Ross McIntyre at least has this air of being “broken,” like he doesn’t understand the world he lives in anymore, and he’s had all his supports ripped away. His wife took her life, his daughter’s off at college until she comes home “different,” he’s got an Invisible Sky Wizard who calls for his daughter’s death. I wouldn’t say that all of that makes him *sympathetic,* but there’s still at least something tragic about him, because he could have been, and more than likely *was,* a better person, at some point. It is possible to picture a world where Mrs. McIntyre didn’t take her life, where Ross remained at least *stable,* even if he couldn’t accept his daughter’s homosexuality. Maybe he wouldn’t have let her live in his home, even, and that would be tragic and a terrible thing to do, but I do believe that in such a world, at least Ross wouldn’t have come to the school with a rifle.
Blaine, on the other hand, just actively enjoys making other people suffer, with a particular fixation on making Amber’s life miserable. I don’t think we’ve seen even a single panel of him being anything other than an absolute tool. Every single second of screentime, he’s 100% devoted to making Amber feel terrible. There’s no tragedy that he has suffered through, there is no hint of him ever having been a better person, or even of any possible path that might have produced a better person. He’s just an asshole, and the only tragedy here is that he exists in the first place.
Mike is an ass, but he hasn’t, to my knowledge, ever crossed the Moral Event Horizon (like, you know, trying to kill your daughter for Jesus). He engages in Comedic Sociopathy, and that’s about it. He is “salvageable,” Blaine is not. Ross probably isn’t, either, but I maintain that he once *was* salvageable.
Blaine is the sort of fool you get from a late-night infomercial when you’re drunk: he’s only useful for one thing, no one knows what that thing is, he’s not even good at it, and he broke the first time he was used for that thing.
From what I understood, he was domineering and negative from the start (and thus, as per the impression we got, did in fact drive her to suicide to escape her bad situation). But even if that wasn’t the case, he certainly wasn’t the type to be sympathetic or supportive. So, no matter how you look at it, he’s responsible enough for how things turned out that you can’t give him any kind of sympathy on having to deal with the end result.
It’s like having sympathy for someone who got bit by a dog after they slapped it. Sure, they have an injury, but they’re also the ones who pushed for that outcome to occur. Meanwhile, a far more tragic thing has happened to the other party involved.
Everyone is technically evil, its just that the degree of that evil varies dramatically. Evil is a just an imperfection in the soul, and don’t we all have imperfections?
Note that the use of “soul” doesn’t represent any belief in God or an actual soul, and is merely the best sounding moniker as saying mind might risk implying that mentally disabled people are evil.
Ooh ooh! Is that the one where if you turn the left bit 90 degrees to the left, all the colors change? And if you turn the bottom bit 90 degrees up, it becomes a hemisphere? And if you turn the blueward bit 90 degrees to the past, someone assasinates Adolf Hitler?
You should put the Escher Cube in to the Klein Bottle, and mount the resulting anomaly on the Hayward blivet. It makes a Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum! Very handy if you are ever running late and need to arrive before you leave, or if you want to visit Titan…
Since when is evil defined as imperfection of the soul?
By whom?
Just looked into Merriam Webster and wasn’t finding my own definition “acting with intent to damage and hurt and enjoy it” but things that are much much more vague. Hmm. And there I thought the English language was better equipped that the German language n this case.
Definition of evil
eviler or eviller; evilest or evillest
1 a : morally reprehensible : sinful, wicked an evil impulse
b : arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct a person of evil reputation
2 a archaic : inferior
b : causing discomfort or repulsion : offensive an evil odor
c : disagreeable woke late and in an evil temper
3 a : causing harm : pernicious the evil institution of slavery
b : marked by misfortune : unlucky
“Since when is evil defined as imperfection of the soul?” I mean, he didn’t say it was the definition of evil…I do find it a reasonable description of it. And since he was the one who first started talking about evil in this discussion, I think it’s reasonable for him to further describe what he means without making the dictionary into the ultimate authority.
What I was trying to say was that to me, defining evil as imperfections of the soul makes the word worthless, as everyone has those and not everyone is or even acts evil(ly). So this definition sounds to me as a term used to suppress everyone, not a term to describe what I perceive as evil. So, as words are only sounds wrapped around ideas, I tried to find out whose idea we a talking about (while finding that my idea an MWs idea differ greatly).
There was a piece in The New Yorker a few years ago that you might find interesting: “What Do We Mean By ‘Evil'” by Rollo Romig. From the article: “Neiman herself is understandably reluctant to offer a single, narrow definition of her own for what “evil” means today, but what she does suggest is a useful description of what effect evil has: calling something “evil,” she writes, “is a way of marking the fact that it shatters our trust in the world.” Evil is both harmful and inexplicable, but not just that; what defines an evil act is that it is permanently disorienting for all those touched by it.”
Really? I see that as a decent description– not definition, as it says that’s not what she’s really offering it as– though one that could include things that aren’t actually evil. (Though maybe they are experienced as evil by those affected by them.)
Why do you think that nothing could fall under that description?
@CJ: He seems to be treating evil as a spectrum, rather than black and white, if that helps it seem less like suppressing everyone. And he’s describing people moreso than acts in his suggested description.
Because the world works in shades of grey, and I would say Willis writing is close enough to the real world for his characters to also work in shades of grey. No one is completely black, and no one is completely white (in morality not race) so to call someone completely evil or completely heroic causes us to fail to properly understand them as people.
Yes, spectrum, sure. If we have a spectrum of behavior that at one end start with “good” has lots of shaded between good and neutral and then goes off to the other end which i’m not sure how to name, with lots of shades between neutral an that end, “evil” to me starts a rather long way off between neutral and the not named end.
I can relate to the Neiman description quoted above by Kit. It describes something that is extreme and disturbing which matches with my idea of evil, whereas some1 definition talks of the normality of humans not being perfect.
CJ and Yumi I suppose. Let me make my argument a bit clearer.
A. Evil has a fairly broad definition, but to simplify let’s describe it as anything that harms either mentally or physically a person or other life form whether intended or not.
B. Everyone occasionally performs actions that harm others, whether in large ways or small ways. For instance, while Blaine beating his wife is obviously a much worse act that Joyce trying to break up Walky and Dorothy, both are based around harming someone else to fulfill your own desire and as such both count as being evil.
C. Having determined that everyone commits “evil” acts, if we describe someone who commits evil acts as being “evil” we therefore must describe everyone as evil.
D. Therefore we cannot describe anyone as being evil because while it might be simple to compare Joyce to Blaine on extreme ends of the spectrum as we get close to the center it starts to rely more and more on your own personal morality system.
E. Is this saying therefore everyone’s actions are okay, because everyone does bad things? Of course not, but we punish based on action not on how we feel about the person. You would never say someone should go to prison because they’re “evil” because that doesn’t mean anything.
—
Now sadly if we want to say no truly evil people exist, because of the reasons mentioned above, we must also concur that no truly good people exist. Once again, an action can of course be good and selfless, but life isn’t a video game with a meter telling you how evil or good your are.
And good, I suppose, is anything that helps anyone, intentionally or not. Which leaves everyone and damn near any action as both good and evil, thus rendering the terms near meaningless.
Until we focus on the more extreme cases and get back to the conventional use of good and evil.
@thejeff, well the terms themselves aren’t meaningless, as I would say the difference between an evil and a good action is based on how many people it helps vs how many it hurts and to what degree. For instance, shooting a man before he can harm a child is good because typically children’s lives are seen as more important than dangerous maniacs. However if you were to shoot an unarmed shoplifter in the back, that would be seen as evil because stuff is always worth less than people’s lives.
If an amoral disregard for the well being of others or how your actions affect them (which isn’t even the situation with Mike because he actively seeks to hurt people for his own amusement) isn’t evil than what is anymore?
Leslie. Other parents, but they seem to be more one-off (though so is this flashback teacher). Jocelyn is technically an adult. I mean, so’s most of the cast, but she’s somewhat more adult than them.
She’s old enough to have some established writing and a place and (at least some) income of her own, at least. Probably late 20s, though I could see higher mid range.
I don’t think she’s the oldest (I think that’s John), so I don’t think there’s that big an age difference between her and Joyce…actually, remembering a Patron strip, I’d say she’s about five or six years older than Joyce is?
I think a conversation between Jocelyne and John indicated that there was enough of a gap that college was ‘different’ than when they went. I imagine Jocelyne’s on the lower end of the scale though, so it can’t be more than 8-9 years at most.
John seems to be from generation x, the generation of the south park creators and nostalgia critic. They are the current 30 year old people that see people below them (millenials) as entitled and obsessed with social change. Jocelyn seems to be a millenial in her 20s. Because this comic has no specific time because of 8 years of writing and just a semester in the time of the story, it’s difficult to say which generation Joyce belongs to.
On the topic of nice adults, there’s the manager of the floor, there’s Robin’s aide that is the only member of her party that wished her luck and reminded her of stuff she easily forgets, there’s Mike’s parents, there’s Asma, etc.
I mean, generations on the whole are kind of stupid, but beyond that, I don’t see what’s stupid about 30 year olds being millennials? They have more claim to it than current 20 year olds, anyway.
There doesn’t seem to be a defined cutoff date, which is probably by design so aging boomers still have a fresh punching bag they can blame for things not being like Leave It to Beaver anymore.
How about we say Gen z is too young to remember 9/11 firsthand? That would put the line somewhere around 1997/1998. They’re the children of the youngest Gen X-ers and first-wave Millennials.
Generations are always kind of loosely defined, so it’s not a particular attack by boomers on millennials.
John would be millennial, unless he’s a good deal older than I think. Joyce is now a Gen Z or whatever we’re going to call them (though she would have been a millennial back when the strip started. And late Gen X in the Walkyverse, I suspect.) Jocelyne probably somewhere on the cusp, though by the time she appears again she’ll probably be solidly Gen Z.
Yeah, pretty sure it’s John, Jordan*, Jocelyn, Joyce, unless I’m forgetting one in the middle there. So probably more like mid-20s, I guess? She seems to have more of her shit together than I do at 25, so I was skewing older.
Consider this image from said bonus strip, featuring young Jocelyne and pregnant Carol. In the text of the bonus strip, Jocelyne is being asked what a good name for a girl would be, and she responds with Jocelyne (she says “Josswin” and likes it because it’s “pwetty,” so she’s probably even younger in that strip than I was remembering).
I was thinking it could turn out that was from she was pregnant with Jordan, they just didn’t know the sex of the baby at the time, but Hank does say “for your sister,” which makes it seem like they do know. Gonna go read the comments on it for any clarification, I guess. Took me way too long to find.
Ragelli is right about the birth order (and in the other universe, there would be extra siblings to include – 2, I think) though I couldn’t point to specific comics.
In the next panel of that comic, the parents suggest “Joyce” as a simpler to say alternative to “Jocelyn” so I’d say that’s def Carol’s last pregnancy
I agree that she’s pregnant with Joyce then, but I don’t know that them suggesting the name Joyce for a girl is actually definite proof of that. Like, it could be they decide on “Joyce if it’s a girl” and then it’s a boy, so they name the next one Joyce. But if the birth order you seconded is confirmed, then that’s moot anyway.
(This comment got eaten by the spam filter yesterday because I linked to two other strips. Let’s try again!)
Yeah, as far as we know in this continuity, Hank and Carol had the four kids in that order.
John is probably in his mid-thirties. He looks older in that bonus comic than Amber, Mike, and Ethan do in the current flashbacks. Joyce also said he’s by far the oldest, and been out of the house almost as long as she can remember (which would suggest he either moved out or went to college when she was five or six). He also went to public school “twenty years ago” according to Carol.
Jordan is almost a complete mystery. So far we know he was “too… Jordan” to come along on Freshman Family Weekend, and there’s a “situation” regarding him and his parents (which came from “squeezing too hard” according to Hank). I’m guessing he rebelled hard and severed.
Jocelyne is very little in the flashback bonus strip, and is old enough to be out of college now, but she’s most likely closer to 20 than 30.
We know Joyce is eighteen.
I’d guess there’s a bigger age gap between John and Jordan than there is between the others.
Akechi definitely isn’t an uncaring jerk, I think most of his problem is that he cared TOO MUCH and was consistently fucked over by an uncaring, corrupt world.
Oh yeah. And I bet any testimony Mike would give would include ‘she admitted she marked Amber’s test incorrectly because Amber couldn’t be that smart.’ Which, while a he said/she said situation, gets a lot more scrutiny when at least one test has been misgraded, and probably more.
The problem is that he might be in a school that would not be inclined to listen to a “troublemaker” student as defined by going against a teacher in the first place.
A school where a teacher feels within her rights to physically abuse a student is a scary scary place.
Reporting the incident would be the responsible thing to do, not the Mike thing to do. I’m thinking he reports it, the administration covers it up, and amber gets in trouble with her dad. Then Mike learns to solve things his way.
Did Mike make a pass at the teacher and get soundly rejected? How old is he in the flashback?
While I can’t condone a teacher striking a student, a teacher rejecting the advances of a minor is very much justified
oh, that could make sense. I guess I didn’t think there would be a pause (last panel on June 12th) before the “how dare you!”
I usually think of “how dare you!” as being an immediate response
Going by the last flashback, he suggested the reason the teacher below ever Amber cheated on her test was because Amber was a girl, and the teacher, either because she was a woman or because he implied she was biased, took offense.
I sincerely doubt anything involved Mike making a pass at the teacher, especially going by his comment the other day, and hope you are joking for some reason.
No, I wasn’t joking, but I did think the possibility was far-fetched. If you go to the comment thread on June 18th at least three other people thought something inappropriate happened between Amber’s teacher and Mike
Teachers having relations with students was the subject of June 18th and the idea that this teacher was inappropriate with Mike was in the comments on that day. I guess it was on my mind
Teachers having relations with students was the subject of June 18th and the idea that this teacher was inappropriate with Mike was in the comments on that day. I guess it was on my mind
No, he had the temerity to suggest to a female teacher that she lacked confidence in the capability of a student only because that student is female. The fact that the teacher overreacted so strongly suggests that his comment hit home.
As has been remarked on several times in reference to this flashback sequence, the kids are too young to be actively soliciting sexual encounters (unless they have already been sexually abused, but that doesn’t seem to be the story here).
Well…it wasn’t? If you mean, “how was that excused”…Mike may not have reported it. If he did, I’ve heard of teachers and parents doing very not-okay things without any real reprimand, which could add to the breaking of Mike’s spirit/faith in the system.
It’s so un-okay. Unfortunately, I’ve seen teachers get away with this sort of thing with nothing more than a slap of the wrist irl before. I hope Mike gets her in huge trouble for this though. (Me, actively rooting for Mike? What??)
Oh dear. Can’t say that I am surprised that the teacher got supremely offended at his query even if right, but Amber fleeing after or while Mike was standing up for her will not do well for either of their psyches. Not that I blame Amber mind, she was in an awful position mentally and emotionally at this period of her life, but I can see how the cracks in Mike will begin to appear starting here.
Amber didn’t flee. She’s hiding in the locker (unless she fled off panel). Of course, it does look like she fled and that’s not good for their relationship.
Yeah, most students take about four classes a semester to maintain full time status, and I think we’ve only ever seen two (Calc and Gender Studies) for Joyce, Walky and Dorothy. Add in Amber and Danny’s CS class (New Alex is fine, and if there’s only ever been Single Alex who wasn’t attentive because she had Other Stuff to worry about, she was mostly a below average uselessness that’s totally redeemable now that the effort is being made,) and Jacob and Sarah’s pre-law (teacher unseen, I think,) and you’re still missing a LOT of teachers who are probably just fine.
For one thing, I guarantee you 90% of the fast is in English 101 or will be taking it next semester. I know some schools even use it as one of their ways to group freshmen together.
Well Leslie has had some moments teaching that she’d rather, and everyone else, forget. Nothing like assaulting a child of course but putting Joyce and Becky in Robyns firing line certainly isn’t a good thing
the slowness of comics is frustrating at times like these. I really, really want to get the whole backstory at once, not one comic a week or whatever we’ve been getting so far. I want to know how this all fits together.
So, despite trying to talk and do things nice, young Mike was abandoned by the friend he tried to help, learned the system was made of people with irrational prejudices, and got slapped by an authority figure whose job it is to help care for kids like him.
I wonder how much worse this ‘one bad day’ will get.
It might that Amber was so reluctant to confront her teacher because she knew from past experience that Ms. Phillips got violent when a student even suggested that she was wrong.
And this highlights a probable source of Amber’s brokenness — she’s unsafe at home, and unsafe at school.
It might also explain why Mike goes the way he does — the principal and other school authorities might be looking the other way when Ms. Phillips does this shit.
Maybe. Though Amber at this stage wouldn’t be likely to confront a teacher, even if the teacher was known to be safe and friendly. It’s possible Ms. Phillips is part of the reason for that, but Blaine definitely gets the vast majority of the blame.
Oh, wait, I forgot about a white supremacist doing a sad-trombone sound effect at hearing about a child with down syndrome being taken away from her mother.
And all the other updates on the concentration camps.
……..at this point, Young!Mike getting beaten by a teacher is the Funtime Comedy Hour.
Mike’s basically an anime character at this point, period. The edge, the backstory, the physics-defying hair…
At this point, he just needs to suddenly become everyone’s ally and use the power of friendship to fire a mega-laser and destroy the evil teacher, and it’ll be confirmed.
😮 :c *hugs Mike, glares angrily at the terrible terrible teacher*
I’ve gone off on bad teachers before and well, yeah, a bad teacher can do a lot of harm in the same way a good teacher can make some small level of good impact on a student.
There are students who develop year-long aversions to subjects or ways of approaching the world simple because of a traditionally bad teacher who approached their subject and methodology with a bad edge.
A teacher like this is something beyond that, something terrifying.
A teacher who is not only bitterly sexist and grades down their own students but will physically assault a child to hide this?
There are no excuses that can be made about a person that vile and the effects of that are immense. Being physically attacked by a teacher removes any hope of safety from one’s surroundings and leaves a strong mark that you are in a place and a position where no one gives a shit about you and no one is going to help you.
Based on the backstory so far, we can assume that any attempt to follow up with this fails and through this Mike inherits the lesson vomited out to other white men of his generation that to care is to feel pain and be abused by a system you can otherwise opt out of.
And it explains somewhat his descent into edgelordery. After all, much like with Carla, there is a defense against vulnerability with projecting a front of “not caring”. A means of saying that you are not a target and nothing will drag you down.
Now while the method Carla employs is also not 100% healthy, Mike has chosen a very toxic method instead, one that preaches a defense from vulnerability by punching down and hurting others and losing himself in “for the lols” defenses so he can strangle whatever remains of his empathy that he blames for feeling this hurt and betrayal by the system.
And the thing is, I can understand that path of descent and sympathize with it to some extent, the reality of the matter is that as a white man, he can opt out of a lot of pain and while this is a truly horrific experience, it is also one those with less privilege frequently face with no end or hope for respite through apathy.
He has the privilege not to care and to opt out of a lot of bullshit and not only did he choose that over this admittedly awful temporary pain and vulnerability, but he chose to join in the victimization of others.
And that was a choice. One I hope we’ll see him grow out of as he is forced to confront his coping strategies for painful situations like this.
Bad teachers can do SO MUCH damage it’s horrible. I’m re-reading Amber’s reaction after her failed attempt to show off in class and… yeah it manages to put this teacher in an even worse light.
I always feel like you’re going over the top with this stuff Willis. The teacher isn’t just grading stuff badly on purpose, she’s also physically abusive and yet somehow won’t be called out for this? The RA isn’t just a violent alcoholic, she also got her job through illegal favoritism, and that will just keep on keeping on. The TA isn’t just sleeping with students, she lies about another person doing the same thing and this hearsay is accepted at face value without so much as a hearing. It’s not that bad people don’t exist, it’s that the badness of people without any checks or balances (or even notice) is rather unbelievable applied to every character without fail. In the next comic, Mike could burn her house down, Vice Principals style and for consistency’s sake, I would assume he just gets away with that forever.
Also, I don’t think Ruth got her job through illegal favoritism? She continued to be forced into it through strings being pulled by someone else, but we don’t know how she got it in the first place.
And on that note, we don’t know how this will be handled yet. Shitty Teacher seems to think it’ll be okay on her end but abusers always think like that.
Yeah, we don’t even know if Mike’s going to report it to the higher ups, much less how they’d handle it…and even if they let her mostly get away with it, yeah, that sucks and it’s a lot, but it’s not unrealistic.
Jason is getting a hearing but there is nothing unfair about his being fired because he’s guilty and deserves to be fired. He’s an awful teacher and took advantage of a student. Plus, he didn’t even give the grades. Bad form, man. Bad form.
He should be fired, but the way they’re going about it is horribly wrong.
Not just that they’re proceeding on hearsay and apparently with a Catch-22 defense required, but by putting the task of contacted the affected student on the offender, they’d be giving a worse TA a golden opportunity to pressure/bribe her into covering for him.
I’m sorry, but I have upsetting news about the *actual* world we live in. Every last one of those things happens in real life. Hell, most of them have probably happened to people who read the comments here.
The disbelief people tend to have that someone even could be so awful is common. When you haven’t experienced it yourself you tend not to want to believe it, but it’s quite possible.
Hey try to not be so condescending, you know nothing about their life. You have no idea what they’ve been through, or if they know the “real world” or not.
I agree that we should be more considerate in our discussion in the way you mentioned, but I also want to note that calling things actual people have been through “over the top” or such can be disrespectful as well, and to some extent people are responding to that.
If events in the comic seem “over the top” to them, I feel extremely comfortable assuming that they don’t have experience with those kinds of events. With all of the absolutely awful shit happening right now, that was all the diplomacy I have the spoons for.
And yes, that was the diplomatic version. The US government is conducting mass child abuse right now. I don’t have tons of patience for people to figure out that internalized sexism and authority figures getting away with horrible misconduct are much too fucking common
^ All of this. “You have no idea” is a two-way street. I haven’t read anything that doesn’t pretty much mirror my school-age/college experience, so…perhaps it’s the OP who has no idea?
Granted. But it’d be nice, just once, to see a system work in a non-evil way. The only example that really comes to mind is Ruth’s therapy, and I personally expect that’ll go sideways too somewhere down the road.
The existence of bad things doesn’t mean that any event that occurs in this comic is now 100% believable. If that was the case, Ruth’s Grandpa could gun her down in cold blood in front of 100 people and not go to prison in the comic, and you would say “that is believable in universe because in real life, we have a terrible government committing human rights abuses.” Surely you can see how that’s a complete non sequitur and not the powerful argument you believe it to be.
The only thing that has happened in this comic that does not happen on a regular basis I real life is the costumed vigilante.
There are teachers who have gotten away with far worse than what we’re seeing here, for starters. Remember that team doctor just this year who was finally put in jail after sexually assaulting hundreds of minors over the course of DECADES? Just punching or slapping a student is much easier to get away with. Fuck, there are states where that shit is *legal*
Every single time some.awful thing happens in this comic (sometimes even before the full scope of something is known) there have been people in the comments sharing stories of how something similar happened to them. Every. Time.
People are capable of incredible cruelty. People who refuse to believe that are a major reason they’re able to get away with it. If you’re not willing to put the slightest bit of effort into understanding the connection there, that’s not something I can help you with.
Given the state of the world, I’m rapidly losing my ability to cope with horrible petty injustice, even in a good comic I like. I’m probably gonna have to take a break unless all these characters get lined up in front of a guillotine.
So, there are two reactions in the comments. One reaction is that people find this unbelieveable. The second reaction is that this is depressingly real. I fit into the second category. To those who’s reaction is the first, I envy your life so far.
I’ve had a pretty traumatic life and I find this completely OTT. I’m slowly losing patience with the comic. It’s dramatic to the point of ridiculousness. I really love the characters but I’m just tired of the storylines.
ok, seeing him not perfectly in control of everyone else makes me feel a bit more sympathetic. i think the two are mutually exclusive for me.
i wonder if this is gonna blow up for amber via her dad; if mike’s known as the clever one who helps people out at this time, a smart way to punish mike would be to punish amber.
getting real speculative, maybe that’s his arc, realizing he’s not powerful enough to perfectly reliably help people, which feels like an unacceptable loss of control, but he can stay in control if he tries to hurt them instead
I’ve decided I know how this story goes. Mike decides that being good isn’t working for him so he goes to a dojo which teaches him to be a thug and the arts of Bastard Karate. Then he returns to Amber and Ethan’s life as an Arrogant Sociopath.
I am just picturing him starting a long drawn out plan to make her life more and more miserable until it all shatters around her. at least the at school part.
I am pleasantly surprised -yes, genuinely surprised not trying to be funny- that I haven’t found any comments trying to warp a child hurt alone and on the verge of tears after being assaulted by a teacher into some sort of evil master plan. Can we finally agree that this 11 to 12 year old kid isn’t some evil genius sociopath who wants to burn the world and play adults like puppets?
That teacher needs to be fired immediately. There are very few cases in which a teacher can leave a mark on a student like that and I don’t think Mike fell into any of them. Whether she suspected Amber of cheating or not, it’s no longer a factor.
I have no mercy for someone that would harm a child.
Man that final panel Mike face.
ULTIMATE WOOBIE FACE.
I want to hug him and take him out for some icecream or something.
And I heavily dislike children!
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no good deed goes unpunished =(
Now Mike feels like defying… social order.
love how the placement of that new avatar’s eyes makes it look like Joyce is peering up at Amber’s “Batman Peens Superman: Dawn of Buttstuff” novel
BABY ;_;
same 🙁
Mike copped a feel on his way out
what universe am i in
*looks at the news*
…….fucked if I know. Can we get back to the normal timeline please?
This IS the normal timeline. Feel free to lose your mind to the existentialist dread of that fact. No one will blame you.
Reminds me of this thing
https://i.imgur.com/pPJPpjR.jpg
trump . . . lizard overlords
lizard overlords . . . trump
I can’t DECIDE!
I welcome our new lizard overlords.
New? They’ve been around since the pyramids!
Actually, there is no ‘normal timeline’ Causality is a lie. Stuff just happens, and sometimes it happens in order
…Okay, maybe this whole tragic Mike backstory thing is legit.
The Breaking of Mike begins
):
well so far we do see some hit on his face.
Aw man, first sympathy for Faz, and now Mike.
There had better not be a storyline coming up that makes me feel sorry for frigging Blaine.
I wouldn’t count on it, no.
We did get small glimpses of humanity in Ross, but operative word being “small”, just with respect to the late Mrs McIntyre.
Ross McIntyre at least has this air of being “broken,” like he doesn’t understand the world he lives in anymore, and he’s had all his supports ripped away. His wife took her life, his daughter’s off at college until she comes home “different,” he’s got an Invisible Sky Wizard who calls for his daughter’s death. I wouldn’t say that all of that makes him *sympathetic,* but there’s still at least something tragic about him, because he could have been, and more than likely *was,* a better person, at some point. It is possible to picture a world where Mrs. McIntyre didn’t take her life, where Ross remained at least *stable,* even if he couldn’t accept his daughter’s homosexuality. Maybe he wouldn’t have let her live in his home, even, and that would be tragic and a terrible thing to do, but I do believe that in such a world, at least Ross wouldn’t have come to the school with a rifle.
Blaine, on the other hand, just actively enjoys making other people suffer, with a particular fixation on making Amber’s life miserable. I don’t think we’ve seen even a single panel of him being anything other than an absolute tool. Every single second of screentime, he’s 100% devoted to making Amber feel terrible. There’s no tragedy that he has suffered through, there is no hint of him ever having been a better person, or even of any possible path that might have produced a better person. He’s just an asshole, and the only tragedy here is that he exists in the first place.
Mike is an ass, but he hasn’t, to my knowledge, ever crossed the Moral Event Horizon (like, you know, trying to kill your daughter for Jesus). He engages in Comedic Sociopathy, and that’s about it. He is “salvageable,” Blaine is not. Ross probably isn’t, either, but I maintain that he once *was* salvageable.
I resent people like Blaine being called “tools”.
Tools are useful. In some universes (cough cough Erfworld cough), tools control the world.
Blaine is just a pile of rust.
Blaine is the sort of fool you get from a late-night infomercial when you’re drunk: he’s only useful for one thing, no one knows what that thing is, he’s not even good at it, and he broke the first time he was used for that thing.
I got the impression I got. I thought the comic was implying Ross DROVE his wife to suicide to show just how awful he was.
‘Not the impression I got.’
I also had this impression, yes.
From what I understood, he was domineering and negative from the start (and thus, as per the impression we got, did in fact drive her to suicide to escape her bad situation). But even if that wasn’t the case, he certainly wasn’t the type to be sympathetic or supportive. So, no matter how you look at it, he’s responsible enough for how things turned out that you can’t give him any kind of sympathy on having to deal with the end result.
It’s like having sympathy for someone who got bit by a dog after they slapped it. Sure, they have an injury, but they’re also the ones who pushed for that outcome to occur. Meanwhile, a far more tragic thing has happened to the other party involved.
Well if were going in order of relative evilness next up will probably be Mary.
I don’t consider Mike evil. Sociopathic with amoral tendencies, but that’s not evil. Mary, on the other hand, is certainly evil. Blaine also.
Everyone is technically evil, its just that the degree of that evil varies dramatically. Evil is a just an imperfection in the soul, and don’t we all have imperfections?
Note that the use of “soul” doesn’t represent any belief in God or an actual soul, and is merely the best sounding moniker as saying mind might risk implying that mentally disabled people are evil.
I have imperfections, but I don’t have a soul. I traded it to a troll under a bridge for forty radishes and a box of knives.
You got radishes and knives?!? Man, I got hornswoggled.
All I got for my soul was a Klein bottle, an Escher cube, and a Hayward blivet.
Dang and all I got was a Rubic’s Hypercube – I haven’t even figured out how many dimensions it has as yet
Ooh ooh! Is that the one where if you turn the left bit 90 degrees to the left, all the colors change? And if you turn the bottom bit 90 degrees up, it becomes a hemisphere? And if you turn the blueward bit 90 degrees to the past, someone assasinates Adolf Hitler?
Man, I hated that puzzle.
You should put the Escher Cube in to the Klein Bottle, and mount the resulting anomaly on the Hayward blivet. It makes a Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum! Very handy if you are ever running late and need to arrive before you leave, or if you want to visit Titan…
Since when is evil defined as imperfection of the soul?
By whom?
Just looked into Merriam Webster and wasn’t finding my own definition “acting with intent to damage and hurt and enjoy it” but things that are much much more vague. Hmm. And there I thought the English language was better equipped that the German language n this case.
Definition of evil
eviler or eviller; evilest or evillest
1 a : morally reprehensible : sinful, wicked an evil impulse
b : arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct a person of evil reputation
2 a archaic : inferior
b : causing discomfort or repulsion : offensive an evil odor
c : disagreeable woke late and in an evil temper
3 a : causing harm : pernicious the evil institution of slavery
b : marked by misfortune : unlucky
“Since when is evil defined as imperfection of the soul?” I mean, he didn’t say it was the definition of evil…I do find it a reasonable description of it. And since he was the one who first started talking about evil in this discussion, I think it’s reasonable for him to further describe what he means without making the dictionary into the ultimate authority.
What I was trying to say was that to me, defining evil as imperfections of the soul makes the word worthless, as everyone has those and not everyone is or even acts evil(ly). So this definition sounds to me as a term used to suppress everyone, not a term to describe what I perceive as evil. So, as words are only sounds wrapped around ideas, I tried to find out whose idea we a talking about (while finding that my idea an MWs idea differ greatly).
There was a piece in The New Yorker a few years ago that you might find interesting: “What Do We Mean By ‘Evil'” by Rollo Romig. From the article: “Neiman herself is understandably reluctant to offer a single, narrow definition of her own for what “evil” means today, but what she does suggest is a useful description of what effect evil has: calling something “evil,” she writes, “is a way of marking the fact that it shatters our trust in the world.” Evil is both harmful and inexplicable, but not just that; what defines an evil act is that it is permanently disorienting for all those touched by it.”
That’s an AWFUL definition of evil. By that definition, nothing’s evil, and that can’t be right.
Really? I see that as a decent description– not definition, as it says that’s not what she’s really offering it as– though one that could include things that aren’t actually evil. (Though maybe they are experienced as evil by those affected by them.)
Why do you think that nothing could fall under that description?
@CJ: He seems to be treating evil as a spectrum, rather than black and white, if that helps it seem less like suppressing everyone. And he’s describing people moreso than acts in his suggested description.
Because the world works in shades of grey, and I would say Willis writing is close enough to the real world for his characters to also work in shades of grey. No one is completely black, and no one is completely white (in morality not race) so to call someone completely evil or completely heroic causes us to fail to properly understand them as people.
Yes, spectrum, sure. If we have a spectrum of behavior that at one end start with “good” has lots of shaded between good and neutral and then goes off to the other end which i’m not sure how to name, with lots of shades between neutral an that end, “evil” to me starts a rather long way off between neutral and the not named end.
I can relate to the Neiman description quoted above by Kit. It describes something that is extreme and disturbing which matches with my idea of evil, whereas some1 definition talks of the normality of humans not being perfect.
CJ and Yumi I suppose. Let me make my argument a bit clearer.
A. Evil has a fairly broad definition, but to simplify let’s describe it as anything that harms either mentally or physically a person or other life form whether intended or not.
B. Everyone occasionally performs actions that harm others, whether in large ways or small ways. For instance, while Blaine beating his wife is obviously a much worse act that Joyce trying to break up Walky and Dorothy, both are based around harming someone else to fulfill your own desire and as such both count as being evil.
C. Having determined that everyone commits “evil” acts, if we describe someone who commits evil acts as being “evil” we therefore must describe everyone as evil.
D. Therefore we cannot describe anyone as being evil because while it might be simple to compare Joyce to Blaine on extreme ends of the spectrum as we get close to the center it starts to rely more and more on your own personal morality system.
E. Is this saying therefore everyone’s actions are okay, because everyone does bad things? Of course not, but we punish based on action not on how we feel about the person. You would never say someone should go to prison because they’re “evil” because that doesn’t mean anything.
—
Now sadly if we want to say no truly evil people exist, because of the reasons mentioned above, we must also concur that no truly good people exist. Once again, an action can of course be good and selfless, but life isn’t a video game with a meter telling you how evil or good your are.
And good, I suppose, is anything that helps anyone, intentionally or not. Which leaves everyone and damn near any action as both good and evil, thus rendering the terms near meaningless.
Until we focus on the more extreme cases and get back to the conventional use of good and evil.
@thejeff, well the terms themselves aren’t meaningless, as I would say the difference between an evil and a good action is based on how many people it helps vs how many it hurts and to what degree. For instance, shooting a man before he can harm a child is good because typically children’s lives are seen as more important than dangerous maniacs. However if you were to shoot an unarmed shoplifter in the back, that would be seen as evil because stuff is always worth less than people’s lives.
If an amoral disregard for the well being of others or how your actions affect them (which isn’t even the situation with Mike because he actively seeks to hurt people for his own amusement) isn’t evil than what is anymore?
Disney corp.
Every monster was once an innocent baby.
Except Damien. There was never anything innocent about him even as a baby.
How many adults in this comic aren’t unabashedly pieces of shit? Hank, Amber’s Mom, Joe’s Dad seems to be recovering from being one.
Both Dorothy and Dina’s parents seem okay.
Weird to think that Galasso is probably a Top 5 Dad, though.
Leslie and… mindy?
Sierra’s parents, Dorothy’s parents, Dina’s parents.
Chloe Pudding is naive but her heart is kinda in the right place.
Leslie. Other parents, but they seem to be more one-off (though so is this flashback teacher). Jocelyn is technically an adult. I mean, so’s most of the cast, but she’s somewhat more adult than them.
She’s old enough to have some established writing and a place and (at least some) income of her own, at least. Probably late 20s, though I could see higher mid range.
I don’t think she’s the oldest (I think that’s John), so I don’t think there’s that big an age difference between her and Joyce…actually, remembering a Patron strip, I’d say she’s about five or six years older than Joyce is?
I think a conversation between Jocelyne and John indicated that there was enough of a gap that college was ‘different’ than when they went. I imagine Jocelyne’s on the lower end of the scale though, so it can’t be more than 8-9 years at most.
John seems to be from generation x, the generation of the south park creators and nostalgia critic. They are the current 30 year old people that see people below them (millenials) as entitled and obsessed with social change. Jocelyn seems to be a millenial in her 20s. Because this comic has no specific time because of 8 years of writing and just a semester in the time of the story, it’s difficult to say which generation Joyce belongs to.
On the topic of nice adults, there’s the manager of the floor, there’s Robin’s aide that is the only member of her party that wished her luck and reminded her of stuff she easily forgets, there’s Mike’s parents, there’s Asma, etc.
Asma– okay, IS, technically, an adult, but only in the same sense as the rest of the cast. She’s an undergrad.
30 year olds are millennials too. Yes, this is stupid.
I mean, generations on the whole are kind of stupid, but beyond that, I don’t see what’s stupid about 30 year olds being millennials? They have more claim to it than current 20 year olds, anyway.
Yeah, the millenial generation is 1980Ish to mid/late 1990ish/2000. I think a current 20 year old would be gen z but that’s debatable
There doesn’t seem to be a defined cutoff date, which is probably by design so aging boomers still have a fresh punching bag they can blame for things not being like Leave It to Beaver anymore.
How about we say Gen z is too young to remember 9/11 firsthand? That would put the line somewhere around 1997/1998. They’re the children of the youngest Gen X-ers and first-wave Millennials.
Surely the next generation will be called into being when millennials decide to hate young people?
Generations are always kind of loosely defined, so it’s not a particular attack by boomers on millennials.
John would be millennial, unless he’s a good deal older than I think. Joyce is now a Gen Z or whatever we’re going to call them (though she would have been a millennial back when the strip started. And late Gen X in the Walkyverse, I suspect.) Jocelyne probably somewhere on the cusp, though by the time she appears again she’ll probably be solidly Gen Z.
According to Pew Research Center, millennials are 1981 to 1996.
http://www.pewresearch.org/topics/millennials/
Yeah, pretty sure it’s John, Jordan*, Jocelyn, Joyce, unless I’m forgetting one in the middle there. So probably more like mid-20s, I guess? She seems to have more of her shit together than I do at 25, so I was skewing older.
* WHO ARE YOU, JORDAN?
Consider this image from said bonus strip, featuring young Jocelyne and pregnant Carol. In the text of the bonus strip, Jocelyne is being asked what a good name for a girl would be, and she responds with Jocelyne (she says “Josswin” and likes it because it’s “pwetty,” so she’s probably even younger in that strip than I was remembering).
I was thinking it could turn out that was from she was pregnant with Jordan, they just didn’t know the sex of the baby at the time, but Hank does say “for your sister,” which makes it seem like they do know. Gonna go read the comments on it for any clarification, I guess. Took me way too long to find.
Ragelli is right about the birth order (and in the other universe, there would be extra siblings to include – 2, I think) though I couldn’t point to specific comics.
In the next panel of that comic, the parents suggest “Joyce” as a simpler to say alternative to “Jocelyn” so I’d say that’s def Carol’s last pregnancy
I agree that she’s pregnant with Joyce then, but I don’t know that them suggesting the name Joyce for a girl is actually definite proof of that. Like, it could be they decide on “Joyce if it’s a girl” and then it’s a boy, so they name the next one Joyce. But if the birth order you seconded is confirmed, then that’s moot anyway.
(This comment got eaten by the spam filter yesterday because I linked to two other strips. Let’s try again!)
Yeah, as far as we know in this continuity, Hank and Carol had the four kids in that order.
John is probably in his mid-thirties. He looks older in that bonus comic than Amber, Mike, and Ethan do in the current flashbacks. Joyce also said he’s by far the oldest, and been out of the house almost as long as she can remember (which would suggest he either moved out or went to college when she was five or six). He also went to public school “twenty years ago” according to Carol.
Jordan is almost a complete mystery. So far we know he was “too… Jordan” to come along on Freshman Family Weekend, and there’s a “situation” regarding him and his parents (which came from “squeezing too hard” according to Hank). I’m guessing he rebelled hard and severed.
Jocelyne is very little in the flashback bonus strip, and is old enough to be out of college now, but she’s most likely closer to 20 than 30.
We know Joyce is eighteen.
I’d guess there’s a bigger age gap between John and Jordan than there is between the others.
Carla’s parents and Joss are pretty cool.
wait, amber’s mom’s a piece of shit? i thought she was okay, have i missed something? D:
I think you missed or misread “aren’t” in the first comment.
…This is bad, huh? This is…this is probably very, very bad.
Virtue is wasted on the virtuous.
Is this… sympathy I feel for Mike? This is the weirdest thing ever.
Wait a minute, an uncaring jerk surrounded by terrible adults..
..Is Mike Akechi from Persona 5?
It’s actually more like “an unusually charismatic, unusually perceptive kid turned into an uncaring, single-minded jerk *by* terrible adults.”
… And yet still, it applies to both Akechi and Mike. Smart cookies ruined by their surroundings and their reactions to them.
Akechi definitely isn’t an uncaring jerk, I think most of his problem is that he cared TOO MUCH and was consistently fucked over by an uncaring, corrupt world.
dared, crap teacher
Is this how the start of Mike’s Mike-ening begins? By using this incident and bruise as evidence to get the teacher fired?
…
To be fair, THAT TEACHER DESERVES TO BE FIRED.
Oh yeah. And I bet any testimony Mike would give would include ‘she admitted she marked Amber’s test incorrectly because Amber couldn’t be that smart.’ Which, while a he said/she said situation, gets a lot more scrutiny when at least one test has been misgraded, and probably more.
The problem is that he might be in a school that would not be inclined to listen to a “troublemaker” student as defined by going against a teacher in the first place.
A school where a teacher feels within her rights to physically abuse a student is a scary scary place.
And she clearly doesn’t care about leaving a mark or what his parents will say. And he’s new, they could be willing to sue for all she knows.
Yeah admin’s probably on her side. That ‘the way things are done here’ comment doesn’t bode well either. Man, fuck this school.
Yeah… 🙁
Reporting the incident would be the responsible thing to do, not the Mike thing to do. I’m thinking he reports it, the administration covers it up, and amber gets in trouble with her dad. Then Mike learns to solve things his way.
Mike??? 🙁 Dumbiverse Mike gets tragic back story… he needs a hug in that last panel.
And then Mike sued the school for assault….
Did Mike make a pass at the teacher and get soundly rejected? How old is he in the flashback?
While I can’t condone a teacher striking a student, a teacher rejecting the advances of a minor is very much justified
To me, a (much) more likely reading of this is that this strip directly follows the previous flashback strip: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/condone/
oh, that could make sense. I guess I didn’t think there would be a pause (last panel on June 12th) before the “how dare you!”
I usually think of “how dare you!” as being an immediate response
Going by the last flashback, he suggested the reason the teacher below ever Amber cheated on her test was because Amber was a girl, and the teacher, either because she was a woman or because he implied she was biased, took offense.
I sincerely doubt anything involved Mike making a pass at the teacher, especially going by his comment the other day, and hope you are joking for some reason.
No, I wasn’t joking, but I did think the possibility was far-fetched. If you go to the comment thread on June 18th at least three other people thought something inappropriate happened between Amber’s teacher and Mike
w…what could ever have given you the inclination to think that thats what happened
Teachers having relations with students was the subject of June 18th and the idea that this teacher was inappropriate with Mike was in the comments on that day. I guess it was on my mind
How you got to that from this is something I literally cannot comprehend.
Teachers having relations with students was the subject of June 18th and the idea that this teacher was inappropriate with Mike was in the comments on that day. I guess it was on my mind
No, he had the temerity to suggest to a female teacher that she lacked confidence in the capability of a student only because that student is female. The fact that the teacher overreacted so strongly suggests that his comment hit home.
As has been remarked on several times in reference to this flashback sequence, the kids are too young to be actively soliciting sexual encounters (unless they have already been sexually abused, but that doesn’t seem to be the story here).
But in any case, he should ask for his nickel back.
oh yes, him soliciting a teacher at that age would be hugely concerning.
What is this George Lucas style BS and is this the QC universe?
I wasn’t sure of the context so I looked it up.
So the teacher slapped him and physically assaulted him. How was that okay?
Considering this would’ve been, what, 2010…?
Well…it wasn’t? If you mean, “how was that excused”…Mike may not have reported it. If he did, I’ve heard of teachers and parents doing very not-okay things without any real reprimand, which could add to the breaking of Mike’s spirit/faith in the system.
Mike may not have reported it because it would have dragged Amber into the situation, and he may have seen how terribly Blaine would have reacted.
Well, Mike was obviously an evil little liar who accused a teacher of laying hands on him.
What a delinquent.
It’s so un-okay. Unfortunately, I’ve seen teachers get away with this sort of thing with nothing more than a slap of the wrist irl before. I hope Mike gets her in huge trouble for this though. (Me, actively rooting for Mike? What??)
Oh dear. Can’t say that I am surprised that the teacher got supremely offended at his query even if right, but Amber fleeing after or while Mike was standing up for her will not do well for either of their psyches. Not that I blame Amber mind, she was in an awful position mentally and emotionally at this period of her life, but I can see how the cracks in Mike will begin to appear starting here.
Amber didn’t flee. She’s hiding in the locker (unless she fled off panel). Of course, it does look like she fled and that’s not good for their relationship.
the alt-text points to her fleeing: “earlier amber always chose flee over fight”.
Did that bongo put her hands on him for questioning her biased grading?
If so, I think we need a dose of Leslie soon as the bad teachers feel like they’re outnumbering the good ones.
We’re only being shown plot-relevant teachers. Because the plot is “bad stuff happens to students”, pretty much only bad teachers are relevant.
Yeah, most students take about four classes a semester to maintain full time status, and I think we’ve only ever seen two (Calc and Gender Studies) for Joyce, Walky and Dorothy. Add in Amber and Danny’s CS class (New Alex is fine, and if there’s only ever been Single Alex who wasn’t attentive because she had Other Stuff to worry about, she was mostly a below average uselessness that’s totally redeemable now that the effort is being made,) and Jacob and Sarah’s pre-law (teacher unseen, I think,) and you’re still missing a LOT of teachers who are probably just fine.
For one thing, I guarantee you 90% of the fast is in English 101 or will be taking it next semester. I know some schools even use it as one of their ways to group freshmen together.
Gender Studies counts as an English credit, apparently (http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/02-uphill-from-here/why/), so maybe not English 101 exactly. But yeah, I do wonder what other classes people are taking.
Well, last we saw Dorothy, she seemed like she was taking (a break from) a political or legal class, IIRC.
Well Leslie has had some moments teaching that she’d rather, and everyone else, forget. Nothing like assaulting a child of course but putting Joyce and Becky in Robyns firing line certainly isn’t a good thing
the slowness of comics is frustrating at times like these. I really, really want to get the whole backstory at once, not one comic a week or whatever we’ve been getting so far. I want to know how this all fits together.
In the words of the immortal Pete Seeger: “Anything worthwhile takes a little time.”
So anything only worth killing time with is more readily available?
well, there is an entire internet of bad fanfiction I could try to distract myself with…
Tonight, as much as ever:
“Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.”
in the words of Veruca Salt:
Don’t care how
I want it now!
😉
In the words of Wilkie Collins (maybe): “Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait”
Veruca was not presented as a role model, you know.
that’s the joke.
Just remember, we could always be getting the same paced story, but with only 2-3 updates a week.
As grandpa Alfonse always said, anything free is worth saving up for.
Friendly reminder you get the next strip a day early on Patreon
Holy fuckberries and cream, lady, what the shit is wrong with you?
She’s in denial. Violently so.
I thought I wanted Mike backstory! I was wrong! So wrong!
So, despite trying to talk and do things nice, young Mike was abandoned by the friend he tried to help, learned the system was made of people with irrational prejudices, and got slapped by an authority figure whose job it is to help care for kids like him.
I wonder how much worse this ‘one bad day’ will get.
Huh.
It might that Amber was so reluctant to confront her teacher because she knew from past experience that Ms. Phillips got violent when a student even suggested that she was wrong.
And this highlights a probable source of Amber’s brokenness — she’s unsafe at home, and unsafe at school.
It might also explain why Mike goes the way he does — the principal and other school authorities might be looking the other way when Ms. Phillips does this shit.
Yeah, I highly doubt his test was an isolated case for Amber, or that Amber’s an isolated case in Ms. Phillips’s treatment of students.
Maybe. Though Amber at this stage wouldn’t be likely to confront a teacher, even if the teacher was known to be safe and friendly. It’s possible Ms. Phillips is part of the reason for that, but Blaine definitely gets the vast majority of the blame.
This is the second most horrifying thing I’ve seen today involving children.
…
Fuck today so fucking hard.
Are you talking about Trump’s concentration camps?
Specifically the ones for babies and toddlers, yeah.
Oh, wait, I forgot about a white supremacist doing a sad-trombone sound effect at hearing about a child with down syndrome being taken away from her mother.
And all the other updates on the concentration camps.
……..at this point, Young!Mike getting beaten by a teacher is the Funtime Comedy Hour.
I hate this timeline so fucking much.
Yeah. This universe is defective, let’s return it and get a new one :p
In the meantime, hugs for anyone who wants them! It seems like lots of us might need them right now.
In the words of the immortal E.E. Cummings:
“listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go”
What?!! 😮 I hadn’t heard about that!!
It’s just SO messed up…
So he was kicked out by a misogynist teacher, and Amber ran away because of her anxiety. Mike’s problems run deep.
Oh my. Seems like the last comment about being a girl hit too close to home for that teacher.
Some anime levels of tragic backstory here.
“Mike-san, why don’t you care about anything?”
“What good did that ever do?”
Mike’s basically an anime character at this point, period. The edge, the backstory, the physics-defying hair…
At this point, he just needs to suddenly become everyone’s ally and use the power of friendship to fire a mega-laser and destroy the evil teacher, and it’ll be confirmed.
Strange. I hear that last line of yours in Linkara’s Batman voice.
I get the feeling that is not a very good teacher.
Aww.
I forget at times that it’s impossible for everyone to stay innocent or Decent in a world filled with dipshites.
Comic Reaction:
😮 :c *hugs Mike, glares angrily at the terrible terrible teacher*
I’ve gone off on bad teachers before and well, yeah, a bad teacher can do a lot of harm in the same way a good teacher can make some small level of good impact on a student.
There are students who develop year-long aversions to subjects or ways of approaching the world simple because of a traditionally bad teacher who approached their subject and methodology with a bad edge.
A teacher like this is something beyond that, something terrifying.
A teacher who is not only bitterly sexist and grades down their own students but will physically assault a child to hide this?
There are no excuses that can be made about a person that vile and the effects of that are immense. Being physically attacked by a teacher removes any hope of safety from one’s surroundings and leaves a strong mark that you are in a place and a position where no one gives a shit about you and no one is going to help you.
Based on the backstory so far, we can assume that any attempt to follow up with this fails and through this Mike inherits the lesson vomited out to other white men of his generation that to care is to feel pain and be abused by a system you can otherwise opt out of.
And it explains somewhat his descent into edgelordery. After all, much like with Carla, there is a defense against vulnerability with projecting a front of “not caring”. A means of saying that you are not a target and nothing will drag you down.
Now while the method Carla employs is also not 100% healthy, Mike has chosen a very toxic method instead, one that preaches a defense from vulnerability by punching down and hurting others and losing himself in “for the lols” defenses so he can strangle whatever remains of his empathy that he blames for feeling this hurt and betrayal by the system.
And the thing is, I can understand that path of descent and sympathize with it to some extent, the reality of the matter is that as a white man, he can opt out of a lot of pain and while this is a truly horrific experience, it is also one those with less privilege frequently face with no end or hope for respite through apathy.
He has the privilege not to care and to opt out of a lot of bullshit and not only did he choose that over this admittedly awful temporary pain and vulnerability, but he chose to join in the victimization of others.
And that was a choice. One I hope we’ll see him grow out of as he is forced to confront his coping strategies for painful situations like this.
Bad teachers can do SO MUCH damage it’s horrible. I’m re-reading Amber’s reaction after her failed attempt to show off in class and… yeah it manages to put this teacher in an even worse light.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/braggart/
I always feel like you’re going over the top with this stuff Willis. The teacher isn’t just grading stuff badly on purpose, she’s also physically abusive and yet somehow won’t be called out for this? The RA isn’t just a violent alcoholic, she also got her job through illegal favoritism, and that will just keep on keeping on. The TA isn’t just sleeping with students, she lies about another person doing the same thing and this hearsay is accepted at face value without so much as a hearing. It’s not that bad people don’t exist, it’s that the badness of people without any checks or balances (or even notice) is rather unbelievable applied to every character without fail. In the next comic, Mike could burn her house down, Vice Principals style and for consistency’s sake, I would assume he just gets away with that forever.
Jason is getting a hearing. It hasn’t happened yet.
I think he blew it off because they want to hear Sal’s side of the story and he doesn’t expect her to lie for him.
Plus, he actually DID the thing so even if it were easy, he doesn’t plan to contest it.
Also, I don’t think Ruth got her job through illegal favoritism? She continued to be forced into it through strings being pulled by someone else, but we don’t know how she got it in the first place.
And on that note, we don’t know how this will be handled yet. Shitty Teacher seems to think it’ll be okay on her end but abusers always think like that.
Yeah, we don’t even know if Mike’s going to report it to the higher ups, much less how they’d handle it…and even if they let her mostly get away with it, yeah, that sucks and it’s a lot, but it’s not unrealistic.
You think the *comic* is over the top? Compared to t the comments about sjit happening in the real world? 0.o
Jason is getting a hearing but there is nothing unfair about his being fired because he’s guilty and deserves to be fired. He’s an awful teacher and took advantage of a student. Plus, he didn’t even give the grades. Bad form, man. Bad form.
He should be fired, but the way they’re going about it is horribly wrong.
Not just that they’re proceeding on hearsay and apparently with a Catch-22 defense required, but by putting the task of contacted the affected student on the offender, they’d be giving a worse TA a golden opportunity to pressure/bribe her into covering for him.
This has been frustrating me as well 🙁
I’m sorry, but I have upsetting news about the *actual* world we live in. Every last one of those things happens in real life. Hell, most of them have probably happened to people who read the comments here.
The disbelief people tend to have that someone even could be so awful is common. When you haven’t experienced it yourself you tend not to want to believe it, but it’s quite possible.
Hey try to not be so condescending, you know nothing about their life. You have no idea what they’ve been through, or if they know the “real world” or not.
I agree that we should be more considerate in our discussion in the way you mentioned, but I also want to note that calling things actual people have been through “over the top” or such can be disrespectful as well, and to some extent people are responding to that.
If events in the comic seem “over the top” to them, I feel extremely comfortable assuming that they don’t have experience with those kinds of events. With all of the absolutely awful shit happening right now, that was all the diplomacy I have the spoons for.
And yes, that was the diplomatic version. The US government is conducting mass child abuse right now. I don’t have tons of patience for people to figure out that internalized sexism and authority figures getting away with horrible misconduct are much too fucking common
^ All of this. “You have no idea” is a two-way street. I haven’t read anything that doesn’t pretty much mirror my school-age/college experience, so…perhaps it’s the OP who has no idea?
Granted. But it’d be nice, just once, to see a system work in a non-evil way. The only example that really comes to mind is Ruth’s therapy, and I personally expect that’ll go sideways too somewhere down the road.
The existence of bad things doesn’t mean that any event that occurs in this comic is now 100% believable. If that was the case, Ruth’s Grandpa could gun her down in cold blood in front of 100 people and not go to prison in the comic, and you would say “that is believable in universe because in real life, we have a terrible government committing human rights abuses.” Surely you can see how that’s a complete non sequitur and not the powerful argument you believe it to be.
The only thing that has happened in this comic that does not happen on a regular basis I real life is the costumed vigilante.
There are teachers who have gotten away with far worse than what we’re seeing here, for starters. Remember that team doctor just this year who was finally put in jail after sexually assaulting hundreds of minors over the course of DECADES? Just punching or slapping a student is much easier to get away with. Fuck, there are states where that shit is *legal*
Every single time some.awful thing happens in this comic (sometimes even before the full scope of something is known) there have been people in the comments sharing stories of how something similar happened to them. Every. Time.
People are capable of incredible cruelty. People who refuse to believe that are a major reason they’re able to get away with it. If you’re not willing to put the slightest bit of effort into understanding the connection there, that’s not something I can help you with.
*hugs*
…huh, that was meant for Cerberus. Replies, how do they work :p
Eh, just looks like you’re sending out love to the universe, or maybe baby!Mike. Could be worse.
.. I like both of those interpretations. 🙂
Given the state of the world, I’m rapidly losing my ability to cope with horrible petty injustice, even in a good comic I like. I’m probably gonna have to take a break unless all these characters get lined up in front of a guillotine.
yeah, shit like that’ll upset a dude
So, there are two reactions in the comments. One reaction is that people find this unbelieveable. The second reaction is that this is depressingly real. I fit into the second category. To those who’s reaction is the first, I envy your life so far.
I’ve had a pretty traumatic life and I find this completely OTT. I’m slowly losing patience with the comic. It’s dramatic to the point of ridiculousness. I really love the characters but I’m just tired of the storylines.
Poor Mike. :’-(
A pox on thee, teacher.
Shouldn’t Ms Phillips be tagged? Or do the tags hate her that much?
ok, seeing him not perfectly in control of everyone else makes me feel a bit more sympathetic. i think the two are mutually exclusive for me.
i wonder if this is gonna blow up for amber via her dad; if mike’s known as the clever one who helps people out at this time, a smart way to punish mike would be to punish amber.
getting real speculative, maybe that’s his arc, realizing he’s not powerful enough to perfectly reliably help people, which feels like an unacceptable loss of control, but he can stay in control if he tries to hurt them instead
notice how it seems that he was hit on the cheek or something, likely by the teacher.
Shouldn’t this be grounds for booting that teacher out of the school and onto her ugly mug?
I’ve decided I know how this story goes. Mike decides that being good isn’t working for him so he goes to a dojo which teaches him to be a thug and the arts of Bastard Karate. Then he returns to Amber and Ethan’s life as an Arrogant Sociopath.
Wait, that’s Cobra Kai the Youtube Series.
What the FUCK! D8
The feels… 🙁
Aaannnd we can add ‘assault of a minor’ to Ms Phillips’ list of ‘reasons why you suck’.
Had Amber run away or is she hiding in a locker?
We know that young Amber was really bad at handling confrontations. She’s probably fled.
Well, http://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/battles/ makes me wonder…
And mikes heart shrunk 3 sizes that day
But his brain for schemes grew 3 sizes to compensate
Wow, that woman needs to be fired
Out of a cannon
Into the sun
SCP style
Not KSP-style, though. The orbital mechanics alone make it all but impossible.
Y’just need enough boosters :p
Which SCP
Wait, those scratches/marks on his face weren’t there before, were they?
not that i noticed
P sure she slapped him
I am just picturing him starting a long drawn out plan to make her life more and more miserable until it all shatters around her. at least the at school part.
We can only hope.
*sees comic*
Ah.
http://i.imgur.com/a1Bntgt.jpg
The teacher hit him? WTF.
Power lends itself to abuse, especially in authority positions over minors or the otherwise-vulnerable..
I am pleasantly surprised -yes, genuinely surprised not trying to be funny- that I haven’t found any comments trying to warp a child hurt alone and on the verge of tears after being assaulted by a teacher into some sort of evil master plan. Can we finally agree that this 11 to 12 year old kid isn’t some evil genius sociopath who wants to burn the world and play adults like puppets?
That teacher needs to be fired immediately. There are very few cases in which a teacher can leave a mark on a student like that and I don’t think Mike fell into any of them. Whether she suspected Amber of cheating or not, it’s no longer a factor.
I have no mercy for someone that would harm a child.
Hands have been laid on a child. 🙁
Ohhhh, fuck you, lady. I would walk right into the principal’s office with that mark on my face.
Oh, MIKE. :c
Man that final panel Mike face.
ULTIMATE WOOBIE FACE.
I want to hug him and take him out for some icecream or something.
And I heavily dislike children!
I fucking hate adults who hit kids, I pisses me off!!! And they get away with it, because they “know better” Fuck her
This hits uncomfortably close to home.
I expected to see Mike get more depth, but I didn’t expect to empathize with him. Well played, Willis. Interested to see where his story goes.