That depends on how you define power. We know the Billingsworths are very wealthy which means he’s more powerful than the average middle class loser, but money only goes so far. Are politics involved? Does having criminal connections make you more or less powerful than also having money? How much money? Could say Carla’s dad technically be more powerful in that regard?
I doubt she’d be as eager to bear children for Asher’s Grandfather in order to strengthen relations with his crowd….Jared Leto’s coattails and Al Capone’s are not interchangeable.
I doubt that’s What Ms.Billingsworth meant, but she is still giving Sal’s reading on the nature of her recent behavior more validation. I hope Asher’s reflecting on her comment….’Cause I doubt “Jennifer” is playing dumb.
I believe it’s stated earlier that her dad is/was the mayor of her hometown and is at least still heavily involved in politics. It was during the comics when Becky and zjoyce went back home for the weekend and Billie had to move back into room and so was looking for a place to shift Becky too.
The Ruttens make the most common brand of phone we’ve seen, they make a fairly common brand of engine, and we’ve heard of them throwing their money behind politicians and high-profile legal campaigns. So we know they have power, probably a great deal of it.
I doubt the Billingsworths are on that level with them. They’re probably a big deal in the state.
And I feel it really needs to be underscored how much power control over data infrastructure gives people. We tend to ignore it because it’s sort of background noise, but Facebook creates profiles on people who aren’t even on the platform due to the void their absence creates in the flow of data they get from people who are on the platform. To me, that’s power in spades.
Yeah, Billingsworth Sr. is definitely rich enough to have genuine political clout.
But there’s a pretty big difference between ‘killing people politely with policy’ and ‘considered a guy who laundered millions of dollars an extremely replaceable stooge.’ Gramps knows his hands are bloody, for one.
It’s also not quite as easy for a businessman/maybe local politician to get a hitman. Which is a very important difference in this case.
We don’t know, because we know nothing about him except ‘very neglectful,’ ‘rich,’ and ‘fucked over the homeless in their city,’ but I don’t take it as a given he has plural on his payroll the same way Gramps obviously does.
The Walkertons seem to be on good terms with the Billingsworths, since the three have been friends since early childhood, but at the same time the Walkertons all took it as a given Jennifer’s parents wouldn’t be at Family Weekend, to the point where IIRC Linda and Charles don’t comment on it at all. That gives a rough estimate of social status and says the neglect’s been going on for a long time.
Hey, spotted your twitter account in the wild today, on that thread on the absolute fuckery of article about how “solar power might become supercheap and that’s bad, actually.”
It is actually a problem and one that’s been known for a while now. It’s mostly a problem with our current ways of running the power grid admittedly.
The problem is that solar power doesn’t really become supercheap. It’s definitely cost effective, but it still costs money to build and maintain solar arrays and that needs to be paid for. And it needs to promise some return on the investment in order to get built in the first place because we still need more.
But once built there’s essentially no energy price too low for it to not be worth selling onto the grid. Unlike fossil fuel plants where you need to buy the fuel and that sets a floor for the price, there’s no floor for solar pricing. Even when the price drops below what you need to make to keep making payments on the loans used to build it.
And since even on a regional scale all the solar is generally operating at peak at the same time, most of their power will be sold at deflated prices on the spot market, but we’ll still need more expensive power the rest of the time.
Left uncorrected, what this will really do is not lead to free power, but to less incentive to build the cheap solar power, since those plants can’t even cover their costs.
The article then goes on to talk about ways to mitigate the problem. It’s a far better article than might be thought from the first tweet in the thread. Even if they don’t suggest “smash capitalism” as the solution.
@thejeff: That reasoning, however, presumes two things that are not true:
1 – That the enterprise needs to be privately run, and
2 – That it needs to be independently profitable.
It literally can* be just something that you throw tax dollars into and get clean power out of. Like, nobody** is going around arguing that firefighters aren’t profitable, they’re just organisations that we throw tax dollars into and get (hopefully) fires put out out of.
*and it SHOULD, because power supply is too important to leave in the hands of private corps, but I digress.
**well, SOMEBODY probably is, because the dregs of humanity never cease to dig a deeper septic tank, but you know what I mean.
One things for sure, we’re not gonna prevent irreversible damage to our ecosystems and cities from climate change unless nuclear power is also an active player.
Even that’s too simple a solution. Sure governments could build solar power plants under the current market pricing system and just eat the construction and maintenance costs, but that doesn’t change the basic problem. Heavy reliance on solar produces excess energy at some times while leaving the system reliant on other more expensive energy at other times. Just having government eat the costs doesn’t fix that. (Nor are government resources unlimited and efficiencies shouldn’t be ignored just because the government is involved.)
There are both technological and market rule fixes to this problem. Most obviously – batteries and other power storage techniques so solar power can be stored to be used later when demand is higher and the sun not shining.
I never said nuclear power was gonna solve the climate crisis on it’s own. My point is that we need all the help we can get in our mission from every carbon-free source of energy available.
It is instructive to note that an energy source need not be renewable in order to be carbon free. Even if we don’t rely on nuclear power in the long term, solar power and wind alone just aren’t reliable enough for today’s electricity demands.
Increased implementation of nuclear power, combined with all other efforts at carbon-free energy generation and storage, will be wholly necessary to win the race against the clock of climate change.
The other critical thing is that Jennifer hasn’t stolen a ton of money from her father the way Asher’s stolen from the family business, so there’s no known risk of him finding out and trying to kill Jennifer. (Maybe Gramps wouldn’t decide he wants Asher dead, but the alternative is ‘back in the mob for good’ and thus probably not much better for someone who does sincerely seem to want out.) Really what I’m getting at is, Gramps is way more likely to pose a deadly threat to Asher (and anyone in his orbit) than Billingsworth Sr. is to his daughter or her friends, specifically.
I worry for Asher. He may not be particularly good at getting out of a life of crime (as evidenced by ‘stealing tuition money from the mob,’ you poor doomed kid,) but I’d like him to have the chance. Maybe he should look into transfer programs. In like, Australia or something.
I don’t know if Blaine was necessarily an easily replaceable asset, but rather someone who was actively undermining their operations and who needed replacing.
He just looks perturbed to me, which is pretty reasonable considering that Sal just told them that they kinda suck and his girlfriend shouldn’t trust him.
I, meanwhile, am loving Jennifer’s dialogue in that last panel.
Like, no the situation, but just that response. I might disagree with your choices Jennifer, but you rock that linguistic logic.
I would say it’s plenty fair to Carl not to trust him. By my read, he’s either pretty dim or pretty callous. He either didn’t notice or actively ignored his serious girlfriend spiraling right in front of his face. Or never saw/didn’t care about the red flag that was dumping him out of nowhere so she’d have more personal time for her drug habit.
Last semester, when Sarah defended her actions to Raidah, she replied ‘not according to Dana, last I checked.’ However, we don’t know WHEN Raidah last checked. It could be Dana’s dad isn’t a safe person, or it could be that whatever treatment she was getting for her grief wasn’t particularly pleasant (especially since Dana’s primary mechanism seemed to be avoidance) and Raidah checked a while ago. Or that there was a heavier focus on the marijuana than the actual issue, which was as I said grief. We really don’t know enough about Dana to say, except that she’s not back at IU as far as we know. (Because she’s doing a year at community college? Because her dad’s controlling? We have no information here.)
Also, given that Raidah completely missed that she was in bad shape while at school, I’m not sure how much faith I put in her assessment of Dana’s status.
Yeah, I’m assuming she’s talked to Dana, but even if so we don’t know how much or when. I’d be totally fine if there’s an eventual reveal Raidah WAS right because she knew Dana’s dad would make things worse, a la the Ruth and Carla situation, but what Raidah was doing was untenable, too.
I kind of hope not, just because of what that would do to Sarah. In that case it would have been a completely hopeless situation, but she’d absolutely blame herself for whatever happened to Dana.
I’d love for Dana to come back from a leave of absence and hug Sarah in front of Raidah thanking her for doing what she needed to be done, which none of her friends would do
Asher looks concerned for his safety; as he should be considering the circumstances. Also, does anyone else feel like Billie/Jennifer is trying a little too hard in her “be a new person” thing?
Between the part where 18-year-olds are talking about how they’re all grown up and settled down, and the part where Asher implied Sal’s motorcycle was a sign of immaturity when we know he rides one? Yeah, there is some definite tryhardness here.
I think specifically it was riding a motorcycle in winter. The safe, mature, settled-down thing to do is to put it away for the winter. Where I live, it’s the law, though our winters are admitedly tougher than other places.
I’m sure Asher recognizes that still riding his motorcycle in the winter means he has not settled down as much as Sal. I’m not sure if he’s not proud of that a little bit. Asher may not want to be a criminal anymore, but he still might be cultivating his bad boy image.
Right about them in the sense that Billie/Jennifer is trying too hard to be “normal.” While Asher may not be actively trying to be a criminal, he still helped a psychopath kidnap multiple people and may or may not have had something to do with Amber’s father dying.
Honestly, this isn’t even a new habit. This is her in high school (and to a lesser extent Forest Quad) all over again.
She didn’t distance herself from friends to the same extent moving dorms, but there’s clearly some element of reinvention and putting on an idealized front implied given she didn’t wear glasses there initially (because glasses don’t fit the Head Cheerleader image, I guess?) I suspect she’s burying her problems here too, same as last time.
If she successfully has stayed sober, that’s newish since she’d only just stopped drinking pre-skip, but yeah, that was with Ruth as well (even if Ruth’s restarted now that she’s on different meds and is 21 so it’s totally fine!*)
* It is not fine.
But seriously, I know the Forest Quad reinvention was a while ago and references to high school longer still, but this is in fact just a new coat of paint on Jennifer’s MO. Frankly, it’s kind of brilliant that she’s friends with Raidah now – Raidah’s just the kind of popular girl (who can be extremely nasty to those on her bad side) that Jennifer likes to position herself as and has tried to be in the past.
Like yeah a mob boss is a kind of Honest Danger, you know what to expect and what you’re getting into, but what does Jennifer’s father do that makes them about as dangerous in her eyes?
We know her parents are divorced; her dad is neglectful, wealthy, I believe Jennifer’d mentioned at one point a new/‘latest’ stepmother or something to that effect (so he’s been married plural times, probably short-lived marriages) and has political clout enough to force homeless people out of the downtown area of their city. He has at least one person on household staff, who Jennifer’s clearly reasonably familiar with. I think Willis might have mentioned he’s British once, but if so that was a long time ago and I don’t think in the strip itself, so it’s not definite canon.
I think there’s even fewer details about her mom, but the one detail we do have from Jennifer is something to the effect of ‘sleeps around a lot.’ Maybe also drinks a lot?
I don’t think Billie’s parents are divorced, unless I’m forgetting something. She mentioned her dad’s always away on business and her mom’s ‘doing business’ on every man she knows. Her dad’s an English immigrant.
Huh. Could’ve sworn she mentioned something about a new girlfriend or stepmother or something way back, but I could be misremembering. And I know the strip where she asks Nina about the homeless evacuation thing does mention Jennifer’s parents, plural, are out of the house at the time. Cool, scratch that aspect.
This would feel more profound if Sal hadn’t gone all seething over Jason being handcuffed to Ruth’s door and then circled around a whole bunch in the hopes of catching Asher by chance.
Like, I do kinda feel this is more of Sal being angry and isolated and lashing out, granted, lashing out at two people who are, respectively, a judgmental snob and an actual literal murderer.
Nah I don’t think she was after that. Would she do something as pathetic as circle the building a ton of times in the hopes of “accidentally” bumping into him if what she wanted to do was impart something she could say by directly walking up to him?
Jennifer’s still of some kind of importance to Sal, if she felt like she was in danger I think she’d make a more direct line to saying that instead of dancing around it. I really think this right now is her saying Asher’s gonna betray Jennifer the way he did Sal.
Remember, Sal *suddenly* has a huge bone to pick with Jason after he finds him seemingly post-coitus with Ruth.
I mean, I won’t be surprised if she also has a thing for Asher, but I do think that part’s been something she wanted to say when she found out they were a thing.
I suspect it’s both. Like, Sal TOOOOTALLY didn’t bike around here with the exact purpose of running into Asher and Jennifer, obviously not, and if she did it was CERTAINLY to tell her basically-sister to be careful with him, which is also true, but if that just so happened to be complete news to Jennifer that made her radically reconsider their relationship and break up…
Well. That would of course be a complete surprise to Sal and not at all something she was secretly hoping for, because she knows all of Asher’s dark secrets and is therefore by her TOTALLY OBJECTIVE metrics suitable to bang him. Obviously.
/Sal’s brain, making completely unquestionable decisions.
I doubt Jennifer’s going to break up any time soon (my guess is that’s when ‘Asher was involved in the kidnapping and to a lesser extent Blaine’s death’ breaks, though I’ve been wrong before and that might not be for ages, we just know there has to be SOMEONE in the main cast in his orbit when his past comes back to bite him,) but I would not be shocked by some eventual ‘no but seriously Sal what is your DEAL?’ conflict. And of course Jennifer and Asher being very very sure that problems like ‘depression’ and ‘stealing money from your mob boss relatives, leaving you vulnerable to blackmail’ are firmly in the past, and will never come up again! But that’s just a given from this last scene.
I think not trusting Asher is a poor reaction because the problem isn’t that he’s duplicitous or plotting something. No, he just fell into mobster habits when things went arry. He’s DANGEROUS not untrustworthy.
I think this depends on how you define trust. Can you rely on him to be a considerate, honest, kind, respectful person to be around, whose acquaintanceship is unlikely to directly lead to direct harm to you in ways he could have worked to mitigate but chose not to? If not, then he isn’t trustworthy.
Based on what we see of him, yeah. Asher was straightforward with Jennifer, and he is actively trying to distance himself from his mob connections. Trustworthy is a good word for that.
The only way he could be safer for the people around him is to…not have any friends? Just in case his family gets handsy? That wouldn’t be fair to ask of anybody.
Now, whether it’s a sort of trust where you’d hang out on a daily basis…Don’t think so, no. I’d appreciate the honesty, and keep a veeery healthy distance from him. If he was genuine in his warning, he’d understand.
Of course, knowing Jennifer, warning her away just made her more interested…
I love that punny names mostly aren’t a thing in this universe, (Leslie Bean aside,) no one has superpowers except for comedic or action sequence purposes, but Dargon Chesterfield (‘cruel captain of industry’) still gets to sound like the comic book supervillain he is.
He’s in Witness Protection. & Ethan is with him out of misplaced guilt.
& Maybe, Amazigirl Knows, but Amber doesnt.
Mikes the only person who could connect Blaine O malley and his kidnapping ( other than asher and that cop ) to ashers grandfather. ( because of seeing the books)
although Faz probably knows too.
maybe Faz will be seen ‘as Family’ and given a job for loyalty.
Besides its completely in character for Mike to die and come back from the dead. The only way that can be pulled off and not screw up the timescale is a time jump, past peak sadness and into part 2.
Well, not like it was Dallas and all a dream. Rather with no explanation ever and the characters refer to his reappearance only in vague terms as something everybody knows. Or, failing that, a different explanation each time it comes up.
Personally, I strongly feel like Mike should probably just stay dead this time, but I do get the feeling that Willis hasn’t necessarily fully closed the door on his return. Like, suddenly bringing him back after all of this would kinda feel like a cop-out, but the subject has been just vague enough that “he was just hiding” probably wouldn’t actively contradict anything we’ve seen on-panel. Until we get a flashback where we see his body in the coffin, I think it’s hypothetically doable. Just not a good idea IMO, since I’m pretty sure Willis wrote him out in the first place because “cartoonish jackass” just didn’t work very well as a character in a more down-to-earth universe. Mike tends to work best and be at his most nuanced when the world around him is as cartoonish as he is– or in other words, Shortpacked!
With that said, if he did come back, I would want his character development to actually continue from where his previous final moments left off– returning him to the cartoonish jackass he was for most of his run would just run into the same problems that made Willis kill him in the first place.
I am inclined to think this is genuine concern for Jennifer from Sal. Even if she is nowhere near as close to her as Walky is, she does still consider her family, which is probably part of why she brushed off Billie’s drunken passes once or twice. (That, and Sal seems to be Quite Straight.)
I do wonder, though. I know she feels like she is flawed enough to deal with Asher, but that feels of course unfair to her and also maybe Asher. I say maybe because there’s still a lot we don’t know about Asher.
Asher professes to not be part of his grandfather’s operations, and was given casual disrespect from Blaine that I do not think he’d have dared do if he felt like Asher was a real power player. But, we also know he knew of the kidnappings that put the group in Blaine’s hands when it happened, as well as him being told when Blaine was murdered. That does not mean that he is a made man or whatever the Korean mob equivalent would be, but I don’t think he’s as out as he said he was, either.
Furthermore, I do wonder if when Jennifer says she knows, if she does know. Asher seemed hesitant there, like maybe he knows Jennifer *doesn’t* have all of the facts. That, or maybe he just isn’t hugely keen having this conversation in front of Carl and Raidah, who likely don’t know dick about any of this.
My guess is that Asher WANTS to be out, but had at least one contact (a fixer-type uncle, or knew the cops on the take in Bloomington) who he could reach out to when Blaine started blackmailing him, and decided it was better to fall back on them and distance himself again later than risk Blaine spilling. I don’t expect this to be a great choice for him. In fairness, I’m not sure there was a particularly good one.
I also guess that Jennifer knows ‘Gramps is a mobster (and presumably, so are multiple other family members)’ but not probably not ‘Asher stole a lot of money from Gramps,’ (at least not the part where he’s been blackmailed by a mob stooge over it,) and certainly not ‘Asher played a direct but likely unwilling role in kidnapping six people including her surrogate brother, and was on the mailing list for the perpetrator’s subsequent death by cleanup.’ Asher’s relation to all this being painted firmly as by association and in the past, in other words, where we know it can still resurface in very worrisome ways.
And agreed, Raidah and Carl probably know nothing about it whatsoever beyond ‘Asher had a troubled adolescence.’
Given what we’ve seen I feel safe in saying that Asher is sincere about his intentions. He genuinely wants out of the mob, he’s genuinely trying to be a good guy.
Anyway it’s probably significant that the last several Sal strips have focused on her crashing and burning with guys she’s had intimacy (not necessarily sexual, I’ll get to that) with.
She hasn’t talked to Jason since he carried her back to her dorm after a night of drinking where she admitted to him, probably for the first time to anyone else, that she was lonely without Marcie, and before that was the two of them sleeping together a second time. Sal is very clearly not unattracted to him, but then she sees him again with Ruth and suddenly he’s the biggest asshole in the universe.
Danny (I know that they aren’t necessarily coded romantic, this is why I picked “guys she’s been intimate with”, because in this case I’m talking about emotional intimacy) buys her a bike because he’s noticed she’s been super miserable without her motorcycle. Danny is maybe the one non-Marcie person in the cast that Sal can be completely unguarded around (Amber is getting there, Walky will pry the door open if he has to), Sal knows he has the same capacity for deception as a golden retriever, and she still threw a bunch of gift cards at him to claim she definitely paid for the bike herself and that Danny was partaking in a transaction instead of giving her a gift because he wanted to make her happy.
Sal then bikes around the McNutt building enough that an entire strip was devoted to Walky calling her a big fucking nob for doing so, and in the hopes of casually bumping into Asher, who she sees with his arm wrapped around his girlfriend. Again, Sal immediately gets defensive and crabby and seems unable to engage with anyone on any positive ground even before Asher and Jennifer reveal they are still, in fact, Asher and Jennifer.
Like, I think the feelings that went between her and Jason/Asher are way more complex than “the bad shit’s in the past”, but I think it is true that Sal expressed a measure of peace with both of them that she’s now turning back on because they’re failing to be the person she wants at the moment. I don’t know how to properly express this, but I think right now Sal does want a guy she can be romantic with, except both of her last picks are taken and she doesn’t want Danny that way, either romantically or as someone she can be emotionally honest with at the moment.
Edit: a quick archive hike has informed that Sal and Jason interacted two times after he escorted her home. Once was when she told him off that she got a better grade without his help, the other was when he lost his job and she came to see him, and the two were still pretty cordial there.
If nothing else, I think she doesn’t want to start a romance with Danny right now, immediately after the bike – payment or not, I can see that still changing their dynamic a bit because it’s a fairly big gift and Sal’s not comfortable with those. Danny doesn’t want her to think she owes him, of course, but it’s still probably a good idea if they DO decide to date that they hold off until they know ‘Danny bought Sal a bike’ isn’t changing anything between them.
Yeah I could actually see Sal being wary of approaching Danny at the moment, because she’s worried of being nice to someone after they’re nice to her, like if she’s nice back to them it’s somehow fake and transactional.
Sal has Asher’s number which is the fact that he is a person who wants to be good and go straight but when things went bad, his reaction was to go back to his family and order a murder. I think that’s a very believable and yet still quite sad reaction.
He’s a guy without the strength to leave behind old habits. Plus, uh, if your solution is murder then you are a murderer. Not something you can easily leave behind.
How complicit Asher was in that murder remains uncertain, and who the victim of that murder was is kind of important. Blaine was a man entirely absent of virtue, an overconfident idiot who abused his family members and murdered people for money, and who blackmailed Asher into being complicit in his schemes. Blaine was an active danger to everyone around him.
The problem with Asher is primarily that Cold-Blooded Murder is an option for him. That’s a level of brutality and ruthlessness that puts our kids in danger of being caught up in whatever might happen with Asher in the future. He was fine with murdering someone to protect himself. If the kids get into a situation where they are a threat to Asher… who knows what he might do.
While I doubt Asher ordered the hit (Blaine was too transparently a risk to the mob’s secrecy, and no way Lester would do it for just the Boss’s grandkid who’s claiming to be out of the business,) his lack of reaction to a text that he pretty much had to know meant a guy had been killed definitely suggests he’s way more comfortable with the concept of stone-cold murder than one would like. The victim was an asshole with negative redeeming qualities* and an active threat to Asher’s life, sure, but the kids were clearly not okay seeing Ross get hit in the head with a hammer in a similar position. (They managed to capitalize on it thanks to Dorothy running tactics on adrenaline surprisingly well, and most of them weren’t exactly sad about it, but Walky fumbles his words telling AG what happened, Dorothy has her ‘it’s working maybe a little too well’ just before the first hit, and AG was not okay on seeing it. Unlike Joyce, none of them ever knew Ross as anything but Becky’s homophobic dad who kidnapped her at gunpoint once and currently had them kidnapped. They still found it reasonably traumatic.)
I don’t think Asher’s likely to casually attempt murder or murder-by-proxy, but I would be worried if Sal or AG figured out he was involved in the kidnapping, or what he might do when cornered once the mob comes looking for him again (and it almost certainly will). And while it would have been interesting how he and Mike might interact if Mike had survived, it’s one of those what if’s that nothing good can really come of.
i spent like 20 minutes typing up this huge thing but it came off very cynical and personal and i ended up crying at it so im just gonna say that i love sal a lot and i dont trust asher and i dont like that he and jennifer are patronizing her ((they may not be doing it on purpose but theyre still doing it)) and that finding yourself can be really scary and i hope sal can do it while being supported because i really really love her
First off: you have my sympathies for the whole I TYPED UP A HUGE COMMENT BUT IT WAS PERSONAL AND SAD SO I DELETED IT thing. I’ve done that a lot myself. Hope your situation gets better. :C
Also YEAH they’re being super patronizing and it’s so bad hhhhgdksldklg. I hate this weird insistence that they’re ~all grown up now~ (and also the strange jab at Sal’s ‘nerd friends’), it’s so… eew.
I love how Asher looks surprised by Sal’s threat. But I agree with Jennifer, her father and Asher’s gramps must be quite similar. Maybe they really are a well-balanced couple after all. Sal is trying to show herself as a protective sister, and maybe she is sincere on some levels. But we read her chat with Amazi Girl, she wants Asher to be with someone more capable of handling him, someone like her (or Amazi Girl… I kinda wish I could see Sal as a matchmaker). The only thing I see is how confused Sal is about herself and her feelings, how lonely she is and in search for someone to love. I hope Danny has resolved his situation with Ethan and decides that he can have a chance with Sal
I think that was partly a coded warning to Jen, as well. “He threw me under the bus to protect himself, stay guarded because he might do the same to you.”
Okay, so Jennifer is one of my favorite characters, but that last panel might be the first time I’ve felt like she’s said something that could have come out of my mouth.
No, he did not. At the place they robbed together, she was the lookout. At the place Sal was caught in, SHE specifically asked the driver to let her off there. At no point did Asher instigate, let alone SENT, her to rob the store.
The line between lovable yet flawed person trying to be better and irredeemable scumbag who thrives on deliberate malicious is drawn by judicious applications of panel time.
Only in the sense that we actually get to see the flawed people trying to be better. If we’re not shown that for the scumbags, that’s not just coincidence, it’s deliberate authorial choice. We know what we know about these characters because it’s what we’ve been shown. We can pretend they’re all off doing good deeds whenever they’re not on panel, but that’s not part of their actual character.
This feels like the kind of reading reliant on what is shown as opposed to what can be inferred from character interactions and the kind of story we’re reading (there’s probably a reason the series’ title is a pun on “coming of age”), as well as one where two characters being dicks to each other has a clear moral resolution where one of tem has more panel time and that’s like their DBZ power level so they just automatically win.
There’s a difference, I would argue, between making inferences and reasonable guesses and theories based on what we’ve seen in comic and making things up out of the ether. Like, there’s a theory going around that Dana may not have a safe home and Raidah knows that, hence explaining some of her hostility to Sarah. That’s a theory based around Dana’s dad’s immediate response, how Dana talked about home and how Raidah says she’s not doing better. That might not be enough information for some, but it is a theory based on what we’ve seen. Assuming Raidah’s an angel who spends her weekends volunteering with the elderly is not a reasonable theory, guess, or inference based on what we’ve been shown.
Like literally all I am asking of y’all is to consider the possibility that there is more to Raidah than “antagonist to a character we like so everything she does is bad and she’s always wrong and that makes it okay when Joyce and Sarah cock her life up.”
There’s exactly one character in the series that two-dimensional for motive and personality. Her name is Mary, and her role is getting aggressively hompfked to death by Dina.
I mean, I DON’T think it’s okay for Joyce and Sarah to fuck Raidah’s life up. I have said that for YEARS. I have said that while not liking Raidah.
I just don’t think that ‘Joyce and Sarah and Dina are wrong to try and sabotage a relationship because they don’t like someone in it’ is incompatible with ‘Raidah was genuinely a bully to Sarah, and can be a bully if pressed again, as was already heavily implied by the comic itself.’ In fact, I PREFER this. Ruth and Rachel are a conflict where the one we have more sympathy for is heavily dependent on screentime. Raidah is a better, more realistic portrayal of a bully than Mike or Mary, because she can be nice and pleasant to people she likes, she can be defensive of her actual friends, but she’s also incredibly spiteful and can be AWFUL to someone on her bad side – even someone who was a friend who she decided wronged the in-group.
But as my lengthy last comment yesterday said, Sarah refers to Raidah and her friends as bullies and tried leaving in multiple of their interactions before punching her (of the three interactions before the punch, the only one Sarah doesn’t walk away from is the one where she was already sitting and eating and Raidah sat down to harass her. Even then, Sarah did not engage or insult, just the coldly factual defense of why she called Dana’s dad. Even immediately before the punch, Sarah was trying to take Joyce and Dina and go.) Raidah referred to these attempted deescalations as ‘slinking away and looking out for number one like you always do.’ Raidah was not in any way, shape, or form taking the high ground with Sarah before Sarah gave into her pent-up anger and punched her. And Sarah shouldn’t have done that, but Raidah shouldn’t have been going out of her way to insult Sarah, either. And we saw her do that twice, and refuse to go quietly when Sarah tried to take the high road and leave when they bumped into each other by chance and Raidah and co. insulted her repeatedly. That’s a pattern. The punch is the first time the two of them interact where Raidah DOESN’T go out of her way to insult Sarah.
Even if you assume they had no interactions whatsoever in the semester and a half between the flashbacks and the start of the new school year – and Sarah’s distinct lack of surprise when Raidah shows up to harass her in the dining hall the first two times and her apology including ‘despite everything between us,’ she shouldn’t have punched Raidah, while maintaining she did what she thought was right in the Dana debacle both imply there WERE offscreen interactions, which likely followed the same pattern – what we see onscreen is Raidah bullying Sarah, and we have no reason whatsoever to believe she would have stopped if Sarah hadn’t punched her. Raidah can be good to people she considers friends and still be a bully. Raidah can be a bully and it still be wrong to break her and her boyfriend up so someone else can date him. But Raidah’s behavior towards Sarah is textbook bullying.
I mean, I’m just not sure I agree with your interpretation of her as a bully. Genuinely, I don’t read the same “campaign of prolonged harassment” in the earliest interactions Raidah and Sarah had.
I think she is incredibly spiteful and is actually an asshole we’re not really supposed to be endeared towards for the entire run of the comic so far, and I think that spite had to be conveyed in her very first appearance to infer to the audience that Sarah has a Dark Secret From Freshman Year that will be mined for future drama. I am not saying I am right, we could very well see Sarah go “you never left me the fuck alone the entire year!” and there would be zero contradiction, but right now it’s inference. You see Raidah’s treatment of her in the first couple years as an example of what Raidah does on the regular, I think it’s something that happened if, god forbid, they ever crossed paths, and that got exacerbated when they all came back for another year and Dana was still gone.
I also read the “despite everything between us” line to be, like, in reference to stuff we definitely saw such as the fallout of Dana’s departure, how they both feel the other has wronged them, and then the actual altercation at the mall where Raidah is “trying to protect Joyce from Sarah” (as how she almost certainly sees it) and Sarah punches her in the face.
I also feel it’s important when discussing Raidah’s character that when Sarah apologized it was inferred she hadn’t even thought about reporting her for the punch. When Sarah goes “oh crap, double my apology!” Raidah jokes about it and laughs about Sarah being a maybe crummy lawyer, but otherwise I think it’s clear as day the actual thought of getting revenge on Sarah never crossed her mind, and I will harp on this until we get some resolution, Raidah does not think Dana is getting better.
Like, that should be huge, right? Even if Raidah was correct and Dana just needed to process her grief instead of the reality that Sarah saw every day where Dana was collapsing worse and worse, you’d think an entire year back home would give her some healing, and somehow it’s made things worse? I know it’s been like eight years now, but that line is gonna mean something.
Look, unsolicited harassment on several different occasions is never gonna sit right with me, because drive-by ‘bongo’ comments and insulting Sarah when she tries to not engage for trying not to engage don’t actually solve the problem or avenge Dana if she needs avenging. However, they sure as hell look like the shit I saw school bullies pull as a kid. (What I experienced was more ostracism and occasional physical harassment, but I saw enough like that to be, as my getting heated may suggest, a bit touchy on the subject.) If Dana’s dad’s not a safe person, Raidah could have told Sarah that, the same way Jennifer told Carla when she was defending her actions with Ruth. Calling her a bongo or saying Sarah’s actions were wrong because ‘we liked (Dana) better’ doesn’t make Sarah any more likely to apologize, it just makes Raidah come off as a mean girl and a bully. And that line is the ONLY TIME Raidah ever brings up Dana like that after the reveal. Even when she’s telling Jacob why she and Sarah can’t interact civilly, she doesn’t bring up ‘her first roommate was my friend, and she called her abusive father to pull her out of school’ or anything on that subject.
If the only narrative purpose of the first two incidents is ‘Sarah has a dark past involving her ex-roommate and her ex-roommate’s friends,’ that could have been accomplished with Chan and Char being the only ones in the second dining hall scene, and then we see all three of them together at the mall. If the only history meant to be implied is the flashback and Raidah had no further contact with her until the new schoolyear, then the flashback ending with Raidah saying ‘stay the hell away from me’ in the same storyline she was just insulting Sarah for trying to stay the hell away from her is a bizarre contradiction, especially since we’re introduced to Raidah sitting herself down at Sarah’s lunch table for the sole purpose of insulting her. If, however, Raidah is meant to be portrayed as someone who had an active role in Sarah’s isolation and misanthropy – someone who decided it wasn’t good enough for Sarah to just stay the hell away from her, she has to make sure Sarah is actively miserable – then there’s no longer a contradiction, just hypocrisy.
I don’t know how Dana’s doing. I’m not even sure RAIDAH knows how Dana is doing currently, because ‘not according to Dana, last I checked’ could have meant anything from ‘last week via text’ to ‘when I heard her screaming at her dad as she left.’ We don’t know. We may never know. Honestly taking more than a year off for a medical leave of absence isn’t unheard of, and it could be that, because Dana clearly knew where on campus she could acquire pot, she and her dad decided she should go to another school entirely instead when she was ready to return so it wouldn’t be as easy to fall back into that particular set of grief-driven habits. It’s actually 100% possible for her to be recovering or back at school and just not at IU. But if Raidah wanted Sarah to actually, sincerely apologize, telling her she’s a terrible person and Dana befriending her was a mistake isn’t going to do it. Even if that was a moment of emotional outburst, ‘we liked her more than you, (you terrible person)’ isn’t any better, and that was calculated. This does nothing but satisfied Raidah’s desire to make Sarah feel bad about herself. If Raidah has genuine information that Dana’s doing worse without her friend network, that her dad isn’t helping, that the program she went to was terrible and made things worse – she could tell Sarah any of these concrete facts. But Raidah hasn’t said any of that. Raidah may claim she wants an apology, but none of her actions towards Sarah were actually aimed to get Sarah to realize she did hurt Dana longterm, they were all ‘you’re a terrible person and no one should be friends with you ever again.’
I don’t actually have a problem with Raidah in this scene, she’s really only in it to be the audience, but again. Her being nice when it suits her doesn’t preclude her actions towards Sarah having been vindictive and wrong. And I, clearly quite firmly, think the text on the whole supports my assertion that Raidah’s actions towards Sarah were vindictive and wrong.
Well yeah she’s absolutely a vindictive person, and the way she treats Sarah is wrong, I just think there’s more ground to cover on Raidah since she’s still a fairly minor character, so some of her Mean Girl actions at the start still have some wiggle room on interpretation and motivation, and that’s before getting into the vague stuff like Dana’s situation, where, hypothetically, if Dana is not getting better, Raidah could feel like she’s “getting revenge” for Dana by sniping at Sarah, which I think would be something Raidah would view as moral while also being incredibly vindictive and wrong.
But yeah, I’ll say again I don’t necessarily believe it’s 100% clear Raidah has been bullying Sarah, if only because if it were that clear I think I’d view it the same There’s a possibility I’m coming off the wrong way here in that I think I’m sounding like “Raidah wasn’t actually a jerk to Sarah because here’s XYZ reasons why it was right and/or could be proven right later” so I do want to make clear that I absolutely agree that Raidah has been a huge asshole to Sarah, let alone that we know how much it hurt Sarah to do what she did given that it resulted in her getting ripped out of her first friend group she had in college, maybe ever (like there’s this really telling scene after the mall where Sarah’s always kinda frames Dana’s situation as how it affected her, but then Billie tells her that she actually just wanted to get rid of Dana like she wanted to get rid of Joyce, and Sarah loses it and screams that it was the hardest thing she’s ever done in her life), the fact of the matter is that Raidah has been taking potshots at her on-panel and for whatever reason she wants to ascribe to it and the frequency of those actions, she’s doing it to hurt Sarah.
I want to stress that I don’t want to try and take away your interpretation of Raidah’s character or really even question its validity, everything you’ve said above absolutely can be confirmed hardcoded canon later on, and that your reading was correct the whole time, I’m just approaching it from a different angle because that’s how Sarah and Raidah’s interactions come off to me in a series like Dumbing of Age, where most of the main/supporting cast has some hidden depth to them, and I think Raidah just teeters into main/supporting cast territory thanks to the handful of strips she’s had as the focus to the point where I’m not entirely willing to take her character so far at face value, the way I wouldn’t do so for, say, Ruth right at the start of the series.
I don’t disagree with you. I was one of the people arguing in Raidah’s favour when that went down. I’m speaking more generally about how we think of characters outside what’s on panel.
As I’ve said before, I think one point of the Jacob arc was that Raidah isn’t a nice person and that it still wasn’t okay for Joyce or Sarah to screw with that relationship. To screw with the rom-com idea that it’s okay for the protagonist to mess with other people’s relationships because they’re the protagonist and the other person isn’t worthy.
It was pretty clear throughout that arc and especially the aftermath that is was portrayed as a bad thing Joyce was doing, right?
Like isn’t this kind of reading acting like the characters just start and stop depending entirely on what they say? Does anyone actually think Sal came here to warn Jennifer because that’s what she’s saying right now instead of, like, she’s lonely and wants companionship with Asher, before realizing she can’t have it because he’s taken, like Jason was taken earlier today?
Dumbing of Age is a comic about the people we are underneath the mask, except those guys over there are just pricks and we hate them and there’s no possibility of anything more complex.
You have some solid points, and if the jerks want to show themselves being better people, then I’ll watch. However, I’ve been crossed by enough people talking the talk then bullying or fucking people over that I’m solidly in the camp of:
“When people show you who they really are, believe them.”
~Maya Angelou
Anyone taking a position that they are better than others is behaving poorly, and I’m going to remain very skeptical of them and not give them any chances that they don’t earn through compassionate action *prior* to the chances that they want.
I work in a university English Department and my reaction to the word was “Oh yeah, haven’t heard or even read that one in years…” before thinking “…and I’d be so done with anyone who tried to end a conversation with that note.”
But I would hope that someone in the English department would approve the use of the correct word to express what you mean. It’s not really the place I would expect to run into reverse linguistic snobbery.
I don’t know. I mean, you’re right, I wouldn’t expect it there either. At the same time, I gots mad respect for someone who can look at their profession with a critical eye to pierce through professional snobbery. I took a path away from a career aspiration when I’d met enough industry folks to realize that they were (to a very large degree) poncey wankers. Now as it happens I’ve become a poncey wanker anyways, but at I’m content that I did it on my own terms rather than have a particular ideology mold me into one.
I think the issue is Jennifer either entirely missing Sal’s point or choosing to be snide just to point out a technicality instead of acknowledging her friend’s concern. Not in love with either option.
The “Why wouldn’t she know” makes me concerned. Because regardless of whether Asher was honest or not, he should know full well why it was plausible for him to not be open. As such, that line kinda makes me think he is deliberately downplaying things, giving the impression it is nothing that would warrant hiding, even though we know that is clearly not the case.
Yeah, like I’ve said before, there’s pretty good odds on Asher not having told her that he stole A LOT of money from the mob and has been blackmailed by a stooge about it once already. Sure, that stooge is dead now, but that just raises even MORE concerns.
And obviously, it would not be good or fair to Asher that he never has any close contacts because he stole money from the mob to try and escape, but at the same time he has not gone anywhere NEAR far enough to count on Blaine being a one-off. There are reasons to be concerned here, and they’re concerning enough that while I understand why he wouldn’t tell people about them, nothing good can come of it.
To quote Sam Wilson, “[she]’s out of line, but she’s right”.
Mostly because, like, Asher, you’re hanging out with Raidah. Have you not paid attention to how her entire character literally screams “villain”? You’re letting her make you look bad, my dogg.
Seriously, as much as I think Asher offing Blaine is pretty much a good deed*, Raidah’s a condescending jerk at worst. “Villain” is pretty drastically overstating it.
Yeah, Raidah’s an antagonist but I don’t think she’s a potential threat to the cast’s safety. With Asher, it’s only a question of whether it’ll be because Gramps found out he stole that money and others are in the splash zone of that or if Asher will end up going in a bad direction again when pushed (by Lester, by his brother, by other mob ties, by any number of reasons, but we know he is willing to fall back on those ties when threatened and that’s not a great sign.) Either option’s a ripe source of drama, but he’s clearly got a bigger role post-skip after the ‘it’s done’ strip because his mob ties and stolen tuition money are going to be fired again in act three.
There are people who do bad things for good reasons. Sometimes there are moral decisions to be made that violate the law. Sometimes there are people that follow the letter of the law but are so absolutely horrible that they make life hell for those around them. Given the choice between the two, I’ll hang out with ethical murderers instead of law abiding assholes any day.
Is Raidah that horrible?… no, but she still isn’t someone I would keep company with. (unless, ‘keep your enemies closer’) And neither is Asher, as he seems chiefly driven by self-preservation. (although I don’t recall actually seeing or hearing his actual motivation, just his actions)
Welp. I was hoping Sal and Asher could still be friends and maybe get together later, but Sal is burning that bridge rather brazenly. Asher’s expressions and “why wouldn’t she know?” hurts. He is finding out that Sal thinks he is dangerous to his girlfriend, bound to not be good to her, and was not expected to tell her about his family ties. Asher seems to have thought the opposites should go without saying and that Sal was his friend. Ouch.
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Just how powerful is her father, anyway?
That depends on how you define power. We know the Billingsworths are very wealthy which means he’s more powerful than the average middle class loser, but money only goes so far. Are politics involved? Does having criminal connections make you more or less powerful than also having money? How much money? Could say Carla’s dad technically be more powerful in that regard?
Oh, I meant to ask HOW her father is powerful. My bad.
But her father being wealthy does explain how she was able to get away with her complete wreck of a life in high school, at least partly.
Her surrogate mother, too.
I doubt she’d be as eager to bear children for Asher’s Grandfather in order to strengthen relations with his crowd….Jared Leto’s coattails and Al Capone’s are not interchangeable.
I doubt that’s What Ms.Billingsworth meant, but she is still giving Sal’s reading on the nature of her recent behavior more validation. I hope Asher’s reflecting on her comment….’Cause I doubt “Jennifer” is playing dumb.
wtf are you talkin about
I believe it’s stated earlier that her dad is/was the mayor of her hometown and is at least still heavily involved in politics. It was during the comics when Becky and zjoyce went back home for the weekend and Billie had to move back into room and so was looking for a place to shift Becky too.
Wasn’t actually mayor, but was able to get the mayor to clear the homeless out of town, so had significant influence.
We may never know. It’s a mystery!
I would say yes only because it’s been shown that Carla’s family makes phones. Which means they mine information. And information is power.
The Ruttens make the most common brand of phone we’ve seen, they make a fairly common brand of engine, and we’ve heard of them throwing their money behind politicians and high-profile legal campaigns. So we know they have power, probably a great deal of it.
I doubt the Billingsworths are on that level with them. They’re probably a big deal in the state.
And I feel it really needs to be underscored how much power control over data infrastructure gives people. We tend to ignore it because it’s sort of background noise, but Facebook creates profiles on people who aren’t even on the platform due to the void their absence creates in the flow of data they get from people who are on the platform. To me, that’s power in spades.
Is this from Patreon strips?
Didn’t he have a group of people deported?
Powerful enough to singlehandedly get the mayor of (insert hometown/city here, dunno it off the top of my head) to “move all the homeless people out of downtown,” at the very least.
Yeah, Billingsworth Sr. is definitely rich enough to have genuine political clout.
But there’s a pretty big difference between ‘killing people politely with policy’ and ‘considered a guy who laundered millions of dollars an extremely replaceable stooge.’ Gramps knows his hands are bloody, for one.
It’s also not quite as easy for a businessman/maybe local politician to get a hitman. Which is a very important difference in this case.
I dunno about that last part. Is Billingsworth Sr. computer savvy enough to use the dark web?
We don’t know, because we know nothing about him except ‘very neglectful,’ ‘rich,’ and ‘fucked over the homeless in their city,’ but I don’t take it as a given he has plural on his payroll the same way Gramps obviously does.
The Walkertons seem to be on good terms with the Billingsworths, since the three have been friends since early childhood, but at the same time the Walkertons all took it as a given Jennifer’s parents wouldn’t be at Family Weekend, to the point where IIRC Linda and Charles don’t comment on it at all. That gives a rough estimate of social status and says the neglect’s been going on for a long time.
Maybe he could do it through one of those new cryptocurrency cards advertised these days?
Considering that Ruth used a Deep Fake application, it seems at least somewhat possible.
I think that pic just came off of an image search. Amber’s more likely to be the one using actual deepfake stuff.
She cropped the head off anyway, so she probably just used “willow deepfake” as a shortcut for finding a nood that could plausibly be her own.
Hey, spotted your twitter account in the wild today, on that thread on the absolute fuckery of article about how “solar power might become supercheap and that’s bad, actually.”
It is actually a problem and one that’s been known for a while now. It’s mostly a problem with our current ways of running the power grid admittedly.
The problem is that solar power doesn’t really become supercheap. It’s definitely cost effective, but it still costs money to build and maintain solar arrays and that needs to be paid for. And it needs to promise some return on the investment in order to get built in the first place because we still need more.
But once built there’s essentially no energy price too low for it to not be worth selling onto the grid. Unlike fossil fuel plants where you need to buy the fuel and that sets a floor for the price, there’s no floor for solar pricing. Even when the price drops below what you need to make to keep making payments on the loans used to build it.
And since even on a regional scale all the solar is generally operating at peak at the same time, most of their power will be sold at deflated prices on the spot market, but we’ll still need more expensive power the rest of the time.
Left uncorrected, what this will really do is not lead to free power, but to less incentive to build the cheap solar power, since those plants can’t even cover their costs.
The article then goes on to talk about ways to mitigate the problem. It’s a far better article than might be thought from the first tweet in the thread. Even if they don’t suggest “smash capitalism” as the solution.
@JBento
Can you really be sure it was me? My avatar is a funny green alien, after all. Maybe you were just drunk and saw the lights from a tractor.
@thejeff: That reasoning, however, presumes two things that are not true:
1 – That the enterprise needs to be privately run, and
2 – That it needs to be independently profitable.
It literally can* be just something that you throw tax dollars into and get clean power out of. Like, nobody** is going around arguing that firefighters aren’t profitable, they’re just organisations that we throw tax dollars into and get (hopefully) fires put out out of.
*and it SHOULD, because power supply is too important to leave in the hands of private corps, but I digress.
**well, SOMEBODY probably is, because the dregs of humanity never cease to dig a deeper septic tank, but you know what I mean.
One things for sure, we’re not gonna prevent irreversible damage to our ecosystems and cities from climate change unless nuclear power is also an active player.
Even that’s too simple a solution. Sure governments could build solar power plants under the current market pricing system and just eat the construction and maintenance costs, but that doesn’t change the basic problem. Heavy reliance on solar produces excess energy at some times while leaving the system reliant on other more expensive energy at other times. Just having government eat the costs doesn’t fix that. (Nor are government resources unlimited and efficiencies shouldn’t be ignored just because the government is involved.)
There are both technological and market rule fixes to this problem. Most obviously – batteries and other power storage techniques so solar power can be stored to be used later when demand is higher and the sun not shining.
I never said nuclear power was gonna solve the climate crisis on it’s own. My point is that we need all the help we can get in our mission from every carbon-free source of energy available.
It is instructive to note that an energy source need not be renewable in order to be carbon free. Even if we don’t rely on nuclear power in the long term, solar power and wind alone just aren’t reliable enough for today’s electricity demands.
Increased implementation of nuclear power, combined with all other efforts at carbon-free energy generation and storage, will be wholly necessary to win the race against the clock of climate change.
It is, in fact, extremely easy, and they have done it repeatedly. It’s called the Pinkerton Agency.
You know, fair.
The other critical thing is that Jennifer hasn’t stolen a ton of money from her father the way Asher’s stolen from the family business, so there’s no known risk of him finding out and trying to kill Jennifer. (Maybe Gramps wouldn’t decide he wants Asher dead, but the alternative is ‘back in the mob for good’ and thus probably not much better for someone who does sincerely seem to want out.) Really what I’m getting at is, Gramps is way more likely to pose a deadly threat to Asher (and anyone in his orbit) than Billingsworth Sr. is to his daughter or her friends, specifically.
I worry for Asher. He may not be particularly good at getting out of a life of crime (as evidenced by ‘stealing tuition money from the mob,’ you poor doomed kid,) but I’d like him to have the chance. Maybe he should look into transfer programs. In like, Australia or something.
I don’t know if Blaine was necessarily an easily replaceable asset, but rather someone who was actively undermining their operations and who needed replacing.
Sure, but is he more powerful than a locomotive?
Fear on Asher’s face in the final panel.
He just looks perturbed to me, which is pretty reasonable considering that Sal just told them that they kinda suck and his girlfriend shouldn’t trust him.
She also just threatened him. After all, she just reminded him that despite everything, Jennifer is basically her sister and she’ll look out for her.
Seriously, if Sal made that face at you while telling you to treat someone properly, wouldn’t you get a little worried?
Especially since she quite clearly implied that she fully expects Asher to do wrong by Ms. Billingsworth at some point.
I, meanwhile, am loving Jennifer’s dialogue in that last panel.
Like, no the situation, but just that response. I might disagree with your choices Jennifer, but you rock that linguistic logic.
Fear with a dash of regret for throwing Sal under the bus at the convenience store that night.
You tag anything, Willis, dew it.
Speaking of, where is Gramps
In the secret Korean mafia opium den hidden deep beneath the University and accessible only through the steam tunnels.
As far as we know.
I mean, Carl’s shoulder is very important to the story.
Oh shit does Jennifer also have cops willing to murder hospital patients?
Yes, but only if they’re gay or black.
Well, maybe if they’re native American and resisting arrest.
I don’t trust Asher, that’s a given, but maybe also I shouldn’t trust Jennifer???…Nah I knew her dad was a rich douche already.
I don’t trust their entire group, though I guess that’s not fair to Carl?
I would say it’s plenty fair to Carl not to trust him. By my read, he’s either pretty dim or pretty callous. He either didn’t notice or actively ignored his serious girlfriend spiraling right in front of his face. Or never saw/didn’t care about the red flag that was dumping him out of nowhere so she’d have more personal time for her drug habit.
Speaking of, I wonder how she’s doing now. Is she still in contact with her IU friend group?
Maybe she got better with familial support back home. Let Sarah have a little vindication, as a treat.
Last semester, when Sarah defended her actions to Raidah, she replied ‘not according to Dana, last I checked.’ However, we don’t know WHEN Raidah last checked. It could be Dana’s dad isn’t a safe person, or it could be that whatever treatment she was getting for her grief wasn’t particularly pleasant (especially since Dana’s primary mechanism seemed to be avoidance) and Raidah checked a while ago. Or that there was a heavier focus on the marijuana than the actual issue, which was as I said grief. We really don’t know enough about Dana to say, except that she’s not back at IU as far as we know. (Because she’s doing a year at community college? Because her dad’s controlling? We have no information here.)
* Er. Sarah defended herself by saying she did what was best for Dana, or something similar, Raidah said ‘not according to Dana.’
Also, given that Raidah completely missed that she was in bad shape while at school, I’m not sure how much faith I put in her assessment of Dana’s status.
Yeah, I’m assuming she’s talked to Dana, but even if so we don’t know how much or when. I’d be totally fine if there’s an eventual reveal Raidah WAS right because she knew Dana’s dad would make things worse, a la the Ruth and Carla situation, but what Raidah was doing was untenable, too.
I kind of hope not, just because of what that would do to Sarah. In that case it would have been a completely hopeless situation, but she’d absolutely blame herself for whatever happened to Dana.
That sounds like a perfect reason to delve into it! Go all in!
All’s well that ends on the road to hell.
I’d love for Dana to come back from a leave of absence and hug Sarah in front of Raidah thanking her for doing what she needed to be done, which none of her friends would do
I would thrive if Dana ever comes back and is grateful to Sarah. It would be a nice thing for Sarah.
I forgot about that. Now I remember why I don’t trust Carl, along with the rest of that group of people.
Mr Billingsworth is a rich shithead. Gramps is a mobster. One of these is more dangerous than the other.
Well, yes. But which is which.
I would wager a small sum that the total damage caused by rich shitheads far exceeds that caused by Korean mobsters.
Depends on circumstance.
One likely does more damage overall. The other is more likely to bump off an individual who crosses them.
Yeah Sal, go hang with the dorks and the nerds, they’re way more honest about who they are.
I’ve always found dorks and nerds far more fun to hang out with, but then I’m a dork/nerd myself.
Asher looks concerned for his safety; as he should be considering the circumstances. Also, does anyone else feel like Billie/Jennifer is trying a little too hard in her “be a new person” thing?
Sal certainly feels that way
1,000,000% yes. I think both Asher and Jennifer have been trying too hard in this interaction as Sal says in the first panel.
Between the part where 18-year-olds are talking about how they’re all grown up and settled down, and the part where Asher implied Sal’s motorcycle was a sign of immaturity when we know he rides one? Yeah, there is some definite tryhardness here.
I think specifically it was riding a motorcycle in winter. The safe, mature, settled-down thing to do is to put it away for the winter. Where I live, it’s the law, though our winters are admitedly tougher than other places.
I’m sure Asher recognizes that still riding his motorcycle in the winter means he has not settled down as much as Sal. I’m not sure if he’s not proud of that a little bit. Asher may not want to be a criminal anymore, but he still might be cultivating his bad boy image.
Either way, since he still rides in the winter, he should not be talking.
She didn’t seem nearly that comfortable about it when Walky asked. “Don’t want to talk about it.”
Everyone has been feeling that way since she first appeared post time skip.
Raidah and Carl are just in the back thinking, “ugh, I thought we got a new, drama FREE friend group”.
Either that or “woohoo, we got a new FREE DRAMA friend group” 😉
Cynicism isn’t cute or cool Sal.
Luckily, she’s not trying to be cute or cool.
She’s right about them, too.
Right about them how?
Right about them in the sense that Billie/Jennifer is trying too hard to be “normal.” While Asher may not be actively trying to be a criminal, he still helped a psychopath kidnap multiple people and may or may not have had something to do with Amber’s father dying.
I do think Jennifer made the correct choice to leave behind a lot of bad habits. However, she has picked up a few new ones in return.
Honestly, this isn’t even a new habit. This is her in high school (and to a lesser extent Forest Quad) all over again.
She didn’t distance herself from friends to the same extent moving dorms, but there’s clearly some element of reinvention and putting on an idealized front implied given she didn’t wear glasses there initially (because glasses don’t fit the Head Cheerleader image, I guess?) I suspect she’s burying her problems here too, same as last time.
What bad habits has she left behind?
Hopefully she’s still not drinking, but she’d stopped that with Ruth, so that’s not new.
If she successfully has stayed sober, that’s newish since she’d only just stopped drinking pre-skip, but yeah, that was with Ruth as well (even if Ruth’s restarted now that she’s on different meds and is 21 so it’s totally fine!*)
* It is not fine.
But seriously, I know the Forest Quad reinvention was a while ago and references to high school longer still, but this is in fact just a new coat of paint on Jennifer’s MO. Frankly, it’s kind of brilliant that she’s friends with Raidah now – Raidah’s just the kind of popular girl (who can be extremely nasty to those on her bad side) that Jennifer likes to position herself as and has tried to be in the past.
Disrespecting someone asking you to call them by a preferred name isn’t cute or cool either mon frere
She’s not trying, and she doesn’t have to. She simply is.
She’s not but go off I guess
. . . What do Jennifer’s parents do again?
Like yeah a mob boss is a kind of Honest Danger, you know what to expect and what you’re getting into, but what does Jennifer’s father do that makes them about as dangerous in her eyes?
We know her parents are divorced; her dad is neglectful, wealthy, I believe Jennifer’d mentioned at one point a new/‘latest’ stepmother or something to that effect (so he’s been married plural times, probably short-lived marriages) and has political clout enough to force homeless people out of the downtown area of their city. He has at least one person on household staff, who Jennifer’s clearly reasonably familiar with. I think Willis might have mentioned he’s British once, but if so that was a long time ago and I don’t think in the strip itself, so it’s not definite canon.
I think there’s even fewer details about her mom, but the one detail we do have from Jennifer is something to the effect of ‘sleeps around a lot.’ Maybe also drinks a lot?
I don’t think Billie’s parents are divorced, unless I’m forgetting something. She mentioned her dad’s always away on business and her mom’s ‘doing business’ on every man she knows. Her dad’s an English immigrant.
… Are she and Jason long-lost half-siblings in this continuity?
And her mother is a Chinese immigrant IIRC.
Huh. Could’ve sworn she mentioned something about a new girlfriend or stepmother or something way back, but I could be misremembering. And I know the strip where she asks Nina about the homeless evacuation thing does mention Jennifer’s parents, plural, are out of the house at the time. Cool, scratch that aspect.
Business or politics, maybe both? I think. Sorry I’m not helping much.
“Tautology” I’m learning new vocabulary words from Dumbing of Age.
Me too. I had to Google that one.
This would feel more profound if Sal hadn’t gone all seething over Jason being handcuffed to Ruth’s door and then circled around a whole bunch in the hopes of catching Asher by chance.
Like, I do kinda feel this is more of Sal being angry and isolated and lashing out, granted, lashing out at two people who are, respectively, a judgmental snob and an actual literal murderer.
I have a feeling she was looking for Asher to deliver that ‘be good to her’ message. I don’t think she planned to do it so publicly but *shrugs*.
Nah I don’t think she was after that. Would she do something as pathetic as circle the building a ton of times in the hopes of “accidentally” bumping into him if what she wanted to do was impart something she could say by directly walking up to him?
Jennifer’s still of some kind of importance to Sal, if she felt like she was in danger I think she’d make a more direct line to saying that instead of dancing around it. I really think this right now is her saying Asher’s gonna betray Jennifer the way he did Sal.
Remember, Sal *suddenly* has a huge bone to pick with Jason after he finds him seemingly post-coitus with Ruth.
I mean, I won’t be surprised if she also has a thing for Asher, but I do think that part’s been something she wanted to say when she found out they were a thing.
Sal absolutely is attracted to Asher and last night with Amber made rueful comments to that effect, yeah.
I suspect it’s both. Like, Sal TOOOOTALLY didn’t bike around here with the exact purpose of running into Asher and Jennifer, obviously not, and if she did it was CERTAINLY to tell her basically-sister to be careful with him, which is also true, but if that just so happened to be complete news to Jennifer that made her radically reconsider their relationship and break up…
Well. That would of course be a complete surprise to Sal and not at all something she was secretly hoping for, because she knows all of Asher’s dark secrets and is therefore by her TOTALLY OBJECTIVE metrics suitable to bang him. Obviously.
/Sal’s brain, making completely unquestionable decisions.
Oh wow.
I am bracing for drama bombs.
I doubt Jennifer’s going to break up any time soon (my guess is that’s when ‘Asher was involved in the kidnapping and to a lesser extent Blaine’s death’ breaks, though I’ve been wrong before and that might not be for ages, we just know there has to be SOMEONE in the main cast in his orbit when his past comes back to bite him,) but I would not be shocked by some eventual ‘no but seriously Sal what is your DEAL?’ conflict. And of course Jennifer and Asher being very very sure that problems like ‘depression’ and ‘stealing money from your mob boss relatives, leaving you vulnerable to blackmail’ are firmly in the past, and will never come up again! But that’s just a given from this last scene.
I don’t trust Asher as far as I can throw him and I can’t even lift him off the ground
I think not trusting Asher is a poor reaction because the problem isn’t that he’s duplicitous or plotting something. No, he just fell into mobster habits when things went arry. He’s DANGEROUS not untrustworthy.
I think this depends on how you define trust. Can you rely on him to be a considerate, honest, kind, respectful person to be around, whose acquaintanceship is unlikely to directly lead to direct harm to you in ways he could have worked to mitigate but chose not to? If not, then he isn’t trustworthy.
Based on what we see of him, yeah. Asher was straightforward with Jennifer, and he is actively trying to distance himself from his mob connections. Trustworthy is a good word for that.
The only way he could be safer for the people around him is to…not have any friends? Just in case his family gets handsy? That wouldn’t be fair to ask of anybody.
Now, whether it’s a sort of trust where you’d hang out on a daily basis…Don’t think so, no. I’d appreciate the honesty, and keep a veeery healthy distance from him. If he was genuine in his warning, he’d understand.
Of course, knowing Jennifer, warning her away just made her more interested…
Great to know the League of Bad (Grand)Dads has enough members to spare even after losing a couple. Maybe they can get in touch with Clint and Dargon.
Who’s Dargon?
Jason’s dad. He’s British, evil, and has an eyepatch.
He was a villain in It’s Walky! as well (and Penny was his evil treacherous assistant).
I love that punny names mostly aren’t a thing in this universe, (Leslie Bean aside,) no one has superpowers except for comedic or action sequence purposes, but Dargon Chesterfield (‘cruel captain of industry’) still gets to sound like the comic book supervillain he is.
Mike …isnt Dead.
He’s in Witness Protection. & Ethan is with him out of misplaced guilt.
& Maybe, Amazigirl Knows, but Amber doesnt.
Mikes the only person who could connect Blaine O malley and his kidnapping ( other than asher and that cop ) to ashers grandfather. ( because of seeing the books)
although Faz probably knows too.
maybe Faz will be seen ‘as Family’ and given a job for loyalty.
Besides its completely in character for Mike to die and come back from the dead. The only way that can be pulled off and not screw up the timescale is a time jump, past peak sadness and into part 2.
I wonder if Ethan can ride a motorcycle.
Well, yes.
I seriously just want Mike to walk back on-page like it’s Dallas.
I still hope to find out that Danny offed Mike and buried him into the woods.
Then Mike reveals it was all a hypnosis implanted false memory designed to torture him.
Because Mike.
Well, not like it was Dallas and all a dream. Rather with no explanation ever and the characters refer to his reappearance only in vague terms as something everybody knows. Or, failing that, a different explanation each time it comes up.
Oh, I kinda hope so.
Mike was a pretty good antagonist that caused some interesting conflict in the earlier parts of the webcomic.
Personally, I strongly feel like Mike should probably just stay dead this time, but I do get the feeling that Willis hasn’t necessarily fully closed the door on his return. Like, suddenly bringing him back after all of this would kinda feel like a cop-out, but the subject has been just vague enough that “he was just hiding” probably wouldn’t actively contradict anything we’ve seen on-panel. Until we get a flashback where we see his body in the coffin, I think it’s hypothetically doable. Just not a good idea IMO, since I’m pretty sure Willis wrote him out in the first place because “cartoonish jackass” just didn’t work very well as a character in a more down-to-earth universe. Mike tends to work best and be at his most nuanced when the world around him is as cartoonish as he is– or in other words, Shortpacked!
With that said, if he did come back, I would want his character development to actually continue from where his previous final moments left off– returning him to the cartoonish jackass he was for most of his run would just run into the same problems that made Willis kill him in the first place.
I think Ethan is still in school, just distant from the rest of the cast.
I’m still not sure if I should be going ‘Jennifer, no’ or ‘JENNIFER, NO’ but either way, I don’t like where this is going.
Sal’s apparently worried too.
More like a “Jen Inferno” am I right?
Nyuk nyuk
I’ll see myself out.
Ha! I love it.
That wouldn’t be a bad derby name for her.
i think Sal is / or wants to bang Asher .
and her justification is to to break them to keep Billie safe
That is not the impression I got. I feel like she is legitimately concerned for Billie/Jennifer, in large part because of her distrust of Asher.
Por que no los dos
Tautology is fun and all, but I prefer Tauntaunlogy, the study of tauntauns.
I prefer tauntology, the study of taunts.
The school is headquartered on Tauntooine.
And is run by the same French people who taunted Arthur in Monty Python’s Holy Grail.
Yeah I know which way the door is.
The problem with Tauntaunology is that no matter how it looks from the outside, it’s worse once you get into it.
I am inclined to think this is genuine concern for Jennifer from Sal. Even if she is nowhere near as close to her as Walky is, she does still consider her family, which is probably part of why she brushed off Billie’s drunken passes once or twice. (That, and Sal seems to be Quite Straight.)
I do wonder, though. I know she feels like she is flawed enough to deal with Asher, but that feels of course unfair to her and also maybe Asher. I say maybe because there’s still a lot we don’t know about Asher.
Asher professes to not be part of his grandfather’s operations, and was given casual disrespect from Blaine that I do not think he’d have dared do if he felt like Asher was a real power player. But, we also know he knew of the kidnappings that put the group in Blaine’s hands when it happened, as well as him being told when Blaine was murdered. That does not mean that he is a made man or whatever the Korean mob equivalent would be, but I don’t think he’s as out as he said he was, either.
Furthermore, I do wonder if when Jennifer says she knows, if she does know. Asher seemed hesitant there, like maybe he knows Jennifer *doesn’t* have all of the facts. That, or maybe he just isn’t hugely keen having this conversation in front of Carl and Raidah, who likely don’t know dick about any of this.
My guess is that Asher WANTS to be out, but had at least one contact (a fixer-type uncle, or knew the cops on the take in Bloomington) who he could reach out to when Blaine started blackmailing him, and decided it was better to fall back on them and distance himself again later than risk Blaine spilling. I don’t expect this to be a great choice for him. In fairness, I’m not sure there was a particularly good one.
I also guess that Jennifer knows ‘Gramps is a mobster (and presumably, so are multiple other family members)’ but not probably not ‘Asher stole a lot of money from Gramps,’ (at least not the part where he’s been blackmailed by a mob stooge over it,) and certainly not ‘Asher played a direct but likely unwilling role in kidnapping six people including her surrogate brother, and was on the mailing list for the perpetrator’s subsequent death by cleanup.’ Asher’s relation to all this being painted firmly as by association and in the past, in other words, where we know it can still resurface in very worrisome ways.
And agreed, Raidah and Carl probably know nothing about it whatsoever beyond ‘Asher had a troubled adolescence.’
Given what we’ve seen I feel safe in saying that Asher is sincere about his intentions. He genuinely wants out of the mob, he’s genuinely trying to be a good guy.
That doesn’t mean he’s going to be successful.
Anyway it’s probably significant that the last several Sal strips have focused on her crashing and burning with guys she’s had intimacy (not necessarily sexual, I’ll get to that) with.
She hasn’t talked to Jason since he carried her back to her dorm after a night of drinking where she admitted to him, probably for the first time to anyone else, that she was lonely without Marcie, and before that was the two of them sleeping together a second time. Sal is very clearly not unattracted to him, but then she sees him again with Ruth and suddenly he’s the biggest asshole in the universe.
Danny (I know that they aren’t necessarily coded romantic, this is why I picked “guys she’s been intimate with”, because in this case I’m talking about emotional intimacy) buys her a bike because he’s noticed she’s been super miserable without her motorcycle. Danny is maybe the one non-Marcie person in the cast that Sal can be completely unguarded around (Amber is getting there, Walky will pry the door open if he has to), Sal knows he has the same capacity for deception as a golden retriever, and she still threw a bunch of gift cards at him to claim she definitely paid for the bike herself and that Danny was partaking in a transaction instead of giving her a gift because he wanted to make her happy.
Sal then bikes around the McNutt building enough that an entire strip was devoted to Walky calling her a big fucking nob for doing so, and in the hopes of casually bumping into Asher, who she sees with his arm wrapped around his girlfriend. Again, Sal immediately gets defensive and crabby and seems unable to engage with anyone on any positive ground even before Asher and Jennifer reveal they are still, in fact, Asher and Jennifer.
Like, I think the feelings that went between her and Jason/Asher are way more complex than “the bad shit’s in the past”, but I think it is true that Sal expressed a measure of peace with both of them that she’s now turning back on because they’re failing to be the person she wants at the moment. I don’t know how to properly express this, but I think right now Sal does want a guy she can be romantic with, except both of her last picks are taken and she doesn’t want Danny that way, either romantically or as someone she can be emotionally honest with at the moment.
Edit: a quick archive hike has informed that Sal and Jason interacted two times after he escorted her home. Once was when she told him off that she got a better grade without his help, the other was when he lost his job and she came to see him, and the two were still pretty cordial there.
If nothing else, I think she doesn’t want to start a romance with Danny right now, immediately after the bike – payment or not, I can see that still changing their dynamic a bit because it’s a fairly big gift and Sal’s not comfortable with those. Danny doesn’t want her to think she owes him, of course, but it’s still probably a good idea if they DO decide to date that they hold off until they know ‘Danny bought Sal a bike’ isn’t changing anything between them.
Yeah I could actually see Sal being wary of approaching Danny at the moment, because she’s worried of being nice to someone after they’re nice to her, like if she’s nice back to them it’s somehow fake and transactional.
Sal has Asher’s number which is the fact that he is a person who wants to be good and go straight but when things went bad, his reaction was to go back to his family and order a murder. I think that’s a very believable and yet still quite sad reaction.
He’s a guy without the strength to leave behind old habits. Plus, uh, if your solution is murder then you are a murderer. Not something you can easily leave behind.
How complicit Asher was in that murder remains uncertain, and who the victim of that murder was is kind of important. Blaine was a man entirely absent of virtue, an overconfident idiot who abused his family members and murdered people for money, and who blackmailed Asher into being complicit in his schemes. Blaine was an active danger to everyone around him.
The problem with Asher is primarily that Cold-Blooded Murder is an option for him. That’s a level of brutality and ruthlessness that puts our kids in danger of being caught up in whatever might happen with Asher in the future. He was fine with murdering someone to protect himself. If the kids get into a situation where they are a threat to Asher… who knows what he might do.
While I doubt Asher ordered the hit (Blaine was too transparently a risk to the mob’s secrecy, and no way Lester would do it for just the Boss’s grandkid who’s claiming to be out of the business,) his lack of reaction to a text that he pretty much had to know meant a guy had been killed definitely suggests he’s way more comfortable with the concept of stone-cold murder than one would like. The victim was an asshole with negative redeeming qualities* and an active threat to Asher’s life, sure, but the kids were clearly not okay seeing Ross get hit in the head with a hammer in a similar position. (They managed to capitalize on it thanks to Dorothy running tactics on adrenaline surprisingly well, and most of them weren’t exactly sad about it, but Walky fumbles his words telling AG what happened, Dorothy has her ‘it’s working maybe a little too well’ just before the first hit, and AG was not okay on seeing it. Unlike Joyce, none of them ever knew Ross as anything but Becky’s homophobic dad who kidnapped her at gunpoint once and currently had them kidnapped. They still found it reasonably traumatic.)
I don’t think Asher’s likely to casually attempt murder or murder-by-proxy, but I would be worried if Sal or AG figured out he was involved in the kidnapping, or what he might do when cornered once the mob comes looking for him again (and it almost certainly will). And while it would have been interesting how he and Mike might interact if Mike had survived, it’s one of those what if’s that nothing good can really come of.
i spent like 20 minutes typing up this huge thing but it came off very cynical and personal and i ended up crying at it so im just gonna say that i love sal a lot and i dont trust asher and i dont like that he and jennifer are patronizing her ((they may not be doing it on purpose but theyre still doing it)) and that finding yourself can be really scary and i hope sal can do it while being supported because i really really love her
i also havent slept in like a week and am going through a lotta shit i just wanna see sal happily ride a bike
Sympathy via (electronically telegraphed) light physical contact.
You deserve to feel loved, just for being you.
You have my deepest sympathy as well.
Although I am no artist, maybe Yotomoe could make something for you if they see this?
*internet hug* Be well and may things turn around.
Fourthing the sympathy.
Sympathy in your preferred method. I hope your situation improves soon.
“Sympathy in your preferred method.”
…
BlowjobCat has entered the chat.
Sympathy via internet comment.
thanks y’all i genuinely needed this <3
First off: you have my sympathies for the whole I TYPED UP A HUGE COMMENT BUT IT WAS PERSONAL AND SAD SO I DELETED IT thing. I’ve done that a lot myself. Hope your situation gets better. :C
Also YEAH they’re being super patronizing and it’s so bad hhhhgdksldklg. I hate this weird insistence that they’re ~all grown up now~ (and also the strange jab at Sal’s ‘nerd friends’), it’s so… eew.
Well, I mean, why would she Know ?
I love how Asher looks surprised by Sal’s threat. But I agree with Jennifer, her father and Asher’s gramps must be quite similar. Maybe they really are a well-balanced couple after all. Sal is trying to show herself as a protective sister, and maybe she is sincere on some levels. But we read her chat with Amazi Girl, she wants Asher to be with someone more capable of handling him, someone like her (or Amazi Girl… I kinda wish I could see Sal as a matchmaker). The only thing I see is how confused Sal is about herself and her feelings, how lonely she is and in search for someone to love. I hope Danny has resolved his situation with Ethan and decides that he can have a chance with Sal
I think that was partly a coded warning to Jen, as well. “He threw me under the bus to protect himself, stay guarded because he might do the same to you.”
Okay, so Jennifer is one of my favorite characters, but that last panel might be the first time I’ve felt like she’s said something that could have come out of my mouth.
At some point, Asher is going to have to realise that Sal has neither forgiven nor forgotten just what a rotten creep he was as an early/mid-teen.
I think Sal did. Then he did something else that broke her trust.
Does Sal know about anything else Asher did?
And yet, Asher wasn’t the early/mid-teen that put a knife to a kid’s throat.
Bruh, he sent her in there with a knife!
No, he did not. At the place they robbed together, she was the lookout. At the place Sal was caught in, SHE specifically asked the driver to let her off there. At no point did Asher instigate, let alone SENT, her to rob the store.
Bruh.
I’m glad to see that Sal apparently doesn’t trust this group, especially Asher who definitely still doesn’t seem trustworthy to me.
Oddly, I think Asher is one of the most overtly honest characters about who he is. It’s just that he is utterly ruthless.
Reading the commentariat on these last few strips is a study on protagonist-based morality.
God, tell me about it.
The line between lovable yet flawed person trying to be better and irredeemable scumbag who thrives on deliberate malicious is drawn by judicious applications of panel time.
I recommend popcorn.
Only in the sense that we actually get to see the flawed people trying to be better. If we’re not shown that for the scumbags, that’s not just coincidence, it’s deliberate authorial choice. We know what we know about these characters because it’s what we’ve been shown. We can pretend they’re all off doing good deeds whenever they’re not on panel, but that’s not part of their actual character.
This feels like the kind of reading reliant on what is shown as opposed to what can be inferred from character interactions and the kind of story we’re reading (there’s probably a reason the series’ title is a pun on “coming of age”), as well as one where two characters being dicks to each other has a clear moral resolution where one of tem has more panel time and that’s like their DBZ power level so they just automatically win.
There’s a difference, I would argue, between making inferences and reasonable guesses and theories based on what we’ve seen in comic and making things up out of the ether. Like, there’s a theory going around that Dana may not have a safe home and Raidah knows that, hence explaining some of her hostility to Sarah. That’s a theory based around Dana’s dad’s immediate response, how Dana talked about home and how Raidah says she’s not doing better. That might not be enough information for some, but it is a theory based on what we’ve seen. Assuming Raidah’s an angel who spends her weekends volunteering with the elderly is not a reasonable theory, guess, or inference based on what we’ve been shown.
I don’t know who is doing this.
Like literally all I am asking of y’all is to consider the possibility that there is more to Raidah than “antagonist to a character we like so everything she does is bad and she’s always wrong and that makes it okay when Joyce and Sarah cock her life up.”
There’s exactly one character in the series that two-dimensional for motive and personality. Her name is Mary, and her role is getting aggressively hompfked to death by Dina.
I mean, I DON’T think it’s okay for Joyce and Sarah to fuck Raidah’s life up. I have said that for YEARS. I have said that while not liking Raidah.
I just don’t think that ‘Joyce and Sarah and Dina are wrong to try and sabotage a relationship because they don’t like someone in it’ is incompatible with ‘Raidah was genuinely a bully to Sarah, and can be a bully if pressed again, as was already heavily implied by the comic itself.’ In fact, I PREFER this. Ruth and Rachel are a conflict where the one we have more sympathy for is heavily dependent on screentime. Raidah is a better, more realistic portrayal of a bully than Mike or Mary, because she can be nice and pleasant to people she likes, she can be defensive of her actual friends, but she’s also incredibly spiteful and can be AWFUL to someone on her bad side – even someone who was a friend who she decided wronged the in-group.
But as my lengthy last comment yesterday said, Sarah refers to Raidah and her friends as bullies and tried leaving in multiple of their interactions before punching her (of the three interactions before the punch, the only one Sarah doesn’t walk away from is the one where she was already sitting and eating and Raidah sat down to harass her. Even then, Sarah did not engage or insult, just the coldly factual defense of why she called Dana’s dad. Even immediately before the punch, Sarah was trying to take Joyce and Dina and go.) Raidah referred to these attempted deescalations as ‘slinking away and looking out for number one like you always do.’ Raidah was not in any way, shape, or form taking the high ground with Sarah before Sarah gave into her pent-up anger and punched her. And Sarah shouldn’t have done that, but Raidah shouldn’t have been going out of her way to insult Sarah, either. And we saw her do that twice, and refuse to go quietly when Sarah tried to take the high road and leave when they bumped into each other by chance and Raidah and co. insulted her repeatedly. That’s a pattern. The punch is the first time the two of them interact where Raidah DOESN’T go out of her way to insult Sarah.
Even if you assume they had no interactions whatsoever in the semester and a half between the flashbacks and the start of the new school year – and Sarah’s distinct lack of surprise when Raidah shows up to harass her in the dining hall the first two times and her apology including ‘despite everything between us,’ she shouldn’t have punched Raidah, while maintaining she did what she thought was right in the Dana debacle both imply there WERE offscreen interactions, which likely followed the same pattern – what we see onscreen is Raidah bullying Sarah, and we have no reason whatsoever to believe she would have stopped if Sarah hadn’t punched her. Raidah can be good to people she considers friends and still be a bully. Raidah can be a bully and it still be wrong to break her and her boyfriend up so someone else can date him. But Raidah’s behavior towards Sarah is textbook bullying.
I mean, I’m just not sure I agree with your interpretation of her as a bully. Genuinely, I don’t read the same “campaign of prolonged harassment” in the earliest interactions Raidah and Sarah had.
I think she is incredibly spiteful and is actually an asshole we’re not really supposed to be endeared towards for the entire run of the comic so far, and I think that spite had to be conveyed in her very first appearance to infer to the audience that Sarah has a Dark Secret From Freshman Year that will be mined for future drama. I am not saying I am right, we could very well see Sarah go “you never left me the fuck alone the entire year!” and there would be zero contradiction, but right now it’s inference. You see Raidah’s treatment of her in the first couple years as an example of what Raidah does on the regular, I think it’s something that happened if, god forbid, they ever crossed paths, and that got exacerbated when they all came back for another year and Dana was still gone.
I also read the “despite everything between us” line to be, like, in reference to stuff we definitely saw such as the fallout of Dana’s departure, how they both feel the other has wronged them, and then the actual altercation at the mall where Raidah is “trying to protect Joyce from Sarah” (as how she almost certainly sees it) and Sarah punches her in the face.
I also feel it’s important when discussing Raidah’s character that when Sarah apologized it was inferred she hadn’t even thought about reporting her for the punch. When Sarah goes “oh crap, double my apology!” Raidah jokes about it and laughs about Sarah being a maybe crummy lawyer, but otherwise I think it’s clear as day the actual thought of getting revenge on Sarah never crossed her mind, and I will harp on this until we get some resolution, Raidah does not think Dana is getting better.
Like, that should be huge, right? Even if Raidah was correct and Dana just needed to process her grief instead of the reality that Sarah saw every day where Dana was collapsing worse and worse, you’d think an entire year back home would give her some healing, and somehow it’s made things worse? I know it’s been like eight years now, but that line is gonna mean something.
Look, unsolicited harassment on several different occasions is never gonna sit right with me, because drive-by ‘bongo’ comments and insulting Sarah when she tries to not engage for trying not to engage don’t actually solve the problem or avenge Dana if she needs avenging. However, they sure as hell look like the shit I saw school bullies pull as a kid. (What I experienced was more ostracism and occasional physical harassment, but I saw enough like that to be, as my getting heated may suggest, a bit touchy on the subject.) If Dana’s dad’s not a safe person, Raidah could have told Sarah that, the same way Jennifer told Carla when she was defending her actions with Ruth. Calling her a bongo or saying Sarah’s actions were wrong because ‘we liked (Dana) better’ doesn’t make Sarah any more likely to apologize, it just makes Raidah come off as a mean girl and a bully. And that line is the ONLY TIME Raidah ever brings up Dana like that after the reveal. Even when she’s telling Jacob why she and Sarah can’t interact civilly, she doesn’t bring up ‘her first roommate was my friend, and she called her abusive father to pull her out of school’ or anything on that subject.
If the only narrative purpose of the first two incidents is ‘Sarah has a dark past involving her ex-roommate and her ex-roommate’s friends,’ that could have been accomplished with Chan and Char being the only ones in the second dining hall scene, and then we see all three of them together at the mall. If the only history meant to be implied is the flashback and Raidah had no further contact with her until the new schoolyear, then the flashback ending with Raidah saying ‘stay the hell away from me’ in the same storyline she was just insulting Sarah for trying to stay the hell away from her is a bizarre contradiction, especially since we’re introduced to Raidah sitting herself down at Sarah’s lunch table for the sole purpose of insulting her. If, however, Raidah is meant to be portrayed as someone who had an active role in Sarah’s isolation and misanthropy – someone who decided it wasn’t good enough for Sarah to just stay the hell away from her, she has to make sure Sarah is actively miserable – then there’s no longer a contradiction, just hypocrisy.
I don’t know how Dana’s doing. I’m not even sure RAIDAH knows how Dana is doing currently, because ‘not according to Dana, last I checked’ could have meant anything from ‘last week via text’ to ‘when I heard her screaming at her dad as she left.’ We don’t know. We may never know. Honestly taking more than a year off for a medical leave of absence isn’t unheard of, and it could be that, because Dana clearly knew where on campus she could acquire pot, she and her dad decided she should go to another school entirely instead when she was ready to return so it wouldn’t be as easy to fall back into that particular set of grief-driven habits. It’s actually 100% possible for her to be recovering or back at school and just not at IU. But if Raidah wanted Sarah to actually, sincerely apologize, telling her she’s a terrible person and Dana befriending her was a mistake isn’t going to do it. Even if that was a moment of emotional outburst, ‘we liked her more than you, (you terrible person)’ isn’t any better, and that was calculated. This does nothing but satisfied Raidah’s desire to make Sarah feel bad about herself. If Raidah has genuine information that Dana’s doing worse without her friend network, that her dad isn’t helping, that the program she went to was terrible and made things worse – she could tell Sarah any of these concrete facts. But Raidah hasn’t said any of that. Raidah may claim she wants an apology, but none of her actions towards Sarah were actually aimed to get Sarah to realize she did hurt Dana longterm, they were all ‘you’re a terrible person and no one should be friends with you ever again.’
I don’t actually have a problem with Raidah in this scene, she’s really only in it to be the audience, but again. Her being nice when it suits her doesn’t preclude her actions towards Sarah having been vindictive and wrong. And I, clearly quite firmly, think the text on the whole supports my assertion that Raidah’s actions towards Sarah were vindictive and wrong.
Well yeah she’s absolutely a vindictive person, and the way she treats Sarah is wrong, I just think there’s more ground to cover on Raidah since she’s still a fairly minor character, so some of her Mean Girl actions at the start still have some wiggle room on interpretation and motivation, and that’s before getting into the vague stuff like Dana’s situation, where, hypothetically, if Dana is not getting better, Raidah could feel like she’s “getting revenge” for Dana by sniping at Sarah, which I think would be something Raidah would view as moral while also being incredibly vindictive and wrong.
But yeah, I’ll say again I don’t necessarily believe it’s 100% clear Raidah has been bullying Sarah, if only because if it were that clear I think I’d view it the same There’s a possibility I’m coming off the wrong way here in that I think I’m sounding like “Raidah wasn’t actually a jerk to Sarah because here’s XYZ reasons why it was right and/or could be proven right later” so I do want to make clear that I absolutely agree that Raidah has been a huge asshole to Sarah, let alone that we know how much it hurt Sarah to do what she did given that it resulted in her getting ripped out of her first friend group she had in college, maybe ever (like there’s this really telling scene after the mall where Sarah’s always kinda frames Dana’s situation as how it affected her, but then Billie tells her that she actually just wanted to get rid of Dana like she wanted to get rid of Joyce, and Sarah loses it and screams that it was the hardest thing she’s ever done in her life), the fact of the matter is that Raidah has been taking potshots at her on-panel and for whatever reason she wants to ascribe to it and the frequency of those actions, she’s doing it to hurt Sarah.
I want to stress that I don’t want to try and take away your interpretation of Raidah’s character or really even question its validity, everything you’ve said above absolutely can be confirmed hardcoded canon later on, and that your reading was correct the whole time, I’m just approaching it from a different angle because that’s how Sarah and Raidah’s interactions come off to me in a series like Dumbing of Age, where most of the main/supporting cast has some hidden depth to them, and I think Raidah just teeters into main/supporting cast territory thanks to the handful of strips she’s had as the focus to the point where I’m not entirely willing to take her character so far at face value, the way I wouldn’t do so for, say, Ruth right at the start of the series.
I don’t disagree with you. I was one of the people arguing in Raidah’s favour when that went down. I’m speaking more generally about how we think of characters outside what’s on panel.
As I’ve said before, I think one point of the Jacob arc was that Raidah isn’t a nice person and that it still wasn’t okay for Joyce or Sarah to screw with that relationship. To screw with the rom-com idea that it’s okay for the protagonist to mess with other people’s relationships because they’re the protagonist and the other person isn’t worthy.
It was pretty clear throughout that arc and especially the aftermath that is was portrayed as a bad thing Joyce was doing, right?
Like isn’t this kind of reading acting like the characters just start and stop depending entirely on what they say? Does anyone actually think Sal came here to warn Jennifer because that’s what she’s saying right now instead of, like, she’s lonely and wants companionship with Asher, before realizing she can’t have it because he’s taken, like Jason was taken earlier today?
Dumbing of Age is a comic about the people we are underneath the mask, except those guys over there are just pricks and we hate them and there’s no possibility of anything more complex.
You have some solid points, and if the jerks want to show themselves being better people, then I’ll watch. However, I’ve been crossed by enough people talking the talk then bullying or fucking people over that I’m solidly in the camp of:
“When people show you who they really are, believe them.”
~Maya Angelou
Anyone taking a position that they are better than others is behaving poorly, and I’m going to remain very skeptical of them and not give them any chances that they don’t earn through compassionate action *prior* to the chances that they want.
Ah, “tautology” … a word enthusiastically learned in college and never used again after graduation.
I work in a university English Department and my reaction to the word was “Oh yeah, haven’t heard or even read that one in years…” before thinking “…and I’d be so done with anyone who tried to end a conversation with that note.”
I suggest some reading on the foundations of mathematics.
But I would hope that someone in the English department would approve the use of the correct word to express what you mean. It’s not really the place I would expect to run into reverse linguistic snobbery.
I don’t know. I mean, you’re right, I wouldn’t expect it there either. At the same time, I gots mad respect for someone who can look at their profession with a critical eye to pierce through professional snobbery. I took a path away from a career aspiration when I’d met enough industry folks to realize that they were (to a very large degree) poncey wankers. Now as it happens I’ve become a poncey wanker anyways, but at I’m content that I did it on my own terms rather than have a particular ideology mold me into one.
I think the issue is Jennifer either entirely missing Sal’s point or choosing to be snide just to point out a technicality instead of acknowledging her friend’s concern. Not in love with either option.
That’s phrased just carefully enough I’m pretty sure Jennifer doesn’t really know.
Yep.
The “Why wouldn’t she know” makes me concerned. Because regardless of whether Asher was honest or not, he should know full well why it was plausible for him to not be open. As such, that line kinda makes me think he is deliberately downplaying things, giving the impression it is nothing that would warrant hiding, even though we know that is clearly not the case.
Yeah, like I’ve said before, there’s pretty good odds on Asher not having told her that he stole A LOT of money from the mob and has been blackmailed by a stooge about it once already. Sure, that stooge is dead now, but that just raises even MORE concerns.
And obviously, it would not be good or fair to Asher that he never has any close contacts because he stole money from the mob to try and escape, but at the same time he has not gone anywhere NEAR far enough to count on Blaine being a one-off. There are reasons to be concerned here, and they’re concerning enough that while I understand why he wouldn’t tell people about them, nothing good can come of it.
Devil’s advocate, because they are together. And you don’t hide things from someone your together with, right?
To quote Sam Wilson, “[she]’s out of line, but she’s right”.
Mostly because, like, Asher, you’re hanging out with Raidah. Have you not paid attention to how her entire character literally screams “villain”? You’re letting her make you look bad, my dogg.
Raidah is the villain when standing next to someone who has orchestrated a murder.
Seriously, as much as I think Asher offing Blaine is pretty much a good deed*, Raidah’s a condescending jerk at worst. “Villain” is pretty drastically overstating it.
* = As per usual, in a fictional context.
Yeah, Raidah’s an antagonist but I don’t think she’s a potential threat to the cast’s safety. With Asher, it’s only a question of whether it’ll be because Gramps found out he stole that money and others are in the splash zone of that or if Asher will end up going in a bad direction again when pushed (by Lester, by his brother, by other mob ties, by any number of reasons, but we know he is willing to fall back on those ties when threatened and that’s not a great sign.) Either option’s a ripe source of drama, but he’s clearly got a bigger role post-skip after the ‘it’s done’ strip because his mob ties and stolen tuition money are going to be fired again in act three.
There are people who do bad things for good reasons. Sometimes there are moral decisions to be made that violate the law. Sometimes there are people that follow the letter of the law but are so absolutely horrible that they make life hell for those around them. Given the choice between the two, I’ll hang out with ethical murderers instead of law abiding assholes any day.
Is Raidah that horrible?… no, but she still isn’t someone I would keep company with. (unless, ‘keep your enemies closer’) And neither is Asher, as he seems chiefly driven by self-preservation. (although I don’t recall actually seeing or hearing his actual motivation, just his actions)
Raidah’s a bongo, but ‘villain’ is a little harsh.
Her scenes have mainly been about her dynamic with Sarah and/or Joyce, both of whom she has legitimate cause to dislike.
Welp. I was hoping Sal and Asher could still be friends and maybe get together later, but Sal is burning that bridge rather brazenly. Asher’s expressions and “why wouldn’t she know?” hurts. He is finding out that Sal thinks he is dangerous to his girlfriend, bound to not be good to her, and was not expected to tell her about his family ties. Asher seems to have thought the opposites should go without saying and that Sal was his friend. Ouch.