It’s art. Let no-one constrain your work Ana. Let your heart scream out it’s message across the void, carried to each of us by the fragile gossamer threads of the aether.
I appreciate that you have a creative outlet and all but this really screws up the comment area on mobile. You touch any part of that and all the comments move left and get covered up by the sidebar and you can’t move them back.
By my understanding, which I’ll admit is lacking, Torette’s can manifest in many ways, blurting out what you are currently thinking might be one of them
That was part of how South Park did it, but that was more because Cartman was being a prick and taking advantage of the existence of a condition to blurt out any old thing he pleased – which led to his internal censor completely collapsing from disuse, and eventually spouting secrets he REALLY didn’t want to share.
Look I don’t know I think it’s pretty reasonable to be worried about how your former friend and crush who you had a dramatic falling out with will react to you dating a woman who held a knife to his throat
Reasonable maybe, but life’s too short to give a crap. Especially since Ethan’s proven to be a bit of a douche to Danny about Mike and honestly most people wouldn’t give the same courtesy anyway.
Yeah, I’m trying to remember the exact words – I don’t think Danny expressed he *hoped* he’d die, but he did say something like “Would that be so bad?”, showing zero empathy for Ethan’s feelings or friendship with Mike. It was impressively insensitive, and yeah, Ethan’s response was quite reasonable. It wasn’t measured or polite, but he had every reason to be upset, and I don’t recall him being douchey about it.
This would be Season Four I believe, correct? There was the original season post-timeskip, then season two when a few new gravs dropped, then a brief season three when more gravs got added just a few days later?
Season six, I think. There was the OG search for Sal and then there was one more that I kinda abandoned because it was taking forever before the time skip had new gravs drop.
Thank you! We’ll split the difference and call this season 5 and say that the season two arc was on a long hiatus that involved another gravitar switch. 😛
It’s Bloodrose, Meredith’s goth roommate who’s been in two background crowd shots and been mentioned offhand like twice. This grav used to be in rotation, but it hasn’t been for a while, I manually selected this
If you don’t want to cheat, the site automatically assigns a grav to people who haven’t set one of their own, and you can reroll by altering how your email is capitalized
I don’t know if things have been changed since I last tried the grav roulette before I started using my current avatar, but back then I did the grav roulette a bit too much and lost the ability to comment for a few days. So I’m not sure it’s worth the risk to try it.
It’s always been safe to do it a couple of times, but I’ve heard the same thing from others. I wonder if it’s just from posting too many times too quickly, rather than anything about the roulette specifically?
I didn’t even realize that was Ethan last comic. I thought it was that guy who looked like a skinny Ethan, the one who liked Malaya in ShortPacked.
Blew right by me.
Cuz the last time these two were in the same shared space Danny boy said it wouldnt be so bad if Mike, Ethans best friend and lover, never woke up again. And then Mike never woke up again. I imagine there is some amnosity still held, even if Danny wasnt involved in the situation and tbh Mike had bullied just about everyone past the point of sympathy.
He also pointed out that Ethan was one of Mike’s chief enablers becuase even though Mike was shitty to Ethan too, Ethan never cared about the people Mike hurt as much as he cared about Mike.
And the worst part is that Danny was right. Mike’s one final good act didn’t make up for all the shit he did, and day to day he was a net negative for the world.
Counterpoint: why should you care more about random people than about your friends?
I don’t necessarily agree with the implication of the question, it all depends on how shitty your friends are (and if they’re all shitty, maybe take a good long look at your life), but it’s still a valid viewpoint to consider.
Also, shit, my gravatar seems appropriate for this particular comment.
Countercounterpoint: You should care if you are the kind of friend who says he’s fine with what Danny was currently doing if Mike did it on the grounds of “I knew him longer.”
Mike was definitely an asshole to most people, but he was also one of Ethan’s best friends and lover, so I’ve been assuming things won’t go well the next time Ethan and Danny meet after Mike’s death.
“Lover” is strong, considering they banged once and Ethan moved on. And “one of Ethan’s best friends” is sad, given that Ethan kept saying things like “I’m maybe 50% sure you’re my friend”.
Also considering that Mike was also an asshole to Ethan
It’s probably love now, considering Ethan learned that the Mike he wanted to exist actually was there, and now he’s never going to get the chance to be with him.
Except that love is based on the most idealized read of Mike as a person Ethan could possibly engage in, and there’s no way to knock him out of it because Mike’s dead and he’ll never do anything to contradict the Mike that’s in Ethan’s head now.
I’m with Spencer that Ethan could definitely produce an Idealized Mike Image to crush on, especially once Mike was in a coma for saving AG.
I also agree with you that the friendship was abusive, and any serious romance between Mike and Amber or Ethan in this universe would probably have had serious Issues because of the years of abusive friendship. But while both Ethan and Amber recognized that Mike was a manipulative asshole and not a good or trustworthy friend (recall after Mike and Ethan hooked up that Ethan went to talk about it with Amber and they were BOTH like ‘oh OBVIOUSLY don’t do anything serious and emotionally vulnerable with him, but so long as you’re looking for the inevitable backstab it’s probably okay,’) neither of them seemed to really recognize that he was an emotionally abusive friend to them both. Given they seemed to be each other’s only friends and had low self-esteem before Mike showed up, I wonder if they didn’t think they could do better. (This also informs my take on the hospital talk – simply telling your friend who’s being abused that they’re being abused tends not to work well, because a lot of the cycle of abuse is built on eroding the victim’s sense of non-shitty behavior and keeping them from recognizing this IS abusive even when directly pointed out. Saying ‘Mike sucks and I wouldn’t mind if he didn’t wake up’ was pretty much guaranteed to put Ethan and Amber on the defensive, especially under the circumstances. Saying nothing in that moment and, later when it’s not so fresh, pointing out that even though Mike saved AG, that’s one good action against all the times Danny saw him mistreat them both might have started a reassessment. I’m not surprised Danny isn’t equipped for helping your friends with their abusive friend, but he did the exact wrong things in that moment if he was hoping to actually help break Mike’s hold on them both.)
The thing about the hospital talk with Danny to me is that Ethan HAD told Mike to lay off Danny in the past. It felt like before Mike’s death, his arc might have been trending towards ‘Amber and Ethan realize just how utterly shitty he is and dump him.’ (Recall, after all, that Mike blackmailed Blaine into being Amber and Ethan’s ride on the field trip of doom, and told Blaine afterwards that he did it ‘hoping to make BOTH’ Blaine and Amber miserable all day. That was probably at least in part a bluff, but then one of his lines in the fight was that he would wind Amber up and point her dadwards for fun. I think if Mike hadn’t died, that information would eventually have come out to Amber and Ethan another way, and ‘was indirectly responsible for the worst day of both your lives, maybe in a misjudged attempt to help Amber but maybe because he enjoyed knowing she’d be trapped in a car all day with her abuser’ is one of those things that might actually force a confrontation.) Ethan was being more defensive of Mike because Mike’s one of his best friends and he was angry at Amber for letting her issues get so bad without telling anyone that she ended up endangering them and leaving Mike alone and comatose in a hospital for 36 hours because she didn’t have AG’s memories. Mike couldn’t defend himself, so it fell on Ethan, or something like that. I think if AmbG had gotten hurt in Mike’s place, or Danny, and Mike had made those comments, there IS a chance that would have been the breaking point for Ethan. We’ll never know, but Mike’s not the only friend Ethan’s ever been defensive of.
It’s messy, it’s very complicated, and it’s all tangled up in the circumstances of Mike’s death and the complete lack of support Ethan and Amber had outside each other growing up. (They didn’t have other friends, Stacy was working after the split and clearly seems unequipped to handle Amber’s issues even when she is available, Ethan had an emotionally abusive parent of his own in Naomi and Saul seems… unhelpful, and we saw how teachers treated Amber. I suspect that was pretty indicative of their relationships to non-family adults. Mike wasn’t as bad as Blaine – neither is Naomi at that – so he’s probably fine, right? And they were too isolated otherwise for much other support.)
Mike? If he had lived, he honest to god would have changed, because he had only realized in that last second how utterly horrible he had been. He seriously would have done everything he could to try and make it right.
Like, I think there’s a pretty clear thing for Ethan to be furious about: Amber didn’t just not tell him about Mike being in the hospital due to her DID blackouts, Mike, and subsequently everyone who got kidnapped including Ethan, got involved in something that only happened because Amber’s dad is a fucking nut and then she beat the hell out of him so hard he developed a supervillain persona to cope with it. Mike’s dead and Ethan got kidnapped and assaulted because of Amber’s superhero bullshit.
Except.
All of it? Amber being in the car with Blaine, egging her on to be angrier? That was Mike. That started with Mike, and it started because at age 13 he thought he had the whole world figured out, an ability to perceive people better than his peers laid completely to waste by his petulant teenage cynicism he only managed to outgrow a minute before the one and only decent thing he’s ever done in his life.
He honest to god loved Amber and Ethan but filtered it through his edgelord “I hurt you because I love you” shit for so long he poisoned their lives until one last act of decency has now fucked them up even harder than anything else he’s ever done.
The Mike we saw in those final chapters, the one who did actually fall for Ethan and realized to his horror he was one of the roots of Amber’s suffering, what do you think he’d feel if he saw Amber and Ethan not just totally withdrawn, but in a way where if left to their own devices they’d let themselves be alone and miserable forever?
That’s Mike. That’s the cost of taking ownership of someone else’s life.
The amount of trauma that produced Amber and AG is basically all on Blaine, but I do think if Mike had lived he would have realized that holy shit, he bears A LOT of responsibility for things getting so bad with Amber and AG once the split had occurred. (In particular, his comments about ‘what does that make you then’ seem to have been one of the major precipitating events in AmbG both declaring Amber the ‘bad’ alter which caused a LOT of her subsequent issues since the strip started, culminating in the stabbing which then caused Amber and AG to stop talking to each other completely.) And I suspect Mike very much WOULD have blamed himself for the convenience store once he had the edgelord justification forcibly ripped away. (Again, active fault rests on Blaine, but Mike did inadvertently set those circumstances up.) I also think it would have been a consistent and not particularly entertaining thread to watch in his redemption arc as he’d have to actively resist falling back into his old justifications. Again, Mike had to leave the strip because if he lived, he could no longer be Mike as we knew him.
In fairness to Amber beating the shit out of Blaine so hard he became a literal supervillain, this was in direct response to Blaine trying to kidnap Danny to get revenge on Amber for Amber punching him/costing him money to go to college/existing. Again, Blaine is the ultimate architect of that entire fiasco on every level, and Amber was consistently reacting to his being an evil bastard. (He is also, after all, the person who convinced everyone that Amber should get self-defense classes rather than therapy in the wake of the convenience store thing.) But I’m not sure either Amber or Danny ever told Ethan about how her evil dad tried to kidnap Danny, which definitely matters in why Amber beat the shit out of him in costume to prompt the grudge against AG specifically.
Yeah I’m not saying it’s Mike’s fault Amber’s mental state was so messed up, but the worst night if her life started because he thought he knew better. That’s what I mean by taking ownership: this Shadow the Hedgehog-ass 13 year old decided he knew exactly what was best for Amber.
Amber’s life still would have been horrible, but maybe it wouldn’t have involved stabbing Sal and taking up amateur crime fighting.
Mine’s sadly stuck on a Gravatar I made (of the cover of my second novel) and I hate it because it’s such a dumb, awkward combo breaker among all the DoA avatars.
Back before I got this Twilight Sparkle avatar, I rolled the grav roulette a few too many times and was unable to comment for a few days. So definitely be careful with the grav roulette.
Also I know what some of you guys are thinking. Even if you look past how badly things between them ended off and put aside that Danny just started a promising Romance with Sal, you got to take a good look at Ethan and ask yourself this…does that look like the face of a man who’s emotionally available?
I wonder if it was intentional, from a writing standpoint, that Sal and Danny hooked up before Ethan’s reintroduction.
Danny’s big fears of his sexuality while dating Amber were, at least how I see it, rooted in how he couldn’t accept the idea of looking at more than one person in a non-platonic context. Danny tries to push Amber away because he realized he was attracted to her and that’s not okay, he’s dating Amazi-Girl, and then the resolution to that is they’re both the same person so he never actually challenges the idea that he can have Thoughts about more than one person at a time and not be unfaithful. Then Ethan’s incredibly manly chest lands on top of Danny and he freaks the hell out because he is now having a boner for someone who isn’t Amber (among other reasons like Danny’s total lack of understanding on bisexuality), except Danny doesn’t know how to process romantic and sexual feelings individually, he just treats himself as unfaithful and wrong because he’s noticed that dudes are hot and tries to smother it as much as possible.
I don’t think Danny was into Ethan romantically while dating Amber, I think all of that was sexual attraction and Danny didn’t know how to square it until Amber dumped him and he made a bold declaration to his bisexuality and then went “haha silly we can’t date ever”, whereupon Danny started actually developing the feels because he was freed up and kept hanging around the one person he was never ever ever ever going to smooch, which obviously means he’ll never get any kind of longing or desire and it’s all good.
I bring all that up to say that, per Danny himself, he’s a one-person kind of guy. He’s a serial monogamist (and, y’know, it’s okay if he stays that way or decides otherwise), and now he’s dating his cool friend who thinks he’s neat and Danny can assert out loud that he actually is neat because he’s learned to respect himself enough beyond just slavishly submitting to his romantic partners. It’s certainly possible that Danny will reignite those romantic feelings, you can crush on a person and also be in a committed relationship, I just dunno if that’s how Danny would process it*, but if he did, I wonder if his growth and confidence in himself would let him process it more healthily.
*I also do this. I’m slowly realizing I am the most heteronormative bisexual on the planet
I fully believe Danny is going to torture himself over his feelings for Ethan and regrets at offending him while with Sal. Which will result in him breaking up with Sal because of the exact state of mind he has. He cannot properly process multiple romantic feelings.
I mean, that depends on if it’s still romantic. Danny sure as hell had no problem turning Sal down that one time. For Ethan’s return to muck that up would mean Fanny was still into him, and if he is, if that compartmentalization is something he’s still incapable of.
And that definitely can happen, I don’t think it will in the same circumstance as it did with Danny/Amber, where Danny tears himself in half unable to just say the problem exists.
I’m shocked this is the first thing that Danny should be worried about regarding Ethan. Saying out loud some nasty stuff about Mike to Ethan as the former was in the ICU – and later passed on – would take precedence on the cringe regret scale.
I kind of assume they’ve seen each other around, maybe had some arguments even. It’s at least had time to fade, while the Sal/Danny thing hasn’t even had a full day.
Yeah you might be right. But I can’t imagine their fight fading as much currently since Mike actually died and it’s only been under three months after he passed. These scars are just too fresh to see any progress in healing.
Ethan looks…. very different…
He looks like he straight up stopped eating, and got put in a Emo band for a few months…
Also, I gotta say, I really don’t want those two to become a thing again… as much as some people want that, it would only be unhealthy for everybody involved. Danny and Sal are good for each other, evening out each others personalities in a more healthy way. The way things ended for Danny and Ethan was a very bad one, Ethan told him to his face that it would be a good thing if the person he loved didn’t wake up… that’s not a thing you can take back. At that point the most they could people is friends, and even then its asking for a lot.
I’m with the people who say this looks more like Ken than Ethan. I mean the hair is one thing, but what happened to his chest and shoulders? They just shrank??
Best guess is he’s slouching/shoulders are hunched (he looks much closer to his more standard proportions in the model for next storyline up on Twitter – comparing it to the model used for the Book Ten magnet on Kickstarter, his shirt looks baggier and arms look narrower but shoulders are the right width) and lost a noticeable amount of weight over the timeskip due to depression.
Out of universe, I think it’s the combination of Willis not drawing him for several months, the timeskip redesign, and something about the hoodie seems to make him look a touch smaller as well.
The new model also clearly shows he’s lost his cheek blushes – truly, the clearest sign of angst in this comic – and does, in fact, have some sort of dark lines under his eyes.
(It’s also on the main campaign page but I wanted to see if I could single out the Ethan one rather than making everyone scroll down.) It also seems like his shading and outlines got a very slightly cooler color in the model than the magnet art, but I think that difference is unique to the magnets, not standard character art.
Saw there were 130+ comments and wondered just how much Ethan discourse there could be. Turns out it’s mostly folks playing grav roulette, which I think is much more preferable!
(The real punchline is that I’m usually the one correct people about Ruth being bi! Every friggin’ time I mention her boyfriend it’s “well yeah but she could have just dated him before she knew” as if that boyfriend wasn’t specifically brought up in the context of somebody that Ruth cherished and got taken away from, like her granddad was trying to make her do to Billie!)
Right? It’s always a delight having to point out that your sexuality is not, in fact, made up. God, we all recognize Jennifer’s aggressively wrong in denying the idea she might be bisexual and then the comments do it with Ruth anyway.
(And then there’s the ace erasure in Dina and Carla’s storylines. For that matter given the Walkyverse I think there’s a very good chance Malaya is aspec of some variety but that at least hasn’t directly come up in this comic yet.)
oooh, tha’ts what the glare was about
‘a piss its danny, what horrible brain-thought any idiot knows to not vocalise is going to fall lout his face now?’
‘oh ok nothing i’ll go back to beta-ing transformer slashfic fr continuity’
‘dammit danny’
I’ve caught my former love interest and friend looking at me like that too. It was very brief and they played it off like they didn’t notice me. Which was fine with me at that time. And by “fine” ill admit that means “I want to not give a shit, but honestly, I still really miss them, and it still hurts a lot.”
I had kind of forgotten that when Danny blurted out that it would be good if Mike never woke up, that was a pick-up attempt in the waiting room outside Ethan’s lover’s ICU room.
He went over there to confess and then stuck his foot in his mouth. He did not actually attempt to ask Ethan out with “golly it’s swell he’s gonna die.”
Calling Mike Ethan’s ‘lover’ feels kinda overplaying too considering, like, they had sex once and Ethan never looked his way again. Mike’s probably got that label retroactively a lot more than he did in the moment.
Mike and Ethan boning? It was just the one time. It made Ethan feel a lot more self-confident about himself and his sexuality where he started playing the field because he was suddenly a lot more cognizant of how attractive he was.
At least how I see it, Ethan really only became consciously aware of how he felt about Mike at the hospital.
There was definitely an attraction there beforehand, but I think the idea of “oh shit, I have it bad for Mike” only really became a thing when Mike was in a coma because he saved Amber’s life, and suddenly all those reasons Ethan would never actually go for a romantic relationship with him evaporated, because Mike was actually good all along like Ethan had hoped. Beforehand, banging him the one time was enough, ’cause it was all there could be and Ethan was smart enough to know that.
But once he realized the Mike he wanted existed in there somewhere, he never got the chance to act on it.
Don’t have a whole lot to say myself (though I am curious to see what Ethan has to say), but I definitely want to know which character my email gives me this time around.
Danny’s subconscious is his enemy! It wants to ruin his own happiness… because he’s too happy right now. I don’t think Ethan really care about what Danny is doing with Sat. But, who know? Ethan seems in needs of something that would make him return to the world of the living.
I think it’s less whether or not Ethan would care (he has forgiven Sal, but I think there’s an interesting wrinkle where he did so mostly for her and Amber’s sake, or at least I think so, and I wonder how that’ll affect things now that he’s isolated from the cast and maybe strewing in resentments) and more that seeing Ethan out of the blue is making Danny laser focus on anything he could do that could possibly upset him, because the last conversation we saw was one that Danny’s never really going to get to apologize for.
So from Danny’s perspective (or at least how I see his perspective), saying he’s dating Sal now is saying “hi, Ethan, how you doing? I’m dating that girl who terrified you with a knife! I’m totally okay with it! Actually it makes things hotter!”
The interesting thing about Ethan forgiving Sal to me is that if there IS a ‘forgiving her for Amber’s sake’ aspect, I think it’s way more in how Ethan coped with the trauma before Sal reentered the picture. Amber, obviously, dwelled on the incident and needed to blame someone for all the trauma, and so she pinned it on Sal rather than Blaine. This is obviously unhealthy, and I think Ethan may have actively avoided thinking about it too much as a result. (Not consciously, but like. Brains are weird.) Issue is, I’m not entirely sure he ever processed how traumatic it was until after the second kidnapping as a result. He also seemed a bit more sympathetic to Sal to begin with (noting that she seemed afraid before the holdup began,) and the moment Sal recognized him she immediately ran after him to apologize, so I can see him genuinely forgiving her just because he recognized there was clearly a lot going on there and she’s changed, but I do wonder if he’d be dramatically less okay with it now if they hadn’t made up previously.
I agree though that it’s more about Danny’s anxieties here than realistic odds of Ethan actually being upset that someone he’s no longer friends with is dating someone who did hold a knife to his throat once but has since demonstrated she changed a lot and was instrumental in safely resolving two subsequent hostage crises. (While Ethan definitely had a falling out with Amber, I don’t think he actively wishes her harm, so Sal saving AG’s life is probably a plus there, and while he’s isolated towards the rest of the cast there was never any real reason for ill will towards Joyce or Becky. Until proven otherwise I suspect him not seeing most of the non-Danny and Amber cast is more about needing space from Amber and because he’s generally too depressed to socialize rather than any real issues with them.)
Ethan should be kind of a whiny and pathetic person, I think. Not to like, outright negative levels, but I view him (or rather, Shortpacked!Ethan who remains rent-free in my head after all these years) as someone who’s endearing for trying more than he is for his successes. DoA!Ethan is Amber’s childhood friend who knows how to deal with anxiety and self-loathing flare-ups and can endlessly accommodate her, whereas SP!Ethan could do those things too, he just wasn’t as effortlessly good at it to the point where his plan to save Amber from Blaine when they first met was to call the police and get punched in the face, and then he slept with her almost out of obligation; that he saw her as vulnerable and needed to care for her even to the point of doing wrong by her.
So I think dragging Ethan away from his super hot beefcake appearance and ability to dispense a kind word to validate everyone’s feelings is absolutely for the best, both because I think it makes him a more dynamic character and more because I think it’s truer to the essence of Ethan as a character; he’s not good at this, but bless him, he is trying. If this Ethan tried to be there for someone I think he’d screw it up, but I’d appreciate him a lot more because I can tell that support is coming from so much effort.
And even taking Shortpacked! into consideration, this is still totally new ground for Ethan as a character. SP!Ethan was a goober everyone liked but nobody respected, he gets effortlessly punched out like three times in the first two years of the series, Galasso standing next to him made him look like Danny does standing next to DoA!Ethan. He was comedically weak, but he wasn’t really a failure, he was a Boring Everyman protagonist whose boredom was a feature, not a bug, and he eventually proved himself not an everyman at all because he seriously just wanted to spend his life away from all this drama bullshit and go on the internet to complain about toys.
But this Ethan is someone who’s deeply, visually and textually, a really broken and messed up person at the moment, and he’s been dragged to the lowest point in his life so hard that his own body changed to sell that fall. Just looking at him carries this air of vulnerability that I think sells that absolute despair he’s going through in a way that I don’t think would work if he was still this tall buff dude; if he still looked effortlessly hot I think it would run the risk of making him too much of a joke, instead of the current cycle of laughter -> guilt -> more laughter seeing him provokes in me. It’s funny that Ethan’s visual expression of his sadness is dressing up like Bully Maguire, it’s also mortifying that his face is so gaunt, his eyes look like they’re struggling to stay open, his muscle mass has depleted to a level slightly above Ken, and there’s this kind of unspoken admission that he’s so totally done that seeing Danny can’t even provoke that much anger in him anymore, like it’s way, way too much effort to give a shit.
Remember what you said yesterday, about Ethan being mostly a non-entity before? I can’t help but notice that this is the first time we see him post-break, two strips in a row, and he STILL does jack-shit.
Yesterday was the commentariat responding to Ethan existing, today is Danny responding to Ethan existing, I’m half-expecting tomorrow being somebody else responding to Ethan existing, and Ethan’s still doing jack shit, except this time around he looks like he drank all the jack (and nothing else).
Well yeah, he’s a passive character, but passive characters can still have drive. Dorothy is/was as vanilla but she’s driven enough that you can throw her into scenarios or have other more pushy characters drag her along so she can play straight man. Old Ethan was passive, didn’t have the energy to pilot his own stories, and when he was with someone else was incapable of causing any interesting conflict. That last part is already gone.
Every team book needs a Cyclops.
And you’re correct he’s doing nothing, but instead of doing nothing when Amber climbs through his window in a mask talking in third person telling him the girl she stabbed is on-campus, he’s doing nothing because he never wants to see these assholes again because every time he does something horrible happens.
Plays “Walk on by,” and is morose cause he’s missing the old Hack’d Muzak. I miss it, I’m telling you a fact. It was good. You kids these days with your MP3s and your iPods and Androids, you don’t know how good you have it! And Keep your bicycles off of my lawn!
Meh, unnecessary drama, is unnecessary. I recall that Ethan and Sal talked this out a long time ago, so Ethan would have zero f*cks that Danny and Sal are seeing each other. If this is where the rest of the story is going, it is going to be one boring drag to slog through.
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stupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidst
upidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstup
idstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupid
stupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidst
upidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstup
idstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupid
ok basically correct but a little more horrifying than the draft
It’s art. Let no-one constrain your work Ana. Let your heart scream out it’s message across the void, carried to each of us by the fragile gossamer threads of the aether.
I clearly see Danny barfing ‘stupid’….
If this isn’t ASCII art, I don’t know what is. 😀
Ana I need you to stop.
I need her to continue, because that is amazing.
https://i.giphy.com/media/uj8SbnHpCfxlm3jfJA/giphy.webp
You know what they say, great artists are like Pokeballs — they both know how to steal your soul.
Great work!
Yotomoe pauses making art and Ana starts. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!
Have we ever seen them in a room together?
No, but I’ve never seen them in a room apart either.
Are you planning to do this often?
oh god no it’s a pain to do correctly
Okay. Then never mind that the leading makes it look as thought it was printed by and eight-pin dot-matrix printer with two jammed pins.
Why the jammed pins? The lettering and solid blacks look fine to me.
Have you checked the ribbon’s ink levels behind your own display?
Oh wait. I see it now. Yeah, stuck pins. 🙁
But if you call it an NFT, you could make a fortune!
My oddly specific neuroses about ASCII art are extremely grateful
Looks like someone really sick putting on rubber protection
…………..What.
…………………….The frick.
…………………………………………….Is this.
what does it look like?
From a distance if you squint?
Early Eighties computer graphics for a black & white (not grayscale) display, with white streaks across it.
It’s better than Campbells Tomato Soup is what it is.
I really wish there was a like system.
YES… HA HA HA… YES!
It just kinda pours outta his mouth, doesn’t it?
I appreciate that you have a creative outlet and all but this really screws up the comment area on mobile. You touch any part of that and all the comments move left and get covered up by the sidebar and you can’t move them back.
Chrome on iOS doesn’t do that for me… The comment editing box is sometimes too wide for the comment text area though.
Ethan: Sorry, what was that?
Danny: You always blurt out exactly what’s on the tip of your goddamn tongue!
Ethan: I’m sorry you feel that way, I guess I should go.
Danny: Shit, he’s leaving!
Ethan: …Do you not want me to?
Danny: Is this still happening?! Act casual and engage him in conversation while subtly googling at what age Tourette’s symptoms start to appear!
(For the record, I’m fully aware Tourette’s is nothing like this, Danny is just being especially Danny.)
By my understanding, which I’ll admit is lacking, Torette’s can manifest in many ways, blurting out what you are currently thinking might be one of them
That was part of how South Park did it, but that was more because Cartman was being a prick and taking advantage of the existence of a condition to blurt out any old thing he pleased – which led to his internal censor completely collapsing from disuse, and eventually spouting secrets he REALLY didn’t want to share.
Meh. They squashed that beef ages ago. These teens care way to much about other people’s opinion on who they’re dating.
Look I don’t know I think it’s pretty reasonable to be worried about how your former friend and crush who you had a dramatic falling out with will react to you dating a woman who held a knife to his throat
Reasonable maybe, but life’s too short to give a crap. Especially since Ethan’s proven to be a bit of a douche to Danny about Mike and honestly most people wouldn’t give the same courtesy anyway.
They were standing outside a dying man’s room and Danny said he hoped he’d die. Ethan reacted reasonably.
Yeah, I’m trying to remember the exact words – I don’t think Danny expressed he *hoped* he’d die, but he did say something like “Would that be so bad?”, showing zero empathy for Ethan’s feelings or friendship with Mike. It was impressively insensitive, and yeah, Ethan’s response was quite reasonable. It wasn’t measured or polite, but he had every reason to be upset, and I don’t recall him being douchey about it.
He told Danny he’d let Mike laugh at him in a coma because he knew him longer.
And specifically the “Would that be so bad?” wasn’t in response to “He’s going to die”, but to They’re not sure he’ll wake up for a while.
Iunno, I expected Danny to be a little more worrying about how hard he goofed up being there when Mike died.
Eh. I can live with Dotty.
Does Danny know Ethan and Sal reconciled? I don’t remember.
I don’t even remember where he found out Sal was the one who took Ethan hostage.
I’m assuming he pieced it together when Sal and Amber fought on the Got Dumped Stairs.
Nice save Danny.
That side look from Ethan….
Oh dear. Oh no. Danny, you take that foot out of your mouth right now, you’ll choke.
Oh and in other news, it’s time for a new Search for Sal season. Damn You, Willis.
…Reconsidering my damning now, I feel honoured. Ruth is a national treasure.
Ruth does have all the abrupt violence of Nicolas Cage, but I don’t think she cares about American history.
Canada has national treasures.
Liek the majestic møøse.
Much like Ruth, I’m a Canadian type Pokemon!
Ruth is Ontario Pride.
And? 😛
Oh boy! My favorite show got renewed for another season! Let’s go! Reroll!
XD Well, I’m glad to provide free entertainment in the comments anyway.
This would be Season Four I believe, correct? There was the original season post-timeskip, then season two when a few new gravs dropped, then a brief season three when more gravs got added just a few days later?
Season six, I think. There was the OG search for Sal and then there was one more that I kinda abandoned because it was taking forever before the time skip had new gravs drop.
Hang in there BBCC. We have confidence in you.
Thank you! We’ll split the difference and call this season 5 and say that the season two arc was on a long hiatus that involved another gravitar switch. 😛
There are worse things he could have in his mouth in this situation.
…like what?
Puns.
Wee puns.
Them’s fightin’ words!
Sal’s cool but let’s see who I get.
(laughs in default e-mail)
*Glares enviously*
*stares worryingly*
*credits the hat obtusely*
I’m not entirely sure how the avatar-switching works, since apparently it doesn’t change if you use a formerly-used misspelled email?
Not one I would prefer, there… -_-
What’s the matter with
MikeBooster?Well for one, Mike is clearly Jennifer.
It’s possible you just got uh… ‘lucky’ with two of the same.
Grav Roulette should hopefully answer any questions.
Heee! I’m mentioned in Walkypedia!
*sense of belonging*
Well earned I should say.
This was not an angle I had considered.
Who’s your grav supposed to be anyway?
And how do I play grav roulette?
It’s Bloodrose, Meredith’s goth roommate who’s been in two background crowd shots and been mentioned offhand like twice. This grav used to be in rotation, but it hasn’t been for a while, I manually selected this
If you don’t want to cheat, the site automatically assigns a grav to people who haven’t set one of their own, and you can reroll by altering how your email is capitalized
Thanks for the tip!
I don’t know if things have been changed since I last tried the grav roulette before I started using my current avatar, but back then I did the grav roulette a bit too much and lost the ability to comment for a few days. So I’m not sure it’s worth the risk to try it.
It’s always been safe to do it a couple of times, but I’ve heard the same thing from others. I wonder if it’s just from posting too many times too quickly, rather than anything about the roulette specifically?
And, since I’m here, trying one more time.
Well at least he was able to take advantage of how his dumb mouth works to control what he uncontrollably blurted out.
It’s okay Danny, many people hold a phone to other people’s necks.
I didn’t even realize that was Ethan last comic. I thought it was that guy who looked like a skinny Ethan, the one who liked Malaya in ShortPacked.
Blew right by me.
Time to reroll.
Again
I’m stopping after 5 if I’m not satisfied.
He will never be satisfied!
Gods, I hope you’re satisfied!
But if you ain’t, don’t blame me!
Blame my friends on the other side!
Really sorry I missed this chain of responses.
Sometimes the original steals from the copycat. It happens.
Ken?
Yes! Ken. I thought it was Ken.
Oh wait, did the gravatars get mixed up again, dang.
Why does Ethan look so pissed?
He’s channeling Young Bruce Wayne pretty hard.
Especially the broody part.
Cuz the last time these two were in the same shared space Danny boy said it wouldnt be so bad if Mike, Ethans best friend and lover, never woke up again. And then Mike never woke up again. I imagine there is some amnosity still held, even if Danny wasnt involved in the situation and tbh Mike had bullied just about everyone past the point of sympathy.
He also pointed out that Ethan was one of Mike’s chief enablers becuase even though Mike was shitty to Ethan too, Ethan never cared about the people Mike hurt as much as he cared about Mike.
And the worst part is that Danny was right. Mike’s one final good act didn’t make up for all the shit he did, and day to day he was a net negative for the world.
yyyup.
Counterpoint: why should you care more about random people than about your friends?
I don’t necessarily agree with the implication of the question, it all depends on how shitty your friends are (and if they’re all shitty, maybe take a good long look at your life), but it’s still a valid viewpoint to consider.
Also, shit, my gravatar seems appropriate for this particular comment.
Countercounterpoint, if none of your friends are shitty, then maybe YOU are the shitty friend, and also take a good long look at your life.
Or be smart like me and have no friends.
And apparently I’m Joyce now, which is definitely an upgrade, but still not perfect.
Countercounterpoint: You should care if you are the kind of friend who says he’s fine with what Danny was currently doing if Mike did it on the grounds of “I knew him longer.”
Mike was definitely an asshole to most people, but he was also one of Ethan’s best friends and lover, so I’ve been assuming things won’t go well the next time Ethan and Danny meet after Mike’s death.
“Lover” is strong, considering they banged once and Ethan moved on. And “one of Ethan’s best friends” is sad, given that Ethan kept saying things like “I’m maybe 50% sure you’re my friend”.
Also considering that Mike was also an asshole to Ethan
It’s probably love now, considering Ethan learned that the Mike he wanted to exist actually was there, and now he’s never going to get the chance to be with him.
Except that love is based on the most idealized read of Mike as a person Ethan could possibly engage in, and there’s no way to knock him out of it because Mike’s dead and he’ll never do anything to contradict the Mike that’s in Ethan’s head now.
It is, as the kids say, complicated.
I’m with Spencer that Ethan could definitely produce an Idealized Mike Image to crush on, especially once Mike was in a coma for saving AG.
I also agree with you that the friendship was abusive, and any serious romance between Mike and Amber or Ethan in this universe would probably have had serious Issues because of the years of abusive friendship. But while both Ethan and Amber recognized that Mike was a manipulative asshole and not a good or trustworthy friend (recall after Mike and Ethan hooked up that Ethan went to talk about it with Amber and they were BOTH like ‘oh OBVIOUSLY don’t do anything serious and emotionally vulnerable with him, but so long as you’re looking for the inevitable backstab it’s probably okay,’) neither of them seemed to really recognize that he was an emotionally abusive friend to them both. Given they seemed to be each other’s only friends and had low self-esteem before Mike showed up, I wonder if they didn’t think they could do better. (This also informs my take on the hospital talk – simply telling your friend who’s being abused that they’re being abused tends not to work well, because a lot of the cycle of abuse is built on eroding the victim’s sense of non-shitty behavior and keeping them from recognizing this IS abusive even when directly pointed out. Saying ‘Mike sucks and I wouldn’t mind if he didn’t wake up’ was pretty much guaranteed to put Ethan and Amber on the defensive, especially under the circumstances. Saying nothing in that moment and, later when it’s not so fresh, pointing out that even though Mike saved AG, that’s one good action against all the times Danny saw him mistreat them both might have started a reassessment. I’m not surprised Danny isn’t equipped for helping your friends with their abusive friend, but he did the exact wrong things in that moment if he was hoping to actually help break Mike’s hold on them both.)
The thing about the hospital talk with Danny to me is that Ethan HAD told Mike to lay off Danny in the past. It felt like before Mike’s death, his arc might have been trending towards ‘Amber and Ethan realize just how utterly shitty he is and dump him.’ (Recall, after all, that Mike blackmailed Blaine into being Amber and Ethan’s ride on the field trip of doom, and told Blaine afterwards that he did it ‘hoping to make BOTH’ Blaine and Amber miserable all day. That was probably at least in part a bluff, but then one of his lines in the fight was that he would wind Amber up and point her dadwards for fun. I think if Mike hadn’t died, that information would eventually have come out to Amber and Ethan another way, and ‘was indirectly responsible for the worst day of both your lives, maybe in a misjudged attempt to help Amber but maybe because he enjoyed knowing she’d be trapped in a car all day with her abuser’ is one of those things that might actually force a confrontation.) Ethan was being more defensive of Mike because Mike’s one of his best friends and he was angry at Amber for letting her issues get so bad without telling anyone that she ended up endangering them and leaving Mike alone and comatose in a hospital for 36 hours because she didn’t have AG’s memories. Mike couldn’t defend himself, so it fell on Ethan, or something like that. I think if AmbG had gotten hurt in Mike’s place, or Danny, and Mike had made those comments, there IS a chance that would have been the breaking point for Ethan. We’ll never know, but Mike’s not the only friend Ethan’s ever been defensive of.
It’s messy, it’s very complicated, and it’s all tangled up in the circumstances of Mike’s death and the complete lack of support Ethan and Amber had outside each other growing up. (They didn’t have other friends, Stacy was working after the split and clearly seems unequipped to handle Amber’s issues even when she is available, Ethan had an emotionally abusive parent of his own in Naomi and Saul seems… unhelpful, and we saw how teachers treated Amber. I suspect that was pretty indicative of their relationships to non-family adults. Mike wasn’t as bad as Blaine – neither is Naomi at that – so he’s probably fine, right? And they were too isolated otherwise for much other support.)
Here’s kinda how I see the tragedy of it all.
Mike? If he had lived, he honest to god would have changed, because he had only realized in that last second how utterly horrible he had been. He seriously would have done everything he could to try and make it right.
Like, I think there’s a pretty clear thing for Ethan to be furious about: Amber didn’t just not tell him about Mike being in the hospital due to her DID blackouts, Mike, and subsequently everyone who got kidnapped including Ethan, got involved in something that only happened because Amber’s dad is a fucking nut and then she beat the hell out of him so hard he developed a supervillain persona to cope with it. Mike’s dead and Ethan got kidnapped and assaulted because of Amber’s superhero bullshit.
Except.
All of it? Amber being in the car with Blaine, egging her on to be angrier? That was Mike. That started with Mike, and it started because at age 13 he thought he had the whole world figured out, an ability to perceive people better than his peers laid completely to waste by his petulant teenage cynicism he only managed to outgrow a minute before the one and only decent thing he’s ever done in his life.
He honest to god loved Amber and Ethan but filtered it through his edgelord “I hurt you because I love you” shit for so long he poisoned their lives until one last act of decency has now fucked them up even harder than anything else he’s ever done.
The Mike we saw in those final chapters, the one who did actually fall for Ethan and realized to his horror he was one of the roots of Amber’s suffering, what do you think he’d feel if he saw Amber and Ethan not just totally withdrawn, but in a way where if left to their own devices they’d let themselves be alone and miserable forever?
That’s Mike. That’s the cost of taking ownership of someone else’s life.
The amount of trauma that produced Amber and AG is basically all on Blaine, but I do think if Mike had lived he would have realized that holy shit, he bears A LOT of responsibility for things getting so bad with Amber and AG once the split had occurred. (In particular, his comments about ‘what does that make you then’ seem to have been one of the major precipitating events in AmbG both declaring Amber the ‘bad’ alter which caused a LOT of her subsequent issues since the strip started, culminating in the stabbing which then caused Amber and AG to stop talking to each other completely.) And I suspect Mike very much WOULD have blamed himself for the convenience store once he had the edgelord justification forcibly ripped away. (Again, active fault rests on Blaine, but Mike did inadvertently set those circumstances up.) I also think it would have been a consistent and not particularly entertaining thread to watch in his redemption arc as he’d have to actively resist falling back into his old justifications. Again, Mike had to leave the strip because if he lived, he could no longer be Mike as we knew him.
In fairness to Amber beating the shit out of Blaine so hard he became a literal supervillain, this was in direct response to Blaine trying to kidnap Danny to get revenge on Amber for Amber punching him/costing him money to go to college/existing. Again, Blaine is the ultimate architect of that entire fiasco on every level, and Amber was consistently reacting to his being an evil bastard. (He is also, after all, the person who convinced everyone that Amber should get self-defense classes rather than therapy in the wake of the convenience store thing.) But I’m not sure either Amber or Danny ever told Ethan about how her evil dad tried to kidnap Danny, which definitely matters in why Amber beat the shit out of him in costume to prompt the grudge against AG specifically.
Yeah I’m not saying it’s Mike’s fault Amber’s mental state was so messed up, but the worst night if her life started because he thought he knew better. That’s what I mean by taking ownership: this Shadow the Hedgehog-ass 13 year old decided he knew exactly what was best for Amber.
Amber’s life still would have been horrible, but maybe it wouldn’t have involved stabbing Sal and taking up amateur crime fighting.
Oh damn I forgot about that
He must have inherited Mike anger towards the world.
I think that’s just his default right now
Because he has black hair, which is in his eyes now. He could have sad eyebrows and we couldn’t tell.
He doesn’t, i think that’s just his resting face now. Notice how he went right back to minding his own business after glancing up at Danny
I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. So what are Danny’s odds of getting through this without Danning it up?
Unclear. As I recall, Ethan gave zero shits about past-Sal. Danny was there when that air was cleared, too.
So honestly, Danny’s panicking over nothing. But I equally have faith he’ll find a way to fuck it up.
Not good. Considering how well things went with Sal, I think Danny may have already used up his entire annual supply of smooth.
Random chance working in your favour isn’t a supply that gets used up. Danny’s smooth however, burns out the second hi eyes open.
Not high, since this is how he’s starting out.
Ah, the hunt fir gravatars begins again.
Nope.
Nope, not Asher.
Sal only thinks that when she’d not busy finding him hot.
Mine’s sadly stuck on a Gravatar I made (of the cover of my second novel) and I hate it because it’s such a dumb, awkward combo breaker among all the DoA avatars.
ETHAN, THANK GOD YOU HEARD THAT.
I ALMOST blurted out that I’m kissing the girl who held a knife to your threat.
Bullet dodged, am I right?
Sal!? Hell yeah. 🙂
This was supposed to be a reply to my last message, but oh well.
Fuck yeah! When I find Sal again, we’ll be Sal together.
That will be awesome, hopefully it doesn’t take you too many rolls to get her.
Here’s hoping!
Hopefully I can join you two
Huh. I think this is actually the first Ethan I’ve seen
Hell yeah, join the Sal club.
god dan it
No, no. This is progress. Remember what happened last time.
I like Sal, but I’m gonna go ahead and make a list of potential Gravs based on my address. Here goes nothing.
Okay that last one was a mistake
That Danny was good though.
Didn’t mean to write Joe/Danny but I’ll happily take it.
I think Chrome screwed up…
Nope, both of those options genuinely give me Danny. Huh.
And now…
I’ll find Dina yet, even if I don’t stick to her
Ethan and Asher in a row look like they were trying to be hairstyle buddies but made some communication errors
Careful now, I think rolling the Grav roulette too many times in one day can get you banned for a while
I guess theres a 50/50 chance I’ll get a feamle gravitar for a change.
Interesting, those are the same odds of getting any specific gravitar after rolling a maximum of 17 times.
Back before I got this Twilight Sparkle avatar, I rolled the grav roulette a few too many times and was unable to comment for a few days. So definitely be careful with the grav roulette.
I’m guessing that would have to be either a cookie or IP ban. Both of those can be worked around.
“Ethan! What have you done??? We agreed combed to the left!”
“I thought you meant left from the point of view of people looking at us!!!”
If they look at each other though they make a mirror image
Also I know what some of you guys are thinking. Even if you look past how badly things between them ended off and put aside that Danny just started a promising Romance with Sal, you got to take a good look at Ethan and ask yourself this…does that look like the face of a man who’s emotionally available?
His soulful glances suggest he might be.
Those feel less like “soulful glances” and more like “ah, there he is, that tool” to me.
Danny: Ethan is now so tortured and brooding!
I wonder if it was intentional, from a writing standpoint, that Sal and Danny hooked up before Ethan’s reintroduction.
Danny’s big fears of his sexuality while dating Amber were, at least how I see it, rooted in how he couldn’t accept the idea of looking at more than one person in a non-platonic context. Danny tries to push Amber away because he realized he was attracted to her and that’s not okay, he’s dating Amazi-Girl, and then the resolution to that is they’re both the same person so he never actually challenges the idea that he can have Thoughts about more than one person at a time and not be unfaithful. Then Ethan’s incredibly manly chest lands on top of Danny and he freaks the hell out because he is now having a boner for someone who isn’t Amber (among other reasons like Danny’s total lack of understanding on bisexuality), except Danny doesn’t know how to process romantic and sexual feelings individually, he just treats himself as unfaithful and wrong because he’s noticed that dudes are hot and tries to smother it as much as possible.
I don’t think Danny was into Ethan romantically while dating Amber, I think all of that was sexual attraction and Danny didn’t know how to square it until Amber dumped him and he made a bold declaration to his bisexuality and then went “haha silly we can’t date ever”, whereupon Danny started actually developing the feels because he was freed up and kept hanging around the one person he was never ever ever ever going to smooch, which obviously means he’ll never get any kind of longing or desire and it’s all good.
I bring all that up to say that, per Danny himself, he’s a one-person kind of guy. He’s a serial monogamist (and, y’know, it’s okay if he stays that way or decides otherwise), and now he’s dating his cool friend who thinks he’s neat and Danny can assert out loud that he actually is neat because he’s learned to respect himself enough beyond just slavishly submitting to his romantic partners. It’s certainly possible that Danny will reignite those romantic feelings, you can crush on a person and also be in a committed relationship, I just dunno if that’s how Danny would process it*, but if he did, I wonder if his growth and confidence in himself would let him process it more healthily.
*I also do this. I’m slowly realizing I am the most heteronormative bisexual on the planet
I fully believe Danny is going to torture himself over his feelings for Ethan and regrets at offending him while with Sal. Which will result in him breaking up with Sal because of the exact state of mind he has. He cannot properly process multiple romantic feelings.
I mean, that depends on if it’s still romantic. Danny sure as hell had no problem turning Sal down that one time. For Ethan’s return to muck that up would mean Fanny was still into him, and if he is, if that compartmentalization is something he’s still incapable of.
And that definitely can happen, I don’t think it will in the same circumstance as it did with Danny/Amber, where Danny tears himself in half unable to just say the problem exists.
“I’m helping” – my autocorrect calling Danny a butt.
That’s a very abusable weakness for someone who was a superhero’s lover, Danny.
that’s a past tense relationship for a reason
a lot of reasons, actually
The haircut is so different, he doesn’t even look like Ethan… can we be sure this is Ethan? I am not convinced. It could be another Ethan clone.
Of course, Danny would probably be able to tell the difference.
Good lord, I hope we see Ethan again this arc after this interaction inevitably goes poorly.
Another Ethan clone?
Oh dang, was not expecting an Agatha.
An Agatha is never late, nor is she early. She arrives precisely when the trash chute’s full.
For what is worth, I’m glad to see more Agatha. The comic could use more Agatha.
She’s cute and upbeat, which is a good palette cleanser after a particularly heavy chapter.
…. all told, that went better than it might have.
(Laissez les bons gravs rouler…)
Huh. Cheerfully innocent and shy fanficcer who could never bring herself to speak up to her crush.
… Okay, I’m going to own this. I was going to hold out for Walky, but Lucy’s a good fit too.
I mean, there’s definitely a Lucy/Walky/good fit joke there, but she’s a good Christian girl and they haven’t had three dates yet. Have they?
I think she’s trying to speedrun through them, to get up to the “okay, milestone reached, but now what” stage.
Your tie is on too tight, Danny.
Yeah, and not in a good way, either. 😆
Good save, that’s a totally inconspicuous thing to say.
I’m shocked this is the first thing that Danny should be worried about regarding Ethan. Saying out loud some nasty stuff about Mike to Ethan as the former was in the ICU – and later passed on – would take precedence on the cringe regret scale.
I kind of assume they’ve seen each other around, maybe had some arguments even. It’s at least had time to fade, while the Sal/Danny thing hasn’t even had a full day.
Yeah you might be right. But I can’t imagine their fight fading as much currently since Mike actually died and it’s only been under three months after he passed. These scars are just too fresh to see any progress in healing.
I’m not saying either is actually over it, but it may not be quite as raw as it used to have been
Alright then.
I’m guessing he’s being hyper aware of anything that could upset him, given their last argument.
Yeah that makes sense. It’s just a surprise to me, that’s all.
Ethan looks…. very different…
He looks like he straight up stopped eating, and got put in a Emo band for a few months…
Also, I gotta say, I really don’t want those two to become a thing again… as much as some people want that, it would only be unhealthy for everybody involved. Danny and Sal are good for each other, evening out each others personalities in a more healthy way. The way things ended for Danny and Ethan was a very bad one, Ethan told him to his face that it would be a good thing if the person he loved didn’t wake up… that’s not a thing you can take back. At that point the most they could people is friends, and even then its asking for a lot.
Grav roulette?
I’m okay with sexy potential villain.
You might be. I had to mess with my email on mobile to make sure I didn’t have him
I dunno if I want BJ Cat…let’s reroll for funsies
nope nope nope
Hmmm emothan is fun but i generally like having a lady grav
I am not against carla
I might want to be.
(and that’s an interesting ship. Carla/Danny. Hmmm)
Hell yeah, Agatha! But one more reroll back to the regular e-mail, no caps.
I’m with the people who say this looks more like Ken than Ethan. I mean the hair is one thing, but what happened to his chest and shoulders? They just shrank??
Best guess is he’s slouching/shoulders are hunched (he looks much closer to his more standard proportions in the model for next storyline up on Twitter – comparing it to the model used for the Book Ten magnet on Kickstarter, his shirt looks baggier and arms look narrower but shoulders are the right width) and lost a noticeable amount of weight over the timeskip due to depression.
https://mobile.twitter.com/damnyouwillis/status/1457083102220652548
Out of universe, I think it’s the combination of Willis not drawing him for several months, the timeskip redesign, and something about the hoodie seems to make him look a touch smaller as well.
The new model also clearly shows he’s lost his cheek blushes – truly, the clearest sign of angst in this comic – and does, in fact, have some sort of dark lines under his eyes.
By comparison, and hopefully this is visible to non-backers as well, the Hostage Ethan magnet from Kickstarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dumbingofage/dumbing-of-age-tenth-book-collection/posts/3148271
(It’s also on the main campaign page but I wanted to see if I could single out the Ethan one rather than making everyone scroll down.) It also seems like his shading and outlines got a very slightly cooler color in the model than the magnet art, but I think that difference is unique to the magnets, not standard character art.
Yeah, no, pretty sure that’s a difference in the magnet art comparing his current model to last pre-timeskip appearance.
Yeah, posture can make a dramatic difference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtrXDq5OTn4
Well, if Danny was gonna Dan anything up it would involve Ethan.
Think Danny, think of something else! Like how sexy Ethan is!
….And Danny’s my grav. Works for me.
Yeah he’s totally sexy!
Well, at least he’s self-aware on the blurting.
Well at least he’s not thinking about how it’s not so bad that Mike died.
Let’s see whatcha give me this time, o roulette de la grav
Mmm…nah.
Will remember that one, but not choosing it yet.
Huh.
Oh yeah, that’s more like it. One more roll for the day just in case, though.
Oh, Danny does know how his dumb mouth works. Nonsense is slightly better than the initial worry, I think.
New gravatar here I come!
I like you Liz, but I like myself more. Next one!
Oopsie v:
Oh No!
SARAH MY BELOVED! WE MEET AGAIN!
This is a million times better than Walky. Woot!
gravatar test
No.
No…
Better. Now to what I was gonna say… Danny, do you know how to make a gag with a tie? Now is the time to learn.
Honestly, good job Danny. A save is a save.
Danny is good disaster Bisexual rep. Good job Willis!
Saw there were 130+ comments and wondered just how much Ethan discourse there could be. Turns out it’s mostly folks playing grav roulette, which I think is much more preferable!
Broke: Ethan discourse
Woke: “Oh huh, I wonder who I got this time?” “No” “No” “Oh come on!” “No” “I can work with this.”
Bespoke: Grav discourse.
Smug Joe approves.
Lupin III getting bonked on the head is symbolic of my bad opinions I believe in with full confidence coming back to haunt me.
Some of us were doing it before it was cool.
(And now doing it stealthily.)
Was wondering when Ethan would return
Grav roulette for me?
Disaster lesbian trying to keep a grip on. Yeah, that works.
Ruth’s bisexual, just pointing it out. 😛
I certainly hope so, that’d make things awkward with Jason.
She had a boyfriend back in Canada, before her life got uprooted to live in Indiana with her grandfather.
psh yeah but thats just a phase right
ruth likes girls so shes gay obviously
you cant like both is there even a word for that
(The real punchline is that I’m usually the one correct people about Ruth being bi! Every friggin’ time I mention her boyfriend it’s “well yeah but she could have just dated him before she knew” as if that boyfriend wasn’t specifically brought up in the context of somebody that Ruth cherished and got taken away from, like her granddad was trying to make her do to Billie!)
Right? It’s always a delight having to point out that your sexuality is not, in fact, made up. God, we all recognize Jennifer’s aggressively wrong in denying the idea she might be bisexual and then the comments do it with Ruth anyway.
(And then there’s the ace erasure in Dina and Carla’s storylines. For that matter given the Walkyverse I think there’s a very good chance Malaya is aspec of some variety but that at least hasn’t directly come up in this comic yet.)
Hun?
I’m bi. I just forgot about Jason because he’s so unlikable and the boyfriend back in Canada because who even cares it was before the story started.
Christ.
Oh right, I keep blocking that out.
Has Danny considered just, not thinking?
I think he only has the one braincell, and it’s forgotten how not to work overtime
He’s probably thought about it
Wait that’s an option
Progress?
oooh, tha’ts what the glare was about
‘a piss its danny, what horrible brain-thought any idiot knows to not vocalise is going to fall lout his face now?’
‘oh ok nothing i’ll go back to beta-ing transformer slashfic fr continuity’
‘dammit danny’
I’ve caught my former love interest and friend looking at me like that too. It was very brief and they played it off like they didn’t notice me. Which was fine with me at that time. And by “fine” ill admit that means “I want to not give a shit, but honestly, I still really miss them, and it still hurts a lot.”
I got a lot of work to do still
And by “looking at”, I mean the first panel, not the last one, which tobme is more of a “wtf is he yelling about now?” Kinda look
1) Mood, Danny. Mood. 2) Yay I’m Sarah now!
Just out of curiosity, though…
I had kind of forgotten that when Danny blurted out that it would be good if Mike never woke up, that was a pick-up attempt in the waiting room outside Ethan’s lover’s ICU room.
Noooooo?
He went over there to confess and then stuck his foot in his mouth. He did not actually attempt to ask Ethan out with “golly it’s swell he’s gonna die.”
Calling Mike Ethan’s ‘lover’ feels kinda overplaying too considering, like, they had sex once and Ethan never looked his way again. Mike’s probably got that label retroactively a lot more than he did in the moment.
i think it was a bunch of times.
Mike and Ethan boning? It was just the one time. It made Ethan feel a lot more self-confident about himself and his sexuality where he started playing the field because he was suddenly a lot more cognizant of how attractive he was.
Fair enough. I ought to have described Mike as Ethan’s “bully with benefits”.
At least how I see it, Ethan really only became consciously aware of how he felt about Mike at the hospital.
There was definitely an attraction there beforehand, but I think the idea of “oh shit, I have it bad for Mike” only really became a thing when Mike was in a coma because he saved Amber’s life, and suddenly all those reasons Ethan would never actually go for a romantic relationship with him evaporated, because Mike was actually good all along like Ethan had hoped. Beforehand, banging him the one time was enough, ’cause it was all there could be and Ethan was smart enough to know that.
But once he realized the Mike he wanted existed in there somewhere, he never got the chance to act on it.
Mike also said he and Danny had something in common. Ethan misinterpreted it but Mike clearly meant, “Danny and I both love you.”
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/02-to-remind-you-of-my-love/empathizing/
Damn, I just got Joe down recently. Ah well, guess it’s time to start over.
Nope.
I really hope this isn’t annoying, but I saw other people doing it so fuck it.
Pretty relatable, I’ll take it.
The chains of Grav Roulette comments are easy to skip, but they’re going to artificially inflate the comment count for today…
But let’s keep going, it boosts engagement.
Sorry, everyone. Real life events are making me testy and I’ve been rude.
I’ll take a break and come back when this damned kidny stone passes.
That, too, shall pass.
Keep drinking plenty of fluids!
It happens. I hope you feel better soon!
Yeah I don’t want a Robin grav what else ya got
I’ll take Leslie!
Grav roulette time!
Ethan looks like the guy from Smosh during his goth phase
OKAY BUT WHERE IS DINOBOT?!
No seriously what the HELL happened to Ethan
I think he just stopped working out.
And eating right, and sleeping enough.
Lack of self-care will leave just about anyone looking gaunt.
Venom symbiote.
Grief depression
Bully Maguire memes.
Don’t have a whole lot to say myself (though I am curious to see what Ethan has to say), but I definitely want to know which character my email gives me this time around.
Dina! Dina is good.
Ethan looks like he could really do with some sympathy via light physical contact right about now, or some other appropriate gesture of support.
Danny’s subconscious is his enemy! It wants to ruin his own happiness… because he’s too happy right now. I don’t think Ethan really care about what Danny is doing with Sat. But, who know? Ethan seems in needs of something that would make him return to the world of the living.
I think it’s less whether or not Ethan would care (he has forgiven Sal, but I think there’s an interesting wrinkle where he did so mostly for her and Amber’s sake, or at least I think so, and I wonder how that’ll affect things now that he’s isolated from the cast and maybe strewing in resentments) and more that seeing Ethan out of the blue is making Danny laser focus on anything he could do that could possibly upset him, because the last conversation we saw was one that Danny’s never really going to get to apologize for.
So from Danny’s perspective (or at least how I see his perspective), saying he’s dating Sal now is saying “hi, Ethan, how you doing? I’m dating that girl who terrified you with a knife! I’m totally okay with it! Actually it makes things hotter!”
The interesting thing about Ethan forgiving Sal to me is that if there IS a ‘forgiving her for Amber’s sake’ aspect, I think it’s way more in how Ethan coped with the trauma before Sal reentered the picture. Amber, obviously, dwelled on the incident and needed to blame someone for all the trauma, and so she pinned it on Sal rather than Blaine. This is obviously unhealthy, and I think Ethan may have actively avoided thinking about it too much as a result. (Not consciously, but like. Brains are weird.) Issue is, I’m not entirely sure he ever processed how traumatic it was until after the second kidnapping as a result. He also seemed a bit more sympathetic to Sal to begin with (noting that she seemed afraid before the holdup began,) and the moment Sal recognized him she immediately ran after him to apologize, so I can see him genuinely forgiving her just because he recognized there was clearly a lot going on there and she’s changed, but I do wonder if he’d be dramatically less okay with it now if they hadn’t made up previously.
I agree though that it’s more about Danny’s anxieties here than realistic odds of Ethan actually being upset that someone he’s no longer friends with is dating someone who did hold a knife to his throat once but has since demonstrated she changed a lot and was instrumental in safely resolving two subsequent hostage crises. (While Ethan definitely had a falling out with Amber, I don’t think he actively wishes her harm, so Sal saving AG’s life is probably a plus there, and while he’s isolated towards the rest of the cast there was never any real reason for ill will towards Joyce or Becky. Until proven otherwise I suspect him not seeing most of the non-Danny and Amber cast is more about needing space from Amber and because he’s generally too depressed to socialize rather than any real issues with them.)
Danning it up commences!
I have nothing clever to say about the comic, but everyone’s playing grav roulette, I want to play grav roulette, too!
Aw yeah, Dina! 😀
Still gonna give it another try.
NOPE
yay malaya!
I know they’re a jerk but I still love them.
Hmm
Not bad, not the best but not the worst either
now THAT’S DANNY
A tour de force of expressions on Danny in this one.
honestly loving ethans new look, also grav roulette time
Ah yes. Danny being Danny.
Dorothy hm? I’m not complaining.
So exciting to see Ethan! I just want him and Danny to be friends again.
My take on Ethan’s character design: I like it!
Ethan should be kind of a whiny and pathetic person, I think. Not to like, outright negative levels, but I view him (or rather, Shortpacked!Ethan who remains rent-free in my head after all these years) as someone who’s endearing for trying more than he is for his successes. DoA!Ethan is Amber’s childhood friend who knows how to deal with anxiety and self-loathing flare-ups and can endlessly accommodate her, whereas SP!Ethan could do those things too, he just wasn’t as effortlessly good at it to the point where his plan to save Amber from Blaine when they first met was to call the police and get punched in the face, and then he slept with her almost out of obligation; that he saw her as vulnerable and needed to care for her even to the point of doing wrong by her.
So I think dragging Ethan away from his super hot beefcake appearance and ability to dispense a kind word to validate everyone’s feelings is absolutely for the best, both because I think it makes him a more dynamic character and more because I think it’s truer to the essence of Ethan as a character; he’s not good at this, but bless him, he is trying. If this Ethan tried to be there for someone I think he’d screw it up, but I’d appreciate him a lot more because I can tell that support is coming from so much effort.
And even taking Shortpacked! into consideration, this is still totally new ground for Ethan as a character. SP!Ethan was a goober everyone liked but nobody respected, he gets effortlessly punched out like three times in the first two years of the series, Galasso standing next to him made him look like Danny does standing next to DoA!Ethan. He was comedically weak, but he wasn’t really a failure, he was a Boring Everyman protagonist whose boredom was a feature, not a bug, and he eventually proved himself not an everyman at all because he seriously just wanted to spend his life away from all this drama bullshit and go on the internet to complain about toys.
But this Ethan is someone who’s deeply, visually and textually, a really broken and messed up person at the moment, and he’s been dragged to the lowest point in his life so hard that his own body changed to sell that fall. Just looking at him carries this air of vulnerability that I think sells that absolute despair he’s going through in a way that I don’t think would work if he was still this tall buff dude; if he still looked effortlessly hot I think it would run the risk of making him too much of a joke, instead of the current cycle of laughter -> guilt -> more laughter seeing him provokes in me. It’s funny that Ethan’s visual expression of his sadness is dressing up like Bully Maguire, it’s also mortifying that his face is so gaunt, his eyes look like they’re struggling to stay open, his muscle mass has depleted to a level slightly above Ken, and there’s this kind of unspoken admission that he’s so totally done that seeing Danny can’t even provoke that much anger in him anymore, like it’s way, way too much effort to give a shit.
Remember what you said yesterday, about Ethan being mostly a non-entity before? I can’t help but notice that this is the first time we see him post-break, two strips in a row, and he STILL does jack-shit.
Yesterday was the commentariat responding to Ethan existing, today is Danny responding to Ethan existing, I’m half-expecting tomorrow being somebody else responding to Ethan existing, and Ethan’s still doing jack shit, except this time around he looks like he drank all the jack (and nothing else).
Well yeah, he’s a passive character, but passive characters can still have drive. Dorothy is/was as vanilla but she’s driven enough that you can throw her into scenarios or have other more pushy characters drag her along so she can play straight man. Old Ethan was passive, didn’t have the energy to pilot his own stories, and when he was with someone else was incapable of causing any interesting conflict. That last part is already gone.
Every team book needs a Cyclops.
And you’re correct he’s doing nothing, but instead of doing nothing when Amber climbs through his window in a mask talking in third person telling him the girl she stabbed is on-campus, he’s doing nothing because he never wants to see these assholes again because every time he does something horrible happens.
I don’t think there’s anything whiny or pathetic about being traumatized by your childhood friend dying horribly three months ago.
Notably dying trying to save your OTHER best friend.
Bud, you gotta stop taking like one part of my post out of context and then responding to it as if the rest doesn’t exist.
I actually am entirely comfortable with the idea of Ethan just ignoring Danny’s cute antics and walking on past.
Ethan noticed Danny before Danny noticed Ethan, though – yesterday he was already looking at him.
Plays “Walk on by,” and is morose cause he’s missing the old Hack’d Muzak. I miss it, I’m telling you a fact. It was good. You kids these days with your MP3s and your iPods and Androids, you don’t know how good you have it! And Keep your bicycles off of my lawn!
I love Danny so much in this comic. Self-awareness makes the cringe endearing.
Damn, I’m Carla now. Not bad. Love how I keep getting the trans characters. GravRoulette knows me too well.
Hey, he didn’t blurt out that he’s kissing the girl who held a knife to Ethan’s neck… yet.
Leslie Bean? Awesome
Well this can only go well
This would be an awkward situation for anyone, but these two turn it up to 11
Can someone please remind me of who the man in my new grav is
I approve of his indignant side-eye
That would be Professor Brock, the Biology teacher.
also he’s Hank’s brother and Joyce’s uncle my fanfic says soPssh… grav rouletters.
None can compete with my waffle!
Phrasing
Very appropriate for Blowjob Cat.
That’s ethan? What’s with the emo haircut? He almost looks like Kenji.
Grief, malnutrition and Bully Maguire.
I did not see that coming. I do not know how I feel about this
Okay let’s see
Well. That could have gone worse.
Nnnnnoooope.
And that, folks, is what we call a motherfuckin’ WIN.
Oh Danny
You are Danning it up again
He danned so hard, he danned up danning up
Meh, unnecessary drama, is unnecessary. I recall that Ethan and Sal talked this out a long time ago, so Ethan would have zero f*cks that Danny and Sal are seeing each other. If this is where the rest of the story is going, it is going to be one boring drag to slog through.
Danny is very self aware.
For all the good it does him.
Moments like this make me think Danny’s voice is Lemongrab’s from Adventure Time.
“STUPID MOUTHHHH!”
**pictures that**
**then pictures Sal as having the voice of LSP**
**bursts out laughing**
It feels so weird to read IW/SP and see one of the saddest pages and then jump here and laugh loudly:)
I suppose it’s not the worst thing he could have blurted out.
(Mostly just posting to check my grav.)
I don’t get the grav roulette. Too much of a control freak. I have ten avatars and I rotate them.
Sorry, Roz, I’ll try my luck.
Aaaaaaaaaaand…
Well, I was Lucy before, let’s take another chance.
I’ll settle for Joe, it seems he will be just on point for the next few months.
Gravatar shuffle time?
I’ll take it!
Well, it worked.
Well, that’s one way to avoid putting your foot in it.
At least he’s self aware about it this time. (Checking to see if my OG email’s grav is better or worse than Blowjob Cat.)
Pfffffft, that fits. I’ll take it.
hmmm, ethan do be looking like bully mcguire.
Ethan looks very different, I didn’t recognize him as Ethan, I thought that was Ken.
You can do this, Dan. Don’t Dan things up *now*!
Didn’t mean for this to be a reply but whatever. Hey, how’s it going?
I mean, seems fitting.
Ethan, I missed you! (I need to check my new av)