don’t rly remember the convo (too lazy to look it up) but i was under the impression he didn’t like it at all versus “everyone else besides my fave sucks”
Walky’s only real argument against Ultra Car in that convo is that it got bad ratings and didn’t run very long. When I was a teen I used to think it was very important to remind people who loved “failed” projects that they didn’t end because of malicious action, they ended because capitalism, even though those convos were never productive. I assume Walky was being that kinda shithead–he’s a telecom major, after all.
I mean in the sense that shows seldom get cancelled because execs really hate them, they usually just get cancelled because they’re not making money, which tends to be correlated to how many people like them.
The streaming situation in general has gotten weird. It’s still capitalism, but it’s a result of perverse incentives (a new show that draws in new viewers is considered more valuable than a show that has reached max market penetration, if they think the watchers of the older show will still stick around as subscribers).
I mean the insanity of the HBO Max situation is still more to do with money than, like, Zaslov personally hating Infinity Train or whatever but uh, yeah, I stopped making that argument for a reason. At a certain point it just does not matter.
Capitalism is based on consensual exchange, not coercive. under capitalism, if party A and Party B agree that a transaction take place, it takes place, if one party or the other refuses, it does not.
For MALICIOUS action, you need a third party that can dictate or change the terms and benefits from that role…such as when a government fixes pricing or permits and enforces a Monopoly or oligopoly using the power of a gun-to-the-head to force transactions that are not agreed to by both parties.
For example, forcing Scottish peasants off their land for a fraction of the value of that land to sell it to a Lord for his private estate, or you can look to the very socialist actions of the Soviet Union in the Ukraine (look up “Holodomor”), the destruction of the Aral Sea for Comrade Stalin’s cotton fields, or the confiscation of businesses by the Third Reich.
If you want true malice, it takes a socialist to carry it out.
Correct that socialism and communism are not the same. The first is what early communists called “lower stage communism” as being the ownership, either directly (worker cooperatives) or through representative republic (socialist states, which have historically themselves also hosted numerous worker cooperatives), of productive capital by the laboring public. The later is something that is uncertain if it will ever exist at large scale, but offers a guiding post that many political parties have adopted as a name as it is an aspirational goal: a classless, stateless society. While communism has existed around the world in largely familial or otherwise tight-knit societies, what many Marxists would call “primitive communism”, there is yet to be a state that has progressed to the point of “withering away”, as Lenin put it, in the post-industrial world, and likely never will be while reactionary forces and global capitalism exist.
I would also recommend not using vapid terms like “Stalinism” to describe early experimental socialist states. Any well Marxist-Leninist that has seriously studied the history of the USSR will regale you with a litany of failures of the early-mid 20th century if you approach them in good faith and not spouting easily-debunked century old propaganda. It would be like holding “lack of women’s suffrage” or “19th century chattel slavery” against modern capitalism (though there are some unresolved contradictions remaining relating to those, looking at you private prison industrial complex). I would also recommend reading up on the actual mechanisms of Soviet democracy, since many in the west are of the delusion that Stalin was an absolute autocratic monarch during the time he was General Secretary of the Party or Chairman of the Council. While these were not elections like we imagine in the west, with the billions of dollars spent in advertising and marketable personality commercials for party-selected nominees and a job so alien to the average public experience we can hardly conceptualize it, Stalin was appointed by a democratically elected representative assembly. The term “soviet” literally means “an elected local, district, or national council”, and the soviet democracy generally consisted of each tier from the directly publicly voted on local level appointing a representative to the next tier higher. Many countries still use something akin to this today, since it allows constituents to be more participatory in their local elections, and less a volatile spectacle during national elections. There are drawbacks, of course, but it was still a democratic republic that followed constitutional rules. Funnily enough, if you actually list the powers of office, the President of the USA has more autocratic powers than pretty much any communist party leader (unless you count the CIA-backed Pol Pot, which why would you?) This isn’t to say that a democratic society means there can be no oppression or failures of administration, especially in a place still rich in Reactionary bigotries from the Czarist era, but it’s a bit more complicated than saying “Stalin bad”, especially when you consider that if you actually read the history, Krushev’s “destalinization” policy was responsible for much of the blaming of Stalin for governmental failures often caused by factionalists like Krushev himself.
Oh, and I guess I should mention the “socialism” of social democracies that have become popular among the “left”. Production is still generally help privately and the Labor – Employer dialectic still exists in full, so it’s really just capitalism with some safety valves for the ruling class to stave off revolution. For countries like Sweden and such it’s also predicated on the exports of military goods and exploitation of the “third-world” or “global south” or whatever term you prefer for the victims of imperialism. For these reasons and more, I don’t think it’s uncontroversial to say the social democracy and welfare is ill-equipped to tackle the contradictions inherent to capitalism. Much like the Nazis, using the term socialism is just piggybacking off the actual populism of revolutionary movements, though at least most social democrats have the conscious to not immediately turn it towards genocide…most…current events in Gaza prove how tenuous a lifeline Liberal squeamish is, sadly.
Additionally, in real-world capitalist societies in the west, the coercive/malicious role that systematic bigotries have played and still play in banking and loans, the housing market, wage theft and business can not be overstated.
Regardless of what your Totally Non-Political™ economics professor wants you to believe, free market economic theory just about never holds up outside a social vacuum.
Agreed. And there are insidious bigotries related to positioning of brownsites and reckless disregard in the production and disposition of environmentally toxic materials. Western capitalism will kill its granny for a buck.
I’m sorry but if you think the Nazi’s were socialist in a remotely Marxist or anti-capitalist sense you don’t have a very good grasp of the Labor – Employer dialectic and it’s contradictions (or of history in general). The fascist state was conceived as and operated as a tool to whip the lower classes in line to private capital interests. The word “privatization” was literally coined to describe the process of collaboration with capitalists in the Third Reich. Monopolization isn’t the antithesis of capitalism, it is it’s goal, or at least the self-evident consequence of the system’s incentives and definitional class structure (markets=/=capitalism, the bourgeois – proletariat dialectic does, the means of trade is merely an expected consequence of the historical evolution of debt as a social construct).
Also: everyone’s favorite instance of landed reactionaries (kulaks, who were definitionally capitalists, they held capital, and exploited wage workers for profit margins) refusing to cooperate with central authority for their own profit and personal gain by selling crops to the west or outright burning them instead of letting the “dirty Russians” redistribute them during a natural drought isn’t actually that great of an argument against central authority as historically illiterate Liberals and Reactionaries think it is. There are plenty of problems with the Soviet administration of the early-mid 20th century (which Stalin had popular support in the elected national Soviet assembly, but Soviet democracy is a whole other thing that people are usually poorly educated on, often deliberately by their historical curriculum) but it also existed 80 years ago. If you want a real dressing down of the Soviets, listen to a modern communist in good faith, we’ll generally be more open to criticizing historical failures of experimental states when we aren’t having to address the most vapid of propaganda, much of it dating back to Goebbels himself.
I didn’t want to get into this on this usually peaceful forum, but I also refuse to let such misguided Red-Bashing go unaddressed. Also, as people have pointed out already, the passive threat of poverty in a capitalist economy is both maintained with the very real threat of state violence (the state is not separate from capitalism, if anything it is the enforcer of it without which “private property” could not exist) are absolutely coercive. The myth of consensual exchange in capitalism exists purely in the realm of idealism, and I use that word explicitly in the philosophical sense, that is to say the anti-thesis of materialism. Lack of class consciousness does not make wage labor consensual, if anything it only makes the superstructure (media, institutions, culture, education, ideology) that reaffirms that productive base (means of production, natural resources, and the relations of labor to production) all the more insidious.
I’ll stop now, but let me assure you there is plenty of literature (hosted online and translated entirely free of charge in most cases) if you find any of my statements strange or involve words you aren’t super familiar with. I like to joke the reason Liberals and Reactionaries try to argue against “The Communist Manifesto” is because “Capital vol. I-III” is too long and dense for them to read without a secondary school teacher drilling them with weekly quizzes. It’s a shame too, even if it uses 19th century examples it’s entirely descriptive of Capitalism as a system, often in ways that seem almost supernaturally prescient. The little pamphlet that was handed out to workers in London in 1848 is a much easier windmill for our modern intellectual Don Quixotes, but is a relatively poor representation of the scientific rigor of Marxists.
Typo in the third paragraph, when describing the coercive nature of capitalism I accidentally shifted one of the methods of the state being a tool of capitalism into the parentheses, resulting in some horrendous grammar. Should read something like:
“…the passive threat of poverty in a capitalist economy is both [a result of state ordained deeds and property rights to hoard production of goods and necessities, without which “private property” would not exist, and is] maintained with the very real threat of state violence [which is] absolutely coercive.”
While writing this correction I realized I should probably distinguish between “private property” and “personal property” since a lot of people unversed in Marxist literature might not make a distinction. “Private property” is used for profit-seeking production, as opposed to “personal property” which is your own property that you derive use-value from (tooth brush, home you live in, the device you are seeing this on, etc.). There is also “public property” and “worker cooperatives” where the labor force has some democratic input, directly or through something like a proletarian (worker focused) representative republic.
I feel “it was cancelled before it really got a chance to hit it’s stride” is in fact a valid criticism. Granted, I also don’t recall the specifics of that convo so he could quite easily have been shitty about it. Like, no matter how good a failed project might have been, the fact that it was cut short in the first place means it’s not as good as it could have been if they were allowed to finish it. That in itself is a flaw, regardless of why it was cancelled, and a show of equal quality that was allowed to have more episodes and reach an actual conclusion (or even just peter out in quality until nobody cares that it was cancelled) will, in my opinion, be objectively better than the also really, really good show that was cut too soon, obviously through no fault of the show itself.
I actually think a show that peters out in quality is worse than one than got cancelled while it was still in it’s prime. There are less episodes, but what does exist is good. There’s no need to explain away the last two seasons.
I’ve heard more than one person in the last couple decades switch from “Damn FOX for never giving Firefly a proper chance,” to, “Thank God the FOX execs failed so badly they kept the show going on so long that Joss ruined it.”
But the ones that do finish themselves out, like Breaking Bad, in my opinion do tend to noticeably better fulfill the “convince you it told a complete quality story” criteria.
Yeah probably the show described as too smart and radical for normies is supposed to be [my favorite fandom] and the show described as kind of purile and dumb and pop-culture referencing is [my least favorite fandom]. All the evidence points in this direction
I think it is especially unlikely that the “bad” show is supposed to be Teen Titans Go, as the closest they’ve ever gotten to expressing a negative opinion about TTG was Shortpacked!Lucy simultaneously going, “I don’t like Teen Titans Go, but I remember jerks being really mean to me for liking the old cartoon when I was a kid, and now the jerks being mean to kids are our age.”
Which, like. If I had to guess I’d say that’s where Willis lands themself: not liking Teen Titans Go very much, but recognizing that it was aimed at kids much younger than them, and having sympathy for the fans of it having to deal with a lot of grownups lashing out at them like it’s their fault Teen Titans got canceled.
Teen Titans was not “cancelled in the middle of a tragic story arc”, the Terra finale was intended to tell the audience it’s okay to let go even though doing so is very sad.
Maybe in the broad sense that given how they were described Ultra-Car was probably more serialized while Dexter was more episodic and more comedic but I don’t think it’s the specific reference point
I don’t think they’re meant to be one to one with any real show. Ultra-Car has the Young Justice toy thing but it also has the Firefly thing of getting canned mid production on it’s first season. Given the premise and the gas leak season the best reference point for Dexter’s probably Pinky and the Brain
Young Justice was also canned too early, mainly because it (shock horror!) attracted as many female as male viewers if not slightly more. And of course that didn’t match their marketing strategies. Obviously the solution wasn’t to market more broadly, nooo.
I don’t think it’s really intended as a parallel to anything other than Willis’s own works, but I like to think our universe’s equivalent would be My Life As A Teenage Robot. Trans themes + it got canceled due to low ratings
Nature versus nurture. She was raised by billionaires, even if the elder Ruttens were mostly fantastic parents they’re still slipping bits and pieces of their monstrousness into Carla’s development. She can be an asshole, but I wouldn’t fully write her off like that.
See, that’s not an irrational thing to say but it’s hard for me to process that idea while also remembering that she (okay, Ultra Car) was also exactly like this in the Walkyverse, where she was built by Joe and Rachel.
It also couldn’t at all a defense mechanism tied to growing up trans in full public view.
It’s either just that she’s innately an asshole or it’s purely because she grew up rich.
Unclear if Booster means Walky’s being a good trans ally for helping Booster get out of a conversation or for putting up with Carla’s shenanigans in general.
Both but prolly meant helping them more than carla, otherwise booster could’ve said like “fine i’ll text my sister a picture of you and tell her to say hi to you next time in class”
Like, the main definition of trans is “not the same gender you were assigned at birth”. (Cisgender is “the same gender you were assigned at birth”.) Booster and Carla are equally not the same gender they were assigned at birth: Carla is strongly a girl instead, and Booster hasn’t talked about their exact gender but probably they’re neither a girl nor a boy. So Booster can totes be considered trans.
A few more nonbinary options include:
– having more than one gender at once
– having no gender at all (this is called agender, or, “nah, I’m just a person”)
– identifying with something unusual as your gender (whatever you really relate to in place of where your gender would go)
– having genders that fluctuate over time.
etc. etc., endless possibility.
And anyone can appreciate a girl in a cute dress. 🙂
There is also gender contrarian — insisting on being the opposite to the gender people are assuming you are. I am thinking of Osana Najimi from ‘Komi Can’t Communicate’. Najimi can quickly become friends with anyone of any gender.
In what world is appreciating a pretty girl in a cute dress only a “guy” thing? Is a cis lesbian who appreciates a pretty girl in a cute dress “guy enough”?
Walky has to help Carla woo Charlie when his only dating advice is to wait for her to break up with Danny and be the rebound (Danny Danny’d that up by dating his sister).
I always assumed the one who gets dumped is the one on the rebound, as in the relationship ended before they were ready and so they easily rebound into a new one for the familiar routine/situation of being in a relationship (however said relationship manifests itself).
That said, it’s not like anyone ever defined it for me.
Are all parties involved able to be on the rebound even when there’s clearly one breaking up with the other?
Would it actually be that early? The last strip showed a lovely sunrise and full daylight, what time is sunrise that time of year in Indiana? Here in winter it’s like 7:30, which is still like rudely early for a Sunday morning but I think there’s a world of difference between that and 5am.
Oh man, but early sunsets are the best! Just need to find a place that somehow has extremely late sunrises and extremely early sunsets all year ’round, and I’d finally have discovered the perfect place to live.
it is just during winter, in the North. Nowhere on Earth has short days, or long days, all year long, not without help.
No, what you want is a dell deep in a range of hills or mountains somewhere, so that you only see the sun as it passes over the portion of the sky which the surrounding heights frame.
–Dave, like various nooks and crannies in the Alleghenies, for instance, which folk song has been committed about
Add in that IN is so far west that it should have been in the Central time zone (with Chicago and St. Louis) so the civil time makes even less sense with respect to mean solar time.
But, to answer the earlier question: in Indiana, in January, sunrise is sometime in February.
That’s a great way of putting it! So like most places in winter sunrise is probably not actually super early to be getting up for most people. (Insert caveats about this being a college campus and a Sunday and it still being rude to bother people first thing in the morning even if they could reasonably be awake already here.)
Oh hey I wrote the last two dialogue bubbles for this one! David sent me two versions of that final panel with Carla’s first line and extremely minimal context, and after A/B testing the punchlines they wrote I came up with a secret, third thing, which is what you’re reading now.
So yeah, for nine words I got to write for two of my favorite characters, my ace trans queen and my ADHD king, in my favorite comic of all time! Genuinely incredible. On cloud nine about it. Genuinely can’t thank David enough for the opertunity.
Now to wait for the royalty checks to start rolling in.
I cannot speak for David but that was, at the very least, not my intention when writing that last line in the slightest. (I speak more on this further down.)
Not even a little bit. Chill
Cringe comedy is a legitimate choice. The Office was popular for a reason. I was surprised by this direction with this character – but it’s the creator’s choice.
Why is Booster the gateway for their sister? Do they usually determine who should be friends with Charlie? Why can’t Carla just talk to Charlie herself? Or is Ms. Super Sized Opinion About Herself actually afraid of making friends? I’m a little confused. That is a nice dress Carla is wearing, though.
Carla has tried talking to Charlie herself. For whatever reason, Charlie seems literally incapable of noticing when someone is talking to her unprompted, which means nothing Carla’s tried thus far has worked, and it’s driving Carla nuts.
Charlie must have really severe ADD/ADHD. That must make classes really difficult. I hope she’s got proper support, not just from her sibling. Seriousness aside: I don’t think someone with attention issues is right for an attention junkie like Carla. Not even as a friend.
i imagine carla doesn’t know what dorm room she’s in, or rather, talking ‘one on one’ hasn’t esp helped so going to the sibling who understands how her brain functions would help a bit
Charlie tends wounder around and doesn’t always reply straight away. Carla is impatient and slightly impulsive. If carla would wait for a few seconds for Charlie to notice which Charlie did eventually after Carla left. Honestly a little impulse control and patience would make this whole sequence of events unnecessary.
Carla has tried, hard, to get Charlie to notice her.
Not confess feelings, just to notice her.
And Charlie is oblivious to her presence.
That’s why she’s going to Booster.
I imagine she could actually touch Charlie to get her attention, but that is generally considered rude and I guess that’s one level of rudeness she doesn’t want to cross.
i mean, yeah don’t grab random ppl of course, but i feel like just a tap on the shoulder is a lot less obnoxious to getting their attention than like just shouting while waving signs of her name or so
tho i ‘m surprised booster hasn’t straight up told her “yeah, my sister has a very delayed reaction to stuff” tho even if they ended up having a ‘proper’ conversation idk if carla would have the patience for a romantic relationship versus like a friendship maybe (i mean i know ppl are rooting for her but other than a long arc, i don’t think someone like carla irl would be given the time of day after pie-ing booster in the face, but this is a comic so we can suspend disbelief or so)
Alternate-timeline me reads DoA in his reality, and he said the Carla-Charlie wedding was a real tear-jerker. Not so co-incidentally I’m insanely jealous of Alternate-timeline me because he was able to sue the employer of the truck driver that killed us for million$ because the apartment building we got hit in front of had a security camera pointed at the exact driveway where we got hit in both realities where in my reality the camera wasn’t installed until after I got hit.
I am of the opinion that Carla does not want this to actually work out, because a relationship would mean dealing with actual feelings. But at the same time it bothers her that Booster is denying her something and she can’t overpower them with her amazing Carla-ness.
I largely agree. I actually hope Carla IS having some genuine feelings here just because I want her to be, like, one and one tenth dimensional. But I don’t have hopes.
It’s very important to Carla that her courtship of Charlie be as pointlessly convoluted and inefficient as possible.
Also, like she said, Booster promised! They already kind of sort of arguably implied some sort of tribute they would offer to Carla’s greatness! How would Carla look if she didn’t milk that for everything it’s worth?! Like a chump, that’s what. LIKE A CHUMP.
imagine charlie seeing the two and having a crush on walky instead XD;
Tho, idk how much more walky can help other than annoy/distract her versus just like setting a meetup between the two in teh cafeteria, which booster would have more ‘access’ to/can send a text or so lol
I didn’t think Booster was asking Walky to deputize and handle Carla’s request. I think Booster was asking Walky to talk to Carla so Booster doesn’t have to and can resume sleeping.
This scene is going to be history’s greatest monster vs someone with a good heart who’s just using obnoxious “humor” as an emotional defense mechanism.
You’re both trans tho, Booster.
What if Walky decides to be a good trans ally to Carla instead and team up against you?
It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve worked together to annoy someone.
i mean they are roommates, it’d benefit walky more to be on booster’s good side but i mean he’s prolly too tired to ‘team up’ or so, unless he’s somehow able to wingman for carla effectively
If not for the salt, and practically all of them shut down because of the pandemic, I would love an Indian Buffet. I used to treat myself once a month, there was one next to the post office when I still paid bills by mail.
can’t go wrong with breakfast food but i feel like even if it’s your fave meal i wouldn’t be able to eat first thing in the morning/right after i woke up unless i was super hungry, or at least have like a hot cup of peppermint tea first and then wait 30 mins and eat lol.
I’m starting to wonder if coffee does anything for me besides putting liquid in my system, because I can drink a couple shots of espresso right before bed and sleep just fine. Either way, food has to come second or else.
i’m surprised someone like walky could even wake up before noon otherwise but i mean if he makes carla go away by annoying her they’d both get a little bit of peace til carla tries again
I mean, even if walky wanted to help, idk if he’d be that much better versus booster putting in a good word
who knows, maybe walky would make the situation worse (if it isn’t booster playing 5D chess being like “oh i expected walky to put his foot in his mouth”)
I don’t remember if it’s been outright stated at any point, but they’re not as oblivious as Walky or sheltered as Joyce, so I would say the likelihood of Booster knowing about Carla approaches infinitely close to 100% without ever quite reaching it.
It’s weird because I didn’t even think of the “be a trans ally by doing a favor for me” reading at first and was kind of weirded out by Booster casually dropping that Carla is trans in front of Walky like he obviously knew. The more I think about it though, the more it seems Booster has to be the trans person in question.
Maybe because using “be a good ally” to get random favors from your roommate seems kind of lousy.
Yeah, i guess it’s a joke in this case, but i’ve also had a trans roommate and she used “but i’m trans“ to get away with bs that was not in the least related to her being trans. Ma’am i’m not gonna disrespect your gender, no matter how upset i am at you, but if you don’t act like a decent human being, we still have a problem. You don’t get to be an ass to people or get everything you want just by being marginalized. This tends to end in “who’s most oppressed and therefore always right?” competition. Been there. oof.
I think everybody but Joyce knows that Carla is trans. Not just the other characters on the floor, or in the dorm, or on campus… literally everybody. Like, if you find an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon and ask them about her, they’ll be all, “Carla Rutten? Oh, yeah, that’s that girl who came through here in a red SUV a few months ago yelling, ‘Hey everybody! I’m Carla Rutten, and I’m trans! In your face! And then she threw a pie at us?'”
I was gonna say Booster outobnoxioused Carla until Carla brought up the traumatizing event when Walky was trapped in a basement by a crazed psycho on the day after his roommate was murdered as a funny GOTCHA for not liking a cartoon.
walky would prolly be ok with that snark compared to if she had said it to another person, tho i feel like walky would be more offended about her insulting dexter monkey master versus the basement comment
Okay so when David showed me the original versions of this punchline, all of them had Walky bringing up the kidnapping as The One Other Time They Interacted, and Carla writing it off as nothing compared to having insulted a cartoon, and I thought “Carla pretends not to care about other people but always in a way that demonstrates she’s thinking of them more than she’d admit, so her broaching the kidnapping is the stronger choice here. And Walky’s repeatedly said he’d prefer that incident to be funny! So this is some good Carla facade bullshit, being a plausibly deniable jerk.”
But whatever, it’s fine, readers deciding characters have crossed some horrifying ethical line is just part of The Experience™ for me.
Something can be in-character AND I can find it rude and terrible simultaneously. If Walky’s cool with it there’s not much I can say but personally I feel like it’s just kind of a inappropriately dark joke for someone to make.
I’m with Wack’d here. For nearly anyone else it would be inappropriately dark, but Inappropriately dark is exactly Walky’s sense of humor. He’d appreciate it, even if the others who were there wouldn’t.
And Carla, despite her facade, knows enough about him to know that.
Like, not that you or anyone else needs permission to dislike either this piece of dialogue or Carla in general, but I just wanna say that, as someone who liked the line and Wack’d’s explanation for it, it’s still totally okay to NOT like it and to think Carla was over the line.
(Also thanks for the link! I might share it with other people in different situations bc it’s a good explanation of the phenomenon. What’s over the line in terms of “too much for how well x knows y” is gonna vary from person to person but the video is a really good illustration of how it feels when that line gets crossed.)
Yeah, that crosses a line, Carla. You don’t imply that people should have to stay in traumatic and life-threatening situations. That’s not a joke. If it’s not funny to everyone involved, it’s not a good joke.
I mean it was funny to everyone involved explicitley. Walky and Carla both liked it. The audience member who says ‘if i was in this situation i wouldnt like it’ is not involved, in this situation.
Oh, it certainly is, but it’s not one he’ll take. I mean, if it were a reasonable hour (which for him probably means at least noon) he’d probably find it funny.
I just realized that both Booster and Walky have twin sisters. That’s neat, to have both roommates in a dorm have twin sisters elsewhere. It would be even better if both of those sisters were also roommates but this is fine for now.
Honestly, the confluence of Carla’s asshole nature and Booster insisting that Walky be a Trans Ally is just hitting my “call her an asshole, slam the door in her face and go back to bed” buttons. “Ally” doesn’t mean “Doormat”, Walky and Booster are entirely within their rights to tell Carla to buzz off until its a normal hour, and Booster can kinda get bent for thrusting this bullshit onto Walky.
Listen, i know Willis is supposed to be like the “author” etc and yadda (except today Wackd is a little bit the author too) but i still think my Carla in a dress is better than theirs.
Maaan that’d probably be a real fucked up statement if it was directed towards anyone but Walky. Walky’s probably the only one that might take it as a joke and joke back.
yeah if anything walky was just as bad putting his foot in his mouth when he was talkign to ethan like “so did you already own all those black clothes or did you go to target” or so lol
I’m old and not familiar with a lot of modern terms.
Is a ‘good trans ally’ a non-trans person who is somehow obligated to do things that a trans person doesn’t want to do, or is Booster just being an ass?
Asking because this particular situation doesn’t really appear to have anything to do with Walky, and I don’t see how any of it is really his problem.
Booster is being sarcastic, yes. If it helps, you could easily substitute the phrase “good roommate” or “good friend” and achieve roughly the same effect.
“Some people” including the creator of the trans flag.
Trans* has always included non-binary people. Some non-binary people don’t ID as trans, but like… almost always because they’ve had bad experiences being told they aren’t “trans enough” to qualify and they don’t want to fight about it.
(The asterisk on trans* community *needs* to come back, frankly, because we all need a reminder that all gnc people are welcome in the broad community and that we are stronger together than apart.)
I don’t know that the asterisk was helping people understand that, honestly. As a nonbinary person, I was seeing it be used more as a way to distinguish trans (binary) people from “trans*” (nonbinary people).
Yeah, I never really felt like it cleared anything up. Usually when you put an asterisk, you wanna put a little annotation at the bottom of your text, so people can read the clarification without interrupting the flow of the main body. I’ve never seen that bit added, even as a hyperlink to a helpful resource.
Yes, that’s one of the reasons why it’s fallen off, but it’s not “trans (binary)” and “trans* (non-binary people)”, tho. The * is to represent that it’s transgender, but also transsexual (which used to refer specifically to folks who want physical transition as well as social transition, distinguished from transgender), transvestite, etc.
(Yes, some of these words have fallen out of favor! That doesn’t change the fact that they’re also words people have used for themselves for decades.)
Anyway it’s less about needing one specific term and more about pushing back against the idea that you can be “more” or “less” trans. No oppression Olympics.
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hey, at least he says it’s SECOND best! lotta folks would vote it* WORST EVAR just for being Chinese
*generic inspecific “it” defined usually as a bilibili title
don’t rly remember the convo (too lazy to look it up) but i was under the impression he didn’t like it at all versus “everyone else besides my fave sucks”
Walky’s only real argument against Ultra Car in that convo is that it got bad ratings and didn’t run very long. When I was a teen I used to think it was very important to remind people who loved “failed” projects that they didn’t end because of malicious action, they ended because capitalism, even though those convos were never productive. I assume Walky was being that kinda shithead–he’s a telecom major, after all.
Isn’t capitalism itself malicious action?
I mean in the sense that shows seldom get cancelled because execs really hate them, they usually just get cancelled because they’re not making money, which tends to be correlated to how many people like them.
> which tends to be correlated to how many people like them
It is legitimately shocking how much that is not the case, especially when it comes to cartoons.
Exactly. How many HBO Max shows were finished, had fan support, and then shot in the back of the head for short-term monetary gain?
Still mad about Infinity Train.
The streaming situation in general has gotten weird. It’s still capitalism, but it’s a result of perverse incentives (a new show that draws in new viewers is considered more valuable than a show that has reached max market penetration, if they think the watchers of the older show will still stick around as subscribers).
I mean the insanity of the HBO Max situation is still more to do with money than, like, Zaslov personally hating Infinity Train or whatever but uh, yeah, I stopped making that argument for a reason. At a certain point it just does not matter.
Capitalism is based on consensual exchange, not coercive. under capitalism, if party A and Party B agree that a transaction take place, it takes place, if one party or the other refuses, it does not.
For MALICIOUS action, you need a third party that can dictate or change the terms and benefits from that role…such as when a government fixes pricing or permits and enforces a Monopoly or oligopoly using the power of a gun-to-the-head to force transactions that are not agreed to by both parties.
For example, forcing Scottish peasants off their land for a fraction of the value of that land to sell it to a Lord for his private estate, or you can look to the very socialist actions of the Soviet Union in the Ukraine (look up “Holodomor”), the destruction of the Aral Sea for Comrade Stalin’s cotton fields, or the confiscation of businesses by the Third Reich.
If you want true malice, it takes a socialist to carry it out.
Re: true Malice,
Socialism ≠ Communism ≠ Stalinism 😑
Correct that socialism and communism are not the same. The first is what early communists called “lower stage communism” as being the ownership, either directly (worker cooperatives) or through representative republic (socialist states, which have historically themselves also hosted numerous worker cooperatives), of productive capital by the laboring public. The later is something that is uncertain if it will ever exist at large scale, but offers a guiding post that many political parties have adopted as a name as it is an aspirational goal: a classless, stateless society. While communism has existed around the world in largely familial or otherwise tight-knit societies, what many Marxists would call “primitive communism”, there is yet to be a state that has progressed to the point of “withering away”, as Lenin put it, in the post-industrial world, and likely never will be while reactionary forces and global capitalism exist.
I would also recommend not using vapid terms like “Stalinism” to describe early experimental socialist states. Any well Marxist-Leninist that has seriously studied the history of the USSR will regale you with a litany of failures of the early-mid 20th century if you approach them in good faith and not spouting easily-debunked century old propaganda. It would be like holding “lack of women’s suffrage” or “19th century chattel slavery” against modern capitalism (though there are some unresolved contradictions remaining relating to those, looking at you private prison industrial complex). I would also recommend reading up on the actual mechanisms of Soviet democracy, since many in the west are of the delusion that Stalin was an absolute autocratic monarch during the time he was General Secretary of the Party or Chairman of the Council. While these were not elections like we imagine in the west, with the billions of dollars spent in advertising and marketable personality commercials for party-selected nominees and a job so alien to the average public experience we can hardly conceptualize it, Stalin was appointed by a democratically elected representative assembly. The term “soviet” literally means “an elected local, district, or national council”, and the soviet democracy generally consisted of each tier from the directly publicly voted on local level appointing a representative to the next tier higher. Many countries still use something akin to this today, since it allows constituents to be more participatory in their local elections, and less a volatile spectacle during national elections. There are drawbacks, of course, but it was still a democratic republic that followed constitutional rules. Funnily enough, if you actually list the powers of office, the President of the USA has more autocratic powers than pretty much any communist party leader (unless you count the CIA-backed Pol Pot, which why would you?) This isn’t to say that a democratic society means there can be no oppression or failures of administration, especially in a place still rich in Reactionary bigotries from the Czarist era, but it’s a bit more complicated than saying “Stalin bad”, especially when you consider that if you actually read the history, Krushev’s “destalinization” policy was responsible for much of the blaming of Stalin for governmental failures often caused by factionalists like Krushev himself.
Oh, and I guess I should mention the “socialism” of social democracies that have become popular among the “left”. Production is still generally help privately and the Labor – Employer dialectic still exists in full, so it’s really just capitalism with some safety valves for the ruling class to stave off revolution. For countries like Sweden and such it’s also predicated on the exports of military goods and exploitation of the “third-world” or “global south” or whatever term you prefer for the victims of imperialism. For these reasons and more, I don’t think it’s uncontroversial to say the social democracy and welfare is ill-equipped to tackle the contradictions inherent to capitalism. Much like the Nazis, using the term socialism is just piggybacking off the actual populism of revolutionary movements, though at least most social democrats have the conscious to not immediately turn it towards genocide…most…current events in Gaza prove how tenuous a lifeline Liberal squeamish is, sadly.
Additionally, in real-world capitalist societies in the west, the coercive/malicious role that systematic bigotries have played and still play in banking and loans, the housing market, wage theft and business can not be overstated.
Regardless of what your Totally Non-Political™ economics professor wants you to believe, free market economic theory just about never holds up outside a social vacuum.
Agreed. And there are insidious bigotries related to positioning of brownsites and reckless disregard in the production and disposition of environmentally toxic materials. Western capitalism will kill its granny for a buck.
I’m sorry but if you think the Nazi’s were socialist in a remotely Marxist or anti-capitalist sense you don’t have a very good grasp of the Labor – Employer dialectic and it’s contradictions (or of history in general). The fascist state was conceived as and operated as a tool to whip the lower classes in line to private capital interests. The word “privatization” was literally coined to describe the process of collaboration with capitalists in the Third Reich. Monopolization isn’t the antithesis of capitalism, it is it’s goal, or at least the self-evident consequence of the system’s incentives and definitional class structure (markets=/=capitalism, the bourgeois – proletariat dialectic does, the means of trade is merely an expected consequence of the historical evolution of debt as a social construct).
Also: everyone’s favorite instance of landed reactionaries (kulaks, who were definitionally capitalists, they held capital, and exploited wage workers for profit margins) refusing to cooperate with central authority for their own profit and personal gain by selling crops to the west or outright burning them instead of letting the “dirty Russians” redistribute them during a natural drought isn’t actually that great of an argument against central authority as historically illiterate Liberals and Reactionaries think it is. There are plenty of problems with the Soviet administration of the early-mid 20th century (which Stalin had popular support in the elected national Soviet assembly, but Soviet democracy is a whole other thing that people are usually poorly educated on, often deliberately by their historical curriculum) but it also existed 80 years ago. If you want a real dressing down of the Soviets, listen to a modern communist in good faith, we’ll generally be more open to criticizing historical failures of experimental states when we aren’t having to address the most vapid of propaganda, much of it dating back to Goebbels himself.
I didn’t want to get into this on this usually peaceful forum, but I also refuse to let such misguided Red-Bashing go unaddressed. Also, as people have pointed out already, the passive threat of poverty in a capitalist economy is both maintained with the very real threat of state violence (the state is not separate from capitalism, if anything it is the enforcer of it without which “private property” could not exist) are absolutely coercive. The myth of consensual exchange in capitalism exists purely in the realm of idealism, and I use that word explicitly in the philosophical sense, that is to say the anti-thesis of materialism. Lack of class consciousness does not make wage labor consensual, if anything it only makes the superstructure (media, institutions, culture, education, ideology) that reaffirms that productive base (means of production, natural resources, and the relations of labor to production) all the more insidious.
I’ll stop now, but let me assure you there is plenty of literature (hosted online and translated entirely free of charge in most cases) if you find any of my statements strange or involve words you aren’t super familiar with. I like to joke the reason Liberals and Reactionaries try to argue against “The Communist Manifesto” is because “Capital vol. I-III” is too long and dense for them to read without a secondary school teacher drilling them with weekly quizzes. It’s a shame too, even if it uses 19th century examples it’s entirely descriptive of Capitalism as a system, often in ways that seem almost supernaturally prescient. The little pamphlet that was handed out to workers in London in 1848 is a much easier windmill for our modern intellectual Don Quixotes, but is a relatively poor representation of the scientific rigor of Marxists.
Typo in the third paragraph, when describing the coercive nature of capitalism I accidentally shifted one of the methods of the state being a tool of capitalism into the parentheses, resulting in some horrendous grammar. Should read something like:
“…the passive threat of poverty in a capitalist economy is both [a result of state ordained deeds and property rights to hoard production of goods and necessities, without which “private property” would not exist, and is] maintained with the very real threat of state violence [which is] absolutely coercive.”
While writing this correction I realized I should probably distinguish between “private property” and “personal property” since a lot of people unversed in Marxist literature might not make a distinction. “Private property” is used for profit-seeking production, as opposed to “personal property” which is your own property that you derive use-value from (tooth brush, home you live in, the device you are seeing this on, etc.). There is also “public property” and “worker cooperatives” where the labor force has some democratic input, directly or through something like a proletarian (worker focused) representative republic.
I feel “it was cancelled before it really got a chance to hit it’s stride” is in fact a valid criticism. Granted, I also don’t recall the specifics of that convo so he could quite easily have been shitty about it. Like, no matter how good a failed project might have been, the fact that it was cut short in the first place means it’s not as good as it could have been if they were allowed to finish it. That in itself is a flaw, regardless of why it was cancelled, and a show of equal quality that was allowed to have more episodes and reach an actual conclusion (or even just peter out in quality until nobody cares that it was cancelled) will, in my opinion, be objectively better than the also really, really good show that was cut too soon, obviously through no fault of the show itself.
I actually think a show that peters out in quality is worse than one than got cancelled while it was still in it’s prime. There are less episodes, but what does exist is good. There’s no need to explain away the last two seasons.
(cough) (cough) thrones… (cough)
(cough) (cough) Dexter (cough)
I’ve heard more than one person in the last couple decades switch from “Damn FOX for never giving Firefly a proper chance,” to, “Thank God the FOX execs failed so badly they kept the show going on so long that Joss ruined it.”
Eh. Few shows are ever really finished, or even plan to be. The important thing is the show convinces you it told a complete, quality story.
But the ones that do finish themselves out, like Breaking Bad, in my opinion do tend to noticeably better fulfill the “convince you it told a complete quality story” criteria.
Babylon 5 {cough] [cough}
Walky: Ugh, fine, I’ll go light the Charlie Signal.
(big spotlight of a seahorse illuminates the clouds)
This bids fair to be the finest comment of the day.
*Charlie sits up suddenly, concentric circles funnelling into his head, exclamation points above it*
–Dave, almost exactly like Havoc’s don’t
Which cartoon show?
Ultra Car, naturally.
Ultracar is Carla’s fav, while Walky’s is Dexter and Monkey Master.
oh, natural enemies, I suposse.
Carla sees it that way. Walky credits UC as being second best. That’s a bloody high ranking from someone accused of hating the show.
The Ultra Car cartoon. There was a subplot about it back in 2016 (starts here). You’d be forgiven for forgetting it, seeing as 2016 was 75 years ago.
Yes, I think that Ultra Car is meant to be Young Justice.
And Dorothy says it’s just better written than whatever Monkey Master is supposed to be.
monkey master in the DoA universe is probably akin to Teen Titans Go!
Nope, lets try again
maybe, lets roll again
last time
Did you roll better opinions? :–D
Ultracar may have been inspirational, but the sheer cartoon villainy of Monkey Master is unmatchable.
Yeah probably the show described as too smart and radical for normies is supposed to be [my favorite fandom] and the show described as kind of purile and dumb and pop-culture referencing is [my least favorite fandom]. All the evidence points in this direction
Just as well you never saw [show I liked], it would have been wasted on the likes of you.
+1
I think it is especially unlikely that the “bad” show is supposed to be Teen Titans Go, as the closest they’ve ever gotten to expressing a negative opinion about TTG was Shortpacked!Lucy simultaneously going, “I don’t like Teen Titans Go, but I remember jerks being really mean to me for liking the old cartoon when I was a kid, and now the jerks being mean to kids are our age.”
Which, like. If I had to guess I’d say that’s where Willis lands themself: not liking Teen Titans Go very much, but recognizing that it was aimed at kids much younger than them, and having sympathy for the fans of it having to deal with a lot of grownups lashing out at them like it’s their fault Teen Titans got canceled.
Not only cancelled but cancelled in the middle of a tragic story arc.
Okay? Again, not the fault of the kids who liked Teen Titans Go.
Teen Titans was not “cancelled in the middle of a tragic story arc”, the Terra finale was intended to tell the audience it’s okay to let go even though doing so is very sad.
Maybe in the broad sense that given how they were described Ultra-Car was probably more serialized while Dexter was more episodic and more comedic but I don’t think it’s the specific reference point
I don’t think they’re meant to be one to one with any real show. Ultra-Car has the Young Justice toy thing but it also has the Firefly thing of getting canned mid production on it’s first season. Given the premise and the gas leak season the best reference point for Dexter’s probably Pinky and the Brain
I always visualize Dexter and Monkey Master as the unholy hybrid of Pinky and the Brain and PowerPuff Girls.
Oh no, now I desperately want to watch that.
… thou hast firmly cannoned my HEAD
–Dave, somewhere in paratime –
Young Justice was also canned too early, mainly because it (shock horror!) attracted as many female as male viewers if not slightly more. And of course that didn’t match their marketing strategies. Obviously the solution wasn’t to market more broadly, nooo.
Dorothy said it was “smarter”, but that she liked Dexter better, for whatever that’s worth.
I always assumed that Ultra Car was sort of a cartoon version of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercar_(TV_series)
I don’t think it’s really intended as a parallel to anything other than Willis’s own works, but I like to think our universe’s equivalent would be My Life As A Teenage Robot. Trans themes + it got canceled due to low ratings
Ahhh yes as I recall cell phones where still powered by coal, and Youtube videos were crafted the old fashioned way on the spinning wheel.
Interesting: I came here directly from a BBC article about batteries made from burnt waste cotton.
We’re they pro or con wasting and burning cotton?
yes, that was well into the Before Times
–Dave, real good thing that particular Issue has not invaded the Walkywheres. it would be unbearable at 2 days per month
Walky’s expression in panel 4 is SUCH a mood
Re: Last Panel,
Wow Carla going straight for the jugular there 😮
Still more interaction than Joe + Jennifer.
Carla deserves love and support. It’s not her fault her parents are billionaires.
But goddamn, girl, come back once the sun’s fully up. It’s Sunday morning, right? Walky should at least be able to sleep in until Lucy posts up.
Being an insufferable narcissist kinda is her fault, though.
Nature versus nurture. She was raised by billionaires, even if the elder Ruttens were mostly fantastic parents they’re still slipping bits and pieces of their monstrousness into Carla’s development. She can be an asshole, but I wouldn’t fully write her off like that.
See, that’s not an irrational thing to say but it’s hard for me to process that idea while also remembering that she (okay, Ultra Car) was also exactly like this in the Walkyverse, where she was built by Joe and Rachel.
Joe and Rachel were mostly fantastic parents but still couldn’t help slipping bits and pieces of their monstrousness into Ultracar’s development.
How’s that leather taste?
It also couldn’t at all a defense mechanism tied to growing up trans in full public view.
It’s either just that she’s innately an asshole or it’s purely because she grew up rich.
Carla is the princess in a reincarnation webtoon and I love her for it.
Unclear if Booster means Walky’s being a good trans ally for helping Booster get out of a conversation or for putting up with Carla’s shenanigans in general.
Yes.
Both? /o/
Both but prolly meant helping them more than carla, otherwise booster could’ve said like “fine i’ll text my sister a picture of you and tell her to say hi to you next time in class”
Not sure if she’d remember that, or remember to check the text again to remember to do it, focus issues dependent… or if Carla would be fine with it
So does this mean that Walky knows Carla’s trans (and that Booster knows he knows)? Or could the phrasing be taken to mean being an ally to Booster?
I take this as meaning that Booster is trans, not just NB. Not that I really care.
( booster is guy enough to appreciate a pretty girl in a cute dress )
The trans umbrella includes nonbinary people. Nonbinary people, like Booster, often-but-not-always refer to themselves as trans.
Like, the main definition of trans is “not the same gender you were assigned at birth”. (Cisgender is “the same gender you were assigned at birth”.) Booster and Carla are equally not the same gender they were assigned at birth: Carla is strongly a girl instead, and Booster hasn’t talked about their exact gender but probably they’re neither a girl nor a boy. So Booster can totes be considered trans.
A few more nonbinary options include:
– having more than one gender at once
– having no gender at all (this is called agender, or, “nah, I’m just a person”)
– identifying with something unusual as your gender (whatever you really relate to in place of where your gender would go)
– having genders that fluctuate over time.
etc. etc., endless possibility.
And anyone can appreciate a girl in a cute dress. 🙂
Emphasis mine.
Hm I thought the cite attribute would add the person’s name, maybe I messed it up. Anyway: quote Monica Helms, creator of the trans pride flag.
(Just agreeing with you, Leorale!)
There is also gender contrarian — insisting on being the opposite to the gender people are assuming you are. I am thinking of Osana Najimi from ‘Komi Can’t Communicate’. Najimi can quickly become friends with anyone of any gender.
In what world is appreciating a pretty girl in a cute dress only a “guy” thing? Is a cis lesbian who appreciates a pretty girl in a cute dress “guy enough”?
If she says so, I would not venture to disagree.
Booster didn’t say they were “guy enough” though, you did.
I support Booster’s right to be Booster, whatever that is. Enough?
The “guy enough” bit was a very weird thing to say.
My apologies to anyone who felt weirded.
( going to sleep now )
Walky is a true friend :’DD
(Carla ILU but seriously, there’s no way this wasn’t done for maximum annoyance. Games, prizes, and all that.)
If Carla was trying to be maximally annoying, you’d know. This is just her regular level of only thinking/caring about what she wants.
Walky has to help Carla woo Charlie when his only dating advice is to wait for her to break up with Danny and be the rebound (Danny Danny’d that up by dating his sister).
I always assumed the one who gets dumped is the one on the rebound, as in the relationship ended before they were ready and so they easily rebound into a new one for the familiar routine/situation of being in a relationship (however said relationship manifests itself).
That said, it’s not like anyone ever defined it for me.
Are all parties involved able to be on the rebound even when there’s clearly one breaking up with the other?
Genuinely asking.
Both folks can be on the rebound I mean dumping another person doesn’t always mean the dumper wants to be single for a bit.
imagine if after all this charlie ends up with malaya somehow
Well, walky also playing cupid/matchmaker and giving advice as aa neutral third party might help realize/reflect on his own relationship a bit
Damn that last panel. Wowzer.
I’m pretty sure the correct response to this request is, “It’s like five in the morning, go fuck yourself.”
Would it actually be that early? The last strip showed a lovely sunrise and full daylight, what time is sunrise that time of year in Indiana? Here in winter it’s like 7:30, which is still like rudely early for a Sunday morning but I think there’s a world of difference between that and 5am.
booster did say it was “very very early” so it’s def prolly closer to sunrise than it is to like 11 am, but either way too early to be bothered
Does Indiana run Daylight Savings Time? If they do, obnoxiously early sunrises and depressingly early sunsets is par for the course.
Oh man, but early sunsets are the best! Just need to find a place that somehow has extremely late sunrises and extremely early sunsets all year ’round, and I’d finally have discovered the perfect place to live.
Welcome to Alaska where 10 AM sunrises and 2 PM sunsets are a thing.
Is that all year round? Thought that was just a winter thing.
it is just during winter, in the North. Nowhere on Earth has short days, or long days, all year long, not without help.
No, what you want is a dell deep in a range of hills or mountains somewhere, so that you only see the sun as it passes over the portion of the sky which the surrounding heights frame.
–Dave, like various nooks and crannies in the Alleghenies, for instance, which folk song has been committed about
::Frantically taking notes:: I see, I see. Good to know…
IN does observe DST, I’m sorry to say.
Add in that IN is so far west that it should have been in the Central time zone (with Chicago and St. Louis) so the civil time makes even less sense with respect to mean solar time.
But, to answer the earlier question: in Indiana, in January, sunrise is sometime in February.
You win today xD
That’s a great way of putting it! So like most places in winter sunrise is probably not actually super early to be getting up for most people. (Insert caveats about this being a college campus and a Sunday and it still being rude to bother people first thing in the morning even if they could reasonably be awake already here.)
A quick google shows that in Bloomington IN in mid- to late-January, sunrise is about 8am
Huh, that’s probably more patience than I would have expected from Carla then! 😛
sometimes im just laughing too hard to even say “Jesus tapdancing christ.” I’m too exhausted- y’know what, Carla, actually, never change.
That’s the coldest thing I’ve seen anyone say.
Oh hey I wrote the last two dialogue bubbles for this one! David sent me two versions of that final panel with Carla’s first line and extremely minimal context, and after A/B testing the punchlines they wrote I came up with a secret, third thing, which is what you’re reading now.
So yeah, for nine words I got to write for two of my favorite characters, my ace trans queen and my ADHD king, in my favorite comic of all time! Genuinely incredible. On cloud nine about it. Genuinely can’t thank David enough for the opertunity.
Now to wait for the royalty checks to start rolling in.
Congrats!
It’s great, it’s like she’s out-walkying Walky.
it’s a good punchline
Now see, I thought the punchline was that Booster thought they would get any sleep with Carla and Walky arguing in the doorway.
Been unsure about Carla’s characterization lately. But – this strip cleared things up.
She is being written as unsympathetic as Dwight Schrute or Andy Bernard from early seasons of The Office. And that’s the source of the humor.
The reader is not supposed to relate to her. They are supposed to laugh at her – or at least at her inappropriate behavior.
Slightly embarrassed it took me this long to realize this was the direction of the character.
I cannot speak for David but that was, at the very least, not my intention when writing that last line in the slightest. (I speak more on this further down.)
That’s a lot of words just to say “I don’t like this character and no one else should either”.
Anyway, Carla’s great.
Not even a little bit. Chill
Cringe comedy is a legitimate choice. The Office was popular for a reason. I was surprised by this direction with this character – but it’s the creator’s choice.
Uh-huh, sure. You are definitely reading the comic correctly.
Just wanna say “props”, and I totally get what you described as the intent in your convo w/Yotomoe. Made sense to me and was also insightful.
Why is Booster the gateway for their sister? Do they usually determine who should be friends with Charlie? Why can’t Carla just talk to Charlie herself? Or is Ms. Super Sized Opinion About Herself actually afraid of making friends? I’m a little confused. That is a nice dress Carla is wearing, though.
Carla has tried talking to Charlie herself. For whatever reason, Charlie seems literally incapable of noticing when someone is talking to her unprompted, which means nothing Carla’s tried thus far has worked, and it’s driving Carla nuts.
Charlie must have really severe ADD/ADHD. That must make classes really difficult. I hope she’s got proper support, not just from her sibling. Seriousness aside: I don’t think someone with attention issues is right for an attention junkie like Carla. Not even as a friend.
i imagine carla doesn’t know what dorm room she’s in, or rather, talking ‘one on one’ hasn’t esp helped so going to the sibling who understands how her brain functions would help a bit
Charlie tends wounder around and doesn’t always reply straight away. Carla is impatient and slightly impulsive. If carla would wait for a few seconds for Charlie to notice which Charlie did eventually after Carla left. Honestly a little impulse control and patience would make this whole sequence of events unnecessary.
That panel sequence seemed like a lot more than a few seconds.
Carla has tried, hard, to get Charlie to notice her.
Not confess feelings, just to notice her.
And Charlie is oblivious to her presence.
That’s why she’s going to Booster.
I imagine she could actually touch Charlie to get her attention, but that is generally considered rude and I guess that’s one level of rudeness she doesn’t want to cross.
i mean, yeah don’t grab random ppl of course, but i feel like just a tap on the shoulder is a lot less obnoxious to getting their attention than like just shouting while waving signs of her name or so
tho i ‘m surprised booster hasn’t straight up told her “yeah, my sister has a very delayed reaction to stuff” tho even if they ended up having a ‘proper’ conversation idk if carla would have the patience for a romantic relationship versus like a friendship maybe (i mean i know ppl are rooting for her but other than a long arc, i don’t think someone like carla irl would be given the time of day after pie-ing booster in the face, but this is a comic so we can suspend disbelief or so)
Alternate-timeline me reads DoA in his reality, and he said the Carla-Charlie wedding was a real tear-jerker. Not so co-incidentally I’m insanely jealous of Alternate-timeline me because he was able to sue the employer of the truck driver that killed us for million$ because the apartment building we got hit in front of had a security camera pointed at the exact driveway where we got hit in both realities where in my reality the camera wasn’t installed until after I got hit.
curse you, i can PARSE that
–Dave, and now my tenses are declining
I am of the opinion that Carla does not want this to actually work out, because a relationship would mean dealing with actual feelings. But at the same time it bothers her that Booster is denying her something and she can’t overpower them with her amazing Carla-ness.
I largely agree. I actually hope Carla IS having some genuine feelings here just because I want her to be, like, one and one tenth dimensional. But I don’t have hopes.
Perhaps she hasn’t yet thought about how she will feel if she gets what she wants.
It’s very important to Carla that her courtship of Charlie be as pointlessly convoluted and inefficient as possible.
Also, like she said, Booster promised! They already kind of sort of arguably implied some sort of tribute they would offer to Carla’s greatness! How would Carla look if she didn’t milk that for everything it’s worth?! Like a chump, that’s what. LIKE A CHUMP.
imagine charlie seeing the two and having a crush on walky instead XD;
Tho, idk how much more walky can help other than annoy/distract her versus just like setting a meetup between the two in teh cafeteria, which booster would have more ‘access’ to/can send a text or so lol
I didn’t think Booster was asking Walky to deputize and handle Carla’s request. I think Booster was asking Walky to talk to Carla so Booster doesn’t have to and can resume sleeping.
This scene is going to be history’s greatest monster vs someone with a good heart who’s just using obnoxious “humor” as an emotional defense mechanism.
“Some defense mechanism. If I were the killer, I would kill you next.”
Nah, Dorothy’s not in this strip.
I accidentally described
Dorothy and Arnold’s meetcuteevery scene.I appreciate the ambiguity here and I look forward to no one else acknowledging that you could read it the way I do.
You’re both trans tho, Booster.
What if Walky decides to be a good trans ally to Carla instead and team up against you?
It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve worked together to annoy someone.
i mean they are roommates, it’d benefit walky more to be on booster’s good side but i mean he’s prolly too tired to ‘team up’ or so, unless he’s somehow able to wingman for carla effectively
Booster’s the one with access to the Nintendo. It’s not as if Carla’s going to just start randomly handing out gaming consoles oh crap.
Bi-visibility trio.
Was just thinking about how much I like these 3 together. Based on Willis’ Bi visibility day drawing a few years back.
🫠👍
Is it weird to be envious of Jennifer in this image?
It’d be weirder if you weren’t!
Mt. Rushmore, the way it oughta be
I’d add Asher into the mix, make it a full-on mutually-attracted four-way fuckpile. 😀
Get out of my head. I thought the EXACT SAME THING.
Aaah it’s too hotttt *shields eyes*
I refuse to ally myself with anyone who wakes me up first thing in the morning.
What if they cook you your favorite breakfast? Like your MOST favorite breakfast?
lunch?
Ooooo? and what would yours be?
If not for the salt, and practically all of them shut down because of the pandemic, I would love an Indian Buffet. I used to treat myself once a month, there was one next to the post office when I still paid bills by mail.
can’t go wrong with breakfast food but i feel like even if it’s your fave meal i wouldn’t be able to eat first thing in the morning/right after i woke up unless i was super hungry, or at least have like a hot cup of peppermint tea first and then wait 30 mins and eat lol.
People who don’t understand that you need to hydrate first are a mystery to me.
Some days I can just go directly to eating, but usually it ends up making me so queasy I can’t get off the couch. Hydration is important.
I don’t know about hydration, but coffee before breakfast is important.
You have to be awake in order to eat.
I guess sleep-eating is conceivable, but doesn’t sound like much fun
I’m starting to wonder if coffee does anything for me besides putting liquid in my system, because I can drink a couple shots of espresso right before bed and sleep just fine. Either way, food has to come second or else.
i pretty much always have water bottles at night/by my bedside lol
i’m surprised someone like walky could even wake up before noon otherwise but i mean if he makes carla go away by annoying her they’d both get a little bit of peace til carla tries again
“Waking a person unnecessarily should not be considered a capital crime. For a first offense, that is.” – from The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
XD Careful Booster – he could decide to be a trans ally to Carla and try to get her what she wants.
I mean, even if walky wanted to help, idk if he’d be that much better versus booster putting in a good word
who knows, maybe walky would make the situation worse (if it isn’t booster playing 5D chess being like “oh i expected walky to put his foot in his mouth”)
I thought being a trans ally would mean supporting them against outside bigotry and oppression, not getting involved in, err, intramural disputes.
(Though come to think of it, do we know if Booster knows Carla is trans?)
That’s the joke here. The correct usage is what you said, but Booster is using it to mean “doing a favor for a trans person”.
Can you even call yourself a trans ally if you haven’t ever run interference to keep the two nearest trans kids from murdering each other?
I don’t remember if it’s been outright stated at any point, but they’re not as oblivious as Walky or sheltered as Joyce, so I would say the likelihood of Booster knowing about Carla approaches infinitely close to 100% without ever quite reaching it.
asymptotic enlightenment
–Dave, alas, the student is still waiting
It’s weird because I didn’t even think of the “be a trans ally by doing a favor for me” reading at first and was kind of weirded out by Booster casually dropping that Carla is trans in front of Walky like he obviously knew. The more I think about it though, the more it seems Booster has to be the trans person in question.
Maybe because using “be a good ally” to get random favors from your roommate seems kind of lousy.
I genuinely think it is just a joke, and a good one at that.
Yeah, i guess it’s a joke in this case, but i’ve also had a trans roommate and she used “but i’m trans“ to get away with bs that was not in the least related to her being trans. Ma’am i’m not gonna disrespect your gender, no matter how upset i am at you, but if you don’t act like a decent human being, we still have a problem. You don’t get to be an ass to people or get everything you want just by being marginalized. This tends to end in “who’s most oppressed and therefore always right?” competition. Been there. oof.
I think everybody but Joyce knows that Carla is trans. Not just the other characters on the floor, or in the dorm, or on campus… literally everybody. Like, if you find an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon and ask them about her, they’ll be all, “Carla Rutten? Oh, yeah, that’s that girl who came through here in a red SUV a few months ago yelling, ‘Hey everybody! I’m Carla Rutten, and I’m trans! In your face! And then she threw a pie at us?'”
where ‘uncontacted’ means ‘Ultra Car dropped Ethan and Mike near there one day’
–Dave, it’s a small ‘verse aaafter all
I was gonna say Booster outobnoxioused Carla until Carla brought up the traumatizing event when Walky was trapped in a basement by a crazed psycho on the day after his roommate was murdered as a funny GOTCHA for not liking a cartoon.
walky would prolly be ok with that snark compared to if she had said it to another person, tho i feel like walky would be more offended about her insulting dexter monkey master versus the basement comment
Okay so when David showed me the original versions of this punchline, all of them had Walky bringing up the kidnapping as The One Other Time They Interacted, and Carla writing it off as nothing compared to having insulted a cartoon, and I thought “Carla pretends not to care about other people but always in a way that demonstrates she’s thinking of them more than she’d admit, so her broaching the kidnapping is the stronger choice here. And Walky’s repeatedly said he’d prefer that incident to be funny! So this is some good Carla facade bullshit, being a plausibly deniable jerk.”
But whatever, it’s fine, readers deciding characters have crossed some horrifying ethical line is just part of The Experience™ for me.
Something can be in-character AND I can find it rude and terrible simultaneously. If Walky’s cool with it there’s not much I can say but personally I feel like it’s just kind of a inappropriately dark joke for someone to make.
I not only agree with this sentiment, I thought that was the point. And I got a good laugh at it, because it’s a great line.
I’m with Wack’d here. For nearly anyone else it would be inappropriately dark, but Inappropriately dark is exactly Walky’s sense of humor. He’d appreciate it, even if the others who were there wouldn’t.
And Carla, despite her facade, knows enough about him to know that.
It’s ok, Mike’s alive.
This is a great read of the character and cuts to the heart of what makes Carla compelling. Thrilled you got to write a bit of dialogue for the comic!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gHk2m8x4KEg&pp=ygUVZ3VtYmFsbCBkYXJ3aW4gdG9iaWFz
I thought about it a bit and I think this is a perfect example for why I don’t like Carla’s comment so much.
Like, not that you or anyone else needs permission to dislike either this piece of dialogue or Carla in general, but I just wanna say that, as someone who liked the line and Wack’d’s explanation for it, it’s still totally okay to NOT like it and to think Carla was over the line.
(Also thanks for the link! I might share it with other people in different situations bc it’s a good explanation of the phenomenon. What’s over the line in terms of “too much for how well x knows y” is gonna vary from person to person but the video is a really good illustration of how it feels when that line gets crossed.)
Yeah, that crosses a line, Carla. You don’t imply that people should have to stay in traumatic and life-threatening situations. That’s not a joke. If it’s not funny to everyone involved, it’s not a good joke.
I mean it was funny to everyone involved explicitley. Walky and Carla both liked it. The audience member who says ‘if i was in this situation i wouldnt like it’ is not involved, in this situation.
She’s not just wearing a dress. She willingly took off the skates. That’s kinda a big deal, no?
You’re right! :O
That’s commitment, right there.
Holy shit, hell has frozen over.
You should only take off your skates on the third date!
Wtf, Carla???
No, seriously, wtf?
I know, right? That dress with those shoes?
So you think she should take off the shoes?
Right. And put the skates back on.
autoplaying a/v ads covering the comic
That’s just your YouTube tab. Try clicking this one.
ads on this site are pretty out of control
… … adblock+ means I never knew this site HAD ads
–Dave, ditto, earlier on, for both YouTube and Twitter
So telling Carla to eff off, closing (and locking) the door and going back to sleep isn’t an option?
She’s not going to let a little setback like that stop her pestering. She’ll find a way!
Oh, it certainly is, but it’s not one he’ll take. I mean, if it were a reasonable hour (which for him probably means at least noon) he’d probably find it funny.
I mean, they can close the door. Don’t mean she won’t keep banging the door until they pay attention to her.
A quick jab to the solar plexus solves a lot of issues
Once again the deeper message in DoA is “I should have locked the door.”
Go sleep on the floor in Amber’s room, Walky.
hey wait does Walky sleep with his butt in the air like Garfield
I just realized that both Booster and Walky have twin sisters. That’s neat, to have both roommates in a dorm have twin sisters elsewhere. It would be even better if both of those sisters were also roommates but this is fine for now.
Damn, I am roommated with the wrong amniotic sac”.
I wish I didn’t find Carla’s behavior so endearing.
I’m so upset about feeling joy.
Carla is such a fun and lovable character 😡
“your approval fills me with shame” situation
–Dave, but in first-person instead
Everyone eventually gets the dreaded Carla Duty.
This is the least Carla-like Carla outfit ever. Flats? Not skates?
It’s so wrong, and yet so right because she rocks it anyway.
goddammit, why didn’t i think of that? next time my dad calls me i’m going to throw the phone at my brother’s head and tell him to be a good lgbt ally
If I’m being honest… I don’t like Deb.
I feel like this is a reference to something… actually, it makes me think of “Arrested Development,” but if that’s the case, how did GOB become Deb?
Oh crap, Fandom Drama in the hallway!
Honestly, the confluence of Carla’s asshole nature and Booster insisting that Walky be a Trans Ally is just hitting my “call her an asshole, slam the door in her face and go back to bed” buttons. “Ally” doesn’t mean “Doormat”, Walky and Booster are entirely within their rights to tell Carla to buzz off until its a normal hour, and Booster can kinda get bent for thrusting this bullshit onto Walky.
I do believe that Booster is asking Walky to be a good trans ally to them, as they are non-binary thus trans ! 😀
But that’s still a lousy way to push your roommate into doing stuff for you.
it’s a lighthearted way of saying ‘hey do me a solid’ it’s not always that deep
Booster’s being a bit rude, but they’re still lightyears behind Carla demanding attention at dark o’clock from college students :D.
Listen, i know Willis is supposed to be like the “author” etc and yadda (except today Wackd is a little bit the author too) but i still think my Carla in a dress is better than theirs.
*plays Sarah Brand’s Red Dress on Honked Muzank* (careful that song is.. different)
OOOOH I REALLY LIKE THIS COLOR SCHEME FOR CARLA.
I can have little a being the author, as a treat
can’t go wrong with red and stripes lol
ripped, nipped, _and_ tucked!
–Dave, … carry on
God I hate morning people 😀
I know that Carla was talking about another cartoon. But now I thing Walky don’t like “Hey Arnold” and prefer “Invader Zim”.
Walky in panel 5 looks like if the Gorillaz artist was trying to draw on Yoshiyuki Sadamoto’s style.
Maaan that’d probably be a real fucked up statement if it was directed towards anyone but Walky. Walky’s probably the only one that might take it as a joke and joke back.
See Wack’d comment on it above.
Carla knows her audience.
Oh yeah. I figure she wouldn’t say something like this to most folks, but Walky’s a bit different and she knows that.
yeah if anything walky was just as bad putting his foot in his mouth when he was talkign to ethan like “so did you already own all those black clothes or did you go to target” or so lol
Oh I need to try this line when I need a favour!
(Because this is the internet I must inform everyone this is a joke, I will not be demanding things by stating it is to be an ally)
That’s disappointing.
I was going to ask you to be a good hetro-ally and let me know if it works.
The hets don’t need allies in the way trans folk do, it wouldn’t work even if Mel committed :v
“Allyship” I whisper to myself as I sit through another baby gender reveal party my cousins are throwing
Do your cousins provide fire extinguishers for everyone, or is it more of a potluck situation?
they could save time by just
providing baby extinguishers
instead
–Dave, things NOT to say at the next such party
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh4PTkFYGbY&ab_channel=TheCamelToeVigilante “yas queen”
I’m old and not familiar with a lot of modern terms.
Is a ‘good trans ally’ a non-trans person who is somehow obligated to do things that a trans person doesn’t want to do, or is Booster just being an ass?
Asking because this particular situation doesn’t really appear to have anything to do with Walky, and I don’t see how any of it is really his problem.
Booster is being sarcastic, yes. If it helps, you could easily substitute the phrase “good roommate” or “good friend” and achieve roughly the same effect.
they’re joking in the way a person does when they’re very tired and trying to go back to sleep.
Insert “that’s bait” gif from Fury Road.
You’re right, it doesn’t have anything to do with Walky. Booster is making it his problem though, because they’re a mischievous scamp.
oh my god carla
carla is also my god
Being a good trans ally means acting as a buffer between the trans people in your life so none of them get murdered.
Maybe Booster knows Charlie will react more violently to be woken up super early and wants Walky to protect Carla
Or maybe they’re just being snarky because they’re tired
Or maybe it’s Maybelline.
Wait, Booster is trans? I thought they were just NB
Sorry, not JUST NB
They are overlapping circles in a broader Venn diagram!
Some people consider nonbinary a form of trans
“Some people” including the creator of the trans flag.
Trans* has always included non-binary people. Some non-binary people don’t ID as trans, but like… almost always because they’ve had bad experiences being told they aren’t “trans enough” to qualify and they don’t want to fight about it.
(The asterisk on trans* community *needs* to come back, frankly, because we all need a reminder that all gnc people are welcome in the broad community and that we are stronger together than apart.)
I don’t know that the asterisk was helping people understand that, honestly. As a nonbinary person, I was seeing it be used more as a way to distinguish trans (binary) people from “trans*” (nonbinary people).
Yeah, I never really felt like it cleared anything up. Usually when you put an asterisk, you wanna put a little annotation at the bottom of your text, so people can read the clarification without interrupting the flow of the main body. I’ve never seen that bit added, even as a hyperlink to a helpful resource.
Yes, that’s one of the reasons why it’s fallen off, but it’s not “trans (binary)” and “trans* (non-binary people)”, tho. The * is to represent that it’s transgender, but also transsexual (which used to refer specifically to folks who want physical transition as well as social transition, distinguished from transgender), transvestite, etc.
(Yes, some of these words have fallen out of favor! That doesn’t change the fact that they’re also words people have used for themselves for decades.)
Anyway it’s less about needing one specific term and more about pushing back against the idea that you can be “more” or “less” trans. No oppression Olympics.
joyce and dorothy had this exact discussion about a week and a half ago: dumbingofage.com/everysexualimpulse/
I consider myself an ally, but I am also enough of an asshole that if I was in Walky’s position I would tell Booster to F off and go back sleep.
IMO, that’s not being an asshole, that’s simply having boundaries and not letting people take advantage of you.