True, but at least we got a Count of Monte Cristo out of it (in fiction).
So if Walky is exiled to Elba, maybe someone supposedly dead and living under a fake name will eventually appear…
Better skip a step and go straight to St. Helena. Post a garrison and permanently station a couple of royal navy ships on patrol. We don’t want any Jurrasic Park III situations here.
Amber didn’t want to speak to him when he pooped into her room, giving us our first hint of Halloween havoc.
Then later, she nuked their conversation via Dina when she realized she was getting turned on by his new hair (for both their sakes), so I think she has basically cut him off unless I’m forgetting an interaction.
More or less.
The thing is, it doesn’t seem like Walky is trying to be funny. He seems to legitimately believe what he’s saying. I can see the characters getting upset over this but I really hope the comments section isn’t going to turn on him for reacting to a friends death in a manner that suggests he needs a whole hell of a lot of counseling to accept the fact that Mike really is dead.
I mean naritively I would not be surprised if Walky were right, stranger more soap opera level shit has happened in this comic, but he’s basing this on nothing but not wanting it to be true.
I agree, he is not being an ass at all. He is saying this in good faith – probably really messed up over his roommate dying and being kidnapped. Plus, it does make sense.
You can have good intentions and still unknowingly be an ass.
Heck, I’d say he’s knowingly being an ass, because for all his issues, Walky’s very observant. He would know that Amber’s grieving. And he’s shown enough aptitude to be tactful when he wants to be.
This is him lashing out. Understandable, but still assholish.
He’s doing a bit in his Head Alien voice (notice the squared off dialogue balloon). He’s trying to get people to laugh so they’ll enjoy the party and he can stop feeling so bad. Walky can’t deal with Mike’s death. Most 18 year olds can’t because they don’t know anybody who has died. I don’t know why so many of the comments try to make it more complicated than that.
As a former grieving 18 year old, can confirm. I made up rather similar stories. And while I was aware that I’d made them up based on absolutely nothing, at times I held into them real hard just to get a moment to breathe.
On a related note – when my first pet died, I made up my own version of heaven to cope. Eventually let go of that story and properly processed things. Later, my grandma tried to introduce me to the idea of Christian heaven. I was like ‘yeah no I’m past that phase. wait you adults really believe that? You have a problem.’ Grandma was not amused.
To be fair to literally everybody, I’ve seen like 2 comments point out that Walky was actually doing an in-character bit, and I did not even remotely catch that part of the strip myself, so I’m guessing it went over quite a lot of peoples’ heads. The strip makes 1000x more sense once I realized that.
When you see what some people believe IRL – like the earth is flat, man never landed on the moon, or 5G (which is just one narrow segment of ALL frequencies of electro-magnetic radiation) is evil and sinister – this is no different than all the people IRL who still believe Elvis faked HIS death and is still alive and well (although getting pretty long in the tooth by now).
Am I the only one thinking that Walky is not jokeing? That he really think Mike is in witness protection program and this denial is simply his own way to process the grief?
Of course he is going to challenge anyone who contradict that narrative. Like, I understand where he is coming from. IT’s not a joke, he just want to be allowed to feel happy.
There are people who believe Elvis died in Witness Protection sometime in the 1980s, the Earth is flat, birds are surveillance drones, the Moon landing was fake and done on the same soundstage as the moon scenes from “2001”…
There was a conspiracy going around – satirically as thejeff said – that claimed that COVID lockdowns were a conspiracy to replace the batteries in the birds.
I literally know it isn’t true, but there is still a part of me that is 100% willing to and desiring to believe that Booster is literally just Mike with a haircut, living their real identity after dealing with their transition in the most over-the-top way possible. I am aware that’s not the plot of the comic, I simply want it to be. Especially because Booster clearly serves the exact same archetypal function as Mike to the story.
Just to be fair, it’s really likely that Walky has ADHD, according to Mike himself (rest his legacy). Regardless, this is one mistake for which Walky is not gonna be easily forgiven.
Given a lot of us have difficulty regulating emotions, we tend clasp on to any viable mechanism to help cope, regardless of how maladaptive it is. Not just ADHD either. Within overlapping stripes of autism and PTSD, at least if you’re unlucky as i am you have to bend and break your brain in all kinds of ways to be just barely functioning.
I wouldn’t be surprised myself if Walky has to climb down a denialist staircase of sorts before he’s ready to face the loss of his friend.
No, but we’re more impulsive, which means we’ve got less of a “slow down and take a moment to think about how the thing you are about to say will impact people before you say it” filter.
Yes, this too. I just mean that with difficulty regulating emotions that tends to come with autism / adhd / ptsd, you tend to cling on to easier / less healthy coping mechanisms more readily as a temporary solution. the real trick is to make sure a temporary solution doesn’t become a permanent one, prioritizing of which during daily routine can also be a problem if you have ADHD
Can it not be down to both ADHD and being human? i mean, i totally agree it’s not a way to explain absolutely everything about how we act. but it’s still a part of us, and affects our emotions, how we cope and how we interact with others
Yeah, I remember the last time I loudly insisted somebody in my social circle was alive when they were clearly dead and I went to their funeral. Just ADHD things!
I don’t think it was ADHD so much as unable/unwilling to process one of his best friends from childhood was dead. He’s a budding Conspiracy Theorist trying to make sense of a world gone mad.
i think it’s more any repressed emotions/not wanting to deal with sadness as opposed to an adhd thing , plenty of ppl with adhd are self aware enough to not be like “yeah our friend died, but i’m gonna make a conspiracy theory about him secretly being in hiding, let’s stop being sad”
Yeah, ADHD has nothing to do with something like this. An attention-deficit disorder does not also come with “being a complete jackass about the recent, tragic death of friends” as a side effect. Falling asleep at the funeral or spacing out when someone is talking about how broken up they are by the death, that’d be one thing, but you can’t blame this on ADHD.
…you can blame it on how he’s very clearly traumatized, both by Mike’s death and the kidnapping and fight, and is trying to deal with that trauma in a whole host of unhealthy, self-destructive ways. There’s plenty of room for sympathy, but we can put the ADHD card away for this subject.
Really, it’s kind of hard to tell which it is more down to between trauma and ADHD? People with ADHD / Autism often get PTSD, and there’s tons of overlap.
NDs tend to defy neatness, really, but yeah trauma-denial is also a factor as well as others, including the sugar overload that Laura suggested earlier, and I’m not one to turn down a nuanced position.
I think his coping mechanisms are informed by his ADHD, and his history, and seeing his mom make shit up to be justified and getting away with it. And I hope he learns not to do that. Or at the very least not to do that when it hurts people.
Hey Taffy, how’s it been? I really miss talking to you on Discord. If you still need some time away from social media, that’s totally understandable. Just wanna let you know I’ve gotten something up and running on newgrounds if you want to see it.
If I said things that offended you in the past, i may not have realized it, and really don’t want them to come between us. I have lots of fun talking to you, and don’t want that to end because of a few misunderstandings. no hard feelings, just wanted to let you know
That’s not what Danny said, though—he said not waking up “for a while” might not be such a bad thing. Still a foot-in-mouth moment and compounded further by Mike actually dying a few hours later, but not the same thing as saying that it would be good if Mike “never woke up again”.
Also, once again, people do regularly ignore that for 99.9% of the total duration of his existence, literally everybody he ever interacted with outside of like 3 friends only knew him as a completely manipulative, sadistic, bullying, psychopathic asshole. Saying that to one of those three friends should be a foot that’s easy to keep out-of-mouth, but while we have the benefit of being the omnipotent audience, I literally could not blame a single person in this cast for being glad that Mike is dead. Even his actual close friends, if they really felt that way.
Like, grim reminder that Mike was in the process of sexually manipulating Danny, just to get a rise out of Ethan. If Mike hadn’t died, that would have literally started happening. We all know that Mike literally always had noble intentions, as the audience, holy shit, please actually consider how fucked up that is! Mike literally acts like the guy we’ve all assumed Asher is, deep down, all the time. He just happens to be protagonist-coded, instead of antagonist-coded.
I think if he had been straight with “hey uh Dorothy maybe this isn’t the fucking time to confront us with all our trauma,” he might have had a few people actually agree with him. But, that would have required him being sincere and emotionally open and honest, for like, two whole seconds. Definitely an unreasonable expectation, where Walky is concerned.
Let the walkys hit the floor
Let the walkys hit the floor
Let the walkys hit the floor
Let the walkys hit the [tch tch]
FLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Nah. This is partly why I don’t like Amber as a person even though her character is compelling. She’s very quick to violence and rage and she even knows this about herself. Pushing Walky in this moment is understandable, forgivable, maybe even deserved, and still wrong. She has realized in the past she has the potential to go too far on this.
I keep seeing this dichotomy where we pretend violence is outside the realm of human nature and also inherently immoral, yet many of us, at the same time, agree that Walky deserved the violence. It can’t be both.
“Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
It’s from Frodo and Gandalf’s discussion in Bag End of the One Ring’s history—Frodo had just asked why Gollum, after his capture, was still being kept alive and treated gently by the Wood-elves instead of being put to death for what he had done, and the above was (the first part of) Gandalf’s reply.
I mean, I agree with you in part because I like consistency, and often find the comments section to be lacking in that. At the same time I think that paradox and contradictory feelings are part of human experience too. I don’t think something being paradoxical is exactly the same as being inconsistent.
I mean my point isn’t really whether Walky deserved the shove just that Amber has no right to do the shoving. Even if she is the one most emotionally hurt she has a bad track record with violence especially with the Walkertons.
Her relationship with violence is irrelevant to the question of if she is Immoral to do this now. Where does that right (of shoving) magically come from? If a man grabbed your ass, would you slap him if he stopped before you could slap him?
Where does any right come from? All rights are invented, the entire idea is a human concept. I don’t see why this one is more magical than any of the rest.
It can be immoral to do something purely because of the effect it so have on you; if it hurts you, or causes you to regress, or sets you up to hurt more people in the future, it might be immoral. Her relationship with violence matters because it plays into all of those.
I feel like you’re trying to make a completely different argument to mine. Your example doesn’t really apply to this situation either. It describes a scenario where someone disrespected my personal space to physically molest me, I probably would slap them for that because it would be in self defense. In this situation Walky didn’t touch Amber he just offended her which makes a violent reaction less justifiable.
My point is that Amber is more immoral for doing this because of her history of violence. If say Joyce or Sal had shoved Walky this would be less of an issue get it?
To put it another way, Jennifer getting behind the wheel of a car with a beer in her hand is worse than Becky doing the same thing because only one of them has a history of alcohol abuse and a DUI.
Nah, for most of the time we’ve seen her, Amber hasn’t been terribly prone to violence.
I’m pretty sure most of that got sectioned off into Amazi-girl when they split.
That said, if this shove was indeed Amber instead of Amazi-girl (or perhaps even HeadMike, although I don’t know if he’d showed up by this point?), be. very. afraid?
not that i condone violence irl but a lot of series would’ve def had someone like walky getting punched by another person. amber just happens to have the strength to make it worse than just an offended slap
I think she needs more therapy for that. Like, it’s not good that she does this, but I feel like this really is just learned behaviour paired with different aspects of her childhood trauma. Not reacting with anger and violence is something that needs to be unlearned. And she IS trying, kind of? I don’t actually know if she has a therapist rn. But she doesn’t want to be like this, is my point.
I saw someone saying “she was being like Blaine” and that’s really not fair, when her father is the person who was essentially a big part of why she has the problems she has.
So, whilst she is probably still dealing with grief and guilt ontop of everything else. i’m willing to cut Amber some slack.
Also sometimes people deserve a push. Like when they’re being incredibly tactless.
It is never appropriate to respond to verbal provocation with physical violence. That is not a thing.
Imagine if, say, Jacob had shoved Joyce so hard she fell over backwards and took down a table, in response to the *king-shit* inappropriate behavior of pretending to his brother that she was his girlfriend. Would anybody be trying to argue that that was anything other than a massive, honking red flag? That it was justified and appropriate, and that she had it coming, or that it was necessary to physically knock her down to make her knock it off? Of course not! Which is why he handled it like a civilized human being, and used his *words* to tell her why it wasn’t okay, and make the consequences clear (friendship ended; romantic potential permanently shut down).
(And yeah Jacob is a big, strong dude and Joyce is comparatively tiny. But that’s the approximate strength differential between Amber and Walky.)
Oh she knows it’s wrong. This is just another incident for Amber to add to her list of red PTSD panels, the reasons she hates herself and (thinks) she should not be happy.
i like lucy and walky as a couple for now but i don’t see them lasting in the long run
there is more to him than that, but dating wise he does seem like the type of boy you’d date/have a casual/summer fling with when you’re 14-15 and then move onto something more serious later
Lucy would probably be one of those better able to see how Walky has a lot of unresolved, unhandled trauma about things going on right now, just because she’s playing close (ahem, VERY close) attention to Walky, but is entirely disconnected from those events, so she doesn’t have her own baggage to cloud her perspective.
Because, yeah, while Walky’s being a jackass here, it’s not because he’s an asshole exactly. It’s because he’s been through some really ugly shit and is in deep, deep denial about it all.
Not only is he in denial, but even a few months down the line, even if he intellectually knows Mike is dead, he still thinks on some level that it is a prank because Mike bullied and gaslit him THAT HARD.
Yeah his reaction is in fairness understandable, the comments he is making are not APPROPRIATE but you can see why hes acting he way he is, a mix of trauma, denial and generally the dead individual being a not so great person to begin with who WOULD fake his own death just to fuck with people
“Wow Amber, why did you shove me, Amber. That’s so fucked up, Amber. It’s me, Mike, Amber. Your friend Mike, Amber. I’m alive, Amber, I thought you would be glad to see me, but then you shoved me, Amber. Amber that’s really cringe.” I don’t know where he fucks somebody’s Mom for a nickel, but I think I got the rest of it.
Coping is coping. Dorothy coping by remember Mike. Walky coping by dont remember Mike and dont want dead Mike in the party. Difference is Walky was rude about that and for someone point of view could offence memory of Mike but like Chazkuangshi point out some comments yesterday thought that Dorothy ruined the party
Dorothy could have remembered Mike in the privacy of her own head, where y’know, remembering takes place. What she did instead was “and now EVERYBODY is going to go down painful memory lane, whether they like it or not”.
Is it not common enough during events like these to talk about and have a moment of silence for a recently deceased friend? (Was Mike a friend? Frenemy? I dunno) No one seemed particularly upset with her before walky opened his mouth.
If anything people often do that if only so its known that, even if they’re doing a fun thing they’re still grieving, still thinking about the person themselves, but they’re going to try enjoy themselves despite it.
I’ve seen it a few times before too, life doesnt stop for you when someone goes, but it is respectful to give a moment to think on them.
“Is it not common enough during events like these to talk about and have a moment of silence for a recently deceased friend?”
Nnnnooooo? This what wakes and funerals are for, not “random party”.
“No one seemed particularly upset with her before walky opened his mouth.”
That’s because there’s literally three people this is actually affecting: Amber and Ethan, who were his friends, and Walky, who got routinely abused by him for a semester. Maybe four, because Danny is the type to go “oh no, I said it wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t wake up, AND HE DIDN’T”. You think Sarah or Sal care?
“If anything people often do that if only so its known that, even if they’re doing a fun thing they’re still grieving, still thinking about the person themselves”
You really think wakes and funerals are the only place it’s ever appropriate to acknowledge a very fresh, common loss, in a social gathering? This would be…completely normal in my circles. Calling for a moment of silence isn’t demanding that everyone spend the entire party dwelling on the sad thing, it’s being respectful. I mean, everyone grieves in their own way, but many, many people find it painful to have to pretend that nothing is wrong, or have everyone around them avoiding talking about the sad thing. Other people’s silence on the subject (because they don’t want to make the bereaved party sad, by reminding them!) can be really alienating to a lot of folks experiencing loss.
I think it’s fair for you to say that in the same situation, you wouldn’t welcome someone doing what Dorothy did, but I think it’s pretty weird to act like EVERYONE MUST FEEL THE SAME WAY and that she’s being a show-offy asshole for saying something nice about a dead friend and calling for a moment of silence, or that it’s inherently socially inappropriate to mention a dead person outside of a funeral.
Really? It’s normal in your friend circle to publicly call for a moment of silence in a completely unrelated event over someone that literally only one person present cared about (and it wasn’t you)?
Literally everyone at this party knew Mike. Joyce *just said* they were all at his funeral! Whether or not they liked him or considered him a friend, he was a regular presence in the overlapping social circles that make up the group in this room, and his recent violent death is probably on everyone’s mind to some degree (if nothing else, this is probably the first gathering they’ve had as a group SINCE the funeral). Yes, absolutely, 100%, in any social circle or workplace I have ever encountered, not only would it be normal and unexceptional to call for a moment of silence to honor a recently deceased person wildly known among the attendees, it would be considered more appropriate to do so than not to. Like, if no one mentioned the person, people would be talking about *that* later—“couldn’t someone have said something?”
Personally I don’t think talking about death needs to be *more* taboo in American society than it already is.
I feel that this is a “subjective life experiences,” sort of debate. What you’re describing isn’t my life experience at all– death is something that I’m used people talking about, including dead people.
When people get hush hush about it after someone dies or people try to forget, that’s what weirds me out and makes me feel sick. Why do you feel the need to compartmentalize that much? I don’t understand.
Walky’s whole history has meant that he presents as a harmless and comic goofus to survive. And that any trauma be avoided no matter how ludicrous the rationale, because that is how he’s survived a traumatic (and let’s face it, abusive) childhood.
I expected disaster, and even so I’m appalled. Can confirm that death by head-landing does not make for a happy or pleasant open casket! Really should have left that thing closed!
To be fair to that point, I sort of thought that we were all at least partially considering that he’d been killed by cops, not died naturally from his injuries?
A disability (if Walky does have one) isn’t a free pass to be a jerk. Walky’s actions can be understandable, even tolerable. It doesn’t mean people have to be okay with them. His actions still affect other people.
Disability related or not, I still think it’s a lot easier to sympathize with someone who’s actually freaking out in denial than someone just making a joke.
Can’t blame the other characters for reacting badly, especially Amber, but we can still see where Walky’s coming from.
Just because Walky might have issues regulating his emotions doesn’t mean he doesn’t understand them. Walky’s very smart and trope aware, you have to give him credit because just because he might have ADHD doesn’t mean he’s invalid. He knows enough to ease off his joking behaviour when Jennifer was having a bad day.
Walky is around Amber enough to pick up that she’s not doing well.
It doesn’t make him a malicious jerk, because his behaviour is understandable, but it’s still a jerk move when the news of his death is pretty darn fresh.
Okay but if he is in Denial then… like, can you blame someone for actions they took while their perception of reality was warped? They didn’t Know the information they possess are false?
Has Walky verified this? No. Did he just decide to tell people who went to his funeral, went through and is going through grieving, that his completely unfounded theory about someone’s death is correct? Yes. Did he double down when people call him out and poke holes in his denial? Yes.
We can’t blame Walky for his denial, but we can blame him for his actions.
It’s not even really “blame” at this point, it’s just an outright statement of fact that he’s doing and saying these things, entirely of his own volition.
No amount of denial, or shock, or ADHD, or magical sugar drunkenness, or anything else, makes it remotely okay for him to act the way he’s acting. We can understand the why and how, but they don’t get to matter more than the impact he’s having on everyone around him. The worst he’s gotten for it short-term is some loud swear words and a shove, and to be frank he should feel lucky they’re being so nice to him.
Good point, that being said the temporary insanity plea is a valid defence in court. I imagine it has to do with whether a person’s mental capacity was compromised due to their own actions (drinking, taking drugs, maybe going off of prescribed meds) vs things out of their control (their mental health deteriorating on its own)
<@Eldritchy: I feel it’s worth noting here that it’s actually very difficult to actually succeed on an insanity plea—certainly a lot harder than pop culture often makes it seem. You basically need to prove, to legal standards, that your client was/is literally mentally incapable of discerning the difference between the right and wrong thing to do.
If he believes it then how is he being an ass? From his point of view He’s just trying to cheer his friends up by making sure they know the truth about Mike not being dead.
Also I missed this at first, but the square speech bubbles mean he’s saying all this in a silly joke-y Head Alien voice (until he starts shouting). Really changes the read.
All by people who knows how to talk in a helmet. On this one, everyone is already silent for Dorothy’s speech so he could be heard without raising his voice
I feel like it’s no coincidence that Walky is wearing a costume where we can’t see his face. This sounds like classic stupid glib Walky, but I’m betting it’s tearful-and-not-coping-well Walky.
I also noted that he’s saying everything in a Head Alien voice (note the shape of the speech bubbles) until the penultimate panel, when he starts SUDDENLY SHOUTING.
And here I was going back to the last time Sal spoke while wearing the helmet (nearly two and a half years ago) just in case Sal somehow did an Alien voice while wearing the helmet.
Oh wow, good catch. Yeah, he’s tripping on copium. Not healthy, the poor kid.
I feel bad for everyone here. Dorothy dropped an emotional bomb by forcing everyone to think about Mike again when they’re only a few days removed from the funeral and their guards were down, but I know she meant well. Walky is so deep in his own denial that he’s causing Amber a lot of distress, among others…
Poor, dumbing babies. At least we know that most of them are a little further along in healing by the end of the I’ll leave You a Phantom storyline.
Walky’s childhood has taught him to be passive, harmless and submissive (in a goofy way) to survive. And that any trauma should be ignored or rationalised away no matter how ridiculous the premise (a skill set I think he learned from his father). It’s not healthy and is something he needs to address. Except his whole life has taught him that anything can and should be ignored or rationalised (no matter how stupidly) in the name of a ‘quiet life’.
So this is why Becky didn’t know what happened between Walky and Amber even though they were invited. She and Dina were busy stomping offensive cardboard.
Also, Joyce swearing.
Yeah I posted late on yesterday’s suspecting something like this and yeah, checks out. I won’t rehash that too much because I’m busy dealing with other shit, but: Mike made elaborate fake websites to trick Walky into thinking his favorite cartoon had been cancelled, specifically to make Walky upset. Is this a dick thing to say? Yeah. But we know even months later post-timeskip that Walky has some trauma from Mike’s mind games and half expects him to reveal it was a prank. I think this isn’t just denial, Walky would GENUINELY buy Mike faking his own death just to mess with them, because that was his consistent experience with Mike.
Like, Amber’s still well within her rights to dump him for this, but it does make SENSE as more than just Walky being goofy and inappropriate – Mike was THAT BAD to Walky, which is one of the reasons why he narratively HAD to be gone in some way. There’s no way he could keep being Mike to any of the characters he interacted with, because they were all realistically traumatized by his antics.
He was literally about to start the process of sexually manipulating the boy Ethan was interested in dating, specifically to fuck with Ethan, because Ethan laid a hard boundary against Mike fucking with that boy. IIRC, that boy was Danny. So, no, Mike was about to start bullying Ethan hardcore, using Danny as the fucking weapon. I cannot comprehend how much people in this generally very sensitive chat constantly condone his consistently monstrous behavior. I know he always had good intentions or whatever, audience omnipotence, but holy shit he still was openly sadistic and narcissistic beyond comedic quirk or punchline as explanations.
This is like when Nick Fury died for the umpteenth time and instead of mourning Dum Dum Dugan and the rest of the surviving Howling Commandos just went out partying and made bets if what was being buried was a clone, an MVA, a skrull, or just someone who had plastic surgery.
In addition: Holy shit, Amber just killed him in front of everybody. I can’t believe Walky is fucking dead. This is gonna mess with the dynamics going forward, for sure.
now that he’s broken his vow and killed mike off, im sure willis is planning on making the next fifty years of dumbing of age just a tightening spiral of the characters dying one by one.
Huh… So this is Walky’s… poor. oh so poor error in judgement—attempt at coping! Rather than treat things with the tone necessary, he adds extremely inappropriate levity to the situation in hopes that everything can remain copacetic.
Oh yeah. A lot of his scenes after the time-skip have been pretty heavily emphasizing that he is NOT handling Mike’s death well, but it’s a lot of under-the-surface stuff that’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it.
Yeah I am not sure he is actually genuinely in denial/delusional, especially when the immediate previous conversation he just had with Amber was her thanking him for not taking things seriously, so that combined with his sugar high I think possibly made him think that pretending Mike isn’t dead was the best to try to change the subject from the heavy topic Dorothy brought up from her little speech.
I didn’t notice the square speech bubbles at first. They mean he’s using a silly Head Alien voice for most of this strip (until he starts shouting). Really changes the read, he’s doing a bit.
Of course he can be in denial *and* joking, that’s how my family rolls, but yeah the silly voice does a lot here to change the interpretation from Proxiehunter’s to Theozilla’s.
I’ll also point out that not all plurality is necessarily “disordered”, at least not in the sense that it negatively impacts systems being able to go about living their lives.
Dissociative Identity Disorder is probably the best-known form of plurality, especially of traumogenic plurality, but it’s far from the only form. (That said, basically all of the systems I know have some sort of trauma. It’s just a matter of whether that trauma is the cause of their plurality or merely incidental to it.)
Amber is plural. There’s more than one person in that brain. A set of people sharing a single brain is generally referred to as a system.
Amazi-girl is Amber’s main headmate (kinda like a roommate, but sharing a brain instead of a house/apartment/dorm room)
A fictive is a type of headmate that shows up based on a fictional character, based on the brain’s modeling of that character. (Authors sometimes end up with this type of headmate too!)
A factive is like that but based on a real person instead of a fictional one.
Fronting is what it’s called when a particular headmate is in primary control of the body/consciousness.
Possession is when another headmate borrows control from the fronter without actually being in front themselves
I don’t think I’m the only one to conclude that Amber’s hallucinatory Mike, seen in previous chapters, is actually another headmate in the system, and since he’s based on an actual person (in canon, at least), he would be a factive.
(source: I’m just a singlet—I’m the only person in my head, so far as I know—but I’m friends with a fair number of plural systems. One tends to pick up on things in such situations.)
Huh, I haven’t heard those terms before. I’ve had friends with DID call the various identities “multis” and them referring to who in in control as who is on the surface. Perhaps it’s a regional thing?
(also sorry I accidentally flagged your comment when I went to press reply)
“headmate” is the term I’ve heard my friends use.
I gather that “alter” has some similar overtones as “transsexual” in trans circles: it’s historically an overly medicalized term and thus may carry some pejorative overtones to many folks (and may not always be precisely accurate in the latter case), but some still identify with it. I gather that the usage advice is also similar: if a system specifically uses the term to describe themselves, fine, but don’t use it to describe people without their consent.
(repeating the disclaimer: I’m a transfemme singlet, so I know fairly well whereof I speak about trans stuff, but my plurality knowledge is second-hand, albeit closely so. Either way, neither of these overlapping communities is monolithic, and opinions within them may differ.)
Uh…well the answer to that is whether they are an actual distinct personality within the mind of a system. Like, it’s not just a “I think Dora the Explorer is in my head”, but an actual, real distinct personality who identifies AS Dora the Explorer genuinely existing within that person.
Imaginary friends don’t actually exist, they aren’t hallucinations, nor delusions, they’re just a way that people (particularly children) engage in fantasy. A person with an imaginary friend is no more comparable to a fictive than someone who believes in santa claus or the tooth fairy.
The simplest way to put it really is that an imaginary friend is not real as it IS a fictional character and a fictive is real because it is an alter based ON a fictional character.
It’s like how Sora from Kingdom Hearts is a fictional character, he is not real. He is the imaginary friend and he would still be imaginary if I was imagining him sitting next to me.
But if I woke up tomorrow identifying myself as Sora from Kingdom Hearts, I would still be real even if my appearance, personality, mannerisms or decisions were based on a fictional character. You could not imagine me into not being Sora, I would be Sora and you could not make me stop being Sora.
This is a bit of a simplification though as most systems cannot create new alters at will (I have heard a few systems that fragment regularly MAY be able to, but this is definitely not the majority experience, it is mostly uncontrollable). In the usual case to my understanding your brain decides this character has something the system ‘needs’ or the system forms a strong emotional attachment to the character, and the brain adds them to the brain crew. The fictive does not ‘choose’ to be character X, they just ARE character X.
There is no perfectly clean 1 to 1 way to define the experience of a fictive forming experience I think because the closest thing to it is like cosplaying but like, you never knew anything before being the character you are based on and only know yourself as this character so you can’t ‘stop’ being the character. Because that is who you know yourself as and who you are.
Two (at least?) of the systems I know are tulpagenic.
I gather that tulpamancy (in the secular sense, at least) is something kinda(?) like intentionally creating and interacting with an imaginary friend so vividly/strongly that the brain makes them an independent personality. This process may be harder or easier depending on a given brain, and I gather that once a brain is “rewired” (or however you want to put it) for plurality, gaining new headmates can become easier. For example, for one of the aforementioned systems I know, it took years for the first tulpa to be able to have any physical control of the body or for her to interact externally at all, but they were later able to spin up a third headmate in a matter of hours/days.
(same disclaimers as in my previous comments still apply)
I have this idea that is probably wrong, but what if all the other people there *also* knew that Mike is in witness protection (or at least some of them) and they are getting mad at Walky because he is blowing Mike’s cover and risking him getting killed by the mob?
can we just go to the AU that’s a serious detective comic about Mike fighting the mob and police corruption under an assumed identity, that story seems less emotionally traumatizing than teens with trauma in college
Per WebMD, hyperglycemia can cause impaired cognitive functioning, confusion, disorientation, poor judgment, difficulty making decisions and processing information, audiovisual hallucinations, blurred vision, and poor impulse control. There are several other risk factors for hyperglycemic mental impairment, which coincide with Walky’s current physical and mental circumstances. We just saw him “consume so much sugar he could phase in and out of our physical plane of existence” and physically vibrating into a blur. I believe he’s consumed so much sugar that his judgment is impaired.
It’s like talking to a drunk person at a party. Sometimes they just talk out their a** and don’t make sense, or have no sense of how to behave appropriately and respect others’ needs.
Could be that. Could also be down to the intensity of the trauma, emotional regulation difficulty from ADHD and subsequent temporary coping mechanism that he never found the time to replace. Could be all of those, plus some others.
Also, PTSD can cause paranoia, delusion or hallucination, dissociation or detachment from reality, and a tendency to suspect conspiracies. I’m frankly flabbergasted that they’re not all more unhinged than they are, after what happened to them.
I just think about all the people who’ve lost friends and family to COVID but still think COVID is a hoax. Or who have lost people to gun violence but still believe that gun violence is due to “false-flag” psy-ops. I’ve worked with some very traumatized people who have some very delusional and conspiratorial beliefs, doubting the reality of their situations. We have so many people like that in this country right now — who are so vulnerable to charlatans like Alex Jones, who are selling them a vision of a conspiratorial puzzle, where all the pieces fall neatly into place, which is more palatable to believe than the messy and tragic evidence right before them. I think mass PTSD and deliberate manipulation by fearmongers can help explain some of the deep mistrust in “official” reporting, some of the deep divisions in how the people of the US perceive reality.
I can think of a much more fun way to cope, that’s much more healthy too.
If the world doesn’t want to play fair, you can always temporarily escape reality and have fun with others in virtual worlds / online games!
And if you’re up to it like i am, you can even try your hand at making your own. Playing and making games as art to express myself has been a very valuable coping mechanism indeed, just putting all this out there for those who want to explore their options! 😉
I see a lot of people dunking on Walky, and like… I don’t really feel that he entirely deserves it?
Obviously, this whole elaborate narrative is a shitty thing to bring up in front of people who are clearly trying to take this tragedy seriously (though given how much Mike fucked with him, I can totally believe that Walky genuinely believes in this delusion), but his Sudden Shouting in panel 5? That, to me, is probably the most relatable reaction to the death so far.
Walky wasn’t the one who brought up Mike, that was Dorothy. I’m not saying she’s literally Satan for doing so or anything, it genuinely seemed to be her way of dealing with the grief, herself. But holy hell, that’s not the kind of thing you can just spring on someone and expect them to react well.
If I went to a party so soon after someone in my friend group died, I’d probably be expecting some levity, a good time to take everyone’s mind off it. So if one of my friends suddenly went “Hey, let’s remember that guy who’s no longer with us,” my first thought would probably be “But why? This is a fun Halloween party. Can we please stop being fuckin’ sad?”
So yeah, I dunno. Amber’s right to be angry, especially after that cartoony witness-protection shit, and this is a perfectly valid reason to dump him, but at the same time I think Walky’s right to just want a single evening where he doesn’t have to be reminded of the fact that he has a dead roommate.
I mean… Yes. I even acknowledged that, twice, in my previous comment. Right here and now definitely wasn’t the best time to pull out the dumb witness-protection theory, and resorting to a shouting match when that theory is countered is some classic Walky childishness.
The point, though, is that each panel doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There’s no timeline-jump between the panels that suddenly changes the context of the situation. Walky’s being an asshole, but I personally feel that his reason for being one is somewhat justifiable, and that reason remains constant throughout the whole strip.
A less inappropriate way for him to express that would be “I still can’t believe this isn’t just one of his elaborate pranks”, not making a declarative statement that it is one.
That would be less inappropriate, but would also require him to have processed mikes death and not be in denial about it. This doesn’t seem like Walky is joking, he genuinely believes mike is alive. He doesn’t want to be sad, and his brain has latched onto this theory so he doesn’t have to grieve. Anything that threatens this fragile coping mechanism is going to make him angry and dig his heels in even further because he desperately doesn’t want to be wrong. He is scared that they’re right, so the anger replaces his fear to protect himself and his delusion. In short, people don’t always behave rationally or socially acceptably when they are grieving.
None of that is to excuse walky, I think he owes everyone in this room an apology once he’s in a healthy enough mental place to recognise he’s wrong. But I don’t think he is intentionally being a dick, and i feel quite sorry for him. This kind of denial in the face of death is quite relatable to me.
I really think a lot of people are missing, is that the subtext of the bit he is doing, and thus the way his tone should be read, is “Dorothy, drop the trauma shit, why are you bringing up our fresh trauma out of nowhere on us, that’s fucked;” but nobody takes it that way, because Walky can’t be emotionally honest about that, and so when he uses a sarcastic bit to communicate that subtext, the other very traumatized people in the room, take it merely as Never Serious Walky doing an utterly insensitive bit. But, Walky literally can’t directly talk about his emotions, that did not fly in his household. He actually can only communicate like this, especially under the intense emotional pressure he feels when being ambushed with his trauma.
I don’t think people would be so confused, if they understood why he was doing what he is doing. It is so utterly odd to me that 98% of readers seemed to jump to the explanation being that Walky is genuinely delusional about Mike being dead, that’s an extreme leap for this comic. Amber’s literally hallucinating the dude, and even she knows he’s dead as hell.
Sure but like, it was also a huge elephant in the room and sometimes you just need to bring it up to get it out of everyones system so you can continue with the fun
People are pretty good at compartmentalising things, even if they dont think they are, so while some may get teary eyed it also opens the floor to actually just
Talking about them. Generally this sort of thing with most people opens the floor to people talking positively and kinda… heal a bit by speaking of said person. Because they did exist, and talking about someone who has passed is normal, and should be.
A party the person wouldve gone to and everyone at it knows is pretty appropriate to say for a moment of silence
Well, the answer to that is that a much larger number of people than you were expecting do not believe that ambushing people with fresh, raw trauma out of the blue without their consent, is a particularly friendly thing to do. I’m utterly shocked that people think such behavior from Dorothy was even within her right, let alone warranted. That’s so presumptuous, and superior, and entitled of her.
“Consent”. That is *hilarious*. The idea that Dorothy needs “consent” in order to make reference to something that everyone is aware of, about a mutual acquaintance…I’ve seen the concept of consent weaponized before, but never in such a strange way as the way you’re using it here.
No, it’s just… uh, how to say. I think Walky’s standard way of being is trying to dodge anything painful with jokes, no matter the cost.
(he may be tearing up behind that helmet tho)
Honestly I think the helmet was an important narrative addition to the costume for exactly this reason! We CAN’T see his face or gage the degree to which he believes what he’s saying. Personally I think he is stuck in “I cope through jokes” and “I cope through denial” and “emotions make me desperately uncomfortable” and OOPS all of that combined and fell out of his face in the worst way possible.
I actually read him as kind of angry in his sarcasm, here. He’s like, “Dorothy, what the fuck, you think that’s appropriate?” and it’s partly just Walky literally avoiding his emotions, at all times and all costs, but I still am on the side that Dorothy was being extremely careless with her friends feelings and boundaries by doing this with absolute presumption and no caution, just because it’s the kind of thing leaders do, and so naturally it’s her responsibility to foist it on everybody, whether or not they are willing.
You know what, this is the only plausible sympathetic read on what Walky’s probably aiming for here I have yet to encounter in the comments section today. He’s very obviously doing a bit, and it is not finding a receptive audience, but he’s doubling down on it and upsetting people anyway. That’s not cool, and we know he can do better than that. But! As you say, this is something that not only do people expect of Walky—lightheartedness and jokes even in inappropriate or stressful situations—but also claim to like about him.
He’s also traumatized, and in that context, I can see why he’s clinging to “let’s just pretend everything is really okay and have fun” even in the face of direct, explicit pushback.
man how dare he not wanted to be confronted with extreme, days-old open-wound trauma, at a fun party celebrating one of his favorite holidays with his close personal friends, in a space that was supposed to be emotionally safe for him. impossible to understand how someone might feel that way, gotta say.
The fact that he’s doing a bit, is in direct protest of the topic of their mutual trauma being breached, because he doesn’t feel that a fun holiday party is the correct space to be ambushed with something like that. This is par for the course with his generally avoidant nature when it comes to the emotional realm, but also, this is like a week removed from the funeral, at best. He has a legitimate grievance, in terms of not wanted to be re-confronted with that trauma on a night that, from his perspective, was supposed to literally help him forget about said trauma. It’s just that he’s so emotionally stunted, and unable to communicate his feelings effectively, that he can’t approach placing that boundary in a way that isn’t utterly insensitive and inappropriate. He has a legitimate grievance, but under duress and pressure, he completely failed to address it in a sensitive or productive way.
Yikes, I don’t know if Walky’s joking. truly in denial. or some other reason. Whichever of the three, I can see why Amber and him are no longer together.
Um… Am I the only commenter who looks at Panel 6 and sees a domestic assault? Amber shoved him hard enough to send him sprawling, and take table with him. While not likely, a sudden and unexpected fall can cause serious injury. This is absolutely new territory–sure, she’s beaten up thugs and individuals who were, on one level or another, putting other people at risk–but this? Nothing like this, until now. She’s always held herself back from hitting someone she’s supposed to care about.
I’m not excusing Walky. He is being an ass, here, at best, or outright delusional at worst. (I’m honestly reading it as him being an ass–panel 5 is too much of a direct statement of motive for me to write it off.)
But I don’t care what the verbal provocation is; Amber has escalated, dramatically. And yes, I know, she’ll feel horrible, afterwards.
Betcha Blaine did, too, the first few times.
Amber just pole-vaulted over a line, here, and it needs to be addressed, firmly.
Yeah. She also flipped Ethan’s table (or lunch tray, I forget) when he was eating lunch with Joyce. Assault, sure. Assault of an intimate partner, sure.
Yeah, she’s got self-control issues. Going back to when she stabbed Sal. Maybe earlier.
I mean, yes. If one person attacks another, particularly when that other person is not making hostile motions in response, that is considered an assault. Generally not a good thing.
It can be considered justifiable, depending on extenuating circumstances (always punch nazis), but factually, it is an assault.
That said, Freemage is vaulting the hell over the line here. This is nothing like what Blaine got up to. I’m sure Amber will conflate the two, because of her heaping helpings of trauma, but from an outside perspective it’s not the same damn thing at all…
To use a legal analogy from ye olden days of the 18th and 19th centuries, just because two people agree to meet with pistols at dawn at a predetermined location, that doesn’t make it not manslaughter/murder if one of them ends up shot dead.
(The above was, more or less, the actual legal reasoning used to ultimately outlaw dueling.)
You’re probably not the only one, but I don’t count myself among them.
I see this much more as regular violence. Amber’s relationship with Walky does not seem to be a contributing factor to the violence, therefore I wouldn’t consider it an element of it.
The question I’m going with here is, if another person did the same actions as Walky did, would Amber’s reaction notably change? If, say, it was Becky making these comments, would Amber react differently?
I don’t think she would, at least not in a notable sense. Walky’s comments here are effectively kicking Amber right in the emotional nads, with Mike’s death very fresh, not something she’s come to terms with, and… she’s not the most mentally healthy person on a good day. The only difference between her reaction to these comments coming from Walky versus Joe, to me, is that she’d go for the legs on Joe, since she’d need to take him down to the ground before beating him into submission.
I should note, though, that this does not make this right. Walky seems to be lashing out because of his own unprocessed trauma from this whole debacle, and I’m very much a “violence bad” person 9 times out of 10. And I’m sure that Amber’s going to compare herself to Blaine because that’s the kind of damage that fucking bastard inflicted upon her.
But we shouldn’t be going “she hit her boyfriend in an extremely justifiable and understandable rage where he was acting far beyond the pale, therefore she’s no difference from her horrifically abusive father” either. That’s… honestly rather stomach-churning.
I am not sure about domestic abuse (could be assault and/or battery) and I do get why Amber is angry but yeah that is in noway an appropriate response. Amber resorts to physical violence way to quickly in general. She needs an anger management course or something like that. What she is doing now is not okay.
And Walky needs to learn as to when to just shut up.
Given the context that they’re dating…once you say that, I can’t think of any argument why it *shouldn’t be considered domestic assault that doesn’t sound like victim blaming or generally leave a sour taste in my mouth.
I’m sure this will make for more Amber “I’m such a worthless piece of shit there’s no saving me, so why bother trying” self-loathing spiraling later, but oh man, I do not care about Amber’s feelings any more. I’m completely burnt out on it. Maybe she can turn that ship around and actually improve as a person and not channel her issues into physical violence (especially against people who are no threat to herself or anyone else). Maybe. Maybe someday I’ll be able to care about her as a person/character again if she does. But I am off that train. I do not want to take that cruise with her. I’m not interested in her journey any more.
I dont know if law see difference between showing stranger and colegue, but first important question is does Walky sue her for that, without that law dont care.
As much as I fucking hate what Walky is saying here, he kind of echoes my sentiments about Mike’s death. Mainly because I’m not a fan of the “death = redemption” trope.
While Mike was an absolute piece of shit, some people still cared about him regardless. Like Amber. Like Ethan.
Remember when Danny told Ethan – to his face – that maybe Mike not waking up might be for the best? Maybe understandable on an emotional level, but still way out of line.
Walky joking about Mike’s death like that falls in the same category.
Yeah I mean, we all had the added baggage of knowing this is fiction, a story, often a comedy, a character who came back to life in another webcomic, etc etc. We also knew the background of Mike knowing the blackmail material.
I guess what I’m saying is, it’s perfectly reasonable for readers to go “I bet Mike is still alive,” while Walky is still being a dick.
(although apparently Willis confirmed at one point that Mike is Actually Dead?)
I’m pretty sure the subtext was that Mike was suicidal when he made his self-sacrifice? I mean, it’s still Blane who led him to that point by chasing him with intent to kill, as well as verbally abusing him into feeling suicidal when he otherwise would have felt bad in a “character growth,” sort of way.
Either Willis has been playing 4D chess and took notes from whatever ridiculous conspiracy theories the comments made up to put in Walky’s dialogue, or he predicted exactly what we’d say. Either way, hats off.
Just be careful to recognize the difference between people going “I understand why Character X is doing a thing” and “It’s okay for Character X to do that thing”.
I understand why Walky said what he said. Post-timeskip, he’s been sending up all kinds of flags saying that he is not handling what happened to him and Mike’s death well, and this is earlier than that, before that’s settled into a place where he’s moderately functional. He’s going through a lot of shit right now and he needs help.
But he was also being an asshole when he said that shit, and part of being an adult is being able to recognize when you do need help and seeking that out. Understanding something can come without condoning it.
Well, if you want to just view things through the lens of saintly good an devilish evil, have a blast, but there’s room for some bloody nuance in this comic, and the haughty “more moral than thou” attitude is getting tired real fast.
I agree with you. This is similar when a person makes the most surface level observation and their friend with no curiosity just says “You’re reading into this too much.” It’s not far off from saying “Don’t make a comment in the comments section.”
no you need to understand he was winning at ethics, and for him to win, other people have to lose. a very normal and rational thing to want, a desire without which, you cannot be ethical.
Of course there are people analyzing, but there’s also people justifying and if you’re doing the former then I don’t understand why my comment about the latter is an issue.
I think Walky at this moment believes what he is saying is true. Or at least is trying to convince himself of it. While not what happened (unless Willis has some wild plots in the future) it is not completely implausible. The mob was indeed involved. While not pleasant to hear Amber shoving Walky so hard into a table that it knocks over is…real bad. Taking after her father kinda bad.
“so hard into a table that it knocks over” ISTG the way y’all phrase things to cause drama. We saw this table being set up ( https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/05-this-was-halloween/joyless/ ), it’s not like a super sturdy heavy oak think or anything. Someone walking quickly without noticing could’ve knocked it over, too.
Should Amber have shoved Walky? Of course not. Did she display some sort of superhuman strength? Also no. Calm down.
Yep, it’s a folding table. Amber does not have superhuman strength. She probably didn’t hurt him beyond maybe a bruise. She does however have a pattern of violence and intimidation towards friends/loved ones when upset.
I’m generally pretty calm reading Willis’s work. Some pages have made me laugh. Others have made me confused because I didn’t get the Transformers lore. The Shortpacked! comic where he proposes to his now wife made me smile.
Remember when Amber flipped the fuck out on Danny for the heinous crime of talking to Sal without her express written consent? Or the time she stalked Sal and provoked her into a fight? Or the time she turned that one guy into Dijon mustard for quoting the Bible? Or the time she put her dad in a neck brace for talking to her boyfriend? Or the time she stabbed an unarmed black teenager for getting arrested? Or the time she lured random guys to empty houses just to ambush them and beat the piss out of them? Or the time she joined a sports team just to have an excuse to hit people?
I like Amber, but she might be a tiny bit on the violent side.
Sometimes people who were abused need to work really hard to not become abusers themselves. I can get where Amber is coming from but a bunch of her behaviour is unhealthy and dangerous for both herself and others. In the future I really hope she holds herself more responsible for her actions while not falling into self-loathing. Not an easy task, but she has already started on it.
…what. She fought back against a rapist/stalker for trying to kill her. Also faking out the guys she fought wasn’t for the sake of thrills, it was to prevent them from attacking other people (pulling agro). “quoting the bible,” oh goodness. That was not the reason.
I think she always has a reason for acting in these sorts of ways? Like, it’s something to work on, but this is a theme that Willis is choosing to explore with this character.
In a comic that is literally about dumb teenagers making awful mistakes because of their deep-rooted trauma, the audience sure seems surprised that sometimes the characters make sub-optimal choices. Who could have predicted, a comic called “Dumbing of Age,” would not contain a stellar social group of well-adjusted adults?
Hey y’all, if Walky is being a jerk…well, one can’t then say he’s not committed to the bit of being in-character in costume. Heck, he’s even doing the Head Alien voice for most of today’s strip!
I noticed also that when Joyce points out Ethan was there when Mike died, that’s when Walky breaks character and reverts back to his normal voice, because there’s no way he can explain that off.
How do people think Chekov’s frying pan is going to get used? While it is possible the fight might escalate from here, Walky fighting back here is sort of out-of-character for him, and I think its unlikely everyone else would start pounding on him just because of his insane theory.
If Walky actually tried to fight Amber (something I’ve also wondered about going forward from this strip) that would be an even clearer indication that he’s not right in the head at the moment, as he rarely resorts to violence and always in a sibling roughhousing way other than when he punched Asher.
Add in the fact that he knows Amber can fold him six ways to Sunday, for him to fight anyway would be 🤯
Obviously not totally comparable, but this reminds me of when a childhood friend died when I was in middle school as the result of a house fire. Before she had actually passed, some kid on the bus was telling everyone that she was already dead, and my sister jumped over the bus seat to beat the shit out of him for it.
I wonder if Amber will leave now or if Sal and the others will have to stop her from continuing to hit Walky. Meanwhile, Dorothy will be behind the others wondering “I did it?”
Someone’s going to get a much needed timeout to sort through his feelings I think.
The nice way of saying if Walky is this desperate to avoid feeling anything real he probably shouldn’t be around people. At least not while they’re grieving.
Watching a bunch of traumatized barely-adults grapple with their grief in increasingly unhealthy and self-destructive ways that clash horrifically against each other is fun.
And by “fun” I mean, “goddamn, Becky and Dina made the right choice to be fashionably late. I’d rather be stomping cardboard, too.”
I think he wants to be in denial. He wants to believe this story he’s come up with where Mike isn’t really dead. However, he knows it’s not true and that Mike is dead, but he can’t admit that to himself. So when he’s called out on it, he gets very angry and defensive and digs in harder.
Jerk or not. Amber has no right to assault him and she resorts to violence way too often. Telling him off is one thing, physically hurting him is another. Hopefully her actions will have some consequences.
Although, racking up all the violent moments Amber has committed, I would think the school would either kick her out or put her in charge of the campus security office’s Riot Control team.
What violence has Amber done that the school would be aware of? Only one I can think of is defending herself against Gashface. None of the smaller personal stuff got reported. Nor will this be, unless Walky somehow needs to be rushed to the hospital because of it.
The school knows about Amazi-Girl’s violence, but doesn’t know to attach it to Amber.
I would like to lightly push back against her shoving him being “necessary for the story”. It’s what happened and now there’s gonna be a reaction to it, but Willis really could have written anything and made it work exactly as well. Something had to happen, yes, that’s what stories are, but I reject the premise that this was the required event.
Going by how last comic ended, I’m guessing that this isn’t him just joking around or trying to lighten the mood. He is very much in denial and has made up this story to pretend that Mike’s not dead. However, he isn’t stupid and he knows that the story is BS. But he doesn’t want to admit that to himself. So when he gets called on it, he gets angry and defensive.
I think people are actually over-thinking this part. Walky is being sarcastic about it, literally because he’s being confronted with his trauma, at an event that was supposed to be a fun, safe night between him and his friends, and Walky is so emotionally avoidant that this constitutes a real over-step of his boundaries, and it makes him feel attacked. He genuinely does not believe that it was kind or nice or right of Dorothy to bring up something traumatic to everybody present, when they were doing something that was literally supposed to be fun (which, to Walky, means “Devoid of any serious emotions of feelings whatsoever, with zero serious content or critical awareness needed,”) and being unexpectedly ambushed by your friends with your still-fresh, open-wound trauma is pretty much the antithesis of fun, I’m sure most people here will agree. The way Walky reacts to this, is not productive or good in any way, but I think most people are failing to read why he’s reacting this way. He actually has a legit gripe, that Dorothy is out-of-line to spring this on everybody with zero consideration for how it might make everybody feel while they’re trying to have a fun night, but of course, he absolutely Walky’s up the delivery, and is immediately confused when more people don’t agree with his unreasonable expression of a very reasonable desire to not force him to pick at an open wound he was actively here to try to ignore.
I think a few commenters pointed this out, but for the first 3 panels, he’s still doing his Dexter voice. I actually read it as an echo from the helmet until his speech bubble became normal again, so as I’m interpreting it, he’s doing a silly voice while insisting Mike is alive. Now, that doesn’t say that maybe he doesn’t think that, but he’s clearly trying for some kind of joke here, which… I’ve had lots of reactions to death, and yesh, joking about it is one of them. But you have to be able to read the room to determine if that’s something that will be welcome right now, and clearly, this wasn’t one of them.
Walky is going about this in the absolute worst possible way…but on the whole, I agree with his premise? Walky is being a huge idiot about what Dorothy has done here…but also, what the fuck, Dorothy?
“Hey I get that this is a fun Hallowe’en party, but I’m gonna hijack it, apropos of nothing, to hold a moment of silence for our deceased mutual friend, giving no warning or discussion with anybody present about this extremely sensitive topic, because I Am A Leader and That Is What Leaders Do.” But, you know, one, that wasn’t her place; two, that’s genuinely absurd social behavior, which most people would naturally intuit is wildly inappropriate; three, she shouldn’t be hijacking another person’s fun event and using it to satisfy her well-meaning desire to be an authority over everybody’s feelings and conduct. Walky could not have responded more farcically worse than he did, because this is a comedy about young adults going through major life trauma, but him being utterly wrong in his response to Dorothy’s baffling combination of entitlement, misplaced sense of authority, and general condescension towards her peers, is not actually related to the fact that I really think Dorothy’s behavior here is also way out of line. It’s out of line in a much gentler, more diplomatic and subtle manner as Walky’s brand of fuck-up, but that doesn’t change the fact that I also think she has acted well beyond what her agency over this environment should have allowed her to, if she had more self-awareness, and was less obsessed with leading everybody to moral correctness to placate her massive ego. At least when Joyce tries to act like that, nearly everybody in this chat calls her on it being presumptuous and wrong.
Wait, so, when Walky is responding to a death of a peer badly it’s “going through a major life trauma” and when Dorothy does it it’s ” baffling combination of entitlement, misplaced sense of authority” and she has a “massive ego”.
Well, this is gong to be a nuclear-level meltdown for everyone where everyone says and does many bad things they regret, but it looks like I’m going to get a small moment of longed-for satisfaction out of it in the form of somebody finally beating the shit out of Walky. Bliss.
I love how Walky is one stage of grief less along than everybody at this party, and so he deserves to be assaulted. This strip’s chat never fails to disappoint.
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And so the cataclysm begins. This is gonna be so sad. 😥
*plays “O Fortuna” by Carl Orff on hacked muzak*
Nice.
Perfect choice.
Yeah this is going to be a rough stretch of comic.
Is there a place farther out than the dog house?
because DAMN, Walky gonna be sentenced there for LIFE
SHIT, dude!
The local pound?
Get it?
The outhouse?
exile him to Elba, it’s the only way to be sure
Elba? I don’t think that one went so well last time.
Somehow, Napoleon returned.
True, but at least we got a Count of Monte Cristo out of it (in fiction).
So if Walky is exiled to Elba, maybe someone supposedly dead and living under a fake name will eventually appear…
Able will he be, ere he sees it.
Thank you!
*tips hat, doesn’t say whose*
Better skip a step and go straight to St. Helena. Post a garrison and permanently station a couple of royal navy ships on patrol. We don’t want any Jurrasic Park III situations here.
well, they did keep their distance but i don’t think anyone really fully cut walky off for being an assi n this scene
Amber didn’t want to speak to him when he pooped into her room, giving us our first hint of Halloween havoc.
Then later, she nuked their conversation via Dina when she realized she was getting turned on by his new hair (for both their sakes), so I think she has basically cut him off unless I’m forgetting an interaction.
More or less.
To be fair, I wouldn’t speak to someone who pooped into my room either.
Yeah, that’d be a pretty shitty thing to do.
It was for his twitter account! Much like this joke about Mike being alive, Amber just didn’t get it!
Maybe they’ll send him floating out to sea on an ice floe with a 50-piece box of Chicken McNuggets.
You think he’d be exiled to the Yukon?
Narnia?
The hospital?
Mars.
-Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiince-
In which Walky is the comment section when we found out two years ago that Mike died during the timeskip
It’s not as funny when the person is “real”.
The thing is, it doesn’t seem like Walky is trying to be funny. He seems to legitimately believe what he’s saying. I can see the characters getting upset over this but I really hope the comments section isn’t going to turn on him for reacting to a friends death in a manner that suggests he needs a whole hell of a lot of counseling to accept the fact that Mike really is dead.
I mean naritively I would not be surprised if Walky were right, stranger more soap opera level shit has happened in this comic, but he’s basing this on nothing but not wanting it to be true.
I agree, he is not being an ass at all. He is saying this in good faith – probably really messed up over his roommate dying and being kidnapped. Plus, it does make sense.
You can have good intentions and still unknowingly be an ass.
Heck, I’d say he’s knowingly being an ass, because for all his issues, Walky’s very observant. He would know that Amber’s grieving. And he’s shown enough aptitude to be tactful when he wants to be.
This is him lashing out. Understandable, but still assholish.
He opened with “stop booing me, I’m right” and ended with “this is supposed to be a fun party”.
He knows full well that he’s being a dick.
Conspiracy theories about dead friends are kinda categorically bad faith idk
But what about conspiracy theories about alive friends who are just faking their deaths?
He’s doing a bit in his Head Alien voice (notice the squared off dialogue balloon). He’s trying to get people to laugh so they’ll enjoy the party and he can stop feeling so bad. Walky can’t deal with Mike’s death. Most 18 year olds can’t because they don’t know anybody who has died. I don’t know why so many of the comments try to make it more complicated than that.
As a former grieving 18 year old, can confirm. I made up rather similar stories. And while I was aware that I’d made them up based on absolutely nothing, at times I held into them real hard just to get a moment to breathe.
On a related note – when my first pet died, I made up my own version of heaven to cope. Eventually let go of that story and properly processed things. Later, my grandma tried to introduce me to the idea of Christian heaven. I was like ‘yeah no I’m past that phase. wait you adults really believe that? You have a problem.’ Grandma was not amused.
To be fair to literally everybody, I’ve seen like 2 comments point out that Walky was actually doing an in-character bit, and I did not even remotely catch that part of the strip myself, so I’m guessing it went over quite a lot of peoples’ heads. The strip makes 1000x more sense once I realized that.
When you see what some people believe IRL – like the earth is flat, man never landed on the moon, or 5G (which is just one narrow segment of ALL frequencies of electro-magnetic radiation) is evil and sinister – this is no different than all the people IRL who still believe Elvis faked HIS death and is still alive and well (although getting pretty long in the tooth by now).
Wouldn’t this basically just be him stuck at “Denial” when everyone else has moved on to “Depression”?
Am I the only one thinking that Walky is not jokeing? That he really think Mike is in witness protection program and this denial is simply his own way to process the grief?
Of course he is going to challenge anyone who contradict that narrative. Like, I understand where he is coming from. IT’s not a joke, he just want to be allowed to feel happy.
There are people who believe Elvis died in Witness Protection sometime in the 1980s, the Earth is flat, birds are surveillance drones, the Moon landing was fake and done on the same soundstage as the moon scenes from “2001”…
Those people usually didn’t get to know Elvis on a personal level, though.
But they confirmed Elvis did fake his death. It was covered in the documentary they made, called Bubba Ho-Tep.
p…people believe birds are what
It’s really a satirical conspiracy theory, but it’s also proof you can’t make up something dumb enough that someone on the Internet won’t believe it.
There was a conspiracy going around – satirically as thejeff said – that claimed that COVID lockdowns were a conspiracy to replace the batteries in the birds.
Oh, was that confirmed in the comments by Willis? I don’t read the comments very often.
I’ll admit the witness protection thing made a ton of sense to me. Honestly, it still would, although apparently Ethan was there when he died?
I literally know it isn’t true, but there is still a part of me that is 100% willing to and desiring to believe that Booster is literally just Mike with a haircut, living their real identity after dealing with their transition in the most over-the-top way possible. I am aware that’s not the plot of the comic, I simply want it to be. Especially because Booster clearly serves the exact same archetypal function as Mike to the story.
JFC Walky
Poor Amber.
Walky is Moron confirmed
Just to be fair, it’s really likely that Walky has ADHD, according to Mike himself (rest his legacy). Regardless, this is one mistake for which Walky is not gonna be easily forgiven.
I thought building a story to avoid having to face grief was a human thing. Denial. Are adhd people more likely to do stuff like that?
Given a lot of us have difficulty regulating emotions, we tend clasp on to any viable mechanism to help cope, regardless of how maladaptive it is. Not just ADHD either. Within overlapping stripes of autism and PTSD, at least if you’re unlucky as i am you have to bend and break your brain in all kinds of ways to be just barely functioning.
I wouldn’t be surprised myself if Walky has to climb down a denialist staircase of sorts before he’s ready to face the loss of his friend.
Walky is clearly aware of the incredibly specific words he is choosing, though. This isn’t just social awkwardness.
No.
No, but we’re more impulsive, which means we’ve got less of a “slow down and take a moment to think about how the thing you are about to say will impact people before you say it” filter.
Yes, this too. I just mean that with difficulty regulating emotions that tends to come with autism / adhd / ptsd, you tend to cling on to easier / less healthy coping mechanisms more readily as a temporary solution. the real trick is to make sure a temporary solution doesn’t become a permanent one, prioritizing of which during daily routine can also be a problem if you have ADHD
Agreed. This is humanity.
Can it not be down to both ADHD and being human? i mean, i totally agree it’s not a way to explain absolutely everything about how we act. but it’s still a part of us, and affects our emotions, how we cope and how we interact with others
Yeah, I remember the last time I loudly insisted somebody in my social circle was alive when they were clearly dead and I went to their funeral. Just ADHD things!
I don’t think it was ADHD so much as unable/unwilling to process one of his best friends from childhood was dead. He’s a budding Conspiracy Theorist trying to make sense of a world gone mad.
i think it’s more any repressed emotions/not wanting to deal with sadness as opposed to an adhd thing , plenty of ppl with adhd are self aware enough to not be like “yeah our friend died, but i’m gonna make a conspiracy theory about him secretly being in hiding, let’s stop being sad”
Yeah, ADHD has nothing to do with something like this. An attention-deficit disorder does not also come with “being a complete jackass about the recent, tragic death of friends” as a side effect. Falling asleep at the funeral or spacing out when someone is talking about how broken up they are by the death, that’d be one thing, but you can’t blame this on ADHD.
…you can blame it on how he’s very clearly traumatized, both by Mike’s death and the kidnapping and fight, and is trying to deal with that trauma in a whole host of unhealthy, self-destructive ways. There’s plenty of room for sympathy, but we can put the ADHD card away for this subject.
+1, usually can’t unscramble this egg, but this one’s clearly way more about trauma-denial than ADHD.
Really, it’s kind of hard to tell which it is more down to between trauma and ADHD? People with ADHD / Autism often get PTSD, and there’s tons of overlap.
NDs tend to defy neatness, really, but yeah trauma-denial is also a factor as well as others, including the sugar overload that Laura suggested earlier, and I’m not one to turn down a nuanced position.
I think his coping mechanisms are informed by his ADHD, and his history, and seeing his mom make shit up to be justified and getting away with it. And I hope he learns not to do that. Or at the very least not to do that when it hurts people.
Is it actually a mistake if he really think Mike is alive and in witness protection program?
For once, it wasn’t Danny who danned the situation up! XD
Danny got that out of the way when he was talking to Ethan at the hospital.
Walky fucks up, news at 11.
In other news, the sky is blue and water is wet.
good
Wow and here I thought it would be Danny that committed the social faux pas at the party.
There is plenty of time for Danny to do worse.
Yeah, let’s not rush the guy.
Hey Taffy, how’s it been? I really miss talking to you on Discord. If you still need some time away from social media, that’s totally understandable. Just wanna let you know I’ve gotten something up and running on newgrounds if you want to see it.
If I said things that offended you in the past, i may not have realized it, and really don’t want them to come between us. I have lots of fun talking to you, and don’t want that to end because of a few misunderstandings. no hard feelings, just wanted to let you know
I mean, he already did his part.
Remember when he told Ethan that Mike not waking up again wouldn’t be such a bad thing? While they were standing outside the guy’s hospital room?
And then we learned that Mike died not too long after?
That’s not what Danny said, though—he said not waking up “for a while” might not be such a bad thing. Still a foot-in-mouth moment and compounded further by Mike actually dying a few hours later, but not the same thing as saying that it would be good if Mike “never woke up again”.
Also, once again, people do regularly ignore that for 99.9% of the total duration of his existence, literally everybody he ever interacted with outside of like 3 friends only knew him as a completely manipulative, sadistic, bullying, psychopathic asshole. Saying that to one of those three friends should be a foot that’s easy to keep out-of-mouth, but while we have the benefit of being the omnipotent audience, I literally could not blame a single person in this cast for being glad that Mike is dead. Even his actual close friends, if they really felt that way.
Like, grim reminder that Mike was in the process of sexually manipulating Danny, just to get a rise out of Ethan. If Mike hadn’t died, that would have literally started happening. We all know that Mike literally always had noble intentions, as the audience, holy shit, please actually consider how fucked up that is! Mike literally acts like the guy we’ve all assumed Asher is, deep down, all the time. He just happens to be protagonist-coded, instead of antagonist-coded.
well danny already messed up with ethan at the hospital so he’d probably avoid talking about mike anymore
she still did, Walky just did a different bigger one
Walky out-Danny’d Danny, woo.
Danny’s in the background, relieved that it wasn’t him for a change.
Nope, not touching this one with a 10 foot pole.
Have a good night everyone.
I accidentally used the wrong email, whoops.
Maybe it was just instinct for Roz to talk about 10 foot poles.
What is it about Poland that makes them so tall, or well endowed, apparently.
Sure it’s not about the number of shoes that they need?
Okay I’ll have a good night, but not just cuz you told me to.
oh god damn it walky
it’s what mike would’ve wanted (maybe lol)
I feel like this outcome is exactly what Mike would have wanted.
well, maybe a fight but maybe not amber/ethan to be the violent ones
The true irony of this situation. In text, there could not be a more fitting send-off to Mike, as awful as that is to say.
Walky, dude, this is NOT the time for that coping mechanism.
Also, called it that Ethan was there when Mike died: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/05-this-was-halloween/longer/#comment-1642331
(scroll down a couple replies from the linked comment)
Well done.
Good thing he’s wearing that helmet. I don’t think he could take an uppercut as well as Blaine.
Absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong with Walky’s attempt to get everyone to stop being fucking sad, and I unreservedly endorse it.
I think if he had been straight with “hey uh Dorothy maybe this isn’t the fucking time to confront us with all our trauma,” he might have had a few people actually agree with him. But, that would have required him being sincere and emotionally open and honest, for like, two whole seconds. Definitely an unreasonable expectation, where Walky is concerned.
Well….Walky has had better moments.
To put it mildly :v
Let the walkys hit the floor
Let the walkys hit the floor
Let the walkys hit the floor
Let the walkys hit the [tch tch]
FLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
i for one welcome our death-metal-singing parrot overlords
Walky stop being a Doofus.
Amber, stop going directly to violence for all your problems.
Well, someone yelling at Walky clearly wasn’t working.
Pretty sure that still doesn’t make shoving him into a table right.
Nah. This is partly why I don’t like Amber as a person even though her character is compelling. She’s very quick to violence and rage and she even knows this about herself. Pushing Walky in this moment is understandable, forgivable, maybe even deserved, and still wrong. She has realized in the past she has the potential to go too far on this.
I keep seeing this dichotomy where we pretend violence is outside the realm of human nature and also inherently immoral, yet many of us, at the same time, agree that Walky deserved the violence. It can’t be both.
“Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
Where is that from?
I want to say Harry Potter. Or Lord of the Rings.
It sounds like wizard advice.
It’s from Lord of the Rings. Gandalf is talking about Smeagol/Gollum. To Frodo, I think, but it’s been a bit since I read the books.
Oh, you better believe he’s gettin’ his Frodo on in that scene.
Gandalf, natch.
It’s from Frodo and Gandalf’s discussion in Bag End of the One Ring’s history—Frodo had just asked why Gollum, after his capture, was still being kept alive and treated gently by the Wood-elves instead of being put to death for what he had done, and the above was (the first part of) Gandalf’s reply.
I heard this so clearly just as it was spoken in the Lord of the Rings audiobook, before I realized what it was even from.
I mean, I agree with you in part because I like consistency, and often find the comments section to be lacking in that. At the same time I think that paradox and contradictory feelings are part of human experience too. I don’t think something being paradoxical is exactly the same as being inconsistent.
you can be sure that a guy deserves a kicking, but that doesn’t give you the right to administer the kicking.
I mean my point isn’t really whether Walky deserved the shove just that Amber has no right to do the shoving. Even if she is the one most emotionally hurt she has a bad track record with violence especially with the Walkertons.
Her relationship with violence is irrelevant to the question of if she is Immoral to do this now. Where does that right (of shoving) magically come from? If a man grabbed your ass, would you slap him if he stopped before you could slap him?
Where does any right come from? All rights are invented, the entire idea is a human concept. I don’t see why this one is more magical than any of the rest.
It can be immoral to do something purely because of the effect it so have on you; if it hurts you, or causes you to regress, or sets you up to hurt more people in the future, it might be immoral. Her relationship with violence matters because it plays into all of those.
*”will have on you”, not “so have on you”.
I feel like you’re trying to make a completely different argument to mine. Your example doesn’t really apply to this situation either. It describes a scenario where someone disrespected my personal space to physically molest me, I probably would slap them for that because it would be in self defense. In this situation Walky didn’t touch Amber he just offended her which makes a violent reaction less justifiable.
My point is that Amber is more immoral for doing this because of her history of violence. If say Joyce or Sal had shoved Walky this would be less of an issue get it?
To put it another way, Jennifer getting behind the wheel of a car with a beer in her hand is worse than Becky doing the same thing because only one of them has a history of alcohol abuse and a DUI.
Nah, for most of the time we’ve seen her, Amber hasn’t been terribly prone to violence.
I’m pretty sure most of that got sectioned off into Amazi-girl when they split.
That said, if this shove was indeed Amber instead of Amazi-girl (or perhaps even HeadMike, although I don’t know if he’d showed up by this point?), be. very. afraid?
not that i condone violence irl but a lot of series would’ve def had someone like walky getting punched by another person. amber just happens to have the strength to make it worse than just an offended slap
At this point I think Walky deserved, at most, a dope slap over the top of his head. But let’s wait for tomorrow!
I think she needs more therapy for that. Like, it’s not good that she does this, but I feel like this really is just learned behaviour paired with different aspects of her childhood trauma. Not reacting with anger and violence is something that needs to be unlearned. And she IS trying, kind of? I don’t actually know if she has a therapist rn. But she doesn’t want to be like this, is my point.
I saw someone saying “she was being like Blaine” and that’s really not fair, when her father is the person who was essentially a big part of why she has the problems she has.
So, whilst she is probably still dealing with grief and guilt ontop of everything else. i’m willing to cut Amber some slack.
Also sometimes people deserve a push. Like when they’re being incredibly tactless.
It is never appropriate to respond to verbal provocation with physical violence. That is not a thing.
Imagine if, say, Jacob had shoved Joyce so hard she fell over backwards and took down a table, in response to the *king-shit* inappropriate behavior of pretending to his brother that she was his girlfriend. Would anybody be trying to argue that that was anything other than a massive, honking red flag? That it was justified and appropriate, and that she had it coming, or that it was necessary to physically knock her down to make her knock it off? Of course not! Which is why he handled it like a civilized human being, and used his *words* to tell her why it wasn’t okay, and make the consequences clear (friendship ended; romantic potential permanently shut down).
(And yeah Jacob is a big, strong dude and Joyce is comparatively tiny. But that’s the approximate strength differential between Amber and Walky.)
Oh she knows it’s wrong. This is just another incident for Amber to add to her list of red PTSD panels, the reasons she hates herself and (thinks) she should not be happy.
Also can’t wait for Lucy to find out what Walky said at his former roommmate’s funeral.
Or how he just barged into Amber’s room post time skip as if everything was fine and he wasn’t the last living person she’d want to see
Or how he basically told Ethan to stop being sad after he had to watch his best friend die in real time
Hoooooooo boy
i like lucy and walky as a couple for now but i don’t see them lasting in the long run
there is more to him than that, but dating wise he does seem like the type of boy you’d date/have a casual/summer fling with when you’re 14-15 and then move onto something more serious later
Lucy would probably be one of those better able to see how Walky has a lot of unresolved, unhandled trauma about things going on right now, just because she’s playing close (ahem, VERY close) attention to Walky, but is entirely disconnected from those events, so she doesn’t have her own baggage to cloud her perspective.
Because, yeah, while Walky’s being a jackass here, it’s not because he’s an asshole exactly. It’s because he’s been through some really ugly shit and is in deep, deep denial about it all.
Not only is he in denial, but even a few months down the line, even if he intellectually knows Mike is dead, he still thinks on some level that it is a prank because Mike bullied and gaslit him THAT HARD.
Yeah his reaction is in fairness understandable, the comments he is making are not APPROPRIATE but you can see why hes acting he way he is, a mix of trauma, denial and generally the dead individual being a not so great person to begin with who WOULD fake his own death just to fuck with people
it’s not like we haven’t discussed it in the comments too, but like, the friends of the fictional deceased can’t see that
also I don’t think we knew panel 4 (although some may have guessed that Ethan was the one who contacted Amber)
The twist: it’s actually Mike wearing the helmet, he switched places with Walky about twenty minutes ago.
Yesssss
The double-twist is that, instead of dying from his coma, he died when Amber shoved him into the snack table.
Not because she seriously injured him, but because he has a nut allergy, and the whole bowl of peanuts fell all over him.
“Wow Amber, why did you shove me, Amber. That’s so fucked up, Amber. It’s me, Mike, Amber. Your friend Mike, Amber. I’m alive, Amber, I thought you would be glad to see me, but then you shoved me, Amber. Amber that’s really cringe.” I don’t know where he fucks somebody’s Mom for a nickel, but I think I got the rest of it.
And y’all were mad at Dorothy.
Confused with Dorothy. There’s a difference.
Coping is coping. Dorothy coping by remember Mike. Walky coping by dont remember Mike and dont want dead Mike in the party. Difference is Walky was rude about that and for someone point of view could offence memory of Mike but like Chazkuangshi point out some comments yesterday thought that Dorothy ruined the party
Dorothy could have remembered Mike in the privacy of her own head, where y’know, remembering takes place. What she did instead was “and now EVERYBODY is going to go down painful memory lane, whether they like it or not”.
I mean
Is it not common enough during events like these to talk about and have a moment of silence for a recently deceased friend? (Was Mike a friend? Frenemy? I dunno) No one seemed particularly upset with her before walky opened his mouth.
If anything people often do that if only so its known that, even if they’re doing a fun thing they’re still grieving, still thinking about the person themselves, but they’re going to try enjoy themselves despite it.
I’ve seen it a few times before too, life doesnt stop for you when someone goes, but it is respectful to give a moment to think on them.
“Is it not common enough during events like these to talk about and have a moment of silence for a recently deceased friend?”
Nnnnooooo? This what wakes and funerals are for, not “random party”.
“No one seemed particularly upset with her before walky opened his mouth.”
That’s because there’s literally three people this is actually affecting: Amber and Ethan, who were his friends, and Walky, who got routinely abused by him for a semester. Maybe four, because Danny is the type to go “oh no, I said it wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t wake up, AND HE DIDN’T”. You think Sarah or Sal care?
“If anything people often do that if only so its known that, even if they’re doing a fun thing they’re still grieving, still thinking about the person themselves”
“so its known that”
So, performative shit.
You really think wakes and funerals are the only place it’s ever appropriate to acknowledge a very fresh, common loss, in a social gathering? This would be…completely normal in my circles. Calling for a moment of silence isn’t demanding that everyone spend the entire party dwelling on the sad thing, it’s being respectful. I mean, everyone grieves in their own way, but many, many people find it painful to have to pretend that nothing is wrong, or have everyone around them avoiding talking about the sad thing. Other people’s silence on the subject (because they don’t want to make the bereaved party sad, by reminding them!) can be really alienating to a lot of folks experiencing loss.
I think it’s fair for you to say that in the same situation, you wouldn’t welcome someone doing what Dorothy did, but I think it’s pretty weird to act like EVERYONE MUST FEEL THE SAME WAY and that she’s being a show-offy asshole for saying something nice about a dead friend and calling for a moment of silence, or that it’s inherently socially inappropriate to mention a dead person outside of a funeral.
Really? It’s normal in your friend circle to publicly call for a moment of silence in a completely unrelated event over someone that literally only one person present cared about (and it wasn’t you)?
Literally everyone at this party knew Mike. Joyce *just said* they were all at his funeral! Whether or not they liked him or considered him a friend, he was a regular presence in the overlapping social circles that make up the group in this room, and his recent violent death is probably on everyone’s mind to some degree (if nothing else, this is probably the first gathering they’ve had as a group SINCE the funeral). Yes, absolutely, 100%, in any social circle or workplace I have ever encountered, not only would it be normal and unexceptional to call for a moment of silence to honor a recently deceased person wildly known among the attendees, it would be considered more appropriate to do so than not to. Like, if no one mentioned the person, people would be talking about *that* later—“couldn’t someone have said something?”
Personally I don’t think talking about death needs to be *more* taboo in American society than it already is.
I feel that this is a “subjective life experiences,” sort of debate. What you’re describing isn’t my life experience at all– death is something that I’m used people talking about, including dead people.
When people get hush hush about it after someone dies or people try to forget, that’s what weirds me out and makes me feel sick. Why do you feel the need to compartmentalize that much? I don’t understand.
I’m still gonna say bringing it up in the first place was a dumb idea on Dorothy’s part but holy fucking shit Walky
Walky’s whole history has meant that he presents as a harmless and comic goofus to survive. And that any trauma be avoided no matter how ludicrous the rationale, because that is how he’s survived a traumatic (and let’s face it, abusive) childhood.
🫢
I expected disaster, and even so I’m appalled. Can confirm that death by head-landing does not make for a happy or pleasant open casket! Really should have left that thing closed!
But the fact that he didn’t immediately die says to me there’s a limitation on how bad it could have been.
People can survive some gnarly shit, and Mike didn’t survive very long
To be fair to that point, I sort of thought that we were all at least partially considering that he’d been killed by cops, not died naturally from his injuries?
If Walky’s joking around, yeah, that’s a dick move, but if he’s actually in denial then I feel for him here.
Oh he’s very clearly in denial. Doesn’t give him the license to be an ass.
Okay, don’t think we’re gonna see this one the same way. Have a nice day.
According to Mike, Walky “clearly has ADHD”. Given that a lot of us have difficulty coping and regulating emotions, I say this checks out.
A disability (if Walky does have one) isn’t a free pass to be a jerk. Walky’s actions can be understandable, even tolerable. It doesn’t mean people have to be okay with them. His actions still affect other people.
Disability related or not, I still think it’s a lot easier to sympathize with someone who’s actually freaking out in denial than someone just making a joke.
Can’t blame the other characters for reacting badly, especially Amber, but we can still see where Walky’s coming from.
But describing his behavior as “being a jerk” makes no sense.
Just because Walky might have issues regulating his emotions doesn’t mean he doesn’t understand them. Walky’s very smart and trope aware, you have to give him credit because just because he might have ADHD doesn’t mean he’s invalid. He knows enough to ease off his joking behaviour when Jennifer was having a bad day.
Walky is around Amber enough to pick up that she’s not doing well.
It doesn’t make him a malicious jerk, because his behaviour is understandable, but it’s still a jerk move when the news of his death is pretty darn fresh.
I literally never suggested that he was invalid because of his ADHD. :/
ADHD doesn’t make Walky a malicious jerk.
Doubling down makes him a malicious jerk.
It certainly does.
Whatever explanation he has for his behavior, and it might be a great one, he’s still hurting others.
Okay but if he is in Denial then… like, can you blame someone for actions they took while their perception of reality was warped? They didn’t Know the information they possess are false?
Yes, we can.
Has Walky verified this? No. Did he just decide to tell people who went to his funeral, went through and is going through grieving, that his completely unfounded theory about someone’s death is correct? Yes. Did he double down when people call him out and poke holes in his denial? Yes.
We can’t blame Walky for his denial, but we can blame him for his actions.
It’s not even really “blame” at this point, it’s just an outright statement of fact that he’s doing and saying these things, entirely of his own volition.
No amount of denial, or shock, or ADHD, or magical sugar drunkenness, or anything else, makes it remotely okay for him to act the way he’s acting. We can understand the why and how, but they don’t get to matter more than the impact he’s having on everyone around him. The worst he’s gotten for it short-term is some loud swear words and a shove, and to be frank he should feel lucky they’re being so nice to him.
Yes, we can, which is why you’re still getting punished for things you did while drunk or high.
Good point, that being said the temporary insanity plea is a valid defence in court. I imagine it has to do with whether a person’s mental capacity was compromised due to their own actions (drinking, taking drugs, maybe going off of prescribed meds) vs things out of their control (their mental health deteriorating on its own)
<@Eldritchy: I feel it’s worth noting here that it’s actually very difficult to actually succeed on an insanity plea—certainly a lot harder than pop culture often makes it seem. You basically need to prove, to legal standards, that your client was/is literally mentally incapable of discerning the difference between the right and wrong thing to do.
Yeah, I am fully prepared for him to be like “no guys you don’t get it. someone we know- my roommate- dying?? that’s impossible.”
If he believes it then how is he being an ass? From his point of view He’s just trying to cheer his friends up by making sure they know the truth about Mike not being dead.
He’s in denial, not delusional. He doesn’t actually believe half the stuff he’s spouting.
But he’s acting like they are all fucking idiots for thinking he’s dead.
Also I missed this at first, but the square speech bubbles mean he’s saying all this in a silly joke-y Head Alien voice (until he starts shouting). Really changes the read.
good noticing, I missed that
I always interpret it as his voice being muffled in a box than an accent
We’ve seen lots of talking while wearing the helmet in the past. It doesn’t normally cause HA-style speech bubbles.
All by people who knows how to talk in a helmet. On this one, everyone is already silent for Dorothy’s speech so he could be heard without raising his voice
Its like Walky got possessed by Mike’s ghost. Actually pretty appropriate for a Halloween arc!
*blink* *blink blink* *blink blink ka-blink*
I did check the cast page and I don’t get what you’re referring to.
I feel like it’s no coincidence that Walky is wearing a costume where we can’t see his face. This sounds like classic stupid glib Walky, but I’m betting it’s tearful-and-not-coping-well Walky.
I also noted that he’s saying everything in a Head Alien voice (note the shape of the speech bubbles) until the penultimate panel, when he starts SUDDENLY SHOUTING.
Is that head alien voice or is it coincidentally the same speech bubbles used when talking in the helmet regardless?
Never mind. I didn’t notice the bubble change at the end.
And here I was going back to the last time Sal spoke while wearing the helmet (nearly two and a half years ago) just in case Sal somehow did an Alien voice while wearing the helmet.
She did not. 😛
Oh wow, good catch. Yeah, he’s tripping on copium. Not healthy, the poor kid.
I feel bad for everyone here. Dorothy dropped an emotional bomb by forcing everyone to think about Mike again when they’re only a few days removed from the funeral and their guards were down, but I know she meant well. Walky is so deep in his own denial that he’s causing Amber a lot of distress, among others…
Poor, dumbing babies. At least we know that most of them are a little further along in healing by the end of the I’ll leave You a Phantom storyline.
Walky’s childhood has taught him to be passive, harmless and submissive (in a goofy way) to survive. And that any trauma should be ignored or rationalised away no matter how ridiculous the premise (a skill set I think he learned from his father). It’s not healthy and is something he needs to address. Except his whole life has taught him that anything can and should be ignored or rationalised (no matter how stupidly) in the name of a ‘quiet life’.
dang it, walky
We’re gonna have another closed-casket funeral in a minute.
If there’s even enough left to bury.
I don’t think your joke landed Walky.
The joke didn’t land, but Walky did. Bah dum chhh
Good thing he’s wearing a helmet.
Well that sure went from awkward to appalling to fuck it, smash the Reese’s and leave before the cops show up.
So this is why Becky didn’t know what happened between Walky and Amber even though they were invited. She and Dina were busy stomping offensive cardboard.
Also, Joyce swearing.
Hard to believe she wouldn’t have heard about it later.
Jesus, Walky, asshole much?
Yeah I posted late on yesterday’s suspecting something like this and yeah, checks out. I won’t rehash that too much because I’m busy dealing with other shit, but: Mike made elaborate fake websites to trick Walky into thinking his favorite cartoon had been cancelled, specifically to make Walky upset. Is this a dick thing to say? Yeah. But we know even months later post-timeskip that Walky has some trauma from Mike’s mind games and half expects him to reveal it was a prank. I think this isn’t just denial, Walky would GENUINELY buy Mike faking his own death just to mess with them, because that was his consistent experience with Mike.
Like, Amber’s still well within her rights to dump him for this, but it does make SENSE as more than just Walky being goofy and inappropriate – Mike was THAT BAD to Walky, which is one of the reasons why he narratively HAD to be gone in some way. There’s no way he could keep being Mike to any of the characters he interacted with, because they were all realistically traumatized by his antics.
We’re not supposed to acknowledge that Mike straight-up bullied Walky.
Mike straight up bullied pretty much everyone.
Except Ethan.
He was literally about to start the process of sexually manipulating the boy Ethan was interested in dating, specifically to fuck with Ethan, because Ethan laid a hard boundary against Mike fucking with that boy. IIRC, that boy was Danny. So, no, Mike was about to start bullying Ethan hardcore, using Danny as the fucking weapon. I cannot comprehend how much people in this generally very sensitive chat constantly condone his consistently monstrous behavior. I know he always had good intentions or whatever, audience omnipotence, but holy shit he still was openly sadistic and narcissistic beyond comedic quirk or punchline as explanations.
Good reminders about the fake websites and such.
It’s sad how much power Mike still holds on Walky…
This is like when Nick Fury died for the umpteenth time and instead of mourning Dum Dum Dugan and the rest of the surviving Howling Commandos just went out partying and made bets if what was being buried was a clone, an MVA, a skrull, or just someone who had plastic surgery.
Wow, this is an excellent point.
Walky’s lucky he’s (currently) hot, because he’s dumb as hell.
In addition: Holy shit, Amber just killed him in front of everybody. I can’t believe Walky is fucking dead. This is gonna mess with the dynamics going forward, for sure.
So let me get this right: post-timeskip “Walky” is actually a disguised Reginald, Duke of Thingley?
now that he’s broken his vow and killed mike off, im sure willis is planning on making the next fifty years of dumbing of age just a tightening spiral of the characters dying one by one.
Fuckface will be the last one standing. The last 25 years of the strip will be said iguana eating lettuce.
Willis has to fulfil the vow to make Fuckface the most-appeared character SOMEHOW.
Willis is going to turn this into And Then There Were None, and the end reveal is that the murderer is Mike, who actually faked his own death.
I mean, we are all at least in agreement that Walky is literally correct about Mike faking his own death, right? Right?
Dude’s brain is totally scrambled by cartoons. I suspect this is more him being in denial than anything though.
Huh… So this is Walky’s… poor. oh so poor error in judgement—attempt at coping! Rather than treat things with the tone necessary, he adds extremely inappropriate levity to the situation in hopes that everything can remain copacetic.
I’m pretty sure he needs therapy…
Oh yeah. A lot of his scenes after the time-skip have been pretty heavily emphasizing that he is NOT handling Mike’s death well, but it’s a lot of under-the-surface stuff that’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it.
Levity would imply he’s joking rather than deluded.
Yeah I am not sure he is actually genuinely in denial/delusional, especially when the immediate previous conversation he just had with Amber was her thanking him for not taking things seriously, so that combined with his sugar high I think possibly made him think that pretending Mike isn’t dead was the best to try to change the subject from the heavy topic Dorothy brought up from her little speech.
I didn’t notice the square speech bubbles at first. They mean he’s using a silly Head Alien voice for most of this strip (until he starts shouting). Really changes the read, he’s doing a bit.
Of course he can be in denial *and* joking, that’s how my family rolls, but yeah the silly voice does a lot here to change the interpretation from Proxiehunter’s to Theozilla’s.
Why do I get the feeling that Mike might’ve actually been the headmate who pushed him?
Then again, is their Mike factive actually capable of fronting and/or possession?
These terms you use, they are unfamiliar to me.
basically one of ambers other ‘personalities’ like amazi-girl, though so far we’ve only seen her talk with mike rather than him ‘taking over’
I thought he was just a hallucination.
i mean, that’s definitely a part of amber’s mental illnesses and such even if Amazi-girl is more ‘weaponized’
I’ll also point out that not all plurality is necessarily “disordered”, at least not in the sense that it negatively impacts systems being able to go about living their lives.
Dissociative Identity Disorder is probably the best-known form of plurality, especially of traumogenic plurality, but it’s far from the only form. (That said, basically all of the systems I know have some sort of trauma. It’s just a matter of whether that trauma is the cause of their plurality or merely incidental to it.)
It is unclear if he is just a hallucination or if he is also an alter.
A headmate that only interacts through imposition rather than thought-bursts/fronting/possession/etc?
Amber is plural. There’s more than one person in that brain. A set of people sharing a single brain is generally referred to as a system.
Amazi-girl is Amber’s main headmate (kinda like a roommate, but sharing a brain instead of a house/apartment/dorm room)
A fictive is a type of headmate that shows up based on a fictional character, based on the brain’s modeling of that character. (Authors sometimes end up with this type of headmate too!)
A factive is like that but based on a real person instead of a fictional one.
Fronting is what it’s called when a particular headmate is in primary control of the body/consciousness.
Possession is when another headmate borrows control from the fronter without actually being in front themselves
I don’t think I’m the only one to conclude that Amber’s hallucinatory Mike, seen in previous chapters, is actually another headmate in the system, and since he’s based on an actual person (in canon, at least), he would be a factive.
(source: I’m just a singlet—I’m the only person in my head, so far as I know—but I’m friends with a fair number of plural systems. One tends to pick up on things in such situations.)
Huh, I haven’t heard those terms before. I’ve had friends with DID call the various identities “multis” and them referring to who in in control as who is on the surface. Perhaps it’s a regional thing?
(also sorry I accidentally flagged your comment when I went to press reply)
don’t worry, there’s like, 5 votes to ban and the commenter will never know about this missclick
actually, now it’s dozens more
“headmate” is the term I’ve heard my friends use.
I gather that “alter” has some similar overtones as “transsexual” in trans circles: it’s historically an overly medicalized term and thus may carry some pejorative overtones to many folks (and may not always be precisely accurate in the latter case), but some still identify with it. I gather that the usage advice is also similar: if a system specifically uses the term to describe themselves, fine, but don’t use it to describe people without their consent.
(repeating the disclaimer: I’m a transfemme singlet, so I know fairly well whereof I speak about trans stuff, but my plurality knowledge is second-hand, albeit closely so. Either way, neither of these overlapping communities is monolithic, and opinions within them may differ.)
Out of curiosity, where is the line drawn between imaginary friend and fictive?
Uh…well the answer to that is whether they are an actual distinct personality within the mind of a system. Like, it’s not just a “I think Dora the Explorer is in my head”, but an actual, real distinct personality who identifies AS Dora the Explorer genuinely existing within that person.
Imaginary friends don’t actually exist, they aren’t hallucinations, nor delusions, they’re just a way that people (particularly children) engage in fantasy. A person with an imaginary friend is no more comparable to a fictive than someone who believes in santa claus or the tooth fairy.
The simplest way to put it really is that an imaginary friend is not real as it IS a fictional character and a fictive is real because it is an alter based ON a fictional character.
It’s like how Sora from Kingdom Hearts is a fictional character, he is not real. He is the imaginary friend and he would still be imaginary if I was imagining him sitting next to me.
But if I woke up tomorrow identifying myself as Sora from Kingdom Hearts, I would still be real even if my appearance, personality, mannerisms or decisions were based on a fictional character. You could not imagine me into not being Sora, I would be Sora and you could not make me stop being Sora.
This is a bit of a simplification though as most systems cannot create new alters at will (I have heard a few systems that fragment regularly MAY be able to, but this is definitely not the majority experience, it is mostly uncontrollable). In the usual case to my understanding your brain decides this character has something the system ‘needs’ or the system forms a strong emotional attachment to the character, and the brain adds them to the brain crew. The fictive does not ‘choose’ to be character X, they just ARE character X.
There is no perfectly clean 1 to 1 way to define the experience of a fictive forming experience I think because the closest thing to it is like cosplaying but like, you never knew anything before being the character you are based on and only know yourself as this character so you can’t ‘stop’ being the character. Because that is who you know yourself as and who you are.
Two (at least?) of the systems I know are tulpagenic.
I gather that tulpamancy (in the secular sense, at least) is something kinda(?) like intentionally creating and interacting with an imaginary friend so vividly/strongly that the brain makes them an independent personality. This process may be harder or easier depending on a given brain, and I gather that once a brain is “rewired” (or however you want to put it) for plurality, gaining new headmates can become easier. For example, for one of the aforementioned systems I know, it took years for the first tulpa to be able to have any physical control of the body or for her to interact externally at all, but they were later able to spin up a third headmate in a matter of hours/days.
(same disclaimers as in my previous comments still apply)
Headmate Mike… Headmike?
I don’t think Wally is being an asshole. I think he’s genuinely delusional.
Sorry. I meant Walky obviously.
Its Wally!!
In which Walky commits the ultimate faux pas: saying, “Stop booing me, I’m right!” when he is neither being booed nor right.
He’s experiencing Meme Rot, which is unfortunately terminal.
Meme rot *and* butts disease. A true medical tragedy.
I absolutely loathe people that think and talk in memes.
That’s not very poggers of you. Decidedly un-based, even.
Agreed. It’s not very cash money of them. The very antithesis of goated with the sauce.
i want to say that this has been cringe, but alas, then I, too, will become cringe. absolutely a shambles
welp… I was wondering what would trigger things in the ‘Present.’ I think we can agree this is hell of a trigger
I really want Wally to be right, though.
I have this idea that is probably wrong, but what if all the other people there *also* knew that Mike is in witness protection (or at least some of them) and they are getting mad at Walky because he is blowing Mike’s cover and risking him getting killed by the mob?
can we just go to the AU that’s a serious detective comic about Mike fighting the mob and police corruption under an assumed identity, that story seems less emotionally traumatizing than teens with trauma in college
Per WebMD, hyperglycemia can cause impaired cognitive functioning, confusion, disorientation, poor judgment, difficulty making decisions and processing information, audiovisual hallucinations, blurred vision, and poor impulse control. There are several other risk factors for hyperglycemic mental impairment, which coincide with Walky’s current physical and mental circumstances. We just saw him “consume so much sugar he could phase in and out of our physical plane of existence” and physically vibrating into a blur. I believe he’s consumed so much sugar that his judgment is impaired.
It’s like talking to a drunk person at a party. Sometimes they just talk out their a** and don’t make sense, or have no sense of how to behave appropriately and respect others’ needs.
Oooooh! This is not an angle I had considered!
Could be that. Could also be down to the intensity of the trauma, emotional regulation difficulty from ADHD and subsequent temporary coping mechanism that he never found the time to replace. Could be all of those, plus some others.
Lots of factors at play here.
Also, PTSD can cause paranoia, delusion or hallucination, dissociation or detachment from reality, and a tendency to suspect conspiracies. I’m frankly flabbergasted that they’re not all more unhinged than they are, after what happened to them.
I just think about all the people who’ve lost friends and family to COVID but still think COVID is a hoax. Or who have lost people to gun violence but still believe that gun violence is due to “false-flag” psy-ops. I’ve worked with some very traumatized people who have some very delusional and conspiratorial beliefs, doubting the reality of their situations. We have so many people like that in this country right now — who are so vulnerable to charlatans like Alex Jones, who are selling them a vision of a conspiratorial puzzle, where all the pieces fall neatly into place, which is more palatable to believe than the messy and tragic evidence right before them. I think mass PTSD and deliberate manipulation by fearmongers can help explain some of the deep mistrust in “official” reporting, some of the deep divisions in how the people of the US perceive reality.
I can think of a much more fun way to cope, that’s much more healthy too.
If the world doesn’t want to play fair, you can always temporarily escape reality and have fun with others in virtual worlds / online games!
And if you’re up to it like i am, you can even try your hand at making your own. Playing and making games as art to express myself has been a very valuable coping mechanism indeed, just putting all this out there for those who want to explore their options! 😉
Yeah, Amber even seems to have gained a new headmate in the aftermath.
Whether HeadMike sticks around for long is something we readers can only guess at while we wait to see.
I think we all should appreciate the fact that Danny is doing the smart thing and shutting up right now
As am I! Yay me!
I’m so proud of me.
let the walkies hit the
*symbol crash*
FLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOR
(I stole this from the alt text lmao)
Wait, no, I’ve got a better one:
THESE FIVE WOOOOORDS IN MY HEAD SCREAM ARE WE HAVING FUN YEEEET?
noooo, the snacks!
too soon, Walky
Also, good thing Walky is wearing a helmet. He really doesn’t need a brain injury today.
I see a lot of people dunking on Walky, and like… I don’t really feel that he entirely deserves it?
Obviously, this whole elaborate narrative is a shitty thing to bring up in front of people who are clearly trying to take this tragedy seriously (though given how much Mike fucked with him, I can totally believe that Walky genuinely believes in this delusion), but his Sudden Shouting in panel 5? That, to me, is probably the most relatable reaction to the death so far.
Walky wasn’t the one who brought up Mike, that was Dorothy. I’m not saying she’s literally Satan for doing so or anything, it genuinely seemed to be her way of dealing with the grief, herself. But holy hell, that’s not the kind of thing you can just spring on someone and expect them to react well.
If I went to a party so soon after someone in my friend group died, I’d probably be expecting some levity, a good time to take everyone’s mind off it. So if one of my friends suddenly went “Hey, let’s remember that guy who’s no longer with us,” my first thought would probably be “But why? This is a fun Halloween party. Can we please stop being fuckin’ sad?”
So yeah, I dunno. Amber’s right to be angry, especially after that cartoony witness-protection shit, and this is a perfectly valid reason to dump him, but at the same time I think Walky’s right to just want a single evening where he doesn’t have to be reminded of the fact that he has a dead roommate.
Walky can be right in the 4th panel while still being an ass in the first three.
I mean… Yes. I even acknowledged that, twice, in my previous comment. Right here and now definitely wasn’t the best time to pull out the dumb witness-protection theory, and resorting to a shouting match when that theory is countered is some classic Walky childishness.
The point, though, is that each panel doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There’s no timeline-jump between the panels that suddenly changes the context of the situation. Walky’s being an asshole, but I personally feel that his reason for being one is somewhat justifiable, and that reason remains constant throughout the whole strip.
A less inappropriate way for him to express that would be “I still can’t believe this isn’t just one of his elaborate pranks”, not making a declarative statement that it is one.
That would be less inappropriate, but would also require him to have processed mikes death and not be in denial about it. This doesn’t seem like Walky is joking, he genuinely believes mike is alive. He doesn’t want to be sad, and his brain has latched onto this theory so he doesn’t have to grieve. Anything that threatens this fragile coping mechanism is going to make him angry and dig his heels in even further because he desperately doesn’t want to be wrong. He is scared that they’re right, so the anger replaces his fear to protect himself and his delusion. In short, people don’t always behave rationally or socially acceptably when they are grieving.
None of that is to excuse walky, I think he owes everyone in this room an apology once he’s in a healthy enough mental place to recognise he’s wrong. But I don’t think he is intentionally being a dick, and i feel quite sorry for him. This kind of denial in the face of death is quite relatable to me.
Yup. Like someone said yesterday, he’s constructed this elaborate fantasy as a mechanism to avoid confronting that fact.
I really think a lot of people are missing, is that the subtext of the bit he is doing, and thus the way his tone should be read, is “Dorothy, drop the trauma shit, why are you bringing up our fresh trauma out of nowhere on us, that’s fucked;” but nobody takes it that way, because Walky can’t be emotionally honest about that, and so when he uses a sarcastic bit to communicate that subtext, the other very traumatized people in the room, take it merely as Never Serious Walky doing an utterly insensitive bit. But, Walky literally can’t directly talk about his emotions, that did not fly in his household. He actually can only communicate like this, especially under the intense emotional pressure he feels when being ambushed with his trauma.
I don’t think people would be so confused, if they understood why he was doing what he is doing. It is so utterly odd to me that 98% of readers seemed to jump to the explanation being that Walky is genuinely delusional about Mike being dead, that’s an extreme leap for this comic. Amber’s literally hallucinating the dude, and even she knows he’s dead as hell.
Nope. He deserves it.
Sure but like, it was also a huge elephant in the room and sometimes you just need to bring it up to get it out of everyones system so you can continue with the fun
People are pretty good at compartmentalising things, even if they dont think they are, so while some may get teary eyed it also opens the floor to actually just
Talking about them. Generally this sort of thing with most people opens the floor to people talking positively and kinda… heal a bit by speaking of said person. Because they did exist, and talking about someone who has passed is normal, and should be.
A party the person wouldve gone to and everyone at it knows is pretty appropriate to say for a moment of silence
Yeah, all of this. I find the angry commentary about how awful Dorothy is for doing a perfectly normal thing….bizarre.
Well, the answer to that is that a much larger number of people than you were expecting do not believe that ambushing people with fresh, raw trauma out of the blue without their consent, is a particularly friendly thing to do. I’m utterly shocked that people think such behavior from Dorothy was even within her right, let alone warranted. That’s so presumptuous, and superior, and entitled of her.
“Consent”. That is *hilarious*. The idea that Dorothy needs “consent” in order to make reference to something that everyone is aware of, about a mutual acquaintance…I’ve seen the concept of consent weaponized before, but never in such a strange way as the way you’re using it here.
Agreed; totally and utterly ludicrous in every possible way. What is the world coming to?
He deserves it, but he doesn’t deserve to deserve it?
Amber a few pages ago : “it guess I really need someone like you, Walky, someone incapable of taking anything seriously”
Amber now : “Forget I said anything”
Yeah, plus there’s Sal, having previously called Walky “heroic” for telling jokes throughout the kidnapping:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/04-is-a-song-forever/thick/
Maybe Walky thinks that being the fun-enforcer is just what people expect from him.
Yeah, right?
Like, today, everyone is fucking shoving him, figure and literally. As he is making a thing he was expected to do.
Walky is clearly making a Mike’s move. I didn’t understood their rage.
No, it’s just… uh, how to say. I think Walky’s standard way of being is trying to dodge anything painful with jokes, no matter the cost.
(he may be tearing up behind that helmet tho)
Honestly I think the helmet was an important narrative addition to the costume for exactly this reason! We CAN’T see his face or gage the degree to which he believes what he’s saying. Personally I think he is stuck in “I cope through jokes” and “I cope through denial” and “emotions make me desperately uncomfortable” and OOPS all of that combined and fell out of his face in the worst way possible.
At least he was wearing the helmet, so it wouldn’t fall *on* his face.
Mike can attest what happens with such falls.
[/poor taste]
I actually read him as kind of angry in his sarcasm, here. He’s like, “Dorothy, what the fuck, you think that’s appropriate?” and it’s partly just Walky literally avoiding his emotions, at all times and all costs, but I still am on the side that Dorothy was being extremely careless with her friends feelings and boundaries by doing this with absolute presumption and no caution, just because it’s the kind of thing leaders do, and so naturally it’s her responsibility to foist it on everybody, whether or not they are willing.
You know what, this is the only plausible sympathetic read on what Walky’s probably aiming for here I have yet to encounter in the comments section today. He’s very obviously doing a bit, and it is not finding a receptive audience, but he’s doubling down on it and upsetting people anyway. That’s not cool, and we know he can do better than that. But! As you say, this is something that not only do people expect of Walky—lightheartedness and jokes even in inappropriate or stressful situations—but also claim to like about him.
He’s also traumatized, and in that context, I can see why he’s clinging to “let’s just pretend everything is really okay and have fun” even in the face of direct, explicit pushback.
Damn, literally a perfect character foil with Dorothy that way. I never thought about that.
like, four strips ago I was commenting that I was genuinely empathizing with Walky. shoulda known that wouldn’t last.
man how dare he not wanted to be confronted with extreme, days-old open-wound trauma, at a fun party celebrating one of his favorite holidays with his close personal friends, in a space that was supposed to be emotionally safe for him. impossible to understand how someone might feel that way, gotta say.
Not sure which is worse: If Walky really believes that or if he’s being “SERIOUS SUCKS! MUST BE GOOFYWACKY!”
Both. Which makes it worse.
Worse, he’s multitasking.
The fact that he’s doing a bit, is in direct protest of the topic of their mutual trauma being breached, because he doesn’t feel that a fun holiday party is the correct space to be ambushed with something like that. This is par for the course with his generally avoidant nature when it comes to the emotional realm, but also, this is like a week removed from the funeral, at best. He has a legitimate grievance, in terms of not wanted to be re-confronted with that trauma on a night that, from his perspective, was supposed to literally help him forget about said trauma. It’s just that he’s so emotionally stunted, and unable to communicate his feelings effectively, that he can’t approach placing that boundary in a way that isn’t utterly insensitive and inappropriate. He has a legitimate grievance, but under duress and pressure, he completely failed to address it in a sensitive or productive way.
What the fucking fuck, Walkerton
Yikes, I don’t know if Walky’s joking. truly in denial. or some other reason. Whichever of the three, I can see why Amber and him are no longer together.
Good move, Amber.
Oh this comment section’s gonna be lively tonight.
Also, time to re-read everything from the beginning of the time skip with this recontextualization…
Um… Am I the only commenter who looks at Panel 6 and sees a domestic assault? Amber shoved him hard enough to send him sprawling, and take table with him. While not likely, a sudden and unexpected fall can cause serious injury. This is absolutely new territory–sure, she’s beaten up thugs and individuals who were, on one level or another, putting other people at risk–but this? Nothing like this, until now. She’s always held herself back from hitting someone she’s supposed to care about.
I’m not excusing Walky. He is being an ass, here, at best, or outright delusional at worst. (I’m honestly reading it as him being an ass–panel 5 is too much of a direct statement of motive for me to write it off.)
But I don’t care what the verbal provocation is; Amber has escalated, dramatically. And yes, I know, she’ll feel horrible, afterwards.
Betcha Blaine did, too, the first few times.
Amber just pole-vaulted over a line, here, and it needs to be addressed, firmly.
Yeah. She also flipped Ethan’s table (or lunch tray, I forget) when he was eating lunch with Joyce. Assault, sure. Assault of an intimate partner, sure.
Yeah, she’s got self-control issues. Going back to when she stabbed Sal. Maybe earlier.
It’s fine, he is wearing an helmet.
Though seriously, should every brawl be classified an assault? Is it an assault any time two person arguing come to fists?
was will Smith slapping Chris rock an assault?
Physical contact makes it battery, I think.
(I am not a lawyer, not even a Lionel Hutz grade one.)
I mean, yes. If one person attacks another, particularly when that other person is not making hostile motions in response, that is considered an assault. Generally not a good thing.
It can be considered justifiable, depending on extenuating circumstances (always punch nazis), but factually, it is an assault.
That said, Freemage is vaulting the hell over the line here. This is nothing like what Blaine got up to. I’m sure Amber will conflate the two, because of her heaping helpings of trauma, but from an outside perspective it’s not the same damn thing at all…
To use a legal analogy from ye olden days of the 18th and 19th centuries, just because two people agree to meet with pistols at dawn at a predetermined location, that doesn’t make it not manslaughter/murder if one of them ends up shot dead.
(The above was, more or less, the actual legal reasoning used to ultimately outlaw dueling.)
I wish assault could not exist when 2 people could fight in same phisical condition.
You’re probably not the only one, but I don’t count myself among them.
I see this much more as regular violence. Amber’s relationship with Walky does not seem to be a contributing factor to the violence, therefore I wouldn’t consider it an element of it.
The question I’m going with here is, if another person did the same actions as Walky did, would Amber’s reaction notably change? If, say, it was Becky making these comments, would Amber react differently?
I don’t think she would, at least not in a notable sense. Walky’s comments here are effectively kicking Amber right in the emotional nads, with Mike’s death very fresh, not something she’s come to terms with, and… she’s not the most mentally healthy person on a good day. The only difference between her reaction to these comments coming from Walky versus Joe, to me, is that she’d go for the legs on Joe, since she’d need to take him down to the ground before beating him into submission.
I should note, though, that this does not make this right. Walky seems to be lashing out because of his own unprocessed trauma from this whole debacle, and I’m very much a “violence bad” person 9 times out of 10. And I’m sure that Amber’s going to compare herself to Blaine because that’s the kind of damage that fucking bastard inflicted upon her.
But we shouldn’t be going “she hit her boyfriend in an extremely justifiable and understandable rage where he was acting far beyond the pale, therefore she’s no difference from her horrifically abusive father” either. That’s… honestly rather stomach-churning.
I am not sure about domestic abuse (could be assault and/or battery) and I do get why Amber is angry but yeah that is in noway an appropriate response. Amber resorts to physical violence way to quickly in general. She needs an anger management course or something like that. What she is doing now is not okay.
And Walky needs to learn as to when to just shut up.
Given the context that they’re dating…once you say that, I can’t think of any argument why it *shouldn’t be considered domestic assault that doesn’t sound like victim blaming or generally leave a sour taste in my mouth.
I’m sure this will make for more Amber “I’m such a worthless piece of shit there’s no saving me, so why bother trying” self-loathing spiraling later, but oh man, I do not care about Amber’s feelings any more. I’m completely burnt out on it. Maybe she can turn that ship around and actually improve as a person and not channel her issues into physical violence (especially against people who are no threat to herself or anyone else). Maybe. Maybe someday I’ll be able to care about her as a person/character again if she does. But I am off that train. I do not want to take that cruise with her. I’m not interested in her journey any more.
I dont know if law see difference between showing stranger and colegue, but first important question is does Walky sue her for that, without that law dont care.
Oh to be an iguana while all this is going down
Fuckface ain’t care; fuckface just want kale
As much as I fucking hate what Walky is saying here, he kind of echoes my sentiments about Mike’s death. Mainly because I’m not a fan of the “death = redemption” trope.
It’s not about redemption, though.
While Mike was an absolute piece of shit, some people still cared about him regardless. Like Amber. Like Ethan.
Remember when Danny told Ethan – to his face – that maybe Mike not waking up might be for the best? Maybe understandable on an emotional level, but still way out of line.
Walky joking about Mike’s death like that falls in the same category.
Yeah I mean, we all had the added baggage of knowing this is fiction, a story, often a comedy, a character who came back to life in another webcomic, etc etc. We also knew the background of Mike knowing the blackmail material.
I guess what I’m saying is, it’s perfectly reasonable for readers to go “I bet Mike is still alive,” while Walky is still being a dick.
(although apparently Willis confirmed at one point that Mike is Actually Dead?)
I’m pretty sure the subtext was that Mike was suicidal when he made his self-sacrifice? I mean, it’s still Blane who led him to that point by chasing him with intent to kill, as well as verbally abusing him into feeling suicidal when he otherwise would have felt bad in a “character growth,” sort of way.
That, to me, is worse, though.
Was this inspired by our conspiracy theories in the comments in the aftermath of the Mike drop?
Good thing Walky’s wearing that helmet.
Mike drop? That’s so wrong, yet I love it
Either Willis has been playing 4D chess and took notes from whatever ridiculous conspiracy theories the comments made up to put in Walky’s dialogue, or he predicted exactly what we’d say. Either way, hats off.
ah, so that’s why this party was always such an event….
everything is going down in shambles!
O.O
Every time Walky does something awful I come down to the comments expecting ridiculous ways he’s justified and I’m never disappointed.
This strip just has me wondering why anyone post-timeskip even speaks to him
That’s a good point. So maybe he apologizes or something. This is one of the more misguided things I’ve seen him do.
To be fair, that happens for every character.
I’ll have to pay more attention to that, tbh.
Just be careful to recognize the difference between people going “I understand why Character X is doing a thing” and “It’s okay for Character X to do that thing”.
I understand why Walky said what he said. Post-timeskip, he’s been sending up all kinds of flags saying that he is not handling what happened to him and Mike’s death well, and this is earlier than that, before that’s settled into a place where he’s moderately functional. He’s going through a lot of shit right now and he needs help.
But he was also being an asshole when he said that shit, and part of being an adult is being able to recognize when you do need help and seeking that out. Understanding something can come without condoning it.
As I said, never disappointed.
There’s a difference between a reason for something and an excuse for something.
Well, if you want to just view things through the lens of saintly good an devilish evil, have a blast, but there’s room for some bloody nuance in this comic, and the haughty “more moral than thou” attitude is getting tired real fast.
I mean, if you consider basic character analysis “ridiculous ways he is justified”, no wonder you are never disappointed.
Wraithy wasn’t even being positive about Walky, get off your high horse.
I agree with you. This is similar when a person makes the most surface level observation and their friend with no curiosity just says “You’re reading into this too much.” It’s not far off from saying “Don’t make a comment in the comments section.”
no you need to understand he was winning at ethics, and for him to win, other people have to lose. a very normal and rational thing to want, a desire without which, you cannot be ethical.
Of course there are people analyzing, but there’s also people justifying and if you’re doing the former then I don’t understand why my comment about the latter is an issue.
“and part of being an adult ”
Shame Walky consistently refuses to adult.
Danny Right Now: …Sweet, not Danning it up right now
I think Walky at this moment believes what he is saying is true. Or at least is trying to convince himself of it. While not what happened (unless Willis has some wild plots in the future) it is not completely implausible. The mob was indeed involved. While not pleasant to hear Amber shoving Walky so hard into a table that it knocks over is…real bad. Taking after her father kinda bad.
“so hard into a table that it knocks over” ISTG the way y’all phrase things to cause drama. We saw this table being set up ( https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/05-this-was-halloween/joyless/ ), it’s not like a super sturdy heavy oak think or anything. Someone walking quickly without noticing could’ve knocked it over, too.
Should Amber have shoved Walky? Of course not. Did she display some sort of superhuman strength? Also no. Calm down.
Is there really a call for that?
Yep, it’s a folding table. Amber does not have superhuman strength. She probably didn’t hurt him beyond maybe a bruise. She does however have a pattern of violence and intimidation towards friends/loved ones when upset.
I’m generally pretty calm reading Willis’s work. Some pages have made me laugh. Others have made me confused because I didn’t get the Transformers lore. The Shortpacked! comic where he proposes to his now wife made me smile.
Remember when Amber flipped the fuck out on Danny for the heinous crime of talking to Sal without her express written consent? Or the time she stalked Sal and provoked her into a fight? Or the time she turned that one guy into Dijon mustard for quoting the Bible? Or the time she put her dad in a neck brace for talking to her boyfriend? Or the time she stabbed an unarmed black teenager for getting arrested? Or the time she lured random guys to empty houses just to ambush them and beat the piss out of them? Or the time she joined a sports team just to have an excuse to hit people?
I like Amber, but she might be a tiny bit on the violent side.
Sometimes people who were abused need to work really hard to not become abusers themselves. I can get where Amber is coming from but a bunch of her behaviour is unhealthy and dangerous for both herself and others. In the future I really hope she holds herself more responsible for her actions while not falling into self-loathing. Not an easy task, but she has already started on it.
…what. She fought back against a rapist/stalker for trying to kill her. Also faking out the guys she fought wasn’t for the sake of thrills, it was to prevent them from attacking other people (pulling agro). “quoting the bible,” oh goodness. That was not the reason.
I think she always has a reason for acting in these sorts of ways? Like, it’s something to work on, but this is a theme that Willis is choosing to explore with this character.
“Every time Amber does something awful I come down to the comments expecting ridiculous ways she’s justified and I’m never disappointed.”
Take your +1 for the turning-it-around response. How come there’s a Flag but not an Upvote?
In a comic that is literally about dumb teenagers making awful mistakes because of their deep-rooted trauma, the audience sure seems surprised that sometimes the characters make sub-optimal choices. Who could have predicted, a comic called “Dumbing of Age,” would not contain a stellar social group of well-adjusted adults?
Please point to the part if my comment where I justify Amber’s actions.
I’d say I’ll wait but I don’t usually wait around for things that aren’t going to happen.
I think you may have hit the nail on the motorcycle-helmeted head here.
Hey y’all, if Walky is being a jerk…well, one can’t then say he’s not committed to the bit of being in-character in costume. Heck, he’s even doing the Head Alien voice for most of today’s strip!
I noticed also that when Joyce points out Ethan was there when Mike died, that’s when Walky breaks character and reverts back to his normal voice, because there’s no way he can explain that off.
How do people think Chekov’s frying pan is going to get used? While it is possible the fight might escalate from here, Walky fighting back here is sort of out-of-character for him, and I think its unlikely everyone else would start pounding on him just because of his insane theory.
If Walky actually tried to fight Amber (something I’ve also wondered about going forward from this strip) that would be an even clearer indication that he’s not right in the head at the moment, as he rarely resorts to violence and always in a sibling roughhousing way other than when he punched Asher.
Add in the fact that he knows Amber can fold him six ways to Sunday, for him to fight anyway would be 🤯
Obviously not totally comparable, but this reminds me of when a childhood friend died when I was in middle school as the result of a house fire. Before she had actually passed, some kid on the bus was telling everyone that she was already dead, and my sister jumped over the bus seat to beat the shit out of him for it.
Abnormal reactions to an abnormal situation is, well, normal.
I choose to assume that they did not shave his head for surgical reasons, but because they assumed his physics-defying hair was in some way malignant.
The situation is so terrible that everybody forget Joyce have cursed hard here.
If Joyce of all people is swearing at you, that’s when you know you fucked up.
It’s a really good moment for her to swear too, jesus. Ethan having been there Hurts.
Honestly I wonder if Walky is just in denial. We know how bad he is at dealing with harsh reality.
Yikes. That’s pretty troubling. Especially if he’s serious, and he doesn’t really look like he’s joking, to me.
1. Walky is being an ass here.
2. I think he genuinely believes what he’s saying.
I wonder if Amber will leave now or if Sal and the others will have to stop her from continuing to hit Walky. Meanwhile, Dorothy will be behind the others wondering “I did it?”
Man, Joe dodged SO MANY bullets this sequence even Neo is giving him a standing ovation.
Also, Sarah is probably thinking “THIS is why don’t spend time around people if I can help it”.
Shouldn’t she be happy? People are engaging in violence in front of her, she should be going for the popcorn!
I’m pretty sure this is happening in her room. Nobody is happy when this happens in their own room.
Yeah, boot them to the corridor.
Who do you think is going to have to get all that sticky candy out of the carpet?
I mean, I’ve been on board the witness protection train of thought since the kidnapping
Pretty sure this was Willis coming a little fun out of everyone thinking make is still alive
But now we know it was closed casket so who knows
Yeah, but we’re outside the fourth wall. Walky isn’t.
Walky needs a diaper but for his mouth
Wait, is this the first chronological occurrence of Joyce saying “asshole”?
(focusing on the important stuff here)
as someone else said, when Joyce, of all people, is cussing you out, you know it’s serious.
Someone’s going to get a much needed timeout to sort through his feelings I think.
The nice way of saying if Walky is this desperate to avoid feeling anything real he probably shouldn’t be around people. At least not while they’re grieving.
You have to admire Walky’s dedication to the bit. When Amber shoved him, he was still doing the Head Alien claw hand!
I honestly think Walky’s behavior has a very simple explanation. He’s going through the 5 stages of grief. Currently in the denial stage.
Doesn’t excuse him from shit behavior, but still.
Watching a bunch of traumatized barely-adults grapple with their grief in increasingly unhealthy and self-destructive ways that clash horrifically against each other is fun.
And by “fun” I mean, “goddamn, Becky and Dina made the right choice to be fashionably late. I’d rather be stomping cardboard, too.”
There it is.
The denial, right on time.
What happened to “read the room” walky?
You fuckin idiot
Hoo boy, these next couple of weeks are going to be a tough one, emotionally that is. This is where it starts, this is where it all comes undone.
And as much as I gave him wiggle room, for his childish behavior, not here, not now; fuck you, Walky.
I don’t think this is him necessarily being childish in the same way he often is. This is clearly just the denial stage of grief.
Willis have started the “suprise cliffhange” moment. We even started the Ruth and Bille part…
WELL!! At least Danny’s blunder is automatically nullified.
Until he cheerfully says something like “well at least I didn’t screw everything up this time”
What happens if a friend group loses someone they all cared for, but they all grieve at different rates?
David is stuck in Denial
Amber is Angry
Joyce is Depressed
And on and on it goes in the list.
They’re all at different stages.
I don’t think Walky’s in denial. I think he’s trying to lighten the mood and failing to read the room. Coping mechanisms are clashing.
I have to read the chapter again. Walky is clearly doing the Dexter script. He’s trying to be the enemy.
I think it could be both.
I think he wants to be in denial. He wants to believe this story he’s come up with where Mike isn’t really dead. However, he knows it’s not true and that Mike is dead, but he can’t admit that to himself. So when he’s called out on it, he gets very angry and defensive and digs in harder.
Jerk or not. Amber has no right to assault him and she resorts to violence way too often. Telling him off is one thing, physically hurting him is another. Hopefully her actions will have some consequences.
Her propensity for violence has been established as one of her character flaws, and one of the many things she hates about herself.
The consequence of her NOT assaulting him would be the storyline would end right here. It was a necessary event to push the tale along.
Although, racking up all the violent moments Amber has committed, I would think the school would either kick her out or put her in charge of the campus security office’s Riot Control team.
Amber and Ruth forming a tag-team is not something this school is ready for.
What violence has Amber done that the school would be aware of? Only one I can think of is defending herself against Gashface. None of the smaller personal stuff got reported. Nor will this be, unless Walky somehow needs to be rushed to the hospital because of it.
The school knows about Amazi-Girl’s violence, but doesn’t know to attach it to Amber.
I would like to lightly push back against her shoving him being “necessary for the story”. It’s what happened and now there’s gonna be a reaction to it, but Willis really could have written anything and made it work exactly as well. Something had to happen, yes, that’s what stories are, but I reject the premise that this was the required event.
At least he’s wearing a serious helmet, so he probably won’t get a concussion…
Anger issues that result in violence is precisely why Amazi-girl was created, to try to channel that violence productively.
Ohhhh Walky. Oh no. The denial is strong with this one.
so was walky just born with a foot in his mouth or what
“Why do they call you Walky?”
“Because I walk with both feet in my mouth.”
kneeslap.jpeg
That’s Danny’s schtick.
I’m here for Joyce saying “asshole” and “hell”!
Going by how last comic ended, I’m guessing that this isn’t him just joking around or trying to lighten the mood. He is very much in denial and has made up this story to pretend that Mike’s not dead. However, he isn’t stupid and he knows that the story is BS. But he doesn’t want to admit that to himself. So when he gets called on it, he gets angry and defensive.
I think people are actually over-thinking this part. Walky is being sarcastic about it, literally because he’s being confronted with his trauma, at an event that was supposed to be a fun, safe night between him and his friends, and Walky is so emotionally avoidant that this constitutes a real over-step of his boundaries, and it makes him feel attacked. He genuinely does not believe that it was kind or nice or right of Dorothy to bring up something traumatic to everybody present, when they were doing something that was literally supposed to be fun (which, to Walky, means “Devoid of any serious emotions of feelings whatsoever, with zero serious content or critical awareness needed,”) and being unexpectedly ambushed by your friends with your still-fresh, open-wound trauma is pretty much the antithesis of fun, I’m sure most people here will agree. The way Walky reacts to this, is not productive or good in any way, but I think most people are failing to read why he’s reacting this way. He actually has a legit gripe, that Dorothy is out-of-line to spring this on everybody with zero consideration for how it might make everybody feel while they’re trying to have a fun night, but of course, he absolutely Walky’s up the delivery, and is immediately confused when more people don’t agree with his unreasonable expression of a very reasonable desire to not force him to pick at an open wound he was actively here to try to ignore.
oh no, walky’s just momentarily collided minds with his walkyverse self where mike IS inexplicably alive !! (well, to MOST people it’s inexplicably)
Looks like Joe definitely made the right choice to leave this party early.
I think a few commenters pointed this out, but for the first 3 panels, he’s still doing his Dexter voice. I actually read it as an echo from the helmet until his speech bubble became normal again, so as I’m interpreting it, he’s doing a silly voice while insisting Mike is alive. Now, that doesn’t say that maybe he doesn’t think that, but he’s clearly trying for some kind of joke here, which… I’ve had lots of reactions to death, and yesh, joking about it is one of them. But you have to be able to read the room to determine if that’s something that will be welcome right now, and clearly, this wasn’t one of them.
Okay I was wrong, I thought Walky was smarter than this.
Walky is going about this in the absolute worst possible way…but on the whole, I agree with his premise? Walky is being a huge idiot about what Dorothy has done here…but also, what the fuck, Dorothy?
What.
“Hey I get that this is a fun Hallowe’en party, but I’m gonna hijack it, apropos of nothing, to hold a moment of silence for our deceased mutual friend, giving no warning or discussion with anybody present about this extremely sensitive topic, because I Am A Leader and That Is What Leaders Do.” But, you know, one, that wasn’t her place; two, that’s genuinely absurd social behavior, which most people would naturally intuit is wildly inappropriate; three, she shouldn’t be hijacking another person’s fun event and using it to satisfy her well-meaning desire to be an authority over everybody’s feelings and conduct. Walky could not have responded more farcically worse than he did, because this is a comedy about young adults going through major life trauma, but him being utterly wrong in his response to Dorothy’s baffling combination of entitlement, misplaced sense of authority, and general condescension towards her peers, is not actually related to the fact that I really think Dorothy’s behavior here is also way out of line. It’s out of line in a much gentler, more diplomatic and subtle manner as Walky’s brand of fuck-up, but that doesn’t change the fact that I also think she has acted well beyond what her agency over this environment should have allowed her to, if she had more self-awareness, and was less obsessed with leading everybody to moral correctness to placate her massive ego. At least when Joyce tries to act like that, nearly everybody in this chat calls her on it being presumptuous and wrong.
Wait, so, when Walky is responding to a death of a peer badly it’s “going through a major life trauma” and when Dorothy does it it’s ” baffling combination of entitlement, misplaced sense of authority” and she has a “massive ego”.
Yeah, this is what I meant.
Everyone: Haha Walky we love it when you’re silly and make jokes about everything. Even the darkest stuff. We will reinforce this behavior constantly!
Walky – ::does the thing::
Everyone: NO YOU CANT JOKE ABOUT THAT. ::shoves::
Lmao I never even thought about it from that angle, but that’s kind of true for this group.
Noooo, the neatly sorted snacks!!
Also I realized they’re still a mix, just a mix of one-type-of-snack and skin flakes 🙂
I like how the textbox implies that his earlier assholery was also said in a Head Alien impression
I think he’s actually serious about this, but also so stupid that his even his denial takes the form of weird nonsense.
here’s the fun part:
Walky is not (IMO) actually stupid, per se.
Well, this is gong to be a nuclear-level meltdown for everyone where everyone says and does many bad things they regret, but it looks like I’m going to get a small moment of longed-for satisfaction out of it in the form of somebody finally beating the shit out of Walky. Bliss.
I love how Walky is one stage of grief less along than everybody at this party, and so he deserves to be assaulted. This strip’s chat never fails to disappoint.
Amber looks like she’s about to cry in the fourth panel.
When it comes to reading the room, Walky is illiterate.
Yeah Joe definitely made the right move bailing out here
Yeah, this was not a good look for Walky here.