Yes, that’s good, but picture this: Posters. All the walls, so walking from one room to the next in your home is just a montage of satisfying punches. Just walking to the kitchen for a bowl of Cocoa Puffs would feel so cathartic and empowering.
Can we have this? Or wallet-sized, so you can carry your favorite cathartic punch around with you and pull it out for better fantasizing the next time you have to deal with this kind of asshat?
Ditto. Especially the really satisfying ones, like these tools and Amber’s dad. Oh, and chin thumb man, or whatever he’s being called these days. Chin thumb multiple fractures hospital taunted man? Smells like justice.
Hmmm, all the satisfying punches seem to have a common character theme to them…
This is worse than the time the Gotham PD accidentally mirrored Two-Face’s mugshot for the wanted posters, and nobody called in because they hadn’t seen anyone wearing a bifurcated suit, flipping a coin, and committing crimes based around the theme of duality with the right side of their face all scarred.
“You’re black on one side and white on the other.”
“I am black on the right side.”
“I fail to see the significant difference.”
“Lokai is white on the right side. All of his people are white on the right side.”
I went as Lokai for Hallowe’en one year. I was a fairly geeky kid, something which hasn’t changed much now that I’m an adult. I got some fairly awkward comments from the black households I visited.
“Oh, so that’s you on the one side and me on the other?”
That sort of thing. Every. single. house. Not a peep from any of the whites, except a couple who asked who I was dressed as, and who just smiled and nodded when I said “I am Lokai, from the planet Charon.” Like you do when a kid says something and you have no clue what they are talking about but you don’t want to be negative. Hand them the candy and let them walk away.
Given that they were talking civily a few moments ago, I’m actually wondering if this might be the moment that gets Amazigirl on the track to looking at Sal in a whole new way.
That would be a good answer to “where’d her phone go?”
Though as a person who sometimes walks around recording things (for audio purposes, not surveillance), an audio recording on someone’s person while they are fighting would sound like “CLUNK CRRRRRR {maybe a human voice?} CHNNNNNNNMRGGGGG FFFFFF FFFFFF -just jealous- {unintelligible} CHRRRRR [muffled scream]”
Willis did mention generic fight dudes in the alt text yesterday. My heart tells me that all bros are just clones that fight for the most unique looking among them. Can confirm, how it works at every college everywhere.
Seriously. My undergrad had very little greek life. When I went to grad school and actually encountered sorority girls for the first time, I was floored at how identical they looked. At the time, it was legions of side-ponytails, standing in formation for rush week. I’m sure it’s evolved since then, but only in terms of fashion.
May I celebrate attending a college without any fraternities or sororities? Regardless of your answer, I will probably do so. I love my hippy college founded by disenfranchised Harvardians, local townspeople and a Catholic priest.
Haha, my undergrad did actually have frats and sororities; they just weren’t a significant part of the school. It was in a big city with plenty of interesting non-Greek social life, and real estate was expensive so none of them had houses. If you joined a frat, you got to live… in a dorm. On a floor with all the other frat members. But it was nice, having less of that cookie-cutter element that stereotypically goes along with Greek life.
You do— unless its Boston College.
There it totally backfired and the *entire study body** has the Bro-culture of a giant Fraternity/Sorority.
At least Greek Life contains that to a minority and student can happily be outside that.
( If you are BC grad I dont apologize. I’m a local. I see it hear it everyday. )
It reaches farther back than just College. I have a High school yearbook that is step-ford eerie because the entire cheerleader squad is practically facially identical. This is across ethnicity. Its not just blonde white girls, there’s a slew of ethnicities, and if you lined them up by darkening skin tone it’d just look like a time capture of someone getting a tan save hair and eye color.
Two of them were also US Presidents, although both of them had something to do with death (Taylor died in office, while Tyler took office as a result of W. H. Harrison dying). What does it mean???
I think of them as something like the quick clones from MiB:the animated series. In a couple of hours, they’ll start spotting total gibberish before melting into less-tasty pancake batter.
Either that or the police show up, Sal gets arrested. Amazi-girl has flashbacks to the moment of her creation, only this time she stand up for Sal instead of attacking her.
this is messed up i know but i have thought a few times along the lines of and yes this next part will be a bit dark so if youre sensitive to what type of thing ryan is about stop reading
I have thought where i almost wished someone had tried to rape me because at least then someone would have found me appealing in some messed up way.
like i said way messed up by i dont think like that any more. I’m still messed up in the head but this part isn’t around now at least.
Rapists generally choose thier victims based on how easy a target they perceive them to be, not how attractive they find them. It’s about power, not uncontrollable lust.
Yeah, I know. *Sympathy via internet comment* is acceptable in this group, thanks to Dina (she is the best, after all).
But it’s not just sympathy I feel. I also feel anger towards the people that made you feel that way. I want to punch the universe in the face for messing you up like that for no good reason.
I could be wrong but I am fairly certain there has been no proof of the universe having a face. Plus if it did it would likely be at best like a mosquito bite in terms of what it would think of the attack.
I’m not even sure if it is people or my weird brain that made me think certain ways/things or some combo of both.
Agreed. Case in point, notice how even though Ryan’s ‘bros’ see themselves as just getting their friend’s back when faced with a crazed assailant, they’re unwittingly acting as his henchmen, putting their necks on the line until they have the threat taken care of, when Ryan steps in as if he were their master rather than friend….
I think Amazi-girl really made a mistake by not saying SOMETHING about the attempted rape to the “henchmen” earlier… something like “Are you sure you want to protect a guy who drugs women”… At best, it might cause them to quit helping Ryan. At the very least, it would let Amazi-girl know if these were unwitting henchmen or full-fledged creeps who knew about Ryans antics.
there’s basically no way his bros don’t know about it, at least, there’s no way they don’t know his version of events. “Dude, I was trying to score with this chick and she was ready to go but then her roommate talked her out of it and she hit me with a bottle! And then I, uh, got mugged walking home.”
One of them was actually tagged in the strip before Amazi-Girl went over it all, so at least two of them were just off-panel for that.
And really, once you get to ”holding a girl down while your friend punches her in the face”, it stops mattering if they know what Ryan was up to. Their own actions out them as horrible people.
Even if they do turn on Ryan, they’ve gone way too far for a simple ”oops, my bad!”
I would of been the right thing move, but Amazi-girl was also looking to fight, so maybe she just subconsciously neglected to do that so she could knock heads.
Even so, Ryan pretty much admits it himself here and there’s no pause from the other guys yet (might happen later, Sal’s punch kinda stops any chance of a realisation), so maybe they’ll back up like “bro you did what? not cool bro! BRO!”
I will never understand this rationale given for rape. Admittedly it’s nowhere near my purview in terms of personality types (I’m a quiet, pacifistic, introvert who praises monogamy).
There’s no way it’s just about power. After all, rape victims are predominantly attractive young women. I get that some people get off on control, and there’s definitely an element of it there, but they’re in it for the sex too. Everyone would be raped relatively equally if that weren’t the case. I’m not trying to victim shame here, but there is definitely a VERY unfortunate trend in terms of the demographic.
It pains me as a soon-to-be father of a girl that I will someday have to explain to her that there are people who would use her in a sexual power trip for their own sick satisfaction. I’ll put on my big boy pants and soldier through that though.
CONTENT WARNING: Motivations / Rationalization for sexual assault
Its about power and control. Cerberus has made some really thorough posts the previous few days about it, but it that’s what it seems to come down to. It would require more, but there’s still a lot of ways where young men don’t just fail to respect women, but are basically encouraged not to. “Bro codes” and other forms of toxic masculinity, like how sex is treated as super important and anger is about the only feeling that isn’t considered embarrassing for men to have. These all lower the inhibitions on for violence of all kinds. Put a bunch a guys like this together, and the echo chamber makes it worse. It’s a gradual, steady erosion caused by a number of things, rather than one single thing you can point to causing them to be dramatically worse than the people around them.
It’s why its really, really important to not only teach young men about consent, but also to call that kind of misogynistic shit out when they see it. Once that kind of thinking takes hold, it starts defending itself, and only gets harder to root out over time, until you’ve got a irredeemable shitpile like Ryan.
“Rape victims are predominantly attractive young women.”
Um. I’m not so sure. Because this conflicts with my experience, which boils down to “rape victims are predominantly whoever the rapist thought they’d get away with it with.”
There’s a media tendency to prioritise the stories of the young and appealing, because those are the stories we care about, but that’s not a representative sample by a long shot.
I absolutely agree with you. In my experience, people who are raped are primarily people who are perceived as VULNERABLE. Youth is a form of vulnerability. Unfortunately, being female often is as well. Look at major privileges (in no particular order, and by no means a complete list): gender, race, socioeconomic status, apparent gender, sexual orientation, apparent sexual orientation… the more of those boxes where someone’s not in the most privileged group, the more at-risk they are. Of the people closest to me whom I know to have been raped/sexually assaulted, there’s a nearly-even male/female split. ALL of us were minors every time it happened. Two were above the age of consent in their respective states (although not, I think, in the entire country), but still under eighteen. The rest were assaults of pre-or-barely-pubescent children. That’s not “because they’re attractive young women”. That’s “because they’re there, and I can”. It may also be worth noting that only one person on that list is conventionally attractive.
People focus on the pretty young woman raped by the guy because it’s a clear narrative: either monster hurt beauty -save the pretty girl or evil seductress lured unfortunate man into a trap -burn the witch. Rape is a crime of power that happens to be sexual in nature, but that sexual element means that people have a hard time seeing people they aren’t attracted to as being hurt by it, and ignore it completely if it’s a form of sexual interaction they don’t think about in the first place. That’s part of why if the woman’s not “attractive enough”, she isn’t believed (even more than the baseline of disbelief, I mean, which is already DISGUSTINGLY high). That’s part of why many people think it’s impossible to rape men. That’s part of why male-on-male or female-on-female sexual assaults are ignored or downplayed (that last also often has a horrific element of “the deviants deserved it, maybe this’ll scare them into acting correctly”). That’s part of why assault and rape allegations about hurting children get ignored for years and decades. ZerglingOne, you’re right about what you have to explain to your daughter, (and my prayers join yours that she won’t have to learn that lesson firsthand), but if you have sons, make sure they get that lesson too -because everyone needs to know BEFORE it happens that if they are raped, it’s not their fault. There’s nothing wrong with them. They’re not dirty, they’re not to blame, they’re not broken. They’re loved, no matter what. Because when boys hear girls getting told those things, and they aren’t, and something happens to them… that cuts deep, and those wounds don’t always heal.
When I was working with dependent seniors, we were instructed about elder abuse. Turns out sexual abuse is totally a thing for elders, too, and the most common abusers are adult grandchildren towards their elders, because grandma would never ever turn them in. It’s super fucked up.
So, yeah, not just the young and pretty (though the news enjoys stories about the young and pretty). It’s anybody who doesn’t have power.
“I will never understand this rationale given for rape.”
Good…
There is 0 rational justifications for Rape. and all the rationale given are a idiotic beyond belief
The rationale given are all garbage being used to make the speaker feel better about themselves or reassure themselves it will not happen to them or their daughters/wives/mothers/etc. They use it so they can think they do not need to address the real issues, which they do.
I do not know if you need a hug. I know that when I say things like that, I want hugs, particularly when they are true, and in my world, not getting a hug when you want or need one hurts, so when I recognize contexts where I know I would want a hug, I offer them as my go-to gesture of sympathy. Unless you were asking about cookies, in which case the ghost of my grandmother compels me to say that yes, everyone always needs cookies.
I’m trying to remember when my last hug was but i can’t. I’m not sure if that means i dont really get them or they just dont stick out in my head. I’m sure it has been at least several months though.
I am horrified and awed by that before remembering that different people have very different baselines needs for contact. I can’t go more than two weeks without some form of comfort-contact before my mental state completely destabilizes, no matter my starting point. If you are not a hug-liking person, I respect that -any offer of hugs from me is never an insistence that said hugs be accepted. What would be an appropriate way to express sympathy and sorrow for your having been in such a mental state as you originally mentioned, a desire for vengeance upon anyone who drove you to it, and thankfulness and relief that you no longer are?
I am not opposed to hugs i just do not get them typically. I have one person in my life who is a big hugger who i would get about 99 percent of mine from but she has been in chemo for several months at this point.
as for vengence well i am typically at this point to lazy to worry about causing people harm. it is so much effort to hold onto anger. especially since i am kind of stunted emotionally speaking.
i just know as of now in my life i am working to accomplish something and get a job as a result and after that finally feel i am at least not a full failure and attempt to start dating, which is something i am not well versed in. I have not had a s/o at all in my life up til this point.
Ohhhhh. That is a thing I have context for understanding, and I appreciate you taking the time to clarify, and further appreciate your having done so as often as you have been. My well-wishes to both you and your friend -I wish there was anything I could do beyond that
That makes sense. I struggle with anger on my own behalf (I should perhaps stop trying, but I have been trying to regain the range of emotions I lost when I was younger), but I have always reacted strongly when hearing of other people being put through any sort of hell -they are all bad, but the ones that resonate most all with me are those that either I or the people I loved went through, particularly alone, and that is very much one of them.
Those are good things! Very good things! I don’t see how the term “failure” would apply to you -I am not trying to shut you down; it’s just that to me, that’s a word that means someone like… honestly, I don’t even know if Blaine and Toedad merit that one. Someone who never tries to do better, be better, do more -not because they can’t (for instance, from depression), but because they feel it and everyone is beneath them. Someone so self-absorbed that they hurt others intentionally and careless and unintentionally and it’s all the same meaninglessness. Someone intentionally incapable of learning from their own mistakes, who is so honestly convinced that they are big-r-right that they never bother to even think to consider changing anything about themselves. To me, someone who lives their whole life with that kind of casual, reckless disregard for other people is a failure. You have not sounded like that sort of a person to me. I wish you good luck in the dating world. I am told it is a confusing and yet frequently enjoyable place.
I used to have anger like….. ok you know the saying of when someone says they have a short fuse? when i was in middle/high school it was more like i had an exceptionally long fuse connected to especially potent dynamite.
now I literally can’t remember the time i felt angry/mad. stress is a different matter although now if the stress gets to be to much i start to laugh without being able to stop. its really odd.
I forget who blaine is offhand right now, but i dont have the energy of emotions to be even close to toe dad even if i wanted to. big if there.
right now i am just dealing with getting comptia a+ certified then starting the tech support job. honestly the only reason they are helping me get this job is because there is a stipulation in the contract that says they need to hire people with certain difficulties and my attempts at a game over qualify me it seems. i’ve been in both in and out patient before.
it will be my first full time job and once i get 3 months rent saved up i will move into my first apartment. once that happens i hope to start trying to date, but as i have little experience dating in general its going to be hard to get started.
that plus the fact i am emotionally stunted will make it harder. if i am honest/upfront about my mental issues it will likely cause people to not stay with me. im honestly not sure if i am better as being numb to most emotions for the most part or when i was feeling like hurting myself.
at least i have gotten good at faking things a lot. started to notice when i should laugh and such. although im still trying to figure out how to force myself to cry so i dont seem like a monster/uncaring.
The CompTIA a+ thing is pretty cool. As for dating… I had to practically be dragged kicking and screaming into my first relationship, but it still happened and I have a much easier time of things in that regard now, so there’s always hope. ^_^
Honestly, I don’t think I ever would have ended up in any relationship, if she hadn’t been as pushy about that as she was and it was what I needed at the time, really.
That you think dating is going to be hard, but still want to give it a try sounds like a really healthy attitude for it. Don’t worry about not knowing what you’re doing though. I’m in my 30s and I still don’t think I know what I’m doing. As far as I can tell, the trick is just to keep at it, and eventually you find somebody who fits.
As far as I can tell, the trick is just to keep at it, and eventually you find somebody who fits.
Unless of course you don’t. There isn’t someone for everyone.
Quitters never win.
Winners never quit.
People who never win and never quit piss away their time, energy, and hope making their lives miserable and irritating or annoying other people.
If you make yourself miserable trying, putting aside all else that might improve your life, hope isn’t the problem any more than not finding someone is.
Sure, many people go their entire lives without finding a long-term romantic relationship. Many are perfectly happy. Many continue to look and don’t find what they were looking for and are still happy. Many who do find someone, or a long string of someones or whatever else they were looking for, but aren’t happy.
If someone wants a relationship, they should devote at least some of their energy towards that. How much, and which avenues you pursue are complicated matters that will require trial and error to fine tune.
Obviously, you gotta make adjustments if its not making you happy, take a break and focus that elsewhere if you’ve had a string of failures. But I’m not going to tell anyone that they shouldn’t give it another try later if they still want to.
You have to put energy into other things that make you happy — or at least closer to that — whether you find someone or not, so I’m not gonna say someone should just give up all hope forever just because it might not pan out.
You really shouldnt beat yourself up over this, even if it grew from a dark place. Its more normal than it appears.
Its actually describes an intersection of bunch of common ( almost universal ) turn-ons and personal fantasies. There is sex research that shows sex with total strangers ( because they are strangers) is a common fantasy turn-on. Faces were seen as more sexually attractive to the opposite sex when they were told they were strangers, as opposed to a coworker or friend.
A tremendous amount of people have fantasies they submit themselves to strangers who desire them. its a trope in romance fiction because people buy it. BUt you are in control of the fantasy. You arent really violated. You choose to have it ( unless its an obsession ) . Its the ultimate safe space. It doesnt mean you **really** wanted it to happen. You are not a freak ( too much ) or a weirdo.
Anyone who has been assaulted knows there is huge difference between pretending or consenting to give up control, and having that violated.
As long you have decent personal boundaries, and know the difference between fantasies and reality, you are a super normal person and shouldnt feel bad over that.
I am sure there are many people that would find you desirable.
Yep. This type of guy doesn’t usually say that crap out loud, because he doesnt want his bros to know that’s how he gets girls. More naturally, it would be more like “….no ones ever wanted your fat ass.”
But it is a comic. And he’s the villain of a comic. This is probably as close as well get to the classic monologue, so nbd.
I first heard that I was “too ugly to rape” in…. huh. I was still in middle school the first time I got that one. Bit of a variant, but from my perspective, it’s close enough to the same vein, and from some of the comments I heard made about other girls by the same people…. That didn’t read as comic-book villain to me.
Actual people say similar things, though usually by anonymously hatemailing notable people online. Though, unfortunately, I have also heard the occasional anecdote of shit like that being said in real life.
But I hope never to overhear such things. I’d hate to find out whether or not a jury would convict someone for pulling a Sal on such a douchetruck.
I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard men say shit like that in casual conversation, especially with each other. A lot of immature guy conversation revolves around degrading women in some way.
“Yeah I f****d that person”
“She’s so ugly”
“”Females” (not “women”) are like _”
“Have I mentioned how heterosexual I am today?”
Yeah, it’s pretty grotesque what some guys will just say openly in public when there aren’t any women around. In college in the dorms I would hear guys talking shit even about their own girlfriends. Like, minutes after she’d left.
Ugh, yeah. Thankfully my roommates weren’t like that and there were a handful of other decent guys around the dorms I was in, but a lot of them would just say some really horrible things.
Man, every single time somebody says “That’s just mustache-twirling supervillainy, nobody would ever say/do/think that in real life”, there are a zillion people who have actually seen or heard it happen in real life.
Real life is a pretty messed up place sometimes, huh. D:
Kind of shows he has a line of other victims under his belt that he justifies his drugging to rape them as a ‘compliment’.
Clearly he wouldn’t be sticking his penis in things if he didn’t think they were hot enough for it.
Yes. This is a mentality that many college boys have in regards to using drugs or alcohol to ply a victim into either compliance, or submission. Getting their attention is just soooooo wonderful! It wasn’t rape! It was a gift! From God! God being the pet name of his floppy appendage, of course.
Because when people invoke the Chaos Gods, it tends to go badly for everyone involved.
Khorne, the Brass Lord of Battles, is perhaps the most benevolent in that he just wants skulls, bloodshed, slaughter, wrath, and hatred, not the involved suffering the other three tend to prefer
Nah, brass has got to give at least a +10% bonus to Hatred damage.
And as for the actual physical blow they don’t change the amount of force – just how concentrated its application is.
A fracture or a break to his cheekbone actually, judging from the point of contact, and actually, the more serious damage I would be worried about, from experience, is to his eye and his sinus. I’d be much more concerned about Sal’s knuckles, were she not wearing reinforced motorcycle gloves. The bones in the hand are much more fragile when compared to the skull.
That said, this particular bro is going to need to go to the emergency room, either way. Fractures or breaks close to the orbital socket that could effect the ear (which this one will) have to be looked at. He’s going to be in massive amounts of pain.
MASSIVE. For many months. His sinus cavity and ear might never recover.
Jaws can be fixed. Ears and sinuses? Not so easily.
They look pretty nice, so I’d guess they’re the good Kevlar ones with the padding. They’re designed to keep riders’ hands safe in case they lay their bikes down and their hands make impact with/skid across asphalt at 60 mph.
She’ll have some hella bruising if she keeps going for their faces, but as long as she uses good form, she won’t have to suffer through a boxer’s break or dislocation in her knuckles. She’s smart enough to start going for the soft bits quick though.
We’re seeing the punch pretty late in the follow through.
I’m thinking that red mark on his cheek was put their by Sal’s fist. The converging lines in the air nearby would seem to indicate where her fist was when Ryan’s face got in its way.
I just pictured Sal arriving somewhat like the Flash. Now to dream that her punch was like that one from Injustice, where she first built up speed by circumnavigating the globe several times before delivery.
There are just too many things wrong with Ryan’s comeback there. Seriously.
…..
Wow.
That sure reminded me of some people in JR High and High School…
What a horrible jerk POS. Now I’m crying.
Gah.
Such a satisfying punch, though.
I’m glad you got through those years, and that you are hopefully away from those particular a-holes. May all your comicbook punches be hella cathartic.
… If you were planning a fanfic trying to show Ryan as a decent person with a bad habit or a budding romance with Sal, its death is probably for the best. Consider this moment mosquito netting that prevents the spread of internet malaria.
Eh, with a few metal plates, it can be done. Otherwise it’d need long screws and careful angles, which might be tricky with him squirming, and sedation, while perhaps poetically just, might interfere with the sensation.
On the other hand, it might dull the superficial pain just enough for the deeper rending to better register and have more of a psychological impact.
He seemed to have it down to a routine of sorts. Either he had experience at the ploy, or someone coached him on it.
I’m not certain which is worse, but I’m leaning toward the latter.
1) Invite obvious innocent Christian girl to play games and impress with Bible quotes.
2) Don’t actually ask anyone else to play and then pretend no one wanted to.
3) Play with her alone and slip her a drug when she isn’t looking.
4) It doesn’t go further than that because someone smacks you with a baseball bat just in time every time to forbid you from starting a crime spree. This is not a lie, this is completely factual.
probably was raised as a spoiled and maybe an only child. while not always i have noticed only children seem to be more full of themselves and such than kids with siblings.
Is drugging girls like an icebreaker for Ryan? It’s incredibly threatening that that’s the first place he went to. He didn’t say date….or kiss, or bang, or FUCK…he said “drug” first! That is sooo messed up! Like that’s some serious mental disorder shit!
As someone with alphabet soup brains, I disagree. Mental and neurological disorders are no excuse for him. Even if he has a condition that stunts his capacity for empathy (which I’m not totally ruling out,) simple deduction as a manipulator would suggest NOT giving people a good reason to hurt you, or being so open about it.
No, he simply has no sense of his own entitlement and a total lack of respect for other people. He no consensually hurts others for his own pleasure. Full stop.
What I’m trying to say is that if you ignore for a moment Ryan’s history as a potential rapist, that one line or just that one word “drug” implies a fundamental misunderstanding. Like he thinks drugging is an acceptable go to. Not a quick solution to the problem of getting laid but a necessary step in it. See a cute girl, say hello, DRUG her! That’s incredibly dangerous thinking! And I mean it’s probably just a throw away line I’m reading too much into cause Ryan’s a bad guy and would say something like that (BWAHAHA and such) but still it’s really troubling in and of itself.
I’m not disagreeing with you there. He’s a predator, with no regard for the human rights of the women he targets. What I was reacting to was the implication that it was a result of mental disorder. I have both neurological and mental health issues that I struggle with everyday. I’m also quite used to the general ableist assumption that mental health issues, often falsely conflated with neurological disorders as well, are what make someone dangerous.
Is he a horrible person? Yes. Does that mean he necessarily has mental illnesses? No. On the whole, it is the people with visible mental and neurological illnesses who are at greater danger from those perceived as neurotypical. That is my concern and umbridge with the OP.
This thread gives me further hope for people and discussing. I will make cookies of it, and change my username URL to pictures of them once I do, if I remember.
DL: For a disloyal subject, you sure seem loyal to my edict right now.
Falling Star: When this is over, everyone who wants to will have floury handprints on their butts. And that will be just one of the many hijinks this baking session will produce.
Yeah. Ryan’s behavior can be fully explained by toxic masculinity with a side of entitlement, and maybe some shitty parenting, creating an awful attitude towards women.
The repeated failure of the people around him never calling him out on this has contributed to his ideas that what he does is okay. He totally realizes he can get in trouble for it, but he doesn’t see it as any worse than smoking pot or underage drinking.
Looks like it…. It probably comes from how he was raised, a strict bible upbringing can easily lead a young man-child to think of women as little more then chattel, meant to satisfy his desires.
Remember he drugged Joyce, then tried to force her into the washroom and called her a tease when she did not go in, A girl wearing a sweater with no cleavage and making exactly 0 sexual advances is not being a tease. He also claimed she was going to reap what she sowed and was going to pay her back in full for DEFENDING herself right before Sarah clubbed him with the bat.
He does not see women as people, which was probably learned from his father, and has shown 0 understanding that the scar is his own dam fault and at least a little bit of karmic justice.
The fodder are probably just as bad as he is, since they Amazi-Girl talking to him, and he made aggressive moves not her so they came over and are starting a fight with her because Ryan said to…
I think it’s simpler than that. He’s pissed off about being outed, so he’s hurling it back in her face. That’s not any sort of fancy mental disorder speaking. That’s just old-fashioned hate.
The reality is that many rapists in general, especially on college campuses, are repeat offenders. His dialogue there is a little unbelievable in how he literally says he drugs women, but there is definitely a culture of (both men and women) getting completely fucked up on alcohol and then hooking up with someone. I have known, seen, witnessed people deliberately get drunk so they can then be more open to hooking up with someone. The problematic aspects of that is another discussion.
There’s a great book on drinking culture called “Getting Wasted”. One of the number one reasons why college students drink is because they feel that being drunk opens them up to social situations, one of those situations being anonymous (or not) sex.
One of the issues with that some people are (1) rapists and/or (2) believe that getting (usually a woman) drunk and then having sex with her is a legitimate way of hooking up with someone. See the infamous study where the men said they haven’t raped a woman before, but when confronted with hypothetical scenarios that depicted rape without saying the word, many of them affirmed they performed such actions multiple times.
Women often get “drunk” so they can blame the alcohol because society still views women who enjoy sex as “sluts”. Unfortunately this also leads to guys like this who think they are really helping these women since they think deep down they must crave sex but don’t want to be a “slut”.
Actually, he doesn’t literally say he drugs anyone. He implies it, but with the right (or rather, wrong) authority figure for him to explain himself to he could probably spin it as just a comeback to AG’s accusations even if she got someone to corroborate what he said.
Yeah, it’s gonna take a miracle for this not to blow back on her.
Fuck all those non-Sal assholes in the background, who saw this going down and did nothing. I don’t care if they don’t know what Sal and AG know, if you see and hear something like this going down and don’t immediately have alarm bells going off in your head, you kinda suck as a person.
The one thing that consistently gets me about English (as someone who teaches/tutors some other, use-impaired languages) is how many native English speakers seem to have trouble with the concept of regular verbs.
Yeah, what I’M scared witless off is that this might be the moment the crowd shifts allegiances. White lady beats someone up, she’s heroic. Black lady gets into the fray… The crowd MIGHT support them both, I could be wrong, they could start squealing and tweeting about superhero team ups and sidekicks (which will revolt AG and Sal BOTH), but… Black ladies who fight back are more likely to be seen as aggressive and dangerous. What if Sal gets arrested? She hit a white guy at a republican rally! WILLIS IS MEAN AND I’M SCARED
Eh, I don’t really see that as an issue of alignment so much as skillset. There are plenty of Lawful sorts who’re inclined to a surgical approach to problem-solving.
She doesn’t give a shit about her family, only her image to her voters. You gotta have fucked up political stances to get a white male rapist to wanna vote for a hispanic woman.
Not especially. He could just be there because volunteering for a female candidate seemed like a great way to meet new marks. Or he could just dislike her opponent more. The fact that shitty people want to vote for her more than her opponent doesn’t mean she is. It’s obviously not a great sign, but it’s hardly damning either, especially when we’ve only seen like 5 panels of Robin herself so far.
I’m sure the whole thing will be messy and complicated, especially at first, but not actually gross
That would be one reason it would be messy and complicated. Roz is convinced her sister has a good has a good heart, though, and she knows Robin far better than we do so far
I dunno, maybe we’re in for a pleasant surprise. After all, one of the onlookers in the last strip was commenting on the 3-against-1 odds Amazigirl was facing. Maybe they’ll view this as evening the odds. But maybe that’s a Pollyanna interpretation.
“Guess it’s gonna be one of those bad decision days.”
Well, Sal is most certainly talking about pretty much everyone here. About AG’s plan. About Gashface and his toxic dudebros…
…And last but not least, about herself. She knows how this will end for her: Badly. She’s never attacked a precious white boy before without getting in trouble, and she certainly does not expect to this time. Heck, she probably expects to go to jail for this one. Ryan tried to rape Joyce, and she’s the one who’s ending up in jail. Go fucking figure, right?
And yet she does it anyway!
She just punched Ryan because… Well, it’s beyond merely being convinced she’s doing the right thing. I think it’s more that there simply is no bone in the world that will allow her to not do so. The memory of Leland, AG’s words a couple of minutes ago, it’s all taking control of her body and turning her into pure vengeance.
It’s a bad decision. It’s the right decision. It’s a huge mess.
That is my abolute favorite part of this comic and, while she’s probably also talking about everyone else, I think she is mostly referring to herself.
“This is that thing I specificallyavoid doing, despite wanting to, because I know from experience that it’s an awful idea, but here we go anyway because I’ve reached a point where I can’t not do this.”
I completely agree that it probably didn’t even register as a decision for her. When AG went down, staying out of it just stopped being an option for her.
Thing is, he probably *would* try to drug Amber. Kind of guy that totally lusts for ‘undesirebles’ then pretend to have some sort of standard. Disgusting.
I doubt he’d even see her as undesirable if he weren’t already inclined to hate her for giving him trouble, plus her association with Joyce. Pretty sure he’s just reaching for something hurtful to say, and given his mindset, he came out with something fucked up.
Remember, rape is about power, not sexual interest. Ryan loves the feeling of control and dominance it gives him. Under the circumstances, if he weren’t surrounded by a crowd of people, he’d probably really enjoy sexually dominating and degrading the woman who humiliated him a few minutes ago. He probably wouldn’t even need drugs, if he had his bros with him. Oh, look, he does.
(ERG, sorry if that came out triggery, I know that’s an issue here.)
Ya, Amber is well within the range a horny college guy would try to score with.
They might say they are settling, as she does not have a supermodel body, but most guys that age do not care and are only really seeing the size of her chest…
Ya, I really hope Sal doesn’t end up arrested for that. That’s how they get a lot of former felons/people who have been arrested and charged before.
In a lot of places, if you get into trouble again they send you away for a long time, even if you’ve done some lesser crime. Say, a murderer got acquitted but then gets arrested for robbery or something like that .That’s how they got OJ Simpson – he tried to burglarize a store, they put him away for like 33 years.
That being said, I hope Amber/AG puts her moral money where her mouth is and defends Sal once the whole beat-up-the-person-nobody-there-knows-is-a-rapist thing blows over. Because vigliantism on the part of someone like Sal could quickly land her in jail.
What people love Amazigirl for, is the same thing people like gang members for example end up in prison for. A group a kids might beat up someone who they know hurt one of their people, but they end up in jail for it. It’s an interesting dichotomy there. When people who look like Sal do that, it’s deemed absolutely unacceptable. When Amazigirl does it, it’s totally awesome and justified.
“Send the black girl to jail, she started hitting the white dudes!”
But they were going to beat up Amazi-Girl…
“Doesn’t matter, LOOK AT HER, SHE’S A CRIMINAL!”
I’m gonna try and be optimistic of the crowd and assume they realized Sal and Amazi Girl are currently fighting on the same side. And maybe stupidly assume the fight from before was a ruse to set up Ryan.
I really want to express my feelings about this strip but… wow. I really don’t know how to put into words the profound sadness Ryan’s words make me feel.
My gloom overshadows this, but I am glad that Sal is helping. Like, of COURSE she’s doing something (not that I saw it coming) but I’m thankful because I’m hoping it will help Amber to heal some of her related trauma.
Forget Tyler. (Everyone does.) It’s Beef I’m worried about. He’s been lurking in the background for several strips, he’s goddamned enormous, and he may have a grudge against Amazi-Girl.
Beef didn’t actually fight Amazi-Girl either of the previous times their paths have crossed. The first time he ran off after she smacked around his buddies, and the second time he was busy chatting (grunting?) up Roz during the fight.
On the other hand, “BAD DECISION DAYS” wouldn’t really narrow down the story line, would it? You might as well call it “EVERY DoA DAY EVER” if you were going with that.
Marcie, meanwhile, signing: [This action you are undertaking is not in accord with the policies for this event. I have to ask you to please refrain from punching that man. Oh no, please stop….]
Maybe it’s the eternal optimist in me. I have this hope… That one of the bros are going to say “Hey! What did you say?!”. And they’re going to turn on Ryan for not being a “bro” after all. (Or maybe just for admitting drugging someone out loud in public…) Probably doesn’t fit the strip “bro” archetype, but it wouldn’t be the first time someone in this strip has broken out of their stereotype.
This idea did not occur to me, and the theory is…. I fear that I am too pessimistic to find it particularly likely, but I want to, and it makes me happy to imagine such reactions, both in-comic and out. Thank you.
I get the idea that they are all ‘brothers’, as in members of the same fraternity or some such organization, and they’re taking the idea of “all for one, and one for all” just a little too literally.
I knew it yesterday, Sal just could not stay back out of it. She knows she’s probably going to pay for it, maybe even jail. But does it anyway.
Love Sal, have since day one.
Damage that asshole Sal, put a hurtin’ on him.
I hope this deal opens a way for Sal and AG to talk to each other.
Okay, from everybody else’s vantage point, she took his picture, talked, and he started getting violent. That should be enough to keep the law off her ass. Posting his picture may have been of dubious legality, but his reaction is not dubious it’s just plain illegal. That should be enough to make Sal’s reaction obviously justified as defense.
But… that line, Ryan. There is no law, there is only the deserved pain for that line.
Even if it WAS possibly defamation (which I’ve gone on at length about why it isn’t in a previous comments section), defamation is a tort, not a crime.
As FC said, look at them side by side: Leland — Ryan
The hair and the square chin are similar (and since the flashback was in blue-tone we can’t really compare hair color), but there’s a lot of difference in the nose. Leland has a rod-like, stick-out nose, like Jughead from the old Archie comics, while Ryan’s nose is fuller and more of what we used to call a ‘Roman’ nose. Yes, I know people’s appearances may change as they grow up, but that seems to be a bit much.
I’ve been hiding from DoA updates for a few days now -there… some things were hitting a bit too close to home to really be able to handle incremental updates, and… this feels stupid to ask, but is there a way to get a large/isolated version of the last panel? Just… just as a reminder that sometimes they get stopped, and sometimes they don’t get away with it, and sometimes they get punched in the face, and sometimes they get found, and sometimes people fight for and keep fighting for the people who got targeted? I’m going to be retreating again for a few days after this, I think, mostly out of worry that we’re about to see Sal and Amber (and maybe Marcie, if it gets really bad) being put through some severe harassment, possibly even violence, when the crowd sides with the bros (this is lack of faith in humanity, not lack of faith in Willis), but… I know this doesn’t work in reality. I know I’m never going to get a chance to do this to any of the people who came after me, and I’d discourage the people who care from trying if they thought about it. I just…. I want to pretend that I can. That I could at the times. That there is a clear, easy, simple answer in their language that works, and that this is a problem that can, at the very least, be knocked out for a few seconds. That there are people who care enough to help, because of the person who got hurt, and just because they see an action as wrong.
There really aren’t many things that can be as reassuring as the thought of horrible people like that getting what they deserve, or the thought of good people willing to stand up to them. There’s no means of bringing those thoughts about that could be considered silly, because you absolutely deserve to feel like there people who would fight for you, even without knowing you.
I live in a world (phrasing here used to mean that this is simply my immediate frame of reference when interacting with a shared reality) where people don’t intervene unless it’s to help the person doing the hurting, no matter how clear it is that they have the upper hand. And… and the _idea_ that there are people who care so much about other people -or just about the abstractions of justice and rightness and protectiveness that they are willing to put themselves in harm’s way just for a chance to take down hurt and wrongness and people who cause those -or even just to put those things in the spotlight and make other people think… I know it’s a bad thing to do, particularly given the absence of any sense of universal morality, but… when I see that happen for one of those few things I see a clear “right/wrong” on, even when it’s fictional; when I see comments and reactions like tonight’s have been… it gives me hope. The non-soul-crushing kind of hope, even, and that one’s rare. And, well… better a fictional vent/outlet than a human.
That panel is absolutely fucking horrifying. Even the best, non-rapey scenario is that they’re just really good at ganging up together on a single person in a fight.
> Even the best, non-rapey scenario is that they’re just really good at ganging up together on a single person in a fight.
And more horror on the way …
They weren’t that good in yesterday’s panel when AG was on her feet and they failed to coordinate their attacks. I suspect AG would have beaten the four of them if she was still standing but …
Tyler pounces, AG is vulnerable and they seem to know what to do with practised ease, with no direction from Ryan.
Well, if ya notice, Ryan whispered that. At least, that’s what I assume the smaller font and squiggly direction-indicator-thing mean in Willis comics.
But Willoughby does have a point, they did get her in that position rather quickly.
……does that mean Tyler basically whispered *Everyone always forgets Tyler.* practically into Amazi-Girl’s ear as he grabbed her from behind… because that is slightly horrifying.
I’m disappointed that Amber had to get rescued by Sal again. And that whenever Amber and Sal have a bit of confrontation, Amber gets the worst of it. It makes it look like Sal totally outclasses her.
Okay, I had to think about this but I now know where this is going. When the press report this (because this is a Congress election campaign hustings, it will be reported), the reporters are going to laud Sal as “the mysterious new costumed avenger on the block”. Sal doesn’t want to be a costumed hero but no-one else is really going to think about what she may or may not want.
It gets worse when Robin specifically cites her and Amazi-Girl as a sterling example of private citizens standing up for themselves. In other words, she becomes a Libertarian icon. Naturally, Marcie and Malaya find Sal’s increasing rage at this chain of events hilariously funny.
“Often when the Big Bad things happen to people in my strips, I don’t like strips to end with the feeling that the person is completely alone. That’s why it was important for me that Ruth appear as quickly as she did. That same strip without Ruth showing support would result in a 24-hour moment of suspense that I’d rather avoid.
(very similar to how when Joyce was attacked at the party, strip one had her with the physical upper-hand, and strip two had Sarah at her side)”
I don’t tumbl (is that the verb?) regularly and missed that post. But seeing it has an immediate calming effect on me -it helps a lot of old hurts when I see something like that (the not-aloneness, but the awareness of the importance of visible support/companionship too), and I hadn’t realized there was… I dunno if there’s a guarantee there, but the finding that important, and finding it important enough to make a point of including it and commenting on doing it…. It means a lot. It’s touches like that… I don’t find them humanizing, exactly, but I find them inspiring, and soothing, and aspirational, and to me, that’s preferable. It’s like a little show of “here’s a version of our world. It’s not perfect either, not by a long shot -look at the shit that just happened. But dammit, this world’s trying, and our world can too!”
There is a part of me that wants a framed copy of Sal punching Ryan to put up on my wall and stare at whenever I’m having a bad day. Sal’s bad decision days, now that she’s hit college at least, are the best bad decision days.
Tyler sounds a little sad in panel 3. Not like I feel bad for him or anything, he just sounds hurt. Poor bastard, being left out of the [comment edited for vulgar crime reference].
And I do see what some people have been commenting on, using drug as a verb, in place of what I’ve typically seen used, that being what comes after the drugging part. I can see how it’s what he’s been taught to do, as opposed to something he felt he had to do.
Chances are someone already called the cops long before this altercation started because they saw a “suspicious looking early twenties black female scouting the crowd to try and rob or do other gang related things to” hanging out by an “illegal immigrant security guard that’s too lazy to do their job”.
To be honest, I’m kind of surprised Tyler would be able to subdue Amazi-girl that easily. I took martial arts (Jiu Jitsu to be exact) for several years, and one of the things that we took was how to escape when grabbed from behind. (Several ways… foot stomp, punch to the groin, backwards head butt). I figure amber would probably be much more experienced (and proficient) at that sort of thing than I was.
Amber has no formal training as far as I recollect. It’d be more than understandable for her not to have learned things like that, especially since she usually has the element of surprise rather than the other way around.
It might not have been explicitly confirmed, but I assumed a large part of the reason for that reference was to justify her skills – in addition to showing how damaging Blaine was.
Not only was she surprised and effectively tackled backwards as you can see her feet already in the air in the panel where Tyler grabs her, but Tyler was immediately followed by the other two Bros grabbing her, as well. Otherwise, yeah I’d agree. There are all sorts of ways that you learn to deal with basically exactly that situation.
Yeah, she might have been able to handle it if the other two weren’t right there.
Most self defense classes would have covered escaping from grabs, but the recommend technique for escaping three people grabbing you is probably ”don’t let them grab you”
On the one hand, that was soooooo satisfying (and I would buy the hell out of that book, BTW). On the other, I am feeling really nervous for Sal right now.
First point, on Beef: He was the only one of the gang of three that DIDN’T get beat up by AG way back when. We’ll see if he holds a grudge, I guess.
Second point: I wonder how the mob will react now that “hero” is teaming up with the “thug” against the four “nice campaign staffers.” If Willis keeps up the Trump parallels, AG is probably going to be denounced as an “agent of the librul med, uh, superheroes. Don’t superheroes help people for free? Those commie bastards! Get her, good ‘Muricans, so we can make ‘Murica great again!”
On the other hand, there IS apparently gratuitous violence going on, which also tends to be a draw for those people…
No doubt, and between having her dehumanizing of Sal reflected back at her and the crowd leaping in support of these upstanding Christian men, it will probably start cracking open the mythology that Amber’s built up around herself and Sal.
I’m also pretty convinced the events of this night end up pushing the cops to start cracking down on Amazi-Girl.
Ryan already was getting bad press for resisting Amazi-Girl and (thanks to the scar) ‘looking’ like a bad guy. People will be less focussed on Sal (especially as Amazi-Girl derailed the lynch train) and be far more focussed on the “Two Sexy Dames With Super-Powers” in action. That’s what the ten-million view YouTUBE video will be called, by the way. 😀
In reality, though, it’s going to be a tough scrap and I can see this all ending with Amber and Sal in Sal’s room treating each-other’s bruises and cuts with Marcie and Billie’s help (and Billie will freak at seeing Sal and AG in the same room). Sal and Amazi-Girl will insist that they are not friends, just allies-of-convenience against assholes. However, no-one will believe that.
I’m starting to wonder if the spoiler frames we’ve been seeing recently are showing Billie desperately trying to convince Dorothy not to make Sal’s situation worse by making up a superhero moniker for her whilst an innocent and confused Joyce looks on.
I wonder how many times is Sal going to have save Amazi-girl before AG starts to realize that the person’s she built up in her head and Sal aren’t really the same person?
Also, why not just post Ryan’s photo and see if someone who follows her can ID him or dox him? He had the MO down too well to have just roofied one unsuspecting person at her first house party…
Boy I hope someone’s recording this. Even if they can’t pick up Ryan saying he thinks girls want to be drugged, the image of him raising his hand to a woman who’s pinned to the ground could have the potential to be one of those pictures.
And then we’ll see how many party invitations he gets.
Since this is taking place in the present day (it’s always present day), it would be shocking if there isn’t at least one, or more likely several, smartphones recording video right now.
I’m using a throwaway account for reasons that will be obvious in a moment.
I’d like to call attention to Mister Mendo, who might actually be the (probably unintentional) model for Scarface in this arc (and the original establishing arc).
Mendo, aka David Novelli, harrassed and intimidated a member of the Agony Booth reviewing team (a lady named “Jet”) to the point where she abandoned all most (if not all) of her online presence. The situation was the same — implied romance, rejection, and then vehement attacks.
Novelli, being a member of the cult of Scientology at that point, attacked her without pity or remorse. He posted her name, address, and a litany of how she had “done him wrong”. This was pointed out to Albert (the owner of the Agony Booth); the posts were removed.
I’d post links to Novelli’s attacks, but the Agony Booth forums were taken offline quite awhile back.
Just so you know … this particular story arc has significant pertinence to someone posting here.
It would be really cool if Beef made his non-cameo appearance by doing something to either chokeslam Ryan and his bros for having teamed up one a single woman, or having recognized him from the one party or another party where another one was rumored/reported to have been assaulted.
The guy that hosted the first party where Joyce was attacked did mention he had seen “that little shit” around before and he’d keep a look out in the future, and he looked like the type that might be involved in some kind of high intensity sports team. If Beef is involved in a sport, like wrestling, it’s possible he heard from that guy or just through the wire that some douchebag with a huge face scar and a bad bleaching job on his hair has been attacking women from the campus.
Certainly don’t hope he’s just a muscle head that’ll turn the tide back in Ryan’s favor by helping to overpower and outnumber Sal and Amazigirl.
That is an extremely satisfying punch, though I’m now more worried about Sal than ever. Hope she gets out of this okay – and that Marcie doesn’t have any repercussions on her job for hanging around with Sal.
Man, why can’t this comic just let me enjoy punches without worrying about consequences? Why does it have to be like real life like that?
Good thing then that what Sal is doing is protecting someone who was being attacked.
The police would no doubt encourage civilians to call 911 and let them handle a violent situation like this rather than jumping in and potentially getting hurt themselves, but what Sal is doing is completely legal.
No, but as we’ve clearly seen we do need to worry about AG beating up crooks slippery-sloping into stalking Sal.
I’m not entirely sure where Willis is going with this. I’m not happy with the surface gloss. I’m fine with superheroes, even vigilante style ones, as long as they stay within the tropes of the superhero genre. I’m fine with deconstructing them – exploring why vigilante justice really is problematic and the likely issues people who dress up in costume and “fight crime” would have.
And we’ve done that here – we’ve seen how screwed up Amber is and what drove her to this and how bad her judgment can be and how she’s been less restrained and more and more using it as an outlet for her anger and we’ve seen the effects this has had on Sal.
Now we’ve snapped back around to cheering her on as she beats up the bad guy, as if we were back in the days before the deconstruction – before we’d seen just how screwed up this all was. And that’s what makes me uncomfortable with all this.
I’ll shed no tears for Ryan or his bros. This is fiction, they’re villains, they deserve whatever they get – and we know, from our outside perspective, that Ryan at least is guilty.
I do suspect that Willis has something up his sleeve. That we’re not actually back to “Cheer for the superhero” world. That somehow the two threads he’s playing with here on superheroes/vigilantes are going to come together, but I don’t see how he’s going to pull it off yet.
You seem to be looking at this as very black and white extremes. She punches bad guys and saves kittens from trees, so she’s good guy superhero. We see her damages revealed and how she lets her personal grudge override, well, pretty much everything, so she’s a dangerous vigilante spiralling out of control. Then she also punches bad guys like she was the whole time, so she’s a good guy superhero again. But the one doesn’t cancel out the other. That’s kinda the whole point. She is simultaneously doing good (sometimes) and deeply flawed. These are -layers-. Does she do more harm than good as Amazi-Girl, to the world and/or herself? This is a question without a clean answer. This is a question to explore. Reality is more nuanced than either silver age comic books or fully crapsack world ‘deconstructions’. There is a clash between her public image and her inner turmoil BECAUSE there is an aspect of what she does that is viscerally satisfying. Assholes that wouldn’t otherwise face justice get punched in the face. That feels good. But there are very good reasons why that sort of street justice is illegal. And you can simultaneously know the latter in your head while still feeling the former (which is how we manage to enjoy superhero comics in the first place, paired with a hefty dose of separating fantasy from reality). Amber herself has this conflict; she is just less far removed from it.
So what does this unfocused rambling actually mean for your comic-reading experience? The long and short of it is: don’t look at this as undoing our look into Amazi-Girl’s darker side, but adding to it. You’re meant to read this with all the information you have to this point, just as the next time we see Amazi-Girl screw up and be terrible, you’re meant to also still remember this. These are layers of complexity.
And remember that you don’t have to support Amazi-Girl to support punching Ryan in the fucking face.
I don’t see how that would be a concern. There’s obviously a risk of her relapsing into old habits, but she was chasing criminals as Amazi-Girl long before the stalking started. Even before she knew Sal lived on her floor.
If she flips out at Sal for saving her again, then we’ll know she’s not done with her blood feud yet. Though I think the real test will be the next time Amber bumps into her. Will she still have a panic attack? Will she need to to put the mask on? If she does, what will AG end up doing? That’s what will show how much progress she’s made.
Exactly. And we’ve just seen AG switch between a scaled down version of the Klan and a scaled down version of Batman. I’ve kind of got whiplash and I’m not sure how that contrast gets resolved.
I appreciate the point, and I’m no fan of vigilante justice, but there’s a sizable gulf between AmaziGirl stepping up to an actual rapist and Rodrigo Duterte cheering on the death of thousands.
Gonna call it right now: Given how much it’s been mentioned so far, Amazi-Girl loses her phone.
She either didn’t just send out the info as soon as she had it (because, clearly, busy) leading to a lack of evidence, or the fact that whoever has it has her *other* contact information and so on becomes a plot element.
Dorothy is pretty smart. She might not know exactly what’s going on, but she’ll probably be worried enough to try and keep Joyce preoccupied and away from the internet until she knows more.
At the very least, she’ll make sure Joyce isn’t alone
Her phone is probably secure in a utility pouch. Next to the one with the rope, or grappling hook, first-aid kit, or condoms. She is prepared for anything.
Shit. Shit. Shit. Shiiiiiit. Sal is going to get in so much goddamn trouble. Sal punched a white dude at a conservative rally, she’s either going to get her ass kicked or sent to jail. Unless Amber steps in. Fuck.
I mean, holy shit, that was such a satisfying punch, but I really hope it was worth it for all the shit Sal is going to go through because of it.
There are enough witnesses to what has been going on. A-G is on the floor; three guys are holding her down while a fourth one is getting ready to strike her. Sal is only doing what is right and proper, and anyone who says otherwise is someone who should forfeit their right to call themselves civilized.
Seriously though, the way they’re holding her down is just eeeyaargh.
I have a really hard time believing that the bros haven’t somehow been involved in Ryan’s shitheadery, or at the least know about it. Ryan’s line is in too close proximity of them not to hear it.
Sal is in a way better place mentally than Amber. She has her issues but the major ones that made her act out like Amber does, she was forced to deal with years ago. Amber is a hotbed of stuff that she hasn’t dealt with, and has repressed and pushed her further and further into self destructive (and just destructive in general) actions. It’s not a contest, it’s just that Sal has already pulled herself out of a similar pit that Amber is still trapped in.
It’s also entirely possible that Sal does outclass Amber. Most of the time we see Amber fight, it’s against people who either aren’t expecting a fight or don’t have skills. The only other person I can think of off the top of my head who has given Amber any real difficulty is her father, and from what I remember, his main fighting technique was trying to use his superior height and reach to put her down. It’s entirely possible that Amber is a big fish in a small pond.
Amber handled those chumps yesterday like a pro using a good deal of restraint. Even an expert can get caught by surprise, though.
On the other hand, Sal probably has more experience fighting people who actually want to seriously hurt her, not just get away from her with their ill-gotten bikes and purses.
Its entirely possible they’re actually about even in skill. Just not the same kind of skill. Amber might win in a sparring match, but Sal would probably win in a death match.
Amber handled Blaine with no problems in both clashes. In the first case she just pasted him and stalked off. In the second, she lost control and stomped him into the ground.
It’s still possible Sal does outclass Amazi-Girl in a fight, but we haven’t really seen any evidence of it. They haven’t really clashed. Sal pulls off an impossible catch on the bike, but compare that to everything impossible AG during the car chase.
Sal hasn’t really fought anyone other than Malaya and that got interrupted, but it wasn’t completely one-sided. Amazi-Girl handled Malaya pretty easily one on one – clotheslining her initial attack and then throwing her after taking a knee when the others let her go.
Actually rereading that fight, the parallels are interesting: 4 on one. Sal standing back directing it. Malaya saying “She’s fuckin’ tiny and there’s four of us.” Malaya grabbing her from behind then the three holding her while Sal lectures her.
Of course, Sal walks away rather than trying to hit her, but it’s still a nice reflection.
At some other point I’d agree with you, buuut I really don’t feel that way about the events here. Like if we’re talking the car chase, where Sal calls Amber a dumb jerk for risking her life even though Sal risked her own life and Joyce’s by leaping in front of a truck to catch Amber, then yeah.
But in this chapter we’ve seen Amber actively back down from fighting Sal with no real prompting on the latter’s part, but instead because she’s scared of what the crowd turned the both of them into. We got a strip where Amber tries to walk away while Sal barks at her to fight whereupon Amber gets the funny one-liner. Sal is so burned by past experiences that she doesn’t really care about catching Ryan (and I don’t really think of this as some slight, FTR) and Amber’s the one going after him; if he gets taken down tonight it’s because Amber wouldn’t let him go and Sal is following her lead.
The fact is that Amber is wrong to pursue vengeance against Sal, and she has to be shown to be wrong.
I don’t know if this represents the USA as a whole (I hope not), life on an American campus (I’ve no idea) or a republican convention but I know that where I come from (NZ) if a group of people saw 4 guys grab a girl, shove her to the ground and hold her down well another guy goes to punch her then those guys would be dealt to pretty damn quickly
Or maybe its not NZ but the circles I move in because panels 4 & 5 are making me quite angry and I know I’d be jumping in there because that’s simply not right
Not to defend them, but it might be a little different if the girl had dropped two of them before getting grabbed and might well seem to have started the fight.
I’m choosing to believe the crowd just hasn’t has much time to react, since AG was winning only moments ago, and things went south really fast.
Sal already knew what kind of person Ryan is, and was probably keeping an eye on the situation when she saw Tyler coming up behind AG. So its possible that Sal just got there first, and others in the crowd will follow
I want to say that in most parts of the US, most college campuses, and most conventions, at least some people in the crowd would do something, but beyond that, I just don’t know
I know that I’d jump in as soon as I saw four guys squaring off against one girl (hell my wife would be jumping in before me) so it seems incredible that no one else is
Mind you Mr Willis has probably seen this kind of thing happen before since the comic is largely autobiographical
So at first I was a bit confused at Ryan’s words here as opposed to before (“the [slur] who cut my face SENT her”) . It didn’t make sense, if AmaziGirl was supposedly jealous why would she be doing anything at the behest of the girl who was attacked.
Then I realized that Ryan thinks that women SHOULD want this, want his “attentions”. To be drugged by him. Because that’s supposedly a compliment in his mind. Women need to be GRATEFUL that he takes his sweet time to drug and rape them.
That Ryan thinks AmaziGirl is just mad at him because she didn’t get his precious attention.
and that’s…honestly the most terrifying thing about him.
This is leveled with horrifying frequency, whether implicitly or explicitly, at fat women who are victims of rape. “You should be grateful anybody even wants to fuck you.”
“You’re just jealous no one’s ever wanted to drug your fat ass.”
Drug. Not “fuck”. Drug.
He doesn’t even have to rationalize it. No disgusting bullshit like “it’s just to get her in the mood”. He can actually say to himself “Yep, that’s what I do. I drug women.” and think there’s nothing wrong with that.
Security (where have they been?) will break up the fight. Sal (collared by Marcie) will vanish into the night. Amazi-Girl will speechify about the duties of Concerned Citizens everywhere. … DeSanto — will make the most of this heaven-sent opportunity.
I believe you may be right, with one little variant. I believe Sal will get arrested by the cops for attacking the creeps. Amber/AG will see how the cops treat her harsher based on her skin color and will begin to sympathize with her.
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“dangit Sal, he won’t match the mug shot I took if you break his jaw”
/would buy an entire book of satisfying DoA punches
I don’t know if there’s quite enough to fill a whole book.
…make it a flipbook
these two gravatars are almost perfect together.
Paging Escher Girls! Paging Escher Girls! Broken spine detected!
Also: three hands. Zaphod Beeblebrox is Amazi-Girl?
Illuminati confirmed
Superheroines can do wacky things with their bodies, it seems.
I ship it…
All in due time.
Yet.
I think there seriously is a market for Dumbing of age flipbooks. Start with the punches, and then maybe get some kind of a deal going with Slipshine.
Yes, that’s good, but picture this: Posters. All the walls, so walking from one room to the next in your home is just a montage of satisfying punches. Just walking to the kitchen for a bowl of Cocoa Puffs would feel so cathartic and empowering.
Can we have this? Or wallet-sized, so you can carry your favorite cathartic punch around with you and pull it out for better fantasizing the next time you have to deal with this kind of asshat?
so emPOWering
Get out.
Allow it.
Ditto.
A coffee book full of satisfying DoA punches.
Break out the Kickstarter.
Satisfying Punches: the Willis Collection. Now at the MFA through February 14.
I’m waiting for the Mike Special Edition.
I would totally buy that
Ditto. Especially the really satisfying ones, like these tools and Amber’s dad. Oh, and chin thumb man, or whatever he’s being called these days. Chin thumb multiple fractures hospital taunted man? Smells like justice.
Hmmm, all the satisfying punches seem to have a common character theme to them…
This is worse than the time the Gotham PD accidentally mirrored Two-Face’s mugshot for the wanted posters, and nobody called in because they hadn’t seen anyone wearing a bifurcated suit, flipping a coin, and committing crimes based around the theme of duality with the right side of their face all scarred.
Dangit Gotham! This is why you have all the crazies!
That and a revolving door insane asylum.
…. an outsane asylum?
Naaa, an insane-out asylum…
Let That Be Your Last Cointoss!
“You’re black on one side and white on the other.”
“I am black on the right side.”
“I fail to see the significant difference.”
“Lokai is white on the right side. All of his people are white on the right side.”
I went as Lokai for Hallowe’en one year. I was a fairly geeky kid, something which hasn’t changed much now that I’m an adult. I got some fairly awkward comments from the black households I visited.
“Oh, so that’s you on the one side and me on the other?”
That sort of thing. Every. single. house. Not a peep from any of the whites, except a couple who asked who I was dressed as, and who just smiled and nodded when I said “I am Lokai, from the planet Charon.” Like you do when a kid says something and you have no clue what they are talking about but you don’t want to be negative. Hand them the candy and let them walk away.
Yeah, five bucks says Amazigirl will be none too grateful for Sal saving her butt here.
yea well PTSD can do that to you.
That would be a suckers bet, no thanks..
Given that they were talking civily a few moments ago, I’m actually wondering if this might be the moment that gets Amazigirl on the track to looking at Sal in a whole new way.
[Obligatory shipping comment.]
I dub this ship Bone City.
It’d be about time.
That’s my wager as well.
Also, obligatory shipping. But with Marcie in the mix, because Marcie completes both Sal and Amazigirl.
That’ll be the second time Sal saves Amazi-girl from her own recklessness…
Perhaps third? If you count when Marcie talked Sal out of “painting this parking lot with y…”?
1) Uhhhhh, full on confession?
2) Damn it AG you let them catch you mocking.
3) where’s Chris Tucker when you need him, (Sigh) guess i’ll do it. (clears throat) You got knocked the FUCK OUT!
“Wipe y’self off, fool. You DEAD.”
PLEASE LET AMAZI GIRL HAVE BEEN RECORDING THIS ENTIRE TIME
That would be a good answer to “where’d her phone go?”
Though as a person who sometimes walks around recording things (for audio purposes, not surveillance), an audio recording on someone’s person while they are fighting would sound like “CLUNK CRRRRRR {maybe a human voice?} CHNNNNNNNMRGGGGG FFFFFF FFFFFF -just jealous- {unintelligible} CHRRRRR [muffled scream]”
Player two has entered the game!
Seriously, with the identical dudes getting their asses kicked, I feel like this is a video game like Final Fight or Streets of Rage.
Is Amazi-girl Cody and Sal Guy?
Willis did mention generic fight dudes in the alt text yesterday. My heart tells me that all bros are just clones that fight for the most unique looking among them. Can confirm, how it works at every college everywhere.
Seriously. My undergrad had very little greek life. When I went to grad school and actually encountered sorority girls for the first time, I was floored at how identical they looked. At the time, it was legions of side-ponytails, standing in formation for rush week. I’m sure it’s evolved since then, but only in terms of fashion.
May I celebrate attending a college without any fraternities or sororities? Regardless of your answer, I will probably do so. I love my hippy college founded by disenfranchised Harvardians, local townspeople and a Catholic priest.
Haha, my undergrad did actually have frats and sororities; they just weren’t a significant part of the school. It was in a big city with plenty of interesting non-Greek social life, and real estate was expensive so none of them had houses. If you joined a frat, you got to live… in a dorm. On a floor with all the other frat members. But it was nice, having less of that cookie-cutter element that stereotypically goes along with Greek life.
You do— unless its Boston College.
There it totally backfired and the *entire study body** has the Bro-culture of a giant Fraternity/Sorority.
At least Greek Life contains that to a minority and student can happily be outside that.
( If you are BC grad I dont apologize. I’m a local. I see it hear it everyday. )
It’s Boston. Bro culture is as big a part of the city’s identity as the Garden and broken down Red Line trains.
I thought you were setting up a joke, but I couldn’t find the punchline.
It reaches farther back than just College. I have a High school yearbook that is step-ford eerie because the entire cheerleader squad is practically facially identical. This is across ethnicity. Its not just blonde white girls, there’s a slew of ethnicities, and if you lined them up by darkening skin tone it’d just look like a time capture of someone getting a tan save hair and eye color.
Again, Taylor, Tyler and Dawson were actual (if incredibly minor) characters. With speaking roles.
Right, and the sorority girls are actual people. Doesn’t make them less generic, at least superficially.
Two of them were also US Presidents, although both of them had something to do with death (Taylor died in office, while Tyler took office as a result of W. H. Harrison dying). What does it mean???
And Dawson was the host of Family Feud, which is even more important than the presidency.
I think of them as something like the quick clones from MiB:the animated series. In a couple of hours, they’ll start spotting total gibberish before melting into less-tasty pancake batter.
That’d be a great game…
Sal gained the power of Team Up!
Now we just need Knives Chau to enter the fight!
appears
*Snickers.*
We are on a team up do you object to it!
She grew up and is now the co-pilot of a jaeger.
No “Streets of Age” joke??
(Streeting of Age?)
sal to the rescue. super team up
…Except now the crowd will turn on them.
Because they’re racist.
…. actually, I’m going to call the crowd splitting on this point, and trying to fight Sal, Amazi-girl, the broheims, and each other.
Ryan will slip away in the confusion. Amazi-girl will blame Sal.
or they will keep watching to see if sal and amazi girl kiss.
or at least take pictures after they win and make a meme of it that goes “now kiss”
I wonder which side Beef will chose.
A side of Beef.
A riot breaking out would not look good for Robin’s campaign.
Either that or the police show up, Sal gets arrested. Amazi-girl has flashbacks to the moment of her creation, only this time she stand up for Sal instead of attacking her.
Also, the police arrest Amazi-girl.
Ah, man, they figured out how to team up.
Also I TOTALLY DID NOT FORGET TYLER!
Yeah yeah…
Or they’ve done this sort of thing before.
Tyler always was a cut above the rest of the generics
…wow.
And I’ll be honest, if you took out the “to drug” I’m scarily sure that someone’s thought that when they were trying to get revenge for a friend.
OH SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
…that was a dark thing for him to say…
Man, he’s a scary rapist with a scarred cheek fighting someone in a cape. This is standard supervillain stuff.
Next she’ll accidentally knock him into a vat of acid, bleaching his face and causing him to go completely insane.
Nah, Joyce already hit him with chemicals that messed up his face.
Including acid. Also glass and roofies..
Fallowed by a bat, a few broken ribs, and a concussion.
A *bat* you say…
Yeah it weighed one batman.
Seriously batman is a unit of measurement in Turkey that equals about 10kg.
Strangely enough, he’d still be more likely to improve compared to what he is right now.
I mentioned a few days ago that I had a really awful joke that involved this guy’s actions. It was about his supervillain origin… and name.
I didn’t expect him to actually say something like THAT.
this is messed up i know but i have thought a few times along the lines of and yes this next part will be a bit dark so if youre sensitive to what type of thing ryan is about stop reading
I have thought where i almost wished someone had tried to rape me because at least then someone would have found me appealing in some messed up way.
like i said way messed up by i dont think like that any more. I’m still messed up in the head but this part isn’t around now at least.
Rapists generally choose thier victims based on how easy a target they perceive them to be, not how attractive they find them. It’s about power, not uncontrollable lust.
yeah but as i said my mind was even more messed up than it is now.
when you have tried to game over a few times your thought process isn’t typical.
Miados….
That sucks. It really does.
If I had any idea what to say beyond that, I would.
additions words of sympathy/concern/etc
i soft of just type that when i dont know what to say.
Yeah, I know. *Sympathy via internet comment* is acceptable in this group, thanks to Dina (she is the best, after all).
But it’s not just sympathy I feel. I also feel anger towards the people that made you feel that way. I want to punch the universe in the face for messing you up like that for no good reason.
I could be wrong but I am fairly certain there has been no proof of the universe having a face. Plus if it did it would likely be at best like a mosquito bite in terms of what it would think of the attack.
I’m not even sure if it is people or my weird brain that made me think certain ways/things or some combo of both.
Regardless of all of that, you definitely deserve way better.
…I think that’s an appropriate way of expressing what I’m trying to say?
i cant think of how it would be inappropriate.
If the universe has no face, we’ll just have to swing harder.
KICK REASON TO THE CURB AND GO BEYOND THE IMPOSSIBLE!
so since reason is to the curb impossible is a unit of distance we can move beyond?
More like a landmark than a unit of measurement. I’m not sure what unit would measure probability, but the point is that it’s something to surpass by disregarding and/or defying it.
We measure probability in units of Douglas Adams-es.
Oof. I’m really glad that you’re in a better place mentally now, and I hope it continues to get better.
Agreed. Case in point, notice how even though Ryan’s ‘bros’ see themselves as just getting their friend’s back when faced with a crazed assailant, they’re unwittingly acting as his henchmen, putting their necks on the line until they have the threat taken care of, when Ryan steps in as if he were their master rather than friend….
I think Amazi-girl really made a mistake by not saying SOMETHING about the attempted rape to the “henchmen” earlier… something like “Are you sure you want to protect a guy who drugs women”… At best, it might cause them to quit helping Ryan. At the very least, it would let Amazi-girl know if these were unwitting henchmen or full-fledged creeps who knew about Ryans antics.
there’s basically no way his bros don’t know about it, at least, there’s no way they don’t know his version of events. “Dude, I was trying to score with this chick and she was ready to go but then her roommate talked her out of it and she hit me with a bottle! And then I, uh, got mugged walking home.”
Yeah, but if that’s the version they know, the drug comment is coming out of nowhere.
One of them was actually tagged in the strip before Amazi-Girl went over it all, so at least two of them were just off-panel for that.
And really, once you get to ”holding a girl down while your friend punches her in the face”, it stops mattering if they know what Ryan was up to. Their own actions out them as horrible people.
Even if they do turn on Ryan, they’ve gone way too far for a simple ”oops, my bad!”
I would of been the right thing move, but Amazi-girl was also looking to fight, so maybe she just subconsciously neglected to do that so she could knock heads.
Even so, Ryan pretty much admits it himself here and there’s no pause from the other guys yet (might happen later, Sal’s punch kinda stops any chance of a realisation), so maybe they’ll back up like “bro you did what? not cool bro! BRO!”
I will never understand this rationale given for rape. Admittedly it’s nowhere near my purview in terms of personality types (I’m a quiet, pacifistic, introvert who praises monogamy).
There’s no way it’s just about power. After all, rape victims are predominantly attractive young women. I get that some people get off on control, and there’s definitely an element of it there, but they’re in it for the sex too. Everyone would be raped relatively equally if that weren’t the case. I’m not trying to victim shame here, but there is definitely a VERY unfortunate trend in terms of the demographic.
It pains me as a soon-to-be father of a girl that I will someday have to explain to her that there are people who would use her in a sexual power trip for their own sick satisfaction. I’ll put on my big boy pants and soldier through that though.
CONTENT WARNING: Motivations / Rationalization for sexual assault
Its about power and control. Cerberus has made some really thorough posts the previous few days about it, but it that’s what it seems to come down to. It would require more, but there’s still a lot of ways where young men don’t just fail to respect women, but are basically encouraged not to. “Bro codes” and other forms of toxic masculinity, like how sex is treated as super important and anger is about the only feeling that isn’t considered embarrassing for men to have. These all lower the inhibitions on for violence of all kinds. Put a bunch a guys like this together, and the echo chamber makes it worse. It’s a gradual, steady erosion caused by a number of things, rather than one single thing you can point to causing them to be dramatically worse than the people around them.
It’s why its really, really important to not only teach young men about consent, but also to call that kind of misogynistic shit out when they see it. Once that kind of thinking takes hold, it starts defending itself, and only gets harder to root out over time, until you’ve got a irredeemable shitpile like Ryan.
“Rape victims are predominantly attractive young women.”
Um. I’m not so sure. Because this conflicts with my experience, which boils down to “rape victims are predominantly whoever the rapist thought they’d get away with it with.”
There’s a media tendency to prioritise the stories of the young and appealing, because those are the stories we care about, but that’s not a representative sample by a long shot.
I absolutely agree with you. In my experience, people who are raped are primarily people who are perceived as VULNERABLE. Youth is a form of vulnerability. Unfortunately, being female often is as well. Look at major privileges (in no particular order, and by no means a complete list): gender, race, socioeconomic status, apparent gender, sexual orientation, apparent sexual orientation… the more of those boxes where someone’s not in the most privileged group, the more at-risk they are. Of the people closest to me whom I know to have been raped/sexually assaulted, there’s a nearly-even male/female split. ALL of us were minors every time it happened. Two were above the age of consent in their respective states (although not, I think, in the entire country), but still under eighteen. The rest were assaults of pre-or-barely-pubescent children. That’s not “because they’re attractive young women”. That’s “because they’re there, and I can”. It may also be worth noting that only one person on that list is conventionally attractive.
People focus on the pretty young woman raped by the guy because it’s a clear narrative: either monster hurt beauty -save the pretty girl or evil seductress lured unfortunate man into a trap -burn the witch. Rape is a crime of power that happens to be sexual in nature, but that sexual element means that people have a hard time seeing people they aren’t attracted to as being hurt by it, and ignore it completely if it’s a form of sexual interaction they don’t think about in the first place. That’s part of why if the woman’s not “attractive enough”, she isn’t believed (even more than the baseline of disbelief, I mean, which is already DISGUSTINGLY high). That’s part of why many people think it’s impossible to rape men. That’s part of why male-on-male or female-on-female sexual assaults are ignored or downplayed (that last also often has a horrific element of “the deviants deserved it, maybe this’ll scare them into acting correctly”). That’s part of why assault and rape allegations about hurting children get ignored for years and decades. ZerglingOne, you’re right about what you have to explain to your daughter, (and my prayers join yours that she won’t have to learn that lesson firsthand), but if you have sons, make sure they get that lesson too -because everyone needs to know BEFORE it happens that if they are raped, it’s not their fault. There’s nothing wrong with them. They’re not dirty, they’re not to blame, they’re not broken. They’re loved, no matter what. Because when boys hear girls getting told those things, and they aren’t, and something happens to them… that cuts deep, and those wounds don’t always heal.
When I was working with dependent seniors, we were instructed about elder abuse. Turns out sexual abuse is totally a thing for elders, too, and the most common abusers are adult grandchildren towards their elders, because grandma would never ever turn them in. It’s super fucked up.
So, yeah, not just the young and pretty (though the news enjoys stories about the young and pretty). It’s anybody who doesn’t have power.
“I will never understand this rationale given for rape.”
Good…
There is 0 rational justifications for Rape. and all the rationale given are a idiotic beyond belief
The rationale given are all garbage being used to make the speaker feel better about themselves or reassure themselves it will not happen to them or their daughters/wives/mothers/etc. They use it so they can think they do not need to address the real issues, which they do.
We all have walk down a dark road(s) and some point in our lives.
all i can say is its probably a good thing I hate the taste of booze.
No one drinks booze because of its flavor.
I do.
Beer, maybe. Cider and alcopops, though…
Whiskey. Plenty of schnapps, brandies and other liqueurs.
Not wine or beer – I like my alcohol distilled. Something in the taste of all that kind of booze is just nasty for me.
A good whiskey is fantastic. On rare occasion, a few wines and beers. I have zero interest in drinking alcohol for any reason other than taste.
Can I offer you a hug? You don’t have to take it if you don’t want it, but I can’t make cookies for you over the internet.
i am unsure if I need one. Should I need one?
I do not know if you need a hug. I know that when I say things like that, I want hugs, particularly when they are true, and in my world, not getting a hug when you want or need one hurts, so when I recognize contexts where I know I would want a hug, I offer them as my go-to gesture of sympathy. Unless you were asking about cookies, in which case the ghost of my grandmother compels me to say that yes, everyone always needs cookies.
I’m trying to remember when my last hug was but i can’t. I’m not sure if that means i dont really get them or they just dont stick out in my head. I’m sure it has been at least several months though.
I am horrified and awed by that before remembering that different people have very different baselines needs for contact. I can’t go more than two weeks without some form of comfort-contact before my mental state completely destabilizes, no matter my starting point. If you are not a hug-liking person, I respect that -any offer of hugs from me is never an insistence that said hugs be accepted. What would be an appropriate way to express sympathy and sorrow for your having been in such a mental state as you originally mentioned, a desire for vengeance upon anyone who drove you to it, and thankfulness and relief that you no longer are?
I am not opposed to hugs i just do not get them typically. I have one person in my life who is a big hugger who i would get about 99 percent of mine from but she has been in chemo for several months at this point.
as for vengence well i am typically at this point to lazy to worry about causing people harm. it is so much effort to hold onto anger. especially since i am kind of stunted emotionally speaking.
i just know as of now in my life i am working to accomplish something and get a job as a result and after that finally feel i am at least not a full failure and attempt to start dating, which is something i am not well versed in. I have not had a s/o at all in my life up til this point.
Ohhhhh. That is a thing I have context for understanding, and I appreciate you taking the time to clarify, and further appreciate your having done so as often as you have been. My well-wishes to both you and your friend -I wish there was anything I could do beyond that
That makes sense. I struggle with anger on my own behalf (I should perhaps stop trying, but I have been trying to regain the range of emotions I lost when I was younger), but I have always reacted strongly when hearing of other people being put through any sort of hell -they are all bad, but the ones that resonate most all with me are those that either I or the people I loved went through, particularly alone, and that is very much one of them.
Those are good things! Very good things! I don’t see how the term “failure” would apply to you -I am not trying to shut you down; it’s just that to me, that’s a word that means someone like… honestly, I don’t even know if Blaine and Toedad merit that one. Someone who never tries to do better, be better, do more -not because they can’t (for instance, from depression), but because they feel it and everyone is beneath them. Someone so self-absorbed that they hurt others intentionally and careless and unintentionally and it’s all the same meaninglessness. Someone intentionally incapable of learning from their own mistakes, who is so honestly convinced that they are big-r-right that they never bother to even think to consider changing anything about themselves. To me, someone who lives their whole life with that kind of casual, reckless disregard for other people is a failure. You have not sounded like that sort of a person to me. I wish you good luck in the dating world. I am told it is a confusing and yet frequently enjoyable place.
I used to have anger like….. ok you know the saying of when someone says they have a short fuse? when i was in middle/high school it was more like i had an exceptionally long fuse connected to especially potent dynamite.
now I literally can’t remember the time i felt angry/mad. stress is a different matter although now if the stress gets to be to much i start to laugh without being able to stop. its really odd.
I forget who blaine is offhand right now, but i dont have the energy of emotions to be even close to toe dad even if i wanted to. big if there.
right now i am just dealing with getting comptia a+ certified then starting the tech support job. honestly the only reason they are helping me get this job is because there is a stipulation in the contract that says they need to hire people with certain difficulties and my attempts at a game over qualify me it seems. i’ve been in both in and out patient before.
it will be my first full time job and once i get 3 months rent saved up i will move into my first apartment. once that happens i hope to start trying to date, but as i have little experience dating in general its going to be hard to get started.
that plus the fact i am emotionally stunted will make it harder. if i am honest/upfront about my mental issues it will likely cause people to not stay with me. im honestly not sure if i am better as being numb to most emotions for the most part or when i was feeling like hurting myself.
at least i have gotten good at faking things a lot. started to notice when i should laugh and such. although im still trying to figure out how to force myself to cry so i dont seem like a monster/uncaring.
The CompTIA a+ thing is pretty cool. As for dating… I had to practically be dragged kicking and screaming into my first relationship, but it still happened and I have a much easier time of things in that regard now, so there’s always hope. ^_^
kicking and screaming seems like it might be a good way to start a relationship.
Honestly, I don’t think I ever would have ended up in any relationship, if she hadn’t been as pushy about that as she was and it was what I needed at the time, really.
If you don’t mind saying, what pronouns do you use?
Really, though, you seem like an awesome person to hang out with and I can’t imagine someone won’t find themselves immensely attracted to you one day.
That you think dating is going to be hard, but still want to give it a try sounds like a really healthy attitude for it. Don’t worry about not knowing what you’re doing though. I’m in my 30s and I still don’t think I know what I’m doing. As far as I can tell, the trick is just to keep at it, and eventually you find somebody who fits.
As far as I can tell, the trick is just to keep at it, and eventually you find somebody who fits.
Unless of course you don’t. There isn’t someone for everyone.
Quitters never win.
Winners never quit.
People who never win and never quit piss away their time, energy, and hope making their lives miserable and irritating or annoying other people.
If you make yourself miserable trying, putting aside all else that might improve your life, hope isn’t the problem any more than not finding someone is.
Sure, many people go their entire lives without finding a long-term romantic relationship. Many are perfectly happy. Many continue to look and don’t find what they were looking for and are still happy. Many who do find someone, or a long string of someones or whatever else they were looking for, but aren’t happy.
If someone wants a relationship, they should devote at least some of their energy towards that. How much, and which avenues you pursue are complicated matters that will require trial and error to fine tune.
Obviously, you gotta make adjustments if its not making you happy, take a break and focus that elsewhere if you’ve had a string of failures. But I’m not going to tell anyone that they shouldn’t give it another try later if they still want to.
You have to put energy into other things that make you happy — or at least closer to that — whether you find someone or not, so I’m not gonna say someone should just give up all hope forever just because it might not pan out.
…not sure if you need a hug? C’mere, you doofus-waffle.
SYMPATHY THROUGH HEAVY INTERNET CONTACT!
seconded, if you’re alright with it.
You really shouldnt beat yourself up over this, even if it grew from a dark place. Its more normal than it appears.
Its actually describes an intersection of bunch of common ( almost universal ) turn-ons and personal fantasies. There is sex research that shows sex with total strangers ( because they are strangers) is a common fantasy turn-on. Faces were seen as more sexually attractive to the opposite sex when they were told they were strangers, as opposed to a coworker or friend.
A tremendous amount of people have fantasies they submit themselves to strangers who desire them. its a trope in romance fiction because people buy it. BUt you are in control of the fantasy. You arent really violated. You choose to have it ( unless its an obsession ) . Its the ultimate safe space. It doesnt mean you **really** wanted it to happen. You are not a freak ( too much ) or a weirdo.
Anyone who has been assaulted knows there is huge difference between pretending or consenting to give up control, and having that violated.
As long you have decent personal boundaries, and know the difference between fantasies and reality, you are a super normal person and shouldnt feel bad over that.
I am sure there are many people that would find you desirable.
Yep. This type of guy doesn’t usually say that crap out loud, because he doesnt want his bros to know that’s how he gets girls. More naturally, it would be more like “….no ones ever wanted your fat ass.”
But it is a comic. And he’s the villain of a comic. This is probably as close as well get to the classic monologue, so nbd.
I’ve absolutely seen people saying this sort of thing, sincerely.
I refuse to associate with these people.
I first heard that I was “too ugly to rape” in…. huh. I was still in middle school the first time I got that one. Bit of a variant, but from my perspective, it’s close enough to the same vein, and from some of the comments I heard made about other girls by the same people…. That didn’t read as comic-book villain to me.
RIGHT? I missed it the first run through, then I noticed it, and almost tried strangling him through he screen.
He stops disimulating when angered.
‘dissembling’
Actual people say similar things, though usually by anonymously hatemailing notable people online. Though, unfortunately, I have also heard the occasional anecdote of shit like that being said in real life.
But I hope never to overhear such things. I’d hate to find out whether or not a jury would convict someone for pulling a Sal on such a douchetruck.
I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard men say shit like that in casual conversation, especially with each other. A lot of immature guy conversation revolves around degrading women in some way.
“Yeah I f****d that person”
“She’s so ugly”
“”Females” (not “women”) are like _”
“Have I mentioned how heterosexual I am today?”
etc. It’s toxic masculinity.
Yeah, it’s pretty grotesque what some guys will just say openly in public when there aren’t any women around. In college in the dorms I would hear guys talking shit even about their own girlfriends. Like, minutes after she’d left.
Ugh, yeah. Thankfully my roommates weren’t like that and there were a handful of other decent guys around the dorms I was in, but a lot of them would just say some really horrible things.
Man, every single time somebody says “That’s just mustache-twirling supervillainy, nobody would ever say/do/think that in real life”, there are a zillion people who have actually seen or heard it happen in real life.
Real life is a pretty messed up place sometimes, huh. D:
Kind of shows he has a line of other victims under his belt that he justifies his drugging to rape them as a ‘compliment’.
Clearly he wouldn’t be sticking his penis in things if he didn’t think they were hot enough for it.
Yes. This is a mentality that many college boys have in regards to using drugs or alcohol to ply a victim into either compliance, or submission. Getting their attention is just soooooo wonderful! It wasn’t rape! It was a gift! From God! God being the pet name of his floppy appendage, of course.
If Sal was wearing brass knuckles she could be the ruler of the brass kingdom
If she starts screaming about skulls for the skull throne we should probably be concerned.
Why? That sounds awesome.
Because when people invoke the Chaos Gods, it tends to go badly for everyone involved.
Khorne, the Brass Lord of Battles, is perhaps the most benevolent in that he just wants skulls, bloodshed, slaughter, wrath, and hatred, not the involved suffering the other three tend to prefer
I feel like if Sal was wearing brass knuckles it would have softened the blow.
Does brass dilute the damage of pure hatred? If so I think that would do it
Nah, brass has got to give at least a +10% bonus to Hatred damage.
And as for the actual physical blow they don’t change the amount of force – just how concentrated its application is.
Dang, dude. Is sal like her weird sidekick now?
Called it!
Sal is nobody’s sidekick. They’re teaming up, and probably only for the moment.
More a “Only I am allowed to defeat you!” moment.
“The only one who can defeat me is me!”
(points if you get the reference)
Sorry.
Yes! Team-up!
And with THAT I can go the bed happy! G’Night! GO SAL! >O</
Sal has entered the ring!!!
This is reminding me of Marvel vs. Capcom! Amazi-Girl is definitely Jin Saotome; but who would Sal be? Strider Hiryu?
I imagined Jim Ross narrating that moment.
I don’t know who Jim Ross is, and my mind went to Bob Ross… “Let’s have some friendly little trees, and shards of jawbone”
I give his most famous line
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypot3CYECwE
You Made me laugh, so hard.
FUCK YEAH, SAL!
Those guys don’t stand a chance now.
So, this should be the first punch Sal managed to throw onScreen, without Marcie stopping her first.
I seriously hope that broke his fucking jaw
Preferably not his mind, though, that’s broken enough
A fracture or a break to his cheekbone actually, judging from the point of contact, and actually, the more serious damage I would be worried about, from experience, is to his eye and his sinus. I’d be much more concerned about Sal’s knuckles, were she not wearing reinforced motorcycle gloves. The bones in the hand are much more fragile when compared to the skull.
That said, this particular bro is going to need to go to the emergency room, either way. Fractures or breaks close to the orbital socket that could effect the ear (which this one will) have to be looked at. He’s going to be in massive amounts of pain.
MASSIVE. For many months. His sinus cavity and ear might never recover.
Jaws can be fixed. Ears and sinuses? Not so easily.
Hadn’t though of that. I sure hope Sal’s hand is okay
They look pretty nice, so I’d guess they’re the good Kevlar ones with the padding. They’re designed to keep riders’ hands safe in case they lay their bikes down and their hands make impact with/skid across asphalt at 60 mph.
She’ll have some hella bruising if she keeps going for their faces, but as long as she uses good form, she won’t have to suffer through a boxer’s break or dislocation in her knuckles. She’s smart enough to start going for the soft bits quick though.
Huh. I’d thought she’d hit his jawline instead.
We’re seeing the punch pretty late in the follow through.
I’m thinking that red mark on his cheek was put their by Sal’s fist. The converging lines in the air nearby would seem to indicate where her fist was when Ryan’s face got in its way.
Looks like the Zygomatic bone to me.
If he doesn’t get expelled, his face will be gone before he graduates.
Sidekicks and superhero font!
Why is only the sidekick in a costume, tho ?
Well, I hope someone appreciates my carpentry skills.
Cause I totally nailed this one.
(Just like your mom for a nickel).
In lieu of something insightful and potent, I shall simply reiterate a previous comment of mine:
STAB HIM IN THE DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICK.
That dick is way too long to represent Ryan’s. For his you’ll need a smaller font size.
Small caps, like a certain hooded figure.
Perhaps, but it makes me wonder about the possibility of dangling him in a shark tank.
Yup, was expecti8ng that to happen. This’ll do interesting things to Amazi-Girl’s brain later on.
amazi-girl honey im sorry i dont think were gonna work out.
MARRY ME SAL
CALLED IT
LET’S KICK SOME BRO ASS
ah, so whoever remembered a 4th bro was right.
Does Ryan really count as a bro though?
He’s the D’Ouchetagnan to their Three Bro-sketeers.
Blackbird for the win.
O’ MAN! Blackbird wins the Internet
Might as well lock comment. None shall beat it
That candy bar sounds really gross.
Oh, wow!
Reltzik was kinda freaking out over it yesterday.
I just pictured Sal arriving somewhat like the Flash. Now to dream that her punch was like that one from Injustice, where she first built up speed by circumnavigating the globe several times before delivery.
There are just too many things wrong with Ryan’s comeback there. Seriously.
I can just see Marcie off-screen, signing to herself “JFC” and then jumping into the melee to lay into the smackdown.
Also, the “get her on the ground” thing was just so nauseating.
And Ryan, so brave that he only needs two other guys holding Amazigirl down so he can punch her.
Three other guys. You forgot Tyler!
Another guy holding her down makes him 50% braver. That’s science!
YES!!!! GET HIM!!!
…..
Wow.
That sure reminded me of some people in JR High and High School…
What a horrible jerk POS. Now I’m crying.
Gah.
Such a satisfying punch, though.
I’m glad you got through those years, and that you are hopefully away from those particular a-holes. May all your comicbook punches be hella cathartic.
Jesus fuck Ryan is creepy.
But AmaziGirl and Sal are DAZZLING HEROES, so it balances out.
This officially kills a fanfic I was planning on doing. Thanks Willis.
… If you were planning a fanfic trying to show Ryan as a decent person with a bad habit or a budding romance with Sal, its death is probably for the best. Consider this moment mosquito netting that prevents the spread of internet malaria.
UGH UGH UGH I am physically disgusted with what Ryan said in the penultimate panel
please Sal, break his jaw, break all his bones
I have never in my life so badly (or so specifically) wanted someone to need to have their jaw wired shut before
screw wire. Let’s get some big old drills and screws involved!
I don’t think that’d be medically sound, but its probably worth a shot!
Eh, with a few metal plates, it can be done. Otherwise it’d need long screws and careful angles, which might be tricky with him squirming, and sedation, while perhaps poetically just, might interfere with the sensation.
On the other hand, it might dull the superficial pain just enough for the deeper rending to better register and have more of a psychological impact.
How about an iron mask, that way we don’t even need to see his face?
Iron Man would sue.
Excellent! With Stark’s army of lawyers, Ryan is sure to be left destitute!
Doesn’t he need to start talking in the third person for that?
Oooooooo, a classic!
Yes, a Dumas reference. I love it!
That phrase makes me believe that Joyce was not the first girl that he drugged.
His behavior when he drugged Joyce in the first place was pretty indicative of that, though I had to go back and reread it in order to really see it.
He seemed to have it down to a routine of sorts. Either he had experience at the ploy, or someone coached him on it.
I’m not certain which is worse, but I’m leaning toward the latter.
He seemed to have it down to an art.
1) Invite obvious innocent Christian girl to play games and impress with Bible quotes.
2) Don’t actually ask anyone else to play and then pretend no one wanted to.
3) Play with her alone and slip her a drug when she isn’t looking.
4) It doesn’t go further than that because someone smacks you with a baseball bat just in time every time to forbid you from starting a crime spree. This is not a lie, this is completely factual.
Sal speed-lines!
Woo Sal! Man, Ryan is unapologetically an awful person. Entitled and without empathy.
probably was raised as a spoiled and maybe an only child. while not always i have noticed only children seem to be more full of themselves and such than kids with siblings.
Now THAT is a superhero punch.
I’m imagining a comic book cover – Marvel Team-up: Amazi-Girl and Sal!
Wait until tomorrow. 😉
Don’t do that to those of us that can’t yet buy Patreon, man.
Is drugging girls like an icebreaker for Ryan? It’s incredibly threatening that that’s the first place he went to. He didn’t say date….or kiss, or bang, or FUCK…he said “drug” first! That is sooo messed up! Like that’s some serious mental disorder shit!
Nah, that’s rude to people with mental disorders.
As someone with alphabet soup brains, I disagree. Mental and neurological disorders are no excuse for him. Even if he has a condition that stunts his capacity for empathy (which I’m not totally ruling out,) simple deduction as a manipulator would suggest NOT giving people a good reason to hurt you, or being so open about it.
No, he simply has no sense of his own entitlement and a total lack of respect for other people. He no consensually hurts others for his own pleasure. Full stop.
What I’m trying to say is that if you ignore for a moment Ryan’s history as a potential rapist, that one line or just that one word “drug” implies a fundamental misunderstanding. Like he thinks drugging is an acceptable go to. Not a quick solution to the problem of getting laid but a necessary step in it. See a cute girl, say hello, DRUG her! That’s incredibly dangerous thinking! And I mean it’s probably just a throw away line I’m reading too much into cause Ryan’s a bad guy and would say something like that (BWAHAHA and such) but still it’s really troubling in and of itself.
I’m not disagreeing with you there. He’s a predator, with no regard for the human rights of the women he targets. What I was reacting to was the implication that it was a result of mental disorder. I have both neurological and mental health issues that I struggle with everyday. I’m also quite used to the general ableist assumption that mental health issues, often falsely conflated with neurological disorders as well, are what make someone dangerous.
Is he a horrible person? Yes. Does that mean he necessarily has mental illnesses? No. On the whole, it is the people with visible mental and neurological illnesses who are at greater danger from those perceived as neurotypical. That is my concern and umbridge with the OP.
Fair enough, good sir or madam. I formally apologize for my lack of awareness.
Apology formally accepted, with a general preference for male pronouns noted as an aside.
As emperor of the internet, I now command you to formally hug each other and then have some muffins together!
This thread gives me further hope for people and discussing. I will make cookies of it, and change my username URL to pictures of them once I do, if I remember.
I’ll start baking.
I’ve brought the wacky baking hijinks.
DL: For a disloyal subject, you sure seem loyal to my edict right now.
Falling Star: When this is over, everyone who wants to will have floury handprints on their butts. And that will be just one of the many hijinks this baking session will produce.
Yeah. Ryan’s behavior can be fully explained by toxic masculinity with a side of entitlement, and maybe some shitty parenting, creating an awful attitude towards women.
The repeated failure of the people around him never calling him out on this has contributed to his ideas that what he does is okay. He totally realizes he can get in trouble for it, but he doesn’t see it as any worse than smoking pot or underage drinking.
Looks like it…. It probably comes from how he was raised, a strict bible upbringing can easily lead a young man-child to think of women as little more then chattel, meant to satisfy his desires.
Remember he drugged Joyce, then tried to force her into the washroom and called her a tease when she did not go in, A girl wearing a sweater with no cleavage and making exactly 0 sexual advances is not being a tease. He also claimed she was going to reap what she sowed and was going to pay her back in full for DEFENDING herself right before Sarah clubbed him with the bat.
He does not see women as people, which was probably learned from his father, and has shown 0 understanding that the scar is his own dam fault and at least a little bit of karmic justice.
The fodder are probably just as bad as he is, since they Amazi-Girl talking to him, and he made aggressive moves not her so they came over and are starting a fight with her because Ryan said to…
Off-topic, but I love your avatar.
I have every English printing with that pic other then Summer Magic.
I think it’s simpler than that. He’s pissed off about being outed, so he’s hurling it back in her face. That’s not any sort of fancy mental disorder speaking. That’s just old-fashioned hate.
The reality is that many rapists in general, especially on college campuses, are repeat offenders. His dialogue there is a little unbelievable in how he literally says he drugs women, but there is definitely a culture of (both men and women) getting completely fucked up on alcohol and then hooking up with someone. I have known, seen, witnessed people deliberately get drunk so they can then be more open to hooking up with someone. The problematic aspects of that is another discussion.
There’s a great book on drinking culture called “Getting Wasted”. One of the number one reasons why college students drink is because they feel that being drunk opens them up to social situations, one of those situations being anonymous (or not) sex.
One of the issues with that some people are (1) rapists and/or (2) believe that getting (usually a woman) drunk and then having sex with her is a legitimate way of hooking up with someone. See the infamous study where the men said they haven’t raped a woman before, but when confronted with hypothetical scenarios that depicted rape without saying the word, many of them affirmed they performed such actions multiple times.
Women often get “drunk” so they can blame the alcohol because society still views women who enjoy sex as “sluts”. Unfortunately this also leads to guys like this who think they are really helping these women since they think deep down they must crave sex but don’t want to be a “slut”.
Actually, he doesn’t literally say he drugs anyone. He implies it, but with the right (or rather, wrong) authority figure for him to explain himself to he could probably spin it as just a comeback to AG’s accusations even if she got someone to corroborate what he said.
Dear Sal,
I fucking love you.
Never change.
<3
This is what I ranted about the other day.
Sal is so fucking selfless in her defense of others.
That is a serious moral compass.
Yeah, it’s gonna take a miracle for this not to blow back on her.
Fuck all those non-Sal assholes in the background, who saw this going down and did nothing. I don’t care if they don’t know what Sal and AG know, if you see and hear something like this going down and don’t immediately have alarm bells going off in your head, you kinda suck as a person.
The Willis giveth and the Willis taketh away, but right now, we’re seeing the ‘giveth’ and reveling greatly in it before the ‘taketh’ cometh.
(English is not my preferred language to grammar. How badly did those conjugations get mangled?)
I got it, but being a native english speaker, I barely can grasp the language anyways.
The one thing that consistently gets me about English (as someone who teaches/tutors some other, use-impaired languages) is how many native English speakers seem to have trouble with the concept of regular verbs.
Regular verbs are boring.
“Verbing weirds language.”
-Calvin
I’m pretty sure you’re… perfect.
2 words of Hope for you:
Marcie and Rollerderby
Never a bad time for this:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/03-the-butterflies-fly-away/erase/
That one just always makes me warm and fuzzy inside.
It’s “revelling” with 2 ells. Otherwise you’re doing better than most of us.
I think it’s actually either. One of the american vs british things and all that.
Yeah, what I’M scared witless off is that this might be the moment the crowd shifts allegiances. White lady beats someone up, she’s heroic. Black lady gets into the fray… The crowd MIGHT support them both, I could be wrong, they could start squealing and tweeting about superhero team ups and sidekicks (which will revolt AG and Sal BOTH), but… Black ladies who fight back are more likely to be seen as aggressive and dangerous. What if Sal gets arrested? She hit a white guy at a republican rally! WILLIS IS MEAN AND I’M SCARED
chaotic good instead of lawful good.
lawful good might challenge an evil leader to a duel
chaotic good would sneak into their house as they sleep to subdue them.
Eh, I don’t really see that as an issue of alignment so much as skillset. There are plenty of Lawful sorts who’re inclined to a surgical approach to problem-solving.
Tat’s not the way I play lawful good but whatever.
Kinda feel bad for Leslie falling for a girl whose base is this shitpile
Actually I think it’s just her assistant and the voluntary indentured servants who are shitpiles.
I’m confident that Robin herself will no doubt prove to be far less horrible and far more redeemable than her real-world counterpart.
If only because Willis would have to be some kind of masochist to write her to be that similar to Trump.
She doesn’t give a shit about her family, only her image to her voters. You gotta have fucked up political stances to get a white male rapist to wanna vote for a hispanic woman.
Not especially. He could just be there because volunteering for a female candidate seemed like a great way to meet new marks. Or he could just dislike her opponent more. The fact that shitty people want to vote for her more than her opponent doesn’t mean she is. It’s obviously not a great sign, but it’s hardly damning either, especially when we’ve only seen like 5 panels of Robin herself so far.
I’m sure the whole thing will be messy and complicated, especially at first, but not actually gross
why must you tempt fate in this manner
“An’ allll down here live all the peeps who think yer a hellbound slut. An’ those peeps are what keep me in office.”
Robin is definitely appealing to people with fucked up political stances.
That would be one reason it would be messy and complicated. Roz is convinced her sister has a good has a good heart, though, and she knows Robin far better than we do so far
Leslie’s terrible taste in women is her heroic flaw.
Heroes with hangups.
I wonder if anyone in the audience heard him say that last sentence…
Yeah.. that’s what I wondered too. I hope someone did.
At the very least the three “Bros” right there with him did… and if they don’t react to that it’s pretty damning of them.
It’s whispered. The bros should have heard it at least. Probably not anyone else.
I think I speak for all of us when I say: Sal…. KICK HIS ASS!!!
GRIT THOSE TEETH
(Flying eyebrows allllllll over the place)
(mad scramble for vests)
I think I just disturbed the entire house with my “YES!!!”
Sal has her “It’s Walky” speed lines and cape hair. She’s in battle mode! It’s on!!
Yea. Sal gonna save the day! AGAIN!
Of course the onlookers aren’t going to be on her side
I dunno, maybe we’re in for a pleasant surprise. After all, one of the onlookers in the last strip was commenting on the 3-against-1 odds Amazigirl was facing. Maybe they’ll view this as evening the odds. But maybe that’s a Pollyanna interpretation.
And when Tyler got involved it made it four on one. If I were there, Sal and A-G would quickly find me to be the third musketeer.
Good girl Sal! Amber, I hope you’re recording this so you got that last sentence on record.
See? See? It’s bros bros BROS, just like I said last page!
do not drag the Bro Trio from QC into this
They are total cinnamon buns
Too good for the QC world, too pure
So they migrated to the DoA world
and became evil henchmen?!
Ryan: the kind of guy who will punch someone on the ground in front of a large group
PUNCH HIM IN THE TRACHEA! D8<
Go for the jugular! The jugular!
The hell with that …. kick him in the ‘nads.
RUPTURE HIS ABDOMINAL AORTA!!!
Go for the eyes Boo!
The sad thing is, given the crowd, I have a feeling Sal is going to be the one who ends up in trouble at the end of this.
Amaze-girl gave Sall the no pester protection from the crowd, so they will think She is a deputized sidekick.
Maybe, but Amazigirl is wearing a mask and can escape. Sal is easily identifiable.
Called Tyler ambushing Amazi-girl.
….. I think a buncha other people did too.
…..
WE’RE ALL SPECIAL FLUTTERBYS!
And I will admit to being surprised.
These guys have confirmed that they are of equal intelligence to a velociraptor.
[Turns to await Dina’s lecture on dinosaur intelligence.]
Yes, you did. ‘Cause I was wondering about Tyler too. Claim your Moxana points.
“Guess it’s gonna be one of those bad decision days.”
Well, Sal is most certainly talking about pretty much everyone here. About AG’s plan. About Gashface and his toxic dudebros…
…And last but not least, about herself. She knows how this will end for her: Badly. She’s never attacked a precious white boy before without getting in trouble, and she certainly does not expect to this time. Heck, she probably expects to go to jail for this one. Ryan tried to rape Joyce, and she’s the one who’s ending up in jail. Go fucking figure, right?
And yet she does it anyway!
She just punched Ryan because… Well, it’s beyond merely being convinced she’s doing the right thing. I think it’s more that there simply is no bone in the world that will allow her to not do so. The memory of Leland, AG’s words a couple of minutes ago, it’s all taking control of her body and turning her into pure vengeance.
It’s a bad decision. It’s the right decision. It’s a huge mess.
This is Sal.
PREACH
That is my abolute favorite part of this comic and, while she’s probably also talking about everyone else, I think she is mostly referring to herself.
“This is that thing I specifically avoid doing, despite wanting to, because I know from experience that it’s an awful idea, but here we go anyway because I’ve reached a point where I can’t not do this.”
Spot on.
This really is what makes Sal a complete badass.
I completely agree that it probably didn’t even register as a decision for her. When AG went down, staying out of it just stopped being an option for her.
It’s absolutely the right and the wrong decision.
My love for Sal grows.
It’s fantastic story telling by DYW.
PUNCHING OF AGE!!!
awesome
I’d buy it.
Thing is, he probably *would* try to drug Amber. Kind of guy that totally lusts for ‘undesirebles’ then pretend to have some sort of standard. Disgusting.
I doubt he’d even see her as undesirable if he weren’t already inclined to hate her for giving him trouble, plus her association with Joyce. Pretty sure he’s just reaching for something hurtful to say, and given his mindset, he came out with something fucked up.
Remember, rape is about power, not sexual interest. Ryan loves the feeling of control and dominance it gives him. Under the circumstances, if he weren’t surrounded by a crowd of people, he’d probably really enjoy sexually dominating and degrading the woman who humiliated him a few minutes ago. He probably wouldn’t even need drugs, if he had his bros with him. Oh, look, he does.
(ERG, sorry if that came out triggery, I know that’s an issue here.)
Ya, Amber is well within the range a horny college guy would try to score with.
They might say they are settling, as she does not have a supermodel body, but most guys that age do not care and are only really seeing the size of her chest…
So now Sal has a hand in rearranging Ryan’s face good.
I do have the feeling both Sal and Amber will have to flee soon.
GO SAL!
Ya, I really hope Sal doesn’t end up arrested for that. That’s how they get a lot of former felons/people who have been arrested and charged before.
In a lot of places, if you get into trouble again they send you away for a long time, even if you’ve done some lesser crime. Say, a murderer got acquitted but then gets arrested for robbery or something like that .That’s how they got OJ Simpson – he tried to burglarize a store, they put him away for like 33 years.
That being said, I hope Amber/AG puts her moral money where her mouth is and defends Sal once the whole beat-up-the-person-nobody-there-knows-is-a-rapist thing blows over. Because vigliantism on the part of someone like Sal could quickly land her in jail.
What people love Amazigirl for, is the same thing people like gang members for example end up in prison for. A group a kids might beat up someone who they know hurt one of their people, but they end up in jail for it. It’s an interesting dichotomy there. When people who look like Sal do that, it’s deemed absolutely unacceptable. When Amazigirl does it, it’s totally awesome and justified.
This is what I’m afraid of, too.
“Send the black girl to jail, she started hitting the white dudes!”
But they were going to beat up Amazi-Girl…
“Doesn’t matter, LOOK AT HER, SHE’S A CRIMINAL!”
And so on. 🙁
not really. more like best decision
It’s still risky, if not completely bad. I mean, this rally isn’t exactly full of nice people.
Superhero team-up?
Superhero team-up.
SUPERHERO TEAM-UP!
I’m gonna try and be optimistic of the crowd and assume they realized Sal and Amazi Girl are currently fighting on the same side. And maybe stupidly assume the fight from before was a ruse to set up Ryan.
See, I wondered where Tyler was for a moment, but just assumed he was the least douchey of the bros.
As did I, even after looking at the comic where they first showed up, and noticing all three were there wearing Desantos shirts.
That is some very uncomfortable imagery we’ve got going on in panel 4.
I didn’t forget Tyler, but I kind of hoped that if he showed up, Amazi-Girl would have enough combat awareness to counter any sneak attacks.
Oh, well.
I did think of this scenario as a possibility, but I wasn’t sure that this was where the plot was going.
Ryan’s physical and psychological resemblance to Leland probably figured in Sal’s decision.
Ten bucks says he gets away again in the ensuing melee.
CALLED IT.
Well if Sal is going down she’s going down in style. Make it painful.
I really want to express my feelings about this strip but… wow. I really don’t know how to put into words the profound sadness Ryan’s words make me feel.
My gloom overshadows this, but I am glad that Sal is helping. Like, of COURSE she’s doing something (not that I saw it coming) but I’m thankful because I’m hoping it will help Amber to heal some of her related trauma.
Well, if it helps feel less sad, I think you have like the awesomest name ever!
That name IS pretty darn awesome!
The awesomest awesome?
Ha ha ha, thank you all. I’m flattered
Forget Tyler. (Everyone does.) It’s Beef I’m worried about. He’s been lurking in the background for several strips, he’s goddamned enormous, and he may have a grudge against Amazi-Girl.
Fingers crossed he learned his lesson back during their first encounter, and will fight for good now.
Or at least have an MP4 for the authorities to view.
Beef didn’t actually fight Amazi-Girl either of the previous times their paths have crossed. The first time he ran off after she smacked around his buddies, and the second time he was busy chatting (grunting?) up Roz during the fight.
This is the fight I came to see: Sal and Amazi-Girl righteously wrecking some “bros”.
I want to start a petition that the title of the book this is in be made “YOU MISCOUNTED THE BROS, MAN”.
-Lipke
My signature, for your petition.
-Falling Star
There.
Seriously? You’ve got a choice between “YOU MISCOUNTED THE BROS, MAN” and “BAD DECISION DAYS”, and you went with the miscounting one?
On the other hand, “BAD DECISION DAYS” wouldn’t really narrow down the story line, would it? You might as well call it “EVERY DoA DAY EVER” if you were going with that.
Other potential titles if you’re looking at what’s available so far:
“Mr. Overwhelming Charisma”
“Your Voice in My Nightmares”
“Goddamn Vigilante Shit”
“Still Feel Pretty Good about It”
“Everyone Always Forgets Tyler”
I mean, we’ve already got some options here, and the book is young yet.
It is going to be…INCREDIBLY fucking satisfying when we see Ryan’s total and well-deserved destruction.
Marcie, meanwhile, signing: [This action you are undertaking is not in accord with the policies for this event. I have to ask you to please refrain from punching that man. Oh no, please stop….]
She is using small hand movements.
[Sal get’s pointed at someone and learns that he assaulted Joyce]
[Sal punch said someone is the faaaaace]
Yeah, I’m not entirely surprised at this turn of events. Sarah is not the only one who is protective of their cute little sis.
Oh no he didn’t.
I hope Sal & AG restore his symmetry.
I just really really want Sal to get away okay and without consequences for this.
YES SAL GO DO WHAT WE’VE WANTED TO DO TO HIM for a long long time!!
Goddammit, Taylor
Awwww, yeah, Superhero team up is go!
Maybe it’s the eternal optimist in me. I have this hope… That one of the bros are going to say “Hey! What did you say?!”. And they’re going to turn on Ryan for not being a “bro” after all. (Or maybe just for admitting drugging someone out loud in public…) Probably doesn’t fit the strip “bro” archetype, but it wouldn’t be the first time someone in this strip has broken out of their stereotype.
This idea did not occur to me, and the theory is…. I fear that I am too pessimistic to find it particularly likely, but I want to, and it makes me happy to imagine such reactions, both in-comic and out. Thank you.
I get the idea that they are all ‘brothers’, as in members of the same fraternity or some such organization, and they’re taking the idea of “all for one, and one for all” just a little too literally.
Possible later dialogue:
AG: I didn’t need your help!
Sal: Who says I was helping? I just really wanted to punch a rapist in the face.
Tyler should have been named Xander. (Or Zandar if you want to be obvious.)
I knew it yesterday, Sal just could not stay back out of it. She knows she’s probably going to pay for it, maybe even jail. But does it anyway.
Love Sal, have since day one.
Damage that asshole Sal, put a hurtin’ on him.
I hope this deal opens a way for Sal and AG to talk to each other.
That line from Ryan. That line.
Okay, from everybody else’s vantage point, she took his picture, talked, and he started getting violent. That should be enough to keep the law off her ass. Posting his picture may have been of dubious legality, but his reaction is not dubious it’s just plain illegal. That should be enough to make Sal’s reaction obviously justified as defense.
But… that line, Ryan. There is no law, there is only the deserved pain for that line.
Nah. It’s a public place. She has every right to take a photo. No dubious legality involved.
Oh, and no risk of defamation, either. Indiana law requires malice. Plus she has several witnesses making the accusation.
Even if it WAS possibly defamation (which I’ve gone on at length about why it isn’t in a previous comments section), defamation is a tort, not a crime.
Sal is best girl.
DoA superhero super villain team up?
DoA superhero super villain team up
Anyone notice the facial similarity between the bully who tripped Marcy and Scarface? I think Sal has had it in for this guy for a long time.
Only every other day since Leland appeared. They’re different people (as stated, repeatedly, by Willis himself). They just look vaguely similar.
Look at them side-by side, and they look as similar to each other as they do to Ethan.
omg! Ethan must secretly be Leland. He changed his name. THINK OF THE TWIST!!!
I think I’ve seen it every day. I also think I typically comment on said comment.
Every day since we started that flashback.
Glad to know I’m being predicable.
That’s when I got my glorious title!
As FC said, look at them side by side: Leland — Ryan
The hair and the square chin are similar (and since the flashback was in blue-tone we can’t really compare hair color), but there’s a lot of difference in the nose. Leland has a rod-like, stick-out nose, like Jughead from the old Archie comics, while Ryan’s nose is fuller and more of what we used to call a ‘Roman’ nose. Yes, I know people’s appearances may change as they grow up, but that seems to be a bit much.
No.
I’ve been hiding from DoA updates for a few days now -there… some things were hitting a bit too close to home to really be able to handle incremental updates, and… this feels stupid to ask, but is there a way to get a large/isolated version of the last panel? Just… just as a reminder that sometimes they get stopped, and sometimes they don’t get away with it, and sometimes they get punched in the face, and sometimes they get found, and sometimes people fight for and keep fighting for the people who got targeted? I’m going to be retreating again for a few days after this, I think, mostly out of worry that we’re about to see Sal and Amber (and maybe Marcie, if it gets really bad) being put through some severe harassment, possibly even violence, when the crowd sides with the bros (this is lack of faith in humanity, not lack of faith in Willis), but… I know this doesn’t work in reality. I know I’m never going to get a chance to do this to any of the people who came after me, and I’d discourage the people who care from trying if they thought about it. I just…. I want to pretend that I can. That I could at the times. That there is a clear, easy, simple answer in their language that works, and that this is a problem that can, at the very least, be knocked out for a few seconds. That there are people who care enough to help, because of the person who got hurt, and just because they see an action as wrong.
It wouldn’t be the first time Willis has done that. If he doesn’t see it here, maybe Tweet at him.
That’s definitely not a stupid thing to want.
There really aren’t many things that can be as reassuring as the thought of horrible people like that getting what they deserve, or the thought of good people willing to stand up to them. There’s no means of bringing those thoughts about that could be considered silly, because you absolutely deserve to feel like there people who would fight for you, even without knowing you.
I live in a world (phrasing here used to mean that this is simply my immediate frame of reference when interacting with a shared reality) where people don’t intervene unless it’s to help the person doing the hurting, no matter how clear it is that they have the upper hand. And… and the _idea_ that there are people who care so much about other people -or just about the abstractions of justice and rightness and protectiveness that they are willing to put themselves in harm’s way just for a chance to take down hurt and wrongness and people who cause those -or even just to put those things in the spotlight and make other people think… I know it’s a bad thing to do, particularly given the absence of any sense of universal morality, but… when I see that happen for one of those few things I see a clear “right/wrong” on, even when it’s fictional; when I see comments and reactions like tonight’s have been… it gives me hope. The non-soul-crushing kind of hope, even, and that one’s rare. And, well… better a fictional vent/outlet than a human.
There are other worlds. But this is the one we must live in. I hope things are better for you.
The Willis has tumbled it:
http://dumbingofage.tumblr.com/post/150317069047/i-am-sure-i-am-not-the-first-but-in-case-i-am
That was a low blow, Ryan. It will cost you your jaw.
Of course, when you’re a maggot that crawls on the ground you only can give low blows
Ew, don’t remind me of maggots. I had to throw away a mango in the fridge that got infested. And they were jumping bean-type mangoes.
Er, I mean jumping bean-type maggots.
Heh at least guys Want to have sex with her, the only way that asshat can get any is by drugging and raping girls.
SO MUCH FIRE!!!!!
Well, now we know his friends are not innocent bystanders, they know he roofies girls to rape them.
I hope amazi-girls phone is recording audio.
I mean there’s still a chance they have a “What the fuck, dude!” reaction… but no I don’t think it’s all that likely.
The “on the ground” things seems a little … too well rehearsed.
I figure they’ve done this before with other women.
That panel is absolutely fucking horrifying. Even the best, non-rapey scenario is that they’re just really good at ganging up together on a single person in a fight.
Agree with the horror.
> Even the best, non-rapey scenario is that they’re just really good at ganging up together on a single person in a fight.
And more horror on the way …
They weren’t that good in yesterday’s panel when AG was on her feet and they failed to coordinate their attacks. I suspect AG would have beaten the four of them if she was still standing but …
Tyler pounces, AG is vulnerable and they seem to know what to do with practised ease, with no direction from Ryan.
The implication of that statement is horrific.
Yeah, they definitely aren’t any better then he is.
Well, if ya notice, Ryan whispered that. At least, that’s what I assume the smaller font and squiggly direction-indicator-thing mean in Willis comics.
But Willoughby does have a point, they did get her in that position rather quickly.
……does that mean Tyler basically whispered *Everyone always forgets Tyler.* practically into Amazi-Girl’s ear as he grabbed her from behind… because that is slightly horrifying.
and probably lends further support to Willoughby Chase’s idea above.
I’m disappointed that Amber had to get rescued by Sal again. And that whenever Amber and Sal have a bit of confrontation, Amber gets the worst of it. It makes it look like Sal totally outclasses her.
beef in the back of panel three though
Okay, I had to think about this but I now know where this is going. When the press report this (because this is a Congress election campaign hustings, it will be reported), the reporters are going to laud Sal as “the mysterious new costumed avenger on the block”. Sal doesn’t want to be a costumed hero but no-one else is really going to think about what she may or may not want.
It gets worse when Robin specifically cites her and Amazi-Girl as a sterling example of private citizens standing up for themselves. In other words, she becomes a Libertarian icon. Naturally, Marcie and Malaya find Sal’s increasing rage at this chain of events hilariously funny.
That aside they might call Sal “Amazi-Girl’s Sidekick” which will REALLY drive the rage through the roof… for both Sal and Amber XD
YES!
KAPOW!
Also, that third panel, I heard the sound of the “!”.
Metal Gear Amazi-Girl. 😀
This moment of awesomeness from Sal reminded me of something Willis posted on Tumblr after this strip: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/wrong-2/
“Often when the Big Bad things happen to people in my strips, I don’t like strips to end with the feeling that the person is completely alone. That’s why it was important for me that Ruth appear as quickly as she did. That same strip without Ruth showing support would result in a 24-hour moment of suspense that I’d rather avoid.
(very similar to how when Joyce was attacked at the party, strip one had her with the physical upper-hand, and strip two had Sarah at her side)”
I don’t tumbl (is that the verb?) regularly and missed that post. But seeing it has an immediate calming effect on me -it helps a lot of old hurts when I see something like that (the not-aloneness, but the awareness of the importance of visible support/companionship too), and I hadn’t realized there was… I dunno if there’s a guarantee there, but the finding that important, and finding it important enough to make a point of including it and commenting on doing it…. It means a lot. It’s touches like that… I don’t find them humanizing, exactly, but I find them inspiring, and soothing, and aspirational, and to me, that’s preferable. It’s like a little show of “here’s a version of our world. It’s not perfect either, not by a long shot -look at the shit that just happened. But dammit, this world’s trying, and our world can too!”
Yesterday, at least one person (Ninja Jesus) called Sal saving the day.
Oh look, it’s a demon. Everybody wave at the demon, it may look like a normal human but instead of a heart its insides are all black goo
Panel five: nausea.
Panel six: glee.
There is a part of me that wants a framed copy of Sal punching Ryan to put up on my wall and stare at whenever I’m having a bad day. Sal’s bad decision days, now that she’s hit college at least, are the best bad decision days.
Yeah Ryan, because that’s what it’s all about. God, people like you make me sick.
Snap the neck and take a selfie with the corpse, IT’S THE ONLY WAY!
If Dina came out of nowhere riding a giant raptor to join the fight, the epicness levels would have been broken
We’d be in Dr. McNinja zone.
I’d say a Zhenyuanlong Suni would be more likely.
Willis said no death but if Ryan could be mauled by a raptor and survive barely, I would be happy.
I feel Amazi-Girl will still be like “how dare you save me”…
I dunno, I think she’s already stopped seeing Sal as the villain, even if she can’t let go of the hate just yet.
I think it’ll be more “Hey! I wanted to do that!”
“MY acceptable target”
“I was doing fine.”
Tyler sounds a little sad in panel 3. Not like I feel bad for him or anything, he just sounds hurt. Poor bastard, being left out of the [comment edited for vulgar crime reference].
And I do see what some people have been commenting on, using drug as a verb, in place of what I’ve typically seen used, that being what comes after the drugging part. I can see how it’s what he’s been taught to do, as opposed to something he felt he had to do.
Damn it, I forgot about Tyler. Even though those three guys are always together, I guess I just assumed he was busy giving out signs or something.
It was probably a bad decision for Sal to even go to the Desanto rally, considering her awful supporters.
Chances are someone already called the cops long before this altercation started because they saw a “suspicious looking early twenties black female scouting the crowd to try and rob or do other gang related things to” hanging out by an “illegal immigrant security guard that’s too lazy to do their job”.
Go, Sal!
It’s very easy to forget the third bro. Mainly on account of their interchangeability – it’s like one of them just used Double-Team.
To be honest, I’m kind of surprised Tyler would be able to subdue Amazi-girl that easily. I took martial arts (Jiu Jitsu to be exact) for several years, and one of the things that we took was how to escape when grabbed from behind. (Several ways… foot stomp, punch to the groin, backwards head butt). I figure amber would probably be much more experienced (and proficient) at that sort of thing than I was.
But then, it wouldn’t help the plot.
Amber has no formal training as far as I recollect. It’d be more than understandable for her not to have learned things like that, especially since she usually has the element of surprise rather than the other way around.
I thought her father made her take self-defence classes.
He wanted to make her sign up for them. I don’t remember if she actually did or not.
It might not have been explicitly confirmed, but I assumed a large part of the reason for that reference was to justify her skills – in addition to showing how damaging Blaine was.
Congratulating you on your handle. Segnosaurians are the second cooolest dinosaur family, right after the ankylosaurians!
Not only was she surprised and effectively tackled backwards as you can see her feet already in the air in the panel where Tyler grabs her, but Tyler was immediately followed by the other two Bros grabbing her, as well. Otherwise, yeah I’d agree. There are all sorts of ways that you learn to deal with basically exactly that situation.
“tackled” is probably not quite the right word.
Yeah, she might have been able to handle it if the other two weren’t right there.
Most self defense classes would have covered escaping from grabs, but the recommend technique for escaping three people grabbing you is probably ”don’t let them grab you”
On the one hand, that was soooooo satisfying (and I would buy the hell out of that book, BTW). On the other, I am feeling really nervous for Sal right now.
First point, on Beef: He was the only one of the gang of three that DIDN’T get beat up by AG way back when. We’ll see if he holds a grudge, I guess.
Second point: I wonder how the mob will react now that “hero” is teaming up with the “thug” against the four “nice campaign staffers.” If Willis keeps up the Trump parallels, AG is probably going to be denounced as an “agent of the librul med, uh, superheroes. Don’t superheroes help people for free? Those commie bastards! Get her, good ‘Muricans, so we can make ‘Murica great again!”
On the other hand, there IS apparently gratuitous violence going on, which also tends to be a draw for those people…
No doubt, and between having her dehumanizing of Sal reflected back at her and the crowd leaping in support of these upstanding Christian men, it will probably start cracking open the mythology that Amber’s built up around herself and Sal.
I’m also pretty convinced the events of this night end up pushing the cops to start cracking down on Amazi-Girl.
“it will probably start cracking open the mythology that Amber’s built up around herself and Sal.”
I doubt it, Amber is exactly rational on that…
“I’m also pretty convinced the events of this night end up pushing the cops to start cracking down on Amazi-Girl.”
The car chase should have already done that..
Amber’s also already backed down from fighting Sal because she was horrified at how the crowd was dehumanizing her (you know, like Amber did).
As for the car chase, it did, but now we have more incentive with Amazi-Girl and Sal beating on a helpless, upstanding Christian Good Ol’ Boy.
Ryan already was getting bad press for resisting Amazi-Girl and (thanks to the scar) ‘looking’ like a bad guy. People will be less focussed on Sal (especially as Amazi-Girl derailed the lynch train) and be far more focussed on the “Two Sexy Dames With Super-Powers” in action. That’s what the ten-million view YouTUBE video will be called, by the way. 😀
In reality, though, it’s going to be a tough scrap and I can see this all ending with Amber and Sal in Sal’s room treating each-other’s bruises and cuts with Marcie and Billie’s help (and Billie will freak at seeing Sal and AG in the same room). Sal and Amazi-Girl will insist that they are not friends, just allies-of-convenience against assholes. However, no-one will believe that.
I’m starting to wonder if the spoiler frames we’ve been seeing recently are showing Billie desperately trying to convince Dorothy not to make Sal’s situation worse by making up a superhero moniker for her whilst an innocent and confused Joyce looks on.
Too bad Sal didn’t think to go get a costume for herself.
I wonder how many times is Sal going to have save Amazi-girl before AG starts to realize that the person’s she built up in her head and Sal aren’t really the same person?
Also, why not just post Ryan’s photo and see if someone who follows her can ID him or dox him? He had the MO down too well to have just roofied one unsuspecting person at her first house party…
Oh, and where the fuck are the security guards?
Boy I hope someone’s recording this. Even if they can’t pick up Ryan saying he thinks girls want to be drugged, the image of him raising his hand to a woman who’s pinned to the ground could have the potential to be one of those pictures.
And then we’ll see how many party invitations he gets.
Beat me to it, Amake.
Since this is taking place in the present day (it’s always present day), it would be shocking if there isn’t at least one, or more likely several, smartphones recording video right now.
I have been wondering what Marcie (a.k.a. the one level-headed person at this assembly) is doing right now.
I’m using a throwaway account for reasons that will be obvious in a moment.
I’d like to call attention to Mister Mendo, who might actually be the (probably unintentional) model for Scarface in this arc (and the original establishing arc).
Mendo, aka David Novelli, harrassed and intimidated a member of the Agony Booth reviewing team (a lady named “Jet”) to the point where she abandoned all most (if not all) of her online presence. The situation was the same — implied romance, rejection, and then vehement attacks.
Novelli, being a member of the cult of Scientology at that point, attacked her without pity or remorse. He posted her name, address, and a litany of how she had “done him wrong”. This was pointed out to Albert (the owner of the Agony Booth); the posts were removed.
I’d post links to Novelli’s attacks, but the Agony Booth forums were taken offline quite awhile back.
Just so you know … this particular story arc has significant pertinence to someone posting here.
It would be really cool if Beef made his non-cameo appearance by doing something to either chokeslam Ryan and his bros for having teamed up one a single woman, or having recognized him from the one party or another party where another one was rumored/reported to have been assaulted.
The guy that hosted the first party where Joyce was attacked did mention he had seen “that little shit” around before and he’d keep a look out in the future, and he looked like the type that might be involved in some kind of high intensity sports team. If Beef is involved in a sport, like wrestling, it’s possible he heard from that guy or just through the wire that some douchebag with a huge face scar and a bad bleaching job on his hair has been attacking women from the campus.
Certainly don’t hope he’s just a muscle head that’ll turn the tide back in Ryan’s favor by helping to overpower and outnumber Sal and Amazigirl.
Seeing as Beef likes to harass and assault crying freshmen, I don’t think that’s liable to happen.
He also killed Guns in IW! but that might count as a positive.
Just as a note, Beef was actually at the party where Joyce was attacked: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/jammies/
Oh this is definitely making the school & local newspapers.
Also wow this guy just checks all the entilted creep boxes with dialogue alone. *shudders*
Not to mention that he has his own henchmen aka Bros.
Well, Amazi-Girl needs a new Arch-Foe to replace Sal and Ryan is checking most of the necessary boxes.
Not sure he’ll be up for that when they’re through with him.
Called it.
In conclusion: The Absolute Worst, right there.
I love that last panel. It would be a great title for the book.
AG needs to get better at watching her 6.
“Bad Decision Days” would be an EXCELLENT Dumbing of Age book title.
It is entirely possible that the guys with him know as well.
“You miscounted the bros”
“AND YOU MISCOUNTED THE HOES”*PUNCH*
“I mean, hoes before bros”
DYNAMIC ENTRY!
So considerate from Williams not to put a cliffhanger into this! Keep the action flowing!
I was wondering how long it would be before Sal entered the fray.
I honestly expected it long before this.
That is an extremely satisfying punch, though I’m now more worried about Sal than ever. Hope she gets out of this okay – and that Marcie doesn’t have any repercussions on her job for hanging around with Sal.
Man, why can’t this comic just let me enjoy punches without worrying about consequences? Why does it have to be like real life like that?
Pow! Right in the kisser.
Don’t you mean: Right in the FAAAAACCCEEE!
sorry, couldn’t resist.
(not really sorry)
FUCK YES!!!!!!!!!!!
Didn’t Walky describe her as “basically Batman”?
Will AG and Sal make a properly buffered Salution?
Well, she DID basically just take the law into her own hands.
I was hoping this would happen. I WAS DREAMING THIS WOULD HAPPEN!!!
Great team-up! Sal and Amazi-Girl (sorry but Sal gets top-billing!)
I’m gonna guess that a certain Representative is going to come in and be VERY pissed.
A pertinent NY Times article about how actual, real-world vigilante justice plays out. It’s not pretty.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/world/asia/the-philippines-rodrigo-duterte-vigilante-violence.html
Good thing then that what Sal is doing is protecting someone who was being attacked.
The police would no doubt encourage civilians to call 911 and let them handle a violent situation like this rather than jumping in and potentially getting hurt themselves, but what Sal is doing is completely legal.
Also, I think that we don’t need to worry about AG and Sal beating up a rapist slippery-sloping into government sponsored murder.
Though if we fixed the legal system to actually bring rapists to justice just to make what AG & Sal are doing unnecessary, I’d be all for it.
No, but as we’ve clearly seen we do need to worry about AG beating up crooks slippery-sloping into stalking Sal.
I’m not entirely sure where Willis is going with this. I’m not happy with the surface gloss. I’m fine with superheroes, even vigilante style ones, as long as they stay within the tropes of the superhero genre. I’m fine with deconstructing them – exploring why vigilante justice really is problematic and the likely issues people who dress up in costume and “fight crime” would have.
And we’ve done that here – we’ve seen how screwed up Amber is and what drove her to this and how bad her judgment can be and how she’s been less restrained and more and more using it as an outlet for her anger and we’ve seen the effects this has had on Sal.
Now we’ve snapped back around to cheering her on as she beats up the bad guy, as if we were back in the days before the deconstruction – before we’d seen just how screwed up this all was. And that’s what makes me uncomfortable with all this.
I’ll shed no tears for Ryan or his bros. This is fiction, they’re villains, they deserve whatever they get – and we know, from our outside perspective, that Ryan at least is guilty.
I do suspect that Willis has something up his sleeve. That we’re not actually back to “Cheer for the superhero” world. That somehow the two threads he’s playing with here on superheroes/vigilantes are going to come together, but I don’t see how he’s going to pull it off yet.
You seem to be looking at this as very black and white extremes. She punches bad guys and saves kittens from trees, so she’s good guy superhero. We see her damages revealed and how she lets her personal grudge override, well, pretty much everything, so she’s a dangerous vigilante spiralling out of control. Then she also punches bad guys like she was the whole time, so she’s a good guy superhero again. But the one doesn’t cancel out the other. That’s kinda the whole point. She is simultaneously doing good (sometimes) and deeply flawed. These are -layers-. Does she do more harm than good as Amazi-Girl, to the world and/or herself? This is a question without a clean answer. This is a question to explore. Reality is more nuanced than either silver age comic books or fully crapsack world ‘deconstructions’. There is a clash between her public image and her inner turmoil BECAUSE there is an aspect of what she does that is viscerally satisfying. Assholes that wouldn’t otherwise face justice get punched in the face. That feels good. But there are very good reasons why that sort of street justice is illegal. And you can simultaneously know the latter in your head while still feeling the former (which is how we manage to enjoy superhero comics in the first place, paired with a hefty dose of separating fantasy from reality). Amber herself has this conflict; she is just less far removed from it.
So what does this unfocused rambling actually mean for your comic-reading experience? The long and short of it is: don’t look at this as undoing our look into Amazi-Girl’s darker side, but adding to it. You’re meant to read this with all the information you have to this point, just as the next time we see Amazi-Girl screw up and be terrible, you’re meant to also still remember this. These are layers of complexity.
And remember that you don’t have to support Amazi-Girl to support punching Ryan in the fucking face.
I don’t see how that would be a concern. There’s obviously a risk of her relapsing into old habits, but she was chasing criminals as Amazi-Girl long before the stalking started. Even before she knew Sal lived on her floor.
If she flips out at Sal for saving her again, then we’ll know she’s not done with her blood feud yet. Though I think the real test will be the next time Amber bumps into her. Will she still have a panic attack? Will she need to to put the mask on? If she does, what will AG end up doing? That’s what will show how much progress she’s made.
In real life America, vigilante “justice” tends to be associated more with the KKK than Batman.
Exactly. And we’ve just seen AG switch between a scaled down version of the Klan and a scaled down version of Batman. I’ve kind of got whiplash and I’m not sure how that contrast gets resolved.
I appreciate the point, and I’m no fan of vigilante justice, but there’s a sizable gulf between AmaziGirl stepping up to an actual rapist and Rodrigo Duterte cheering on the death of thousands.
Gonna call it right now: Given how much it’s been mentioned so far, Amazi-Girl loses her phone.
She either didn’t just send out the info as soon as she had it (because, clearly, busy) leading to a lack of evidence, or the fact that whoever has it has her *other* contact information and so on becomes a plot element.
It probably won’t stop the picture from being uploaded, though.
Joyce is gonna have a weird morning wake up.
Oh right. Forgot about Joyce.
Dorothy is pretty smart. She might not know exactly what’s going on, but she’ll probably be worried enough to try and keep Joyce preoccupied and away from the internet until she knows more.
At the very least, she’ll make sure Joyce isn’t alone
She DID send at least one photo to Dorothy though, so that exists and can be used now, even if the clearer one is destroyed.
Her phone is probably secure in a utility pouch. Next to the one with the rope, or grappling hook, first-aid kit, or condoms. She is prepared for anything.
BTW, anybody else have flashbacks to the It’s Walky! Flash video “Coercion”?
How is it Tayler Tyler and Dawson have managed to yell out each others names but no one is yelling ryan’s. God damn help us out boys.
…and it turned into a BALLROOM BLITZ
AND THE MAN IN THE BACK SAID EVERYONE ATTACK
AND THE GIRL IN THE CORNER SAID BOY I WANNA WARN YOU IT’LL TURN INTO A BALLROOM BLITZ
OH MY GOD
IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
THE THING EVERYONE CALLED BUT I DOUBTED
I WAS WRONG
THE BEST POSSIBLE THING IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
BEST CHARACTER
Shit. Shit. Shit. Shiiiiiit. Sal is going to get in so much goddamn trouble. Sal punched a white dude at a conservative rally, she’s either going to get her ass kicked or sent to jail. Unless Amber steps in. Fuck.
I mean, holy shit, that was such a satisfying punch, but I really hope it was worth it for all the shit Sal is going to go through because of it.
Fuuuuuuuuck.
There are enough witnesses to what has been going on. A-G is on the floor; three guys are holding her down while a fourth one is getting ready to strike her. Sal is only doing what is right and proper, and anyone who says otherwise is someone who should forfeit their right to call themselves civilized.
“Officer, please, this woman helped me.”
“Well, I mean, we should probably arrest you too. You dress up at night and beat people up.”
“Amazi-Girl away!” *smoke bomb*
Yep. Unlike Amber she doesn’t have a mask to avoid trouble after this.
someone should tell this guy that girls don’t really LIKE being drugged…
That’s what Sal is explaining to him right now, actually.
He probably doesn’t know sign language though, so she might have to speak a bit louder so he understands
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
NOFOSNFONSDIHGKSLAIDvugakljvdfujlfdskk
Being right is a curse.
“you’re just jealous” – yeah, I was waiting to see when that one reared its ugly head.
Me a few days ago: “There’s no way I can love Sal more that I already do now.”
Me now: shit
Is this a Gavin Volure reference, or has 30 Rock merely colonized my brain?
Seriously though, the way they’re holding her down is just eeeyaargh.
I have a really hard time believing that the bros haven’t somehow been involved in Ryan’s shitheadery, or at the least know about it. Ryan’s line is in too close proximity of them not to hear it.
Would it be too much to ask for that last panel without the speech bubble?
‘Cause that is “Grade A” action right there!
Also “Grade A” smart-ass comic action quip. Inseparable!
Whenever Sal and Amber interact, it comes off looking like Sal totally outclasses Amber. 🙁
Sal is in a way better place mentally than Amber. She has her issues but the major ones that made her act out like Amber does, she was forced to deal with years ago. Amber is a hotbed of stuff that she hasn’t dealt with, and has repressed and pushed her further and further into self destructive (and just destructive in general) actions. It’s not a contest, it’s just that Sal has already pulled herself out of a similar pit that Amber is still trapped in.
It’s also entirely possible that Sal does outclass Amber. Most of the time we see Amber fight, it’s against people who either aren’t expecting a fight or don’t have skills. The only other person I can think of off the top of my head who has given Amber any real difficulty is her father, and from what I remember, his main fighting technique was trying to use his superior height and reach to put her down. It’s entirely possible that Amber is a big fish in a small pond.
Amber handled those chumps yesterday like a pro using a good deal of restraint. Even an expert can get caught by surprise, though.
On the other hand, Sal probably has more experience fighting people who actually want to seriously hurt her, not just get away from her with their ill-gotten bikes and purses.
Its entirely possible they’re actually about even in skill. Just not the same kind of skill. Amber might win in a sparring match, but Sal would probably win in a death match.
Amber handled Blaine with no problems in both clashes. In the first case she just pasted him and stalked off. In the second, she lost control and stomped him into the ground.
It’s still possible Sal does outclass Amazi-Girl in a fight, but we haven’t really seen any evidence of it. They haven’t really clashed. Sal pulls off an impossible catch on the bike, but compare that to everything impossible AG during the car chase.
Sal hasn’t really fought anyone other than Malaya and that got interrupted, but it wasn’t completely one-sided. Amazi-Girl handled Malaya pretty easily one on one – clotheslining her initial attack and then throwing her after taking a knee when the others let her go.
Actually rereading that fight, the parallels are interesting: 4 on one. Sal standing back directing it. Malaya saying “She’s fuckin’ tiny and there’s four of us.” Malaya grabbing her from behind then the three holding her while Sal lectures her.
Of course, Sal walks away rather than trying to hit her, but it’s still a nice reflection.
At some other point I’d agree with you, buuut I really don’t feel that way about the events here. Like if we’re talking the car chase, where Sal calls Amber a dumb jerk for risking her life even though Sal risked her own life and Joyce’s by leaping in front of a truck to catch Amber, then yeah.
But in this chapter we’ve seen Amber actively back down from fighting Sal with no real prompting on the latter’s part, but instead because she’s scared of what the crowd turned the both of them into. We got a strip where Amber tries to walk away while Sal barks at her to fight whereupon Amber gets the funny one-liner. Sal is so burned by past experiences that she doesn’t really care about catching Ryan (and I don’t really think of this as some slight, FTR) and Amber’s the one going after him; if he gets taken down tonight it’s because Amber wouldn’t let him go and Sal is following her lead.
The fact is that Amber is wrong to pursue vengeance against Sal, and she has to be shown to be wrong.
but man was that punch satisfying, fuck him in his stupid face. ~<3
The last panel makes me so happy. It was worth being fucking exhausted this morning when I got up for work.
Yes. Oh sweet God yes.
I don’t know if this represents the USA as a whole (I hope not), life on an American campus (I’ve no idea) or a republican convention but I know that where I come from (NZ) if a group of people saw 4 guys grab a girl, shove her to the ground and hold her down well another guy goes to punch her then those guys would be dealt to pretty damn quickly
Or maybe its not NZ but the circles I move in because panels 4 & 5 are making me quite angry and I know I’d be jumping in there because that’s simply not right
Not to defend them, but it might be a little different if the girl had dropped two of them before getting grabbed and might well seem to have started the fight.
I’m choosing to believe the crowd just hasn’t has much time to react, since AG was winning only moments ago, and things went south really fast.
Sal already knew what kind of person Ryan is, and was probably keeping an eye on the situation when she saw Tyler coming up behind AG. So its possible that Sal just got there first, and others in the crowd will follow
I want to say that in most parts of the US, most college campuses, and most conventions, at least some people in the crowd would do something, but beyond that, I just don’t know
I know that I’d jump in as soon as I saw four guys squaring off against one girl (hell my wife would be jumping in before me) so it seems incredible that no one else is
Mind you Mr Willis has probably seen this kind of thing happen before since the comic is largely autobiographical
So at first I was a bit confused at Ryan’s words here as opposed to before (“the [slur] who cut my face SENT her”) . It didn’t make sense, if AmaziGirl was supposedly jealous why would she be doing anything at the behest of the girl who was attacked.
Then I realized that Ryan thinks that women SHOULD want this, want his “attentions”. To be drugged by him. Because that’s supposedly a compliment in his mind. Women need to be GRATEFUL that he takes his sweet time to drug and rape them.
That Ryan thinks AmaziGirl is just mad at him because she didn’t get his precious attention.
and that’s…honestly the most terrifying thing about him.
There is no one in this world more terrifying than entitled straight white guys.
There’s no one in this world more terrifying than people.
This is leveled with horrifying frequency, whether implicitly or explicitly, at fat women who are victims of rape. “You should be grateful anybody even wants to fuck you.”
As Tuco said in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, “When you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t stand around trying to talk him to death.”
“You’re just jealous no one’s ever wanted to drug your fat ass.”
Drug. Not “fuck”. Drug.
He doesn’t even have to rationalize it. No disgusting bullshit like “it’s just to get her in the mood”. He can actually say to himself “Yep, that’s what I do. I drug women.” and think there’s nothing wrong with that.
And… I have no words.
GIVE EM ANOTHER SCAR!
Faster, pussycat, kill, kill!
I just got back from a 3 week internet-less vacation and I feel like coming back to this strip was really great timing 😀
Dammit, Tyler.
Well, let´s hope Amber?/AG? can rationalize the fact that Sal has stepped in to save her again. Let´s hope.
Security (where have they been?) will break up the fight. Sal (collared by Marcie) will vanish into the night. Amazi-Girl will speechify about the duties of Concerned Citizens everywhere. … DeSanto — will make the most of this heaven-sent opportunity.
…everyone always forgets Daisy…
I believe you may be right, with one little variant. I believe Sal will get arrested by the cops for attacking the creeps. Amber/AG will see how the cops treat her harsher based on her skin color and will begin to sympathize with her.
Daisy will try to get a statement from Leslie… Leslie… gives more than she expects.
Ooooooh!
POW!
I heart Sal.