I mean, this ride sharing service is being run by Carla’s parents. Odds are this is the one universe where there is one ride sharing service that actually pays people properly.
“Jimmy Wilson” was actually mentioned in Walkyverse Liz’s sole appearance, where Liz mentions that he told her that “lawyers are evil.” When I read it, I just assumed that “Jimmy Wilson” was some 1990s media personality that the world had totally forgotten about and I couldn’t find any info on, but apparently not.
Huh! So I’m not the only one who thought that! Guess when you’re binge-reading Roomies “it’s probably some 90’s reference I don’t get” is a pretty good guess for a punchline.
Things we know with any amount of concrete-ness as of this comic:
– Sarah has always been varying degrees of antisocial.
– Sarah and Liz did not live together very long.
– In junior high, Christopher came to Liz, concerned about his and Sarah’s relationship. After three days of encouraging said relationship, Liz “shoved her tongue down his throat.”
– Sarah dated Jimmy Wilson but did not tell Liz. Liz then started dating Jimmy Wilson.
Things we have absolutely no idea whatsoever about as of this comic:
– The exact nature of Sarah and Liz’s relationship at every point across the past twenty years, including any possible unmentioned infractions committed by one or both of them, or any potential issues that existed between them prior to Christopher.
Also Liz and Sarah are 18 and 20 respectively, but significantly less than two years apart (which come to think of it, might mean Liz’s 19th birthday could be “soon” enough to be in the comic).
You don’t have to be a horrible person to do stupid/thoughtless/hurtful things. Liz can try and kid herself into thinking it was “ok” for her to take Sarah’s boyfriends but she also needs to deal with the consequences of her actions. Even if the past boyfriends were cool cheating on Sarah with Liz, if Liz wants to have a good relationship with Sarah, probably don’t do stuff like that.
Though Liz very much seems like the type of person who doesn’t give too much thought into how HER actions hurt others (i.e. running away instead of helping Joyce with Becky and not really caring how Joe was dealing with their almost-night together) so I don’t know what it’ll take to shift her world view on how she treated her sister.
Joyce is some girl she knows over Facebook, and we know that Becky was outraged over Joyce being an atheist at all. Why’s Becky actually matter here?
I’m not sure what she was supposed to do about Joe either. She tried to bang him and freaked out because Christian sexual puritanism made her think she’d ruin her life touching a wiener. Joe… quietly looked sad about it.
In Joe’s case he’s been feeling like crap about it, thinking all he can do is “ruin” people which is probably why he’s trying to keep himself from having feelings for Joyce (it’s been hinted at that he’s been comparing Liz’s reaction to being with him to what might be Joyce’s). In the case of Becky, she could have AT LEAST not tried to ditch the situation like she had nothing to do with the “LOL God is fake and stupid” conversation like someone just pulled the fire alarm. In both cases, I’m trying to say is that Liz doesn’t seem to think she’s done anything to cause or “fan the flames of” said issues.
Liz comes off as someone who, rather than face a problem, either runs away from it (like whatever is going on with college) or pushes the blame on someone else (like blaming Sarah and her past boyfriends for her stealing said boyfriends instead of taking even a speck of responsibility). If she even thinks of her having any connection to the issues in the first place.
I mean, what COULD she have said after Becky got mad at “god is fake and stupid”? Apologize? Say she doesn’t mean it? Why would she lie to Becky about her (Liz’s) own approach to faith?
One of my favorite jokes in the Borderlands games is when Handsome Jack is asked how he wants to die. He says “Somewhere warm, with a hot chick nearby”.
If the driver does as Sarah says – and she then actually commits a murder – the driver would be charged with aiding and abetting a felony. Because she has stated that that is why she wants to go back.
She should keep her mouth shut and wait until she gets back as per original plan, THEN murder Joe.
Yoto owns several musical instruments, Took 7 years of Band classes and likes to sing and make up lyrics. But Yoto is BAD at music so no, I do not do music.
Come on, Joe and Sarah repeatedly hooking up is just about as likely as Joyce being a stalker who obsesses over marrying Danny because of a Mountain Dew-fueled vision where an angel told her that her future husband would have bad hair and a hoodie.
I mean, we don’t know when the Jimmy Incident happened, that could have also been in middle-school. Espacially since the implication has been that Sarah and Liz didn’t grow up in the same household for a very long period of time.
She has but we haven’t seen the fruits if that quite yet. She’s still prickly bad with people and abrasive and misanthropic. She’s not likeable really yet she’s getting there and has a lot of good about her but I’m completely unsurprised that men She’s interested in get turned off very quickly once her personality starts to grate on them
… “She has but we haven’t seen the fruits if that quite yet.”
Her bond with Joyce is ‘the fruits of that”, her friendship with Dina is “the fruit of it”. Sarah *has* been making connections and friendships with people as part of her character arc!
No, she doesn’t have a huge circle of friends like Joyce has but I don’t think she’s interested in having a huge circle of friends. I think Sarah is quite happy having a very small circle of people she really cares about, her only challange is making sure that she always clearly communicate to those folks that she cares about them. And Liz is the first time in a while that it has been a serious problem.
All the “boys cheating on Sarah because she’s cold and distant” stuff is not really relevant here because that all happened BEFORE the events of the comic! we don’t know if anything like that would happen to Sarah now because she hasn’t had any romantic relationship during the course of the comic, outside of a brief purely-physical interest in Jacob.
*smacks own head* Silly me, I completely forgot depending on partner aholeness it is completely justified to cheat on that partner or cheat with your sibling’s partner. How could I not remember something like that.
Raidah didn’t really do anything wrong in those terms, but her mean girl approach to the threat of Joyce didn’t leave her looking well. Classist and manipulative.
Again, one of the things I liked about that scenario and how it subverted rom com tropes. Our protagonist was in the wrong, but it wasn’t because her rival really was a great person and the couple she was trying to break up wasn’t true love, but she didn’t get rewarded for it anyway.
I agree. I likely think especially given what Liz said that it was Sarah’s abrasive personality and lack of social skill that pushed her boyfriends away. And Liz was wrong but it doesn’t feel like it was malevolent but stupidity and lapse in jusgement the first time and ignorance the second
Oof. Yeah, just because you realize you don’t like your partner’s personality for the longterm doesn’t mean you get a pass to cheat on them before you break up. Yuck. Sarah may not have a bubbly personality, but she still deserves dignity and respect.
I agree but also they are dumb horny kids. And I can see this boy being like shit she’s just as hot as her sister but nicer and she actually seems happy to be around me and when she kissed him he deciding to break it off. We know Liz is a Virgin sp she never slept with them just made pit which while bad and wrong is at least understandable. I get why people aren’t seeing her as malevolent.
Cheating doesn’t have to be sex to be a hurtful act, and there’s not some universal, immutable scale that ranks the levels of hurt caused by each type of infidelity. Sarah had her trust violated, on more than one occasion, by individuals she hoped would treat her with kindness and respect. Liz knowingly contributed to that by making out with who she knew to be her sister’s partner. She didn’t just fall on those lips, and per the context we have so far, she made a choice to proceed with physical intimacy. Her choice was selfish, and the way she’s talking to Sarah about it right now demonstrates no real regret. Even if she’s simply ignorant, the damage she’s contributed to is real and long-lasting for Sarah. I find it especially repugnant that she’s telling Sarah that it’s Sarah’s fault her boyfriends have found Liz more attractive in the past. If isn’t an attempt to shift blame, I don’t know what is.
I dint think it’s about shifting blame I think this is supposed to be a wake up call for Sarah to realize she pushes the people she loves away with her attitude and thatcher uses misanthrope and a bristly antisocial hard shell as a defense mechanism for her awkwardness is not serving her and going to end up with her alone. I think this is where Sarah grows from that and becomes a bit more like Sal so she can build relationships a bit.
Yeah, no. It’s not reasonable to suggest that Sarah having her trust violated is going to translate into Sarah becoming a more warm, open, trusting person. Have you considered that being cheated on likely increased Sarah’s discomfort with emotional vulnerability? Also, I’d like to reiterate that Liz is blaming who Sarah is as a person for her boyfriends cheating on her, instead of taking responsibility for the hurt she caused. Sarah does not control the choices of those around her. Sarah’s boyfriends and Liz all made their own decisions that hurt Sarah. Your comment reads as “Well, Sarah isn’t as nice as I think she should be, so she deserved emotional damage at the hands of those she placed trust in, which should teach her to be a more emotionally available, trusting person”. I have to disagree.
At this point, I don’t see how anyone could find Liz even remotely likeable. She’s a bully, she shows no remorse for repeatedly hurting her sister, and repeatedly brags that boys like her more.
And I’m sick of this ‘Liz is being bullied at her school, so that excuses her behavior!’
1) There’s no evidence of that.
2) Bullying is one of the few subjects that this comic hasn’t really tackled in a deep capacity. But, if there was one character who was arguably bullied, it’d be Sarah. She was repeatedly singled out by Raidah, who’d track her down at lunch to remind her that she has no friends, would call her a bongo when she was just minding her own business, and tried to turn multiple friends against her in this harassment campaign.
Honestly, I think the only reason Raidah didn’t report Sarah for punching her wasn’t to save the curve, but because an investigation into their relationship would show her as the repeated offender.
I’ve got the same vibe. It’s really weird that people are jumping over themselves to defend Liz, over Sarah, when Liz self proclaimed here that she did in fact do what she’s accused of, because she’s the ‘smiley’ one.
Is it just because her design is cute? Because so far she hasn’t done much to make me care about her or want her in the main cast. She stole her sisters boyfriends (more than once), and is trying to justify hurting her and justify that Sarah was somehow to blame for Liz making out with the people she was with.
I imagine part of it is because she’s designed to be attractive. That and also her moments of vulnerability re: Joe.
For me she’s veering into the asshole side, but she’s not quite Roz level yet, which is just insufferable, and she’s still miles ahead of the caricatures like Mary.
Honestly, I find Mary more tolerable specifically because she’s just a caricature and I don’t have to expect anything else out of her. I don’t like her, but her role is clearly defined. Liz is written like I’m supposed to expect more out of her, and everything she gives me is just selfish and unkind.
Riz is insufferable, but mostly well-meaning except at specific points when the ‘crusade!!’ of her takes vicious ascendancy. I fully expect experience and the skills it develops to teach her to aim better and/or sand the edges off. Roz has acted genuinely kindly at times and does good things (volunteers and such) as a regular facet of life, so she seems to be basically a good person who is just very young and full of herself. Also, Roz has never stolen anyone’s boyfriend onscreen or by rumor offscreen, intentionally or not.
Liz, on the other hand, has evidenced pretty much zero good qualities (unless you count ‘cute’) or kindness. She has been willfully cruel to her sister, and doesn’t care when she’s cruel by accident. She put both hands into spinning Joyce up and bounced so she didn’t have to support Joyce in the consequences. And, thinking Joe was Joyce’s ‘friend’ she set about seducing him. (Not difficult in the event: it’s Joe, and HE knows he’s actually single. But that’s not the point.) Liz has at no point actually shown anything but selfishness in my view.
Therefore I can honestly say that I believe it’s not possible for Liz to be as bad as Roz, because Liz is already solidly worse. And I don’t even like Roz.
Though a note with the “spinning Joyce up” part – they were both doing the same thing. Both playing up to what they thought the other was already like. Each escalating, up to completely ludicrous levels.
As for Joe, Joyce had framed her fictional thing with Joe as completely casual “friends with a reward program”, so there’s no reason to blame Liz for going after him on those grounds.
I suspect more than a few people who ended up on Joyce’s side of the Joyce/Becky argument are siding with Liz as well because Liz was on Joyce’s side and Sarah told Joyce she’d done wrong.
Honestly it’s because what she did doesn’t seem malevolent and much like her moment with Joe it feels vulnerable. What she says happened if true doesn’t sound intentional or malevolent but much like her thing with Joe an immature lapse in judgement. Her big sisters boyfriend came to her for help a pretty attractive girl she was nice to him and helped him and defended her sister when he was already clearly thinking it wasn’t working but after spending a little time with her in literally junior high he realized she’s just as hot as her sister but not a crabby awkward asshole who doesn’t smile and has very little social skills she’s friendly and likeable and has a more positive personality he liked her both physically and that she was thr smiley happy sister unlike Sarah who turned out to be off-putting in personality *something she I’d just now getting over and still gets needled about* the second time she didn’t even know her sister was dating the guy and it could be as simple as yeah they think the same kind of men are physically hott. I like Liz well enough and hope this helps Sarah realize her personality needs to improve if she wants relationships. It’s why she had 0 chance with Jacob
That has the be the ****iest and coldest take on cheating I’ve ever heard, Samantha. Congratulations! I am impressed by how callous and cruel this is.
I mean, in my world if I didn’t want to date someone with the personality of a feral cat then I wouldn’t ask them out to begin with. Seems like the easy solution. If you don’t like someone’s personality, DON’T DATE THEM.
“They were an asshole, so I HAD to cheat on them!” is a terrible excuse made by terrible people. If your partner is an jerk, then break up. Period. If you’re not happy, find someone new. Being unhappy with a partner who you don’t find friendly enough is NOT a good excuse to stab them in the back. Certainly not by kissing their baby sister.
I agree her cheating is awful her boyfriend was in the wrong so was Liz But we also know that Sarah at least with Jacob tried to hide it to get him interested. Its not a stretch to think she also did so before. In fact it is more likely. It likely wasn’t until college and getting older and hurt by Raidah that she gave up mostly and “embraced being a bongo” and being misanthropic as a defense mechanism. She tried to be friends before. So the way I see it this boyfriend liked Sarah thought she was hot but then her abrasive personality started showing through as they spent more time together and she wasn’t able to hide it just like with Jacob and he didn’t like who she really was went to her sister to ask like hey did I do something she seems to be so angry so crabby and mean and doesn’t seem to like me anymore and then teenage hormones issues because Liz and Sarah look similar are both implied to be hott and unlike Sarah Liz is actuly good with people and quite pleasant. So I can see it sort of happening and yes being bad it wasn’t implied to be intentional or malevolent.
It sounds like Liz was 12 the first time and that older boy took advantage of her. She managed to keep it to kissing. The other boy didn’t disclose he was Sarah’s boyfriend, and apparently she was just a year or two older. I’m sympathies to a child unable to fend off older, manipulative males.
A close friend of my daughter developed physical sexual characteristics in 6th grade, I saw how the male attention negatively affected her. High schoolers, adult men who knew better tried to flatter her and take advantage of her, got her into huge trouble. They helped her sneak out. She let the attention go to her head and lorded it over her friend group. But she was 12! Obviously 12! and those men damaged a vulnerable child.
Junior High can range from 12-14. Sarah’s less than 2 years older and only one grade ahead and we’ve got no idea how old Christopher was. Possibly older and preying on both of them – not uncommon at that age. Neither of them seem to think about it that way though.
And Liz herself describes it as shoving her tongue down his throat – not in terms of an attack on her. That could be misleading, for any number of reasons of course, but there’s nothing we’ve seen here that makes it seem unwanted by her. Even more so with the second case, with Jimmy.
You’re also mixing up the two cases. She was in junior high for Christopher, who she did know was seeing Sarah, since he was asking her for advice about her. Jimmy was an unspecified time later and she didn’t know then.
i do find liz very “likable” although that isn’t really a category i use in engaging with fictional characters. but yeah, i empathize with her, i am interested in her story and feelings, i find her fleshed out and human and vulnerable.
i also don’t think cheating is always the moral crime that it seems to be painted as here. Cheating comes in many forms and can be reacted to in different ways. saying that a person cheated because there was a problem with the relationship is an explanation—it’s not necessarily an excuse. It can be a starting point for a frank conversation. (or it can be a deeply hurtful and unforgivable betrayal, i’m not saying that’s not valid too, it’s just not always and necessarily the case).
And teenagers learning to navigate relationships will do shitty things and learn that they hurt people. i find that relatable. i’m not a perfectly moral person now, but i have learned from past mistakes and i think i am better for it.
(btw i also feel the same things for Sarah. She’s a flawed human being, and i empathize with her. Neither sister is absolutely “right”— they are having a conflict that cannot be solved or objectivized by reducing it to a set of ethical statements)
I deeply and truly believe that cheating is always a moral wrong. There’s no excuse for it. You’re deliberately and consciously hurting someone you supposedly care for personal satisfaction. It’s repulsively selfish and cruel.
If you don’t like someone, then break up.
And just for the record: I am not one of those hyper-monogamous people. I’m actually polyamorous. But even though I do believe people can have healthy and happy relationships with multiple people, cheating is not that. Cheating is inherently selfish. Inherently hurtful. Inherently preventable.
Sarah trying to break Raidah and Jacob up was, in my opinion, her most reprehensible act. Usually her behavior can be put into the category of, ‘Well meaning, but still mean,’ but that was just her being cruel.
I do get her wanting revenge of Raidah, who I do think actively bullied Sarah, but that was not an appropriate way to do it.
i can see two reasons for not “getting” someone. One, that person is just not making sense. Maybe they don’t know what they’re talking about and are just being a troll, or maybe they’re out of touch with reality in some troubling way.
Or two, for whatever reason, you are not willing or able to see things from their perspective, if only to end up agreeing to disagree.
…to be fair though i didn’t say there were no moral wrongs here. i’m just explaining how i feel about the characters and today’s strip, and my feelings are not encapsulatable in a simple angry sentiment.
Also and unrelatedly i want to quickly push back on many people’s apparent assumption that Sarah needs to change her attitude if she wants to be datable. I’ve had grumpy, misanthropic people as friends and lovers, and my own calm personality complements and tempers their fiery one, while their drive and energy may help with my usual sloth and indecisiveness.
i want to quickly push back on many people’s apparent assumption that Sarah needs to change her attitude if she wants to be datable
I don’t think this is the problem at all, because Sal is also grumpy and misanthropic and she is currently dating a sandwich-making ukulele lad in a dapper hat, and she did that by trusting that Danny does appreciate her company and isn’t trying to manipulate her, and that she can also openly express herself around him.
That second part is more significant, I think, in that Sal is a grumpy misanthrope who hasn’t stopped being a grumpy misanthrope, she’s just willing to be engage with Danny on his level. Sarah doesn’t really do that for other people all too much. If Joyce wasn’t her roommate, Sarah would be as alone and miserable as she says she wants to be, but very clearly doesn’t.
I think cheating is wrong (and pretty fucked up) but I think the responses Liz are a little extreme. She only did so knowingly one time, and it was as a high schooler, and she actually looks pretty remorseful in yesterday’s comic.
Not saying Sarah has to (or even should) forgive her, but doing something that really sucks to your sibling(s) when you’re a high schooler is pretty normal. My brother and I settled for pretending each other didn’t exist for the most part, but this seems like an ordinary level of betrayal at that age. (I would feel different if they were adults when it happened, or if Liz had planned it out).
She might look pretty remorseful, but I think it’s telling that what she actually says are ‘I’m nicer than you so of course they were going to like me more’ (blame the betrayed person for the betrayal), ‘Chris came to me’ (disclaim responsibility for her own actions), and ‘lol we just have the same taste in men’ (both disclaiming responsibility and blaming Sarah).
If she was even slightly remorseful, I’d expect at least a pretense of apology, or some kind of acknowledgement that her behavior was bad, not the continuing swings through ‘it’s your fault I did that, and it wasn’t wrong of me anyway’ she’s putting out.
I don’t know about that. Sometimes there are good reasons to cheat while staying together. E.G.:
1. You can’t leave your partner because one of you is financially dependent on the other.
2. You can’t leave your partner because one of you depends on the other for daily disability-related care.
3. You can’t leave your partner because of your partner’s fragile physical or emotional health.
4. You can’t leave your partner for legal reasons (e.g. immigration status…)
5. You don’t wish to leave your partner because the two of you have shared kids/pets/dependents who rely on seeing you two together or rely on both of you for daily care.
Now: imagine that marriage or partnership lacks sex/love/intimacy/fulfillment. You and your partner don’t trust or respect each other, don’t have shared interests, don’t enjoy spending time together, constantly bicker, or don’t treat each other kindly.
Now: imagine someone completely outside of your partner’s social circle offers a discreet, infrequent, telephone-only emotional affair. Or even just a platonic dating relationship (e.g. “let’s be theatre buddies!”). You don’t feel you can talk with your partner about your unmet needs and desires because of abuse / fragile health / extreme reactions, etc. You know that your partner will never find out. You also know that “letting off some steam” by dallying with a trusted friend outside your partner’s social circle would help you return to your partnership with more contentment and calm, a more accepting and caring partner. Getting your social and emotional needs met elsewhere will help you appreciate what you DO have in your primary relationship, despite its shortcomings.
Now: is infidelity wrong, in such circumstances?
Not talking about Liz/Sarah. Just talking about the many older folks in sexless or loveless marriages that they cannot find practical ways to leave or do not wish to abandon.
The solution to being in a loveless marriage you can’t leave is not to throw fuel on the fire and be a shitty partner. And, to be perfectly frank, those reasons suck. They’re terrible, selfish, and cruel reasons. It’s not like you’re saying, ‘What if they’re in an abusive relationship and can’t leave because of our shitty legal system and they fear for their life, but fall in love with someone willing to save them.’ Which would actually be a decent excuse, honestly.
For excuses 1, 2, and 4: You realize what you’re saying boils down to, ‘I want to take advantage of my partner for something they’re offering me, like money or disability care or legal status, but also want to hurt them without consequences because the arrangement I agreed to be in as an adult is not fulfilling enough for me. But I also don’t want to take responsibility for taking care of myself, so I’m going to stab the partner who’s taking care of me in the back.
For excuse 3, I point to Eldritchy. You really think that fueling an emotionally ill’s paranoia by betraying their trust is LESS UPSETTING than having an honest conversation??
For excuse 5, sometimes marriages don’t last. The solution isn’t to cheat on your spouse so your kids don’t learn that their parent’s don’t love each other like they used to. The goal is, again, to communicate. Talk to your partner. If the kids are important enough to you both to stay together despite the lack of romantic or sexual attraction, then do it. If it’s not, then it’s better for your family to separate.
If you’re not literally in an abusive situation, then there’s absolutely no excuse for cheating.
The word YOU’RE looking for is polyamory. If you’re in a loveless marriage or need some extra sexual thrill, then consider being polyamorous. It means both partner’s have agreed that they have needs that aren’t being fulfilled but don’t want to leave each other for whatever reason, then you can agree to see other people while staying together. That solves every single problem you listed above and more (Not actual abuse), and all it takes is some communication and an agreeable partner.
Coming back to excuse 5. In this situation it’s not only the partner who is gets hurt but the children as well. How are They going to feel when they learn that their mother/father were betraying the other parent behind their backs?
Oops! Weird! I meant to reply to this thread but it wound up at the bottom. Reposting here:
Reply
Ok, that’s cool. I’m glad to get your opinions. I was just spinning out hypothetical situations, playing devil’s advocate. I’ve heard a lot of justifications on this topic, so it’s good to see how others see that kind of self-convincing. Not as straightforward as it might appear to be. Good to know how others see it. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts.
Your specific example you should look to have friends outside your marriage and if you feel like that is not allowed that is the issue.
I know emotional affairs are a real thing but so is friendship and that can be a blurry line and friendship alone isn’t cheating.
For actual cheating where you at least intentionally nurture romantic or sexual feelings with another person or kiss them or the like.
1.
If you need someone because they block your independance or they hold your dependence over your head you should see do your best to plan an escape route but cheating will likely just give them more ammunition.
If you can’t dump someone because you need someone and its not because of shit they pull and they are not holding it over your head, you proberly owe sexual/romantic fidelity to them at least while you are using them and should still seek a rout to independence.
If someone needs you that doesn’t stop you from dumping them and dumping them does not stop you from helping them. Still depending on the situation it might not hurt to step back and see if they are taking advantage of you.
If you are really that concerned with your partners emotional health, consider if they are abusing you or if its just an excuse not to leave the good parts. If you are really truely that concerned cheating will proberly be worse than just dumping them.
If you need to maintain your relationship for the sake of appearances talk to your partner about what they will agree on and what you both want out of the business transaction. They deserve to know what type of relationship you are in. They deserve a chance to opt out or set there own terms. Cheating can cause problems for these situations that can be worse than dissolving the relationship so talk to your business partner about what risks you are both willing to take in this venture.
> You’re deliberately and consciously hurting someone you supposedly care for personal satisfaction. It’s repulsively selfish and cruel.
It’s not deliberate if you believe your partner will never find out, although it is certainly selfish. A lot of folks cheat for reasons other than “personal satisfaction” as well, a lot of people who do it have some deep seated issues the cheating soothes without actually making them happy. And finally a lot of folks are just scared and confused or don’t think long term at all. It’s something more akin to emotional negligence than deliberate cruelty. Deliberate cruelty, I think, requires you to actively consider the other persons feelings, and many cheaters do not.
We really aren’t were just more sympathetic that ususally in a lot of cases it isn’t a deliberate act of cruelty. A lot of times it really is a symptom of some other lack and they really just get lost in the moment and it’s wrong but understandable. I’ve never cheated or been cheated on luckily I know it must suck and be agonizing betrayal but it’s not ususally this great evil. Just a wrong action that hurt someone.
I mean, the act itself can be wrong even with understandable circumstance. It’s wrong that this guy cheated on Sarah by macking on her little sister, and also:
– how much responsibility do you have to someone who makes you think they don’t care about you?
– they were like 13 – 15.
I don’t think cheating happens in a vacuum but it’s, innately, a betrayal of an agreed upon relationship and a violation of a trust that someone has placed in you. It’s just a matter of what that betrayal actually means.
I understand what you mean by emotional negligence versus deliberate cruelty, but I think the level of emotional negligence that leads you to cheat on a partner is an example of cruelty itself.
Yes, you still have responsibility towards someone who makes you think they don’t care about you???
You getting it in your head that they don’t care without even bothering to communicate the fact that you feel that way and then blaming and punishing them for your unwillingness to communicate is, um, gross? Standoffish or not, inattentive or not, your partner can’t read minds and it’s your responsibility to communicate your needs and set and enforce your boundaries.
If you’d actually tried to talk about it and your partner made zero effort to listen or try to address it, then you STILL shouldn’t fucking cheat, but should definitely break up. Because that’s the mature and responsible thing to do, and what betraying someone’s trust means, regardless of the circumstance, is that YOU don’t care about other people’s feelings unless it’s personally convenient for you, and that no one should ever trust you, because you’ll decide they don’t deserve your respect the moment they fail to be perfect.
That being said, all of this is completely null and void in this particular circumstance because lol they were like 13-15 and literally didn’t have the mental or emotional capacity to consider ANY of this. They’re not gonna do the mature and responsible thing because they’re children who are inherently impaired in their ability to be mature and responsible.
But yknow. If you become an adult and refuse to acknowledge the ways in which how you acted as a child were immature and irresponsible, and go out of your way to defend your actions, well seems like you’re still immature and irresponsible but don’t have the excuse of being a literal child anymore, so you’re just a shit person.
Not that Liz is an adult yet by any means tbh. Neither is Sarah, really. They’ve still got some leeway, a few more years before they’ve got those fully developed adult brains. Hopefully by then they’ll be able to look back at this whole thing and cringe.
Yes, you still have responsibility towards someone who makes you think they don’t care about you???
I agree in a vacuum (in that you should break things off with a partner who fails to be emotionally fulfilling to you) but I think that’s a circumstance that presumes the person dealing with a partner like that is stable enough to approach the issue the right way. Yeah whatshisname shoulda asked Sarah (if he didn’t, anyway), but like, is it fair that he’s gotta take the emotional responsibility of checking for her?
How do you even ask that question anyway? Do you like me? Did I make you mad? Did I do something wrong? It’s bad enough feeling that with someone you can reasonably trust, what do you do with someone who constantly, repeatedly, enforces into you that they’re always pissed off and don’t care about how you feel?
It’s not in a vacuum, though. And yes! That’s literally what you do, man, you figure out how to have a hard conversation. “Hey, can we please talk, when you say things like x or do y it makes me feel like you don’t care about me.”
It IS your emotional responsibility! To communicate when you have a feeling! Otherwise, if you just sit there and never speak or give any indication you’re unhappy, nobody has any way of knowing that something they are doing is hurtful to you.
It would be ideal, of course, if Sarah (or someone similar to Sarah) voluntarily checked in on how their partner is feeling more, to be certain. That’s general good practice for being a good partner, and not ever doing it at all is quite negligent. But you know what does absolutely nothing to actually fix that? Doing and saying jack nothing about it, not even for your own sake, and then going behind your partner’s back to cheat on them.
Besides, not all relationships and people are the same, so your personal threshold for what FEELS like negligence and what doesn’t is not something anyone but you can know, and needs to be communicated. You could end up feeling uncared for because your partner only asks you how you’re feeling in x circumstance, or only once every two weeks, or they ask but don’t respond how you wish they would, or don’t listen properly, or maybe you’re so insecure that if your partner doesn’t check in with you literally constantly then you’ll just irrationally decide they hate you now.
So you say “It would make me feel better if you tried to ask how I’m feeling more often.” And if their response is “lol wut, naw” then you work up the nerve to tell them that this isn’t working and you don’t want to date them anymore.
None of this is easy. It’s hard. Relationships are really hard, actually! And if you don’t trust your partner enough to communicate with them, then either you need to try and figure out what your partner could do for you to trust them and try to communicate THAT to them, or just break up with them, because trust is literally a requirement and if it’s not there, there’s no relationship. And if you try to think of what your partner could do for you to trust them, and the answer comes up with ‘nothing’, then that’s a You problem. Or, if you have an answer, but the thing you need is something they are either not able or not willing to do, then turns out you’re incompatible and also need to break up.
And wow, the worst possible thing you could ever do in a relationship that’s lacking trust is FURTHER destroy that trust by outright betraying them completely!
Oh no we’re definitely not. None of this counts for middle school children. I read many of your comments as being just general thoughts on how much responsibility people hold to their partners when they feel unfulfilled in a relationship, regardless of age.
But no obviously a 15-year-old isn’t gonna be able to do literally any of this internal work or communication, lol.
Although the fact does remain that choosing not to say anything to your partner about feeling uncared for and then cheating on them still does absolutely nothing to actually fix your problem with your partner, and indicates you either no longer care about fixing the problem, no longer care about your relationship, or your partner’s feelings, or maybe all of the above, and cheating is just a particularly hurtful and cowardly way to carpet-bomb your previous relationship! Regardless of your age!
However, obviously a 15-year-old isn’t gonna know much better, so it’s dumb to expect them to. They’re gonna do the shitty thing, and…HOPEFULLY that ought to be a learning experience that they draw from to do better in the future….or the shitty thing they do is reinforced somehow and they double down and turn into an insufferably immature adult.
Same!! I feel for both of them. I understand Sarah has been hurt and betrayed and is still dealing with it and has struggled with social awkwardness her entire life it seems and inability to express herself positively.
I understand that Liz is just a stupid kid who made mistakes and hurt being a stupid kid with poor judgement and is clearly struggling with her sexuality.
you know what i don’t “get” to use Rabbit’s phrase?
people reading such an emotionally nuanced and deeply empathetic story who are still entirely committed to a strictly moral view of human actions (and/or of characters). Like, how are you enjoying this comic? Are we even reading the same comic?
(this is clearly me not being able to put myself in these commenters’ shoes.)
Look, there are rules around here. In any given conflict, you have to pick the hero and the villain and excuse everything one does and paint everything the other does in the worst possible light. Even if you make excuses for them in a different conflict.
I can’t help it. It’s just how the rules work. It’s always been that way.
yeah. the villain is a terrible human but in a layered and subtle way. but still basically evil. well no we’re atheists, we don’t call people evil, we just call them toxic, or we just so happen to find them humaning unsatisfactorily every chance they get. motivations are now incidental, now distasteful. intentions are irrelevant. some flaws may be tolerated but others are the mark of the devil.
ok i’m getting misanthropic myself. buried a friend today. i can’t access my feelings at present but maybe it turns out i want to smash something.
ey, thank you so much Laura. I was especially exhausted by the day yesterday which had been really long and emotional. i think i’m coping okay on the whole. thank you again you’re so kind.
I feel bad for Liz. She’s been mean and selfish but it seems obvious she’s covering up some deep rooted issues, and we’ve seen the facade crack a few times. I don’t think I’d enjoy her company, but she’s interesting to read about and I do sympathize a bit.
Also, don’t agree about the Raidah thing. Assault is a legit crime and Sarah could have gotten in serious trouble, whereas Raidah probably wouldn’t have even cared that people knew she had beef with Sarah
That’s pretty much how I feel about Liz- I respect that she’s a person who has baggage and issues to work on, but man, if it were real life I would not subject myself to her company. She’s just not nice, at least as we’re seeing her, and I really don’t like how she’s treating the people around her. That being said, it does seem to come from a place of feeling a need to escape expectations but feeling incredibly stuck as well.
Because she’s just some kid fucking up left and right? That’s the point of all these characters though. Apart from the people actually attempting murders/rapes/kidnappings and so forth, they’re all just kids on the other side of getting it right. We’re rooting for them to make that growth.
Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, you’re not being efficient here! Drop Liz off at her college FIRST, then go back and murder Joe. This way you’ll be able to take your time and enjoy it more!
In fairness, she did EXPLICITLY ask Joe to not sleep with Liz because Liz is still emotionally juvenile and not ready for the consequences of what she thinks she wants.
Like, Sarah might be a jerk, but she tends to understand people quite well. She knows her sister thinks she’s made some huge intellectual breakthrough, but still doesn’t understand what she’s talking about or what she’s getting into. This is a girl who took multivitamins thinking that they were “weed drugs”. She isn’t emotionally mature enough for a casual sexual relationship with an older man.
Sarah shows love through pragmatism and tough love. You might not like what she’s doing, but she does what she thinks is best even if the other person doesn’t like her for it.
Liz and Joe are adults and Sarah is only a year or two older. She has no right to tell ANYONE who they can be with. The reason people are defending Liz is that Sarah is an asshole to people. And there’s no evidence of her “stealing” Sarah’s boyfriends, only that they chose to go to Liz instead. Stealing implies intent. Still a dick move, but it does change a lot.
1) Sarah knows her sister and was warning Joe not to sleep with her because she knew Liz wasn’t ready for a casual sexual relationship. And guess what? She was RIGHT.
Joe is a good man for not pushing Liz, but he let his second head do the thinking in regards to sleeping with a woman who was clearly not ready for that kind of casual hook-up.
Emotional maturity matters.
2) What are you talking about? Did you miss the last two or three strips? Liz openly confesses that she knew Christopher was Sarah’s boyfriend but decided to play house with him behind her sister’s back and ultimately kissed him in under a half a week.
Whether she intended to do so from the start is irrelevant.
Emotional maturity matters but that’s NOT Sarah’s decision. Liz and Joe solved that themselves like reasonable young adults. They made out, they snuggled, it didn’t work out. Sarah is not her sister’s keeper. Also Liz made a move on JOE. So what, you can’t even agree to sexy time even if the other party asks, you’re both the same age and you’re just feeling things out?
Yeah like, the only reasonable objection Sarah can have is “I told you not to,” and that’s only reasonable in the sense that it might give Sarah the impression that Joe did it to annoy her.
I know it’s folksy and charming, but older siblings don’t actually have any say over who’s allowed on your genitals.
It occurs to me, though, that Sarah doesn’t have the same friendship with Joe that Joyce has. She certainly doesn’t have the same relationship with him that we, the audience, do. She knows him as the creep who created a sex tape within a few days in college (She does NOT know it was leaked without his consent), who continued to try to hit on and sleep with every girl in his vicinity, and created a SUPER CREEPY hit-list where he scored every girl’s fuckability.
Of course she wouldn’t want that kind of man to get involved with her sheltered little sister who doesn’t know the difference between multivitamins and “weed drugs”.
Sarah has every reason to see Joe as a one-note sleezeball who would take advantage of her sister’s desire to be a big girl now. And while she doesn’t have control over Liz’ genitals, she does have reason to be worried that Joe could hurt her, ruin her reputation, etc.
Roz’s sex tape was not ‘leaked’ without his consent, Joe gave his full and enthusiastic approval. I don’t know why people keep needing to have this pointed out.
Joe gave his full and enthusiastic approval to make a sex tape and have it uploaded. He did NOT know that she was a senator’s sister and that it’d end up as national news.
I don’t know why you don’t understand that people need the full context of a situation in order to give informed consent.
But Sarah doesn’t know how it played out. She asked Joe not to mess with her little sister and now Liz hints that he did. She doesn’t know that Liz propositioned him out of the blue. From Joe’s past behavior and the image he goes to great lengths to present, it’s perfectly reasonable to assume he went after her.
And Liz will likely assume she’s upset because Sarah did have a thing with Joe, since that’s what she asked about.
Doubly so because as her honorary little sister, she clearly saw that Joyce was interested in the same guy she was, and likely feared the inevitable return of the pattern she’d experienced with her real little sister.
Ohhh this makes me want to go back and re-read the Jacob arc because I feel like this puts it in a whole new light. I don’t remember exactly but at the time I think my impression was Sarah backed off because she realized Jacob wanted something serious and she wanted something casual. But I wonder if that’s just what she told Joyce. And really she backed off and pushed Joyce towards him because she foresaw that as inevitable (Jacob losing interest in Sarah and him and Joyce hooking up) with Joyce in this sort of “surrogate little sister” role. So maybe Sarah figured it was better to just fast forward past the damage and hurt feelings she felt were coming based on her history, to try to protect her relationship with Joyce from crumbling the same way her relationship with Liz did?
That seems to be the read some others are getting. I’m not entirely sure that’s where it’s going. There’s a lot more going on here than we know, we’re just getting the slow drip of information. However, the way Liz is defending what Sarah obviously sees as betrayal of trust, and in at least a few ways is, is particularly off-putting to me and makes Liz a particularly distasteful character at this point.
I think this is going to be where Sarah fully develops out of her abrasive personality and her misanthropic Bongo attitude she has as a defense mechanism. From what Liz is saying it was more that Sarah pushed her boyfriends away making them swek others. Liz still did wrong but it was an already am issue in the relationships I bet just like with Jacob.
The fact Sarah only wants a casual thing could also be specifically because she just expects bubbly people around her will swoop in to steal her partners and she’s given up on actually being able to have a long-term partner that at the very least, respects her enough to break up with her instead of cheating.
She gave up pursuing Jacob early on because she only wanted a casual thing and he wanted more serious. Then she went back after him because she wasn’t going to let Raidah have him.
I don’t think the casual part really came up again. Her motivation was breaking them up, not really getting him herself. It moved almost immediately into using Joyce to do that, with little attempt on her part to attract him, even if that was what Joyce thought she was doing.
Wow, now I’m convinced Liz is not that nice person I thought on the first time I saw her.
But I still got mixed feelings. Her upbringing in a christian environment, trying to be herself while hiding it from everyone.
Her obviously beauty and charm, that attracted the Sarah’s assholes boyfriends (really, people? Nobody will put the falt on the boys?) .
Courage to finally have sex with a hot boy, and still have a massive conflict between her new life and the past christian liike she had?
I don’t know, I still don’t see Luz like a villian. But not problem if everybody see her like that. Great villains make great histories
We’re focusing on Liz and Sarah because they’re here, real characters and in conflict. The boys are obviously jerks. Not much needs to be said about that.
Joe will be killed is some orribile way. But now I wonder if Sarah is attracted by him even a bit or not. She and evil Liz really seem to share the same taste in boys.
I’ve never been cheated on so it’s hard for me to really get it as anything other than “it’s bad, and you don’t deserve to go through it.” With Sarah here I understand those feelings, but the context of these last two strips makes me feel like this is more of an examination of her longstanding inability to meaningfully connect with people and then thinking they’re the problem.
Sarah was dating a guy who thought she was going to dump him, and that Liz’s suggestion was that he just needed to ignore how she acts and talks because she really cares deep down. I feel like Liz doing something stupid and impulsive just gave Sarah an opportunity to avoid thinking about the fact that she doesn’t emotionally give back to the people in her life.
To be clear, and I think it’s important I be clear because it’s a tumultuous subject; no obviously Sarah does not deserve to be cheated because she doesn’t smile enough, I dunno if I’m coming off as such but the fact is that I should be elaborating if I’m talking about this, but I don’t think this is meant to be as simple as “cheating is bad,” it is bad, but it was something engaged in by middle school children and I think it’s more relevant as something Sarah cratered because she can’t just tell people she cares about them, and that she expects them to just innately know she does.
There’s these three strips I’ve been thinking about lately wrt Sarah, and I want to talk about them a bit:
Here’s Sarah grousing about how no one said goodbye to her and that she didn’t want them to anyway. Then Joyce does this and Sarah just kind of deflects.
Sarah’s not actually antisocial, Sarah’s just heavily introverted. She cares like crazy, but caring a whole lot leads to things like chasing after Joyce with a bat and having her freshman year defined by losing all her friends trying to help Dana.
But I think being with someone like Joyce leads to Sarah to use her as an emotional battery. Joyce will bulldoze into her life and Sarah’s fine with that, but if Joyce needs Sarah for anything other than a crisis, Sarah doesn’t know how to give back, or thinks she has to.
And here’s what I think is Joyce not so subtly implying that viewing Sarah as someone to admire is something she’s not doing as much anymore, and waaaay back in 2012 here’s Joyce saying that she can’t really trust that Sarah likes her if Sarah can only show it in a crisis.
I do think that’s where things are leading again. Sarah’s got someone who loves her, and Sarah’s unable to give back. Worse, even, for Joyce, because now Sarah’s actively reveling in her misery and telling her to her face that she deserves to be fired for her hubris and that Joyce now is worse than the fundie idiot who’d snap and suck a billion dicks.
Sarah is a bleeding heart for people she cares about, but I think it’s a fairly overt subtext that she expects them to pick up the slack for her.
I would like to briefly rebutt to at least part of this, because tbh the rest is spot on imho–that it genuinely seems, at least from things here, that Sarah is more bothered by the fact that her sister betrayed her and decided to take advantage of the situation for her own benefit, rather than just that Christopher cheated on her. I agree that the situation with Christopher and probably a lot of her boyfriends may well have been due to her issues, but all we’ve really seen in response to her past romantic failures is her further pushing people away, not necessarily deciding that everything was all her ex’s fault and she’s blameless. More of a “I have no clue how to not make this keep happening, or can’t muster up the will to try, so I’m just going to not bother anymore and dating isn’t for me.”
I.e. I don’t think there’s enough here to definitively say that Sarah genuinely thinks that her ex’s are 100% the problem, not her–though maybe you weren’t necessarily saying that. It seems she’s at least partially decided that Liz is the problem instead, though. Which, like, yeah, is also deflection, but also she’s probably not totally wrong either, based on what I’m reading? Like, people are like “surely Liz couldn’t have known and it wasn’t her fault”, but then she literally directly afterwards insinuates that she very much would have tried to pursue Joe further if JUST because Sarah may have liked him at some point. Which like, maybe you could also read it as a genuine bit of curiosity to follow up on ‘we have the same interest in guys maybe, wouldn’t it be funny if you also tried to bang Joe like I happened to’, but tbh I also wouldn’t blame Sarah too hard for interpreting that the way I did if this is a pattern of behavior that extends further than the two incidents we’ve gotten a bit of info on.
Liz also does literally the exact same thing as Sarah, what with the deflecting blame and making everyone else but her the problem, and all of her problems are now everyone else’s too. Which I just think is interesting.
I don’t think there’s enough here to definitively say that Sarah genuinely thinks that her ex’s are 100% the problem, not her–though maybe you weren’t necessarily saying that. I
Not specifically with her boyfriends, so much as I think Sarah is a person who says “I hate people” and when someone else connects with her I think Sarah continues as is, secure in the knowledge that this friend of hers doesn’t need her to say that she cares. She was like this with Jacob, even, where he eventually gave up on trying to be friends with her because she can’t emotionally engage with people of her own volition, she needs someone to make all the effort, and Joyce is a fussy busybody who loves meddling with other peoples’ problems if she can convince herself it’s sufficient romcom shenanigans.
I think part of this was always there if these last two strips are any indication, but I think a major part of it is the fear of it exploding in her face like Dana did. The flashback to that showed that Sarah was genuinely bonding with her and her friends but come the drama bomb they all abandoned her thinking she had betrayed Dana. Sarah did what was best (I’ve been pushing the “Dana didn’t get better” theory a lot but the fact of the matter is that Sarah was in a no-win scenario) and then suffered for it, and I kinda think she’s expecting that other shoe to drop; even when Joe called her out on manipulating Joyce and Jacob, Sarah joked(?) that it’d meant she’d get out of going to the wedding.
TLDR: I think of Sarah as someone who doesn’t consider her own need to be emotionally available to her friends, because she thinks that anyone who is friends with her already knows what she’s about.
Liz also does literally the exact same thing as Sarah, what with the deflecting blame and making everyone else but her the problem
I don’t think this is the case for Liz in that her problems (her friends at Ball State, her fear of sex as something that would ruin her forever, still pretending to be a Christian) aren’t drawn from herself, but in how outside factors have defined these problems for her and will resent her if she steps out of it, but then that’s because I think the subtext of Liz is that she’s Other Joyce and going through the same kind of struggle where the people around her need her to exist in a specific little box.
I’ve been pushing that but there’s gotta be some differences in there. Liz probably doesn’t have a Becky to think about, unless her stepmom is the Becky in this scenario.
I mean Liz’s problem technically stems from outside factors, but the reality is that it’s still her problem. She doesn’t even know for sure how people will respond to her changing how she behaves, the problem here IS internal, and it is her fear. And she’s decided to make that fear someone else’s problem to cater to, by avoiding her problem and relying on Sarah to enable her continued avoidance and let her stay at IU. And when Sarah doesn’t, well it’s because Sarah is just jealous and is trying to get revenge and it’s all HER fault! And also all of the things that Sarah is jealous and angry about aren’t Liz’s fault either, either there’s no fault to be had anywhere and Sarah’s just being unreasonable, or it’s definitely Sarah’s fault because she’s not smiley enough.
Like Liz literally has done basically nothing but deflect any and all sense of blame or personal responsibility for basically everything, for every moment she’s been on-screen. Like look back, there is not a single strip the entire time she’s been in the comic where she tries to take basically any personal responsibility for…anything. Being responsible doesn’t exist! Attempting to like, consider consequences or other people’s feelings is just being a killjoy. There are only whims to follow and no consequences, and she can say and do whatever she wants and it’s fine so long as she’s chill and friendly and nice! And if anything bad has ever happened, it’s not HER fault, ever!
Everything down to the way she talks about even the smallest things is careful to never frame herself as having done anything wrong, even slightly, or for her to have even had the possibility of doing something wrong, because she has zero responsibility. The closest she has gotten is actually admitting to ‘sticking her tongue down Christopher’s throat’, qualified by yet another deflection of any blame or responsibility for that either, because ‘thats forever in junior high time’.
Might put this in a weird way, bear with me, and if anything I says doesn’t sound right please let me know and I’ll try to elaborate some.
The way I’m seeing it, Liz’s problems are from an outside source in the sense that we know how she feels about the people around her. It is technically true that she could be wrong or be misunderstanding them, but with the heavy parallels drawn with Joyce who is going through the exact same struggle I find this unlikely. More broadly, I think it’d be weird for Liz to be in the series for six months now, returns to BSU, and it turns out everything’s fine, she overreacted, and Sarah was completely correct to just drag her back.
I think Sarah’s struggles are internal in the sense that, the way I see it, her story is more about how she acts and less about where it’s from, whereas Liz’s stuff has been snaking in the “why it’s happening and where she’s from.” It’s not nearly as binary as I may be making it sound, Sarah’s history still matters for why she’s like this now, but I think with Sarah it matters more how she is than why she is. Joe, for example, drew a lot of from his parents’ divorce`, but since becoming more of a main character in the last five years he’s been more about changing himself from the person he’s been, if that makes sense.
To get a bit meta, unless Liz is joining the main cast like Becky did, I think she’s here mostly to explore Sarah (the chapter is called Trial & Sarah, after all), and so far since the Faith-Off Sarah’s only showings have been:
– Being a dickbag to Joyce.
– This thing now with Liz, where she threw her into a car and dragged her back. The furthest she’s gotten is asking if Liz doesn’t want to be seen not going to church, and when Liz vented some of those feelings, Sarah called her a fraud.
I don’t think Liz matters as a character so much as she’s here to bounce off of Sarah and examine her character foibles. Even this conversation, for example, matters to me more as “what it means to Sarah” because Liz isn’t going to really matter in three or four months, and I view this as an exploration of Sarah’s negative qualities, and more specifically, her inability to be emotionally empathetic outside of a crisis, because we’ve got her other little sister going through a crisis motivated by her friends who used to laugh at her for being a Jesus Freak now getting mad at her for stepping out of that box.
That’s definitely how this has been reading to me, at any rate! It’s not necessarily that Liz is just a totebag for Sarah to carry around that’ll give her some character development so much as I think Liz’s place in the story is meant more to impact the regular cast members like Joe, Sarah and Joyce.
Oh that’s definitely all true. I agree for the most part, I think, but I still believe it’s probably got a bit more going on in terms of also showing some of the reasons why Sarah behaves the way she does, which involves a lot of different things from her past, Liz and how Liz is also kind of a shitty younger sibling who is happy to further pigeonhole Sarah into the “grumpy one” box, maybe even so she specifically can take things from Sarah for her own benefit by virtue of being “the nice one”.
Also, regardless of how the people on Liz’s campus react to her coming out as atheist, Sarah really isn’t obligated to let Liz crash with her, and forcing her to go back is a neutral action that just actually forces Liz to take responsibility for her own problems. She can show back up on campus and choose to keep pretending, choose to come out fully, choose to cut off all of her old friends and make new ones, or hell even choose to run off again if she wants. But it’s still Liz’s problem and Liz’s choice to make, and she doesn’t get to foist this onto Sarah and make Sarah the one who has to make decisions for Liz on Liz’s behalf just because Liz doesn’t want to.
That being said. Sarah really ought to like. Ask Liz more what’s up and be more thoughtful, as Liz’s sister, just to be supportive and show she cares about her, and she can do that without literally letting Liz crash in her dorm at IU. Set boundaries and stuff. And her inability and/or unwillingess to do that is definitely a character flaw.
But to be fair to Sarah, jesus christ does Liz probably make any of that either impossible or insanely frustrating to try and do, and then immediately goes on immature rants about how she hates Sarah and how Sarah is just jealous and bla bla bla bla. I get not wanting to deal with any of that, and just get this whole fiasco over with, because being forced to be the mature one for someone who is generally resistant is a shitty position to be in, and probably one that Sarah maybe gets put in quite a bit and is sick of. (Yknow, like, with the Dana situation.)
Liz approached Sarah in what is a pretty obviously desperate cry for help, she probably does not literally believe she can just crash in her dorm and smoke pot all the time, and then Sarah called her a fraud, tackled her, and dragged her back to BSU because Sarah decided the problem is getting solved right now.
Sarah can either not care and not be involved, or care and be involved. She can’t decide for herself that she knows better than Liz when she doesn’t even recognize Liz’s struggles as real. She immediately signaled herself as someone who doesn’t care why it’s happening, she just wants the problem to stop making noise.
Joyce introduced Joe to Liz as her best friend who she had hooked up with several times, and Liz’s response to that was to double back to his place later to try and sleep with him.
Somehow I don’t think Sarah is at fault for more than one of her boyfriends cheating on her with Liz. Regardless of Sarah’s emotional (un)availability, Liz has an established pattern of behavior here.
Joyce presented it as hooking up with her BEST FRIEND. It says a lot that Liz didn’t bother or care to ask Joyce if it would be weird for her or if it might trample any unspoken feelings. It’s not like Liz has earned the benefit of the doubt, either.
There are three cases that we’ve seen or heard described now where Liz pursued someone in a relationship with her friends or family. That’s a pattern.
You’re allowed to fuck other people’s best friends without their say-so.
if it might trample any unspoken feelings.
Joyce presented herself as friends with a rewards program with Joe, and also both she and Liz were pretending to be cool worldly badasses who have awesome sex with hot boys while doing weed drugs.
Like specifically, FwB means “we do not fuck exclusively.”
If you have no regard for the feelings of those in your life, then yes, you can hook up with any consenting adult you want without regard for the consequences. You can hook up with a sibling’s best friend, a parent’s best friend, a child’s best friend, the best friend of someone close to you who is romantically/sexually involved… You can hook up with two of your sister’s boyfriends… It’s allowed, in the strictest sense. Nothing to stop you but your own sense of right and wrong. It could cause emotional pain to others in your life, but it’s allowed.
On the other hand, people are free to regard that behavior as selfish at best or malicious at worst, especially if it’s part of an established pattern, like it is with Liz.
I should add: I don’t think Liz is malicious, but she comes across as pretty selfish in her pursuit of chest hair that goes down to the ankles. You’d think that someone who hurt her sister twice by hooking up with her boyfriends would err on the side of caution with other hookups that are friend/family-adjacent, but Liz seems like an impulsive little PG-13 hedonist, and I say that with affection for the character. She’s an enjoyable source of drama for me so far.
Calling her a hedonist because she wanted to sleep with a guy that is so open to casual hookups he filmed himself banging Roz in the first week of college is wack.
There’s nothing to be cautious about, Joyce didn’t sign her name on Joe’s ass, she explicitly said that they were friends with benefits. Even if Joyce has a thing for him (a distinct possibility), on what grounds is she allowed to object to that guy she knows sleeping with that girl she knows?
I’m calling Liz a PG-13 hedonist because she came to indulge in a (relatively safe) sinful bender. She wanted to swear, take weed drugs, and have sex. To “experience everything,” in her own words.
Joyce explicitly said that she and Joe were best friends and “friends with rewards,” haha. Liz didn’t care enough to ask if the latter and the former were entangled or if there was more to this, she just tried to hook up, regardless of whether or not Joyce cares. That’s what makes it selfish. Liz wants, Liz pursues. End of story.
Liz impulsively engages guys who are romantically or sexually involved with her family and friends. She’s done it three times that we know of. That’s a pattern. Whether it’s ultimately harmless or has emotional blowback for those in her life, that’s another matter.
Caring about Joyce’s feelings about Joe are irrelevant because Joyce said they were Friends With Reward Programs, as in you don’t need to know if “there”s more to this” because that means “we’re friends and we fuck.”
I’ve seen you write essays in these comments dissecting character motivations and subtext, so I know you’re capable of a more nuanced reading of this social interaction. If you’d prefer to ignore all context outside of a surface level reading of that one line, I’ll leave you to it.
Your view on this social interaction is absurd and presumes a level where you need permission from an entirely separate person before you’re allowed to pursue someone they have explicitly told you they are not exclusively seeing.
The nuance you’re looking for is “well what if Joyce would get upset” and there’s no nuance there because A. they ain’t dating and B. even if Joyce got upset, she still doesn’t get to control who boffs Joe. She got cranky about Malaya doing it and she still had no say there.
If you think that best friends who are also hooking up casually have no chance of having another layer to their friendship and and overall relationship that could be affected by one of them sleeping with a friend of the other’s, then sure. Turn off your brain. You’ve figured it all out. No need to inquire further. As we learned with Dina and Joe earlier, people always say exactly what they mean.
For fuck’s sake, if Joyce was gonna have a problem with Liz fucking Joe, she would have said as much. She’s never been remotely shy about fuck-shaming people or advising against a shag. Fuck Joyce’s imaginary hypothetical speculative feelings about Liz maybe fucking Joe, she isn’t a factor in this equation at all. There is absolutely no moral quandary around that specific interaction, and it’s fucking creepy how personally people are taking this goddamn scenario.
For the record, I was using Liz’s interactions with Joyce/Joe in support of my observation that Liz appears to have a pattern of her interest in boys trumping any cares about whether her actions could hurt others. That was the crux of my comment that has you all riled up: That I don’t think it’s Sarah’s fault that Liz kissed her boyfriends. Sorry if that offends you, I guess?
I don’t think this is difficult to understand: I’m not worried about Joyce’s actual feelings about Joe/Liz. We know the truth about Joyce and Joe (not best friends, not hooking up). Liz does not know this; she thinks that Joyce and Joe are best friends who hook up. She does not care to ask Joyce whether being best friends and fuck buddies means that there’s something more there. What she chooses to do with that info is to pointedly tell everyone that she is leaving and sneak back to Joe’s room to try to hook up herself.
This isn’t some sweeping moral judgement, it’s just my take on Liz’s priorities. Liz is an enjoyable foil for Joyce and Sarah. I think her presence in the story has pushed some of the character dynamics in very interesting directions.
It’s perfectly OK if you interpret Liz’s interactions and characterization differently than me, but I’d appreciate you not coming at me with hostility and projecting your own weird baggage onto me, though. You jumped into my replies here unprompted just to cuss at me repeatedly, call me creepy, and tell me that I’m taking this personally. It sounds like you have some feelings to sort out.
“Like specifically, FwB means ‘we do not fuck exclusively.’”
No.
It does not.
The phrase “Friends with Benefits” denotes an emotional relationship that is less romantically or emotionally intense than the stereotypical coupling. It is not a synonym for “open relationship”. The two often overlap, but they are not the same thing; romantic intensity is not the same thing as exclusivity, and it is as possible for two people to be in an exclusive FwB pairing as it is for them to be a romantically intense non-exclusive couple.
Friends with Benefits don’t always fuck other people. Hearing that phrase is not a guarantee of non-exclusivity, and as a matter of ethics and morals, you should not assume that it is—you should get clarification and consent before you stick your junk into the middle of someone else’s partnership. You are free to have whatever opinions about fictional characters you like like, but—this? I don’t care how much you dislike Sarah—this is not up for debate.
I kinda feel “we’re friends that fuck exclusively” is just dating at that point. It’s “not a synonym for an open relationship” in the sense that it just means you aren’t in one.
But, sure, I can buy that. It’s a term I’ve pretty much only heard in that regard, but that doesn’t mean other uses of it don’t exist. It’s still nonsensical to call it “someone else’s partnership” when it’s not being defined as a partnership. And if it is then that feels like something that’s really easy to communicate about if the situation arises, like, say, if you define a relationship with a term that typically means a non-exclusive relationship.
(y’know, in a circumstance that was not Joyce and Liz pretending they were worldly sex-having adults)
. You are free to have whatever opinions about fictional characters you like like, but—this? I don’t care how much you dislike Sarah
I don’t know what it means to dislike a fictional character to such a degree that it influences my feelings on them as if they were actual people, but I’m slowly coming to grips with the fact that the entire universe is crazy except for me on this.
nonsensical to call it “someone else’s partnership” when it’s not being defined as a partnership
I mean—fair! (honestly that specific choice of words was less a reflection of strong feelings and more a reflection of the shitty thesaurus that lives in my head shouting “you can’t just write ‘relationship’ AGAIN, stupid”). But the broader point stands—partnership or friendship or relationship or however you want to define it, “Friends with Benefits” does not guarantee an open relationship, and if you assume that it does and fuck accordingly you’re being pretty damn careless with other people’s emotions, partnership or no. (Obviously that’s not the end of the story when it comes to the specific case of Liz—not least because Liz didn’t go through with anything and Joe and Joyce weren’t actually a thing to begin with—but that’s a whole different bundle of cans.)
I don’t really agree with this insofar that if I was introduced to someone as “this is my boyfriend” I wouldn’t leap to thinking of it being open as a possibility because open relationships are a thing. “X’s Boyfriend” kinda innately speaks to me as “exclusive unless otherwise noted” and I suppose with what you’re laying out, it’s the other way around for me regarding FwB: not exclusive except otherwise noted, in that I don’t think of FwB as “A Romantic Relationship” in the sense that there’s exclusivity involved at all.
There can be, mind you, but I don’t think the expectation of “there’s no relationship to rile up” is unfounded, I think that just means someone using that term can then communicate “we’re FwB but just with each other.”
Or tldr: I think communication here is more important than conflict avoidance.
This still doesn’t make me think Liz is the horrible monster that so many people in these comments are making her out to be. It doesn’t sound Liz has been intentionally and maliciously “stealing” Sarah’s boyfriends to me. Making dumb mistakes as a kid, yes. But she couldn’t know Sarah was dating Jimmy Wilson if Sarah didn’t tell her. And Sarah had no right to stop Liz from sleeping with Joe, though Sarah doesn’t know yet that Liz stopped it before anything actually happened anyway.
I don’t know about “horrible monster”, but it says a lot to me about where Liz is as a person that the revelation that she didn’t know about Jimmy Wilson because Sarah didn’t want Liz to steal him, after that was very much a thing that she did does not give her the slightest bit of pause. The way that she’s interacting with Sarah in terms of and in the context of all of these happenings says a lot about her, none of it particularly good.
She doesn’t seem to care that she has genuinely hurt Sarah, and is taking the opportunity to further needle her. And “as a kid” holds a lot less weight when the person who did the hurting seems to not be the slightest bit remorseful. That does not foster an environment of forgiveness. And dumb mistakes can still be incredibly hurtful. Let’s not minimize that.
Okay but Liz’s dumb mistake was kissing a boy in middle school that thought Sarah hated him. And then because of that, she kissed a boy that she did not know Sarah was dating.
How long do you have to apologize for shit you did when you were 13? Like, even beyond the context of “this guy was unconvinced Sarah liked him” and “kissed a guy who Sarah refused to divulge she was dating.”
Honestly she doesn’t seen particularly pressed by it she sees it as a stupid thing she did and is pointing put that it was most likely Sarah’s personality that pushed them away. I think people are missing the point of this arc a little bit. Yes Liz made mistakes but Darah also has some fault.
Here’s the thing, neither Sarah nor Liz seem to have changed much since that encounter. Sarah is still difficult to get along with and doesn’t show affection easily, and Liz still makes excuses for her behavior and winds Sarah up rather than try to be a compassionate sister.
But people are MORE WILLING to throw blame on Sarah, and LESS WILLING to hold Liz accountable for her behavior.
Even though we’ve repeatedly seen that Liz doesn’t give a half a damn about anyone else’s feelings, because she does it with a smile then all is forgiven. She can mock the fact that “men like her more” right in front of the sister who she stole multiple men from, but she was a child when that happened and Sarah’s mean so who cares? She can call all Christians stupid and then refuse to apologize to the stranger she hurt, but she has a complicated history with religion so we can’t expect her to show empathy. She returns to the boyfriend conversation and immediately starts making excuses and refuse to apologize, but why should she be expected to apologize for something that happened soooOOOoooOoo long ago?
It’s like people hate Sarah, and therefore Liz is right by default.
That’s been a trend since this drama started. I’m not saying it’s everyone, but there are a handful of people who have been ride or die with Liz while attacking everyone around her.
Relationships can end without cheating, and cheating takes more than one party. The whole bit about Sarah pushing people away is very much being used by Liz to justify something that she did that was pretty blatantly wrong. The fact that she’s comfortable with that as a justification doesn’t paint her in a good light, and I’m a little gobsmacked that you’ve also been throwing that around in the comments section.
Sarah pushing someone away in no way justifies what Liz did. And come on, three days being “…like, forever in junior high” is garbage. When you do something lousy in junior high, you can acknowledge that it was because you were a stupid kid and made a bad choice and still acknowledge that it was a lousy thing. Liz is still justifying it in college.
This is my biggest issue. Like at first with Liz I wasn’t a fan, but I was curious about where it was going. But I just don’t really like her much? She shows 0 thought and remorse for anything she did. You’re still culpable when you’re like 13-14. I did stupid stuff all the time at that age, some I didn’t know was wrong.
I still knew it was wrong to chase after taken people. People acting like stuff that happens when you’re a dumb kid should just be forgotten and automatically forgiven as an adult when the person shows not even a little remorse for it… especially with siblings, it sticks with you as you grow up.
Sarah mentioning Jimmy and not telling Liz about him, also shows that it might not have been an isolated incident.
Like I just can’t wrap my head around some people here justifying it, or saying in some cases it is okay. Like middle school and high school are very formative years in your life. Especially the latter half of middle school when you’re potentially having a lot of firsts. Sure kids arent gonna be able to have that nuanced internal dialogue but they know most base, base level right vs wrong.
The boyfriends are both shitty here too, but they’re also not characters we’ve seen at all. Liz felt entitled to Sarah’s cute boyfriend because Sarah pushed him away, and he came to her for help, and she decided she wanted him.
It’s not a matter of ‘oh you paint things black and white and have to have a villain’
It’s the fact of the matter that in-text and how she interacts with others shows she’s just cruel and justifies said cruelty because it’s towards her mean, antisocial sister and was ‘like forever ago’ and shifts blame and doesn’t take accountability.
I love sarah as a character. So I’m biased here, I’m aware she can be a bit of a bongo, and she’s not being the best friend to joyce during the current arc. I like he despite these issues because there are times she TRIES, and she makes mistakes informed by her character and personality.
I liked her even early on before we got a ton of nuance.
Liz has none of anything that makes me want to like her, despite the fact that it feels like narratively we are supposed to? Like it sucks that she has bad stuff goin on at her own college. Sucks that she’s struggling like joyce.
But She doesn’t compel me. I don’t want to see her develop. I just find myself wishing she’d just go back to her own college, or go home or something. Because she doesn’t feel like she’s going to change or develop.
Ok, that’s cool. I’m glad to get your opinions. I was just spinning out hypothetical situations, playing devil’s advocate. I’ve heard a lot of justifications on this topic, so it’s good to see how others see that kind of self-convincing. Not as straightforward as it might appear to be. Good to know how others see it. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts.
something I have to constantly remind myself is that when I find a DoA character “unlikeable”….. I wasn’t exactly a perfect specimen of a human from 18-21 either. Is Liz my favorite character? Not really, don’t appreciate her hurting Sarah (though come ON Sarah that was MIDDLE SCHOOL jfc), but I also fucked up with friends at that age. This comic is about all of them figuring that out, and the only characters I think that deserve real hate are, like, Joyce’s mom, Becky’s Dad, etc.
Huh. This is actually fairly awesome. A community of people who take 24 hours at a time to hold a full-group conversation (with lots of subconversations) about interpersonal dynamics, advice, emotions, character, etc., and share their own experiences and how it makes them feel. It’s refreshing to be among such thoughtful people.
awwww =3
thank you for reminding me of why i love this place. yes i get frustrated sometimes, but also, there is something so cool about people putting so much energy and brain-hours into this ephemeral space. And every day brings a new conversation starter, which then as you said splinters off into a bunch of unexpected side chats. Yeah, it is fairly awesome and i appreciate you for saying it <3
(PS are there two Laura's or are you using two different avatars?)
Yes, 2 different Avatars, Ruth and Billie. I don’t know why I get 2: I just take whatever the website gives me. Maybe when I use a different device (phone vs. Laptop) I get a different Avatar? Who knows. I am the only Laura I know, but maybe another may pop up sometimes.
Milu, I am so glad to hear you are feeling better. I hope you can vent here and in other spaces. Thank you for your kind words.
I have lost so many friends and loved ones, these past 2+ years of COVID. It gets so exhausting to lose people. I sometimes feel like Johnny Cash: “Everyone I know goes away in the end.” So I do empathize with your loss, especially if you attended the ceremony in person. It’s so raw and fresh, and it just keeps welling up over and over sometimes.
What I love about this community is how honest people are. Even when they are calling people out or disagreeing wildly, I don’t see malice behind it. Anger, sure. But not hatred. That is refreshing to me.
And so many smart, creative people, with such resources to share! My appreciation for this saga is much deeper with you all here.
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oh there IS a driver
or is the driver Alexa or Cortana or something
The driver is Sydney.
Just because after this strip, I want to believe that being a Zoomr driver is their side gig, and they’ve had to listen to this whole conversation.
Sydney wouldn’t have stayed silent this long, they would’ve started going off about their “insignificant petty squabbling” fifty miles ago.
Yep. That.
It’s those self-driving cars Joe made in the Walkyverse
WHO IS DRIVING
OH NO CAR IS DRIVING HOW CAN THAT BE
It’s a ride-sharing service, so there is a Driver and they are not getting paid nearly enough for this shit.
I mean, this ride sharing service is being run by Carla’s parents. Odds are this is the one universe where there is one ride sharing service that actually pays people properly.
Oh look, the people who called it as having happened more than once were right??
Also “Jimmy Wilson” made me double-take for a moment and wonder when this comic had shifted into the DC-verse, I was thinking of Jimmy Olsen
At the same time Giant Days did.
“Jimmy Wilson” was actually mentioned in Walkyverse Liz’s sole appearance, where Liz mentions that he told her that “lawyers are evil.” When I read it, I just assumed that “Jimmy Wilson” was some 1990s media personality that the world had totally forgotten about and I couldn’t find any info on, but apparently not.
Oooh, nice catch!
…I’ll be honest, I’ve always remembered that strip as ending with “Jerry Falwell says lawyers are evil.”
You probably conflated it with this strip and the one right after it.
Huh! So I’m not the only one who thought that! Guess when you’re binge-reading Roomies “it’s probably some 90’s reference I don’t get” is a pretty good guess for a punchline.
And hey, if Liz didn’t even know that is 100% on Jimmy.
Never said it wasn’t. 😛
Things we know with any amount of concrete-ness as of this comic:
– Sarah has always been varying degrees of antisocial.
– Sarah and Liz did not live together very long.
– In junior high, Christopher came to Liz, concerned about his and Sarah’s relationship. After three days of encouraging said relationship, Liz “shoved her tongue down his throat.”
– Sarah dated Jimmy Wilson but did not tell Liz. Liz then started dating Jimmy Wilson.
Things we have absolutely no idea whatsoever about as of this comic:
– The exact nature of Sarah and Liz’s relationship at every point across the past twenty years, including any possible unmentioned infractions committed by one or both of them, or any potential issues that existed between them prior to Christopher.
Also Liz and Sarah are 18 and 20 respectively, but significantly less than two years apart (which come to think of it, might mean Liz’s 19th birthday could be “soon” enough to be in the comic).
Based on all that we know about Liz so far, I definitely don’t think she’s a horrible person.
You don’t have to be a horrible person to do stupid/thoughtless/hurtful things. Liz can try and kid herself into thinking it was “ok” for her to take Sarah’s boyfriends but she also needs to deal with the consequences of her actions. Even if the past boyfriends were cool cheating on Sarah with Liz, if Liz wants to have a good relationship with Sarah, probably don’t do stuff like that.
Though Liz very much seems like the type of person who doesn’t give too much thought into how HER actions hurt others (i.e. running away instead of helping Joyce with Becky and not really caring how Joe was dealing with their almost-night together) so I don’t know what it’ll take to shift her world view on how she treated her sister.
I mean, what’s Liz supposed to do about Becky?
Joyce is some girl she knows over Facebook, and we know that Becky was outraged over Joyce being an atheist at all. Why’s Becky actually matter here?
I’m not sure what she was supposed to do about Joe either. She tried to bang him and freaked out because Christian sexual puritanism made her think she’d ruin her life touching a wiener. Joe… quietly looked sad about it.
In Joe’s case he’s been feeling like crap about it, thinking all he can do is “ruin” people which is probably why he’s trying to keep himself from having feelings for Joyce (it’s been hinted at that he’s been comparing Liz’s reaction to being with him to what might be Joyce’s). In the case of Becky, she could have AT LEAST not tried to ditch the situation like she had nothing to do with the “LOL God is fake and stupid” conversation like someone just pulled the fire alarm. In both cases, I’m trying to say is that Liz doesn’t seem to think she’s done anything to cause or “fan the flames of” said issues.
Liz comes off as someone who, rather than face a problem, either runs away from it (like whatever is going on with college) or pushes the blame on someone else (like blaming Sarah and her past boyfriends for her stealing said boyfriends instead of taking even a speck of responsibility). If she even thinks of her having any connection to the issues in the first place.
In Joe’s case he’s been feeling like crap about it, thinking all he can do is “ruin” people which is probably why he’s trying to keep himself
How could Liz even possibly be aware of this.
Why she gotta worry about Joe when she was chewing her own face off thinking she’d ruined herself having almost touched his wiener.
like she had nothing to do with the “LOL God is fake and stupid”
I mean, she doesn’t, not really. The root of Becky’s problems have been pretty firmly established as “Joyce is not allowed to be an atheist.”
Plus, would you want someone who thinks God is fake and stupid to apologize to someone she doesn’t know about that?
I mean, what COULD she have said after Becky got mad at “god is fake and stupid”? Apologize? Say she doesn’t mean it? Why would she lie to Becky about her (Liz’s) own approach to faith?
I wonder what’s going to happen if/when Liz meets Jacob.
Alright, RIP Joe, you had a good run
To be fair, Dying at the hands of an Angry hot chick is probably on Joe’s top 10 list of ways to die.
One of my favorite jokes in the Borderlands games is when Handsome Jack is asked how he wants to die. He says “Somewhere warm, with a hot chick nearby”.
He gets killed in a volcano by Lilith.
I call that a win.
I alternate taking the pleasure myself and letting Lilith do it.
Still counts if you play Maya, anyway.
Zapp Brannigan and Fry, sentenced to death by snu-snu.
If the driver does as Sarah says – and she then actually commits a murder – the driver would be charged with aiding and abetting a felony. Because she has stated that that is why she wants to go back.
She should keep her mouth shut and wait until she gets back as per original plan, THEN murder Joe.
Ok but what if threesome?
God, Liz, the audacity.
The Audacity! The Audition of it all. The sheer Reaper! The complete and utter TwistedWave. The absolute Garageband!
I spotify what you’re doing there.
i’m also Abletonotice the Logic of this comment.
I also now have to wonder if Yoto does music. Yoto. ya do music??
Yoto owns several musical instruments, Took 7 years of Band classes and likes to sing and make up lyrics. But Yoto is BAD at music so no, I do not do music.
I’d like to though.
Sarah you’re going back there soon enough anyway
She wants Liz to bear witness to the carnage.
Depends on if this comic respects the multiverse, I guess.
not in this life
not in this universe
Maybe in another life, Liz… Maybe in another life…
Come on, Joe and Sarah repeatedly hooking up is just about as likely as Joyce being a stalker who obsesses over marrying Danny because of a Mountain Dew-fueled vision where an angel told her that her future husband would have bad hair and a hoodie.
Pfft.
To be fair, the angel was right.
Okay, so middle school wasn’t the only time it happened. Good to know, I guess.
Liz, shhh! If she goes back, you avoid Ball State for a while longer.
I mean, we don’t know when the Jimmy Incident happened, that could have also been in middle-school. Espacially since the implication has been that Sarah and Liz didn’t grow up in the same household for a very long period of time.
They may not have been living together, but still in the same area and the same school.
Maybe Sarah should be less of an asshole and then she wouldn’t find so many people she is interested in swooping off to other people in her proximity.
Sarah has been less of an asshole. I don’t know where the idea that she’s undergone zero character growth is coming from.
She has but we haven’t seen the fruits if that quite yet. She’s still prickly bad with people and abrasive and misanthropic. She’s not likeable really yet she’s getting there and has a lot of good about her but I’m completely unsurprised that men She’s interested in get turned off very quickly once her personality starts to grate on them
… “She has but we haven’t seen the fruits if that quite yet.”
Her bond with Joyce is ‘the fruits of that”, her friendship with Dina is “the fruit of it”. Sarah *has* been making connections and friendships with people as part of her character arc!
No, she doesn’t have a huge circle of friends like Joyce has but I don’t think she’s interested in having a huge circle of friends. I think Sarah is quite happy having a very small circle of people she really cares about, her only challange is making sure that she always clearly communicate to those folks that she cares about them. And Liz is the first time in a while that it has been a serious problem.
All the “boys cheating on Sarah because she’s cold and distant” stuff is not really relevant here because that all happened BEFORE the events of the comic! we don’t know if anything like that would happen to Sarah now because she hasn’t had any romantic relationship during the course of the comic, outside of a brief purely-physical interest in Jacob.
it’s weird that you think the girl trying to justify repeatedly hurting her sister isn’t the asshole in the situation
What? Where do you read that?
Maybe it’s still not great for people to cheat before breaking up.
okay but Liz was still being an asshole here
*smacks own head* Silly me, I completely forgot depending on partner aholeness it is completely justified to cheat on that partner or cheat with your sibling’s partner. How could I not remember something like that.
*glances at how many people in the comments were rooting for Jacob to cheat on Raidah with Joyce*
First time?
There were a lot of people who were just aghast at everyone involved then, too.
Nobody came off looking well.
Raidah didn’t really do anything wrong there.
Raidah didn’t really do anything wrong in those terms, but her mean girl approach to the threat of Joyce didn’t leave her looking well. Classist and manipulative.
Again, one of the things I liked about that scenario and how it subverted rom com tropes. Our protagonist was in the wrong, but it wasn’t because her rival really was a great person and the couple she was trying to break up wasn’t true love, but she didn’t get rewarded for it anyway.
It was wrong then and it’s wrong now
Very few were rooting for them to cheat. A lot were rooting for him to dump Raidah in favor of Joyce.
I agree. I likely think especially given what Liz said that it was Sarah’s abrasive personality and lack of social skill that pushed her boyfriends away. And Liz was wrong but it doesn’t feel like it was malevolent but stupidity and lapse in jusgement the first time and ignorance the second
Oof. Yeah, just because you realize you don’t like your partner’s personality for the longterm doesn’t mean you get a pass to cheat on them before you break up. Yuck. Sarah may not have a bubbly personality, but she still deserves dignity and respect.
I agree but also they are dumb horny kids. And I can see this boy being like shit she’s just as hot as her sister but nicer and she actually seems happy to be around me and when she kissed him he deciding to break it off. We know Liz is a Virgin sp she never slept with them just made pit which while bad and wrong is at least understandable. I get why people aren’t seeing her as malevolent.
Cheating doesn’t have to be sex to be a hurtful act, and there’s not some universal, immutable scale that ranks the levels of hurt caused by each type of infidelity. Sarah had her trust violated, on more than one occasion, by individuals she hoped would treat her with kindness and respect. Liz knowingly contributed to that by making out with who she knew to be her sister’s partner. She didn’t just fall on those lips, and per the context we have so far, she made a choice to proceed with physical intimacy. Her choice was selfish, and the way she’s talking to Sarah about it right now demonstrates no real regret. Even if she’s simply ignorant, the damage she’s contributed to is real and long-lasting for Sarah. I find it especially repugnant that she’s telling Sarah that it’s Sarah’s fault her boyfriends have found Liz more attractive in the past. If isn’t an attempt to shift blame, I don’t know what is.
I dint think it’s about shifting blame I think this is supposed to be a wake up call for Sarah to realize she pushes the people she loves away with her attitude and thatcher uses misanthrope and a bristly antisocial hard shell as a defense mechanism for her awkwardness is not serving her and going to end up with her alone. I think this is where Sarah grows from that and becomes a bit more like Sal so she can build relationships a bit.
Yeah, no. It’s not reasonable to suggest that Sarah having her trust violated is going to translate into Sarah becoming a more warm, open, trusting person. Have you considered that being cheated on likely increased Sarah’s discomfort with emotional vulnerability? Also, I’d like to reiterate that Liz is blaming who Sarah is as a person for her boyfriends cheating on her, instead of taking responsibility for the hurt she caused. Sarah does not control the choices of those around her. Sarah’s boyfriends and Liz all made their own decisions that hurt Sarah. Your comment reads as “Well, Sarah isn’t as nice as I think she should be, so she deserved emotional damage at the hands of those she placed trust in, which should teach her to be a more emotionally available, trusting person”. I have to disagree.
She never slept with only made out sorry spelling
Goodbye, Joe.
At this point, I don’t see how anyone could find Liz even remotely likeable. She’s a bully, she shows no remorse for repeatedly hurting her sister, and repeatedly brags that boys like her more.
And I’m sick of this ‘Liz is being bullied at her school, so that excuses her behavior!’
1) There’s no evidence of that.
2) Bullying is one of the few subjects that this comic hasn’t really tackled in a deep capacity. But, if there was one character who was arguably bullied, it’d be Sarah. She was repeatedly singled out by Raidah, who’d track her down at lunch to remind her that she has no friends, would call her a bongo when she was just minding her own business, and tried to turn multiple friends against her in this harassment campaign.
Honestly, I think the only reason Raidah didn’t report Sarah for punching her wasn’t to save the curve, but because an investigation into their relationship would show her as the repeated offender.
I’ve got the same vibe. It’s really weird that people are jumping over themselves to defend Liz, over Sarah, when Liz self proclaimed here that she did in fact do what she’s accused of, because she’s the ‘smiley’ one.
Is it just because her design is cute? Because so far she hasn’t done much to make me care about her or want her in the main cast. She stole her sisters boyfriends (more than once), and is trying to justify hurting her and justify that Sarah was somehow to blame for Liz making out with the people she was with.
I don’t like her, and I don’t say that lightly.
I imagine part of it is because she’s designed to be attractive. That and also her moments of vulnerability re: Joe.
For me she’s veering into the asshole side, but she’s not quite Roz level yet, which is just insufferable, and she’s still miles ahead of the caricatures like Mary.
Honestly, I find Mary more tolerable specifically because she’s just a caricature and I don’t have to expect anything else out of her. I don’t like her, but her role is clearly defined. Liz is written like I’m supposed to expect more out of her, and everything she gives me is just selfish and unkind.
Riz is insufferable, but mostly well-meaning except at specific points when the ‘crusade!!’ of her takes vicious ascendancy. I fully expect experience and the skills it develops to teach her to aim better and/or sand the edges off. Roz has acted genuinely kindly at times and does good things (volunteers and such) as a regular facet of life, so she seems to be basically a good person who is just very young and full of herself. Also, Roz has never stolen anyone’s boyfriend onscreen or by rumor offscreen, intentionally or not.
Liz, on the other hand, has evidenced pretty much zero good qualities (unless you count ‘cute’) or kindness. She has been willfully cruel to her sister, and doesn’t care when she’s cruel by accident. She put both hands into spinning Joyce up and bounced so she didn’t have to support Joyce in the consequences. And, thinking Joe was Joyce’s ‘friend’ she set about seducing him. (Not difficult in the event: it’s Joe, and HE knows he’s actually single. But that’s not the point.) Liz has at no point actually shown anything but selfishness in my view.
Therefore I can honestly say that I believe it’s not possible for Liz to be as bad as Roz, because Liz is already solidly worse. And I don’t even like Roz.
Though a note with the “spinning Joyce up” part – they were both doing the same thing. Both playing up to what they thought the other was already like. Each escalating, up to completely ludicrous levels.
As for Joe, Joyce had framed her fictional thing with Joe as completely casual “friends with a reward program”, so there’s no reason to blame Liz for going after him on those grounds.
I suspect more than a few people who ended up on Joyce’s side of the Joyce/Becky argument are siding with Liz as well because Liz was on Joyce’s side and Sarah told Joyce she’d done wrong.
Honestly it’s because what she did doesn’t seem malevolent and much like her moment with Joe it feels vulnerable. What she says happened if true doesn’t sound intentional or malevolent but much like her thing with Joe an immature lapse in judgement. Her big sisters boyfriend came to her for help a pretty attractive girl she was nice to him and helped him and defended her sister when he was already clearly thinking it wasn’t working but after spending a little time with her in literally junior high he realized she’s just as hot as her sister but not a crabby awkward asshole who doesn’t smile and has very little social skills she’s friendly and likeable and has a more positive personality he liked her both physically and that she was thr smiley happy sister unlike Sarah who turned out to be off-putting in personality *something she I’d just now getting over and still gets needled about* the second time she didn’t even know her sister was dating the guy and it could be as simple as yeah they think the same kind of men are physically hott. I like Liz well enough and hope this helps Sarah realize her personality needs to improve if she wants relationships. It’s why she had 0 chance with Jacob
That has the be the ****iest and coldest take on cheating I’ve ever heard, Samantha. Congratulations! I am impressed by how callous and cruel this is.
I mean, in my world if I didn’t want to date someone with the personality of a feral cat then I wouldn’t ask them out to begin with. Seems like the easy solution. If you don’t like someone’s personality, DON’T DATE THEM.
“They were an asshole, so I HAD to cheat on them!” is a terrible excuse made by terrible people. If your partner is an jerk, then break up. Period. If you’re not happy, find someone new. Being unhappy with a partner who you don’t find friendly enough is NOT a good excuse to stab them in the back. Certainly not by kissing their baby sister.
Cheating is inexcusable.
I agree her cheating is awful her boyfriend was in the wrong so was Liz But we also know that Sarah at least with Jacob tried to hide it to get him interested. Its not a stretch to think she also did so before. In fact it is more likely. It likely wasn’t until college and getting older and hurt by Raidah that she gave up mostly and “embraced being a bongo” and being misanthropic as a defense mechanism. She tried to be friends before. So the way I see it this boyfriend liked Sarah thought she was hot but then her abrasive personality started showing through as they spent more time together and she wasn’t able to hide it just like with Jacob and he didn’t like who she really was went to her sister to ask like hey did I do something she seems to be so angry so crabby and mean and doesn’t seem to like me anymore and then teenage hormones issues because Liz and Sarah look similar are both implied to be hott and unlike Sarah Liz is actuly good with people and quite pleasant. So I can see it sort of happening and yes being bad it wasn’t implied to be intentional or malevolent.
I am not going to reply to this speculative ramble.
That’s fine but I believe that may be why people aren’t seeing Liz as negatively as they could be.
It sounds like Liz was 12 the first time and that older boy took advantage of her. She managed to keep it to kissing. The other boy didn’t disclose he was Sarah’s boyfriend, and apparently she was just a year or two older. I’m sympathies to a child unable to fend off older, manipulative males.
A close friend of my daughter developed physical sexual characteristics in 6th grade, I saw how the male attention negatively affected her. High schoolers, adult men who knew better tried to flatter her and take advantage of her, got her into huge trouble. They helped her sneak out. She let the attention go to her head and lorded it over her friend group. But she was 12! Obviously 12! and those men damaged a vulnerable child.
Junior High can range from 12-14. Sarah’s less than 2 years older and only one grade ahead and we’ve got no idea how old Christopher was. Possibly older and preying on both of them – not uncommon at that age. Neither of them seem to think about it that way though.
And Liz herself describes it as shoving her tongue down his throat – not in terms of an attack on her. That could be misleading, for any number of reasons of course, but there’s nothing we’ve seen here that makes it seem unwanted by her. Even more so with the second case, with Jimmy.
You’re also mixing up the two cases. She was in junior high for Christopher, who she did know was seeing Sarah, since he was asking her for advice about her. Jimmy was an unspecified time later and she didn’t know then.
That’s *entirely* the boy’s fault in the second case at minimum. Liz had no knowledge of the relationship.
i do find liz very “likable” although that isn’t really a category i use in engaging with fictional characters. but yeah, i empathize with her, i am interested in her story and feelings, i find her fleshed out and human and vulnerable.
i also don’t think cheating is always the moral crime that it seems to be painted as here. Cheating comes in many forms and can be reacted to in different ways. saying that a person cheated because there was a problem with the relationship is an explanation—it’s not necessarily an excuse. It can be a starting point for a frank conversation. (or it can be a deeply hurtful and unforgivable betrayal, i’m not saying that’s not valid too, it’s just not always and necessarily the case).
And teenagers learning to navigate relationships will do shitty things and learn that they hurt people. i find that relatable. i’m not a perfectly moral person now, but i have learned from past mistakes and i think i am better for it.
(btw i also feel the same things for Sarah. She’s a flawed human being, and i empathize with her. Neither sister is absolutely “right”— they are having a conflict that cannot be solved or objectivized by reducing it to a set of ethical statements)
… Comments like this one remind me why I empathize with Sarah so much. She gets it. People suck.
I deeply and truly believe that cheating is always a moral wrong. There’s no excuse for it. You’re deliberately and consciously hurting someone you supposedly care for personal satisfaction. It’s repulsively selfish and cruel.
If you don’t like someone, then break up.
And just for the record: I am not one of those hyper-monogamous people. I’m actually polyamorous. But even though I do believe people can have healthy and happy relationships with multiple people, cheating is not that. Cheating is inherently selfish. Inherently hurtful. Inherently preventable.
It’s actually a bit sad how many people are going ‘but Sarah/Raidah/etc. are mean so it’s okay!’ every time something like this happens in the comic.
Yeah, seriously.
Sarah trying to break Raidah and Jacob up was, in my opinion, her most reprehensible act. Usually her behavior can be put into the category of, ‘Well meaning, but still mean,’ but that was just her being cruel.
I do get her wanting revenge of Raidah, who I do think actively bullied Sarah, but that was not an appropriate way to do it.
Sarah is mean, Liz is ‘cute’ and naive. Therefore, people are siding with her.
I don’t get the people here who don’t see cheating as a moral wrong here.
i can see two reasons for not “getting” someone. One, that person is just not making sense. Maybe they don’t know what they’re talking about and are just being a troll, or maybe they’re out of touch with reality in some troubling way.
Or two, for whatever reason, you are not willing or able to see things from their perspective, if only to end up agreeing to disagree.
…to be fair though i didn’t say there were no moral wrongs here. i’m just explaining how i feel about the characters and today’s strip, and my feelings are not encapsulatable in a simple angry sentiment.
Also and unrelatedly i want to quickly push back on many people’s apparent assumption that Sarah needs to change her attitude if she wants to be datable. I’ve had grumpy, misanthropic people as friends and lovers, and my own calm personality complements and tempers their fiery one, while their drive and energy may help with my usual sloth and indecisiveness.
i want to quickly push back on many people’s apparent assumption that Sarah needs to change her attitude if she wants to be datable
I don’t think this is the problem at all, because Sal is also grumpy and misanthropic and she is currently dating a sandwich-making ukulele lad in a dapper hat, and she did that by trusting that Danny does appreciate her company and isn’t trying to manipulate her, and that she can also openly express herself around him.
That second part is more significant, I think, in that Sal is a grumpy misanthrope who hasn’t stopped being a grumpy misanthrope, she’s just willing to be engage with Danny on his level. Sarah doesn’t really do that for other people all too much. If Joyce wasn’t her roommate, Sarah would be as alone and miserable as she says she wants to be, but very clearly doesn’t.
I think cheating is wrong (and pretty fucked up) but I think the responses Liz are a little extreme. She only did so knowingly one time, and it was as a high schooler, and she actually looks pretty remorseful in yesterday’s comic.
Not saying Sarah has to (or even should) forgive her, but doing something that really sucks to your sibling(s) when you’re a high schooler is pretty normal. My brother and I settled for pretending each other didn’t exist for the most part, but this seems like an ordinary level of betrayal at that age. (I would feel different if they were adults when it happened, or if Liz had planned it out).
She might look pretty remorseful, but I think it’s telling that what she actually says are ‘I’m nicer than you so of course they were going to like me more’ (blame the betrayed person for the betrayal), ‘Chris came to me’ (disclaim responsibility for her own actions), and ‘lol we just have the same taste in men’ (both disclaiming responsibility and blaming Sarah).
If she was even slightly remorseful, I’d expect at least a pretense of apology, or some kind of acknowledgement that her behavior was bad, not the continuing swings through ‘it’s your fault I did that, and it wasn’t wrong of me anyway’ she’s putting out.
I don’t know about that. Sometimes there are good reasons to cheat while staying together. E.G.:
1. You can’t leave your partner because one of you is financially dependent on the other.
2. You can’t leave your partner because one of you depends on the other for daily disability-related care.
3. You can’t leave your partner because of your partner’s fragile physical or emotional health.
4. You can’t leave your partner for legal reasons (e.g. immigration status…)
5. You don’t wish to leave your partner because the two of you have shared kids/pets/dependents who rely on seeing you two together or rely on both of you for daily care.
Now: imagine that marriage or partnership lacks sex/love/intimacy/fulfillment. You and your partner don’t trust or respect each other, don’t have shared interests, don’t enjoy spending time together, constantly bicker, or don’t treat each other kindly.
Now: imagine someone completely outside of your partner’s social circle offers a discreet, infrequent, telephone-only emotional affair. Or even just a platonic dating relationship (e.g. “let’s be theatre buddies!”). You don’t feel you can talk with your partner about your unmet needs and desires because of abuse / fragile health / extreme reactions, etc. You know that your partner will never find out. You also know that “letting off some steam” by dallying with a trusted friend outside your partner’s social circle would help you return to your partnership with more contentment and calm, a more accepting and caring partner. Getting your social and emotional needs met elsewhere will help you appreciate what you DO have in your primary relationship, despite its shortcomings.
Now: is infidelity wrong, in such circumstances?
Not talking about Liz/Sarah. Just talking about the many older folks in sexless or loveless marriages that they cannot find practical ways to leave or do not wish to abandon.
“3. You can’t leave your partner because of your partner’s fragile physical or emotional health.”
For real? You see someone who is already on the brink and decide that stabbing them in the back and shoving them down the cliff is a good idea?
I can feel sympathy for people who cheat in some of those situations, but that’s different from saying it’s not wrong.
“Is infidelity wrong, in such circumstances?”
Uh… YES.
The solution to being in a loveless marriage you can’t leave is not to throw fuel on the fire and be a shitty partner. And, to be perfectly frank, those reasons suck. They’re terrible, selfish, and cruel reasons. It’s not like you’re saying, ‘What if they’re in an abusive relationship and can’t leave because of our shitty legal system and they fear for their life, but fall in love with someone willing to save them.’ Which would actually be a decent excuse, honestly.
For excuses 1, 2, and 4: You realize what you’re saying boils down to, ‘I want to take advantage of my partner for something they’re offering me, like money or disability care or legal status, but also want to hurt them without consequences because the arrangement I agreed to be in as an adult is not fulfilling enough for me. But I also don’t want to take responsibility for taking care of myself, so I’m going to stab the partner who’s taking care of me in the back.
For excuse 3, I point to Eldritchy. You really think that fueling an emotionally ill’s paranoia by betraying their trust is LESS UPSETTING than having an honest conversation??
For excuse 5, sometimes marriages don’t last. The solution isn’t to cheat on your spouse so your kids don’t learn that their parent’s don’t love each other like they used to. The goal is, again, to communicate. Talk to your partner. If the kids are important enough to you both to stay together despite the lack of romantic or sexual attraction, then do it. If it’s not, then it’s better for your family to separate.
If you’re not literally in an abusive situation, then there’s absolutely no excuse for cheating.
The word YOU’RE looking for is polyamory. If you’re in a loveless marriage or need some extra sexual thrill, then consider being polyamorous. It means both partner’s have agreed that they have needs that aren’t being fulfilled but don’t want to leave each other for whatever reason, then you can agree to see other people while staying together. That solves every single problem you listed above and more (Not actual abuse), and all it takes is some communication and an agreeable partner.
Coming back to excuse 5. In this situation it’s not only the partner who is gets hurt but the children as well. How are They going to feel when they learn that their mother/father were betraying the other parent behind their backs?
Oops! Weird! I meant to reply to this thread but it wound up at the bottom. Reposting here:
Reply
Ok, that’s cool. I’m glad to get your opinions. I was just spinning out hypothetical situations, playing devil’s advocate. I’ve heard a lot of justifications on this topic, so it’s good to see how others see that kind of self-convincing. Not as straightforward as it might appear to be. Good to know how others see it. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts.
Your specific example you should look to have friends outside your marriage and if you feel like that is not allowed that is the issue.
I know emotional affairs are a real thing but so is friendship and that can be a blurry line and friendship alone isn’t cheating.
For actual cheating where you at least intentionally nurture romantic or sexual feelings with another person or kiss them or the like.
1.
If you need someone because they block your independance or they hold your dependence over your head you should see do your best to plan an escape route but cheating will likely just give them more ammunition.
If you can’t dump someone because you need someone and its not because of shit they pull and they are not holding it over your head, you proberly owe sexual/romantic fidelity to them at least while you are using them and should still seek a rout to independence.
If someone needs you that doesn’t stop you from dumping them and dumping them does not stop you from helping them. Still depending on the situation it might not hurt to step back and see if they are taking advantage of you.
If you are really that concerned with your partners emotional health, consider if they are abusing you or if its just an excuse not to leave the good parts. If you are really truely that concerned cheating will proberly be worse than just dumping them.
If you need to maintain your relationship for the sake of appearances talk to your partner about what they will agree on and what you both want out of the business transaction. They deserve to know what type of relationship you are in. They deserve a chance to opt out or set there own terms. Cheating can cause problems for these situations that can be worse than dissolving the relationship so talk to your business partner about what risks you are both willing to take in this venture.
> You’re deliberately and consciously hurting someone you supposedly care for personal satisfaction. It’s repulsively selfish and cruel.
It’s not deliberate if you believe your partner will never find out, although it is certainly selfish. A lot of folks cheat for reasons other than “personal satisfaction” as well, a lot of people who do it have some deep seated issues the cheating soothes without actually making them happy. And finally a lot of folks are just scared and confused or don’t think long term at all. It’s something more akin to emotional negligence than deliberate cruelty. Deliberate cruelty, I think, requires you to actively consider the other persons feelings, and many cheaters do not.
“I didn’t intentionally hurt your feelings, honey, I just never considered how this might make you feel.” Is, again, a terrible excuse.
I don’t see why everyone is bending over backwards to justify cheating. Holy shit.
We really aren’t were just more sympathetic that ususally in a lot of cases it isn’t a deliberate act of cruelty. A lot of times it really is a symptom of some other lack and they really just get lost in the moment and it’s wrong but understandable. I’ve never cheated or been cheated on luckily I know it must suck and be agonizing betrayal but it’s not ususally this great evil. Just a wrong action that hurt someone.
I mean, the act itself can be wrong even with understandable circumstance. It’s wrong that this guy cheated on Sarah by macking on her little sister, and also:
– how much responsibility do you have to someone who makes you think they don’t care about you?
– they were like 13 – 15.
I don’t think cheating happens in a vacuum but it’s, innately, a betrayal of an agreed upon relationship and a violation of a trust that someone has placed in you. It’s just a matter of what that betrayal actually means.
I understand what you mean by emotional negligence versus deliberate cruelty, but I think the level of emotional negligence that leads you to cheat on a partner is an example of cruelty itself.
Yes, you still have responsibility towards someone who makes you think they don’t care about you???
You getting it in your head that they don’t care without even bothering to communicate the fact that you feel that way and then blaming and punishing them for your unwillingness to communicate is, um, gross? Standoffish or not, inattentive or not, your partner can’t read minds and it’s your responsibility to communicate your needs and set and enforce your boundaries.
If you’d actually tried to talk about it and your partner made zero effort to listen or try to address it, then you STILL shouldn’t fucking cheat, but should definitely break up. Because that’s the mature and responsible thing to do, and what betraying someone’s trust means, regardless of the circumstance, is that YOU don’t care about other people’s feelings unless it’s personally convenient for you, and that no one should ever trust you, because you’ll decide they don’t deserve your respect the moment they fail to be perfect.
That being said, all of this is completely null and void in this particular circumstance because lol they were like 13-15 and literally didn’t have the mental or emotional capacity to consider ANY of this. They’re not gonna do the mature and responsible thing because they’re children who are inherently impaired in their ability to be mature and responsible.
But yknow. If you become an adult and refuse to acknowledge the ways in which how you acted as a child were immature and irresponsible, and go out of your way to defend your actions, well seems like you’re still immature and irresponsible but don’t have the excuse of being a literal child anymore, so you’re just a shit person.
Not that Liz is an adult yet by any means tbh. Neither is Sarah, really. They’ve still got some leeway, a few more years before they’ve got those fully developed adult brains. Hopefully by then they’ll be able to look back at this whole thing and cringe.
Yes, you still have responsibility towards someone who makes you think they don’t care about you???
I agree in a vacuum (in that you should break things off with a partner who fails to be emotionally fulfilling to you) but I think that’s a circumstance that presumes the person dealing with a partner like that is stable enough to approach the issue the right way. Yeah whatshisname shoulda asked Sarah (if he didn’t, anyway), but like, is it fair that he’s gotta take the emotional responsibility of checking for her?
How do you even ask that question anyway? Do you like me? Did I make you mad? Did I do something wrong? It’s bad enough feeling that with someone you can reasonably trust, what do you do with someone who constantly, repeatedly, enforces into you that they’re always pissed off and don’t care about how you feel?
It’s not in a vacuum, though. And yes! That’s literally what you do, man, you figure out how to have a hard conversation. “Hey, can we please talk, when you say things like x or do y it makes me feel like you don’t care about me.”
It IS your emotional responsibility! To communicate when you have a feeling! Otherwise, if you just sit there and never speak or give any indication you’re unhappy, nobody has any way of knowing that something they are doing is hurtful to you.
It would be ideal, of course, if Sarah (or someone similar to Sarah) voluntarily checked in on how their partner is feeling more, to be certain. That’s general good practice for being a good partner, and not ever doing it at all is quite negligent. But you know what does absolutely nothing to actually fix that? Doing and saying jack nothing about it, not even for your own sake, and then going behind your partner’s back to cheat on them.
Besides, not all relationships and people are the same, so your personal threshold for what FEELS like negligence and what doesn’t is not something anyone but you can know, and needs to be communicated. You could end up feeling uncared for because your partner only asks you how you’re feeling in x circumstance, or only once every two weeks, or they ask but don’t respond how you wish they would, or don’t listen properly, or maybe you’re so insecure that if your partner doesn’t check in with you literally constantly then you’ll just irrationally decide they hate you now.
So you say “It would make me feel better if you tried to ask how I’m feeling more often.” And if their response is “lol wut, naw” then you work up the nerve to tell them that this isn’t working and you don’t want to date them anymore.
None of this is easy. It’s hard. Relationships are really hard, actually! And if you don’t trust your partner enough to communicate with them, then either you need to try and figure out what your partner could do for you to trust them and try to communicate THAT to them, or just break up with them, because trust is literally a requirement and if it’s not there, there’s no relationship. And if you try to think of what your partner could do for you to trust them, and the answer comes up with ‘nothing’, then that’s a You problem. Or, if you have an answer, but the thing you need is something they are either not able or not willing to do, then turns out you’re incompatible and also need to break up.
And wow, the worst possible thing you could ever do in a relationship that’s lacking trust is FURTHER destroy that trust by outright betraying them completely!
Okay are we still talking about middle school children?
Oh no we’re definitely not. None of this counts for middle school children. I read many of your comments as being just general thoughts on how much responsibility people hold to their partners when they feel unfulfilled in a relationship, regardless of age.
But no obviously a 15-year-old isn’t gonna be able to do literally any of this internal work or communication, lol.
Although the fact does remain that choosing not to say anything to your partner about feeling uncared for and then cheating on them still does absolutely nothing to actually fix your problem with your partner, and indicates you either no longer care about fixing the problem, no longer care about your relationship, or your partner’s feelings, or maybe all of the above, and cheating is just a particularly hurtful and cowardly way to carpet-bomb your previous relationship! Regardless of your age!
However, obviously a 15-year-old isn’t gonna know much better, so it’s dumb to expect them to. They’re gonna do the shitty thing, and…HOPEFULLY that ought to be a learning experience that they draw from to do better in the future….or the shitty thing they do is reinforced somehow and they double down and turn into an insufferably immature adult.
Same!! I feel for both of them. I understand Sarah has been hurt and betrayed and is still dealing with it and has struggled with social awkwardness her entire life it seems and inability to express herself positively.
I understand that Liz is just a stupid kid who made mistakes and hurt being a stupid kid with poor judgement and is clearly struggling with her sexuality.
Basically. I can like Liz without needing to decide she was somehow in the right or that it was all Sarah’s fault.
you know what i don’t “get” to use Rabbit’s phrase?
people reading such an emotionally nuanced and deeply empathetic story who are still entirely committed to a strictly moral view of human actions (and/or of characters). Like, how are you enjoying this comic? Are we even reading the same comic?
(this is clearly me not being able to put myself in these commenters’ shoes.)
Look, there are rules around here. In any given conflict, you have to pick the hero and the villain and excuse everything one does and paint everything the other does in the worst possible light. Even if you make excuses for them in a different conflict.
I can’t help it. It’s just how the rules work. It’s always been that way.
yeah. the villain is a terrible human but in a layered and subtle way. but still basically evil. well no we’re atheists, we don’t call people evil, we just call them toxic, or we just so happen to find them humaning unsatisfactorily every chance they get. motivations are now incidental, now distasteful. intentions are irrelevant. some flaws may be tolerated but others are the mark of the devil.
ok i’m getting misanthropic myself. buried a friend today. i can’t access my feelings at present but maybe it turns out i want to smash something.
Oh, milu, I’m so sorry you buried a friend! That is so hard.
We’re here and listening, for what it’s worth, as frustrating and infuriating as we all may be.
I hope you find some way to access those feelings and find a way to channel them.
Take good care.
ey, thank you so much Laura. I was especially exhausted by the day yesterday which had been really long and emotional. i think i’m coping okay on the whole. thank you again you’re so kind.
I feel bad for Liz. She’s been mean and selfish but it seems obvious she’s covering up some deep rooted issues, and we’ve seen the facade crack a few times. I don’t think I’d enjoy her company, but she’s interesting to read about and I do sympathize a bit.
Also, don’t agree about the Raidah thing. Assault is a legit crime and Sarah could have gotten in serious trouble, whereas Raidah probably wouldn’t have even cared that people knew she had beef with Sarah
That’s pretty much how I feel about Liz- I respect that she’s a person who has baggage and issues to work on, but man, if it were real life I would not subject myself to her company. She’s just not nice, at least as we’re seeing her, and I really don’t like how she’s treating the people around her. That being said, it does seem to come from a place of feeling a need to escape expectations but feeling incredibly stuck as well.
Because she’s just some kid fucking up left and right? That’s the point of all these characters though. Apart from the people actually attempting murders/rapes/kidnappings and so forth, they’re all just kids on the other side of getting it right. We’re rooting for them to make that growth.
Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, you’re not being efficient here! Drop Liz off at her college FIRST, then go back and murder Joe. This way you’ll be able to take your time and enjoy it more!
Driver: “I don’t get paid enough for this. . .”
Zangeif: You got…. paid?
Yes, but it was with Bison Dollars, so it’s not like it counts.
Proof Sarah and Joe need to get together!
Sarah, things in order. You can still murder Joe once you get back AFTER bringing her to school
At least she doesn’t know about Jacob. Yet.
I have a spray bottle, and I’m not afraid to use it on both of you!
How much for your Deluge Premium Sprayer?
i suppose that’s a typo but arguably it makes for an even better brand name =D
Ok whats Sarah problem? She know Joe enough to know that he dont “trick” women to bed, so sudenly big Sister syndrome?
In fairness, she did EXPLICITLY ask Joe to not sleep with Liz because Liz is still emotionally juvenile and not ready for the consequences of what she thinks she wants.
Like, Sarah might be a jerk, but she tends to understand people quite well. She knows her sister thinks she’s made some huge intellectual breakthrough, but still doesn’t understand what she’s talking about or what she’s getting into. This is a girl who took multivitamins thinking that they were “weed drugs”. She isn’t emotionally mature enough for a casual sexual relationship with an older man.
Sarah shows love through pragmatism and tough love. You might not like what she’s doing, but she does what she thinks is best even if the other person doesn’t like her for it.
Joe is older than Liz?
Hrm… For some reason I thought Liz was younger than the rest of the cast, but I suppose they’re all freshmen except for Sarah. My mistake!
More experienced though, certainly.
Lmao, I would not call what Sarah did ‘Asking”
For Sarah, that was asking. 😛 It was downright polite.
I mean Sarah did explicity warn specifically Joe to not touch her little sister, so I think it makes sense for her to be upset about this here
Liz and Joe are adults and Sarah is only a year or two older. She has no right to tell ANYONE who they can be with. The reason people are defending Liz is that Sarah is an asshole to people. And there’s no evidence of her “stealing” Sarah’s boyfriends, only that they chose to go to Liz instead. Stealing implies intent. Still a dick move, but it does change a lot.
1) Sarah knows her sister and was warning Joe not to sleep with her because she knew Liz wasn’t ready for a casual sexual relationship. And guess what? She was RIGHT.
Joe is a good man for not pushing Liz, but he let his second head do the thinking in regards to sleeping with a woman who was clearly not ready for that kind of casual hook-up.
Emotional maturity matters.
2) What are you talking about? Did you miss the last two or three strips? Liz openly confesses that she knew Christopher was Sarah’s boyfriend but decided to play house with him behind her sister’s back and ultimately kissed him in under a half a week.
Whether she intended to do so from the start is irrelevant.
Emotional maturity matters but that’s NOT Sarah’s decision. Liz and Joe solved that themselves like reasonable young adults. They made out, they snuggled, it didn’t work out. Sarah is not her sister’s keeper. Also Liz made a move on JOE. So what, you can’t even agree to sexy time even if the other party asks, you’re both the same age and you’re just feeling things out?
Seems kinda shitty.
Yeah like, the only reasonable objection Sarah can have is “I told you not to,” and that’s only reasonable in the sense that it might give Sarah the impression that Joe did it to annoy her.
I know it’s folksy and charming, but older siblings don’t actually have any say over who’s allowed on your genitals.
It occurs to me, though, that Sarah doesn’t have the same friendship with Joe that Joyce has. She certainly doesn’t have the same relationship with him that we, the audience, do. She knows him as the creep who created a sex tape within a few days in college (She does NOT know it was leaked without his consent), who continued to try to hit on and sleep with every girl in his vicinity, and created a SUPER CREEPY hit-list where he scored every girl’s fuckability.
Of course she wouldn’t want that kind of man to get involved with her sheltered little sister who doesn’t know the difference between multivitamins and “weed drugs”.
Sarah has every reason to see Joe as a one-note sleezeball who would take advantage of her sister’s desire to be a big girl now. And while she doesn’t have control over Liz’ genitals, she does have reason to be worried that Joe could hurt her, ruin her reputation, etc.
Oh, I just realized who this is. I don’t actually want to have a conversation with you. Disregard.
Roz’s sex tape was not ‘leaked’ without his consent, Joe gave his full and enthusiastic approval. I don’t know why people keep needing to have this pointed out.
Joe gave his full and enthusiastic approval to make a sex tape and have it uploaded. He did NOT know that she was a senator’s sister and that it’d end up as national news.
I don’t know why you don’t understand that people need the full context of a situation in order to give informed consent.
But Sarah doesn’t know how it played out. She asked Joe not to mess with her little sister and now Liz hints that he did. She doesn’t know that Liz propositioned him out of the blue. From Joe’s past behavior and the image he goes to great lengths to present, it’s perfectly reasonable to assume he went after her.
And Liz will likely assume she’s upset because Sarah did have a thing with Joe, since that’s what she asked about.
Joe is miles away and Liz is right there, Sarah, just sayin’ : D
.. you know, Sarah having personally experienced this several times puts the scheme she cooked up for Joyce in a new light.
“It worked so easily whenever Liz did it!”
Doubly so because as her honorary little sister, she clearly saw that Joyce was interested in the same guy she was, and likely feared the inevitable return of the pattern she’d experienced with her real little sister.
Ohhhh, she did it TWICE, and one of those times was on purpose. Gross!
Ohhh this makes me want to go back and re-read the Jacob arc because I feel like this puts it in a whole new light. I don’t remember exactly but at the time I think my impression was Sarah backed off because she realized Jacob wanted something serious and she wanted something casual. But I wonder if that’s just what she told Joyce. And really she backed off and pushed Joyce towards him because she foresaw that as inevitable (Jacob losing interest in Sarah and him and Joyce hooking up) with Joyce in this sort of “surrogate little sister” role. So maybe Sarah figured it was better to just fast forward past the damage and hurt feelings she felt were coming based on her history, to try to protect her relationship with Joyce from crumbling the same way her relationship with Liz did?
That seems to be the read some others are getting. I’m not entirely sure that’s where it’s going. There’s a lot more going on here than we know, we’re just getting the slow drip of information. However, the way Liz is defending what Sarah obviously sees as betrayal of trust, and in at least a few ways is, is particularly off-putting to me and makes Liz a particularly distasteful character at this point.
I think this is going to be where Sarah fully develops out of her abrasive personality and her misanthropic Bongo attitude she has as a defense mechanism. From what Liz is saying it was more that Sarah pushed her boyfriends away making them swek others. Liz still did wrong but it was an already am issue in the relationships I bet just like with Jacob.
The fact Sarah only wants a casual thing could also be specifically because she just expects bubbly people around her will swoop in to steal her partners and she’s given up on actually being able to have a long-term partner that at the very least, respects her enough to break up with her instead of cheating.
She gave up pursuing Jacob early on because she only wanted a casual thing and he wanted more serious. Then she went back after him because she wasn’t going to let Raidah have him.
I don’t think the casual part really came up again. Her motivation was breaking them up, not really getting him herself. It moved almost immediately into using Joyce to do that, with little attempt on her part to attract him, even if that was what Joyce thought she was doing.
Sorry Liz but you are going into the trash person bin.
Wow, now I’m convinced Liz is not that nice person I thought on the first time I saw her.
But I still got mixed feelings. Her upbringing in a christian environment, trying to be herself while hiding it from everyone.
Her obviously beauty and charm, that attracted the Sarah’s assholes boyfriends (really, people? Nobody will put the falt on the boys?) .
Courage to finally have sex with a hot boy, and still have a massive conflict between her new life and the past christian liike she had?
I don’t know, I still don’t see Luz like a villian. But not problem if everybody see her like that. Great villains make great histories
We’re focusing on Liz and Sarah because they’re here, real characters and in conflict. The boys are obviously jerks. Not much needs to be said about that.
Liz, no!
Sarah, you’re being played! Turning back around is exactly what Liz wants!
There’s a pretty good chance Liz only brought this up because she knew implying she’d slept with Joe might get you to go back immediately.
Joe will be killed is some orribile way. But now I wonder if Sarah is attracted by him even a bit or not. She and evil Liz really seem to share the same taste in boys.
Sarah was into Jacob who was quite buff and so is Joe.
There’s no issue with Joe’s body, it’s the personality that turns Sarah off.
Can’t take out from my head the image of Sarah in a yellow tracksuit wielding a baseball bat.
“Kill Joe, Vol.1”
Throw Joe under the bus even though y’all never got that far?
Bold move, Liz.
yeah that’s really fuckin’ ugly.
Trying to word this correctly, here goes nothing.
I’ve never been cheated on so it’s hard for me to really get it as anything other than “it’s bad, and you don’t deserve to go through it.” With Sarah here I understand those feelings, but the context of these last two strips makes me feel like this is more of an examination of her longstanding inability to meaningfully connect with people and then thinking they’re the problem.
Sarah was dating a guy who thought she was going to dump him, and that Liz’s suggestion was that he just needed to ignore how she acts and talks because she really cares deep down. I feel like Liz doing something stupid and impulsive just gave Sarah an opportunity to avoid thinking about the fact that she doesn’t emotionally give back to the people in her life.
To be clear, and I think it’s important I be clear because it’s a tumultuous subject; no obviously Sarah does not deserve to be cheated because she doesn’t smile enough, I dunno if I’m coming off as such but the fact is that I should be elaborating if I’m talking about this, but I don’t think this is meant to be as simple as “cheating is bad,” it is bad, but it was something engaged in by middle school children and I think it’s more relevant as something Sarah cratered because she can’t just tell people she cares about them, and that she expects them to just innately know she does.
There’s these three strips I’ve been thinking about lately wrt Sarah, and I want to talk about them a bit:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/02-look-straight-ahead/agoodbye/
Here’s Sarah grousing about how no one said goodbye to her and that she didn’t want them to anyway. Then Joyce does this and Sarah just kind of deflects.
Sarah’s not actually antisocial, Sarah’s just heavily introverted. She cares like crazy, but caring a whole lot leads to things like chasing after Joyce with a bat and having her freshman year defined by losing all her friends trying to help Dana.
But I think being with someone like Joyce leads to Sarah to use her as an emotional battery. Joyce will bulldoze into her life and Sarah’s fine with that, but if Joyce needs Sarah for anything other than a crisis, Sarah doesn’t know how to give back, or thinks she has to.
The other two are these ones:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/01-sister-christian/aticking/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/05-saturdays-all-right-for-slighting/gesture/
And here’s what I think is Joyce not so subtly implying that viewing Sarah as someone to admire is something she’s not doing as much anymore, and waaaay back in 2012 here’s Joyce saying that she can’t really trust that Sarah likes her if Sarah can only show it in a crisis.
I do think that’s where things are leading again. Sarah’s got someone who loves her, and Sarah’s unable to give back. Worse, even, for Joyce, because now Sarah’s actively reveling in her misery and telling her to her face that she deserves to be fired for her hubris and that Joyce now is worse than the fundie idiot who’d snap and suck a billion dicks.
Sarah is a bleeding heart for people she cares about, but I think it’s a fairly overt subtext that she expects them to pick up the slack for her.
I would like to briefly rebutt to at least part of this, because tbh the rest is spot on imho–that it genuinely seems, at least from things here, that Sarah is more bothered by the fact that her sister betrayed her and decided to take advantage of the situation for her own benefit, rather than just that Christopher cheated on her. I agree that the situation with Christopher and probably a lot of her boyfriends may well have been due to her issues, but all we’ve really seen in response to her past romantic failures is her further pushing people away, not necessarily deciding that everything was all her ex’s fault and she’s blameless. More of a “I have no clue how to not make this keep happening, or can’t muster up the will to try, so I’m just going to not bother anymore and dating isn’t for me.”
I.e. I don’t think there’s enough here to definitively say that Sarah genuinely thinks that her ex’s are 100% the problem, not her–though maybe you weren’t necessarily saying that. It seems she’s at least partially decided that Liz is the problem instead, though. Which, like, yeah, is also deflection, but also she’s probably not totally wrong either, based on what I’m reading? Like, people are like “surely Liz couldn’t have known and it wasn’t her fault”, but then she literally directly afterwards insinuates that she very much would have tried to pursue Joe further if JUST because Sarah may have liked him at some point. Which like, maybe you could also read it as a genuine bit of curiosity to follow up on ‘we have the same interest in guys maybe, wouldn’t it be funny if you also tried to bang Joe like I happened to’, but tbh I also wouldn’t blame Sarah too hard for interpreting that the way I did if this is a pattern of behavior that extends further than the two incidents we’ve gotten a bit of info on.
Liz also does literally the exact same thing as Sarah, what with the deflecting blame and making everyone else but her the problem, and all of her problems are now everyone else’s too. Which I just think is interesting.
I don’t think there’s enough here to definitively say that Sarah genuinely thinks that her ex’s are 100% the problem, not her–though maybe you weren’t necessarily saying that. I
Not specifically with her boyfriends, so much as I think Sarah is a person who says “I hate people” and when someone else connects with her I think Sarah continues as is, secure in the knowledge that this friend of hers doesn’t need her to say that she cares. She was like this with Jacob, even, where he eventually gave up on trying to be friends with her because she can’t emotionally engage with people of her own volition, she needs someone to make all the effort, and Joyce is a fussy busybody who loves meddling with other peoples’ problems if she can convince herself it’s sufficient romcom shenanigans.
I think part of this was always there if these last two strips are any indication, but I think a major part of it is the fear of it exploding in her face like Dana did. The flashback to that showed that Sarah was genuinely bonding with her and her friends but come the drama bomb they all abandoned her thinking she had betrayed Dana. Sarah did what was best (I’ve been pushing the “Dana didn’t get better” theory a lot but the fact of the matter is that Sarah was in a no-win scenario) and then suffered for it, and I kinda think she’s expecting that other shoe to drop; even when Joe called her out on manipulating Joyce and Jacob, Sarah joked(?) that it’d meant she’d get out of going to the wedding.
TLDR: I think of Sarah as someone who doesn’t consider her own need to be emotionally available to her friends, because she thinks that anyone who is friends with her already knows what she’s about.
Liz also does literally the exact same thing as Sarah, what with the deflecting blame and making everyone else but her the problem
I don’t think this is the case for Liz in that her problems (her friends at Ball State, her fear of sex as something that would ruin her forever, still pretending to be a Christian) aren’t drawn from herself, but in how outside factors have defined these problems for her and will resent her if she steps out of it, but then that’s because I think the subtext of Liz is that she’s Other Joyce and going through the same kind of struggle where the people around her need her to exist in a specific little box.
I’ve been pushing that but there’s gotta be some differences in there. Liz probably doesn’t have a Becky to think about, unless her stepmom is the Becky in this scenario.
I mean Liz’s problem technically stems from outside factors, but the reality is that it’s still her problem. She doesn’t even know for sure how people will respond to her changing how she behaves, the problem here IS internal, and it is her fear. And she’s decided to make that fear someone else’s problem to cater to, by avoiding her problem and relying on Sarah to enable her continued avoidance and let her stay at IU. And when Sarah doesn’t, well it’s because Sarah is just jealous and is trying to get revenge and it’s all HER fault! And also all of the things that Sarah is jealous and angry about aren’t Liz’s fault either, either there’s no fault to be had anywhere and Sarah’s just being unreasonable, or it’s definitely Sarah’s fault because she’s not smiley enough.
Like Liz literally has done basically nothing but deflect any and all sense of blame or personal responsibility for basically everything, for every moment she’s been on-screen. Like look back, there is not a single strip the entire time she’s been in the comic where she tries to take basically any personal responsibility for…anything. Being responsible doesn’t exist! Attempting to like, consider consequences or other people’s feelings is just being a killjoy. There are only whims to follow and no consequences, and she can say and do whatever she wants and it’s fine so long as she’s chill and friendly and nice! And if anything bad has ever happened, it’s not HER fault, ever!
Everything down to the way she talks about even the smallest things is careful to never frame herself as having done anything wrong, even slightly, or for her to have even had the possibility of doing something wrong, because she has zero responsibility. The closest she has gotten is actually admitting to ‘sticking her tongue down Christopher’s throat’, qualified by yet another deflection of any blame or responsibility for that either, because ‘thats forever in junior high time’.
Might put this in a weird way, bear with me, and if anything I says doesn’t sound right please let me know and I’ll try to elaborate some.
The way I’m seeing it, Liz’s problems are from an outside source in the sense that we know how she feels about the people around her. It is technically true that she could be wrong or be misunderstanding them, but with the heavy parallels drawn with Joyce who is going through the exact same struggle I find this unlikely. More broadly, I think it’d be weird for Liz to be in the series for six months now, returns to BSU, and it turns out everything’s fine, she overreacted, and Sarah was completely correct to just drag her back.
I think Sarah’s struggles are internal in the sense that, the way I see it, her story is more about how she acts and less about where it’s from, whereas Liz’s stuff has been snaking in the “why it’s happening and where she’s from.” It’s not nearly as binary as I may be making it sound, Sarah’s history still matters for why she’s like this now, but I think with Sarah it matters more how she is than why she is. Joe, for example, drew a lot of from his parents’ divorce`, but since becoming more of a main character in the last five years he’s been more about changing himself from the person he’s been, if that makes sense.
To get a bit meta, unless Liz is joining the main cast like Becky did, I think she’s here mostly to explore Sarah (the chapter is called Trial & Sarah, after all), and so far since the Faith-Off Sarah’s only showings have been:
– Being a dickbag to Joyce.
– This thing now with Liz, where she threw her into a car and dragged her back. The furthest she’s gotten is asking if Liz doesn’t want to be seen not going to church, and when Liz vented some of those feelings, Sarah called her a fraud.
I don’t think Liz matters as a character so much as she’s here to bounce off of Sarah and examine her character foibles. Even this conversation, for example, matters to me more as “what it means to Sarah” because Liz isn’t going to really matter in three or four months, and I view this as an exploration of Sarah’s negative qualities, and more specifically, her inability to be emotionally empathetic outside of a crisis, because we’ve got her other little sister going through a crisis motivated by her friends who used to laugh at her for being a Jesus Freak now getting mad at her for stepping out of that box.
That’s definitely how this has been reading to me, at any rate! It’s not necessarily that Liz is just a totebag for Sarah to carry around that’ll give her some character development so much as I think Liz’s place in the story is meant more to impact the regular cast members like Joe, Sarah and Joyce.
Oh that’s definitely all true. I agree for the most part, I think, but I still believe it’s probably got a bit more going on in terms of also showing some of the reasons why Sarah behaves the way she does, which involves a lot of different things from her past, Liz and how Liz is also kind of a shitty younger sibling who is happy to further pigeonhole Sarah into the “grumpy one” box, maybe even so she specifically can take things from Sarah for her own benefit by virtue of being “the nice one”.
Also, regardless of how the people on Liz’s campus react to her coming out as atheist, Sarah really isn’t obligated to let Liz crash with her, and forcing her to go back is a neutral action that just actually forces Liz to take responsibility for her own problems. She can show back up on campus and choose to keep pretending, choose to come out fully, choose to cut off all of her old friends and make new ones, or hell even choose to run off again if she wants. But it’s still Liz’s problem and Liz’s choice to make, and she doesn’t get to foist this onto Sarah and make Sarah the one who has to make decisions for Liz on Liz’s behalf just because Liz doesn’t want to.
That being said. Sarah really ought to like. Ask Liz more what’s up and be more thoughtful, as Liz’s sister, just to be supportive and show she cares about her, and she can do that without literally letting Liz crash in her dorm at IU. Set boundaries and stuff. And her inability and/or unwillingess to do that is definitely a character flaw.
But to be fair to Sarah, jesus christ does Liz probably make any of that either impossible or insanely frustrating to try and do, and then immediately goes on immature rants about how she hates Sarah and how Sarah is just jealous and bla bla bla bla. I get not wanting to deal with any of that, and just get this whole fiasco over with, because being forced to be the mature one for someone who is generally resistant is a shitty position to be in, and probably one that Sarah maybe gets put in quite a bit and is sick of. (Yknow, like, with the Dana situation.)
Okay but that’s kinda what I’m getting at.
Liz approached Sarah in what is a pretty obviously desperate cry for help, she probably does not literally believe she can just crash in her dorm and smoke pot all the time, and then Sarah called her a fraud, tackled her, and dragged her back to BSU because Sarah decided the problem is getting solved right now.
Sarah can either not care and not be involved, or care and be involved. She can’t decide for herself that she knows better than Liz when she doesn’t even recognize Liz’s struggles as real. She immediately signaled herself as someone who doesn’t care why it’s happening, she just wants the problem to stop making noise.
Joyce introduced Joe to Liz as her best friend who she had hooked up with several times, and Liz’s response to that was to double back to his place later to try and sleep with him.
Somehow I don’t think Sarah is at fault for more than one of her boyfriends cheating on her with Liz. Regardless of Sarah’s emotional (un)availability, Liz has an established pattern of behavior here.
Joe and Joyce are friends with reward programs. They aren’t dating, Liz just wanted to see his chest hair, that goes all the way down to his feet.
Spencer, is that Taskmaster with a lil Black Ant on his shoulder?
It is Taskmaster with a lil Black Ant on his shoulder!
It’s an edit of a pic by Kamy2425 on twitter.
I love it! Thanks for the artist’s name.
Joyce presented it as a casual thing, meaning there should be no problem.
Joyce presented it as hooking up with her BEST FRIEND. It says a lot that Liz didn’t bother or care to ask Joyce if it would be weird for her or if it might trample any unspoken feelings. It’s not like Liz has earned the benefit of the doubt, either.
There are three cases that we’ve seen or heard described now where Liz pursued someone in a relationship with her friends or family. That’s a pattern.
You’re allowed to fuck other people’s best friends without their say-so.
if it might trample any unspoken feelings.
Joyce presented herself as friends with a rewards program with Joe, and also both she and Liz were pretending to be cool worldly badasses who have awesome sex with hot boys while doing weed drugs.
Like specifically, FwB means “we do not fuck exclusively.”
If you have no regard for the feelings of those in your life, then yes, you can hook up with any consenting adult you want without regard for the consequences. You can hook up with a sibling’s best friend, a parent’s best friend, a child’s best friend, the best friend of someone close to you who is romantically/sexually involved… You can hook up with two of your sister’s boyfriends… It’s allowed, in the strictest sense. Nothing to stop you but your own sense of right and wrong. It could cause emotional pain to others in your life, but it’s allowed.
On the other hand, people are free to regard that behavior as selfish at best or malicious at worst, especially if it’s part of an established pattern, like it is with Liz.
Okay but that’s not ‘no regard’ it’s a regard for what has been stated.
You’re asking Liz to consider feelings that are directly inverted to what Joyce has stated to her.
I should add: I don’t think Liz is malicious, but she comes across as pretty selfish in her pursuit of chest hair that goes down to the ankles. You’d think that someone who hurt her sister twice by hooking up with her boyfriends would err on the side of caution with other hookups that are friend/family-adjacent, but Liz seems like an impulsive little PG-13 hedonist, and I say that with affection for the character. She’s an enjoyable source of drama for me so far.
Calling her a hedonist because she wanted to sleep with a guy that is so open to casual hookups he filmed himself banging Roz in the first week of college is wack.
There’s nothing to be cautious about, Joyce didn’t sign her name on Joe’s ass, she explicitly said that they were friends with benefits. Even if Joyce has a thing for him (a distinct possibility), on what grounds is she allowed to object to that guy she knows sleeping with that girl she knows?
I’m calling Liz a PG-13 hedonist because she came to indulge in a (relatively safe) sinful bender. She wanted to swear, take weed drugs, and have sex. To “experience everything,” in her own words.
Joyce explicitly said that she and Joe were best friends and “friends with rewards,” haha. Liz didn’t care enough to ask if the latter and the former were entangled or if there was more to this, she just tried to hook up, regardless of whether or not Joyce cares. That’s what makes it selfish. Liz wants, Liz pursues. End of story.
Liz impulsively engages guys who are romantically or sexually involved with her family and friends. She’s done it three times that we know of. That’s a pattern. Whether it’s ultimately harmless or has emotional blowback for those in her life, that’s another matter.
Caring about Joyce’s feelings about Joe are irrelevant because Joyce said they were Friends With Reward Programs, as in you don’t need to know if “there”s more to this” because that means “we’re friends and we fuck.”
I’ve seen you write essays in these comments dissecting character motivations and subtext, so I know you’re capable of a more nuanced reading of this social interaction. If you’d prefer to ignore all context outside of a surface level reading of that one line, I’ll leave you to it.
Your view on this social interaction is absurd and presumes a level where you need permission from an entirely separate person before you’re allowed to pursue someone they have explicitly told you they are not exclusively seeing.
The nuance you’re looking for is “well what if Joyce would get upset” and there’s no nuance there because A. they ain’t dating and B. even if Joyce got upset, she still doesn’t get to control who boffs Joe. She got cranky about Malaya doing it and she still had no say there.
If you think that best friends who are also hooking up casually have no chance of having another layer to their friendship and and overall relationship that could be affected by one of them sleeping with a friend of the other’s, then sure. Turn off your brain. You’ve figured it all out. No need to inquire further. As we learned with Dina and Joe earlier, people always say exactly what they mean.
For fuck’s sake, if Joyce was gonna have a problem with Liz fucking Joe, she would have said as much. She’s never been remotely shy about fuck-shaming people or advising against a shag. Fuck Joyce’s imaginary hypothetical speculative feelings about Liz maybe fucking Joe, she isn’t a factor in this equation at all. There is absolutely no moral quandary around that specific interaction, and it’s fucking creepy how personally people are taking this goddamn scenario.
For the record, I was using Liz’s interactions with Joyce/Joe in support of my observation that Liz appears to have a pattern of her interest in boys trumping any cares about whether her actions could hurt others. That was the crux of my comment that has you all riled up: That I don’t think it’s Sarah’s fault that Liz kissed her boyfriends. Sorry if that offends you, I guess?
I don’t think this is difficult to understand: I’m not worried about Joyce’s actual feelings about Joe/Liz. We know the truth about Joyce and Joe (not best friends, not hooking up). Liz does not know this; she thinks that Joyce and Joe are best friends who hook up. She does not care to ask Joyce whether being best friends and fuck buddies means that there’s something more there. What she chooses to do with that info is to pointedly tell everyone that she is leaving and sneak back to Joe’s room to try to hook up herself.
This isn’t some sweeping moral judgement, it’s just my take on Liz’s priorities. Liz is an enjoyable foil for Joyce and Sarah. I think her presence in the story has pushed some of the character dynamics in very interesting directions.
It’s perfectly OK if you interpret Liz’s interactions and characterization differently than me, but I’d appreciate you not coming at me with hostility and projecting your own weird baggage onto me, though. You jumped into my replies here unprompted just to cuss at me repeatedly, call me creepy, and tell me that I’m taking this personally. It sounds like you have some feelings to sort out.
“Like specifically, FwB means ‘we do not fuck exclusively.’”
No.
It does not.
The phrase “Friends with Benefits” denotes an emotional relationship that is less romantically or emotionally intense than the stereotypical coupling. It is not a synonym for “open relationship”. The two often overlap, but they are not the same thing; romantic intensity is not the same thing as exclusivity, and it is as possible for two people to be in an exclusive FwB pairing as it is for them to be a romantically intense non-exclusive couple.
Friends with Benefits don’t always fuck other people. Hearing that phrase is not a guarantee of non-exclusivity, and as a matter of ethics and morals, you should not assume that it is—you should get clarification and consent before you stick your junk into the middle of someone else’s partnership. You are free to have whatever opinions about fictional characters you like like, but—this? I don’t care how much you dislike Sarah—this is not up for debate.
I kinda feel “we’re friends that fuck exclusively” is just dating at that point. It’s “not a synonym for an open relationship” in the sense that it just means you aren’t in one.
But, sure, I can buy that. It’s a term I’ve pretty much only heard in that regard, but that doesn’t mean other uses of it don’t exist. It’s still nonsensical to call it “someone else’s partnership” when it’s not being defined as a partnership. And if it is then that feels like something that’s really easy to communicate about if the situation arises, like, say, if you define a relationship with a term that typically means a non-exclusive relationship.
(y’know, in a circumstance that was not Joyce and Liz pretending they were worldly sex-having adults)
. You are free to have whatever opinions about fictional characters you like like, but—this? I don’t care how much you dislike Sarah
I don’t know what it means to dislike a fictional character to such a degree that it influences my feelings on them as if they were actual people, but I’m slowly coming to grips with the fact that the entire universe is crazy except for me on this.
nonsensical to call it “someone else’s partnership” when it’s not being defined as a partnership
I mean—fair! (honestly that specific choice of words was less a reflection of strong feelings and more a reflection of the shitty thesaurus that lives in my head shouting “you can’t just write ‘relationship’ AGAIN, stupid”). But the broader point stands—partnership or friendship or relationship or however you want to define it, “Friends with Benefits” does not guarantee an open relationship, and if you assume that it does and fuck accordingly you’re being pretty damn careless with other people’s emotions, partnership or no. (Obviously that’s not the end of the story when it comes to the specific case of Liz—not least because Liz didn’t go through with anything and Joe and Joyce weren’t actually a thing to begin with—but that’s a whole different bundle of cans.)
I don’t really agree with this insofar that if I was introduced to someone as “this is my boyfriend” I wouldn’t leap to thinking of it being open as a possibility because open relationships are a thing. “X’s Boyfriend” kinda innately speaks to me as “exclusive unless otherwise noted” and I suppose with what you’re laying out, it’s the other way around for me regarding FwB: not exclusive except otherwise noted, in that I don’t think of FwB as “A Romantic Relationship” in the sense that there’s exclusivity involved at all.
There can be, mind you, but I don’t think the expectation of “there’s no relationship to rile up” is unfounded, I think that just means someone using that term can then communicate “we’re FwB but just with each other.”
Or tldr: I think communication here is more important than conflict avoidance.
I warned you Joe! Time to die!
(no, don’t be that person Sarah)
This still doesn’t make me think Liz is the horrible monster that so many people in these comments are making her out to be. It doesn’t sound Liz has been intentionally and maliciously “stealing” Sarah’s boyfriends to me. Making dumb mistakes as a kid, yes. But she couldn’t know Sarah was dating Jimmy Wilson if Sarah didn’t tell her. And Sarah had no right to stop Liz from sleeping with Joe, though Sarah doesn’t know yet that Liz stopped it before anything actually happened anyway.
I don’t know about “horrible monster”, but it says a lot to me about where Liz is as a person that the revelation that she didn’t know about Jimmy Wilson because Sarah didn’t want Liz to steal him, after that was very much a thing that she did does not give her the slightest bit of pause. The way that she’s interacting with Sarah in terms of and in the context of all of these happenings says a lot about her, none of it particularly good.
She doesn’t seem to care that she has genuinely hurt Sarah, and is taking the opportunity to further needle her. And “as a kid” holds a lot less weight when the person who did the hurting seems to not be the slightest bit remorseful. That does not foster an environment of forgiveness. And dumb mistakes can still be incredibly hurtful. Let’s not minimize that.
Okay but Liz’s dumb mistake was kissing a boy in middle school that thought Sarah hated him. And then because of that, she kissed a boy that she did not know Sarah was dating.
How long do you have to apologize for shit you did when you were 13? Like, even beyond the context of “this guy was unconvinced Sarah liked him” and “kissed a guy who Sarah refused to divulge she was dating.”
Let’s start with ever. By all indications Liz has shown zero remorse about any of this at all.
Honestly she doesn’t seen particularly pressed by it she sees it as a stupid thing she did and is pointing put that it was most likely Sarah’s personality that pushed them away. I think people are missing the point of this arc a little bit. Yes Liz made mistakes but Darah also has some fault.
Here’s the thing, neither Sarah nor Liz seem to have changed much since that encounter. Sarah is still difficult to get along with and doesn’t show affection easily, and Liz still makes excuses for her behavior and winds Sarah up rather than try to be a compassionate sister.
But people are MORE WILLING to throw blame on Sarah, and LESS WILLING to hold Liz accountable for her behavior.
Even though we’ve repeatedly seen that Liz doesn’t give a half a damn about anyone else’s feelings, because she does it with a smile then all is forgiven. She can mock the fact that “men like her more” right in front of the sister who she stole multiple men from, but she was a child when that happened and Sarah’s mean so who cares? She can call all Christians stupid and then refuse to apologize to the stranger she hurt, but she has a complicated history with religion so we can’t expect her to show empathy. She returns to the boyfriend conversation and immediately starts making excuses and refuse to apologize, but why should she be expected to apologize for something that happened soooOOOoooOoo long ago?
It’s like people hate Sarah, and therefore Liz is right by default.
Huh. I’m not seeing that as a trend in the comments.
That’s been a trend since this drama started. I’m not saying it’s everyone, but there are a handful of people who have been ride or die with Liz while attacking everyone around her.
Relationships can end without cheating, and cheating takes more than one party. The whole bit about Sarah pushing people away is very much being used by Liz to justify something that she did that was pretty blatantly wrong. The fact that she’s comfortable with that as a justification doesn’t paint her in a good light, and I’m a little gobsmacked that you’ve also been throwing that around in the comments section.
Sarah pushing someone away in no way justifies what Liz did. And come on, three days being “…like, forever in junior high” is garbage. When you do something lousy in junior high, you can acknowledge that it was because you were a stupid kid and made a bad choice and still acknowledge that it was a lousy thing. Liz is still justifying it in college.
This is my biggest issue. Like at first with Liz I wasn’t a fan, but I was curious about where it was going. But I just don’t really like her much? She shows 0 thought and remorse for anything she did. You’re still culpable when you’re like 13-14. I did stupid stuff all the time at that age, some I didn’t know was wrong.
I still knew it was wrong to chase after taken people. People acting like stuff that happens when you’re a dumb kid should just be forgotten and automatically forgiven as an adult when the person shows not even a little remorse for it… especially with siblings, it sticks with you as you grow up.
Sarah mentioning Jimmy and not telling Liz about him, also shows that it might not have been an isolated incident.
Like I just can’t wrap my head around some people here justifying it, or saying in some cases it is okay. Like middle school and high school are very formative years in your life. Especially the latter half of middle school when you’re potentially having a lot of firsts. Sure kids arent gonna be able to have that nuanced internal dialogue but they know most base, base level right vs wrong.
The boyfriends are both shitty here too, but they’re also not characters we’ve seen at all. Liz felt entitled to Sarah’s cute boyfriend because Sarah pushed him away, and he came to her for help, and she decided she wanted him.
It’s not a matter of ‘oh you paint things black and white and have to have a villain’
It’s the fact of the matter that in-text and how she interacts with others shows she’s just cruel and justifies said cruelty because it’s towards her mean, antisocial sister and was ‘like forever ago’ and shifts blame and doesn’t take accountability.
I love sarah as a character. So I’m biased here, I’m aware she can be a bit of a bongo, and she’s not being the best friend to joyce during the current arc. I like he despite these issues because there are times she TRIES, and she makes mistakes informed by her character and personality.
I liked her even early on before we got a ton of nuance.
Liz has none of anything that makes me want to like her, despite the fact that it feels like narratively we are supposed to? Like it sucks that she has bad stuff goin on at her own college. Sucks that she’s struggling like joyce.
But She doesn’t compel me. I don’t want to see her develop. I just find myself wishing she’d just go back to her own college, or go home or something. Because she doesn’t feel like she’s going to change or develop.
Ok, that’s cool. I’m glad to get your opinions. I was just spinning out hypothetical situations, playing devil’s advocate. I’ve heard a lot of justifications on this topic, so it’s good to see how others see that kind of self-convincing. Not as straightforward as it might appear to be. Good to know how others see it. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts.
something I have to constantly remind myself is that when I find a DoA character “unlikeable”….. I wasn’t exactly a perfect specimen of a human from 18-21 either. Is Liz my favorite character? Not really, don’t appreciate her hurting Sarah (though come ON Sarah that was MIDDLE SCHOOL jfc), but I also fucked up with friends at that age. This comic is about all of them figuring that out, and the only characters I think that deserve real hate are, like, Joyce’s mom, Becky’s Dad, etc.
Huh. This is actually fairly awesome. A community of people who take 24 hours at a time to hold a full-group conversation (with lots of subconversations) about interpersonal dynamics, advice, emotions, character, etc., and share their own experiences and how it makes them feel. It’s refreshing to be among such thoughtful people.
I appreciate you all. 🙂
Who you callin’ thoughtful, punk?
You want a hug, bub? Huh? Come at me.
awwww =3
thank you for reminding me of why i love this place. yes i get frustrated sometimes, but also, there is something so cool about people putting so much energy and brain-hours into this ephemeral space. And every day brings a new conversation starter, which then as you said splinters off into a bunch of unexpected side chats. Yeah, it is fairly awesome and i appreciate you for saying it <3
(PS are there two Laura's or are you using two different avatars?)
Yes, 2 different Avatars, Ruth and Billie. I don’t know why I get 2: I just take whatever the website gives me. Maybe when I use a different device (phone vs. Laptop) I get a different Avatar? Who knows. I am the only Laura I know, but maybe another may pop up sometimes.
Milu, I am so glad to hear you are feeling better. I hope you can vent here and in other spaces. Thank you for your kind words.
I have lost so many friends and loved ones, these past 2+ years of COVID. It gets so exhausting to lose people. I sometimes feel like Johnny Cash: “Everyone I know goes away in the end.” So I do empathize with your loss, especially if you attended the ceremony in person. It’s so raw and fresh, and it just keeps welling up over and over sometimes.
What I love about this community is how honest people are. Even when they are calling people out or disagreeing wildly, I don’t see malice behind it. Anger, sure. But not hatred. That is refreshing to me.
And so many smart, creative people, with such resources to share! My appreciation for this saga is much deeper with you all here.