well, even tho it’s a big part of her identity i think most ppl would think of her as “That one girl on rollerskates” as opposed to “the trans character” as like some mouthpiece/representation or so, like how Booster is also a psych major that probably over steps boundaries a bit (tho it is interesting how booster shares a room with walky and carla has her own dorm unless that was part of the ‘lawsuit’)
Nonbinary don’t have to identify as trans, but we are under the umbrella, and plenty of us do identify as nonbinary trans people. I think Booster is nonbinary trans as well.
Non-binary folk are under the trans umbrella and it’s an important part of identity to some of us.
I’m guessing your point is that we have no reason to think Booster has transitioned medically, which may have been the reason Carla got her own room. Or it might be the level of social transition- if Booster presented as considerably more femme, they might have also been offered their own room. We don’t have enough information to say, but it’s probably to do with the level of transition.
Carla’s probably more comparable to- I think his name was Zac? A trans guy who had recently come out in Billie’s new, uh, area. (I forgot the right word.) He was extremely recently out when we saw him and implied to still be living with girls- if he’s not allowed a solo room then it’s either specifically because Carla’s a trans woman or because her parents are rich.
That’s it! I remembered him being from Shortpacked! but he was so minor a character I was really fuzzy on his name. Clearly.
Also I realised that there’s another option to Carla having her own room and not other transfolk and that’s having transitioned legally- which I think she very likely has.
I’m pretty sure solo rooms just cost more at IU, I was never in campus housing, but I did briefly look into it for the sake of curiosity and I don’t recall seeing anything about specific accommodations for trans people regarding single rooms (or in general, really, not that I looked for it since I’m cis, but still). Zaph might still be in the female wing because he came out after being assigned the room and it will take time to move him, or it might be left up to the individual to decide which wing they’d rather be in.
It might also be a legal thing, a friend of mine who came out and transitioned a couple years ago had her birth certificate legally changed after she started medically transitioning and had her legal name changed, so it could be that IU recognizes whatever gender is on your legal documents when assigning a wing, so if Carla has had her documents changed to reflect her gender identity and Zaph hasn’t, that could explain it.
As for Booster, would a non-binary person care which wing they are in? I get that might sound flippant, but I mean it as a genuine question, since as neither a man nor a woman, wouldn’t being put in the men’s wing or the woman’s wing be equally good or bad or whatever? That’s the kind of thing I assume would have personal variance, but like, in general would it make a difference?
I think we’re way, way overthinking it here. This is a university, and this is clearly a rooming policy. Therefore, it has nothing to do with what makes sense or not, and is instead 100% based on public image.
Whether or not you get a solo room, would be entirely based on what will or will not get the school into scandals with donors. And that 100% has to do with whether you’re rooming with someone whose sex assigned at birth is the same as your own.
Booster may be nonbinary trans, but if their sex assigned at birth was male, then there’s no rich conservative donors clutching their pearls if they room with Walky. Same with Zaph, who was on a women’s floor the last time we saw him.
Carla, however, has a big giant freaking spotlight on her like the queen she is, and I’m sure that the single room was a concession that was made by the school when the Ruttens enrolled her.
I’d also note that there’s an issue of change in policies over time– when the strip started, housing accommodations for trans students were less common. I started college in 2012, and there was a big push for it going on in my campus LGBTQ+ then. Now, my college has more options relating to gender and on-campus housing. I don’t know the exact situation for IU, but I think that might be a factor here as well.
Why does everyone assume Booster is amab tho? they could just as well be afab. actually don’t they have a same age twin sister? it they are identical twins that would imply Booster is afab (they could be fraternal twins, not sure if something has been said abouit that)
“Would a non-binary person care which wing they were in?” That’s an answer which will vary widely. Some would care for safely reasons; some would care for identity reasons; some would do everything they could to look for gender neutral options. And some genuinely wouldn’t care.
“Non-binary” just means someone who falls outside the gender binary. Some lean more masc, some more femme. For example being perceived and treated exclusively as female caused me massive gender dysphoria- being perceived and treated exclusive as male does not. But I’m not male, I’m non-binary. My spouse is agender and doesn’t much care about gendered language unless it has specific connotations that don’t feel right to them. However, if either of us were housed in female-exclusive areas we’d both be deeply uncomfortable because neither of us look female and we know that things would be… awkward at best.
I know someone who’s gender fluid and would find being in gendered housing at all to be uncomfortable. I know someone who is transfemme (NOT female) and transitioned and presents fairly femme but doesn’t care about passing in large part because they are not female. I know or have known non-binary folk where I couldn’t guess where they would fall on gendered housing- but honestly, the most common question in that situation is “where would I be safest”. And we’d definitely care that we need to put our safety over having our identities respected, cause that doesn’t feel good.
Apologies for the ramble. About Booster specifically, it’s unclear how they feel, but iirc (I might not and I just woke up so I haven’t looked) Booster did express a measure of discomfort when they thought Amber was suggesting they hook up with Ethan because he’s exclusively into men, which Booster is not. That implies that they would definitely prefer a gender neutral option were it available to them.
Thank you for the answer, there is admittedly a *lot* I don’t understand about the non-binary spectrum and finding answers to my questions has proven challenging.
I learn best by arguing, if something doesn’t make sense to me I’ve found the most efficient way to learn what I’m missing is to argue with someone who knows what they’re talking about, pointing out what look to be logical holes to me, so they can identify what I’m misunderstanding and correct that, but it’s really hard to do that without coming off like I’m attacking them and that is decidedly *not* my intention so I mostly just don’t so I can avoid causing unintentional harm, but it’s difficult to always be respectful when I’m ignorant since I don’t know enough to know what is and is not respectful.
So thank you for taking my question in the spirit I intended and giving a blunt answer, that is exactly what I needed. Although your answer *does* leave me with more questions since it mentioned some stuff I had never heard of before, I figure this probably isn’t the place to get into the nitty gritty and pester you with more questions.
I mean, I’d be happy to answer questions, but you probably won’t even see this now since the second page after this one will be going up soon! If you do see this uh… feel free to ask? Learning is good.
Again, it depend on the person. I’m agender and consider myself trans, my bestie is genderfluid and don’t really consider themself trans. I guess it’s on the perception of things and the way you wanna handle this?
I’m not sure that’s necessarily the case. Pretty sure most parents of intersex kids don’t go “okay, you’re nonbinary”. They usually seem to assign either ‘he’ or ‘she’.
Unless they were assigned NB at birth, they’re (arguably) trans. Some NB folks don’t identify as trans, but that’s personal choice rather than the word outright not being accurate.
This is how I react to both Booster and Carla. They both annoyed me long before I learned anything about their gender and continue to annoy me for non-gender-related traits.
I’m pretty OK with telling people to be more like Joyce. Say what you will, but she really came in with both her own beliefs and a sincere desire to learn. She was, and is, constantly being confronted by choices and her usual instinct is to learn how to make the best one without losing her sense of self. And, along the way, she’s able to understand her sense of self ever more deeply, embracing the things she wants to be, and leaving behind the things that get into the way of that.
She’s still learning. She’s boorish about it sometimes, but it’s sincere and from a desire to get away from behavior & beliefs she once embraced and now rejects.
I think she’s going to be agitated for a bit, and I hope Carla isn’t nearby during that, but she’ll get her mind around it. Considering the timeline, she’s growing and changing as a person at a remarkable, if not perhaps unrealistic, pace. And the only way for her changes to be believable, she needs to fumble along the way.
Actually, I don’t think Joyce will fuck it up much, if at all. She has realized that everything she has been raised to believe is thoroughly wrong and has been working like crazy to change her behavior and beliefs.
I might even go so far as seeing Joyce and Carla becoming friends over this.
Young baby Carla had very light blue past filter hair. Maybe it was blonde or maybe it was light blue to imitate Carla’s second favorite cartoon Mega Boat. (You’ve never heard of Mega Boat or its lost media pilot because it’s creator lost a lawsuit with Hasbro for looking too much like Depth Charge. Yes I’ve made this all up.)
Dear Prior Joyce, God created you nekkid, and yet you changed that by *gasp* wearing clothes! SINNER. Shave your pits? SINNER. Put on makeup or deodorant? SINNER. Shame on you, Prior Joyce. SHAME.
Google also says it was about preventing people from wearing a certain type of garment reserved for the clergy rather than a moral ruling, but that’s five seconds research so take it with a grain of salt.
Not to mention the types of people who use Leviticus to justify bigotry definitely don’t care about the original intent or context and just ascribe moral judgment to it anyway…
They also conveniently “forget” or disregard that if they consider themselves followers of Jesus, then most of the Old Testament rules were thrown out in favor of His teachings. (I’m not a religious student, but I believe everything except the Ten Commandments were overruled by the New Testament)
Matthew 5:17-18: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” and “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” respectively. Which makes sense, as Christianity was a Jewish sect until at least the time when Paul decided to cast a wider net. So no, your assertion is patently untrue – which doesn’t mean that Christians haven’t simply dismissed or explained away any passage that was inconvenient at the time.
I think I learned that the Old Testament rules were no longer valid because of the Last Supper: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you” but I freely allow that I’m not a scholar and haven’t even looked at a bible in almost 40 years.
One of the issues facing Judaism then (as always) was the questions of what was “the Law” (and wasn’t), and what was the interpretation of “the Law”. Each sect, including “the Way” (early Christianity) had (a) different answer(s) to this.
In the present, different sects of both still argue about the same kind of questions and answers. We just tend to follow some version where someone has or is yelling their version very loudly, because that’s how we determine who’s right. Then everyone else is a godless heathen.
It’s complicated and what we see in the NT is essentially the argument 1st century Christians were having about whether followers of Jesus (or at least Gentile converts) needed to keep Torah Law or whether Jesus’s death and resurrection superseded that. Paul’s faction won out. Cynically, because it was easier to get converts if they didn’t have to get circumcised.
But it left us with conflicting passages in the NT, because the authors were part of this argument. They shouldn’t really be reconciled, because they’re saying different things and the idea that the Bible speaks with one voice hides what the individual authors thought.
yup! thejeff has it right! It’s unclear whether or not ethnically Jewish Christians should still follow Torah Law or not, but Paul definitely wins out on deciding that Gentile converts do not need to convert to Judaism and follow the Law to be Christians. Some segments of modern church have kinda lost sight of the fact that there has always been debate in biblical interpretation. Once you start to see the Bible as containing large sections of debate about how to interpret the teachings of the Law and/or Jesus’ teachings, it gets way more interesting.
Not sure when the “red letter” thing became common, but it’s hardly universal.
Also, even that is really something that a later author claimed Jesus said and since none of them had recordings or even transcripts, even the words in red are shaped to the later authors theological agendas.
Yeah, Joyce had no clue and only picked up on anything because other people were acting weird. That makes sense given that she didn’t guess when Dorothy started talking about it, even though Carla came in at the time.
Also, Jennifer and Dorothy were correct to keep that from her. She wasn’t ready yet, but she probably is now.
Doesn’t she also make a comment after some break period where she notices Carla is bustier than she was before? (Likely because of HRT.) I wanna say it was Dorothy with her?
I think NGPZ meant that the fact that she’s cringing at a flashback of a thing she said in the past means she’s grown since she said it and this is a relatable experience for a lot of people. Personally, I don’t tend to cringe at memories of my past, even if I have said a lot of things I no longer agree with, but I don’t tend to cringe in general and I don’t have much in the way of an episodic memory, so I don’t have a whole lot of memories that I relive in that way in the first place.
Strip time when observed by everyone else present, but she’ll experience it as slowly as it take the real world to get to next month in comic. So it’ll involve relativistic time dilation.
I would entirely fine with Mary being punched into next week. Comic time, not real time, of course, since that would mean we wouldn’t be seeing Mary again probably for months, if not years.
If she didn’t Joyce would look like an asshole for letting it slide and would be compelled to waste a strip on correcting Mary when this isn’t a Mary storyline, which would hurt the pacing.
Mary is a foil. Not a main character. Not every character in a story can be the main, or get special story time allocated to them. Not every character is meant to be a main villain or get a redemption arc. Some characters (those who serve a specific purpose for the main characters) are meant to be 2-dimensional.
In this story, Mary serves as a way to show us what Joyce could have been if she’d gone a different way when she was around people who challenged the views she was brought up with.
I’m not sure why you’re railing this hard against a really common narrative tool, but it just sounds like whining about not understanding story structure at this point.
Thanks for saying this way better that I could. I decided not to engage with them today because really it just fell like a waste and giving them undue attention. And yeah it does fell like whining, especially because that avatar looks like it’s constantly crying out, so that is how I interpret how they sound, just non stop whining.
I do not understand why “Mary sucks and I hate her and I wish she wasn’t in the comic” is being interpreted as “I love Mary and wish we had more Mary content”
Point to me where I said you loved Mary or wanted more Mary content?
You’ve complained at length about Mary’s part in the story so I explained it. Whatever you took from that came from inside yourself unless it was the literal words I wrote on screen.
Everyone different is a depraved monster out to get you and there are countless deep states conspiracies trying to bring humanity to ruin and suppress their freedom. Fear and anger are the only things that give life any semblance of meaning.
Anybody could secretly have been assigned any gender at birth, but the fact that it’s almost impossible to tell and doesn’t change anything somehow doesn’t mean it’s not important. So instead you have to devote your entire life to telling. All the circuits in the brain devoted to joy and caring about other people have to be taken up for looking at finger length, or whatever it is they claim is a biological tell this month, and plotting against imagined enemies. Until your own humanity is like a juiced orange, a bitter rind with no sweetness left. It would be pitiable except the hell is self inflicted, and you do your best to spread it to everyone else.
I think you can get news bulletins from Mary’s reality on Truth Social. America is a failed state over there, wracked by violent crime, and Donald Trump has won eighteen club championships at golf. But on the up side, there are free tampons in the boys’ bathrooms in Minnesota public schools.
I know a guy like Mary and it baffles me. Everything can be going his way, everything turns out how he wants, he lives in one of the reddest states in the country (Texas) and yet it’s still a liberal hellscape and he believes that he is constantly being plotted against and the world is out to get him.
Bro has $300k in the bank and is still miserable beyond all comprehension.
Texas is actually *not* one of the reddest states! It was only +5.6% for the Republicans in the 2020 race for President; only two states that went red had a smaller margin than that! Their Attorney General is on record saying, out loud, that they may have lost the state if they hadn’t engaged in voter suppression.
Demographic shifts are complex, of course, but Texas has drawn a lot of immigration from coastal states as a tech industry hub, and well-educated people like that lean far more left.
What Texas is is one of the states most committed to having an *identity* as a Red State.
In terms of their legislature and representation in Congress, yes. In this context I was using in a more cultural context where it’s a matter of “how many people around you are conservative”‘, and Texas isn’t as red-dominated as it likes to present itself as, at least in its cities.
From Mary’s point of view, all of civilization is constantly on the verge of total collapse, and she is the lone heroine who nobly shoulders the burden of reminding everybody what it means to be truly moral. So yes, her reality is terrible in general, but it’s very satisfying for her personally!
It would also basically require Joyce to push back against it, which would waste panels better spent on the actual story. Mary’s screentime should generally be kept to a minimum because she’s terrible.
Not so sure about that. I mean, true enough, I don’t recall Mary being shown as explicitly calling Carla “he/him” yet, but it’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility, given all the other vile, offensive things Mary has been shown saying and doing.
I do think the actual explanation is probably wanting to keep the real egregiously hateful stuff to a minimum, but I’ve definitely seen transphobes slip up and fail to misgender the target of their ire because a lot of the time it does take active effort.
Mary doesn’t have a male-looking name available for Carla, and Carla doesn’t remotely look male (yes, she’s tall, but that doesn’t mean much), so she actually thinks of Carla as female until she reminds herself.
I finally put it down. That was an ordeal it should not have been.
I am several parsecs away from sober right now, so if this entire thread is shot I understand: The type of person Mary is deserves a summary execution. If you are the kind of independent actor in the universe who concerns themselves so unnecessarily with other actors, especially in such a bigoted manner, you need to be dropped dead as soon with as little fanfare as possible.
GGs, everyone, may you make the world suck a little bit less in your passing.
There’s no real downside though. Mary is an unpleasant and unpopular character with minimal story utility who would’ve been killed off years ago if a subsection of the fandom wasn’t horny for her.
Hey, it’s really fucking inappropriate to be blaming me for the character sticking around. Just because I’d [wow that’s inappropriate] Mary in the [holy fuck, settle down], that’s no excuse to be so ridiculous.
Marys’ unpleasantness and unpopularity is likely exactly why she’s got story utility here. Willis wants Carla outed to Joyce for story reasons, and if Mary does it nobody has to deal with their favorite character doing it.
I very seriously doubt that any readers’ horniness or lack thereof for Mary (ugh, ick, *vomit suppression*) has any bearing whatsoever on Willis’s reasons for keeping her around.
Also, just to clarify, because that looks way worse than I intended…
For me personally, speaking only for myself, it does not matter to me if a person is stupidly, smoking, supermodel hot or whatever*, if their personality is utter shit, as Mary’s is, then the thoughts of fucking them fills me with ugh, ick, and vomit suppression. Whether or not anyone else wants to entertain the idea of fucking Mary, despite her abhorrent personality, is none of my business whatsoever.
* – Which, for what it’s worth, I don’t think applies to Mary to start with, but again, that’s just me.
AC New Horizons is definitely the one I spent the most time in, but AC Fires of Rubicon was a genuine revelation. I never got around to trying AC Skies Unknown, though. 🙂
joyce was a pretty uptight fundie at the start, she also freaked out about that one polycule’s ‘open relationship’ or so , but i can imagine she would’ve avoided bringing up any ‘sensitive’ subject with joyce just to avoid dealing with her reactoins
Jennifer actually makes quite a few good judgement calls. She mostly goes horribly wrong when it comes to anything that involves herself. As long as she has some distance, she’s usually on the money.
God, if one believes such things, created you with eyes to look at the world around you and hands to touch it and change it and brains to think about what you’re seeing and doing. If God has given you the tools to change, are you going to decide He doesn’t want you to use them?
A lot of fundie beliefs are painfully paradoxical and self-serving, yes.
That’s basically why so many post-fundie atheists are so obsessed with logic and reason. That’s how they got out, so they think it’s the only way to see the light.
According to Dorothy, her coming out as a kid was “national news“. I’m guessing Joyce didn’t see that bit of news because the Browns didn’t want their kids exposed to it, fearing that the mere knowledge of the concept would “trans them” or some shit. Oh the irony.
it’ll be q uite the interesting retrospective when the sibling comes out to her and she has flashbacks of joceleyn seeming ‘feminine’ , tho hopefully her joy would out weigh any awkwardness bc there was a strip a while ago that was like “i’ve always wanted a sisterm y whole life”
Her parents are wealthy and famous and she was literally national news.
And honestly, it all sounds awful, and being fabulously Carla is probably the only way she made it through. Immense wealth can insulate you from a lot, and having a loving and supportive family sure doesn’t hurt – but I would not have wanted anything of myself to be national news as an adolescent, certainly not anything anybody might target me for, and not with my rich family making the news cycle last longer than usual.
It’s a little weird, because it’s never really been clear who knew and I don’t think we’ve really seen people on the floor acting weird around Carla. Not enough to warrant Joyce’s comment anyway.
Not quite “blue hair and pronouns,” but dyed hair of any stripe is close enough in spirit.
I’m can totally see a version of this conversation as a long-lost strip from 2010-ish in my head, with all the shaky lineart and bobble-headed anatomy that entails.
I get so many “of course you have blue hair” comments from strangers online. I’m a cis woman, but a strong leftist. When I went to look up why, I was surprised they never added the “and pronouns” for me.
I interpret that face she makes as her having a mini existencial crisis at the concept that trans people aren’t immediately recognizable as fraud by everyone who sees them. Don’t worry she rationalize it away a second later.
I do notice that despite her obvious bigotry, Mary is still referring to Carla with the correct pronouns, which puts her a rung above the likes of JK Rowling and such
It does make it less confusing to read because my brain always hits those like a store’s double doors where one is locked. like, they’ll say “transgender men are men” and I start to agree before realizing they’re talking about transgender women.
It’s one of the weirder Mary quirks where all the other villains got stuck at 100% Hitler but her evil dial is stuck at 99% so there are these weird…little gaps, kind of, in her malice. It’s easy to notice those gaps and think that Mary has some kind of “character trait” that explains them, but really it’s only because there’s an upper limit to how much of an asshole Mary can be before characters should just physically attack her on sight and her still being in the dorm at all without suffering serious violence stops making sense. Arguably we’ve been past that point since the Ruth blackmail.
She’s never done it before. It’s always “her” in quotes or him in bold. Which makes it even more hilarious here. In this moment of mild stress Mary FORGETS to disrespect Carla like her politics require.
Transphobia is really about demanding women look a certain way, a template one might define as “starved young white smooth-skinned upper class perfectly made up effortlessly flawless innocent quiet big eyed Victorian era woman”, or “fuckable”. In a vacuum, Mary would be far more likely to be suspicious of Becky than of Carla, due to her modern hairstyle and plaid shirts. And here she’s telling us she knows it too.
I mean, there was an earlier strip where she’s like “I’m taking you back to the BOYS dorm where you belong” altho i wouldn’t be surprised if she was warned before by ruth or another person to not openly misgender her as much or so
Tho it does make me think of that one tweet like “I have double d’s grandpa, the waitress thinks you have dementia”
We’re either going to waterski over this or go on a full swamp walk, aren’t we? And to be fair, I’m not sure how to avoid either outcome as a writer. Welp, Godspeed (yes, phrasing, I know). I’ll be here to read it and see how it plays out.
For anyone else who’s curious regarding timeline placement, Joyce’s and Billifer’s outfits both match with the ones they were wearing in the third storyline of Book 1. I’d link a specific strip, but they’re never actually in the same strip in that one so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
She didn’t know who it was. That’s the whole point of her referring to the person as “secret,” and in her conversation with Dorothy about it, she was just learning that she knew someone (multiple people!) transgender, but she didn’t learn who “the” trans woman she knew was.
Yeah, I don’t think she ever had anyone in particular in mind. It was an abstract thing for her, which probably made it easier for her to adjust to mentally at the time.
Dorothy at one point told Joyce that she DOES know a trans person, but then refused to out that person to her. So all she knew was that there was a trans person somewhere in broader social group Dorothy and she share.
Joyce didn’t know who it was and suspected it could be Dorothy at one time. She hasn’t figured out about Jocelyne, but may or may not think she’s a gay man.
From what I remember, that joke happened frequently. And also let us know that she was skating up and down the hallways all the time to make sure people noticed her.
For a few decades, cis feminists didn’t have a problem with the T in LGBTQ. Now, thanks to a few crazy bigots, they’re even accusing straight women of being “The Enemy”. For a few years, Republicans thought it would give them the Presidency. Genuinely surprised they haven’t accused Kamala of being one of “Them.”
There is crazy everywhere. I was absolutely shocked when I found out in 1986 that it was very common for lesbians to hate bi women for being traitors to lesbians. And by hate I mean hate them far more than hate the bigoted people in society that were actively physically and verbally attacking the LGBT+ community.
Some people had! Claiming they had prof of her being a “Kamal”. Of course it’s nonsense and rightly was forgotten in the cesspool of the internet but it was there!
There’s always been an undercurrent of transphobia in some strains of feminism – usually radfems, but not by any means all radfems. Similarly, there’s been transphobia in lesbian communities. But it’s always been less prevalent in those groups than in the population as a whole.
It’s just that some have now found using feminist sounding talking points is more effective than just straight up religious/conservative ones.
Oh i love Marys head exploding that Joyce couldnt NATURALLY SIMPLY SENSE THE EVIL WRONGNESS IMPERSONATION. Mofuckers always think they would simply ~know~ (about.. people they know are transgender already, cis people they dislike, women of color for Some Mysterious Reasons.
Also, there’s no way Mary “just knew”. She might have remembered media about the Ruttens. She might have looked her floormates up online. She didn’t “just know”.
She’d be an ORMO member in a Communist state XD Telling on her neighbours to the secret police and acting like a cop while having none of the actual power XD
I know! I’m so proud of her for being such a great ally and affirming her gender. Clearly, what she’s going to say next is something like, “So we’re all chipping in to get Carla a huge present after her upcoming surgery; what should I put you down for?,” which would explain all the inane ramblings about evil unwanted penises.
In my opinion this is by far the best page in the entire series.
Carla is my favorite character. I’d long forgotten she is a natural blond. I hadn’t noticed her breasts have been growing. And I really love the way Joyce has been actively improving herself to be a much better person and to distance herself from the beliefs of the community she was raised in.
Ah okay, didn’t mean to imply that. Just used we as a general thing to refer to the commenters who read it. (English isn’t my first language so sometimes I have issues phrasing things).
I love how you can see the Desperation in Mary’s eyes. Maybe she will soon realising that the only one obsessed by what Carla has between her legs is her.
When Jennifer went by “Billie”, she was a stopped clock who was right twice a day.
Post timeskip Jennifer is… still a stopped clock for the most part, but at the very least she seems to have gotten her alcoholism under control, as well as the end of a relationship which only seemed to bring the worst out of her.
A relationship she didn’t want to end. And to be honest I think when she was with Ruth she was healthier in some ways that now. (That isn’t a high bar to clear mind you).
Or a much earlier day. RassilonTDavros found that Joyce and Jennifer wore these outfits way back in the 3rd chapter – which was long before Carla had appeared on panel at all.
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No additional wind resistance as she skates by??
Carla showers with her skates on?
That’s probably the most gender affirming thing Joyce could have said.
She never noticed Carla as anything different than who she claimed to be.
Awww
well, even tho it’s a big part of her identity i think most ppl would think of her as “That one girl on rollerskates” as opposed to “the trans character” as like some mouthpiece/representation or so, like how Booster is also a psych major that probably over steps boundaries a bit (tho it is interesting how booster shares a room with walky and carla has her own dorm unless that was part of the ‘lawsuit’)
Afaik Booster isn’t trans, they are non-binary
Nonbinary don’t have to identify as trans, but we are under the umbrella, and plenty of us do identify as nonbinary trans people. I think Booster is nonbinary trans as well.
Yeah, I’m not sure if it’s come up, but I would guess Booster self-identifies as trans
They do. They told Walky to get rid of Carla for them and framed it as trans allyship.
Yee, genderfluid folk like Malaya fall under the trans umbrella as well ^^
Yeah, my daughter’s spouse is a trans guy who identifies as nonbinary.
Non-binary folk are under the trans umbrella and it’s an important part of identity to some of us.
I’m guessing your point is that we have no reason to think Booster has transitioned medically, which may have been the reason Carla got her own room. Or it might be the level of social transition- if Booster presented as considerably more femme, they might have also been offered their own room. We don’t have enough information to say, but it’s probably to do with the level of transition.
Carla’s probably more comparable to- I think his name was Zac? A trans guy who had recently come out in Billie’s new, uh, area. (I forgot the right word.) He was extremely recently out when we saw him and implied to still be living with girls- if he’s not allowed a solo room then it’s either specifically because Carla’s a trans woman or because her parents are rich.
Zaph, which I only remember because he was a Shortpacked! carryover.
That’s it! I remembered him being from Shortpacked! but he was so minor a character I was really fuzzy on his name. Clearly.
Also I realised that there’s another option to Carla having her own room and not other transfolk and that’s having transitioned legally- which I think she very likely has.
I’m pretty sure solo rooms just cost more at IU, I was never in campus housing, but I did briefly look into it for the sake of curiosity and I don’t recall seeing anything about specific accommodations for trans people regarding single rooms (or in general, really, not that I looked for it since I’m cis, but still). Zaph might still be in the female wing because he came out after being assigned the room and it will take time to move him, or it might be left up to the individual to decide which wing they’d rather be in.
It might also be a legal thing, a friend of mine who came out and transitioned a couple years ago had her birth certificate legally changed after she started medically transitioning and had her legal name changed, so it could be that IU recognizes whatever gender is on your legal documents when assigning a wing, so if Carla has had her documents changed to reflect her gender identity and Zaph hasn’t, that could explain it.
As for Booster, would a non-binary person care which wing they are in? I get that might sound flippant, but I mean it as a genuine question, since as neither a man nor a woman, wouldn’t being put in the men’s wing or the woman’s wing be equally good or bad or whatever? That’s the kind of thing I assume would have personal variance, but like, in general would it make a difference?
I think we’re way, way overthinking it here. This is a university, and this is clearly a rooming policy. Therefore, it has nothing to do with what makes sense or not, and is instead 100% based on public image.
Whether or not you get a solo room, would be entirely based on what will or will not get the school into scandals with donors. And that 100% has to do with whether you’re rooming with someone whose sex assigned at birth is the same as your own.
Booster may be nonbinary trans, but if their sex assigned at birth was male, then there’s no rich conservative donors clutching their pearls if they room with Walky. Same with Zaph, who was on a women’s floor the last time we saw him.
Carla, however, has a big giant freaking spotlight on her like the queen she is, and I’m sure that the single room was a concession that was made by the school when the Ruttens enrolled her.
I’d also note that there’s an issue of change in policies over time– when the strip started, housing accommodations for trans students were less common. I started college in 2012, and there was a big push for it going on in my campus LGBTQ+ then. Now, my college has more options relating to gender and on-campus housing. I don’t know the exact situation for IU, but I think that might be a factor here as well.
Also, yeah, singles cost more.
It may not have even been a concession. They have the money to pay for a single room. They may have not even considered the question.
Why does everyone assume Booster is amab tho? they could just as well be afab. actually don’t they have a same age twin sister? it they are identical twins that would imply Booster is afab (they could be fraternal twins, not sure if something has been said abouit that)
“Would a non-binary person care which wing they were in?” That’s an answer which will vary widely. Some would care for safely reasons; some would care for identity reasons; some would do everything they could to look for gender neutral options. And some genuinely wouldn’t care.
“Non-binary” just means someone who falls outside the gender binary. Some lean more masc, some more femme. For example being perceived and treated exclusively as female caused me massive gender dysphoria- being perceived and treated exclusive as male does not. But I’m not male, I’m non-binary. My spouse is agender and doesn’t much care about gendered language unless it has specific connotations that don’t feel right to them. However, if either of us were housed in female-exclusive areas we’d both be deeply uncomfortable because neither of us look female and we know that things would be… awkward at best.
I know someone who’s gender fluid and would find being in gendered housing at all to be uncomfortable. I know someone who is transfemme (NOT female) and transitioned and presents fairly femme but doesn’t care about passing in large part because they are not female. I know or have known non-binary folk where I couldn’t guess where they would fall on gendered housing- but honestly, the most common question in that situation is “where would I be safest”. And we’d definitely care that we need to put our safety over having our identities respected, cause that doesn’t feel good.
Apologies for the ramble. About Booster specifically, it’s unclear how they feel, but iirc (I might not and I just woke up so I haven’t looked) Booster did express a measure of discomfort when they thought Amber was suggesting they hook up with Ethan because he’s exclusively into men, which Booster is not. That implies that they would definitely prefer a gender neutral option were it available to them.
Thanks for rambling. It means I don’t feel compelled to, because you shared everything I’d want to see covered 🙂
Thank you for the answer, there is admittedly a *lot* I don’t understand about the non-binary spectrum and finding answers to my questions has proven challenging.
I learn best by arguing, if something doesn’t make sense to me I’ve found the most efficient way to learn what I’m missing is to argue with someone who knows what they’re talking about, pointing out what look to be logical holes to me, so they can identify what I’m misunderstanding and correct that, but it’s really hard to do that without coming off like I’m attacking them and that is decidedly *not* my intention so I mostly just don’t so I can avoid causing unintentional harm, but it’s difficult to always be respectful when I’m ignorant since I don’t know enough to know what is and is not respectful.
So thank you for taking my question in the spirit I intended and giving a blunt answer, that is exactly what I needed. Although your answer *does* leave me with more questions since it mentioned some stuff I had never heard of before, I figure this probably isn’t the place to get into the nitty gritty and pester you with more questions.
I mean, I’d be happy to answer questions, but you probably won’t even see this now since the second page after this one will be going up soon! If you do see this uh… feel free to ask? Learning is good.
Again, it depend on the person. I’m agender and consider myself trans, my bestie is genderfluid and don’t really consider themself trans. I guess it’s on the perception of things and the way you wanna handle this?
The way I’ve always interpreted it is that if you were assigned a gender at birth that does not match your own gender, you are transgender.
Using this rubric, theoretically, an intersex person could identify as cisgender non-binary.
I’m not sure that’s necessarily the case. Pretty sure most parents of intersex kids don’t go “okay, you’re nonbinary”. They usually seem to assign either ‘he’ or ‘she’.
Unless they were assigned NB at birth, they’re (arguably) trans. Some NB folks don’t identify as trans, but that’s personal choice rather than the word outright not being accurate.
and of course I can’t read threaded messages, so your post is DIRECTLY above mine and contradicting what I said, figures =B
Not to speak for others, but my understanding is nonbinary IS trans, bc nobody is “assigned NB at birth”
This is how I react to both Booster and Carla. They both annoyed me long before I learned anything about their gender and continue to annoy me for non-gender-related traits.
Carla’s parent are also super rich and probably paid extra
Not merely paid extra, but also were rich enough to mount legal challenges if necessary.
Legal challenges? “We’d like to endow a Chair of Gender Studies, with the condition that our daughter gets a single dorm room until she graduates.”
Carrot and stick. 🙂
But it also depends on how much they just want Carla treated well and how much they want to affect university policy
Dina has some observations about that.
I was just thinking that. The only ‘off’ thing to Joyce was that OTHERS were treating Carla ‘weird’.
“More people should be like Joyce” is not a sentence I expected to write today, but there you go.
Now don’t fuck it up, Joyce. You done good – don’t fuck it up.
That just means that Carla passes well. Let’s see how Joyce reacts now that she actually knows.
I somehow doubt it’s going to be anything particularly bad. Awkward, probably! But well-meaning awkward, I gotta imagine.
I’m pretty OK with telling people to be more like Joyce. Say what you will, but she really came in with both her own beliefs and a sincere desire to learn. She was, and is, constantly being confronted by choices and her usual instinct is to learn how to make the best one without losing her sense of self. And, along the way, she’s able to understand her sense of self ever more deeply, embracing the things she wants to be, and leaving behind the things that get into the way of that.
She’s still learning. She’s boorish about it sometimes, but it’s sincere and from a desire to get away from behavior & beliefs she once embraced and now rejects.
I think she’s going to be agitated for a bit, and I hope Carla isn’t nearby during that, but she’ll get her mind around it. Considering the timeline, she’s growing and changing as a person at a remarkable, if not perhaps unrealistic, pace. And the only way for her changes to be believable, she needs to fumble along the way.
Actually, I don’t think Joyce will fuck it up much, if at all. She has realized that everything she has been raised to believe is thoroughly wrong and has been working like crazy to change her behavior and beliefs.
I might even go so far as seeing Joyce and Carla becoming friends over this.
I fully expect her to be extremely, loudly awkward and weird about this in an uncomfortable yet funny way at least once.
I’m here for it. Growing up as a cis white male, my manhood was under constant scrutiny
Oh yeah, Carla’s blonde actually.
Is this canon? I love learning trivia about Carla.
Young baby Carla had very light blue past filter hair. Maybe it was blonde or maybe it was light blue to imitate Carla’s second favorite cartoon Mega Boat. (You’ve never heard of Mega Boat or its lost media pilot because it’s creator lost a lawsuit with Hasbro for looking too much like Depth Charge. Yes I’ve made this all up.)
https://www.tumblr.com/dumbingofage/148077389327/this-months-patreon-bonus-strip-poll-winner-was
“She also appears to have grafted the rollerskates directly to her feet and nobody is sure how she did it.”
have bionics gone too far?
Well, she ISN’T a natural redhead 🤷
Dear Prior Joyce, God created you nekkid, and yet you changed that by *gasp* wearing clothes! SINNER. Shave your pits? SINNER. Put on makeup or deodorant? SINNER. Shame on you, Prior Joyce. SHAME.
…and I just saw the Alt Text. Dagnabit! Missed an obvious one!
isn’t there actually some bible verse where you can’t wear clothes made of certain/mixed materials? XD;
Leviticus 19:19.
Google also says it was about preventing people from wearing a certain type of garment reserved for the clergy rather than a moral ruling, but that’s five seconds research so take it with a grain of salt.
Not to mention the types of people who use Leviticus to justify bigotry definitely don’t care about the original intent or context and just ascribe moral judgment to it anyway…
They also conveniently “forget” or disregard that if they consider themselves followers of Jesus, then most of the Old Testament rules were thrown out in favor of His teachings. (I’m not a religious student, but I believe everything except the Ten Commandments were overruled by the New Testament)
Matthew 5:17-18: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” and “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” respectively. Which makes sense, as Christianity was a Jewish sect until at least the time when Paul decided to cast a wider net. So no, your assertion is patently untrue – which doesn’t mean that Christians haven’t simply dismissed or explained away any passage that was inconvenient at the time.
I think I learned that the Old Testament rules were no longer valid because of the Last Supper: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you” but I freely allow that I’m not a scholar and haven’t even looked at a bible in almost 40 years.
One of the issues facing Judaism then (as always) was the questions of what was “the Law” (and wasn’t), and what was the interpretation of “the Law”. Each sect, including “the Way” (early Christianity) had (a) different answer(s) to this.
In the present, different sects of both still argue about the same kind of questions and answers. We just tend to follow some version where someone has or is yelling their version very loudly, because that’s how we determine who’s right. Then everyone else is a godless heathen.
There is also Acts 10, where God says to Peter ‘Excuse me, idiot, which of us is the Creator? Who are you to call my creations ‘unclean’?’
It’s complicated and what we see in the NT is essentially the argument 1st century Christians were having about whether followers of Jesus (or at least Gentile converts) needed to keep Torah Law or whether Jesus’s death and resurrection superseded that. Paul’s faction won out. Cynically, because it was easier to get converts if they didn’t have to get circumcised.
But it left us with conflicting passages in the NT, because the authors were part of this argument. They shouldn’t really be reconciled, because they’re saying different things and the idea that the Bible speaks with one voice hides what the individual authors thought.
yup! thejeff has it right! It’s unclear whether or not ethnically Jewish Christians should still follow Torah Law or not, but Paul definitely wins out on deciding that Gentile converts do not need to convert to Judaism and follow the Law to be Christians. Some segments of modern church have kinda lost sight of the fact that there has always been debate in biblical interpretation. Once you start to see the Bible as containing large sections of debate about how to interpret the teachings of the Law and/or Jesus’ teachings, it gets way more interesting.
But understanding the Bible that way conflicts with seeing it as the inerrant authoritative Word of God.
Nah, it’s easy: in the NT the Word of God is quoted in red, and everything else is history or commentary.
[Looks in my copy. Sees no red. Tosses book.]
Not sure when the “red letter” thing became common, but it’s hardly universal.
Also, even that is really something that a later author claimed Jesus said and since none of them had recordings or even transcripts, even the words in red are shaped to the later authors theological agendas.
Yeah, Joyce had no clue and only picked up on anything because other people were acting weird. That makes sense given that she didn’t guess when Dorothy started talking about it, even though Carla came in at the time.
Also, Jennifer and Dorothy were correct to keep that from her. She wasn’t ready yet, but she probably is now.
Fingers crossed that she understands it’s other people being weird about things that aren’t any of their business that’s the problem.
Doesn’t she also make a comment after some break period where she notices Carla is bustier than she was before? (Likely because of HRT.) I wanna say it was Dorothy with her?
Nothin says growin up like cringe flashbacks, am i right? :p
i odn’t think anyone will ever grow outta cringe flashbacks lol but comedy/story telling wise it is entertaining
I think NGPZ meant that the fact that she’s cringing at a flashback of a thing she said in the past means she’s grown since she said it and this is a relatable experience for a lot of people. Personally, I don’t tend to cringe at memories of my past, even if I have said a lot of things I no longer agree with, but I don’t tend to cringe in general and I don’t have much in the way of an episodic memory, so I don’t have a whole lot of memories that I relive in that way in the first place.
Been there; done that. (toodangmanytimes)
Oh boy, this arc is gonna be interesting. Is it possible for me to hate Mary more?
Sky is the limit baby!
She turns out to be Toedad in a really clever disguise?
It wouldn’t be Toedad if the disguise was clever
the man had scant few virtues and brainpower wasn’t on the list
I seethe with rage at Mary. It’ll be so satisfying when Carla exacts revenge
I… I wouldn’t tempt fate like that…
Oh huh, speaking of, where are Joyce’s glasses this morning?
In her room, probably
Probably still next to or by her bed. She kinda stormed out while chatting with Joe, so glasses were probably not a priority as she left the room.
She was going to shower, and you don’t wear your glasses in the shower.
That too.
Yeah it took me till the alt text to notice
Mary and her “you can always tell”ism, like she would have known if it hadn’t been fuckin national news.
I notice that Mary gets Carla’s pronoun right when she’s upset.
She know that if she starts misgendering the dorm will beat her ass into next month.
Next month in real world time, in strip time, or comic book time?
Strip time when observed by everyone else present, but she’ll experience it as slowly as it take the real world to get to next month in comic. So it’ll involve relativistic time dilation.
I’m fine with ‘next month’ in comic strip time. That means it’ll be like July 2026 before we see her again. I’m cool with that.
Yeah I think Ruth actually did clock Mary for that once, as is right and proper.
Ruth did at least slap her once, Jennifer is the one who outright punched her. Unfortunately not into next week, though.
I would entirely fine with Mary being punched into next week. Comic time, not real time, of course, since that would mean we wouldn’t be seeing Mary again probably for months, if not years.
How about out of the current calendar year? But not into one full of spirited horses, she might actually enjoy that.
Using the wrong words deliberately takes effort!
If she didn’t Joyce would look like an asshole for letting it slide and would be compelled to waste a strip on correcting Mary when this isn’t a Mary storyline, which would hurt the pacing.
Mary is a foil. Not a main character. Not every character in a story can be the main, or get special story time allocated to them. Not every character is meant to be a main villain or get a redemption arc. Some characters (those who serve a specific purpose for the main characters) are meant to be 2-dimensional.
In this story, Mary serves as a way to show us what Joyce could have been if she’d gone a different way when she was around people who challenged the views she was brought up with.
I’m not sure why you’re railing this hard against a really common narrative tool, but it just sounds like whining about not understanding story structure at this point.
Note: This is replying as much to your comments yesterday as it is to your comment here today.
And the day before that tbh.
Thanks for saying this way better that I could. I decided not to engage with them today because really it just fell like a waste and giving them undue attention. And yeah it does fell like whining, especially because that avatar looks like it’s constantly crying out, so that is how I interpret how they sound, just non stop whining.
I do not understand why “Mary sucks and I hate her and I wish she wasn’t in the comic” is being interpreted as “I love Mary and wish we had more Mary content”
Actually, wait, yes I do. Forget it.
Point to me where I said you loved Mary or wanted more Mary content?
You’ve complained at length about Mary’s part in the story so I explained it. Whatever you took from that came from inside yourself unless it was the literal words I wrote on screen.
Anyone ever wonder what it’s like in Mary’s reality? It sounds terrible.
Everyone different is a depraved monster out to get you and there are countless deep states conspiracies trying to bring humanity to ruin and suppress their freedom. Fear and anger are the only things that give life any semblance of meaning.
it would be hilarious if it cut to her parents, being like, the most hippy dippy ppl ever
Anybody could secretly have been assigned any gender at birth, but the fact that it’s almost impossible to tell and doesn’t change anything somehow doesn’t mean it’s not important. So instead you have to devote your entire life to telling. All the circuits in the brain devoted to joy and caring about other people have to be taken up for looking at finger length, or whatever it is they claim is a biological tell this month, and plotting against imagined enemies. Until your own humanity is like a juiced orange, a bitter rind with no sweetness left. It would be pitiable except the hell is self inflicted, and you do your best to spread it to everyone else.
I think you can get news bulletins from Mary’s reality on Truth Social. America is a failed state over there, wracked by violent crime, and Donald Trump has won eighteen club championships at golf. But on the up side, there are free tampons in the boys’ bathrooms in Minnesota public schools.
I know a guy like Mary and it baffles me. Everything can be going his way, everything turns out how he wants, he lives in one of the reddest states in the country (Texas) and yet it’s still a liberal hellscape and he believes that he is constantly being plotted against and the world is out to get him.
Bro has $300k in the bank and is still miserable beyond all comprehension.
Texas is actually *not* one of the reddest states! It was only +5.6% for the Republicans in the 2020 race for President; only two states that went red had a smaller margin than that! Their Attorney General is on record saying, out loud, that they may have lost the state if they hadn’t engaged in voter suppression.
Demographic shifts are complex, of course, but Texas has drawn a lot of immigration from coastal states as a tech industry hub, and well-educated people like that lean far more left.
What Texas is is one of the states most committed to having an *identity* as a Red State.
Isn’t Texas only as red as it is due to rampant gerrymandering? Plus, yeah, voter suppression.
In terms of their legislature and representation in Congress, yes. In this context I was using in a more cultural context where it’s a matter of “how many people around you are conservative”‘, and Texas isn’t as red-dominated as it likes to present itself as, at least in its cities.
Just look at the worldview of any given typical Trump supporter. That’s Mary’s reality.
So, yes. Terrible.
From Mary’s point of view, all of civilization is constantly on the verge of total collapse, and she is the lone heroine who nobly shoulders the burden of reminding everybody what it means to be truly moral. So yes, her reality is terrible in general, but it’s very satisfying for her personally!
I’m surprised Mary’s actually using the correct pronouns, after all the terf stuff she’s been saying.
Possibly that is a line into offensiveness that Willis refuses to cross.
It would also basically require Joyce to push back against it, which would waste panels better spent on the actual story. Mary’s screentime should generally be kept to a minimum because she’s terrible.
Not so sure about that. I mean, true enough, I don’t recall Mary being shown as explicitly calling Carla “he/him” yet, but it’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility, given all the other vile, offensive things Mary has been shown saying and doing.
Just imagine air quotes around every ‘her’ that Mary says, if you need the immersion.
I do think the actual explanation is probably wanting to keep the real egregiously hateful stuff to a minimum, but I’ve definitely seen transphobes slip up and fail to misgender the target of their ire because a lot of the time it does take active effort.
The Watsonian and Doylist explanations can both be true.
idk, in my experience there are plenty of transphobic people who still gender trans people properly
We can also think Mary isn’t smart enough to remember to do it.
i think there was a scene with “He uses they / them” for booster but that was just joyce being awkward
Yes. “His pronouns are they/them!”
Mary doesn’t have a male-looking name available for Carla, and Carla doesn’t remotely look male (yes, she’s tall, but that doesn’t mean much), so she actually thinks of Carla as female until she reminds herself.
Trying to remember if Mary’s ever used the wrong pronouns for Carla
I’m tilting extremely hard at AC6 tonight and every time I try to Ctrl+Alt+Dlt Steam it keeps refiring. Tonight is going to be a task.
I finally put it down. That was an ordeal it should not have been.
I am several parsecs away from sober right now, so if this entire thread is shot I understand: The type of person Mary is deserves a summary execution. If you are the kind of independent actor in the universe who concerns themselves so unnecessarily with other actors, especially in such a bigoted manner, you need to be dropped dead as soon with as little fanfare as possible.
GGs, everyone, may you make the world suck a little bit less in your passing.
Ummm… Hrm. Hrm.
Summary execution might be JUST… a wee bit too far for me. Eep!
We’ve got enough violence in the world already.
FWIW. $0.02.
(Speaking as a person who currently has to go down four flights of stairs just to reach the sole accessible unisex restroom at work…)
*I mean as a trans person. I don’t mean accessible as in wheelchair-accessible. It’s not.
There’s no real downside though. Mary is an unpleasant and unpopular character with minimal story utility who would’ve been killed off years ago if a subsection of the fandom wasn’t horny for her.
Hey, it’s really fucking inappropriate to be blaming me for the character sticking around. Just because I’d [wow that’s inappropriate] Mary in the [holy fuck, settle down], that’s no excuse to be so ridiculous.
Um……..
Meh, just ignore me.
Done.
Marys’ unpleasantness and unpopularity is likely exactly why she’s got story utility here. Willis wants Carla outed to Joyce for story reasons, and if Mary does it nobody has to deal with their favorite character doing it.
I’m sure Mary is someone’s favorite character. They’ve probably been banned though.
Well that’s a new one at least.
I think basically every part of this analysis is wrong outside of “Mary is unpleasant”
Hey careful they might accuse you of “Defending Mary’s honor”.
I very seriously doubt that any readers’ horniness or lack thereof for Mary (ugh, ick, *vomit suppression*) has any bearing whatsoever on Willis’s reasons for keeping her around.
I’m pretty they are just a ver strange troll, I wouldn’t give any of what they say any mine.
Also, just to clarify, because that looks way worse than I intended…
For me personally, speaking only for myself, it does not matter to me if a person is stupidly, smoking, supermodel hot or whatever*, if their personality is utter shit, as Mary’s is, then the thoughts of fucking them fills me with ugh, ick, and vomit suppression. Whether or not anyone else wants to entertain the idea of fucking Mary, despite her abhorrent personality, is none of my business whatsoever.
* – Which, for what it’s worth, I don’t think applies to Mary to start with, but again, that’s just me.
Sorry to hear that Laura! That really sucks T_T
Thanks, NG. :-/
Nothing new, sadly… at least there IS a unisex restroom in the building!
I mean… I can’t say that I don’t get where you’re coming from?
Her getting what’s coming to her in some form, be it Dina mauling her ass or having an actual demon ala Conjuring sent after her,
feels as though it is necessary to balance the universe somehow
Syndicate is probably my favorite AC, which is a weird statement to make.
AC New Horizons is definitely the one I spent the most time in, but AC Fires of Rubicon was a genuine revelation. I never got around to trying AC Skies Unknown, though. 🙂
Jennifer makes a good judgement call and thanks god for that.
joyce was a pretty uptight fundie at the start, she also freaked out about that one polycule’s ‘open relationship’ or so , but i can imagine she would’ve avoided bringing up any ‘sensitive’ subject with joyce just to avoid dealing with her reactoins
Jennifer actually makes quite a few good judgement calls. She mostly goes horribly wrong when it comes to anything that involves herself. As long as she has some distance, she’s usually on the money.
God, if one believes such things, created you with eyes to look at the world around you and hands to touch it and change it and brains to think about what you’re seeing and doing. If God has given you the tools to change, are you going to decide He doesn’t want you to use them?
A lot of fundie beliefs are painfully paradoxical and self-serving, yes.
That’s basically why so many post-fundie atheists are so obsessed with logic and reason. That’s how they got out, so they think it’s the only way to see the light.
Actually wondering how it’s ‘obvious’ to all the other non Joyce people.
Was there a big announcement? Was it because she has a single room? Her height?
She’s the daughter of uber-wealthy and famous Gig Industrialists. Probably how they all found out.
She was on the cover of Time magazine as a child.
I see your gravatar and I imagine Carla herself suddenly appearing out of nowhere to say that, talking about herself in the third person. 😀
Right? Yes, Carla is eccentric and stands out, but her being trans is one of the least attention-grabbing things about her.
According to Dorothy, her coming out as a kid was “national news“. I’m guessing Joyce didn’t see that bit of news because the Browns didn’t want their kids exposed to it, fearing that the mere knowledge of the concept would “trans them” or some shit. Oh the irony.
Carla’s transition is implied to have literally been litigated in a high-profile court case, so she’s kind of famous.
it’ll be q uite the interesting retrospective when the sibling comes out to her and she has flashbacks of joceleyn seeming ‘feminine’ , tho hopefully her joy would out weigh any awkwardness bc there was a strip a while ago that was like “i’ve always wanted a sisterm y whole life”
Her parents are wealthy and famous and she was literally national news.
And honestly, it all sounds awful, and being fabulously Carla is probably the only way she made it through. Immense wealth can insulate you from a lot, and having a loving and supportive family sure doesn’t hurt – but I would not have wanted anything of myself to be national news as an adolescent, certainly not anything anybody might target me for, and not with my rich family making the news cycle last longer than usual.
Which also makes Booster’s jab at Carla’s parents’ wealth kinda insensitive.
It’s okay to acknowledge privilege without necessarily condemning it.
Booster was shooting for worse than kinda insensitive.
Yeah agree, I think if you told them they had only achieved “kinda insensitive” they would take another crack at it.
Booster? Being insensitive? Surely not.
Definitely yes. (and don’t call me ‘shirley’)
Makes note to self to make Shirley Steamweed the heroine of next novel.
I don’t have _nearly as many_ starring roles in fanfic or full novels as I deserve! Get to writin’!
(but do please post links to fanfic sites or bookseller sites!)
It’s a little weird, because it’s never really been clear who knew and I don’t think we’ve really seen people on the floor acting weird around Carla. Not enough to warrant Joyce’s comment anyway.
Not quite “blue hair and pronouns,” but dyed hair of any stripe is close enough in spirit.
I’m can totally see a version of this conversation as a long-lost strip from 2010-ish in my head, with all the shaky lineart and bobble-headed anatomy that entails.
redheads are hot , tho lol
tho other than it being too pricey/costly i can imagine some ppl doing two toned dyed hair with some pride flag colors
I get so many “of course you have blue hair” comments from strangers online. I’m a cis woman, but a strong leftist. When I went to look up why, I was surprised they never added the “and pronouns” for me.
Of course she’s got blue hair, everything’s blue in flashbacks.
I love how Mary is like ‘wtf you didn’t know’ like the scene isn’t going to script
I interpret that face she makes as her having a mini existencial crisis at the concept that trans people aren’t immediately recognizable as fraud by everyone who sees them. Don’t worry she rationalize it away a second later.
She wants Joyce to both be the fundie who agrees with her as well as the dirty ex-fundie she always knew she was.
“How can I recruit you into terfdom if you’re this clueless? I can’t foundationally educate and manipulate you at the same time!”
Mary should just quit while she’s behind.
Seconded. But will she? Likely not.
Died 08/21/2022 – Born 08/20/2024
Welcome back “Billie”
I honestly thought the flashback might be to here https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-13/02-turning-saints-into-the-sea/bigger-2/ .
Though I’d misremembered it as being the same strip as the one previous, where Carla is actually *in* the strip.
Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. Maybe tomorrow?
Is this flashback actually a redrawing of something we’ve seen before? Or just a previously unseen interaction?
Obviously last semester, since it’s Billie.
I do notice that despite her obvious bigotry, Mary is still referring to Carla with the correct pronouns, which puts her a rung above the likes of JK Rowling and such
oh good, looks like It’s starting to take effect >:D
thank you, Satan
I take that as Willis being aware that he can write about bigots without actually engaging with bigotry.
It does make it less confusing to read because my brain always hits those like a store’s double doors where one is locked. like, they’ll say “transgender men are men” and I start to agree before realizing they’re talking about transgender women.
It sounds like they’re big fans of Elliot Roger, and then you’re grabbing a burrito and notice their error.
Page. Elliot Page.
I was about to fucking say.
I mean, it often does sound like they’re big fans of Eliot Roger.
I was so sure of that one, too. Then I looked again later and was like “Uh hey Google, which Elliot was the pretty boy again?”
It’s one of the weirder Mary quirks where all the other villains got stuck at 100% Hitler but her evil dial is stuck at 99% so there are these weird…little gaps, kind of, in her malice. It’s easy to notice those gaps and think that Mary has some kind of “character trait” that explains them, but really it’s only because there’s an upper limit to how much of an asshole Mary can be before characters should just physically attack her on sight and her still being in the dorm at all without suffering serious violence stops making sense. Arguably we’ve been past that point since the Ruth blackmail.
She’s never done it before. It’s always “her” in quotes or him in bold. Which makes it even more hilarious here. In this moment of mild stress Mary FORGETS to disrespect Carla like her politics require.
Transphobia is really about demanding women look a certain way, a template one might define as “starved young white smooth-skinned upper class perfectly made up effortlessly flawless innocent quiet big eyed Victorian era woman”, or “fuckable”. In a vacuum, Mary would be far more likely to be suspicious of Becky than of Carla, due to her modern hairstyle and plaid shirts. And here she’s telling us she knows it too.
Mary- “You didn’t notice Anything different about her??”
Joyce-“She’s kinda tall…? I thought it was just the skates?”
“She’s not a natural redhead.” This put smile on my face.
I mean, there was an earlier strip where she’s like “I’m taking you back to the BOYS dorm where you belong” altho i wouldn’t be surprised if she was warned before by ruth or another person to not openly misgender her as much or so
Tho it does make me think of that one tweet like “I have double d’s grandpa, the waitress thinks you have dementia”
We’re either going to waterski over this or go on a full swamp walk, aren’t we? And to be fair, I’m not sure how to avoid either outcome as a writer. Welp, Godspeed (yes, phrasing, I know). I’ll be here to read it and see how it plays out.
Carla is cool regardless of her hair color, red, blue, green or black.
Huh. You’re right.
She should dye it blue in the front and red in the back to represent the Doppler REffect
If anyone could pull that off, it’d be Carla.
Or the redshift effect?
Different name. Same effect.
Oh my Goddess. That is an awesome idea.
Appropriate gravatar is appropriate.
No dyeing. She just has to skate faster.
For some reason the main thing my brain is pointing to in this comic is the fact that due to arm placement Carla’s shirt just says “Fuc”
I need a shirt that says that, honestly.
For anyone else who’s curious regarding timeline placement, Joyce’s and Billifer’s outfits both match with the ones they were wearing in the third storyline of Book 1. I’d link a specific strip, but they’re never actually in the same strip in that one so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
wow, you are right.
That’s a very good catch.
And wow…. 2010 vs 2024 is so very different!
good eye. Today’s panels would make a good bookmark to keep in book 1.
Hey, if Joyce didn’t know it was Carla, who did she mean? Booster’s nonbinary, so it can’t be them. Has she figured out about Jocelyne?
She didn’t know who it was. That’s the whole point of her referring to the person as “secret,” and in her conversation with Dorothy about it, she was just learning that she knew someone (multiple people!) transgender, but she didn’t learn who “the” trans woman she knew was.
She barely understands nonbinary thanks to Booster and Malaya.
Yeah, I don’t think she ever had anyone in particular in mind. It was an abstract thing for her, which probably made it easier for her to adjust to mentally at the time.
Dorothy at one point told Joyce that she DOES know a trans person, but then refused to out that person to her. So all she knew was that there was a trans person somewhere in broader social group Dorothy and she share.
Joyce didn’t know who it was and suspected it could be Dorothy at one time. She hasn’t figured out about Jocelyne, but may or may not think she’s a gay man.
Oh god. OH GODDDDDD
Carla was LITERALLY PASSING Joyce
>~<
DAVE IF THAT WASN’T INTENTIONAL I WILL EAT MY FUCKING TEN GALLON HAT
Wait a fuckin minute
Now I’m gonna have to wonder how many other times it was the same joke
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/introductions/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/moral-support/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/weekdays/
argh
Its the damn arrows all over again
Wait lmao that’s great
From what I remember, that joke happened frequently. And also let us know that she was skating up and down the hallways all the time to make sure people noticed her.
Stay strong, Joyce! You’ve come so far, don’t let old thought patterns win!
Hmmm, starting to see why Joyce started this storyline without wearing her glasses.
Old Joyce is going to make a little peek-a-boo. :/
Wow, Joyce wasn’t kidding, comparing the start of the comic to now, Carla really is uh, “bigger” these days.
It’s just one line item in a laundry list of Carla fun facts. Can’t really blame Joyce for missing that.
Wait, what am I saying?! There’s no excuse for not memorizing the entire list of Carla Fun Facts.
Carla is relieved that you remembered the truth in time.
I would love to see a huge list list Carla Fun Facts. She is my favorite character.
People were protesting with Mary’s points at the train to Pride this weekend.
*I know they are not Mary’s points as in she came up with them, I mean ‘with the points Mary uses’
For a few decades, cis feminists didn’t have a problem with the T in LGBTQ. Now, thanks to a few crazy bigots, they’re even accusing straight women of being “The Enemy”. For a few years, Republicans thought it would give them the Presidency. Genuinely surprised they haven’t accused Kamala of being one of “Them.”
There is crazy everywhere. I was absolutely shocked when I found out in 1986 that it was very common for lesbians to hate bi women for being traitors to lesbians. And by hate I mean hate them far more than hate the bigoted people in society that were actively physically and verbally attacking the LGBT+ community.
Some people had! Claiming they had prof of her being a “Kamal”. Of course it’s nonsense and rightly was forgotten in the cesspool of the internet but it was there!
There’s always been an undercurrent of transphobia in some strains of feminism – usually radfems, but not by any means all radfems. Similarly, there’s been transphobia in lesbian communities. But it’s always been less prevalent in those groups than in the population as a whole.
It’s just that some have now found using feminist sounding talking points is more effective than just straight up religious/conservative ones.
I think of them as descendants of Betty Friedan and other Old School feminists who hated and worked against “The Lavender Menace”.
I’m excited for this step in Joyce’s evolution, especially given the title of the next chapter. 😁
And the world throws Joyce another confusion curveball XD
Yeah, Joyce’s reaction is something she understands would disincline people not to tell her about trans.
nah, Carla’s gender is Carla
Oh i love Marys head exploding that Joyce couldnt NATURALLY SIMPLY SENSE THE EVIL WRONGNESS IMPERSONATION. Mofuckers always think they would simply ~know~ (about.. people they know are transgender already, cis people they dislike, women of color for Some Mysterious Reasons.
anyways Carla remains: the greatest.
If Mary had Detect Evil she’d light herself up like a Christmas tree
Also, there’s no way Mary “just knew”. She might have remembered media about the Ruttens. She might have looked her floormates up online. She didn’t “just know”.
Mary is absolutely that type of neighbor that would have an eternally smudged window and look up acquaintances online.
She’d be an ORMO member in a Communist state XD Telling on her neighbours to the secret police and acting like a cop while having none of the actual power XD
Gladys Kravitz!
Way back in her first big arc with Carla, I believe Cerberus described her as a “curtain-twitcher”, which is a phrase that’s stuck with me.
Oooh, that’s a lot more succint than the descriptor I grew up with. Definitely gonna start using that for those kinds of people.
“But, Mary, you said ‘her’. So you’re also saying she’s a woman now?”
I know! I’m so proud of her for being such a great ally and affirming her gender. Clearly, what she’s going to say next is something like, “So we’re all chipping in to get Carla a huge present after her upcoming surgery; what should I put you down for?,” which would explain all the inane ramblings about evil unwanted penises.
She’s just getting her appendix out, a big present isn’t needed.
Joyce pls
I had somehow forgotten about Mary and how terrible she is about Carla
Please. Let’s be fair to Mary.
She’s not only terrible about Carla.
“how terrible she is
about Carla“In my opinion this is by far the best page in the entire series.
Carla is my favorite character. I’d long forgotten she is a natural blond. I hadn’t noticed her breasts have been growing. And I really love the way Joyce has been actively improving herself to be a much better person and to distance herself from the beliefs of the community she was raised in.
Ok but it would kind of make sense for Carla to dye her hair red (because of Ultracar?)
We know from a bonus strip to her child self that she is naturally blonde.
“‘We’ know…”
I genuinely don’t get what you mean with that?
Not everybody has access to Patreon exclusive bonus strips, thus not everyone “knows.”
Ah okay, didn’t mean to imply that. Just used we as a general thing to refer to the commenters who read it. (English isn’t my first language so sometimes I have issues phrasing things).
you phrased it just fine.
You were fine. That person is taking offense over absolutely nothing, and their username is extremely apropos.
“We know” from a previous main-site strip that had it in the alt-text as well, jerkass.
Hey, I really didn’t mean it to be any offense.
I wasn’t replying to you, I was replying to the person named “pedantic jerkass”
you really didn’t say anything even approaching offensive.
Given Carla’s Ultra Car interest, it does make sense
I love how you can see the Desperation in Mary’s eyes. Maybe she will soon realising that the only one obsessed by what Carla has between her legs is her.
Wait a minute . . . Billie made a WISE decision once?
When Jennifer went by “Billie”, she was a stopped clock who was right twice a day.
Post timeskip Jennifer is… still a stopped clock for the most part, but at the very least she seems to have gotten her alcoholism under control, as well as the end of a relationship which only seemed to bring the worst out of her.
A relationship she didn’t want to end. And to be honest I think when she was with Ruth she was healthier in some ways that now. (That isn’t a high bar to clear mind you).
has carla worn that t-shirt before? i wanna know what it says 🙁
Same outfit as https://www.dumbingofage.com/assignments-2/
but on a later (probably) day.
Or a much earlier day. RassilonTDavros found that Joyce and Jennifer wore these outfits way back in the 3rd chapter – which was long before Carla had appeared on panel at all.
yes. bad grammar on my part. Assignments-2 is on the day Jennifer moves out of Read, it’s the later day.