would be a net negative for her to be honest about who she is and how she feels, and she’s smart enough to know that. So, we have to read between the lines, and accept that she is a character who is being deliberately portrayed a certain way by the work. I don’t see how Naomi is any different.
I believe there is a limit to where an analyzis and theorizing of a fictional work is reasonable, as in, actually makes sense with the information provided by the narrative. We know that Naomi is pretty homophobic and wanted Ethan to be straight very badly and say as such bluntly and awfully, those are know things that we seen. We can reasonably take from his father dialogue and her reaction here that he is probably a closeted man and she knows it. I think when reaching the point where you are that she is an manipulator narcissist and nothing she says here can be genuine is where that analysis stop being completely reasonable and start being kind of a reach.
Love? Why? If he died, she’d look like a bad mother. That’s motivation enough.
Maybe if we keep saying these things, people will eventually Get It.
We Got It. Some of us are not ready to believe or disbelieve It.
Well, this pretty much confirms the fan theory
As I said yesterday, it is simultaneously true that this is garbage behavior, and that this is progress for her.
Someone else pointed out that progress should be encouraged, and that is true, while at the same it is also true that garbage behavior should be called out and criticized.
Yeah I’m not a fan of the kid-glove approach to this situation. If you’re really making progress away from bigotry, part of that is going to be accepting that your actions have consequences and can still suck even if you’re not “as bad” as before.
it’s strange seeing this comic with a sentient already used toilet that talks to the emo kid… ~<3
yea i love the new avant-garde direction. still sucks it interrupted possibly boys kissing >:(
RIGHT!? I’m not even attracted to boys but I still want them to have smooches! ~<3
Also, I just realized that Asher is in pretty much the same position as us readers and I’m wondering if and what would he comment.
he’s probably gonna mention “hey ethan you know your mom is kind of an awful person, she shoudn’t treat you like that,” and ethan is going to have a blue screen error that will bring the strip somewhere else in the continuity for at least several days
Not least because it’s probably the best she’s ever done (on this issue at minimum) 🙁
I will say, I forgot to consider late last night, the potentiality that Asher actually could be a commiserative foil to Ethan on this issue. It’s entirely possible, if his family is mob connected, that his queerness is a problem to some people in his family, as well. If TV prestige dramas have taught me anything, patriarchal crime syndicates are generally very homophobic.
I mean at the very least hopefully asher wouldn’t hire a hit on his mom
one thing i have not seen mentioned is the absolutely painfully sarcastic eye roll she has, when she finally acknowledges Ethan’s actual feelings for possibly the first time since she has been in the strip. Because she doesn’t actually care about his feelings.
She gives the same caliber of eye roll for “yeah, sucks your boyfriend was murdered” that a normal teenager would give when you tell them to do the dishes. Because that’s how irrelevant other peoples’ needs and emotions are, to her.
She doesn’t care about having a dead son, because her son would be dead, and his life and hopes and dreams would be extinguished tragically. She just cares about being a mother who has a dead son. So, since she doesn’t want that to happen, she’s going to do something about it.
That’s not what most of us would recognize as real, vulnerable, human love; she cares for Ethan, the way somebody might care deeply for an exotic plant. It’s very important to her, because she’d be sad that it died, and she wouldn’t want to be judged for failing to take care of it. But, it’s still ultimately an object to her, over which she expects to have absolute authority, because it is hers, above and before it can ever be anything else.
I would like to say to start that your read that this is 100% pure narcissist manipulation is a completely valid one. If that’s what she’s doing, this is what it would look like.
The thing is, this is also what it would look like if Naomi had a wake-up call that her son is in fact more important to her than her homophobia, and is taking one tiny, awkward step to fix that part of their relationship while also not being ready to let go of the entire tower built on the cornerstones of moral judgment and control that absolutely needs to be demolished. Where you see her rolling her eyes, I see her uncomfortably looking anywhere but directly at Ethan as she tries to save face.
BUT. Again, your read is a completely valid one that is at least as likely as mine. In fact if this were the real world, I’d put money on yours over mine. And even if this legitimately is a step, she has so many more miles to go to even just reach baseline decent human being, which she may or may not wind up taking. Either way this is not something to trust and breathe a sigh of relief and say “Okay, Naomi’s good now”.
I really appreciate this comment. I’m not remotely convinced, but you at least understand what it is I’m trying to convey, and that means a lot after the past couple of days. At the end of the day, it’s easy for me to be passionate about proselytizing warnings, meant to help others avoid being abused by people in their real lives.
I especially agree that, the fact that this is a work of fiction, actually makes it more likely than if it were reality, that Naomi could have good intentions. I can’t say I wouldn’t be happy to be wrong, purely for Ethan’s sake! It just doesn’t read to me like that is the story Willis is trying to tell.
This reads to me like someone who has been immersed in a sea of horrible horrible ideas all her life but who has finally, in panel 5, finally had a breakthrough insight with the potential to redirect her onto a better path. I am hopeful.
she just has to change literally everything about how she interacts with other people completely, and she will be a decent person!
unfortunately, people like her rarely ever change in any significant way
…. This remains, unfortunately, an improvement.
The bar is so damn low.
She’s trying her best. Her best is just, unfortunately, worse than almost everyone else’s “terrible”.
“I’ll allow it. For now. It’s just a phase after all.”
Exactly. She’s moved from “gay is curable with enough pussy” to “lots of people have a ‘phase’ in college,” and the ultimate implication of her being willing to make that shift purely temporarily, is that “the ‘phase’ can simply be cured at a later date.”
People are adamant she is trying to make a change. She is not. She is just manipulative, and doesn’t want her son to pull away from her control, so she’s throwing him a bone, so to speak. She’ll go back to being fully terrible to him, once she recognizes that he’s no longer withdrawing from her, anymore.
The underlying issue appears to be that she fears/knows her husband is gay from what I am reading, which means you’re likely right.
If the underlying cause of her homophobia is fear of losing her marriage and all that that entails (financially, socially, emotionally, ego, etc), then she’s not going to be able to exhibit the growth that is hoped for until she is willing to work through that first. I wonder if Ethan is about to raise this topic in the next strip… is his dad gay?
On a very much less serious note: This is where a Mike solution would have solved all! He was always going on about bangin’ people’s mothers. Mike showing love to Ethan by helping out Ethan’s sexually frustrated mother would be win-win-win!
fuck, you’re so right. Mike truly could have solved all of this, in his Mike way. He’s the Justin Timberlake of fuckin’ moms.
so i guess it’s a classic case of “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” XD
Well, she managed not to limbo under the most incredibly low bar to clear today. Progress?
She absolutely did not. “For now” means “not forever.”
“I’d prefer a son who’s gay and alive” is the first step of the one-two punch of “Okay I let you be gay for a bit, it’s time to grow up now.” Mom of the year.
Some people are also just incredibly bad at expressing any kind of emotion or affection, without it necessarily indicating actual hostility.
It seems somewhat unlikely in this case, but who knows, putting her son’s welfare over her IDpol crap might represent actually getting her priorities correctly in order. Having a family member or friend who is from a minority group is a known way to get even the reddest of hats to actually cool it for a second and think about what they’re actually on about, it’s how Dick Cheney got a heart.
Well, I mean that and the surgery.
This is not Cheney. This is Trump, who doesn’t understand other people are real. Yes, his children included.
I can only assume you weren’t alive during the Bush administration or you wouldn’t be suggesting Dick Cheney has anything inside him but a black pit.
The man started wars on the back of something he knew—for a fact—was a lie, leading to the invasion of multiple countries, an illegal torture program, ramping up of the U.S. security state and destruction of civil rights, rampant islamophobia, and the ruthless slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Oh, and it all happened due to them quite literally *stealing the election* from Gore. Cheney is an irredeemable psychopath.
Seconded. He’s a war profiteer, and millions of people are dead so that he and his accomplices could buy more yachts.
Myeah there are many things to hate Trump for but starting massive wars ain’t one of them… though that may change depending on his attitude towards war in Ukraine will affect Russian imperialistic ideas.
Trump tried to start a war with Iran but Iran didn’t take the bait. Trump also gave Afghanistan to the Taliban.
Yeah on Iran but let’s be real, no matter who’d sit on the chair in the White House Afghanistan would go back to Taliban one way or another. US isn’t the first empire to get burnt while trying to tame that place.
The United States government support of the Saudi Royal family is quite literally the biggest reason why the Middle East went from being the prosperous center of civilization to the desolate war zone it is today.
Shit happening over there was our country’s fault to begin with, go fucking figure.
The 9/11 terrorists were primarily from Saudi Arabia so that’s a bit of dark irony…
I’m honestly surprised that 9/11 is still being talked about THAT much nearly two and a half decades later, especially given the much more imminent threat of white domestic terrorists in the US.
No coincidence that Osama Bin Laden himself was a wealthy-ass nepobaby and fierce anti-socialist who weaponized his religion for that cause alongside US troops in the Soviet-Afgan War. 👀
Not sure about the ages on this site but I was a teen when it happened and it was basically watching a Historical Event happen in real time. It was a paradigm shift because it ended the era of peace after the fall of communism. There was a new massive threat and its name was Islamic Terrorism. Then you got invasion of Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq and all that other nonsense that followed. It was a really big event that changed the direction in which the world was going.
Oh and I’m not from US so my perspective is probably quite a bit different.
The United States’ so-called “War on Terror” is a monument to the politics of fear and absolutely horrific power of the military industrial complex.
By appealing to citizens’ fear and ignorance, conflating policing with military warfare and fostering impossible expectations for perfect security, our government both undermines our freedoms in the name of “protecting” us and has made the problem of terrorism here and abroad even WORSE.
It’s this same pattern that’s gone on since at least the Cold War. Nationalists in United States politics like sell themselves as the platform of careful economic planners who opt for limited government, but when they finally get into office they be like, “Now’s the time for us to TAKE FUCKING ACTION! We’re breaking all the rules, violating your privacy, and use even more of your tax money to start YET ANOTHER WAR with no exit strategy!”
Same fucking shit over and over again, The Korean War shit, the Vietnam War shit, War on Drugs shit, War on Terror shit, etc.
The only thing that ever changes is the country or thing they want us to go to war with, and thinking otherwise makes you “unpatriotic” and therefore EEEEVIIIILL
Okay, you may be right, but just think of all the defense contractors who he pleased by doing so?! Won’t somebody please think of the economy???
Trump and Cheney are just chaotic and lawful evil. There’s no point in comparing them when in the end they are insane narcissistic sociopaths.
Cheney is also far more competent, though not as in control as he thought he was.
“Yea, wouldn’t want those ideas to… get out there in the public”
“Get out of here Amber!”
she’s very much avoiding all eye contact while saying this eh
Honestly i didnt think shed even get this far
still not great but baby steps maybe??
Agreed. It’s still not great, but… “I’d rather you be gay and alive rather than straight and dead” IS a start. 😛
But she didn’t say that.
She said “you can have a little gay. As a treat. Until I don’t want you to, anymore, and then you’ll stop for me.”
I honestly think the way Naomi behaves, is substantially worse than if she simply disowned her son entirely. Nobody deserves to suffer through “love” like this.
oh, so it IS true. Ethan’s dad is gay also?
Ah so that’s how it is, she is Ethan Dad’s beard…
Ahhh, I see
*jots down some notes*
I can’t wait until Asher, literally, comes out of the closet, whispers to Ethan that he can help with Ethan’s issue and make it “disappear”…
Asher! Patricide is not the solution to All of the world’s problems!
No, wait that should be Matricide, right?
Two for the price of one!
Ethan’s mom is Ilana from Broad City?
I misread it as Beach City and was trying to remember if there was a homophobic mom in Steven Universe and was coming up empty XD
Vidalia’s definitely something-phobic.
I mean… the Diamonds.
I mean, on top of being galaxy conquering, mass-murdering dictators, yeah
So most of the comments I’ve seen are of the opinion that Naomi is the controlling one, and that she’s been keeping Saul in the closet. I’d like to present another theory. I don’t know exactly what year it is in comic time, but I’m going to assume that Naomi and Saul got married in the late 70s or early 80s. Saul may not even have told Naomi that he was gay before they got married, and she figured it out when he couldn’t get it up for her. So now she’s stuck. If she divorces him, then she risks outing him, which at that time could be life-ruining or even deadly. So she stays in a loveless marriage, getting more bitter, with only the hope of children to hang onto. And then she sees her son becoming just like his father, the one who got her into this situation, and she freaks out.
This is not to excuse any of Naomi’s behavior, she shouldn’t be taking her anger with her husband’s actions out on her son.
Just another explanation for why she’s suddenly OK with Ethan being gay, but not Saul. Saul is the reason she’s never had good sex, she doesn’t want him to get to go out and have gay sex after that.
Irresistible urge to reference “I Love My Dead Gay Son” here somehow…
How do you think he’d feel about a son with a limp wrist that had a pulse?
Reminder that the advice his father gave Ethan was basically “Yeah, sex with women is gross, but you’ll get used to it.”
This isn’t progress for Naomi but it will be for Ethan. He’ll see the cost his dad pays for being closeted. The problems that kind of relationship brings. How he can’t go back to high school and just be a clueless nerd kid. Plus maybe seeing Naomi will get roadblock out of his head, since he’s just a standin for her. Not the advice or intervention he needs but it’s the one he’s getting.
Now time for Naomi to leave and not come back for ten years / the end of the semester.
[10 YEARS LATER]
“We never made it to the fireworks factory, after all…but, at least Naomi went back to her home planet, never to return.”
I think you’re overestimating how much he’s going to read into that last comment. Kids tend to have blinders when it comes to their parents, so it wouldn’t be unrealistic for Ethan to not pick up on the “your dad might not be straight either” subtext.
You know, this makes me think… obviously a major theme here is how much parents influence and control their children, and not infrequently prevent those children from growing because of the parents’ own issues.
It occurs to me that for many it would be perfectly reasonable to say “I’ll continue being closeted until I graduate because my parents would disown me and I can’t afford college without them.” Like it or not, it’s not a stupid decision for the college student.
However, young people are basically forced to continue relying on their parents well into adulthood – “I will just stay closeted until I graduate” becomes “I will stay closeted until I get a real job” becomes “I will stay closeted until I can move out on my own” &c. And eventually you just never have a chance to explore your own identity.
OTOH, how much of that is the CAUSE of all this trauma. Generations of people always smothered by the trauma of the generation before?
Generational trauma rolls downhill faster and harder than any snowball ever could. A single, fully sane human being, has likely never graced this Earth.
does she think her husband will turn gay if he realizes it’s an option? The general idea is that bigots are stupid of course but that’s just ridiculous…
it was heavily implied in EthanDad’s appearance that he was super gay and just closeted.
The man has one line of dialogue in his entire existence and it goes “don’t worry son, I know having sex with women is disgusting and feels wrong, but if you just do it enough, it will eventually become tolerable.” I’d actually be less certain he was gay, if the character had come out and directly said it.
Go fuck yourself, mom.
Me when she threatens to take away my Xbox 360 Arcade.
she certainly could use it. she’s probably joyce levels of pent up.
wait a second…somebody get Dorothy. Naomi needs to become acquainted with the washing machine!
She’d rather gay than dead, that’s something… man the bar is way to low
Good thing ethan isn’t a sociopath, i could totally imagine some alternate path where he basically pays a body double to committ suicide in front of her/fake his death or so
I guess that’s more fodder for the “Saul isn’t straight” argument.
These strips always make me so grateful for my kind supportive parents
Is this “ideas” in the sense of Ethan’s dad hurting Ethan, or “ideas” in the sense of Ethan’s dad being gay?
I would bet the latter. Naomi doesn’t want Saul thinking that being suicidal might get him out of enforced straightness. (He did refer to heterosexual sex as ‘gross and scary’ in his Freshman Family Weekend appearance.)
so basically he has to be an emo gay from now on? The minute he returns back to normal and nerdy transformers obsessed he has to stay single i guess
So close! C’mon, just a few more steps. You can do it.
I doubt she even wants to make THAT much effort.
Akin to Linda and other bourgeois bongos, she basically thinks/needs giving a shit about her kid to be like a fitness exam or inconvenient chore she can easily and painlessly opt out of. (-_-)
I mean, is Ethan’s dad so amazing that he’d be worth clinging onto as opposed to just moving on/finding another man, unless she’d be humiliated among her neighbors/community if it was like “my husband left me for another man” (Because it’d be better for a breakup as opposed to him going to like, bathhouses or so and just cheat)
Even ‘terrible’ ppl are able to get married/find partners/success, etc, sometimes /because/ they’re terrible
Ok, so, yesterday i said i withhold judgment until i see her reasonings,
now i am ready for a verdict:
-25 points for coming unannounced, this screams entitlement
-10 points for not standing up to the dad (tbh i forgot/don’t know what the dad is like and if she’s safe if she does stand up to him)
– 35 points for thinking it’s her place to *allow* or *forbid* being gay
-5 points for saying “a homosexual“ instead of “gay“ as an adjective
+50 points for the outcome (Ethan for now has a mom he doesn’t have to hide being gay from. “feel accepted“ is not a given)
-45 points for thinking she can *temporarily* accept him to be gay, *as a treat/consolation*, only until he gets over the death of his friend…
+60 points for “i’d rather you are GAY AND ALIVE“, that is absolutely the best thing she’s said in this conversation.
This arbitrary judgment leaves her at -10 points. I’m not happy with her, but there are some small steps in the right direction. There is hope.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/blunt/
His dad is like this.
His dad is gay. Or at least bi-leaning-gay. I’m seeing gay affair here at some point in the next 5 years of comics.
It’s possible he’s just ace/sex repulsed, it’s a bit more uncommon to see ace males even in fiction (tho i don’t consume much i admit) but i mean these days who has the time for a relationship , although it might be ideal for ‘marriages of conveniences’/lavender weddings or so to where you get along well as roommates/platonic partners while being legally married
He hooks up with Joyce’s dad now that he’s single and free to mingle.
Only a closeted bi or gay guy could possibly believe that you can get used to sex with someone you’re not into. that’s so sad.
This is still… progress… sort of. The bar really has been set low by Toedad and Carol so like… a parent who would rather their kid be alive and gay is scoring a solid C on the parent grading curve here. But yeesh
i mean, gotta have an outlet for complaining about parents, might as well be a webtoon tho i’m sure there are good parents besides dinas
And i suppose carla, even tho she kinda got a complex or so despite it
leslie might make a good mom. tho i imagine there’d be some adult charas who are self aware enough to be like “I would not make a good parent, so i won’t have one”
Imagine if that one old science prof despite being bitter in his work end upbeing some ‘amazing’ dad lol. or having like, some cryptid/alien hunter as a son
maybe don’t marry a gay dude then, naomi
First of all, still horrible, Naomi.
Secondly, I think a few people called this yesterday. Either y’all psychic or y’all from the future (Patreon). I don’t remember much about Ethan’s dad, so I’ll probably return to the past and check that out.
Yeah, if you do, you’ll see why neither Patreon nor psychic powers were necessary to get that.
i, too, enjoy being alive and gay.