He didn’t actually tell her that, though, unless I’m misremembering. He pointed out a flaw in her logic, with a lot of subtext that, if she thought through it, could possibly make her rethink her worries. (Not that she would, but you know.)
“If you really ARE doomed to follow your parents’ pattern, and YOU’RE never the one picking the jerks… WHICH one of them does that make you?”
Obviously, as a mere reader, I can take that much more calmly than Amber could, but what stands out there for me is the initial “If.” She’s worried she’ll repeat the pattern and end up like her mom, Mike points out that’s not the role — hey, Amber, have you considered the possibility that means you aren’t doomed to repeat the pattern? (No. No, of course you haven’t.)
He also later admitted (by which I mean, shortly before the fall) that he enjoyed psychologically messing with Amber and ‘pointing her dadwards,’ because she was ‘multiple time bombs.’
He was, if nothing else, aware that saying things like that to Amber could seriously mess her up. And likely would. He doesn’t get a pass for that. (I want him to live but that’s in no small part because I want him to actually fucking APOLOGIZE to Ethan and Amber for that shit.)
“Only a fool or a scoundrel tells the trith on social occasions.”
“I’m very disappointed in the Prime Minister. I thought that we had an arrangement that he wouldn’t tell any lies about me, and I wouldn’t tell the truth about him.”
Good enough reason to maybe get a restraining order, but “beaten into a coma and potentially brain damaged or crippled for life” doesn’t sound like a just response.
I’m not sure how far apart “a valiant effort” is from “he came close”, but I think they’re not all that distant. I’m actually thinking props to Joyce to be able to display some amount of humour about this all. Given the massive growth she’s displayed, and her own kind demeanor, I seriously doubt Joyce would ever think anyone actually deserved something like this. It seems more like a harsher than normal response due to the insane stresses she’s been under since… um… well the beginning of the comic really.
This is her first semester, not even 2 months in and
1. Her bff is gay (not a negative, but still a worldview changing event)
2. Becky is homeless
3. Assaulted and almost got raped after being drugged
4. Becky is kidnapped
5. Ding dong bandit (and capture)
6. Jacob Crush, confusion and rejection
7. R.A. at suicide risk/severe depression
8. Mom unmasked as Bananas/ ‘rents on the rocks
9. Mom springs guy who kidnapped becky
10. Joyce gets kidnapped
11 Finds out Mike’s in Hospital
12 Combat/car chase
13 Gun shot in hospital
14 whatwver else Ive forgot
Any one of those is enough to deal with, and with homework and exams. I mean *seriously* it’s a wonder she hasn’t lost her marbles.
I’d say it’s more the opposite; Mike is good at making people face the things they don’t want to acknowledge about themselves. But he does it by being an asshole.
So he’s kind of doing the wrong thing for the right reason. Maybe?
I would lean towards the second. And I will add, there are worse things than being an asshole, being nice does have its limitations (as much as I personally prefer it), and in several cases even before his recent arc I get the impression that he was doing the right thing for what might be the right reason (or at least a well-intentioned reason) in what may be the wrong way but is at least an unpopular way. *Some* of the time, to be clear – being a snarky asshole also seems to be a hobby… gotta stay in practice, I suppose.
That said, while I have found his character development very fascinating, there are parts of his perspective I really don’t feel like I understand.
But in real life, I will say I know at least one person who – while not specifically going out of their way to be an asshole – does use whatever means at their disposal to try to chase a greater good. They’re really good at applying it. It’s a bit like seeing a drunken master in action to watch, but they get their points across, and they do leave people better than they found them in general. I mention that because I was definitely raised to think being nice was all-encompassing, myself, and seeing them in action, over time they disabused me of that notion. If you know the trope Omniscient Morality License (warning: TV Tropes named the idea), it’s about the closest I’ve seen to a human pull a lower-stakes version of that off.
Of course, if you think you’re doing that but actually failing at it, you’re just being a horrible asshole who’s ALSO self-satisfied…
Mike’s development implies that he was trying to ‘tough love’ people into better versions of themselves so it was for well-intentioned reasons, in the wrong way that mostly made things worse, based on misguided beliefs that people needed to learn the lessons he himself had learned (to not care what others think, to hide vulnerabilities, to not trust people not to turn around and hurt you etc.).
We’ve had the Mike discussion many times, and I doubt this one will solve the conundrum between “Mike is just an asshole” and “Mike does it for the right reasons,” but I’ve been wondering whether both views aren’t right, explaining the divergence in viewpoints between Danny and Ethan. I don’t have time for an archive dive at the moment, but is it possible that whenever Mike’s been arguably doing the right thing, he’s been doing it to his friends, while with everyone else he was just an asshole pure and simple?
Or arguably thinking he was doing the right thing, since his own realization that he was using Blaine’s own arguments to justify it makes it pretty clear that at least with Amber he wasn’t actually doing the right thing.
I would say right and well-intentioned are different. Mike seems to me at least, to have been ultimately well-intentioned of trying to improve people. But were these the right reasons to do these things? No.
Because no one else agreed these lessons were necessary, it was not his place to try to forcibly teach them and if improving them was his entire goal, he could have talked to them straight up about their hypocrisy. I think at least part of it was self-validation and part of it was well-intentioned most of the time but then at other times he was just an ass (to Walky in particular as I think he didn’t particularly like Walky much).
“Nickel deficiency is accompanied by histological and biochemical changes and reduced iron resorption and leads to anaemia. It can disturb the incorporation of calcium into skeleton and lead to parakeratosis-like damage, which finds expression in disturbed zinc metabolism.” You’re welcome.
I don’t think so. That would mean that his line, “I did your mom for a nickel” is saying that Mike is a prostitute instead of your mom, which ruins his attempt at insulting you.
I’ve always found the practice of not speaking ill of someone because they’re dying/in mortal danger/dead is a rather strange one. To a point I understand the idea behind it, you don’t want the last thing you say about someone to be mean. But on the other hand if they were not a great person then trying to say something nice is disingenuous.
I think this is true but I also think time, place, and context matter.
For example, saying ‘They were awful all the time and I’m not personally grieving’ is a lot more understandable at home when talking to your family than at the hospital talking to one of their grieving loved ones. In the latter case, I’d personally probably say something like ‘We weren’t close, but I’m sorry for your loss.’
Avoiding fights at the funeral. Honestly it has more to do with keeping the “peace” in the affected community than with who died. Sometimes it works other times it just lets things fester.
Personally, I don’t think there’s much value in talking about recently dead individuals – they can’t really do anything anymore, after all. If they’ve left behind problems, you can generally deal with the problem itself without going into detail about the person; likewise, if they’ve left behind some toxic advice or mindsets, then you can address those philosophies directly. There’s rarely a need to talk about the person at all.
As such, I don’t think there’s much need to say more than something like “I feel sorry for their friends and family” if the subject comes up, even in the case of genuinely evil people – and since most people are loved by somebody, I’m not really comfortable causing them more pain by celebrating a death.
To summarize, in my opinion, you don’t have to praise a bad person just because they died – but there’s no reason to go out of your way to praise them, either. There’s plenty of bland, neutral platitudes for times like these.
I think it is more for the people around them than for the person themselves. You don’t have to lie and say they were great or nice or wonderful, and you don’t have to be dishonest with people that don’t care or have no attachment to them, but you also don’t want to be known as the ass that made it difficult for all the grieving people that actually do care what happens to them by blurting out all their horrible traits during a hard time as if trying to convince them to not grieve them.
It’s being sensitive to the fact that their relationships with others were different than yours with them and that even if they weren’t, the feelings of other people can be complex. You can know someone sucks but also still care if something bad happens to them (like, a lot of people feel this way for family members and people that were malicious but in their lives a long time) because not everyone is at an extreme of ‘cares immensely and loves them’ or ‘cares not at all and hates them’, sometimes people are in a weird middle of kind of cares but doesn’t trust them or want to be around them much.
Sort of an extension of the ring theory of support, I think: comfort in, vent out. You don’t have to pretend you liked someone to say ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ to their grieving spouse/child/sibling/whatever, because as you say, people’s relationships even to real assholes tend to be complicated. (See: Becky. And I’m pretty sure that, even acknowledging Mike was TERRIBLE to them, him dying like this would be worse for Amber and Ethan’s mental health than him living. For one thing, if he hadn’t had the realization and heroic sacrifice ploy, I’m pretty sure they were in fact starting to grow away from him and he might eventually have pissed them off enough for a massive friend break-up. Now Amber has a survivor’s guilt-based Mike living rent-free in her head and Ethan is in fact defensive of his Asshole Friend if only out of loyalty to the maybe-dying. I don’t see either of those getting better if he actually dies, not any time soon.)
No matter who someone is or how shitty that person might have been overall, there has to be something good about them. It is only the polite thing to try to find it.
And that’s why I hate this so-called “cancel culture” so much. For example, take George Washington led the Continental Armies to win our independence from Great Britain and went on to pilot the tiny little ship that was the foundling United States through troubled seas as our first president, or Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the document that became the birth certificate of our country (the Declaration of Independence). But – ohmyGod! – they also were wealthy men who *gasp!* owned slaves, so they are not worthy of recognition or memorialization because of that.
Or take it the other way. Bill Cosby turned out to be a sexual predator – not good, and I am in no way trying to minimize it – and Garrison Keillor also fell from grace due to alleged sexual improprieties. But is that any reason to cast everything and anything either of the two did – Keillor’s beloved radio program and writings, and Cosby’s early comedy routines, ground-breaking TV shows (as ‘Alexander Scott’ in “I Spy”, he became the first black man have a lead role in an American TV series), books, and movies (with the possible exception of ‘Leonard: Part 6’) – onto the dungheap never to be mentioned again?
As a matter of fact, I have been to both — as well as to Mount Rushmore, where both the men I mention are also immortalized in stone. And there have, occasionally, been trial balloons floated that the site is politically incorrect — honoring four white Americans by sculpting a mountain in the middle of the Black Hills, an area considered sacred by many groups of Native Americans, and that the mountain should be blasted clear and the mountain restored, as much as possible, to its natural state.
As for the Washington and Jefferson Memorials in Washington or the historic sites of Mount Vernon and Monticello in Virginia, I haven’t heard any serious talk of tearing them down, but when you look at how other statues have been removed – statutes of Columbus, for example, or that statue of Edward Colston that was torn down and tossed into the Thames in London because, among other things, he had been a 17th-century slave trader, or various representations of Native Americans because of “stereotyping”, I suppose it’s only a matter of time before George, Thomas, and the rest of the Founding Fathers are next up on the chopping block.
This whole conversation honestly makes me think about the situation with our current dumbass in charge
And i have been of the strong opinion that no one in his family will mourn him
And so if he couldn’t even have loved ones who would mourn him should he ever finally be removed from his pathetic life
Then why should anyone be polite about it
He was is ass of a person and should he ever actually die i will say im happy about
Good riddance
Fuck him
Or can anyone honestly say he deserves platitudes when his time comes?
It gets complicated when dealing with politicians (or to a lesser extent with public figures in general.)
The death of a (in)famous politician is often used not just to rehabilitate their image in a space where it’s impolite to counter the propaganda, but also to rehabilitate the crap they did and the policies they pushed and even other still active political figures linked to them.
Perhaps we ought to reconsider the custom of raising statues to heroise people. Maybe “thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image of anything” is wiser than I thought.
Yeah, you wouldn’t think the Sally Hemings situation could get creepier than it is by inherent ‘she was considered his property and could not say no, also she was 14 for fuck’s sake,’ and then you learn about the half-sister thing and somehow it gets EVEN WORSE.
cancel culture is treating owning slaves as something more than a faux pas, I guess. Nobody is allowed to talk about the atrocious things anyone did, because doing so would be rewriting history or something. pc gone amok, cancel culture, civility, sjw, blah blah blah.
It’s normally a decent practice. Protecting grieving loved ones from petty gossip and complaints.
It can get out of hand when the dead or dying person was horrible and their victims are pushed by social convention into enduring people praising him without being able to respond. In this comic, Blaine and Ross are both dead. Should Amber and Becky refrain from saying anything bad about them?
I think this situation has a further dimension to it in that Mike got severely injured trying to keep Blaine and Ross away from the people in question. It’s one thing to talk shit about a jerk you don’t like when they’re hurt and/or dead, it’s quite another to do it when said jerk has just taken a (metaphorical) bullet for you.
It’s not lying …. it’s a tactful omission of details.
Look at it this way. You’re at the hospital and your child/parent/close friend/loved one is lying there with the prognosis still in some doubt. Do you really want someone else who knows that person detailing his past shortcomings, failings, or transgressions, or would you rather have that other bystander follow Thumper’s mom’s advice — “If you can’t say somethin’ nice, don’t say nothin’ at all?”
The grandfather of my two best non-spouse friends kinda did that. He left something in his will to a raging white supremacist, provided the gobshite said something at his funeral.
For me that goes back into ring theory: Amber knew Blaine way the fuck better than that guy. She wasn’t obliged to sugarcoat things for some dude she didn’t know. It feels a bit significant that we never see Aunt Molly who told them he’d died. Since she was on speaking terms with Stacy, I imagine she’s not a total asshole, so I suspect any interaction between the three of them there would involve at least some variation of ‘I’m not going to pretend he wasn’t an abusive cheating mobster but feelings are Weird, right? Ugh, why was he so terrible’ because… yeah, sometimes that’s how feelings work. Amber’s also way less blunt with Faz in that sequence, because he’s processing everything at once. She doesn’t need to give him the ugly details right there and then.
(I’ll note that this is… not entirely hypothetical a scenario for me. I’m not gonna pretend to be sad when my shitty biological grandfather finally dies, but the odds of my mother having complicated emotions about it are pretty high because she’s interacted with him more than three times ever, and all of those were before I was ten. The rest of us can let her have messy emotions including grief and wish that she didn’t have to go through said messiness without pretending we feel anything besides relief.)
Describing Mike as nice is certainly bearing false witness, But what is fascinating is that you think he would appreciate being described that way. Mike goes out of his way to avoid being his parents. So I have a tough time seeing it as beating false witness *for* him.
Look I’m just here for Hank. He’s vaulted his way up to possibly top 5 DoA characters (and that’s with me kinda dreading the parents slowly becoming and more relevant in the strip).
Another thing to consider with Danny was more who he was saying it to, Ethan, Mike’s friend of 5 years who would very much care if he died being told that his friend is an asshole who deserves a potentially lethal coma, (also Mike’s mother was on the other side of the door and could have over heard him verses saying it to Hank, who I am not even sure knew Mike’s name 5 minutes ago.
He said this to Ethan heavily implying that he’s wrong for caring about Mike and setting up a self-interested comparison. Don’t make Danny’s words sound like an abstract statement of fact (because no one’s denying that Mike is an asshole). Who he said it to and why matters.
Look, people have been misrepresenting Mike’s words and actions since the beginning of the comic, so having a standard about Danny’s words seems a little bit double standard-y. Besides, Joyce admitted in Panel 4 that she’s not going to say “bad things” (a.k.a., the truth) while he’s in the hospital.
Nowhere did Danny say Ethan was wrong for caring about Mike, he made the blatantly correct point that Mike has been a terrible person forever and the hurt he caused still happened.
^ This. I once had… I can’t honestly call her a friend, but she was a friend of a friend, let’s leave it at that. Anyway, she had a ROUGH upbringing. Lower socio-economic background, absentee dad, borderline abusive mom, among other woes. As a result, she developed this personality where her mood is constantly on a hair trigger where if you don’t shower her with praise and think she’s God’s gift to the world, she will absolutely go OFF on you. She also had racist and anti-Muslim views, and wasn’t shy about voicing them. (And if you try to correct her about these, then see the above about “going off on you.”)
I tolerated her behaviour after our mutual friend explained why she’s like this because she’s been through a lot, but does her history obligate me to forgive and accept what she does? No. As I see it, this is pretty similar to Ethan’s situation with Dan, except that in his case, he knows that Mike does it because Mike feels that tough love and pointing out the flaws in others helps improve them. But to anyone else on the outside looking in, Ethan just has a raging a-hole for a friend and can’t understand why he sticks by him.
I’m not sure how much Ethan actually knows that – or how much it’s really true for that matter.
How much of Ethan’s support for Mike is a result of Mike manipulating him over the years? Is Ethan better off for Mike’s help? Amber certainly isn’t, as Mike himself realized. Ethan doesn’t know about that little revelation.
Sometimes people on the outside can see the abuse for what it is, while those inside are too close.
He suggested it might be a good thing if Mike doesn’t wake up from the coma for a while, then said saving Amber doesn’t mean he’s not still a jerk for earlier behavior.
And many people here extrapolated that first part to mean “thinks he should die or never recover”, since that is the common outcome of extended comas, but it wasn’t anything he said and likely didn’t even consider.
I do agree with him that both Ethan and Amber would likely benefit from an extended break from Mike.
Oh, it was DEFINITELY shortsighted foot-in-mouth. (Whoever mentioned that the sheer ‘holy fuck this is bad’ of Mike’s coma was probably a lot realer to Ethan, who’s been in the room, than Danny who hadn’t was I think onto something as well.) Doesn’t make it any less ‘Danny, my man, STOP DIGGING’ or Ethan any less justified to be pissed at him for saying it right there and then.
Oh, I’m sure. They’re not getting it while he’s comatose or if he dies in such a traumatic fashion, not any time soon, but I’d been hoping it was building to a friend breakup and any possible ‘Mike realizes he fucked up and tries to atone’ was prompted by recognizing he FUBARed those relationships and had been doing it for a while.
Joyce saying he came *close* to deserving it sometimes in an abstract sense of deserving, in frustration with him, to her dad who has no attachment to Mike, to just vent some feelings, is very different from saying it to one of Mike’s closest friends that is absolutely broken up about what happened, doubling down when given an out, then doubling down AGAIN when given a second chance to opt out of that line of conversation.
Mike is a very hateable person, and you can barely tolerate if you find him attractive (Ethan and Amber), or if you saw him as the token evil teammate (his teammates in Walkyverse). I am not joking about him being token evil. He didn’t care about civilians in danger and didn’t do his job of taking them out of danger, and he kicked a little girl just to troll some anti war protestors.
Willis did the right thing of toning down the worst aspects of his characters in this universe, except for the villains who just became realistically more hateable than their saturday cartoon villain versions.
I like that Willis is showing us it’s possible to be honestly critical of Mike in the interests of fairness and justice even while he’s in the hospital and not be petty and hurtful about it. Becky is the anti-Danny.
I like that Becky is teaching Joyce things like that. Dad did come up with a good one too. You combine them and you might get a good impression of Mike!
I just want to say that if Becky pursues any objective that being the best DA Boolmington ever had, I’mma be disappointed. She’d be great in a law-room or court.
Becky is taking notes for when she has to go through her father’s funeral.
Oh god, Becky is probably the one going to have to make his funeral arrangements. Unless it’s a very simple tag and bag him and she elects not to. Like what happens when no one claims a body anyway? Though granted if Becky does not probably the church will.
The state of the comments these past few strips has left me woefully uncertain on how to read the tone of that comment and that’s just deeply unfortunate lmao
Apparently him being an asshole gives people a free vaguely wishing death/comma upon him pass. Funny how that works, asshole behaviour is defensible when thrown upon an asshole, I suppose. Kinda annoying how they seem to somehow be holding the moral high ground while doing this though.
The comment section when Danny was firmly sticking his entire leg down his throat was a fun learning experience for sure. Enlightening.
He wasnt just an asshole. He was a very manipulative asshole. That he had some sort of vague good intention doesn’t suddenly absolve him. As they say Intent isn’t magic.
Yeah like, the most important takeaway from Mike’s Heel Realization (thanks TVTropes) is that he absolutely doesn’t deserve immediate forgiveness for being an abusive shit for years and years, deliberately provoking his two closest friends out of the self absorbed belief he knew what’s best for them.
Mike himself, rather drastically, threw his life on the line when he realized that he pointedly was Not Helping.
It’s not just what he did to Ethan and Amber, though. He’s also been needlessly violent (Joe on the date with Joyce), tried getting some harsh payback on Walky for stupid shit (seriously, dude, people fart), used sex for crazy warped purposes (him fucking Ethan was intended to hurt Danny), and at one point offered a mob stooge a key to the Warner family home and told him to get killing. And all the while, people like Crash up above piously prated about how he was a galaxy-brain Asshole Sage that was “just trying to help”.
For the record, I don’t want him to die. But one good deed in NO WAY makes up for a(n apparent) lifetime of nihilistic misanthropy.
Can I have a quote on me saying he was a galxy-brained Asshole Sage that was “just trying to help”?
I’ve never once defended Mike’s action or said he was right. What I don’t like is how him being a bastard somehow makes the behaviour everyone else is displaying not only okay but also the height of good, high moral ground. It is not.
This is not a zero sum game where Mike being wrong somehow makes everyone else right. You can actually me critical of both, I invite you to try it. (:
Fun fact, none of those things justify wishing for him to be in a comma.
Being an asshole to an asshole doesn’t, in fact, help anyone.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
It is, in fact, possible to notice Mike is a bastard and acknowledge that without feeling like you have to excuse the rest of the cast for behaving in ways you’d absolutely be bashing him for.
Mike is a bastard; the growing line of characters being insensitive about his current situation are still way out of line, mate.
Wherein it is proved once and for all that Becky is genuinely suited to be a politician’s spokesperson, and thus deserves her job not just because she’s remarkably good at Twitter for someone who barely knew what it was a few weeks ago.
Yeah. Death or indefinite coma means cutting off any potential he had to get better, it guarantees him a place in Amber and Ethan’s brains long-term, and doing so in a Big Dramatic Act of Redemptive Sacrifice sets up this weird dynamic. (Danny has a point that those don’t change the harm the person’s done up to that point, it just was not an argument anyone was gonna take well right outside his hospital room after seeing him comatose.)
Also, like. On the purely visceral ‘this is fiction but still effective at evoking emotions’ level, it is ROUGH seeing an eighteen-year-old kid in that state. Gotta be even worse for the characters, who aren’t viewing it at a distance.
If she’s trying to find positives there’s how he stepped up as a chaperone on her date with Joe and bounced him the fuck out. I’m sure Hank’ll appreciate that.
Pretty sure that if Hank finds out any details, he won’t be happy with Joyce about it. Yes, Joe was just looking for another notch on his belt, but both Mike and Joyce were in the wrong on that one, hands-down.
I’m finding your “doing x to own the libs” phrase confusing in context. As far as I’m aware bashing Mike doesn’t fall on a conservative/liberal spectrum. Perhaps you could explain.
Gonna be honest, that was more relevant with the Danny incident at this point they’re all just kinda blending in for me.
I’m mainly annoyed about how everyone is going out and about doing their best impression of Mike while he is neither there nor in a good condition and the mental gymnastics going on for trying to defend that behaviour as good and proper.
Like imagine if Joyce was in a comma and Mike was pulling this stuff, people’d be up in arms but since it’s him in the comma it’s fine to go off about it ig.
Either way, think it’s time for me to drop it, reckon I’ve gotten too into it this time.
“Mike habitually said—no, says, it’s still the present—hurtful things to people. He seems to especially enjoy making people confront how their words and actions conflicted with their idea of themselves, which he has an unusual knack for understanding. Kind of like Socrates—I could have wanted to make him drink hemlock sometimes. But I don’t think he ever lied, and he was seldom wrong. No, he didn’t deserve this.”
About Mike? Hmm… Try this. Mike Warner is someone focussed on total honesty to the point where he despises tact. He is so in despair at what he considers the hypocracy of the world that he feels that people who are nice are generally lying ot themselves. He has hurt a lot of people in his time but, I suspect, in many ways, he does so because he thinks it will stop him from being vulnerable to being hurt himself.
In honesty, I’m not sure if Mike had ever allowed himself to acknowledge that he was genuinely loved until those last moments as he was going under as Amazi-Girl was racing him to the hospital.
“Tell me about him.”
Can we all take a step back and appreciate Hank for being a good person and dad? No wonder Joyce allowed him in. No wonder Becky trusts him.
I’m not saying that I’m without empathy, I try to be kind. I’m just saying that I’m like that colorful old man who yells, “you kids stay offfa my lawn!” I just never let them know I’m not serious about it. It’s just grass, it’ll grow back by next week.
“He means well but he had the crappiest way of showing it. That is, until he pushed himself and his friend’s dangerous father over a stairwell, to put her out of harm’s way.”
The best way to word it to me would be “he’s a good person when he wants to be one but most of the time he’s a smart ass…and he’s really good at that last part.”
As long as we’re on the subject of Mike, let me just say: Danny is right. I hope he stays in a coma. Mike is the worst character in this comic. I hope he doesn’t come back.
Blaine and Ross progressed a story, they were villains and I liked them for that. Mary is annoying and an amusing antagonist. I don’t believe Mike actually helped any situation he was in that couldn’t have been helped in a non-Mike way except his fall.
(i figure it’s not going to go through if i change my username in the slightest bit so reposting)
To be fair, Blaine and Ross were worse but are now dead.
He’s perhaps somewhat less insufferable than Mary and friggin’ Carol. Although I don’t know that I’ve ever seen any signs of him being truly supportive. I guess in a way he was supportive of Ethan coming to terms with his sexuality through casual sexual encounters, which probably helped his confidence. Even though it started as a way to make Danny jealous, it seemed like there was some good intention there, eventually.
And I suppose after binging Shortpacked!, I have a bit more understanding how Mike really doesn’t know how to express affection except by being a jerk. So I guess he’s not really a bad person. Personally, I don’t think I’d ever want to hang out with him, though. His actions really aren’t condonable and people should have probably called him out for bringing a toxic atmosphere and refused to associate with him. But the confrontation part of that doesn’t seem like a good idea after this traumatic event. Hopefully he’ll be working on being less of an ass to everyone, at least toning it down to a few mean jokes that aren’t specifically targeted at people’s weak spots… *shrugs*
He’s definitely the worst of the people on the cast page. I’m not quite comfortable with wishing an irreversible coma on him but I’m not exactly looking forward to his next appearance either.
He’s been a complete asshole, probably the worst of the vaguely protagonist characters.
I very much hope he comes back soon, because I really want to see him process the realization he had during the fight before he jumped Blaine. Even assholes can have character growth and letting him linger in a coma is letting him off easy.
Family friend was a district judge. He had a rule that if had nothing good to say about someone, he wouldn’t say anything. But if you asked him about some politicians, he would say “I have nothing to say about him”which spoke volumes.
It amazes me still that Mike was intentionally an unrepentant asshole and yet people insist on repenting for him. It’s amazing how much some character get to get away with just because they are the hashtag good guys and not cartoonish evil goons like Blaine/Toedad.
I don’t like Mike (well I think I like him now, it’s complicated), but I think it was residual good will from the Walkyverse where he was a more complex character whose worst actions were excused by his cartoony slapstick universe.
I say this but the recent reveal of his machinations, that he genuinely believed he was helping Amber and Ethan and ended up making their lives worse, that’s compelling. That’s probably the best place to take what I used to think was a completely irredeemable character.
Oh I flat dislike him, I just have just enough hope he might actually stop being an asshole if he wakes up after that realization and think it’d be better for Ethan and Amber’s mental health if he does. Plus, to quote certain hit musicals: dying (heroically) is easy, young man, living is harder.
Yeah, it’s probably better for Ethan and Amber’s mental health if he does wake up. Though maybe not if he went back to “prodding Amber’s bear”. They would certainly have been better off without him though – had he gone off to a different school or some such.
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no he didn’t Joyce
he gave it a valiant effort, but no
I don’t know, the day he told amber she was on the path to becoming her father was pretty bad.
But it was the truth.
Was it tho?
He didn’t actually tell her that, though, unless I’m misremembering. He pointed out a flaw in her logic, with a lot of subtext that, if she thought through it, could possibly make her rethink her worries. (Not that she would, but you know.)
“If you really ARE doomed to follow your parents’ pattern, and YOU’RE never the one picking the jerks… WHICH one of them does that make you?”
Obviously, as a mere reader, I can take that much more calmly than Amber could, but what stands out there for me is the initial “If.” She’s worried she’ll repeat the pattern and end up like her mom, Mike points out that’s not the role — hey, Amber, have you considered the possibility that means you aren’t doomed to repeat the pattern? (No. No, of course you haven’t.)
He also later admitted (by which I mean, shortly before the fall) that he enjoyed psychologically messing with Amber and ‘pointing her dadwards,’ because she was ‘multiple time bombs.’
He was, if nothing else, aware that saying things like that to Amber could seriously mess her up. And likely would. He doesn’t get a pass for that. (I want him to live but that’s in no small part because I want him to actually fucking APOLOGIZE to Ethan and Amber for that shit.)
That’s no excuse: might even make it worse.
“Don’t you ‘truth’ me, and I won’t ‘truth’ you.”
“Only a fool or a scoundrel tells the trith on social occasions.”
“I’m very disappointed in the Prime Minister. I thought that we had an arrangement that he wouldn’t tell any lies about me, and I wouldn’t tell the truth about him.”
Citation needed
(Honestly, would love to find that stript. my memories of the situation are very similar to Rabid Rabbit’s description)
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/ensnared/
Thanks mate!
I’m a bit scandalized that saying something bad should come close to justify being beaten into a coma.
IMO some of the things Mike did or said would qualify for giving him a friendly wallop, but that’s where I’d draw the line.
The fact that, by his own admission, he was exacerbating Amber’s mental illness for his own amusement feels like a good reason to me.
Verbal abuse is a real thing and goes far beyond what we normally think of as “saying something bad.”
Good enough reason to maybe get a restraining order, but “beaten into a coma and potentially brain damaged or crippled for life” doesn’t sound like a just response.
I’m not sure how far apart “a valiant effort” is from “he came close”, but I think they’re not all that distant. I’m actually thinking props to Joyce to be able to display some amount of humour about this all. Given the massive growth she’s displayed, and her own kind demeanor, I seriously doubt Joyce would ever think anyone actually deserved something like this. It seems more like a harsher than normal response due to the insane stresses she’s been under since… um… well the beginning of the comic really.
This is her first semester, not even 2 months in and
1. Her bff is gay (not a negative, but still a worldview changing event)
2. Becky is homeless
3. Assaulted and almost got raped after being drugged
4. Becky is kidnapped
5. Ding dong bandit (and capture)
6. Jacob Crush, confusion and rejection
7. R.A. at suicide risk/severe depression
8. Mom unmasked as Bananas/ ‘rents on the rocks
9. Mom springs guy who kidnapped becky
10. Joyce gets kidnapped
11 Finds out Mike’s in Hospital
12 Combat/car chase
13 Gun shot in hospital
14 whatwver else Ive forgot
Any one of those is enough to deal with, and with homework and exams. I mean *seriously* it’s a wonder she hasn’t lost her marbles.
Huh, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a new DOA this early, I was just here to reread yesterday’s as I always do before the new one goes up.
Tell me about him.
Well, sometimes he does the right thing, but it’s usually for the wrong reason.
I’d say it’s more the opposite; Mike is good at making people face the things they don’t want to acknowledge about themselves. But he does it by being an asshole.
So he’s kind of doing the wrong thing for the right reason. Maybe?
I would lean towards the second. And I will add, there are worse things than being an asshole, being nice does have its limitations (as much as I personally prefer it), and in several cases even before his recent arc I get the impression that he was doing the right thing for what might be the right reason (or at least a well-intentioned reason) in what may be the wrong way but is at least an unpopular way. *Some* of the time, to be clear – being a snarky asshole also seems to be a hobby… gotta stay in practice, I suppose.
That said, while I have found his character development very fascinating, there are parts of his perspective I really don’t feel like I understand.
But in real life, I will say I know at least one person who – while not specifically going out of their way to be an asshole – does use whatever means at their disposal to try to chase a greater good. They’re really good at applying it. It’s a bit like seeing a drunken master in action to watch, but they get their points across, and they do leave people better than they found them in general. I mention that because I was definitely raised to think being nice was all-encompassing, myself, and seeing them in action, over time they disabused me of that notion. If you know the trope Omniscient Morality License (warning: TV Tropes named the idea), it’s about the closest I’ve seen to a human pull a lower-stakes version of that off.
Of course, if you think you’re doing that but actually failing at it, you’re just being a horrible asshole who’s ALSO self-satisfied…
Remember, Mike will chaperone a date, if he’s allowed to punch people who act inappropriately.
Mike was waaaaaaay more inappropriate than Joe during that date.
Mike’s development implies that he was trying to ‘tough love’ people into better versions of themselves so it was for well-intentioned reasons, in the wrong way that mostly made things worse, based on misguided beliefs that people needed to learn the lessons he himself had learned (to not care what others think, to hide vulnerabilities, to not trust people not to turn around and hurt you etc.).
We’ve had the Mike discussion many times, and I doubt this one will solve the conundrum between “Mike is just an asshole” and “Mike does it for the right reasons,” but I’ve been wondering whether both views aren’t right, explaining the divergence in viewpoints between Danny and Ethan. I don’t have time for an archive dive at the moment, but is it possible that whenever Mike’s been arguably doing the right thing, he’s been doing it to his friends, while with everyone else he was just an asshole pure and simple?
Or arguably thinking he was doing the right thing, since his own realization that he was using Blaine’s own arguments to justify it makes it pretty clear that at least with Amber he wasn’t actually doing the right thing.
I would say right and well-intentioned are different. Mike seems to me at least, to have been ultimately well-intentioned of trying to improve people. But were these the right reasons to do these things? No.
Because no one else agreed these lessons were necessary, it was not his place to try to forcibly teach them and if improving them was his entire goal, he could have talked to them straight up about their hypocrisy. I think at least part of it was self-validation and part of it was well-intentioned most of the time but then at other times he was just an ass (to Walky in particular as I think he didn’t particularly like Walky much).
As he realized, “well-intentioned” in the same way Blaine’s abuse was “well-intentioned”.
No, Mike is good at making people face things *HE* thinks they need to face about themselves.
He is not a mind reader, and he is CERTAINLY no Weatherwax.
He’s not even a full blown Mike yet. He’s still the DOA larval form of Mike.
Ironically, the doctors examining Mike have discovered that he has a nickel deficiency.
That would be fairly amusing actually, although I don’t know what nickel deficiency does to someone.
“Nickel deficiency is accompanied by histological and biochemical changes and reduced iron resorption and leads to anaemia. It can disturb the incorporation of calcium into skeleton and lead to parakeratosis-like damage, which finds expression in disturbed zinc metabolism.” You’re welcome.
Facing reduced iron resorption, obviously Mike needs to trade someone’s mom for a nickel and exchange the nickel for steel pennies, then eat them.
Well, of course he does, he’s always giving his nickels to moms.
Why would that be ironic?
Because he fucks moms, for a nickel.
If you must coin a phrase.
That’s the only way he makes cents!
How else would he make change in this world?
I am Gene C’pausse and I applauded this comment.
No he doesn’t. He has an excess of nickles, because that’s how much your mom pays him for sex.
I don’t think so. That would mean that his line, “I did your mom for a nickel” is saying that Mike is a prostitute instead of your mom, which ruins his attempt at insulting you.
Nah, he’s saying that your mom’s a prostitute AND she pays him anyways. He’s just that good.
Why would he have an excess of woodpeckers?
You and I are two of the very few people who will “get” the above comment without having to refer to Google.
Even /with/ google Im not sure I’m getting that one. Is it a fishing lure? A rare minting? Wood slugs? A coat rack?
A “nickle” is a woodpecker.
A “nickel” is a coin.
He’s just that good.
“Ironic”
Heh.
Score one for tact!
I’ve always found the practice of not speaking ill of someone because they’re dying/in mortal danger/dead is a rather strange one. To a point I understand the idea behind it, you don’t want the last thing you say about someone to be mean. But on the other hand if they were not a great person then trying to say something nice is disingenuous.
Anyone else want to put their two cents in?
I think this is true but I also think time, place, and context matter.
For example, saying ‘They were awful all the time and I’m not personally grieving’ is a lot more understandable at home when talking to your family than at the hospital talking to one of their grieving loved ones. In the latter case, I’d personally probably say something like ‘We weren’t close, but I’m sorry for your loss.’
Avoiding fights at the funeral. Honestly it has more to do with keeping the “peace” in the affected community than with who died. Sometimes it works other times it just lets things fester.
Huh. We Irish just get roaringly drunk at the wake, so we’re too hungover to fight at the funeral.
Personally, I don’t think there’s much value in talking about recently dead individuals – they can’t really do anything anymore, after all. If they’ve left behind problems, you can generally deal with the problem itself without going into detail about the person; likewise, if they’ve left behind some toxic advice or mindsets, then you can address those philosophies directly. There’s rarely a need to talk about the person at all.
As such, I don’t think there’s much need to say more than something like “I feel sorry for their friends and family” if the subject comes up, even in the case of genuinely evil people – and since most people are loved by somebody, I’m not really comfortable causing them more pain by celebrating a death.
To summarize, in my opinion, you don’t have to praise a bad person just because they died – but there’s no reason to go out of your way to praise them, either. There’s plenty of bland, neutral platitudes for times like these.
I think it is more for the people around them than for the person themselves. You don’t have to lie and say they were great or nice or wonderful, and you don’t have to be dishonest with people that don’t care or have no attachment to them, but you also don’t want to be known as the ass that made it difficult for all the grieving people that actually do care what happens to them by blurting out all their horrible traits during a hard time as if trying to convince them to not grieve them.
It’s being sensitive to the fact that their relationships with others were different than yours with them and that even if they weren’t, the feelings of other people can be complex. You can know someone sucks but also still care if something bad happens to them (like, a lot of people feel this way for family members and people that were malicious but in their lives a long time) because not everyone is at an extreme of ‘cares immensely and loves them’ or ‘cares not at all and hates them’, sometimes people are in a weird middle of kind of cares but doesn’t trust them or want to be around them much.
Sort of an extension of the ring theory of support, I think: comfort in, vent out. You don’t have to pretend you liked someone to say ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ to their grieving spouse/child/sibling/whatever, because as you say, people’s relationships even to real assholes tend to be complicated. (See: Becky. And I’m pretty sure that, even acknowledging Mike was TERRIBLE to them, him dying like this would be worse for Amber and Ethan’s mental health than him living. For one thing, if he hadn’t had the realization and heroic sacrifice ploy, I’m pretty sure they were in fact starting to grow away from him and he might eventually have pissed them off enough for a massive friend break-up. Now Amber has a survivor’s guilt-based Mike living rent-free in her head and Ethan is in fact defensive of his Asshole Friend if only out of loyalty to the maybe-dying. I don’t see either of those getting better if he actually dies, not any time soon.)
I think it’s “don’t punch down”.
No matter who someone is or how shitty that person might have been overall, there has to be something good about them. It is only the polite thing to try to find it.
And that’s why I hate this so-called “cancel culture” so much. For example, take George Washington led the Continental Armies to win our independence from Great Britain and went on to pilot the tiny little ship that was the foundling United States through troubled seas as our first president, or Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the document that became the birth certificate of our country (the Declaration of Independence). But – ohmyGod! – they also were wealthy men who *gasp!* owned slaves, so they are not worthy of recognition or memorialization because of that.
Or take it the other way. Bill Cosby turned out to be a sexual predator – not good, and I am in no way trying to minimize it – and Garrison Keillor also fell from grace due to alleged sexual improprieties. But is that any reason to cast everything and anything either of the two did – Keillor’s beloved radio program and writings, and Cosby’s early comedy routines, ground-breaking TV shows (as ‘Alexander Scott’ in “I Spy”, he became the first black man have a lead role in an American TV series), books, and movies (with the possible exception of ‘Leonard: Part 6’) – onto the dungheap never to be mentioned again?
I take it you’ve never been to the Washington monument of the Jefferson Memorial?
As a matter of fact, I have been to both — as well as to Mount Rushmore, where both the men I mention are also immortalized in stone. And there have, occasionally, been trial balloons floated that the site is politically incorrect — honoring four white Americans by sculpting a mountain in the middle of the Black Hills, an area considered sacred by many groups of Native Americans, and that the mountain should be blasted clear and the mountain restored, as much as possible, to its natural state.
As for the Washington and Jefferson Memorials in Washington or the historic sites of Mount Vernon and Monticello in Virginia, I haven’t heard any serious talk of tearing them down, but when you look at how other statues have been removed – statutes of Columbus, for example, or that statue of Edward Colston that was torn down and tossed into the Thames in London because, among other things, he had been a 17th-century slave trader, or various representations of Native Americans because of “stereotyping”, I suppose it’s only a matter of time before George, Thomas, and the rest of the Founding Fathers are next up on the chopping block.
This is a lot of words to say “I think we should keep idolizing people who owned slaves and committed genocide.”
This whole conversation honestly makes me think about the situation with our current dumbass in charge
And i have been of the strong opinion that no one in his family will mourn him
And so if he couldn’t even have loved ones who would mourn him should he ever finally be removed from his pathetic life
Then why should anyone be polite about it
He was is ass of a person and should he ever actually die i will say im happy about
Good riddance
Fuck him
Or can anyone honestly say he deserves platitudes when his time comes?
It gets complicated when dealing with politicians (or to a lesser extent with public figures in general.)
The death of a (in)famous politician is often used not just to rehabilitate their image in a space where it’s impolite to counter the propaganda, but also to rehabilitate the crap they did and the policies they pushed and even other still active political figures linked to them.
Think when Nixon died or even Reagan and Bush.
The statue of Edward Colston was pulled down and thrown into the habour at Bristol, not into the Thames at London.
Consider the example of the statue of Hans Christian Heg outside the Wisconsin state Capitol in Madison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Hans_Christian_Heg
Perhaps we ought to reconsider the custom of raising statues to heroise people. Maybe “thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image of anything” is wiser than I thought.
Jefferson loses me with the whole “rape a 14 year old who was his wife’s half-sister and keep the resulting kids as property” thing.
Yeah, you wouldn’t think the Sally Hemings situation could get creepier than it is by inherent ‘she was considered his property and could not say no, also she was 14 for fuck’s sake,’ and then you learn about the half-sister thing and somehow it gets EVEN WORSE.
cancel culture is treating owning slaves as something more than a faux pas, I guess. Nobody is allowed to talk about the atrocious things anyone did, because doing so would be rewriting history or something. pc gone amok, cancel culture, civility, sjw, blah blah blah.
My great uncle just died two weeks ago. I never liked him, but I love his kids. So the best I could do was not say anything mean about him.
It’s normally a decent practice. Protecting grieving loved ones from petty gossip and complaints.
It can get out of hand when the dead or dying person was horrible and their victims are pushed by social convention into enduring people praising him without being able to respond. In this comic, Blaine and Ross are both dead. Should Amber and Becky refrain from saying anything bad about them?
Very fair point. My situation is nothing like theirs.
I think this situation has a further dimension to it in that Mike got severely injured trying to keep Blaine and Ross away from the people in question. It’s one thing to talk shit about a jerk you don’t like when they’re hurt and/or dead, it’s quite another to do it when said jerk has just taken a (metaphorical) bullet for you.
Well, he only ever hurt people with harsh truths delivered in the most tactless way possible.
For example, “some days he came close to deserving this.”
Or elaborately constructed lies – like the scenarios he set up to get recordings of Walky crying.
Or outright physical assault, as when he punched Joe in the face.
Or false generosity, as when he tried to break up Dorothy and Walky by buying Walky pajama jeans.
Also, kudos to Joe for not breaking Mike’s arm after the “guys think about sex every 6 seconds” bullshit.
Oh, I forgot about that! It’s been so long since Joyce had her first date in college.
So “person is in hospital” trumps the “you shall not lie” thing? Interesting.
She didn’t quite lie. And she certainly didn’t bear false witness against him.
Pretty sure she considers him neither “a good guy” nor “very nice”.
It’s not lying …. it’s a tactful omission of details.
Look at it this way. You’re at the hospital and your child/parent/close friend/loved one is lying there with the prognosis still in some doubt. Do you really want someone else who knows that person detailing his past shortcomings, failings, or transgressions, or would you rather have that other bystander follow Thumper’s mom’s advice — “If you can’t say somethin’ nice, don’t say nothin’ at all?”
I wonder if it’s possible to hire someone to speak at your funeral and say bad things about you.
The grandfather of my two best non-spouse friends kinda did that. He left something in his will to a raging white supremacist, provided the gobshite said something at his funeral.
I mean, that guy didn’t show up, but he tried.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not exactly a fan of the 10 commandments, but as far as I know, they don’t come with a list of exceptions.
I’m reminded now of Amber at Blaine’s funeral in SP! I suppose she should have just kept quiet as people praised him and offered her condolences.
For me that goes back into ring theory: Amber knew Blaine way the fuck better than that guy. She wasn’t obliged to sugarcoat things for some dude she didn’t know. It feels a bit significant that we never see Aunt Molly who told them he’d died. Since she was on speaking terms with Stacy, I imagine she’s not a total asshole, so I suspect any interaction between the three of them there would involve at least some variation of ‘I’m not going to pretend he wasn’t an abusive cheating mobster but feelings are Weird, right? Ugh, why was he so terrible’ because… yeah, sometimes that’s how feelings work. Amber’s also way less blunt with Faz in that sequence, because he’s processing everything at once. She doesn’t need to give him the ugly details right there and then.
(I’ll note that this is… not entirely hypothetical a scenario for me. I’m not gonna pretend to be sad when my shitty biological grandfather finally dies, but the odds of my mother having complicated emotions about it are pretty high because she’s interacted with him more than three times ever, and all of those were before I was ten. The rest of us can let her have messy emotions including grief and wish that she didn’t have to go through said messiness without pretending we feel anything besides relief.)
It’s not “you shall not lie”; it’s “you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor”. She’s bearing false witness for her neighbor.
You may have a future as a lawyer.
Describing Mike as nice is certainly bearing false witness, But what is fascinating is that you think he would appreciate being described that way. Mike goes out of his way to avoid being his parents. So I have a tough time seeing it as beating false witness *for* him.
There is also Leviticus 19:11.
I’m just glad Amber’s foreshadowing was wrong and Mike didn’t spontaneously die.
reframing uncomfortable questions into significantly more palatable answers? that’s very christian of you hank
Also very human.
Look I’m just here for Hank. He’s vaulted his way up to possibly top 5 DoA characters (and that’s with me kinda dreading the parents slowly becoming and more relevant in the strip).
Joyce didn’t stick to that principle for very long, lol.
Her father, a primary source of most of her moral beliefs, just gave her an out. She’s processing.
Here for the people who were laying in to Danny for saying basically the same thing to come after Joyce…
Another thing to consider with Danny was more who he was saying it to, Ethan, Mike’s friend of 5 years who would very much care if he died being told that his friend is an asshole who deserves a potentially lethal coma, (also Mike’s mother was on the other side of the door and could have over heard him verses saying it to Hank, who I am not even sure knew Mike’s name 5 minutes ago.
Joyce doesn’t get a pass, but Becky does.
In no way did Joyce say the same thing Danny did.
Danny didnt say that Mike deserved to get put in the hospital, he just said that Mike was an inconsiderate asshole in the worst way possible.
He said this to Ethan heavily implying that he’s wrong for caring about Mike and setting up a self-interested comparison. Don’t make Danny’s words sound like an abstract statement of fact (because no one’s denying that Mike is an asshole). Who he said it to and why matters.
Look, people have been misrepresenting Mike’s words and actions since the beginning of the comic, so having a standard about Danny’s words seems a little bit double standard-y. Besides, Joyce admitted in Panel 4 that she’s not going to say “bad things” (a.k.a., the truth) while he’s in the hospital.
Nowhere did Danny say Ethan was wrong for caring about Mike, he made the blatantly correct point that Mike has been a terrible person forever and the hurt he caused still happened.
^ This. I once had… I can’t honestly call her a friend, but she was a friend of a friend, let’s leave it at that. Anyway, she had a ROUGH upbringing. Lower socio-economic background, absentee dad, borderline abusive mom, among other woes. As a result, she developed this personality where her mood is constantly on a hair trigger where if you don’t shower her with praise and think she’s God’s gift to the world, she will absolutely go OFF on you. She also had racist and anti-Muslim views, and wasn’t shy about voicing them. (And if you try to correct her about these, then see the above about “going off on you.”)
I tolerated her behaviour after our mutual friend explained why she’s like this because she’s been through a lot, but does her history obligate me to forgive and accept what she does? No. As I see it, this is pretty similar to Ethan’s situation with Dan, except that in his case, he knows that Mike does it because Mike feels that tough love and pointing out the flaws in others helps improve them. But to anyone else on the outside looking in, Ethan just has a raging a-hole for a friend and can’t understand why he sticks by him.
I’m not sure how much Ethan actually knows that – or how much it’s really true for that matter.
How much of Ethan’s support for Mike is a result of Mike manipulating him over the years? Is Ethan better off for Mike’s help? Amber certainly isn’t, as Mike himself realized. Ethan doesn’t know about that little revelation.
Sometimes people on the outside can see the abuse for what it is, while those inside are too close.
Uncle Randy’s got you covered if you ever need to explain it in image form: https://somethingpositive.net/comic/respect-for-the-dead/
He suggested it might be a good thing if Mike doesn’t wake up from the coma for a while, then said saving Amber doesn’t mean he’s not still a jerk for earlier behavior.
And many people here extrapolated that first part to mean “thinks he should die or never recover”, since that is the common outcome of extended comas, but it wasn’t anything he said and likely didn’t even consider.
I do agree with him that both Ethan and Amber would likely benefit from an extended break from Mike.
Oh, it was DEFINITELY shortsighted foot-in-mouth. (Whoever mentioned that the sheer ‘holy fuck this is bad’ of Mike’s coma was probably a lot realer to Ethan, who’s been in the room, than Danny who hadn’t was I think onto something as well.) Doesn’t make it any less ‘Danny, my man, STOP DIGGING’ or Ethan any less justified to be pissed at him for saying it right there and then.
Oh, I’m sure. They’re not getting it while he’s comatose or if he dies in such a traumatic fashion, not any time soon, but I’d been hoping it was building to a friend breakup and any possible ‘Mike realizes he fucked up and tries to atone’ was prompted by recognizing he FUBARed those relationships and had been doing it for a while.
Joyce saying he came *close* to deserving it sometimes in an abstract sense of deserving, in frustration with him, to her dad who has no attachment to Mike, to just vent some feelings, is very different from saying it to one of Mike’s closest friends that is absolutely broken up about what happened, doubling down when given an out, then doubling down AGAIN when given a second chance to opt out of that line of conversation.
Did Joyce say it to Mike’s distressed best friend? Then she didn’t do anything close to Danny.
Joyce returns to Amber.
Amber: So where’s Faz?
Joyce: Shit! I forgot!
Mike is a very hateable person, and you can barely tolerate if you find him attractive (Ethan and Amber), or if you saw him as the token evil teammate (his teammates in Walkyverse). I am not joking about him being token evil. He didn’t care about civilians in danger and didn’t do his job of taking them out of danger, and he kicked a little girl just to troll some anti war protestors.
Willis did the right thing of toning down the worst aspects of his characters in this universe, except for the villains who just became realistically more hateable than their saturday cartoon villain versions.
*plays Pet Shop Boys (with Dusty Springfield) “What Have I Done To Deserve This?” on the hacked Muzak*
Well done/ chosen. :—)
I wish I could be heroically injured. Jump in front of a bullet, fight off a wolf, etc. That’d be badass.
For me, it mostly sounds like being potentially crippled for life. Ptbs included.
I’m completely on board with reaping the benefits of other people being heroically injured.
I read it as “You can’t say he didn’t deserve this” and I was about to say “Hank what the fuck”.
Me too. LOL
I like that Willis is showing us it’s possible to be honestly critical of Mike in the interests of fairness and justice even while he’s in the hospital and not be petty and hurtful about it. Becky is the anti-Danny.
I like that Becky is teaching Joyce things like that. Dad did come up with a good one too. You combine them and you might get a good impression of Mike!
I love Becky and Hank’s interactions.
I just want to say that if Becky pursues any objective that being the best DA Boolmington ever had, I’mma be disappointed. She’d be great in a law-room or court.
Ace Attorney: Becky McEntire
Becky is taking notes for when she has to go through her father’s funeral.
Oh god, Becky is probably the one going to have to make his funeral arrangements. Unless it’s a very simple tag and bag him and she elects not to. Like what happens when no one claims a body anyway? Though granted if Becky does not probably the church will.
The baby doctors get a new toy, I believe.
Depends on the jurisdiction, but typically they get buried or cremated at the government’s expense after a specified amount of time.
I appreciate Joyce showing tact and not bad mouthing Mike at a time like this. Though still maybe should be a bit more honest with her dad than that.
IDK man, the “some days” bit is kinda iffy
*Carol calls
*Mike picks
“HAIL SATAN!”
*Mike hangs up.
At least that didn’t cost a nickel.
The state of the comments these past few strips has left me woefully uncertain on how to read the tone of that comment and that’s just deeply unfortunate lmao
So many people are having such a hard time feeling bad for Mike, I wonder if I’m missing something.
Apparently him being an asshole gives people a free vaguely wishing death/comma upon him pass. Funny how that works, asshole behaviour is defensible when thrown upon an asshole, I suppose. Kinda annoying how they seem to somehow be holding the moral high ground while doing this though.
The comment section when Danny was firmly sticking his entire leg down his throat was a fun learning experience for sure. Enlightening.
He wasnt just an asshole. He was a very manipulative asshole. That he had some sort of vague good intention doesn’t suddenly absolve him. As they say Intent isn’t magic.
Apparently him having good intentions gives him a free pass for being an abusive dickhead.
Yeah like, the most important takeaway from Mike’s Heel Realization (thanks TVTropes) is that he absolutely doesn’t deserve immediate forgiveness for being an abusive shit for years and years, deliberately provoking his two closest friends out of the self absorbed belief he knew what’s best for them.
Mike himself, rather drastically, threw his life on the line when he realized that he pointedly was Not Helping.
It’s not just what he did to Ethan and Amber, though. He’s also been needlessly violent (Joe on the date with Joyce), tried getting some harsh payback on Walky for stupid shit (seriously, dude, people fart), used sex for crazy warped purposes (him fucking Ethan was intended to hurt Danny), and at one point offered a mob stooge a key to the Warner family home and told him to get killing. And all the while, people like Crash up above piously prated about how he was a galaxy-brain Asshole Sage that was “just trying to help”.
For the record, I don’t want him to die. But one good deed in NO WAY makes up for a(n apparent) lifetime of nihilistic misanthropy.
Exactly. Which is why I want him to live. To wake up and deal with that. To have to deal with his version of Rachel’s “Redemption is a story.”
That’s far more interesting than “realized he was an ass, threw his life on the line and died heroically”. Living with your past shit is hard.
Can I have a quote on me saying he was a galxy-brained Asshole Sage that was “just trying to help”?
I’ve never once defended Mike’s action or said he was right. What I don’t like is how him being a bastard somehow makes the behaviour everyone else is displaying not only okay but also the height of good, high moral ground. It is not.
This is not a zero sum game where Mike being wrong somehow makes everyone else right. You can actually me critical of both, I invite you to try it. (:
And also to not put words in my mouth.
Fun fact, none of those things justify wishing for him to be in a comma.
Being an asshole to an asshole doesn’t, in fact, help anyone.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
It is, in fact, possible to notice Mike is a bastard and acknowledge that without feeling like you have to excuse the rest of the cast for behaving in ways you’d absolutely be bashing him for.
Mike is a bastard; the growing line of characters being insensitive about his current situation are still way out of line, mate.
Wherein it is proved once and for all that Becky is genuinely suited to be a politician’s spokesperson, and thus deserves her job not just because she’s remarkably good at Twitter for someone who barely knew what it was a few weeks ago.
And Hank has very effectively summarized my feelings about Mike. He is not a good person. He is manipulative and abusive, but he didn’t deserve this.
Yeah. Death or indefinite coma means cutting off any potential he had to get better, it guarantees him a place in Amber and Ethan’s brains long-term, and doing so in a Big Dramatic Act of Redemptive Sacrifice sets up this weird dynamic. (Danny has a point that those don’t change the harm the person’s done up to that point, it just was not an argument anyone was gonna take well right outside his hospital room after seeing him comatose.)
Also, like. On the purely visceral ‘this is fiction but still effective at evoking emotions’ level, it is ROUGH seeing an eighteen-year-old kid in that state. Gotta be even worse for the characters, who aren’t viewing it at a distance.
If she’s trying to find positives there’s how he stepped up as a chaperone on her date with Joe and bounced him the fuck out. I’m sure Hank’ll appreciate that.
Pretty sure that if Hank finds out any details, he won’t be happy with Joyce about it. Yes, Joe was just looking for another notch on his belt, but both Mike and Joyce were in the wrong on that one, hands-down.
Wow, it’s bash Mike within possible earshot of his friends and family day huh?
Is this what “doing x to own the libs” looks like when you’re trying to prove Mike is an ass by being Mike-esque?
I’m finding your “doing x to own the libs” phrase confusing in context. As far as I’m aware bashing Mike doesn’t fall on a conservative/liberal spectrum. Perhaps you could explain.
Why do you assume his family and friends are in possible earshot? We have no reason to think so.
Gonna be honest, that was more relevant with the Danny incident at this point they’re all just kinda blending in for me.
I’m mainly annoyed about how everyone is going out and about doing their best impression of Mike while he is neither there nor in a good condition and the mental gymnastics going on for trying to defend that behaviour as good and proper.
Like imagine if Joyce was in a comma and Mike was pulling this stuff, people’d be up in arms but since it’s him in the comma it’s fine to go off about it ig.
Either way, think it’s time for me to drop it, reckon I’ve gotten too into it this time.
Hank is good at saying good things about assholes.
Who knew you learnt that at church
“Mike habitually said—no, says, it’s still the present—hurtful things to people. He seems to especially enjoy making people confront how their words and actions conflicted with their idea of themselves, which he has an unusual knack for understanding. Kind of like Socrates—I could have wanted to make him drink hemlock sometimes. But I don’t think he ever lied, and he was seldom wrong. No, he didn’t deserve this.”
Said is correct. Pretty sure he’s not currently saying them.
Now, Joyce, he punched Joe for you. That’s gotta be worth something.
(I still laugh out loud every time I read their date.)
About Mike? Hmm… Try this. Mike Warner is someone focussed on total honesty to the point where he despises tact. He is so in despair at what he considers the hypocracy of the world that he feels that people who are nice are generally lying ot themselves. He has hurt a lot of people in his time but, I suspect, in many ways, he does so because he thinks it will stop him from being vulnerable to being hurt himself.
In honesty, I’m not sure if Mike had ever allowed himself to acknowledge that he was genuinely loved until those last moments as he was going under as Amazi-Girl was racing him to the hospital.
“The best way to describe Mike is as brutally honest. With special emphasis on brutal.”
Joyce wasn’t entirely wrong calling him “nice.” There are more than one old definitions of the word that are fitting and not positive.
Agnes Nutter would approve.
What a nice comment.
How is fabricating an elaborate series of fake internet pages total honesty?
Just to pick one over the top example.
Yes, but it was for the greater good. I mean Walky wouldn’t shut up about the show.
Then again, he might have just been winding Sarah up. And if so, that was for the greater good as well.
By greater good , of course, I mean furthering my own amusement, something that is very important, apparently, to the universe.
“Tell me about him.”
Can we all take a step back and appreciate Hank for being a good person and dad? No wonder Joyce allowed him in. No wonder Becky trusts him.
Danny could probably learn a lot from this conversation.
…which of course means that he won’t even interact with any of these people for as long as this story line is relevant.
Now I’m imagining Danny and Joyce sitting in a small box titled “We do not speak ill of he almost-dead.”
Although I suspect Mike would be annoyed at the false kindness.
“He chaperoned my first date.”
“How’d that go?”
“He punched my first date…”
“Attaboy”
For that service alone, Mike fits into Hank’s ‘superhero’ category!
As someone who doesn’t use facebook, “it’s complicated” is a pretty foreign concept
I’m reasonably sure complicated relationships predated Facebook.
There is a lot of otherwise sympathetic charecters that show a concerning lack of empathy.
Some of us are in the comment section.
I’m not saying that I’m without empathy, I try to be kind. I’m just saying that I’m like that colorful old man who yells, “you kids stay offfa my lawn!” I just never let them know I’m not serious about it. It’s just grass, it’ll grow back by next week.
“He means well but he had the crappiest way of showing it. That is, until he pushed himself and his friend’s dangerous father over a stairwell, to put her out of harm’s way.”
The problem is that nobody knows about “he means well.” To everyone in the cast Mike just said hurtful shit to them constantly with no repercussion.
The only person who thought Mike meant well was Mike himself.
True. Though I recall there’s at least one person who might have perceived what Mike was doing in a roundabout, hurtful way. I think it was Ethan?
I don’t believe anyone’s commented on Mike’s actions beyond “Mike was being a jerk”, but I could be wrong.
The best way to word it to me would be “he’s a good person when he wants to be one but most of the time he’s a smart ass…and he’s really good at that last part.”
“Some” days.
As long as we’re on the subject of Mike, let me just say: Danny is right. I hope he stays in a coma. Mike is the worst character in this comic. I hope he doesn’t come back.
I mean, Mike’s not great, but “worst character”? Like, you think he’s worst than Blaine? Ross? Mary?
Blaine and Ross progressed a story, they were villains and I liked them for that. Mary is annoying and an amusing antagonist. I don’t believe Mike actually helped any situation he was in that couldn’t have been helped in a non-Mike way except his fall.
(i figure it’s not going to go through if i change my username in the slightest bit so reposting)
To be fair, Blaine and Ross were worse but are now dead.
He’s perhaps somewhat less insufferable than Mary and friggin’ Carol. Although I don’t know that I’ve ever seen any signs of him being truly supportive. I guess in a way he was supportive of Ethan coming to terms with his sexuality through casual sexual encounters, which probably helped his confidence. Even though it started as a way to make Danny jealous, it seemed like there was some good intention there, eventually.
And I suppose after binging Shortpacked!, I have a bit more understanding how Mike really doesn’t know how to express affection except by being a jerk. So I guess he’s not really a bad person. Personally, I don’t think I’d ever want to hang out with him, though. His actions really aren’t condonable and people should have probably called him out for bringing a toxic atmosphere and refused to associate with him. But the confrontation part of that doesn’t seem like a good idea after this traumatic event. Hopefully he’ll be working on being less of an ass to everyone, at least toning it down to a few mean jokes that aren’t specifically targeted at people’s weak spots… *shrugs*
He’s definitely the worst of the people on the cast page. I’m not quite comfortable with wishing an irreversible coma on him but I’m not exactly looking forward to his next appearance either.
He’s been a complete asshole, probably the worst of the vaguely protagonist characters.
I very much hope he comes back soon, because I really want to see him process the realization he had during the fight before he jumped Blaine. Even assholes can have character growth and letting him linger in a coma is letting him off easy.
Yeah, here’s hoping…
Danny Was Right
I’d be hard pressed to say anybody deserves what happened to Mike, doubly so given the context of how he got in this situation in the first place.
But if it were any other situation I’d say that karma hit him hard.
Family friend was a district judge. He had a rule that if had nothing good to say about someone, he wouldn’t say anything. But if you asked him about some politicians, he would say “I have nothing to say about him”which spoke volumes.
It amazes me still that Mike was intentionally an unrepentant asshole and yet people insist on repenting for him. It’s amazing how much some character get to get away with just because they are the hashtag good guys and not cartoonish evil goons like Blaine/Toedad.
I don’t like Mike (well I think I like him now, it’s complicated), but I think it was residual good will from the Walkyverse where he was a more complex character whose worst actions were excused by his cartoony slapstick universe.
I say this but the recent reveal of his machinations, that he genuinely believed he was helping Amber and Ethan and ended up making their lives worse, that’s compelling. That’s probably the best place to take what I used to think was a completely irredeemable character.
Oh I flat dislike him, I just have just enough hope he might actually stop being an asshole if he wakes up after that realization and think it’d be better for Ethan and Amber’s mental health if he does. Plus, to quote certain hit musicals: dying (heroically) is easy, young man, living is harder.
“Perhaps, if you had more time… But then again, perhaps not. Redemption is a rare and special thing, after all. It is not for everyone.” – Soon Kim
Yeah, it’s probably better for Ethan and Amber’s mental health if he does wake up. Though maybe not if he went back to “prodding Amber’s bear”. They would certainly have been better off without him though – had he gone off to a different school or some such.
That for sure. Now that he’s in their lives I don’t want him leaving traumatically, but they’d be better off without him to start with.
I mean, I like Mike, but mostly because his asshole-ish-ness is always played as mainly a gag. Sometimes assholes are funny.
If I remember correctly:
Mike: Joyce, can I come to your party?
Joyce: You may.
Mike: YESSSSSSS… *rubs hands together*
Joyce: … IF you promise to be nice.
Mike: PASS. Party just got REAL boring.
… I may not remember correctly.
I love it when Dumbing of Age makes me genuinely LOL <3
I think Joyce’s Mom will track them to the hospital and Mike will wake up just to start aiming endless your mom jokes at her
“De Mortuis nil nisi bonum.”
Well, somebody had to, and I decided it would be me.
Taking this moment to appreciate the fact Hank is actually trying to stay present for the whole thing after taking a stance against his wife.
You go bud!