Bad idea. See Arthur C. Clarke’s short story, ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’. I’d include a link, but I’m at work and most of the free downloads are blocked.
If I recall correctly, it’s been implied Carla is intersexed and lesbian or asexual but homoromantic in the DOA storyline (not sure… I think I need a chart for all of the orientations in DoA).
But as a result, her mere existence angers Mary due to all the gendered rules of her religion that Carla breaks by here mere existence, let alone actions.
Carla is a transwoman who’s orientation is unknown ATM, but likely aesexual/homoromantic or aromantic aesexual. In Shortpacked! her orientation was the former, but odd enough that aro/ace may be what it translates to here.
Side note, she’s not intersexed at all, and please try to avoid that error.
No it doesn’t – it’s perfectly possible to achieve checkmate without losing any pieces, or even with both sides losing pieces. It’s pretty difficult against an even remotely competent opponent, but Mary played right into Carla’s plans at every turn here.
That said, one could argue that Carla lost a Knight or Bishop when Mary caught her off guard with this cheap shot.
When I was in the Navy, one guy was bragging about how great a chess player he was. I played him once, and got him Fool’s Mate in 3 moves. Then I never played against him again. 🙂
Knew a guy in highschool like that… a few weeks of talking himself up finally led to a showdown in the library (I had a well-earned reputation to uphold). First, I beat in ten moves. Second, I took my queen of the board at the start and still won. Finally, I sat in another room and texted him my moves. Still won.
Personally, as a chess player, I would consider that cheap shot equivalent to having the board thrown at me, and Carla was simply clever enough to run with that and say, ‘Okay, let’s fucking play.’
Let that which haunts yet infuriates you most, my existence continue to do so. Allow the moment my grin burned it’s self into your memory torment your every waking moment, as my name echoes in your ear keeping you up at night, However, after your nothing more than dust upon the earth 100 years past your death, than and than do you have my permission to forget my name, but never my face. Now, what’s my Name?
Because it’s crystal clear — and any recitation of the facts of the matter will make it so — that Carla intended Mary to get that pie. What’s she going to do, sue Mary for non-payment and confess in court to planning an assault?
Moreover it’s a basic piece of contract law that it’s a meeting of minds. If that doesn’t happen — and for obvious reasons didn’t here — it’s invalid. You can’t retroactively bill someone for something they didn’t agree to in the first place. So even if Carla were to sue over non-payment, she’d lose.
And doing so at all would undercut the entire arc, which has been about Carla handling this shit on her own, without needing any authorities to do it for her.
Well, I mean, it’s her pie. She was holding onto it. Mary stole it out of her hands. Mary would owe her for a new pie seeing as how she stole and ruined the first one.
But like, this is all moot, because Carla has no intention of involving any form of authority, because she’s more than aware of how authorities of all stripes treat trans folks and especially trans folks who defend themselves in the most minor of ways.
Carla is not going to get Mary in trouble for jack shit. Because the point is more to make Mary aware that she can’t just treat Carla like a disposable pawn in her moral crusade against “The Gay”. Like some “misplaced freak” who doesn’t have a name and a right as much as Mary to be here.
To get personal revenge because the system has failed and will almost always fail those like Carla.
That’s not how theft works. Carla would have to outright lie to present this as theft, and a civil case is a non-starter for reasons I’ve already outlined.
As you say, though, it’s irrelevant because Carla won’t kick this to the authorities, for a whole pile of reasons (and not just fear of anti-trans reactions). The fact that Carla has her own room and no roommates, and is openly (if quietly) trans, suggest to me there’s at least some degree of systematic support for her being in IU.
But Carla’s very much >not< a person who defaults to complaining to someone, or getting them to do her dirty work for her. It's one of the strongest contrasts between her and Mary.
Trans people get single rooms in dorms in order to technically meet Title IX requirements while still maintaining a level of deniability if a bigot registers a complaint. A means of technically respecting her identity enough to not be breaking the law while allowing systemic denials of her rights.
A single room is a major red flag that the level of support she has within IU depends a hell of a lot more on her parents being who they are than it does show a genuine system support for Carla’s identity.
So if I walk up to you, grab up your phone without your consent and in doing so it falls to the floor and breaks, am I not liable for it? I would owe you nothing at all?
Possibly. I’m curious as to if there’s any depictions prior to this that might shed light? Ruth, for example, was about to go nuclear on Mary before she got shut down via blackmail.
I was under the impression that theft was the act of someone taking the property of another person without consent or agreement. Carla may have known that Mary was going to take the pie, maybe even wanted her to take it, but she never gave permission or consent. She wouldn’t have to lie in court. She would just have to tell them that Mary took it without consent or permission, which is true. Mary literally snatched it out of her hands without Carla giving any indication that Mary may do so.
If I put a lock on my phone that’ll self-destruct the phone’s contents, and someone steals my phone from my hand and breaks it, they’re responsible for ruining my phone. Saying that Carla was, in so many words, ‘Asking for it’ when Mary stole her pie doesn’t excuse the pie theft.
Theft, in civil law, is trespass to chattel. It’s a tort, which means the defendant is liable if her conduct was tortuous. Snatching someone’s property out of their hands is unquestionably tortuous, so Mary would be liable.
A good defense attorney might be able to mitigate the damages by arguing that Carla’s own conduct was tortuous for setting up a situation to exploit Mary’s paranoia. But that would require convincing the judge/jury that a reasonable person in Carla’s situation should have known that a person in Mary’s position would pie herself. Also, getting into the origins of Mary’s paranoia with regards to Carla opens a much bigger can of worms.
…not that this is ever going to make it to a small claims court, unless that pie was baked by some Michelin chef out of the most outrageously overpriced ingredients possible. But the law is strongly in Carla’s favor here.
I think you’re doing a lot of confusing of terminology.
Now, let’s set aside the improbability of any of this, ever, going to any actual court of law, be it civil or criminal. We’re assuming that hurdle has somehow been leaped, and the parties are now before the bar.
Mary could be charged with theft and destruction of personal property, as she both removed the pie from Carla’s possession without permission, and (in opening the box) caused the pie to be destroyed prematurely. As even on a gratuitous case, such a minor loss would at most constitute a misdemeanor, she might be ordered to make restitution and pay a fine per the laws of Indiana on the matter.
Meanwhile, Mary could sue Carla, claiming that the pie constituted a booby-trap and thus violated the law on those grounds. However, again, the lack of real damages means that a minimal judgement would be awarded–most of it being court-costs in small claims court.
@Cerberus, Wait, is that why trans people get single rooms? I went to a very LGBTQ+ positive college, where everyone would’ve liked a single. I don’t know whether trans people specifically got singles there. However, if I was in charge, trans people would absolutely have that option, in order to neatly sidestep the potential jackassery of roommates and/or roommates’ parents who might object to rooming with her. (Like, Carla doesn’t need that BS, the college doesn’t need that BS, let’s just offer her one of those coveted singles and avoid the potential for bigots to freak out.) If the housing department gives transfolks singles, I’d sooner assume that they’re primarily interested in avoiding a bigoted shitstorm. Am I hella naive?
There’s hints throughout the archives — as I discovered when I did a “wait what?” archive dive — but this is pretty damn explicit confirmation and it’s what kicked off this entire pie-to-the-face plan:
Mithras, it’s easy to miss because Carla has always been a character who happens to be trans rather than The Trans Character. Some genius has been done there…
It’s also a bit clearer if you’re familiar with Shortpacked!, as the robotic Ultra-Car (Carla’s Walkyverse counterpart) is believed to be male until they get a female humanoid chassis.
In D&D alignments: Carla is the CG who used to be LG until she figured out that where she lives, being aligned with the law just screws over the weakest.
Yup. I doubt she started as anti-authoritarian as she is now, but x years of dealing with transphobic Indiana and she’s well earned her disillusionment.
It’s not like Carla is going to argue she was assaulting Mary tho. She’s going to say she didn’t intend for Mary to have the pie – it’s rather part of the point of the bill. The easier argument to make would be that Mary stole the pie. And I’m not actually sure ‘carla intended for mary to have it’ would be easy to get away with in court (Or would fly in any case. But I’m pretty sure you’d know the latter better than me, so I’ll accept it)
I mean, it won’t happen, you’re right but you’re the one who took it there in the first place.
Carla assaulted no-one. A contract may require a meeting of the minds, but a contract is not the only way to incur liability. The pie was rendered unfit for its normal use by Mary’s unprovoked actions. She completely owes Carla for its replacement.
Any recitation of the facts? Carla was innocently standing in the hall overseeing the operation of an experimental and completely harmless piece of performance art while holding a container of pie when she was approached by Mary who without any permission grabbed the box from her by force and improperly activated the Expermental pie delivery mechanism thereby destroying the pie. Carla didn’t call Mary over, said nothing to Mary to indicate the taking of her pie was okay, and certainly gave no indication she wanted Mary to destroy her pie. Under this completely accurate statement of facts, how can you possibly conclude that Carla intended Mary to get the pie.
If Carla wishes to take Mary to court to recover her damages, the first step is to send a demand letter by registered mail billing her for the pie she destroyed.
Clif: The trouble there is that your “recitation of facts” contains several, you know, lies.
I suspect — but I’m not >completely< certain — that having a mechanism hit someone in the face for you would still qualify as "touching someone rude or disrespectfully" under Indiana's battery laws, precisely because of situations such as this. If not I'd be very surprised if there's not some other provision that criminalizes it, because it's too big of a loophole not to be closed.
(and either way it would be an assault under the laws I live under, so I'm going to keep right on referring to it as that).
And yet the enforcement of such a law would only occur with an intent to use state power to punish a minority group member. Jailing someone for pieing someone or for merely touching someone else “disrespectfully” usually only comes when the police want to jail you for something and this is as good an excuse as any.
Arguing it is the same as striking someone physically with the intention to cause harm (yes, not the legal definition, but the publicly understood definition of assault) would be a hard case for a lawyer (owing to the jury following the common understanding of the term) unless said prejudice was in play for the jury.
That all being said, yeah, this being Indiana, if Carla was less rich and less white, I could see her being in a jail cell for this bullshit or at least being written up.
Wouldn’t make it any more right or any more worthy of being considered as equivalent to actual assault.
… like I get you’re just doing a devil’s advocate legal argument thing here, but this gets really uncomfortable in light of how much actual violence and assault trans people face in real life and how if we so much as do the minimum to fight back, we frequently are jailed and charged with assault, even if it’s to save our own lives or a shadow of the violence we face (especially if we are trans women of color): http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/11196-no-justice-when-women-fight-back
I’m aware of the statistics, Cerberus, though I suppose you’d have no reason to know that.
I find the insistence on this not being “real” assault (like last comic, where you airquoted it) and/or only is only prosecuted out of prejudice/desire to arrest someone for other reasons bothersome, though. It absolutely is assault; the idea that a pie to the face is harmless slapstick is, in real life, is not an accurate one. People go to jail over it, and if you were sitting on a subway and somebody came by and swung a pie into your face you’d damn well think you’d been attacked and you’d be >right<.
Like if this wasn't a pie, but one of those cartoon boxing glove deals, is your reaction the same? What about a non-injury punch? They're all the same class of behaviour.
Point out one lie in that recitation of facts. Go on, we’ll wait.
Yes, pieing someone in the face is assault, but setting them up to pie themselves in the face after stealing from you is another kettle of fish.
Bull-fucking-shit are they the same class of behavior or carry the same weight in terms of damage to the victim.
I mean, legally, sure, the assault laws are purposefully vague, which is part of a much longer conversation about the racist/classist construction of laws and how they are enforced unequally to create a system where a certain class of people are held to one standard of laws where minor actions receive disproportionate punishment while major actions by a more privileged class receive diminished or no punishment (see black people thrown in jail for minor drug offenses while those who gun down unarmed black teenagers walk free or why Johnny Depp will never see the inside of a jail cell, but Cece McDonald spent 19 months in jail for not letting herself get killed).
But in reality. In our reality. Bull-fucking-shit. If someone was to push a pie in my face or tap on my shoulder it would in no uncertain terms not carry the same weight as someone punching me in the face or trying to cause permanent injury. Carries nowhere near the same damage either physically, medically, or in terms of PTSD. I’ve had food thrown at me for my identities. Food thrown with literal hate behind it.*
And I have been physically beaten for a perceived identity (a guy threw a plate at my head and then tackled me and started punching me in the face because he thought I was a gay male), and threatened with murder on at least two or three other occasions. I got out lucky, no lasting physical scars outside some temporary black eyes, but a lot of my close friends haven’t. They carry lifelong scars or chronic pain or major PTSD from having been jumped and queer-bashed.
I understand fully and completely that the law sees those two as equivalent. But fuck that. A pie in someone’s face is as non-violent as it gets and the fact that it gets slapped down as assault is why it’s been used in so many protests, because it tears at the underbelly of the law and how it is used to oppress and dominate the powerless to a disproportionate degree.
It is not actual assault. Legal assault? Sure, according to the law. But a physical beating? FUCK NO.
*A footnote to note that if I had gone to the police after the food throwing, they would have laughed at me. Fuck, after I was jumped and beaten for being perceived as a gay male, the cops who investigated spent the entire time trying to argue that it must have been my fault that it happened and then did nothing to the man who beat me (he was literally allowed to go to work the next day despite this occurring at a company dinner my friend invited me to. My friend was fired the next day for “causing a disturbance”, but was really about him being perceived as a gay male as well because who gets gay-bashed if they’re not gay, right?)
Seriously, shit like this is like Exhibit Number 8 billion of why our legal system is broken and abusive and prone to gross miscarriages of justice as a commonality rather than a rare exception.
I didn’t say anything about “a tap on the shoulder”. That doesn’t count as either “applying force” — the Canadian definition with which I am most familiar — or “touching someone rudely or disrespectfully”.
Maybe you're operating on some assumption that because I'm saying this is an assault I'm equating it to a violent beating? I'm not, and for that matter neither does the law. There's often multiple classes of offense (Indiana has this) and variation of sentencing within a class of offense (also this).
If someone hitting you is assault even if they don't hurt you — and I don't think anyone is arguing that it isn't? — why does it suddenly not become so if they have a pie in front of their fist? Because pies are funny? It's a stupid brainbug and it's why stuff like it doesn't get treated with the seriousness it deserves.
I don’t give a fuck about the technical definition of assault. Thinking people SHOULD go to jail for pushing the equivalent of shaving cream made out of sugar into someone’s face is the literal logic of bigots (as in it was the argument Anita Bryant tried to make when she was pied for actively trying to criminalize teaching while gay) and it is FUCKED.
Especially with all the bigots that Willis is smacking down trying to build an argument that Carla is actually an abusive man who beats women because pie = assault with intent to injure.
I do not have enough middle fingers for this bullshit.
Also, way to fucking gloss over how the law is applied unfairly in this regard. Cause, yeah, that happens all the fucking time. Hey, here’s everyone’s favorite street gang masquerading as a police force getting caught out trying to charge an innocent suspect they beat up with “destruction of property” and “assault on an officer” for the crime of supposedly bleeding on their uniforms: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/15/the-day-ferguson-cops-were-caught-in-a-bloody-lie.html
Once again, you appear to be thinking I’m saying that… but I’m not. Assault covers a range of things and is usually legally subdivided into multiple categories, with multiple sentencing outcomes, for precisely this reason.
Moreover, I don’t believe I’ve said, anywhere whatsoever, that there was an intent to injure here or in any of the analogies I drew. The eaten middle portion of my post above yours was going to point this out, but something got chewed up by the brackets.
But: these are still assaults. Again: if this was a boxing glove, would we be having this argument? If it was a single punch to the gut? Something doesn’t stop being a crime just because it’s not the most extreme example of its category.
Speaking with no authority whatsoever, a pie-launching arm would certainly be assault if Carla had actually, well, assaulted her with it directly, or offered her the box. But the only reason that Mary was in a position to be hit with the pie in the first place was because she first took the box Carla was holding out of Carla’s possession (which Carla did not offer to her in any way). I see no reason that Carla would or should be liable for that. Even if Mary tried to argue that the machine was an attempt to scare her into grabbing the box, Carla can truthfully claim that she told Mary that the box wouldn’t help her.
The pie-launching arm can be compared to a door with the words “keep out” on it and a bucket of water balanced on the top.
Dangerous? Yes.
Lawsuit material? Difficult. Especially when injury can’t be proven and the victim received prior warning against touching the box / door.
However, battery law is also sensitive to the use of things closely related to the victim, in Mary’s case the fact that the entire installation was parked right outside of her front door, and in the case of the water bucket prank would be considered battery if said bucket was placed on Mary’s door.
“Clif: The trouble there is that your “recitation of facts” contains several, you know, lies.”
The real trouble is that you forget that you are looking at this with the point of view of someone essentially standing outside their universe, aka the point of view tantamount to an omniscient god. How would you prove to a court from within their universe that this was a lie? because if you can’t do that then this would be an open and shut case of theft. Whether you agree with it or not.
foamy- Then allow me to simplify, the assault law as currently written is shit, deliberately used and exploited to justify the petty enforcement against the powerless while ignoring the violent assault (by a public, not legal definition of the term) of oppressed group members by the powerful.
And you are making an intentional bad faith argument surrounding said the technical limits of the bad law to argue that since this could technically be considered assault under the terms of the terrible law as exists, that that should be the case.
And you are building that bad faith case by deliberately conflating our broken legal definition of the law of assault with our common societal idea of what an assault law should cover and then retreating under the technical legal side when called out.
In short, you are arguing intentionally in bad faith like a shit lawyer over an impossible scenario because no one in their right mind thinks this is going to court and if it did, Carla would be fucked no matter what because our justice system fundamentally doesn’t work in any way for the benefit of trans people.
In case you missed it, lower down, I was asked to leave the discussion. I’ll note that I emphatically disagree with your characterization of what I’ve said and why and leave it there.
Not to counter your larger point, but in this particular case it might work for Carla. Only because her parents could back her up with expensive lawyers.
Even more than the legal system is geared against various minority groups, it’s rigged in favor of money and class.
Cerberus- I want to hug you. I genuinely want to hug you. I want to give you my rabbits (who are very cute) for extra hugs. I’ve been comparatively fairly lucky with my transition- even if the system set in place in my country screwed up a few times. It honestly made me want to hug you to read your personal accounts.
Just… Fuck transphobia. And homophobia. And pretty much all the “you’re different to me therefore less of a person” that goes on in the world.
Assault?
And as for “retroactively bill someone for something they didn’t agree to in the first place,” I think yanking something out of someone else’s hands – arguably theft or some form of assault – constitutes some form of agreement.
Yes, assault. Or, well, since Indiana doesn’t actually have an “assault” statute on the books, battery. Either way, the essential elements of pieing someone are precisely the same as punching them.
Carla didn’t pie Mary. Mary seized the box by force without permission, and then effectively pied herself with the mechanism.
If Carla had pied her by simply throwing it, that’d be assault. Which is probably part of why she did it, the other being that this was more humiliating.
It’s still an assault if you build a machine to do it for you. If you build a booby-trap and someone triggers it >you are still responsible for it<. If Indiana's battery law doesn't cover it something else will, because a situation where you can rig devices to attack people with no legal consequences is too big and too exploitable a thing to exist.
So if I were to build a booby trap in my front yard, it’d be my fault if someone ignored a ‘NO TRESPASSING’ sign and fell into, let’s say a covered pit? I don’t think so. The box wasn’t Mary’s to take, and it’s because she’s the sort of person who’d disregard that that it worked without a hitch.
I can’t reply farther up but it appears that the link in your post is “sadlyno.com” which looks like some great content (and amusingly the first post I saw on that site was one of Cerberus’s detailing that “trans people exist”)
I don’t think the box actually qualifies as a “booby trap” (which would be, in fact, illegal) under Indiana law, because the definition requires that it be intended to cause “death or bodily harm”, and I don’t think a pie in the face reaches the threshold of bodily harm (and certainly not death, unless Mary has a really severe pie allergy).
Reading the law you posted, it seems like the NO TRESPASSING sign should be adequate to cover liability. You are warning/ordering them to keep out of the unsafe area.
I would guess that the moment you put “DANGER” on the no trespassing sign you’d pretty definitely be covered- as long as you had a wall or fence.
But weighing in on the debate, theft is theft, yo. If someone stole my bag and hurt themselves because I had an unsheathed blade in there, that’s not on me. They stole my freaking bag.
I don’t know whether it says more about me, or about the rest of you, that I felt I had to google this.
Section 35-43-4-2 of the Indiana Code defines theft as follows:
“A person who knowingly or intentionally exerts unauthorized control over property of another person, with intent to deprive the other person of any part of its value or use, commits theft, a Class D felony.”
So whatever Carla may have intended or hoped, she didn’t actually authorize Mary to take the pie. HOWEVER, it’s also pretty clear that Mary didn’t intend to deprive Carla of its use — she just wanted to see what was in the box. Based on what she saw there, she might then have sought to deprive Carla of its use or value, but that’s just a hypothetical. So no, it’s not theft.
Also of interest is the definition of criminal mischief: “A person who… recklessly, knowingly, or intentionally damages or defaces property of another person without the other person’s consent”. That swipe was pretty reckless and that pie was pretty well damaged, but yeah, it’s hard to argue lack of consent. And because it was an unintended consequence on Mary’s part, it’s hard to argue “attempted criminal mischief” based on her lack of awareness of Carla’s consent.
All that said, what really matters is whether Mary THINKS she has to pay.
… and also what regs about student conduct the University has.
Where the heck are you getting the idea that Mary just wanted to see what was in it? Mary jumped to the conclusion that the box was in some way going to protect Carla from whatever the Rube-Goldberg machine was supposed to do, and thus took it away, to protect herself and deprive Carla of same protection.
Pettifoggery. The box was in the possession of someone not Mary, and marked as the property of someone else not Mary. There was no express or implied statement that Mary had any right to the box, which she seized on her own initiative.
Mary swiped the pie out of Carla’s hands. It did not have Mary’s name on it. That’s theft. Mary is liable for the pie, and I’m betting the Ruth can (with some prompting) quote some rules about theft of property. Hell, technically it was Robbery, as she took the pie by force. This could be a criminal charge.
Resident Advisor has no legal power to make anything a criminal charge. Yes, Ruth could talk about it, though Ruth could also have talked about Mary quite intentionally destroying Carla’s property – the skates – and didn’t.
And yes, circumstances have changed, but I don’t see that they’ve changed to this point.
Calling it a criminal case is an empty threat. Ruth has already levied empty threats against Mary, and Mary threw it back in Ruth’s face. And I don’t think Ruth is stupid enough to do that twice.
Who said that the prosecutor would get involved. That’s something for college administrators, which Carla just pointed out will likely be happy to side with Carla on if for no other reason than to get on the good side of rich parents (who may be IU donors).
Granted IU in this universe appears to be run by people entirely free of either ethics or competence, but there’s no legitimate way to make a theft charge stick, and Carla has zero reason to try or to follow up because it would defeat the entire point of this scheme.
GuruBuckaroo said “this could be a criminal charge.” That requires a prosecutor, and no sane one would be bothered with this for even a millisecond, so it can’t.
(a) A person who knowingly or intentionally exerts unauthorized control over property of another person commits criminal conversion, a Class A misdemeanor.
This doesn’t count as unauthorized — or at least you’d >really< have to stretch to turn "I fully intended this person to take this from me" into "I didn't consent to them taking it from me".
“I’m totally hoping she’ll take the bait and steal this from me” isn’t the same as “I’m giving her authorisation to take it.” Similarly to how Westboro Baptist et al – to bring up a recently-discussed example – are hoping they provoke violence against them with their protests so they can sue people does not make any violence against them magically not assault. It’s still assault, even if Westboro are hoping it happens.
But again, as I keep saying, no prosecutor would take this no matter what the details are, so there’s no criminal case. None.
Why would you reasonably conclude Carla intended Mary to take and destroy her pie? Did she call Mary over and say, “this is for you.” ? I agree that a criminal charge is probably a non-starter, but small claims court is there for a reason and if Mary simply ignores it, Carla could also request injunctive relief that would prevent further damage to Carla’s property by say, forbidding Mary to enter a building where Carla is residing. Mary might get such an injunction overturned, but it would cost her more than the pie and she might find the injunction inconvenient in the mean time.
Judge Judy is arbitration and requires the consent of both parties in order to occur. Why anyone smart would chose to use Judge Judy to solve their disputes I have no idea, but when I observe the participants I can see that they don’t.
Interestingly enough, she made a considerable effort to actively dissuade her from grabbing the box, so yeah, by the law in a just world, Mary wouldn’t have a prayer if she tried to make that argument stick. In our world? All that matters is Carla is trans… which is why Carla’s ideal scenarios all involve never involving any form of authority because she’s been betrayed by them all way too many times.
Well if you’re going to go with the bullshit argument that she encouraged Mary to grab it, it’s literally infinity times the amount of effort she put into actively encouraging her to grab it, since she didn’t actually do that.
Okay, all this legal devil’s advocate bullshit is making me legitimately angry in the Cerberus Smash sense, so I’m bailing on this shit. Read my note above about how broken the assault laws and their enforcement are if you care to. But beyond that, I’m out.
I don’t believe I at any point said Carla encouraged Mary to grab the box, so no, I’m not making that argument.
I’ve said Carla planned for Mary to grab the box, intended for Mary to grab the box, and wanted Mary to grab the box. Playing coy “I’m not touching you” games is not something that goes over well with police or judges.
Being trans is not something that goes well with police or judges, so if it actually went anywhere in that route, she’d be fucked no matter what she did or tried to argue. Hence why she won’t ever be going to the authorities even if Mary were to stab her in the kidneys.
The system is fucked. Blood soaked and bitter. And the law as it currently exists does not give a fuck how many of us bleed and die.
Apropos of nothing, I used to be on a (often hilarious, at first) political discussion email list that had a mascot character named Foamy, the Rabid Hyena.
So every time you post anything, I’m seeing old-school Foamy and giggling, regardless of content.
Nightsbridge: I am dead certain that “the law doesn’t care how many transpeople die is not universally true” is not something I am “objectively wrong” about. World’s a big place.
It is if you’re trans. Or bi. Or autistic. Or some variety of not-white in a white-dominant society.
Number of times I’ve had authority figures back me up when I was being obviously bullied in a bigoted manner (sexual harassment, gender expression harassment, sexual orientation harassment, ableism, etc): 2. Once when an authority figure took some kids to task for giggling over how my asthma made me sound like a squeaky toy (at 25), and once when a teacher rode the bus and saw sexual harassment I’d been complaining about for over a year when I was 8 (the harasser was 16). Oh, but the principal and my parents both thought that I was the one at fault and he got kicked off the bus for a year but I got suspended from school for allegedly enabling him somehow? By “not telling anyone” even though I’d been kicked off the bus before for “causing a disturbance” and kept in for recess for “lying” about “a nice boy” like him? And when I pointed that out, I was told I’d been “leading him on” by not hitting a kid twice my age and three times my weight who had a history of explosive violence that I’d seen on the school bus and who I was genuinely afraid of. So that’s really only like 1.5. Fun bonus times: I did hit a different kid who sexually harassed me two years later, and got suspended for violence, though he didn’t get suspended for sexual assault (which is what groping someone’s ass without their consent is).
Number of times I’ve had authority figures bend themselves into pretzels to victim blame me: I lost count before I hit middle school.
* The sexual harassment one above
* The time I was suspended from school because kids kept following me around hitting their wrists to their chests and making beaver faces shouting “r****d!” at me. I apparently should’ve figured out a way to “defuse” it, which made me worse than the kids yelling ableist slurs at me because of my disability.
* The time kids stole my book and tore it up, and I got punished because I used the word “asshole” at the kid who tore up my book. He didn’t get punished, nor did his friends, because apparently using recess to read instead of trying to socialize with kids who would punch me in the face if I said hi (yes, really) meant I deserved it. “Recess is for playing, anyway. Why were you reading?” and “Just try to act normal and fit in more, and the other kids will quit picking on you.”
* The time I was kept in for in school suspension after I got jumped at my locker, the locker slammed on my head, and kidney punched enough times I lost count while they called me dyke and queer. For “fighting,” even though I didn’t have a chance to throw a punch. My attackers? Got off with warnings. Also got told that I should not try to act so much like a guy, and people won’t “prank” me like a boy. (Is it fighting or a prank? It’s a prank for the attackers and fighting for me who got jumped at my locker, apparently).
* The time I was kept in the school’s isolation room for two weeks because I got tackled by two other kids on the playground and had my face smashed into ice repeatedly until the area around my eye looked like hamburger (I still have scars). The kids who did it got a single day of detention. Again, I should’ve “defused” it which apparently made my actions worse than the kids who slammed my face into the ground. (Also I got told that if I’d wear pretty things and not act so much like a boy, they wouldn’t pick on me so much)
* The time a guy tried to attack me for being a “dyke” with the intention of corrective rape (he mentioned that he’d “make me straight”). I was able to get away. Cops threatened me with assault charges (I scratched him in the face and kicked him in the groin) if I pressed charges, because I guess it’s only self-defense if you code cis and straight in your gender expression (the cops spent more time talking about my haircut and my clothes and how that could “provoke” someone than about the incident itself).
I could go on, very easily. But basically what it amounts to is this: If you have someone being a bigot to you, and authorities get involved, they will find a way to blame you for it, because blaming you for it is easier and goes along with their prejudices. It doesn’t matter if you’re an 8YO on a school bus or reading a book on the playground or minding your own business at your locker or just walking down the street. If you’re facing some form of bigotry, you have to be that perfect victim to have even a ghost of a prayer of someone taking it seriously, and even then you probably won’t (the number of autistic kids who get killed by their parents and have their murders written off as non-crimes is heartbreaking, as an example. Activist groups have days of mourning for a reason, and that reason is that if we don’t remember and demand action, nothing will happen).
ischemgeek: This is heartbreakingly true. In situations like this people with privilege (example: my dad) don’t understand why you “didn’t just say something” and you’re a walking testament. *Sending good vibes and hot tea*
We trans people know how unequally we are treated. We’ve measured it. We’ve studied it. And when we are allowed we’ve submitted our findings to general academia.
The amount of times I’ve been WWT’d (walking while trans a sister phenomenon, though albeit not nearly to the same level of harassment as walking while black) because a trans woman walking down the street must be a sex worker donchaknow even if she’s wearing so much clothes everything but her ankles are covered. The amount of times I’ve personally seen cops mistreat trans friends of mine and fundamentally refuse to investigate crimes against them. The amount of trans people who’ve learned to give up on authority figures ever getting their back. I mean, for fuck’s sake, the “trans panic” defense is still a go-to legal strategy in hate crime murder cases these days and it’s the go-to defense because it’s had a really good success record. Hell, it took until 2002 with the murder of Gwen Aruajo for a single jury to reject the trans panic case in the trial of a murder of a trans person.
These days, most police forces know that if they acknowledge the hate crime aspect of a trans murder, they’d have to investigate seriously, so most police departments have to be harangued by activist groups to acknowledge that a trans hate crime victim was even trans much less that their trans-biased murder had anything to do with their trans status. Quite a large number of individuals read off during Transgender Day of Remembrance never have their murderers caught or tried, because the cops never bothered to put forth the effort to do so.
And we know how many trans people have been thrown in jail for the most bare bones crimes possible and how disgustingly many trans people and especially trans people of color are found trapped in our prison system, often in the wrong jails and having been subjected to frequent abuse and assault at the hands of the officers supposedly charged with their protection.
The numbers are not pretty. And they reveal a system that fundamentally fails trans people and especially fails trans people of color.
Which is why most of us when we are beaten in the streets like dogs, when harassed or sexually assaulted or raped, when chased or stalked, view the cops as an option of last result, knowing that what we’ll find if we do the “right” thing is just more abuse and dehumanization and blame for how we’re murdered and attacked.
Also, so many *hugs* for ischemgeek for what you’ve gone through and how the system has let you down so frequently. And thank you so much for being willing to share that.
Foamy is technically correct. It isn’t universally true. The existence of a single counter example is enough to prove that.
Practically speaking though, it’s true far too often. Often enough to establish a pattern. Often enough to make turning to the legal system a horrible risk of more victimization.
thejeff- I mean yeah, not every single case involving a trans person involves unsympathetic police, legal system, or grave misjustice. Hell, I cheer the rare few times when justice is actually served for our community (the Gwen Araujo case in particular has a very special place in my heart for the trans panic defense no longer being a guaranteed defense strategy), but yeah, as you note, it doesn’t change the reality that the trans community is misserved by authorities enough that it would take a very brave trans person or trans supporting advocate to believe that a trans person will receive just and fair treatment by the criminal justice system.
I know, I’m the one arguing against this being a possible criminal case. While technically possible, it would never, ever happen, nor should it.
The person I was replying to brought up the lack of intent to destroy, and I was just noting that under Indiana law, that’s not a requirement. Because I am a pedant.
Honestly, I think Carla will definitely bill Mary for the pie. She just won’t bother trying to collect. Just her little way of saying ‘Hey, remember that time you fucked with me and it went hilariously badly for you? Good times.’ That’s what I’d do.
You’re talking about a girl who reasoned that jamming a ginger snap under a door was sufficient to fulfill her promise to Billie. She is TOTALLY billing Mary for the pie.
Huh, okay, criminal conversion looks like a better fit for this than the two I found. Hmm….
… yeah, okay. Even if someone argued that it doesn’t count because Carla intended for Mary to take the pie, it would still be ATTEMPTED criminal conversion, because Mary was operating under the belief that Carla did not consent to having her pie taken.
This is the same way that stealing a bait car that the cops fully intended for you to steal is attempted car theft and buying a packet of perfectly legal sugar from an undercover narcotics agent is still attempted drug possession.
Delivery surcharge. Maybe even shipping and handling, since it was packaged up and brought to her doorstep. “Handling” is vague enough to hide extra fees in, just look at infomercials.
The greatest revenge is a life well lived, unfettered and unbroken by the hatred and sabotage of others.
It’s why my sole act of revenge against the fuckhead who calls himself my father was proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could survive without ever contacting him again, never allowing myself to ever let him bully me into reparative therapy, without any safety net at all.
Yup, I don’t think my dad was prepared for me to stop fighting for my humanity with the family and just accept my disownment once and for all. But it meant that all the people he had power over he couldn’t use anymore and he no longer had any means of accessing me and my life.
Cerberus: well lived, unfettered, unbroken, and celebrated. ‘Cos what you post here is sheer, generous, deeply-appreciated magic.
I know I’m not the only one from the pentecostal world who thinks so, which delivers a to-me beautiful irony: the tribe this non-entity surely imagines is squarely behind him is one that he’ll find cheering you on if he ever goes looking.
I was halfway expecting that bouncing bowling ball to connect with one of Mary’s feet. But I guess Carla doesn’t believe physical pain is ridiculous. Financial pain, however…
Oh, totally. Mary genuinely believes everyone is as twisted and evil as she is, and doubtlessly assumed that Carla was going to come at her with every ounce of venomous retribution she deserved. Instead, she got completely outsmarted and humiliated with no damage whatsoever. Look at that face, she doesn’t even know how to process it. “…She let me LIVE?!”
This could be the first step on a long road to reform for Mary. She’ll never get over being a self-righteous asshole, but she might just learn to let people exist and refocus her reflexive intolerant hatred on more acceptable targets.
Yup. It’s the failure of her imagination brought on by the inflexibility of her hateful beliefs. She believes that everyone must act like her, taking everything personally and seeing themselves as epic avatars of good or evil (mostly evil). Just as petty, just as desperate to win at all costs, just as giddy to utterly destroy.
But Carla is not Mary. Their positions are not equivalent. Their actions are not equivalent. One is full of genuine violence and intentional attempts to emotionally wound and destroy hurt her. The other throws a pie in her face and shoots up some lights. Because Carla is not some “other side” for Mary to battle against. She’s Carla. And she’s human. And she’s done being the stand-in for some asshole’s “moral crusade”. Especially in the context in comic she is in of the last couple of months of endless bullshit intentionally hateful legislation.
Let me put this out in front, I don’t like Mary. I also don’t like a lot of the other characters either, Carla included. I mostly hang out and just read the sad adventures of Joyce.
But didn’t this whole thing start over a pair of roller blades?
Yeah, but it did kind of start because Carla’s a horrible neighbor. Not taking Mary’s side here, just saying Carla isn’t exactly a great person to be around.
So much this. Skates on carpet? Not really much in terms of noise.
Because it was never about noise. It was never about Carla technically breaking the rules. It wasn’t even about Carla being rude and refusing to respect Mary’s inherent “superiority”.
It was always about Carla being trans and that being an affront to Mary that needed to be torn down a peg.
And that has now been spelled out quite explicitly in the comic, so I think all the various Mary denialists can fuck right off now with this desperate bullshit and zombie mythology, cause it wasn’t any more convincing the first time around when everyone was pretending that Becky not using $20 to magically fix her life made her a user and an abuser to everyone around her.
Well, it is against the rules, and the comic did in fact portray it as annoying. Plus, Carla clearly set out to annoy Mary on purpose long before Mary started spouting transphobic crap at her (prior incidents notwithstanding).
Fact is, we like Carla, but we like her in the same way that we like the average sitcom character: she’s entertaining to watch and she seems fun and clever, but God we’d want to punch her in the face if we ever had to actually spend time with her in real life.
Eh, I’d describe some of the cast like that (mostly Ruth and Malaya), but as for as “love to observe through a one-way mirror” characters go, Carla’s pretty mellow. She’s an annoying butthole but that’s not the sum total of her character, and has been blatantly compassionate at times despite her repeated insistence that she’s an unflappable badass prankster who ain’t got time for your rules so put it in the suck-it bucket.
You’ve seen how often Mary checks her door, right? The *slightest* noise in the hallway sends her scampering to open it?
No. Carla was not being a horrible neighbor. If it had been quiet hours? Yeah. Then you can make the case Carla was being a jerk. In the middle of the day? There is no fucking WAY Carla’s skates, on carpet, could make more noise than, say, the couple one room over going “What do you want to do for lunch?” “I don’t know, what do YOU want to do for lunch?” back and forth for *an hour*, no could it have been louder than people outright *talking in the halls*.
No. Mary was looking for something to complain about Carla about-and I suspect Carla’s been around long enough to *realize* this fact, hence, ignoring Mary’s complaint. If she was, in fact, really bothered by the sound, she could have taken it to the RA. She instead decided to destroy property.
Mary is a curtain-twitcher. Billie quietly exiting Ruth’s room down the hall is enough to get her peering in the hallways hoping to get a scoop she can “use” to tear someone down.
Hell, this plan relied on that habit of Mary’s to even work in the first place. It couldn’t be more spelled out in comic if Willis inserted himself as a 4th wall breaking author insert to literally spell it out.
I’m honestly curious whether Mary came out because of the skating noise or not. My assumption she did because she really was just annoyed by the noise and wanted Carla to stop (which she didn’t because she’s Carla). The thing is, EVERYTHING AFTER THAT, is Mary being a hateful vindictive transphobe scumbag. It’s a distinction a lot of people are hung up on and which confuses me.
Mary came out because of the skating noise. Just like Mary comes out for every other bit of noise in the hallway. But remember, even if it was just “skating noise”, she knew, just like everyone else in the hall, who’s always on skates. It’s not like she heard skates and then found out it was Carla, she had to know (or at least assume) it was her from the start. So the transphobe bigotry kicks in even before she opens the door.
I don’t doubt that, it’s just I think Mary isn’t smart enough to have come up with a convoluted hate plan. She’s Chaotic rather than Lawful Evil. It was a spur of the moment act of evil which she kept escalating because, well, she’s an awful phone of every conceivable type.
Are you suggesting that wheels on carpet is so annoying that it counts as a good enough reason for Mary’s bigoted actions, her blackmailing of Ruth, and her bullying?
I hate loud and obnoxious neighbors. None of that makes a damn bit of difference when hate speech is involved. The big difference to me? Replace Mary with Billie and the whole skate story becomes a fun bit of slapstick humor which ends with the (presumably easily removable) glue. Mary? Blackmail, abuse, and hatespeech.
But yeah, point stands because even if Carla had actually been loud and Billie had poked her head out, Billie would never have escalated to trying to destroy her skates in the first place. And Carla would have been far more receptive to being told to knock it off.
Yeah, it was a moment of unfortunate realism which turned what seemed like funny slapstick into a nasty bit of vandalism. So, yeah, the glue business became a lot less funny (not that it was all that funny to begin with) when it damaged her property.
Throw in Billie or nearly anyone else the whole thing ends with “New skates? Awesome.” That’s assuming anyone else bothers opening the door.
Much like Carla’s “Parkour!” didn’t escalate into a war with anyone, despite being louder and more dangerous. (Though I’ll admit to some disappointment it didn’t escalate into a rooftop race between Carla and Amazi-Girl.) 🙂
Assuming you’re replying to me, then no, I am not suggesting that. Not at all. I am suggesting that people’s actions should be judged independently of the actions of those around them, or, simply put: other people’s bad behavior does not justify yours. Mary is absolutely a horrible person. The fact that Carla was annoying does not justify Mary’s horrible actions. Likewise, the fact that Mary was horrible to Carla does not retroactively mean that Carla has done nothing wrong.
Carla was making a very slight amount of noise in the middle of Friday morning. It’s a dorm, you deal with it. If it was quiet hours, sure, complain to the person and if that doesn’t work, go to the authorities. But I guarantee you, there will be 3 people playing music and a 4 in a Madden tournament at some point that day, all of which are louder than Carla. Mary has to learn that not everything is going to conform to her wishes, and adapt, or she’ll never last a semester.
Oh for the love of… Are there still people who try to insinuate that it’s all Carla’s fault because she was “too loud”? They’re fucking skates rolling on carpet. There’s no way those are any louder than whatever other noises you expect college students to make during the day. Mary doesn’t give… a… flying… fuck about the noise. All she cares about is finding any excuse in order to try and impose her will on others and “win”.
Welcome to the next few months of every appearance of Carla, brought to you by the type of fucks who try and argue Becky’s selfish when she’s literally sacrificed herself to save people’s lives.
I got accused of being transphobic for being on Mary’s side right up until the hate-speech which, well, is apparently an easy mistake to make when you’re siding with a known transphobic bigot against a trans person. Huh. Who would have thought. One should always be aware it’s never just the incident but all the circumstances around the incident.
It’s something that really bothers me here, because Carla was clearly at fault right up until that point. Well, until the glue thing, actually. That was taking it too far. Still, the fact that Carla is trans does not excuse her actions or mean she has no flaws, but apparently any criticism of her means you must be siding with Mary and be a transphobic bigot, because nobody here understands the concept of nuance.
I think said eviscerators were aware of Mary’s motivations at the time. To my knowledge they won’t argue that Carla can be/is a jerk, it was just a disproportionate reaction at the time.
But I’ll never argue the fact that dealing with people is just hard. Too many different views to ever make everyone happy.
Light noise pollution and annoying personality vs destruction of property and assaulting the very dignity and respect that all human beings deserve and purposefully attacking a person’s sense of identity.
It’s not a vs. thing. People’s actions are independent of other people’s actions. It is possible for both parties to be wrong in a conflict, and it is also possible for them to be different degrees of wrong. The fact that Mary is far worse than Carla does not mean Carla is not wrong. To invoke Godwin’s law, I could murder a dude and say it’s okay because at least I’m not Hitler, or I could just not murder a dude because it’s wrong, regardless of whether or not other people have done worse.
In person, if I say something is mean, I always get told “No, what would have been mean is [something 10 times worse].” All it does is deflect the issue. Someone doing something awful doesn’t become less awful when compared to Hitler or whatever.
They’re both antagonizing each other, and either one of them could have stopped. But they didn’t. You can’t control other people, but you can control how you treat them.
While I fully agree that neither is in the right here (Mary for being a bigoted, controlling, all-around terrible person & Carla for being the obnoxious human she is), I still stand by the notion that it isn’t an equal situation. Yes Carla could be a better human, but so could Mike. Mike antagonizes everybody and everybody brushes it off. Carla is being purposely targeted by Mary for being trans, and if she didn’t retaliate (in a non-violent manner), Mary would continue to feel as if she had some power over Carla – just as she exerts power over Ruth.
@Tacos Oh, for the love of… are there still people who don’t blame isn’t exclusive to one party in any given conflict? It is possible for Mary to be horrible and transphobic and for Carla to be annoying simultaneously, and for the incident to be a result of those two things combined, rather than entirely one single person’s fault. And yes, it’s true that Mary is actively looking for reason to make others’ lives miserable. That fact is completely independent of Carla’s actions. Carla broke the rules by skating in the halls, and refused to stop when asked to. Similarly, the fact that Carla was an annoyance does not justify Mary’s transphobia and horrible treatment of Carla. They are both at fault. Not equally at fault, what Mary did is way worse, but Carla is not completely blameless.
Actually I just went back and reread it, Ruth just sorta’ instantaneous transmissions herself there all of a sudden. Like some sort of super hero….hmmm.
Not really. I mean, yes, it started in the comic, from what we’ve seen, with the rollerblades. Mary overreacted, Carla took it badly, Mary went nuclear, Carla went slapstick. But I can almost guarantee you that Mary’s been consistently rude to Carla starting well before the rollerblade incident. As someone that transitioned while working, the LEAST offensive thing a Godbotherer of Mary’s ilk has done to me is preach to me, in a car, while we are driving to a job site. I’ve also been shunned, threatened, fired, and publicly humiliated. And amongst my friends, I’ve had one of if not the smoothest transition.
So much this. Godbotherers aren’t typically subtle about their hatreds. And Mary has been anything but subtle.
Also *hugs* for dealing with that shit.
And yeah for the denialists, that shit happens all the fucking time to trans people. Like, I’ve had folks literally spit on me as if warding an evil spirit, been discriminated out of jobs for being trans, been disowned by my family for being trans, been publicly humiliated and threatened with death on far too many occasions, and had a pleasant evening explaining to my girlfriend on her birthday dinner treat to me that the reason we weren’t getting served ever was because they were hoping to get us to leave because they didn’t want a (slur for trans woman) in their restaurant “scaring off” the other customers. And that wasn’t the first dining experience I’d had where that happened.
I absolutely hate that you got disowned for being transgendered.
When my son came out to my wife and I at the age of 12, I made it very clear to my entire family that he is a boy, will be treated like a boy, referred to as a boy, and that I would unequivocally cut out anyone that had a problem with that.
I am not about to allow anyone to mistreat my son the way you were and it makes me sick that your parents would not do the same for you. I hope that you have found peace.
I have much better family now. Saw them over the weekend, even. It’s small, made up of just my aunt and uncle and cousin. But it’s something. And it’s supplemented by created family.
So I’ve been very lucky in that respect to have a piece. A piece too many trans kids don’t get to have.
I’m always so very happy to hear how you’ve advocated for your son. You’re a great parent and he is very lucky to have you.
I know this sort of stuff happens, I have seen it happen, I’ve read and heard numerous stories of it happening, but every time, it brings the same gut reaction of “… Fookin’ really?”.
If someone isn’t trying to actively make other people around them uncomfortable, just… Leave them be.
These hateful bigots really need to just stop, take a deep breath, relax, and actually realize that (a) if their religion is correct, then 1) Jesus loves trans people as much as he loves anyone else; 2) God made them that way so who are they to say God was wrong when He did so; and 3) judging people like that is so, so very wrong, uncool, and against the direct commandment of God. As is treating anyone with anything less than love and compassion; (b) trans people are fucking awesome, and tend to be fantastic, wonderful, beautiful people with more inner strength than these bigots could ever hope to have ; and (c) just fuck off already. It’s not about you, asshole. It was never about you. You don’t want to deal with them? Then just open your eyes, see their actual stated gender, and move the fuck on. Because the world is changing, we are realizing that the extremely limited and limiting outlook we used to have is not all that there is by a very, very long shot, and those of us in what used to be the shadows are actually full of more glorious colours than you have ever seen.
Don’t run from it, embrace it. You’ve been seeing the world in black and white, and now you’re getting a full rainbow. I know it seems scary. But there isn’t anything to be frightened of. It’s bright, and loud, and glorious, and if you want you can be a part of all that colour and glory too. You just have to be willing to stand and embrace it, instead of trying to pull all the colour out of the world again, and shoving it back into that millennia-old box of yours.
“God made them that way so who are they to say God was wrong when He did so”
Unfortunately most Religious people don’t think God made them the way they are. Most Religious people are dead certain that gay and Trans people are Gay and Trans because The Devil lied to them and told them it’s okay.
That’s what I always heard when I went to Church and it never sat right with me. Might have also contributed to me denying that I was Bi for so long too.
To do otherwise would be to admit that their God specifically made people one way to torture them and have them suffer to prove their faith. Which makes the god botherers itchy. Nonetheless, it’s the position they retreat to after “they’re literally demons taking human form” and “made a sinful choice” and “led astray by Satan” have all run their courses.
The least offensive thing I’ve got from a god-botherer is someone spending their entire work-day passive-aggressively quoting Bible verses at me. Well, that’s tied with the god-botherer who refused to talk to me at all for two years after I told her what I think of a god who believes loving someone is a crime worthy of eternal suffering.
(I might live up to the angry atheist stereotype a bit* whenever god-botherers start in on me for existing while bi.)
*Okay, a lot. As in, I have told people that their god is unworthy of my worship and that if their god runs heaven, I’ll take hell in a heartbeat. Protip: If you ever want to completely gobsmack a god-botherer, use that retort. Just be sure to leave shortly thereafter, while they’re still doing the stunned-silence thing because some god-botherers get violent if you reject their beliefs so unambiguously once they come back to their senses.
I just have to thank you for reminding me of the term “godbotherer”. I’ve always loved it, but it had slipped out of my usual vocabulary. I need to remember to work it back in more often.
At the absolute worst, Carla was being kind of obnoxious. Going to the RA and saying “Hey, my neighbor is skating in the halls and making a racket, can you do something about it?” would have been a reasonable response if the skating was really THAT much of an issue.
Mary instead chose to purposefully and deliberately destroy Carla’s property, in a way that could have gotten her badly injured, and then GLEEFULLY threw transphobic abuse at her. She was just waiting for an excuse to treat Carla badly, and skating in the halls was that excuse.
Yeahh…. if that was a “racket” though, where was everyone else complaining?
Mary made a whiny passive-aggressive move to get her own way over an AFFRONT TO ALL THAT IS DECENT, who cheerfully and quite rightly told her to get bent.
I was under the impression the glue stuff would be easily cleaned off but that’s clearly not the case. Then again, Mary is the kind of person who doesn’t play harmless pranks.
My point isn’t that Carla was actually making a racket, but that if it was the ACTUAL noise that was bothering her, Mary would have been entirely reasonable to go to an RA about it. I would’ve thought she was overreacting a bit, but it wouldn’t have made her a bully.
Assuming a reasonable non-Mary character, going to the RA isn’t an option because Ruth is a verbally abusive and physically threatening individual who hurts people for no (apparent) reason.
But in a reasonable world, Ruth would be able to strike at Mary for hate speech and not be blackmailed for it because of her sexuality. Ruth would be fired for her violence and vandalism while Mary would be on her way back to Hateopolis, IN.
She’s not being blackmailed for her sexuality. From what I can tell Ruth isn’t allowed to to have a sexual relationship with any of the students she’s responsible for. Since it’s a single sex dorm yes it only turns up in cases of same sex attraction, but the rule is about preventing abuse of power.
Given Noel was the RA on Felicity and had a romance with her, I think that’s a questionable assertion. Then again, Ruth SHOULD be fired for a hundred other offenses. The romance element? Nothing.
Yup, Mary spelled it out rather explicitly why she felt Ruth was primed for blackmail and it was “defiling the cheerleader” and “allowing perverted vagrants” to stay (i.e. hasn’t discovered and kicked out Becky).
In Mary’s mind at least, it’s all about the sexuality and if Ruth was merely abusive and not queer, she might have still tried to game her to be her pet gopher (hell, that’s what she tries to do back in the Whiteboard Ding Dong Bandit arc), but she would not have stalked and hunted her or blackmailed her for this.
Well, at the absolute worst she was being a reckless and dangerous nuisance but it wouldn’t have mattered even if she was actively and intentionally antagonizing Mary; bigotry is not an acceptable means of punishing someone for a transgression. It is never justified. If Mary had just stuck to being a general ass in retaliation to Carla’s being an ass the dynamic would have remained one of two douchebags who deserve the aggravation they inflict on each other but Mary took it into a place of oppression which is indefensible.
This. Yes, Carla was being a butthole. Being a butthole is kind of Carla’s thing, and I honestly didn’t feel bad at all for Carla when she faceplanted because wacky slapstick violence happens all the time in this series. Then Mary decides to be a bigoted asshole and suddenly all bets are off and it stops being an equal conflict between two annoying jerks.
Like, I feel that attempting to mitigate Carla’s actions (which to be perfectly clear amounts to just being kind of a pest), does her character a disservice. Like we’re saying that the real reason Carla didn’t deserve to be misgendered is that she’s That Perfect Girl, rather than misgendering being a fundamentally unacceptable response regardless of circumstance.
The main problem I have with that way off looking at it is that Mary was a bigoted asshole all along. It didn’t start out an equal conflict between two annoying jerks and only stop when Mary misgendered her. Her bigotry drove the whole thing, it’s just that we weren’t clued into it at first – largely because we didn’t know Mary knew Carla was trans.
The other is that if we decide it’s only the open misgendering that matters, not the choice of targets to harass, we legitimize subtler forms of bigotry. This doesn’t show up much these days with transgender people, because it’s still pretty much socially acceptable to be open about that, but it’s very common with racism. There’s a lot of discrimination and prejudice you can get away with as long as you’re not burning crosses and calling people “nigger”.
Carla didn’t deserve to be misgendered, but she also didn’t deserve to be harassed for being trans even if Mary never blatantly said it.
But yeah, Carla’s not That Perfect Girl. She could have avoided the conflict, at least for the moment. She’s canonically an annoying jerk, though that’s more an informed characteristic than anything we’ve really seen on screen. Which has even been lampshaded with the “sometimes we forget you’re an asshole” bit.
I assume that Congresswoman De Santo has already blown in like a hurricane, licked most of the pie off Marys face, and then left before anyone fully noticed her.
Carla and Deadpool would get along so, so, SO well. It almost scares me to think about it, because these two combined would be a fucking force of nature and we’d all be doomed, but in the greatest, most entertaining way ever xD
*Glances at sketchbook.* Hrmm… nah, I’ll leave it to you, for now, that Knightfall armor Amazi-Girl didn’t work out. Did get a pretty good Carla sketch into my ongoing page of Willis fanart though. I wanna get at least Becky added before I post it online.
That is brilliant. Carla also made it a point to throw it in Mary’s face that her parents are wealthy (and probably IU donors), so the administration is likely to be more inclined to see Carla’s side in any dispute between her and Mary.
Especially if she’s using highly calibrated standard reference whole milk powder, [$1,056 per 50g] which of course she would be, because replicability is the essence of science.
Interesting point: Carla dropping in her parents. I read that as… hm, not a threat, exactly? More of a warning, I guess, that if Mary continues this escalation Carla has a lot more resources to call on. Possibly with pull with the university given what we’ve seen of how the admin deal with wealthy and/or politically important people.
Carla’s clearly in the right here, but I’m not sure I like this side of her: Rubbing her family’s wealth and privilege in Mary’s face and (as Foamy pointed out) not-so-subtly invoking her parents’ money and business connections as a threat.
As someone who grew up in a *very* poor family, I’ve been in situations where a wealthier classmate or colleague has used their wealth and privilege as an excuse to talk down to me or threaten me, so this exchange raised a lot of red flags. If Carla were cis-gender I’d almost be tempted to side with Mary and that really bothers me. 🙁
Carla’s been doing a fantastic job standing up for herself here, overcoming Mary’s bigotry with smarts and style, and I’d hate to see her reduced to invoking class privilege and using money and threats to solve her problems.
I wouldn’t honestly say that either, any more than I’d villify an upper class black family buying nice, upscale clothing to try to mitigate racism. By all fucking means, use your wealth to insulate yourself from, or prevent, institutionalized hate from affecting you. Just don’t pretend later that the institutionalized hate doesn’t exist, or that ‘merit’ prevents it.
I meant more the snotty rubbing in of the wealth and the “do you know who my parents are” style of it rather than using the wealth privilege to mitigate at least some of the transphobic abuse.
A is B, here. It’s not mitigating it in the best way, but it /is/ still mitigating it. Threatening someone with a legal defense team isn’t something poor people can do, but it’s a legitimate defense against actionable hate.
Very much agree. I fully support people using what little privilege they can to forestall or protect where they can against bigotry for their marginalized identities.
With all due respect, this is a very different situation.
Firstly, Carla wasn’t born into an underprivileged family, she was born into a life of privilege in a nuclear, White, upper class, presumably-college educated family, and while her gender identity has undoubtedly led to hardship, her class privilege inherently already provides her a great deal of insulation from social injustice in a way that being from a black family, even an upper class black family, does not.
Second, what’s at issue her isn’t Carla using her family’s connections and resources to build her… do we have a name for it yet? I’m gonna call it the “Revenge-O-Matic”. That was using her resources to balance the scales and push back against Mary’s bigotry, and that’s fine.
Rubbing her class privilege in Mary’s face and going as far as to subtly threaten her with it is, I worry, a step to far, especially for a nice girl like Carla, and I hope Willis is careful not to let her slide down that path. 🙁
Look at all the hate Caitlyn Jenner gets for how much wealth insulates against transophobia. It buys you some major freedoms and major means of fighting back, but it doesn’t make you any less trans in a transphobic world.
For me it’s a great characterization point. Yeah, Carla takes that single aspect a bit to far when she namedrops her parents, which is rather telling given how careful she has been to minimize the fallout in all other ways. It is a little crack in her armor that shows that, yes, Mary did indeed get to her more than she lets on.
Pah-friggin-leeze, all of you. Until and unless Willis has Carla show otherwise, this is not yet anything more than Carla letting Mary know: “I’m not as insignificant/unimportant/helpless as you think I am.” Fire away, Carla.
I mean, I agree that this really isn’t Carla, like, intentionally rubbing her wealth in Mary’s face, but I don’t think Deja’s perspective is wrong either. Carla’s cold, swift and absolutely ridiculous revenge did come from being able to access technology that she wouldn’t be able to get if not for dipping into her fabulously wealthy parents’ pools of resources.
Like, I’m bi and that comes with a side order of social issues (restricted to heated online discussions for me, as I’m pretty hush about it IRL), but I’m also a white dude living in a first world country. I unilaterally benefit from that, and at the same time can face shit due to my sexual identity. One doesn’t negate the other.
Now that Bagge brings it up, I’m not entirely unconvinced that Carla invoking her parents’ tech firm isn’t actually showing a crack in her armor, and falling back onto something she can rely on in a time of need.
It’s not really different. Carla’s trans. She lacks privilege on one axis, and has it in spades on another. Carla’s family isn’t trans, but I’m not discussing her family’s behavior except as it relates to their daughter. This situation is the definition of intersectionality. This isn’t some weird word we use as a shibboleth.
Mitigating the discrimination their daughter unduly suffers is absolutely class privilege, but unlike nearly every other instance of class privilege, *THIS IS ACTUALLY OKAY*. You are *still mitigating undue discrimination*. This is using your privilege to do some actual fucking good in this world. This is literally what you SHOULD be using it for. What is even better is doing it for more people, and maybe Carla’s parents do (Maybe they don’t.)
If this fit into an overall pattern of Carla even mentioning her family background, I’d be a lot more concerned. But if the only way you can get the rich girl to talk about or mention her wealth is if you repeatedly threaten her safety, well, not nearly so much. It’s still not ideal – Carla shouldn’t be the only trans girl who has access to this. But there’s nothing wrong with a trans girl having defenses. This is itself a good thing.
I do wonder if there isn’t a better way to say it though, one that doesn’t enforce the rich kid name drop of DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM!?
I agree – this looks less like gloating/bullying than like Carla simply cutting off another of Mary’s options before she can try it. Carla knows enough by now to realize that Mary’s blackmailing of Ruth is not just a way to hurt multiple same-sex couples at the same time, but also a way to gain the twisted authority she wants to have over everyone on the floor. As Rutee mentioned above, Carla hasn’t brought up her parents to anyone else (that I recall) – not even in the middle of arguments. I think Carla bringing up her parents here is a subtle (by Carla’s standards) way of saying that if Mary tries to take her utter defeat in the prank war and turn it into a contest of authority/influence, Mary isn’t likely to win that either.
Mary responded to Carla’s skating by destroying her skates. Carla may have mentioned Ruttech to warn Mary that damaging the very expensive experimental lasers would result in a big company coming after her for the damages.
OK DoA tech is advanced over ours, probably because Willis doesn’t want to make the mistake of giving everybody flip phones right before iPhones came out. Right Dan Shive?
well there would have been too much property damage for Nokia’s, and too much soul crushing damage when a character’s iPhone breaks. Flipphones are the middleground.
Yeah, I understand your tin-y bit of reluctance. It’s not like these puns are the cream of the crop. But our quality standards have gone down because we’re on the happieness-high of having seen Mary get her just desserts from Carla’s Confection Contraption Perfection.
It was also pretty important that the machine didn’t actually do anything to Mary because then Carla would be liable for whatever happened. The pie-in-the-box, on the other hand, was entirely Marry’s fault.
This is great. Not only has Carla gotten vengeance, but with only a few words and a light show, she seems to have mentally broken Mary. She’s so freaked out she doesn’t even have sclera anymore. And that line: “The one thing that angers you more than anything else in the world is that I exist.” Does that count as a badass boast? Cause I’m going to count that as a badass boast.
It’s not the actual price of the pie, it’s that Mary took it and in the process of taking destroyed it depriving Carla of the pleasure of consuming it. Assuming that there was something besides whipped cream in it, which I’m gonna go with because it makes billing Mary so much better.
You’re right alt-text, that I am indeed satisfied with how this ended. Of course, I’d’ve been more satisfied if Mary then fell into a black hole but whatevs.
Honestly, Carla’s pretty bad as being a jerk. It’s a mask and she wants to be known that way, but she has trouble convincing people of it.
As Rachel said back in the Whiteboard DingDong Bandit: “Sometimes we forget you’re an asshole.”
Yeah, same comic. It’s all these new freshmen. I’ve gotta build mind share all over again.
One of my favorite bits with Carla. Her first real bit of character definition.
She wants a rep as an asshole, but it’s something she has to work at. It doesn’t come naturally.
Partly, as Cerebus keeps saying, she just has no more fucks left to give, but partly I suspect sadder than that: It’s better to be disliked for something that you control, even something that isn’t really you, than to be disliked for what you are. Better to be a jerk and have people dislike you than to try to be friendly and have them hate you anyway for being trans.
She is a jerk! thats the entire fucking point! She’s a jerk but she still shouldn’t have to put up with Mary’s shit! Acting like she’s the second coming of Jesus ignores like half of her personality, and those are interesting parts.
You misunderstand. Her jerkiness is an informed trait. She insists she’s a jerk, but honestly? Aside from some sass and occasional obnoxiousness, she’s pretty mild in the actual unpleasantness department.
Yeah, that’s kind of been my impression. I had never seen her actually be a jerk. Hell, she even was apologizing to AG for holding her down after she attacked Malaya and threatened her and the rest of the group in the Wal-Mart parking lot. SHE APOLOGIZED FOR DEFENDING HERSELF AGAINST THE THREAT OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE.
Mike, on the other hand, is a real jerk. I don’t even buy the notion he does it to help others (with the possible exception of Ethan).
Being seen as a jerk is her safety net. She never wants to be the powerless victim again. Never wants to show that vulnerability to those who would do her harm.
When the chips are down, she’s a bit of an ass, but she’s often helpful in major ways and even drops the sass when she sees another solitary victim in distress.
But she is scared to drop the mask of sass all the time because of people like Mary who take her silence after the misgendering as a call to go on the offensive and an excuse to harass her further.
So better to be seen as a jerk who’ll prank you into next week. No one actively fucks with a jerk.
And fuck yes, Carla is a jerk, but more importantly, she’s hit that fuck it point that so many trans people hit and is not in the mood to passively absorb constant transphobic abuse without response.
“You’re annoyed that I exist” is a GLORIOUS and accurate assessment of Mary by Carla and it’s beautifully satisfying that Carla says that to her while Mary has pie in her face lmao. This entire strip is just so, so, SO satisfying. I’m in love.
Ok, gotta say, while I still fear that this could spiral out of control, especially where Ruth is concerned (because while Mary is a demon spawned from Satan’s canker sour pus, she isn’t entirely wrong about Ruth’s behavior), as far as Carla is concerned, this was amazing and perfect. It’s not violent or overtly aggressive, it’s entirely based on Mary sabotaging herself- there’s nothing Mary can justifiably do (though I’m sure she’ll try), and it’s awesome.
I read it as being a real-time reference, though. Since this is the strip for May 31, it is the end of the month. Even if the dorm blew up next strip, that would be June 1 – the month would be ending on this mic drop.
-insert that gif of Orson Welles in Citizen Kanes doing that slow clap-
Not gonna say much on this cause sure other people *glances at Cerberus in particular* probably gonna do a much better job at it. Just really wanted to join in on the applause and state my satisfaction with the outcome and my enjoyment at seeing Carla one-up Mary in the best way possible: by shoving her existence in Mary’s bigoted face.
You realize that in that Citizen Kane scene he’s applauding something bad (a performance by his wife) and trying to get other people to support him? It’s not really the kind of reference you should be making to something you like. :p
A bad performance from his wife that she was only giving in the first place (she was no opera singer and knew it) entirely because he pushed her into it, all to try to salvage his own reputation. He’s applauding to make the other people who are afraid of him applaud with him, to try to force a farce into reality…
…which is why I was amused watching that slow-clap gif turn from a sarcastic reaction into a sincere one over time as it lost its context, because that’s exactly what his character was trying to do…
There’s a great big pile of Hollywood politics tied up in the backstory of the film, too. A lot of people really, really disliked Randolph Hearst and he was making movies starring his mistress; Hearst regarded the film as an attack on him and the character of Kane’s wife as an attack on his mistress, and did his level best to end Welles’ career over it.
Is Carla gay? I don’t recall her mentioning her sexuality in this particular iteration.
OTOH, Mike and Carla being so angry at each other they break the 4th wall and spitefully have glorious hate sex while arguing over if the encounter is canon or not would be a good conclusion to an all out prank war.
This one’s prolly gonna be long… so keep in mind that it’s me who’s saying that.
First up, holy fucking hell do I love Carla. Like not only has she played every part of this prank to absolute perfection, building it off of all of Mary’s flaws and demonstrating the truth of her intentions, but she’s done it without once falling into Mary’s game. Even here, she keeps Mary on the back foot and keeps her emotional reality buried until that brutal Panel 4 and it shows how practiced Carla is as well as how done she is to ever again play the weak and defenseless victim, stitching up her cuts and bruises all alone ever again.
Panel 1: Yes, Mary, that’s it. Just spelling out her name. Because what Carla says in Panel 4, but also because none of this is about injuring you like you do. It’s about embarrassing you, getting you off center and reminding you that Carla is not just some thing to pass off.
Carla has a name. And that name is Carla, not some rando thing they slapped on the birth certificate back when they didn’t know any better. And she is a real person and not your tool.
Also, holy fuck do I love Carla’s sass here. Just a beautiful dismissal to get her so shocked and angry that she completely moves out of her fighting stance and into her hurt and confused pose she adopts for all the remaining panels.
Panel 2: With frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads! Also, I’m pretty sure Mary’s spreading blush is the blush of someone who’s actually thought about what it would be like to suck Jesus’s wang.
Maybe that’s what was in the web searches Carla alluded to back in her first Patreon bonus comic.
Also, nice name drop on the parents. Yes, it’s a bit of snooty rich girl “do you know who I am”-ism, but it’s also yet again a potent reminder that Carla did not spring forth from Satan’s bowels to personally torment Mary. She’s just a girl with a name and with parents and with a full life. Not a political tool to act moral at but a person.
A person with a “fuck the world” attitude and a love of skating who would have happily skated down the hall doing her thing and never giving Mary the time of day if Mary hadn’t tried to turn her into this grand symbol and tool in her ongoing war on queerness.
Panel 3: Yes, it could have done anything, but it also couldn’t. Because that machine doing something to you would have given you an out to play victim. To pretend like some bigots on Willis’s twitter timeline that Mary is some abused scared little girl cowering from the big bad trans. Like Pat McCrory when he tries to call trans people bigots oppressing him and his little state just because he tried to strip their right to pee away and make it a literal crime to go to the bathroom.
If it did something to her, then Mary could have posed and preened and argued about rules. This way, Mary played herself and the machine hits the hammer home with the most hurtful thing she could experience. The coup d’etat.
Panel 4: I love everything about this panel. If I could have a big gay wedding with this panel and it was sentient and capable of consenting to that, I would host it this evening, I love it so much.
Like, first up is her face. Before this her face is all smiles, reveling in her plan going off without a hitch and Mary’s impotent rage about it. But here, she’s deadly serious. She shows the anger and hate and hurt that Mary unlocked in her by deliberately misgendering her and abusing her with transphobia.
She’s painfully real with her and cuts to the heart of the matter.
And that matter is that Carla’s existence is at the heart of everything so far. It’s what has incensed Mary and made her target her in the first place. The fact that Carla exists, Mary has decided to treat as an affront to her personally. An attack on her God and her Church and the new enemy number one now that the battle is being lost on queer marriage and related rights.
Carla exists and that brings Mary to rage, makes Mary hate her, makes Mary try and eliminate her by one means or another. And it’s not isolated, it’s part of a giant society that tells trans people that they are worthless, that they’d be better of eliminated, that their existence is an affront to man and God and society and society is perfectly within its rights to try and shut them out of public spaces so that their suffering is never seen by “normal” people.
That showers and vomits hate onto trans people to the point where our suicide numbers and homicide victim numbers are multitudes higher than most every other minority group out there minus maybe sex workers (which is a group that includes a large damn number of trans folks thanks to rampant societal discrimination).
It’s why all the Mary denialists are so full of shit when they try and claim that this was ever about Carla being loud in the halls or that the transphobia was incidental and not central to their very conflict.
This aspect, the right of Carla to exist has always been the point. And Carla is done playing around with that. She exists. She is Carla. She is she. And she’s not going to politely smile and tolerate transphobic bullying like she’s back in HS in central Indiana.
This is the panel that is this whole arc. The summation and the callout that cuts through the bullshit. And it’s why I’m fully 100% done with any “estrogen can’t melt steel beams” conspiracy theorists who still try and deny after this that Carla’s existence is not the central pivot point of this entire conflict. Is not the thing that Mary hates most and cares about most.
And it’s why Carla is badass, because she’s what us trans people wish we could do without facing the potential of literal death and abuse and jail time for not just politely smiling and absorbing the latest round of “golly gee whilikers, ya sure want me dead” thrown at them.
Panel 5: Never change, Carla. Never change…
Well, actually, definitely change, it’s part of growing up, but in this instance at least, bully on you for using your class privilege to do what we could only dream of in standing up for yourself and your rights as a human being.
“I am Carla, I exist. I have the right to exist.” Yup, Carla has done very few things that don’t spell out that message in shiny blue laser letters. And that is awesome.
I literally just said I wasn’t gonna say much outside of applause cause was expecting excellent analysis from people like you and, well, here it is.
And also, seconding the motion that Mary denialists who treat this as simply about rollerskating in the hall or simply wanting to downplay or ignore the very real damage that is done by Mary’s transphobic actions as basically being full of shit.
it’s also yet again a potent reminder that Carla did not spring forth from Satan’s bowels to personally torment Mary. She’s just a girl with a name and with parents and with a full life. Not a political tool to act moral at but a person
This is so beautifully expressed, I almost cried.
I love your analysis and I love how you’re completely 100% fucking DONE with Mary apologists, damn right, if you could see me now you’d see me standing up and applauding. Take a fucking bow.
At first I thought there was no way this perfect gem of a comic strip could possibly be any better, and then I saw there was a Cerberus analysis to go with it and I was proven wrong.
‘Yes, it could have done anything, but it also couldn’t.’
I feel like she’s also just learned a healthy fear of Carla with that line. She has seemed like she genuinely believes that machine could fuck her up, and in doing so she may demonize Carla more, but she also has to admit that she is smart.
And I do mean a healthy fear, I am not meaning that Carla has terrorized her (any more than living while trans, at least)
Like it’s been said before, the ‘noise’ is just a convenient excuse for Mary to spew her vitriol. The existence of anyone who doesn’t share her exact worldview, which is hardcore fundie apparently, offend her on a molecular level, assuming that fundies believe in that. If you share her views, then maybe this isn’t the comic for you.
Also, I did not know that about estrogen. Learn something new every day.
Do you think fundie asshats like this ever realize that they make their god look both evil and incompetent?
If the guy’s pissed at transgender folks, and he’s omnipotent, then shouldn’t he be using targeted lightning strikes or something, rather than assholes in planes hitting a non-related target?
Or previously, when the Phelps clan started crowing that he was killing soldiers in Iraq because I don’t hate my brothers-in-law… so can their idiot of a god not tell the difference between a housewife in North America and a kid carrying a gun in the Middle East? Or is his aim just really, really bad?
Honestly, they spend a lot of time standing around yelling “My god hates love and people who are trying to mind their own business, and he couldn’t hit the broad sign of a barn with a hurricane! Repent!” You’d think they’d at least want to make him look competent, wouldn’t you?
It’s good Old Testament theology. God is making Babylon conquer Israel because they’re not sufficiently keeping to the Covenant.
More to the point, it’s a simplistic answer to the Problem of Evil. God is punishing the people because they’re not faithful enough. And yes, God believes in collective punishment.
Theidiocy, it BURNS! …. wait, it’s called “theodicy”? …. I like theidiocy better.
Seriously, I like my theory of “God has bad aim” better. Hurricane Katrina was supposedly to punish New Orleans for promoting a gay lifestyle, and yet left the predominantly-lgbt sections of town relatively untouched? That’s not the kooks being wrong about it being God’s judgement (or, you know, existing at all), that’s God having bad aim! STDs being God’s judgement upon this nation… and being most prevalent in the conservatively religious parts of the nation? That’s not because they won’t do proper sex education including condom use, that’s BAD AIM!
Yeah, I’m standing by this theory, and if I’m wrong, may lightning strike the southern-baptist church down the street from me!
Also, don’t forget “Touchdown Jesus”, which God smote with lightning that clearly was not meant to show disapproval of ostentatious demonstrations of faith, but must’ve been the libruls’ fault somehow, and God’s lousy aim just kicked in….
um… as a Jew, the “old testament” is my holy book. It’s not all bad. It has the ten commandments, it provided laws that gave women an equal right to inherit property and it only allowed slavery as a punishment for the worst offenses and even then with lots of protections for the slave.
It may not be -all- bad, but by and far, the old testament is depicting a god so hideously evil and self-absorbed (wiping out humanity for not worshipping him enough? Talk about narcissism), the best way to describe it would be a downright psychopathic monster.
again, what a lovely way to talk about my religious beliefs. You have all the right to feel that way, but do you really need to call my holy book evil like that? Do I go around calling the New Testament God a monster for letting everything that happens in the Book of Revelations happen? Do I go around citing all the more questionable parts of the Quran as evidence that Allah is evil? No, because those are just part of the story.
Also, the Noah’s Arc situation was also because they had become selfish, violent and doing stuff like human sacrifice. Noah was a lecherous drunkard and yet was still supposedly the closest thing to a righteous person the world had at the time. Think on that.
Considering the stuff god does in that old testament… There is no way, no way, ABSOLUTELY NO WAY that a good supernatural entity wrote that book. If it weren’t humans that wrote it (which it was, of course), then it would have been a devil that wrote it just to see how many people could somehow think of it as holy. It is filled to the brim with absolutely disgusting behaviour from a so-called “loving” god.
Take for example Abraham. God commands him to kill his son, just to prove his commitment to god. That is disgusting behaviour. It is inexusable. It is horrible. Any god that wants me to sacrifice a child of mine is not a god worth worshipping. It is a useless wannabe “god” that can stick its immortal essence up its own ass. Sure, god stopped Abraham in the nick of time, but it should damn well never in a million years have made up such a vile and heinous test of worship in the first place.
Then the whole Adam and Eve story. So many things that is so morally wrong of god in that story, topped off by a healthy dose of pure misoginy, as Eve gets a significantly harsher punishment than Adam for the exact same offense, for absolutely no real reason at all. An offense that they could not have understood the consequences of in the first place, considering they did not know about evil.
And god having bets with the devil about people, and killing off all their loved ones just for the sake of winning that bet… Fuck such a piece of shit “god”, fuck such a piece of shit story, and fuck everyone that tries to tell me that this is a holy book which morals I could learn something from.
And no, I have nothing particularly good to say about those other two books either. More evil disguised as good a lot of the time, and we would be better off without them altogether.
One wonders if now Mary will make it her goal to expose the nefarious doings of Ruttech, as obviously it has to be crooked since its founders coddle an abomination like Carla.
I’m overall pretty neutral on Carla; don’t love her, don’t hate her. But she does grind down Mary’s gears, which tips her into the “like group” for me.
She’s right, Mary: that was her pie. It was in her box. You had no business taking that box out of her hands and getting that pie all over yourself. That was a perfectly yummy pie and you ruined it.
One of the best fundy-chanter responses I ever heard was, “I don’t want Jesus to come into my life, I want Jesus to come into my mouth.” (This was at a Pride parade.)
That one made them quail for a second, it was great.
(The closest to a good one I ever had was screaming “JESUS NEEDS NERDS!” and throwing a small box of Nerds candy – underhanded! – at one of them. He snarled at me and caught it, and then looked at it, and got so confused because I just gave him candy and he didn’t know how to respond to that. 😀 )
I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of pointing that according to the weird “lust is the most important sin” rules fundies rant by, my trans queer ass is way holier than theirs simply because I’ve never experienced lust in my life (cause ace, not cause of any actual effort on my part). Tends to make them shift to making “be fruitful and multiply” rants, but is amusing initially for the quick moment of abort.retry.fail that happens.
Ah, but you see, to the type of people who make these kinds of arguments. That part of the letter from Paul is merely a guideline (because Paul gives in later and says “oh, all right, if you must get married, here’s how to be a sexist asshole”, whereas those rules for roles for husbands and wives are deadly serious and literal, because something something, literal means whatever we want it to mean in the moment.
Best birth month ever. Thank you so much for strong trans characters, Willis. It means an awful lot to me. It’s not often I get a transwoman to look up to in fiction.
It occurs to me that there are currently two trans characters being simultaneously awesome (1 stepping up for her little sister and one totally crushing Mary with style and grace).
And with today’s outburst about the machine and how all it does is to spell out Carla’s name, I believe that Mary now joins the list of characters who have dropped the F-bomb.
She won’t. Cause Mary refuses to lose. Especially to someone she sees as “beneath” her.
She would have escalated no matter what Carla did or didn’t do. But she’s not about to stop now, though she may back off specifically going after her a little and focus more on Ruth who she feels she has more power over.
There’s nothing more fun than a friendship forged from mutual loathing. I’ve had a few of those in my life, and they are just the weirdest thing to go through.
Great for honing your debating skills. Less fun as the years wore on, though.
to be fair if I was using sadpanda 2 things are probably true about those drawings.
1. They’re on my laptop, which is all but trashed at this point
2. They’re not very good.
Oh, and by the next few days I mean as soon as it’s moderator-accepted. If you like it I’d be willing to divert energy from this book I’m writing to add to it, definitely, and in general I’d love to hear feedback, especially from the inspiration himself.
I received it, but today might be the wrong day to post it on the blog. I have only skimmed it, but Mary is…. very Mary in it, and all that that implies. Maybe when nerves are a little less raw…
Although I doubt Carla and Mary will ever get together, I wouldn’t put it past Willis to have a plot twist where someone goes snooping through Mary’s stuff and finds several drawings of other girls on the floor in various states of undress.
… Now, I feel it my moral obligation to learn how to bake a pie so that I can send it to Carla. But, she exists in a different world… so… the UPS fees would probably be prohibitive.
Boop!
These last few strips have been sooooooo satisfying. A person doesn’t always “win” in life, but getting the upperhand on people like Mary make it all worthwhile.
What if Willis let the commenters write and draw the strip for a month
Willis: okay let’s see what happened while I was gone. Hmm starting of with 3 days worth Danny and Ethan making out…wow they are really getting into it….dammit guys that’s supposed to remain on Slipshine! That’s weird, in the fourth strip Mary dies, but in the fifth strip she comes back to life and declares her love for Carla…and then they make out. Ooh some Joyce and Becky strips! Okay so Dina has found a way to clone herself like 20 times and now they are all making out with Becky. Look is every strip going to involve people making out!? Okay a strip with Carol and Sarah, there is no possible way that this could lead to…..OH GOD DAMMIT!
You know, about a week ago I was wondering what law the comment section would debate next. Got it today. I real think the I’ll send you the bill part was just a joke, I know I’ve heard it before.
In any case, kudos to Willis for taking what could have been a story about “Ally Angst” and turned into a story about Carla arising and seizing the day like a transgendered Newsboy Christian Bale tech genius.
So, to summarize what went down, we learned that Bonnie committed suicide, and Ross, to cope with this while retaining his faith, became overly protective and emotionally abusive of Becky, out of fear she would “be damned to hell” too.
We learned that Jacob doesn’t give a single damn about Ethan being gay, and likely knew the whole entire time.
We…well, okay, we already knew that Mary hated Carla. We just don’t really know why. But Carla’s making it evident that Mary is envious of her for whatever purposes. Parents, maybe? Intelligence?
And finally, we learn that Joyce has learned to tap into her inner hulk and become one BAMF.
Thanks for beating me to that. It’s never been clarified in-strip so it’s fair that people missed that, but I feel it’s important for people to acknowledge that attempt =/= success.
Of course, that still leaves some very sad unanswered questions.
For whatever reason, in the back of my mind, something always told me that Bonnie had cancer. Maybe I pulled that from a different comic, or misinterpreted a comment somewhere.
Ross doesn’t really seem like he was a dick back then so much as he was later on though. It doesn’t excuse him, but it makes me wonder what lead to this man’s switch.
…Mary hates Carla because Carla is transgender. Like, that it is literally the entire point of this. Mary considers Carla to be a goddess abomination who belongs in the boy’s dorm because Mary views her as a male and was willing to use blackmail and any other means necessary to force her view on the dorm. And Carla’s revenge her is to literally rub her very existence in Mary’s face, both through pie and her name in flashing lasers.
Yeah, what Whammy said. It has been very clear for some time that Mary hates Carla because she’s trans, and that’s all there is or needs to be to it.
And the thing is, when the fundamentalists started losing their anti-queer war – and badly – in the late 90s, they began making plans then to take this war against us multi-generational, to embed it into their religion – to move it from an issue of moral policing to a core belief, a central and critical tenet of their religion and tribal identification, as they did with the abortion-rights fight 20-25 years earlier.
The degree to which they’ve succeeded at that should manifest in the next 10 years or so.
I’d be honestly surprised to discover that Mary has a gun. She seems more like the type to believe that her privilege is such a good first line of defense and offense that she doesn’t actually need a second.
Mary probably tends to follow the Bible when it’s in her favour, or it means she can insult/harass people and have the fallback that she’s just expressing her religious beliefs. It’s kinda like the Pirate’s Code, more like guidelines than actual rules.
I suppose it says something about Mary and how she perceives social interaction (and, possibly, her perception of which of the two of them are the true ‘victim’ in this matter) that she’s genuinely shocked that Carla didn’t cause her serious harm with her gimmick.
Maybe she was looking for validation by victimhood or maybe, like the legislators of North Carolina, she thinks that all transsexuals are, by definition, violent sexual predators. Either way, Carla simply telling her in such a dramatic and, ultimately non-violent way that she isn’t going away any time soon seems to have given her food for thought.
I’ve been reading this comic for a good while (by “a good while” I mean probably a year but I caught up on it in three days when I started reading so it feels like a lot longer) and I’ve just gotten around to starting commenting. Also: Go Cerberus! I love reading your commentary on all the comics and your insight is grand.
I LOVE TRANS REPRESENTATION.
That is all.
I don’t know where to add to the very long discussion about whether Carla has a case or not in regards to the pie, but this reminds me of an article I once read about a woman whose lunch – homemade by her husband – would constantly be stolen at work. One day, to find the culprit, the woman’s husband made the lunch extremely spicy to the point that the man cried out in pain an got a very upset stomach.
Going down the internet article rabbit hole, I saw that in similar scenarios, even though the thief was not supposed to steal the lunch, it was deduced that it was a planned attack on the thief and they were prosecuted.
In any case, Carla got what she came here for, and it to have Mary buy her a pie. She got her crowning moment, she played her like a fiddle, and she got her right where it stings most. Carla feels vindicated and the last line (and perhaps a bill in the mail) is salt on the wound and nothing more.
… I also wonder if poor Willis, after thinking of a non-violent and blameless solution to Carla’s predicament, ever expected such a heated debate about Carla suing Mary over pie.
Because ~obviously~ thievery isn’t a problem, but having a planned response is. /sarcasm
I totally agree with your assessment; regardless of the legality bits Carla did what she came here to do, and she did it fabulously.
FWIW, I strongly suspect that Mary will never see an invoice for that pie. It was just Carla’s way of delivering a final ‘gotcha’. We Brits call that ‘rubbing it in’.
WARNING! POTENTIAL SPOILER AHEAD IN THIS COMMENT1
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From Willis’s preview posts on Tumblr, I think that there will be a ’round three’ (the skates incident being very much ’round one’) that will include a shouting match in the corridor. Given the location and the apparent time-frame, I will be very interested to see if Joyce is present, gets involved and how it affects her view of those from a similar religious background to her.
I’ve said this before but I think that a Joyce/Carla friendship, as bizarre as it would be, might be an interesting and fruitful narrative direction to take the strip, especially in the contrast between Dorothy and Carla.
I can definitely see a Joyce/Carla friendship developing and that serving a similar narrative role as Joyce’s interactions with Ethan before Becky came out in helping get her adjusted to the concept of trans people before her sister comes out.
I also would be very curious because Carla is way more confident in her identity than Ethan and less likely to take shit, so I can see their interactions going in some interesting narrative directions because of that as well as Joyce’s likely ignorance to start.
Does Joyce even get the concept of trans people? I know one of the things she said was “that’s Carla, she gets her own room for some reason.” I wonder what she’d think of that?
I’ve mostly come to terms with this. Mary and Carla have a rivalry born of mutual hatred in which they commit acts of violence towards each other. Mary is a transphobic narrow-minded bigot who’s been shown to be increasing abusive, a stalker, and even violent, and so we are happy that Carla got the best of her.
What bothers me is the quick transition of Mary’s image from a hateful, but mostly harmless character into this dangerous, scary mustache-twirler. She goes from engaging in cartoony rivalry with Carla to misgendering her and blackmailing the RA to get away with it. She goes on to give these wild speeches about how homophobic and disgusting she is and how she’s going to make Ruth turn the floor all good and Christian, but she ends up not really doing anything. Every piece of dialogue out of her mouth is designed to make you hate her, and it’s all so sudden that it feels out of place.
This whole arc is a cartoony mess; half Saturday morning Tom & Jerry, half those old Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories with life lessons about systemic oppression swapped out for the realization of a trans person’s autonomy. These two parts of DoA are good on their own, but they shouldn’t have been mixed together.
But it’s not sudden. It’s been foreshadowed back to Mary spying on Billie & Ruth and making not quite definite comments about lesbians to Billie. This goes back at least two years of real time.
She knew about them and was deliberately holding it in reserve. The blackmail was obviously coming. That it would be triggered by her going after Carla wasn’t, partly because we didn’t know she knew Carla was trans.
And she’s working on making Ruth turn the floor all Christian and homophobic, but Ruth’s managed to twist out of the way so far. It’s only been a day or two.
Yeah, it’s been nearly 2 years since Mary did the scheming villain hands after spying on Billie and dropped her little “Hey Joyce, you look to be standing next to my target, what do you think about how hellbound lesbians are” nastiness: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/clear/
After that, she’s glared at a 12 year old for being nice to her because Mary was convinced that her whole family must be evil, and openly hoped for her roommate and Becky to get pregnant and drop out of school, and then everything in this arc. And before that there was a whole arc where she rejected Joyce and Dorothy because Dorothy was an atheist and told Joyce that “if evil weren’t nice, no one would bother with it” and went on a rant to Dorothy about how awful her roommate is because she’s not down with ableist language.
Mary being a giant piece of shit who schemes and goes for the underhand kill has been lampshaded for a long time now. It’s only really a surprise if you’ve been ignoring all of Mary’s comic appearances up to now.
Okay, I concede that. I should have picked up on it. I still think that the change that occurred when they started focusing on her character was way too strong, and that the stuff she blackmailed Ruth for is a little silly and just put in to make her look like a villain. Transphobic people are awful, but like…not actual villains?
Transphobic people are definitely actual villains. Lots of them are very aggressive about their “disapproval of our lifestyle” which basically means they think we are making up our genders which to be quite honest, is saying that I don’t deserve to exist because I don’t exist on their terms.
maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe don’t say stuff like “transphobic people aren’t villains” when, like, right now at this very moment they’re offering cash money to cisgender children to out transgender children in school bathrooms
What’s that line from Shortpacked! about one’s hyperbole being one’s reality, cause damn is it so applicable here.
Fuck, being trans right now is the most surreal and horrifying experience with the daily new awful that some bigot with real political power is pitching everywhere.
Hell, there was the school official a bit ago who argued that pepper spray for all students would be great because the students could use it to “defend themselves” from trans people who try and enter the “wrong” bathrooms.
People don’t even understand what it MEANS to be trans, either. Example: an elderly lady in a Superstore bathroom said a very transphobic thing to another lady in the bathroom regarding me, assuming I was a translady because of my short hair. Like, lady I’m actually following what you say you want here. (Not what you really want because you’re a bigot and want my existence gone.)
A villain is by definition a character in a a piece of fiction. I’m not saying that anything a transphobic person does isn’t terrible, I’m saying that your portrayal of this character would be better suited to a caped anti-crusader with plans to take over the world and henchmen. I am saying that you are a bad writer who does not know how to write realistic antagonists.
Villain, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary is: a character in a story, movie, etc., who does bad things; a person who does bad things; someone or something that is blamed for a particular problem or difficulty
Also, as a trans person, I can confirm that I have met people in real life who are like Mary – bigoted and looking for any reason to cause you trouble. People like that DO exist, whether you’ve met them or not. I have been spared most of the more heavy stuff because I am not out, I just “look” LGBTQ+ at the moment.
I’m saying you’re a bad reader who somehow has missed the hundreds of comments on these pages saying that these things have happened to them repeatedly in their own real lives — including some coming TO YOU, RIGHT NOW, saying “this shit is real” — and so your dumb, obnoxiously tonedeaf comments mock them with your stupid willful ignorance.
You are the villain, right now. A real life one. Go away.
A state legislator in one of the Shithole States declared that if he found a trans woman in the bathroom with his granddaughter, he would ‘stomp a puddle in his [sic] chest’. Think about the imagery that’s meant to conjure up, then tell me transphobes aren’t over-the-top villains.
I personally have been threatened with a beating if I’m ever seen going into a women’s restroom. It’s absolutely over-the-top “cartoon” villainy. Except it’s real- which is terrifying.
Yup, had one of those while I was in the women’s restroom. When I left the stall, I actual fast-walked out the door, because one of the woman was preparing her handbag to take a swing at me. Ah, Orange County mall bathroom. Fun times.
You know, I just remembered something. A couple of decades back worked with a transgender woman. Nice, caring, determined worker; someone who you want working a line alongside you. Was told that ‘he has to use the men’s room, because he’s making women nervous’.
Unfortunately… Mary is on the light side as far as transphobic bigots go. Most of the times they’re much much worse than that.
CONTENT WARNING: AWFUL AWFUL TRANSPHOBIA (seriously, take care of yourself)
Like, there’s a huge number of dedicated transphobic movements dedicated to finding the dead names of transgender children in order to hurl it at them until they kill themselves. The groups frequently keep track of “confirmed kills” which are trans kids they’ve convinced to kill themselves. Slightly less awful versions of these nonetheless find the dead names of trans kids and stalk and harass and try to drive them to suicide, because of ideas that trans people are somehow trying to infiltrate women’s spaces or steal all the butch lesbians away to become men.
There’s also the proposed law Willis is citing which is a proposed Kansas bill winding its way through the legislature which would offer $2500 to any cis student who spots a trans kid trying to use the bathroom. And a similar law that was proposed but will probably die in committee to make using the “wrong” bathroom a sex crime requiring trans people to become registered sex offenders if they try to pee.
And of late the fuckers who brought us the Hobby Lobby decision are currently setting forth lawsuits arguing that teens who have seen a trans person exist have suffered emotional distress and violence and sexual harassment and thus trans people must not be allowed to use bathrooms or locker rooms to spare said children from said distress. Similarly, that same group has started passing out instructions for megachurches telling parishioners to use specific talking points against trans kids including telling them that their genders are not real and that they are child molesters. Kids are encouraged to say these things directly to the trans students’ faces.
There’s also the bigots swarming all over Willis’s twitter mentions to argue that Willis is in favor of the beating of women because Carla is “a large and overbearing man who gets off on the threatening, intimidation, and violent assault on a scared, small, defenseless woman who has done nothing wrong”.
We have no shortage of current staff writers for major American newspapers penning articles musing about the genital states of transgender teenagers in order to argue that their genitals constitute a sexual assault on their fellow students simply by existing in a non-congruent configuration (this is extra awful because these same bigots also made it so nobody under the age of 18 is allowed to receive any form of SRS or even hormones because “they might change their mind” and “we need to be sure”. They are currently also trying to ban puberty blockers cause nothing helps a trans kid more than going through the wrong puberty because some bigots think they understand your gender more than you.)
And in an average day, anytime I go out, I tend to get my fair share of the t-slur yelled at me, people spitting, people literally hiding their kids eyes as if looking upon me will infect them with the trans, mumbled hatred, and lots and lots of death glares. It tends to make any public outing extremely stressful and anxiety-inducing.
Yes, that’s right, an entire community of parents and hate groups went out of their way to bully and harangue a kindergartner for daring to be trans and seek the bare minimum of accommodation and harassed the school out of extending even the smallest amount of support for said kindergartner lest the kindergartner ever believe she is a full human being.
I mean, I’d love to live in a world where the likes of Mary is a strange comedic exaggeration. I hope we can get there.
But currently, the most common reaction from trans folk when Mary let forth her transphobia bomb was “Oh man, that’s a familiar situation”.
We are the marginalized population in the spotlight and that means a lot of awful as the bigot groups swirl and hover and it is not publicly understood yet that we are fully human or deserving of access to even the barest human rights. And there’s a dedicated attempt to smear us all as child molesters people should be scared of, should attack, should feel good about destroying as monsters. And that leads to a lot of harassment, a lot of discrimination, and a lot of literal violence and death by people who feel they have wiped out one more monster from the world.
They espouse hate and violence towards people who’ve done nothing to them except not conform to what they want.
Yes, they are villains. All of them are villains. They also deserve pain inflicted upon them greater than the pain they’ve inflicted upon others, both physically AND emotionally.
Plus all her spying bullshit started after Ruth slapped her, while Mary is a vindictive bongo she does have reasons for how she acts, she’s stuck with a roommate she can’t stand and from her perspective her R.A. is completely incompetent, has threatened her and slapped her when Marry asked her to do her job. Plus she has complained about noise and wanting to be left alone a couple times before the Carla arc so her getting pissed about how Carla acts doesn’t come out of no where, she just goes about solving her problems in the most horrible way possible.
I’d forgotten about the time Ruth slapped her. While I don’t think it excuses Mary’s behavior with Carla, it is probably fair to say that if Ruth was doing a better job as RA thing never would have gotten as out-of-control as they have.
Carla would have been asked to respect the rules about skating in the hallway. Mary would been recommended to look into changing rooms or moving to a different floor. Etc.
Although we’d have missed out on some very entertaining updates if that were the case. 😀
Real quick, if you ignore all the skillful foreshadowing that DYW does. Mary’s actions were totally in line with her character. She’s just drawn that way. Readers might read her another way, as is their right, but Mary’s character is well defined and established as a contrast to Joyce.
A transphobic person suddenly throwing out transphobic slurs in order to hurt another person? Good heavens, yes, how cartoony. Surely that has never happened in real life.
Oh, good gravy miss daisy, say it ain’t so? /southernbelle sarcasm
Due to your gravatar I am 100% convinced that Mike is actually saying this sarcastically right now. Thank you.
Bigot doesn’t mean frothing madwoman or felon. Someone can have hateful beliefs and otherwise be a perfectly good person who everyone who didn’t know of their hatred would want as a neighbor. That’s what’s so goddamn terrifying about bigotry. One of the most disturbing moments of my life was when my grandpa, who I’d loved and respected for years, said he wished he had a couple of [*black gentlemen*] to help him move.
“Someone can have hateful beliefs and otherwise be a perfectly good person who everyone who didn’t know of their hatred would want as a neighbor.”
You’re not wrong, but what, we’re supposed to ignore that Mary is very bigoted? Like, she said bigoted things, so yes, she is a bigot, we (and a lot of the characters) aren’t people who don’t know about her bigotry. We’re not those people.
But Mary kinda was someone like that. She went to church with Joyce and Dorothy (and I think Sierra). She smiled, she was happy to bring them along, she chatted with them afterwards.
And then Dorothy admitted she wasn’t Christian, and so Mary got surly, told Joyce she shouldn’t interact with Dorothy because she’s a sinner, and walked off. She was pleasant until something she disagreed with came up.
Not to mention, we’ve had instances of characters acting like what you describe. Off the top of my head, we have Joyce’s mom mentioning how proud she is to tell people back home about Sarah, because it means that their daughter isn’t a racist.
Man, it’s kinda wild to think that all this arc has been a single weekend. Danny is angry and depressed after finally standing up and asserting himself, Amber is on edge and slipping over after losing an important point of support, Dina is likely to become clingy from being separated from possibly the first someone she feels emotional around, Sal grows increasingly aloof as her few attempts to be involved with others in any capacity ends poorly for her, Mary is headed towards neurotic and is likely to double down foolishly after finally facing backlash for her bigotry, Ruth is suffering having largely lost her own support and is now being blackmailed, Walky is being forced to face his own limits and maybe begun to acknowledge them, and Sarah is acknowledging that she is not only caring about people but also getting attached to their presence.
Combined with their own misadventures, arriving back at the university may not be the smoothest ride for Joyce and Becky as everything seems to be on edge including them.
Spite as survival mechanism got me through high school alive. I can’t knock it.
Also, add awesome points to Carla: She has the guts to go, “Hmm, this person seems pissed off that I exist, and is a total dickbag to me as a result of the fact that I exist as me unapologetically. How about I exist so aggressively that they can’t possibly ignore my existence as my revenge?”
All of this. Spite can keep one alive when one is reeling from bigotry and abuse. And Carla’s response to getting hit with that bigotry is just so beautiful and on point.
Mary’s stunned silence is a little too much for me. It makes for a satisfying conclusion, and it’s not all that unlikely, but it’s just a little too perfect. Like when you fantasize about destroying your enemies with a perfectly executed argument (or machine for ridiculous revenge), they never talk back, but in real life they almost always do. Unless Mary gets in a rejoinder in the next strip or so, if only something dumb like “Don’t think you’re special, I hate lots of other people”, I’m afraid I have to take one point away.
Of course you’re several million ahead with this amazing strip.
That’s kind of what makes it work for me. Carla builds and drags a huge machine in front of Mary’s room with nobody noticing, has an extending robot arm in a cardboard box that hits Mary in the face with a pie, and then everything is timed perfectly with a laser light show.
It’s super cartoony and over the top in a way that, thematically, works perfectly with Carla’s character.
Eh, seems in character for Mary to be dumbfounded by this.
Also, if Mary has any sense whatsoever, she won’t scream, “Next time, Gadget! NEXT TIME!” because announcing that she doesn’t plan to back off is just poor strategy. Of course, doing so would also be totally in character for her.
I think this is definitely Carla’s best move – no damage or anything, just harmless neon lights that will bother Mary to no end.
That said, I would’ve left the pie out. Maybe I’m just worried the bits of pie left behind might have repercussions. Maybe I just think it’s a shame to waste a delicious pie. /shrug
Actually, since Mary STOLE the box from her, she was never offered it, she was never given it, if she complains about getting a pie in the face, she is the only one who would get in trouble.
Case in point: being afraid of biased authority should not stop you from doing your thing. If the authority DOES react in a biased way towards you, gather a proof, record it, and go on a crusade against them. Which reminds me, did Carla record all of this? It’d be smart of her to have done so, and it’d make for a really good family memento.
Case in point 2: when speaking about American universities in the current day and age, if anything the authority will be heavily biased against Mary. Though, how can they show such a bias in this situation? I haven’t heard of a college staff being so brazen as to do anything to a college student just for filing a bullshit complaint against a trans student. I don’t expect anything more than rudeness in answer to Mary’s complaint, and even I’d answer with rudeness in such a situation – provided something has strained my nerves and I can’t keep my cool.
1) “Should not stop” is very strong. It depends on how badly they’re likely to react and how much you can afford the consequences or the crusade. Sometimes it’s worth it. Sometimes you can change the world for the better with such a crusade. Sometimes you just get crushed.
2) The actual transgender people who’ve spoken up in these comments are much less sanguine about where the bias would lie, even in universities in this day and age.
Skipping over the stupidly depressive arguments about the world being full of nothing but bigots (Which isn’t true). There are dozens of ways Carla could bill her for the pie. Maybe it came from the school cafeteria and she told them to put it on Mary’s account. Or maybe she found a place willing to bill her later and had it set up to send it to Mary’s room instead of hers.
Well, yes of course not ALL people are bigoted, but enough people, and especially enough people in power, are that it becomes dangerous for ALL marginalized people.
Yesssssss. I’ve been waiting to see Mary finally get what’s coming to her. And yes I before anyone else says it I am 100 percent aware of the fact that my avatar makes this comment funnier.
It doesn’t surprise me that Mary, being a hateful, bigoted person, assumed that Carla was going to do something more damaging than a pie to the face and some lights. Because it’s what she’d do.
1. If Mary was any other religion, would you think it would be okay to say something like what Carla did in the first panel? Allah, Buddha, etc.?
2. Carla name-dropping just makes her sound a bit spoiled. Was that really necessary? What purpose does it serve?
3. It’s not that she hates Carla’s existence. She asked Carla to stop being noisy and to stop breaking the rules. It doesn’t bother her that Carla *exists.* What bothers her is Carla’s personality and how it affects her. You can dislike someone without wishing they didn’t exist. Mary didn’t treat her differently from anyone else–because she hates *everyone*–until Carla continued to disrupt Mary’s studying. Seems like a pretty big leap to assume that Mary hates her because she’s trans since she was angry with her lonnng before the transphobic remarks.
4. And just for curiosity’s sake… why did Carla feel compelled to skate in the hallways when it’s not only against the rules but also not nearly as big a space as anywhere outside? It’s not like they have curfew.
There is a joke in your name but I am not going to take it!
1. If Mary were from any other religion then it would be pretty awful of Carla, but Mary is someone who uses her religion as justification to belittle and discriminate, and also being part of the biggest religion in the US kind of tips the power scales to the point where one crack at someone who uses her religion entirely to cause pain isn’t going to make me raise my shield. If she said this to, say, Joyce or Becky, and in a completely different situation because neither of them would do something like Mary did here, then yeah, that’d be pretty crappy of her.
2. Carla is a rich white girl with fabulously wealthy tech genius parents, so being spoiled is probably likely. Also she’s explaining where she got the hardware.
3. Mary does, in fact, hate Carla for existing, because Mary has decided that Carla is a weird sex monster who shouldn’t be allowed near her. Mary made it abundantly clear that she hated Carla for being trans when she told her she was going to drag her to the boy’s dorm where “she actually belongs.” If Mary had said “I’m going to drag you outside because you’re an obnoxious hooligan disrupting my precious study time!” then this wouldn’t be a debate, but it’s how it happened. She also recently called Carla a “misplaced freak.”
4. Carla was skating indoors, and continued to do so after finding out it annoyed Mary, because because Carla is an annoying butthole with no regards for your rules, grandpa. Doesn’t make Mary’s response even remotely justified.
Thanks for implying that I’m stupid. :))))))))))))))) I have a Master’s degree in English and spend a lot of time analyzing various forms of literature, and one way that I do that is to ask people’s opinions so I can see how people see the text and to look beyond what is directly presented in it. I have a genuine curiosity about this storyline, and the only way to get people’s thoughts is to ask for them!
I promise that I’m not siding with anyone, neither Carla nor Mary. I personally think that neither of them should be antagonizing each other like this, but that’s not my point at all. I never once said that Mary’s actiosn were justified.
I read the strip, found some points of interest, and thought I’d ask some questions for people to think about.
Wondering why she was skating indoors doesn’t make me a grandpa, by the way. Just curiosity there, because I have skated in places that shouldn’t be skated in, and it’s just not as exciting as she was making it out to be. 😛 Again, they don’t have curfew, so why not go where there’s more space outdoors? Just seems like she’d be hampering her own fun.
She was skating inside because, as she carefully explained to Mary “New skates!”. And frankly because she always skates everywhere as has been emphasized several times.
As for being angry before the transphobic remarks, if someone was harassing a black man and after a few minutes called him a nigger, would you assume that was the moment racism became a factor or would you realize that racism had been driving him all along, even if you didn’t realize it before then.
I also find your stress on “I’m not siding with the bigot or her victim” interesting. Sometimes there is a right side.
But wouldn’t skating on carpet not give her the best experience on her new skates?
And that’s fair. I think she hates her for two reasons, then, you know?
I’m just asking questions as a third party trying to understand the situation from different angles. *shrug*
Mary shouldn’t be a bigot, but Carla also should respect that at least one person in this comic is trying to study. XD But seriously, the situation didn’t need to escalate like this. Mary definitely doesn’t need to be transphobic, but she did ask Carla multiple times to let her study. Not saying it’s justification or anything. They’re just acting like children.
1. Given how she uses her religion maliciously, absolutely.
2. It’s her way of saying that Mary can’t use her religious ties and/or any authorities to exercise her bigotry toward her. It destroys Mary’s ability to appeal to authority to get the “misplaced freak” out of the women’s dorm, which is where she belongs.
3. She absolutely hates that Carla exists. Skates on carpet are very quiet, and even if she was being legitimately disruptive it’s no excuse to destroy $700 skates- which Mary has suffered zero repercussions for, by the way- and attempt to excise Carla from the dorms on transphobic grounds. Her whole crusade has been because of Carla’s trans status- the skating was just what gave her an excuse to start it up.
4. No idea. It’s not the primary concern- though she should have done her skating outside, yeah.
Something I’ve noticed is that no one can agree on what a nice pair of skates costs.
It’s also still the same day, so there’s plenty of time for Mary to cool off and buy her a new pair of skates. And I’d bet that since she has that kind of glue, she also has something that can dissolve it.
Hmm, the word “excuse” always rubs me the wrong way. I’m sure Carla skating was a legitimate disturbance, so to show her bigotry better would probably show Carla doing something far less annoying. Less annoying = less reason to say or do something about it. So if she were to react violently to something smaller, then it would be far more apparent how deep the bigotry goes. That’s just me as a writer and someone who studies language and literature.
1. If the person had been using their religion to spew hate at Carla, and then proceeded to say *major prophet/god-dammit* it would be perfectly fine for her to have said “do you suck *insert major prophet and/or god of religion here* wang with that mouth?”
2. It’s a bit out of character for Carla, but to me it looks like she’s trying to use what privilege she has (wealth/class) to cut off an avenue for Mary to do damaging things. It could also just be Carla getting a little too into the prank and being like the Cartoon Villain. Honestly, she’s a flawed character and this shows one of those flaws.
3. Mary certainly hates Carla’s existence. She has made it clear on MULTIPLE occasions that since Carla isn’t a cisgender straight person, she is a problem. Mary repeatedly calls her a “freak” and even says to “go back to the boys’ dorm”. Mary hates trans people because she is a bigot, and her religion is her justification for her bigotry. Really, there is no justification for bigotry.
4. Because Carla does what she wants. And honestly, she probably just didn’t want to take her skates off from coming inside, and she prefers to wear them all of the time.
Good point about showing one of her flaws. I agree that it seemed out-of-character at first, so if she continues to name-drop later on, that’s a good, consistent flaw.
Well, she called Carla a freak *after* she asked her to stop skating. I’m not saying she’s not bigoted–I just don’t think that’s the particular cause for this incident.
Perhaps it is her existence that she hates, but she hadn’t gone out of her way to show that until Carla wouldn’t move from out in front of her door. I think I’m going to reserve this set of thoughts until we see more interactions with the two of them later on. This is really the first extended time they’ve been around each other, so I’d prefer to see more interactions with each other before I decide that she hates Carla specifically because she’s trans or anything else down that extensive rabbit hole.
And it just seemed to me like she was doing the kind of skating that would be better suited for the outdoors, especially with how small that hallway was.
Thank you for responding not only civilly but also in a way that shows that you genuinely thought about my questions. 🙂
1. I’m not even seeing what you could be upset about here. Leaving aside the various things that make that exchange only possible because of Mary’s brand of Christianity, it’s someone shutting up an asshole. Oh dear.
2. I read it (said so earlier) as a warning to Mary that Carla can keep escalating and that Mary’s apparent default approach of getting someone with power to do her dirty work is going to hit rocks if she tries it. It’s basically saying “check yourself before you wreck yourself”.
3. At this point I have no idea how anyone still thinks this. Mary’s character has been depicted as hateful since pretty much her first appearance and the current arc has been really, really clear that her actions w.r.t. Carla (and others!) aren’t born out of any legit complaint but because she’s hateful, power-hungry, snoopy, and evil.
Wait, why do people think I’m upset? I was just posting some thoughts/questions I had since I like to interact with others about storytelling!
The first question came from seeing some edits of Mary as a Muslim, so I was curious about what people would think, since everybody likes to crap on Christianity so much. I wanted to see if it was a double-standard. Clearly it isn’t.
And yeah, Mary hates pretty much everyone, so it seems a bit senseless to assume that she has a specific reason to hate Carla, but that’s just me.
As for “who cares,” I do, because I’m curious. It just seemed, in the narrative sense, a bit unusual. I have skated in stupid places before, and it’s not particularly excited. Mostly cramped. If Carla is about maximum fun/amusement, which is how she seems to me, then why choose to skate in a place that would cramp her style?
I kind of wonder if we’re reading the same comic. I don’t really want to legitimize Mary’s hate of Carla by saying she has a “reason” for it– that makes it sound, you know, reasonable– but she does, specifically, hate Carla because Carla is trans and Mary is a titanic bigot. This is crystal clear as of when Mary called Carla a boy.
Foamy: StrawGirl is pulling one of the oldest troll tactics in the book: Asking disingenuous, loaded questions to bait people into reacting, then backing off and claiming, “I’m just asking questions!” when someone gets annoyed with them.
I’m legitimately asking questions because I want to see how people think about things. >_> This is the kind of stuff my peers and I did in my grad-school classes.
I think probably my favorite part of this is that nothing Carla did is against the rules. If anything, if/when Mary complains about this, she’ll just get in trouble for stealing Carla’s pie. Just… well done
I hate to report that the comment numbers are now higher and the devil has been subdued.
On the bright side: My deadname was literally the 666th most popular name for afab babies the year I was born, so I’m basically Satan – and I approve this message.
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Not true! A bunch of the other residents ALSO piss off Mary…
Hmm, maybe Carla should have a whole string of machines spelling out the entire directory of the Universe?
EPILOGUE
… I accept this as canon. Damn what Willis may say.
Just assume Death of the Author, and ANYTHING can be canon!
… Orgies everywhere.
Also, healthy and functional people.
We need a DoA doujinshi like that
You don’t need author death for that to be canon. Just a slipshine account.
Do you remember the guest comic about the final days of Questionable Content? (The one with the webcomic illuminati).
Bad idea. See Arthur C. Clarke’s short story, ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’. I’d include a link, but I’m at work and most of the free downloads are blocked.
If I recall correctly, it’s been implied Carla is intersexed and lesbian or asexual but homoromantic in the DOA storyline (not sure… I think I need a chart for all of the orientations in DoA).
But as a result, her mere existence angers Mary due to all the gendered rules of her religion that Carla breaks by here mere existence, let alone actions.
No romantic relationships with Carla are shown in DoA I believe, but she had a romantic and (rather one sided) sexual relationship with Malaya
I know Carla is trans, and since orientation is constant I think she’s also homoromantic ace. So yeah existence will anger Mary quite effectively.
Carla is a transwoman who’s orientation is unknown ATM, but likely aesexual/homoromantic or aromantic aesexual. In Shortpacked! her orientation was the former, but odd enough that aro/ace may be what it translates to here.
Side note, she’s not intersexed at all, and please try to avoid that error.
Thank you for addressing this comment 🙂
And that’s checkmate!
Eh, maybe more like blackjack.
Checkmate implies Carla “lost” some pieces
She just had a 10 (the pie) and an ace (spelling her name)
Jenga?
Yahtzee!
UNO
Numberwang
Wangernumb!
Calvinball!
Mornington Crescent!
Gezundheidt!
Dabo!
Gin!
King me!
BINGO!
Amontillado.
¡Lotería!
Sorry! …Wait
Yes, please.
Now that is jenga.
No it doesn’t – it’s perfectly possible to achieve checkmate without losing any pieces, or even with both sides losing pieces. It’s pretty difficult against an even remotely competent opponent, but Mary played right into Carla’s plans at every turn here.
That said, one could argue that Carla lost a Knight or Bishop when Mary caught her off guard with this cheap shot.
When I was in the Navy, one guy was bragging about how great a chess player he was. I played him once, and got him Fool’s Mate in 3 moves. Then I never played against him again. 🙂
Knew a guy in highschool like that… a few weeks of talking himself up finally led to a showdown in the library (I had a well-earned reputation to uphold). First, I beat in ten moves. Second, I took my queen of the board at the start and still won. Finally, I sat in another room and texted him my moves. Still won.
He didn’t play me again after that…
I love the aesthetics of a chess set. My game is nonexistent, though, which keeps me from buying one.
Although my cat, I’m sure, would just LOVE for the chance to have 32 new toys to bat around…
Personally, as a chess player, I would consider that cheap shot equivalent to having the board thrown at me, and Carla was simply clever enough to run with that and say, ‘Okay, let’s fucking play.’
Mike drop.
As in Mike drops in and hands Mary a nickel, because she just got reamed.
Along with a second one for also getting publicly creamed.
Cream Pie is the name of a sex act and I am perfectly okay with never ever finding out what it entails.
It’s fairly vanilla in that it’s the standard act of sex by which procreation happens.
Well, any non-oral way of shooting semen into someone counts. So that includes the kaboodle and people on the pill.
Let that which haunts yet infuriates you most, my existence continue to do so. Allow the moment my grin burned it’s self into your memory torment your every waking moment, as my name echoes in your ear keeping you up at night, However, after your nothing more than dust upon the earth 100 years past your death, than and than do you have my permission to forget my name, but never my face. Now, what’s my Name?
Mary:(silence) C-Carla!
You’re god damn right.
This. As satisfying as the machine and the humiliation has been, I want to hear Mary say Carla’s name, unwillingly.
FRANCIS!
http://tinyurl.com/hsnm3sa
Carla hit the bullseye, causing the rest of the dominoes to fall like a house of cards.
GOOOOAAAALLLLLLLLAZZZZZOOOOO!!!!!
Super satisfied, thank you Willis
Existence is the greatest “fuck you” to some people.
Indeed.
Billing her for the pie is a very nice touch.
I hope it was an expensive pie.
It’s not like Mary’d be obliged to pay, though.
Oh, of course not. It’s just the principle of the thing.
Why not? She took it and destroyed it.
Because it’s crystal clear — and any recitation of the facts of the matter will make it so — that Carla intended Mary to get that pie. What’s she going to do, sue Mary for non-payment and confess in court to planning an assault?
Moreover it’s a basic piece of contract law that it’s a meeting of minds. If that doesn’t happen — and for obvious reasons didn’t here — it’s invalid. You can’t retroactively bill someone for something they didn’t agree to in the first place. So even if Carla were to sue over non-payment, she’d lose.
And doing so at all would undercut the entire arc, which has been about Carla handling this shit on her own, without needing any authorities to do it for her.
Well, I mean, it’s her pie. She was holding onto it. Mary stole it out of her hands. Mary would owe her for a new pie seeing as how she stole and ruined the first one.
But like, this is all moot, because Carla has no intention of involving any form of authority, because she’s more than aware of how authorities of all stripes treat trans folks and especially trans folks who defend themselves in the most minor of ways.
Carla is not going to get Mary in trouble for jack shit. Because the point is more to make Mary aware that she can’t just treat Carla like a disposable pawn in her moral crusade against “The Gay”. Like some “misplaced freak” who doesn’t have a name and a right as much as Mary to be here.
To get personal revenge because the system has failed and will almost always fail those like Carla.
That’s not how theft works. Carla would have to outright lie to present this as theft, and a civil case is a non-starter for reasons I’ve already outlined.
As you say, though, it’s irrelevant because Carla won’t kick this to the authorities, for a whole pile of reasons (and not just fear of anti-trans reactions). The fact that Carla has her own room and no roommates, and is openly (if quietly) trans, suggest to me there’s at least some degree of systematic support for her being in IU.
But Carla’s very much >not< a person who defaults to complaining to someone, or getting them to do her dirty work for her. It's one of the strongest contrasts between her and Mary.
Trans people get single rooms in dorms in order to technically meet Title IX requirements while still maintaining a level of deniability if a bigot registers a complaint. A means of technically respecting her identity enough to not be breaking the law while allowing systemic denials of her rights.
A single room is a major red flag that the level of support she has within IU depends a hell of a lot more on her parents being who they are than it does show a genuine system support for Carla’s identity.
So if I walk up to you, grab up your phone without your consent and in doing so it falls to the floor and breaks, am I not liable for it? I would owe you nothing at all?
Possibly. I’m curious as to if there’s any depictions prior to this that might shed light? Ruth, for example, was about to go nuclear on Mary before she got shut down via blackmail.
Pylgrim: Your analogy is flawed.
I was under the impression that theft was the act of someone taking the property of another person without consent or agreement. Carla may have known that Mary was going to take the pie, maybe even wanted her to take it, but she never gave permission or consent. She wouldn’t have to lie in court. She would just have to tell them that Mary took it without consent or permission, which is true. Mary literally snatched it out of her hands without Carla giving any indication that Mary may do so.
If I put a lock on my phone that’ll self-destruct the phone’s contents, and someone steals my phone from my hand and breaks it, they’re responsible for ruining my phone. Saying that Carla was, in so many words, ‘Asking for it’ when Mary stole her pie doesn’t excuse the pie theft.
I think this would be history’s first self defense argument to justify stealing.
Theft, in civil law, is trespass to chattel. It’s a tort, which means the defendant is liable if her conduct was tortuous. Snatching someone’s property out of their hands is unquestionably tortuous, so Mary would be liable.
A good defense attorney might be able to mitigate the damages by arguing that Carla’s own conduct was tortuous for setting up a situation to exploit Mary’s paranoia. But that would require convincing the judge/jury that a reasonable person in Carla’s situation should have known that a person in Mary’s position would pie herself. Also, getting into the origins of Mary’s paranoia with regards to Carla opens a much bigger can of worms.
…not that this is ever going to make it to a small claims court, unless that pie was baked by some Michelin chef out of the most outrageously overpriced ingredients possible. But the law is strongly in Carla’s favor here.
Foamy:
I think you’re doing a lot of confusing of terminology.
Now, let’s set aside the improbability of any of this, ever, going to any actual court of law, be it civil or criminal. We’re assuming that hurdle has somehow been leaped, and the parties are now before the bar.
Mary could be charged with theft and destruction of personal property, as she both removed the pie from Carla’s possession without permission, and (in opening the box) caused the pie to be destroyed prematurely. As even on a gratuitous case, such a minor loss would at most constitute a misdemeanor, she might be ordered to make restitution and pay a fine per the laws of Indiana on the matter.
Meanwhile, Mary could sue Carla, claiming that the pie constituted a booby-trap and thus violated the law on those grounds. However, again, the lack of real damages means that a minimal judgement would be awarded–most of it being court-costs in small claims court.
@Cerberus, Wait, is that why trans people get single rooms? I went to a very LGBTQ+ positive college, where everyone would’ve liked a single. I don’t know whether trans people specifically got singles there. However, if I was in charge, trans people would absolutely have that option, in order to neatly sidestep the potential jackassery of roommates and/or roommates’ parents who might object to rooming with her. (Like, Carla doesn’t need that BS, the college doesn’t need that BS, let’s just offer her one of those coveted singles and avoid the potential for bigots to freak out.) If the housing department gives transfolks singles, I’d sooner assume that they’re primarily interested in avoiding a bigoted shitstorm. Am I hella naive?
Not that I think you’re wrong – I just must have missed it, but where is it mentioned that Carly is trans?
It’s come up a lot as the current plotline is all about Mary’s transphobia. But it was first stated explicitly using the trans-word here:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/antagonize/
There’s hints throughout the archives — as I discovered when I did a “wait what?” archive dive — but this is pretty damn explicit confirmation and it’s what kicked off this entire pie-to-the-face plan:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/wrong-2/
also durring the “Whiteboard Dingdong Bandit” arc
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/04-the-whiteboard-dong-bandit/permanent/
That’d be one of the hints I mentioned. I really was kicking myself by the time I got to that one for not catching it sooner. 🙁
Also, after recent comic events, seeing this one here hits a lot harder:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/04-the-whiteboard-dong-bandit/leads/
Mithras, it’s easy to miss because Carla has always been a character who happens to be trans rather than The Trans Character. Some genius has been done there…
It’s also a bit clearer if you’re familiar with Shortpacked!, as the robotic Ultra-Car (Carla’s Walkyverse counterpart) is believed to be male until they get a female humanoid chassis.
In D&D alignments: Carla is the CG who used to be LG until she figured out that where she lives, being aligned with the law just screws over the weakest.
Yup. I doubt she started as anti-authoritarian as she is now, but x years of dealing with transphobic Indiana and she’s well earned her disillusionment.
It’s not like Carla is going to argue she was assaulting Mary tho. She’s going to say she didn’t intend for Mary to have the pie – it’s rather part of the point of the bill. The easier argument to make would be that Mary stole the pie. And I’m not actually sure ‘carla intended for mary to have it’ would be easy to get away with in court (Or would fly in any case. But I’m pretty sure you’d know the latter better than me, so I’ll accept it)
I mean, it won’t happen, you’re right but you’re the one who took it there in the first place.
Like I said: “Carla would have to outright lie to present this as theft”. :p
Carla assaulted no-one. A contract may require a meeting of the minds, but a contract is not the only way to incur liability. The pie was rendered unfit for its normal use by Mary’s unprovoked actions. She completely owes Carla for its replacement.
Any recitation of the facts? Carla was innocently standing in the hall overseeing the operation of an experimental and completely harmless piece of performance art while holding a container of pie when she was approached by Mary who without any permission grabbed the box from her by force and improperly activated the Expermental pie delivery mechanism thereby destroying the pie. Carla didn’t call Mary over, said nothing to Mary to indicate the taking of her pie was okay, and certainly gave no indication she wanted Mary to destroy her pie. Under this completely accurate statement of facts, how can you possibly conclude that Carla intended Mary to get the pie.
If Carla wishes to take Mary to court to recover her damages, the first step is to send a demand letter by registered mail billing her for the pie she destroyed.
Clif: The trouble there is that your “recitation of facts” contains several, you know, lies.
I suspect — but I’m not >completely< certain — that having a mechanism hit someone in the face for you would still qualify as "touching someone rude or disrespectfully" under Indiana's battery laws, precisely because of situations such as this. If not I'd be very surprised if there's not some other provision that criminalizes it, because it's too big of a loophole not to be closed.
(and either way it would be an assault under the laws I live under, so I'm going to keep right on referring to it as that).
And yet the enforcement of such a law would only occur with an intent to use state power to punish a minority group member. Jailing someone for pieing someone or for merely touching someone else “disrespectfully” usually only comes when the police want to jail you for something and this is as good an excuse as any.
Arguing it is the same as striking someone physically with the intention to cause harm (yes, not the legal definition, but the publicly understood definition of assault) would be a hard case for a lawyer (owing to the jury following the common understanding of the term) unless said prejudice was in play for the jury.
That all being said, yeah, this being Indiana, if Carla was less rich and less white, I could see her being in a jail cell for this bullshit or at least being written up.
Wouldn’t make it any more right or any more worthy of being considered as equivalent to actual assault.
… like I get you’re just doing a devil’s advocate legal argument thing here, but this gets really uncomfortable in light of how much actual violence and assault trans people face in real life and how if we so much as do the minimum to fight back, we frequently are jailed and charged with assault, even if it’s to save our own lives or a shadow of the violence we face (especially if we are trans women of color):
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/11196-no-justice-when-women-fight-back
I’m aware of the statistics, Cerberus, though I suppose you’d have no reason to know that.
I find the insistence on this not being “real” assault (like last comic, where you airquoted it) and/or only is only prosecuted out of prejudice/desire to arrest someone for other reasons bothersome, though. It absolutely is assault; the idea that a pie to the face is harmless slapstick is, in real life, is not an accurate one. People go to jail over it, and if you were sitting on a subway and somebody came by and swung a pie into your face you’d damn well think you’d been attacked and you’d be >right<.
Like if this wasn't a pie, but one of those cartoon boxing glove deals, is your reaction the same? What about a non-injury punch? They're all the same class of behaviour.
Point out one lie in that recitation of facts. Go on, we’ll wait.
Yes, pieing someone in the face is assault, but setting them up to pie themselves in the face after stealing from you is another kettle of fish.
foamy-
Bull-fucking-shit are they the same class of behavior or carry the same weight in terms of damage to the victim.
I mean, legally, sure, the assault laws are purposefully vague, which is part of a much longer conversation about the racist/classist construction of laws and how they are enforced unequally to create a system where a certain class of people are held to one standard of laws where minor actions receive disproportionate punishment while major actions by a more privileged class receive diminished or no punishment (see black people thrown in jail for minor drug offenses while those who gun down unarmed black teenagers walk free or why Johnny Depp will never see the inside of a jail cell, but Cece McDonald spent 19 months in jail for not letting herself get killed).
But in reality. In our reality. Bull-fucking-shit. If someone was to push a pie in my face or tap on my shoulder it would in no uncertain terms not carry the same weight as someone punching me in the face or trying to cause permanent injury. Carries nowhere near the same damage either physically, medically, or in terms of PTSD. I’ve had food thrown at me for my identities. Food thrown with literal hate behind it.*
And I have been physically beaten for a perceived identity (a guy threw a plate at my head and then tackled me and started punching me in the face because he thought I was a gay male), and threatened with murder on at least two or three other occasions. I got out lucky, no lasting physical scars outside some temporary black eyes, but a lot of my close friends haven’t. They carry lifelong scars or chronic pain or major PTSD from having been jumped and queer-bashed.
I understand fully and completely that the law sees those two as equivalent. But fuck that. A pie in someone’s face is as non-violent as it gets and the fact that it gets slapped down as assault is why it’s been used in so many protests, because it tears at the underbelly of the law and how it is used to oppress and dominate the powerless to a disproportionate degree.
It is not actual assault. Legal assault? Sure, according to the law. But a physical beating? FUCK NO.
*A footnote to note that if I had gone to the police after the food throwing, they would have laughed at me. Fuck, after I was jumped and beaten for being perceived as a gay male, the cops who investigated spent the entire time trying to argue that it must have been my fault that it happened and then did nothing to the man who beat me (he was literally allowed to go to work the next day despite this occurring at a company dinner my friend invited me to. My friend was fired the next day for “causing a disturbance”, but was really about him being perceived as a gay male as well because who gets gay-bashed if they’re not gay, right?)
Seriously, shit like this is like Exhibit Number 8 billion of why our legal system is broken and abusive and prone to gross miscarriages of justice as a commonality rather than a rare exception.
I didn’t say anything about “a tap on the shoulder”. That doesn’t count as either “applying force” — the Canadian definition with which I am most familiar — or “touching someone rudely or disrespectfully”.
I remind you that we’re talking about a pie being shoved into someone’s face, not a light tap and that the comparisons I made were directly to two other things that also >explicitlyonlyreallyworst< version of that crime should be a really familiar construction to you. And it's nonsense there and it's nonsense here.
Maybe you're operating on some assumption that because I'm saying this is an assault I'm equating it to a violent beating? I'm not, and for that matter neither does the law. There's often multiple classes of offense (Indiana has this) and variation of sentencing within a class of offense (also this).
If someone hitting you is assault even if they don't hurt you — and I don't think anyone is arguing that it isn't? — why does it suddenly not become so if they have a pie in front of their fist? Because pies are funny? It's a stupid brainbug and it's why stuff like it doesn't get treated with the seriousness it deserves.
… what the devil happened to my post there.
It’s a fucking WHIPPED CREAM PIE!
I don’t give a fuck about the technical definition of assault. Thinking people SHOULD go to jail for pushing the equivalent of shaving cream made out of sugar into someone’s face is the literal logic of bigots (as in it was the argument Anita Bryant tried to make when she was pied for actively trying to criminalize teaching while gay) and it is FUCKED.
Especially with all the bigots that Willis is smacking down trying to build an argument that Carla is actually an abusive man who beats women because pie = assault with intent to injure.
I do not have enough middle fingers for this bullshit.
Also, way to fucking gloss over how the law is applied unfairly in this regard. Cause, yeah, that happens all the fucking time. Hey, here’s everyone’s favorite street gang masquerading as a police force getting caught out trying to charge an innocent suspect they beat up with “destruction of property” and “assault on an officer” for the crime of supposedly bleeding on their uniforms:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/15/the-day-ferguson-cops-were-caught-in-a-bloody-lie.html
“pie = assault with intent to injure.”
Once again, you appear to be thinking I’m saying that… but I’m not. Assault covers a range of things and is usually legally subdivided into multiple categories, with multiple sentencing outcomes, for precisely this reason.
Moreover, I don’t believe I’ve said, anywhere whatsoever, that there was an intent to injure here or in any of the analogies I drew. The eaten middle portion of my post above yours was going to point this out, but something got chewed up by the brackets.
But: these are still assaults. Again: if this was a boxing glove, would we be having this argument? If it was a single punch to the gut? Something doesn’t stop being a crime just because it’s not the most extreme example of its category.
Speaking with no authority whatsoever, a pie-launching arm would certainly be assault if Carla had actually, well, assaulted her with it directly, or offered her the box. But the only reason that Mary was in a position to be hit with the pie in the first place was because she first took the box Carla was holding out of Carla’s possession (which Carla did not offer to her in any way). I see no reason that Carla would or should be liable for that. Even if Mary tried to argue that the machine was an attempt to scare her into grabbing the box, Carla can truthfully claim that she told Mary that the box wouldn’t help her.
The pie-launching arm can be compared to a door with the words “keep out” on it and a bucket of water balanced on the top.
Dangerous? Yes.
Lawsuit material? Difficult. Especially when injury can’t be proven and the victim received prior warning against touching the box / door.
However, battery law is also sensitive to the use of things closely related to the victim, in Mary’s case the fact that the entire installation was parked right outside of her front door, and in the case of the water bucket prank would be considered battery if said bucket was placed on Mary’s door.
“Clif: The trouble there is that your “recitation of facts” contains several, you know, lies.”
The real trouble is that you forget that you are looking at this with the point of view of someone essentially standing outside their universe, aka the point of view tantamount to an omniscient god. How would you prove to a court from within their universe that this was a lie? because if you can’t do that then this would be an open and shut case of theft. Whether you agree with it or not.
foamy- Then allow me to simplify, the assault law as currently written is shit, deliberately used and exploited to justify the petty enforcement against the powerless while ignoring the violent assault (by a public, not legal definition of the term) of oppressed group members by the powerful.
And you are making an intentional bad faith argument surrounding said the technical limits of the bad law to argue that since this could technically be considered assault under the terms of the terrible law as exists, that that should be the case.
And you are building that bad faith case by deliberately conflating our broken legal definition of the law of assault with our common societal idea of what an assault law should cover and then retreating under the technical legal side when called out.
In short, you are arguing intentionally in bad faith like a shit lawyer over an impossible scenario because no one in their right mind thinks this is going to court and if it did, Carla would be fucked no matter what because our justice system fundamentally doesn’t work in any way for the benefit of trans people.
Period.
In case you missed it, lower down, I was asked to leave the discussion. I’ll note that I emphatically disagree with your characterization of what I’ve said and why and leave it there.
Not to counter your larger point, but in this particular case it might work for Carla. Only because her parents could back her up with expensive lawyers.
Even more than the legal system is geared against various minority groups, it’s rigged in favor of money and class.
Cerberus- I want to hug you. I genuinely want to hug you. I want to give you my rabbits (who are very cute) for extra hugs. I’ve been comparatively fairly lucky with my transition- even if the system set in place in my country screwed up a few times. It honestly made me want to hug you to read your personal accounts.
Just… Fuck transphobia. And homophobia. And pretty much all the “you’re different to me therefore less of a person” that goes on in the world.
Assault?
And as for “retroactively bill someone for something they didn’t agree to in the first place,” I think yanking something out of someone else’s hands – arguably theft or some form of assault – constitutes some form of agreement.
Whoops, I’m WAY behind y’all. That’s what happens when I start a reply and then get distracted for an hour or so, I suppose.
Yes, assault. Or, well, since Indiana doesn’t actually have an “assault” statute on the books, battery. Either way, the essential elements of pieing someone are precisely the same as punching them.
I also like the suggestion that hitting someone in the face with something isn’t an assault, but taking something out of their hands is. :v
Carla didn’t pie Mary. Mary seized the box by force without permission, and then effectively pied herself with the mechanism.
If Carla had pied her by simply throwing it, that’d be assault. Which is probably part of why she did it, the other being that this was more humiliating.
It’s still an assault if you build a machine to do it for you. If you build a booby-trap and someone triggers it >you are still responsible for it<. If Indiana's battery law doesn't cover it something else will, because a situation where you can rig devices to attack people with no legal consequences is too big and too exploitable a thing to exist.
So if I were to build a booby trap in my front yard, it’d be my fault if someone ignored a ‘NO TRESPASSING’ sign and fell into, let’s say a covered pit? I don’t think so. The box wasn’t Mary’s to take, and it’s because she’s the sort of person who’d disregard that that it worked without a hitch.
You might not think so, but unless your local laws are very strange, you’d be wrong.
(handy example: http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-263.html)
I can’t reply farther up but it appears that the link in your post is “sadlyno.com” which looks like some great content (and amusingly the first post I saw on that site was one of Cerberus’s detailing that “trans people exist”)
Austyn-
Aw thanks, I don’t write for the site as much as I’d like these days, but it’s where I’ve blogged for awhile.
I don’t think the box actually qualifies as a “booby trap” (which would be, in fact, illegal) under Indiana law, because the definition requires that it be intended to cause “death or bodily harm”, and I don’t think a pie in the face reaches the threshold of bodily harm (and certainly not death, unless Mary has a really severe pie allergy).
Reading the law you posted, it seems like the NO TRESPASSING sign should be adequate to cover liability. You are warning/ordering them to keep out of the unsafe area.
I would guess that the moment you put “DANGER” on the no trespassing sign you’d pretty definitely be covered- as long as you had a wall or fence.
But weighing in on the debate, theft is theft, yo. If someone stole my bag and hurt themselves because I had an unsheathed blade in there, that’s not on me. They stole my freaking bag.
Sigh.
I don’t know whether it says more about me, or about the rest of you, that I felt I had to google this.
Section 35-43-4-2 of the Indiana Code defines theft as follows:
“A person who knowingly or intentionally exerts unauthorized control over property of another person, with intent to deprive the other person of any part of its value or use, commits theft, a Class D felony.”
So whatever Carla may have intended or hoped, she didn’t actually authorize Mary to take the pie. HOWEVER, it’s also pretty clear that Mary didn’t intend to deprive Carla of its use — she just wanted to see what was in the box. Based on what she saw there, she might then have sought to deprive Carla of its use or value, but that’s just a hypothetical. So no, it’s not theft.
Also of interest is the definition of criminal mischief: “A person who… recklessly, knowingly, or intentionally damages or defaces property of another person without the other person’s consent”. That swipe was pretty reckless and that pie was pretty well damaged, but yeah, it’s hard to argue lack of consent. And because it was an unintended consequence on Mary’s part, it’s hard to argue “attempted criminal mischief” based on her lack of awareness of Carla’s consent.
All that said, what really matters is whether Mary THINKS she has to pay.
… and also what regs about student conduct the University has.
Where the heck are you getting the idea that Mary just wanted to see what was in it? Mary jumped to the conclusion that the box was in some way going to protect Carla from whatever the Rube-Goldberg machine was supposed to do, and thus took it away, to protect herself and deprive Carla of same protection.
Pettifoggery. The box was in the possession of someone not Mary, and marked as the property of someone else not Mary. There was no express or implied statement that Mary had any right to the box, which she seized on her own initiative.
All this may be the most complex legal argument I’ve ever seen regarding some stupid bullshit like a pie to the face.
I’ll lay odds that this pales in comparison to cases seen in real courts every day. http://www.stellaawards.com/ has a few examples.
Mary swiped the pie out of Carla’s hands. It did not have Mary’s name on it. That’s theft. Mary is liable for the pie, and I’m betting the Ruth can (with some prompting) quote some rules about theft of property. Hell, technically it was Robbery, as she took the pie by force. This could be a criminal charge.
Misdemeanor at most, and no prosecutor would take it up. None.
Prosecutor? No. Threatened Resident Advisor? You betcha.
Resident Advisor has no legal power to make anything a criminal charge. Yes, Ruth could talk about it, though Ruth could also have talked about Mary quite intentionally destroying Carla’s property – the skates – and didn’t.
And yes, circumstances have changed, but I don’t see that they’ve changed to this point.
(Besides, I was addressing “this could be a criminal charge.” Yes, it’s a misdemeanor – http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/incode/35/43/4/35-43-4-3 – up to one year in jail and a fine of up to $5,000, but in practical terms, a monetary penalty of three times the value of the “conversion” item, which in this case, let’s say it’s an expensive pie, you’re looking at maybe $45 – see http://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-defense/crime-penalties/petty-theft-indiana-penalties-defense )
But my more relevant point being:
Calling it a criminal case is an empty threat. Ruth has already levied empty threats against Mary, and Mary threw it back in Ruth’s face. And I don’t think Ruth is stupid enough to do that twice.
Who said that the prosecutor would get involved. That’s something for college administrators, which Carla just pointed out will likely be happy to side with Carla on if for no other reason than to get on the good side of rich parents (who may be IU donors).
Granted IU in this universe appears to be run by people entirely free of either ethics or competence, but there’s no legitimate way to make a theft charge stick, and Carla has zero reason to try or to follow up because it would defeat the entire point of this scheme.
^This.
She stole the pie, and that could get her expelled. .
Mary can transfer to Anderson, and Becky can take her place at IU. Everybody wins!
Needfuldoer:
Nope, that’s a clear loss for Anderson. =)
GuruBuckaroo said “this could be a criminal charge.” That requires a prosecutor, and no sane one would be bothered with this for even a millisecond, so it can’t.
I mean seriously, it’s 100% DO NOT WASTE MY TIME WITH YOUR COLLEGE SHENANIGANS territory.
That’s an important clause for any serious law enforcement agency.
It was not reasonably foreseeable that opening the box would destroy property.
Doesn’t matter under Indiana law. Ind. Code § 35-43-4-3 : Indiana Code – Section 35-43-4-3: Conversion:
(a) A person who knowingly or intentionally exerts unauthorized control over property of another person commits criminal conversion, a Class A misdemeanor.
( http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/incode/35/43/4/35-43-4-3 )
This doesn’t count as unauthorized — or at least you’d >really< have to stretch to turn "I fully intended this person to take this from me" into "I didn't consent to them taking it from me".
“I’m totally hoping she’ll take the bait and steal this from me” isn’t the same as “I’m giving her authorisation to take it.” Similarly to how Westboro Baptist et al – to bring up a recently-discussed example – are hoping they provoke violence against them with their protests so they can sue people does not make any violence against them magically not assault. It’s still assault, even if Westboro are hoping it happens.
But again, as I keep saying, no prosecutor would take this no matter what the details are, so there’s no criminal case. None.
Why would you reasonably conclude Carla intended Mary to take and destroy her pie? Did she call Mary over and say, “this is for you.” ? I agree that a criminal charge is probably a non-starter, but small claims court is there for a reason and if Mary simply ignores it, Carla could also request injunctive relief that would prevent further damage to Carla’s property by say, forbidding Mary to enter a building where Carla is residing. Mary might get such an injunction overturned, but it would cost her more than the pie and she might find the injunction inconvenient in the mean time.
ha ha HA small claims XD
no wait even better
JUDGE JUDY
Judge Judy is arbitration and requires the consent of both parties in order to occur. Why anyone smart would chose to use Judge Judy to solve their disputes I have no idea, but when I observe the participants I can see that they don’t.
Clif-
Interestingly enough, she made a considerable effort to actively dissuade her from grabbing the box, so yeah, by the law in a just world, Mary wouldn’t have a prayer if she tried to make that argument stick. In our world? All that matters is Carla is trans… which is why Carla’s ideal scenarios all involve never involving any form of authority because she’s been betrayed by them all way too many times.
“what box, this box?” counts as “considerable effort”?
foamy-
Well if you’re going to go with the bullshit argument that she encouraged Mary to grab it, it’s literally infinity times the amount of effort she put into actively encouraging her to grab it, since she didn’t actually do that.
Okay, all this legal devil’s advocate bullshit is making me legitimately angry in the Cerberus Smash sense, so I’m bailing on this shit. Read my note above about how broken the assault laws and their enforcement are if you care to. But beyond that, I’m out.
I don’t believe I at any point said Carla encouraged Mary to grab the box, so no, I’m not making that argument.
I’ve said Carla planned for Mary to grab the box, intended for Mary to grab the box, and wanted Mary to grab the box. Playing coy “I’m not touching you” games is not something that goes over well with police or judges.
Being trans is not something that goes well with police or judges, so if it actually went anywhere in that route, she’d be fucked no matter what she did or tried to argue. Hence why she won’t ever be going to the authorities even if Mary were to stab her in the kidneys.
The system is fucked. Blood soaked and bitter. And the law as it currently exists does not give a fuck how many of us bleed and die.
That is not universally true.
Apropos of nothing, I used to be on a (often hilarious, at first) political discussion email list that had a mascot character named Foamy, the Rabid Hyena.
So every time you post anything, I’m seeing old-school Foamy and giggling, regardless of content.
At least it isn’t that sonofabongo of a squirrel this time ’round. *grumble*
You are arguing with a trans person about how a trans person is treated by the law, in practice.
She comes from a place of real world knowledge, you come from a place of armchair pedantry.
You are objectively wrong and I think you know that.
Yeah, this is becoming increasingly gross. Walk it off, Foamy. Find another argument somewhere.
Nightsbridge: I am dead certain that “the law doesn’t care how many transpeople die is not universally true” is not something I am “objectively wrong” about. World’s a big place.
Sorry, missed your post while I was replying. I’ll bail.
Foamy: “That’s not universally true”?
It is if you’re trans. Or bi. Or autistic. Or some variety of not-white in a white-dominant society.
Number of times I’ve had authority figures back me up when I was being obviously bullied in a bigoted manner (sexual harassment, gender expression harassment, sexual orientation harassment, ableism, etc): 2. Once when an authority figure took some kids to task for giggling over how my asthma made me sound like a squeaky toy (at 25), and once when a teacher rode the bus and saw sexual harassment I’d been complaining about for over a year when I was 8 (the harasser was 16). Oh, but the principal and my parents both thought that I was the one at fault and he got kicked off the bus for a year but I got suspended from school for allegedly enabling him somehow? By “not telling anyone” even though I’d been kicked off the bus before for “causing a disturbance” and kept in for recess for “lying” about “a nice boy” like him? And when I pointed that out, I was told I’d been “leading him on” by not hitting a kid twice my age and three times my weight who had a history of explosive violence that I’d seen on the school bus and who I was genuinely afraid of. So that’s really only like 1.5. Fun bonus times: I did hit a different kid who sexually harassed me two years later, and got suspended for violence, though he didn’t get suspended for sexual assault (which is what groping someone’s ass without their consent is).
Number of times I’ve had authority figures bend themselves into pretzels to victim blame me: I lost count before I hit middle school.
* The sexual harassment one above
* The time I was suspended from school because kids kept following me around hitting their wrists to their chests and making beaver faces shouting “r****d!” at me. I apparently should’ve figured out a way to “defuse” it, which made me worse than the kids yelling ableist slurs at me because of my disability.
* The time kids stole my book and tore it up, and I got punished because I used the word “asshole” at the kid who tore up my book. He didn’t get punished, nor did his friends, because apparently using recess to read instead of trying to socialize with kids who would punch me in the face if I said hi (yes, really) meant I deserved it. “Recess is for playing, anyway. Why were you reading?” and “Just try to act normal and fit in more, and the other kids will quit picking on you.”
* The time I was kept in for in school suspension after I got jumped at my locker, the locker slammed on my head, and kidney punched enough times I lost count while they called me dyke and queer. For “fighting,” even though I didn’t have a chance to throw a punch. My attackers? Got off with warnings. Also got told that I should not try to act so much like a guy, and people won’t “prank” me like a boy. (Is it fighting or a prank? It’s a prank for the attackers and fighting for me who got jumped at my locker, apparently).
* The time I was kept in the school’s isolation room for two weeks because I got tackled by two other kids on the playground and had my face smashed into ice repeatedly until the area around my eye looked like hamburger (I still have scars). The kids who did it got a single day of detention. Again, I should’ve “defused” it which apparently made my actions worse than the kids who slammed my face into the ground. (Also I got told that if I’d wear pretty things and not act so much like a boy, they wouldn’t pick on me so much)
* The time a guy tried to attack me for being a “dyke” with the intention of corrective rape (he mentioned that he’d “make me straight”). I was able to get away. Cops threatened me with assault charges (I scratched him in the face and kicked him in the groin) if I pressed charges, because I guess it’s only self-defense if you code cis and straight in your gender expression (the cops spent more time talking about my haircut and my clothes and how that could “provoke” someone than about the incident itself).
I could go on, very easily. But basically what it amounts to is this: If you have someone being a bigot to you, and authorities get involved, they will find a way to blame you for it, because blaming you for it is easier and goes along with their prejudices. It doesn’t matter if you’re an 8YO on a school bus or reading a book on the playground or minding your own business at your locker or just walking down the street. If you’re facing some form of bigotry, you have to be that perfect victim to have even a ghost of a prayer of someone taking it seriously, and even then you probably won’t (the number of autistic kids who get killed by their parents and have their murders written off as non-crimes is heartbreaking, as an example. Activist groups have days of mourning for a reason, and that reason is that if we don’t remember and demand action, nothing will happen).
ischemgeek: This is heartbreakingly true. In situations like this people with privilege (example: my dad) don’t understand why you “didn’t just say something” and you’re a walking testament. *Sending good vibes and hot tea*
Nightsbridge and ischemgeek-
Thanks.
Also, to anyone of the foamy mindset of “nah, Cerberus must totally be making up how the current state of law is not a friend to trans people”:
http://www.avp.org/storage/documents/Training%20and%20TA%20Center/FORGE_Trans_People_Police_Incarceration_Facts.pdf
We trans people know how unequally we are treated. We’ve measured it. We’ve studied it. And when we are allowed we’ve submitted our findings to general academia.
The amount of times I’ve been WWT’d (walking while trans a sister phenomenon, though albeit not nearly to the same level of harassment as walking while black) because a trans woman walking down the street must be a sex worker donchaknow even if she’s wearing so much clothes everything but her ankles are covered. The amount of times I’ve personally seen cops mistreat trans friends of mine and fundamentally refuse to investigate crimes against them. The amount of trans people who’ve learned to give up on authority figures ever getting their back. I mean, for fuck’s sake, the “trans panic” defense is still a go-to legal strategy in hate crime murder cases these days and it’s the go-to defense because it’s had a really good success record. Hell, it took until 2002 with the murder of Gwen Aruajo for a single jury to reject the trans panic case in the trial of a murder of a trans person.
These days, most police forces know that if they acknowledge the hate crime aspect of a trans murder, they’d have to investigate seriously, so most police departments have to be harangued by activist groups to acknowledge that a trans hate crime victim was even trans much less that their trans-biased murder had anything to do with their trans status. Quite a large number of individuals read off during Transgender Day of Remembrance never have their murderers caught or tried, because the cops never bothered to put forth the effort to do so.
And we know how many trans people have been thrown in jail for the most bare bones crimes possible and how disgustingly many trans people and especially trans people of color are found trapped in our prison system, often in the wrong jails and having been subjected to frequent abuse and assault at the hands of the officers supposedly charged with their protection.
The numbers are not pretty. And they reveal a system that fundamentally fails trans people and especially fails trans people of color.
Which is why most of us when we are beaten in the streets like dogs, when harassed or sexually assaulted or raped, when chased or stalked, view the cops as an option of last result, knowing that what we’ll find if we do the “right” thing is just more abuse and dehumanization and blame for how we’re murdered and attacked.
Also, so many *hugs* for ischemgeek for what you’ve gone through and how the system has let you down so frequently. And thank you so much for being willing to share that.
Foamy is technically correct. It isn’t universally true. The existence of a single counter example is enough to prove that.
Practically speaking though, it’s true far too often. Often enough to establish a pattern. Often enough to make turning to the legal system a horrible risk of more victimization.
thejeff- I mean yeah, not every single case involving a trans person involves unsympathetic police, legal system, or grave misjustice. Hell, I cheer the rare few times when justice is actually served for our community (the Gwen Araujo case in particular has a very special place in my heart for the trans panic defense no longer being a guaranteed defense strategy), but yeah, as you note, it doesn’t change the reality that the trans community is misserved by authorities enough that it would take a very brave trans person or trans supporting advocate to believe that a trans person will receive just and fair treatment by the criminal justice system.
Carla probably isn’t actually gonna bill Mary for the pie! The point of saying she’s going to bill Mary, it’s really a parting ‘fuck you’.
I know, I’m the one arguing against this being a possible criminal case. While technically possible, it would never, ever happen, nor should it.
The person I was replying to brought up the lack of intent to destroy, and I was just noting that under Indiana law, that’s not a requirement. Because I am a pedant.
Honestly, I think Carla will definitely bill Mary for the pie. She just won’t bother trying to collect. Just her little way of saying ‘Hey, remember that time you fucked with me and it went hilariously badly for you? Good times.’ That’s what I’d do.
You’re talking about a girl who reasoned that jamming a ginger snap under a door was sufficient to fulfill her promise to Billie. She is TOTALLY billing Mary for the pie.
Huh, okay, criminal conversion looks like a better fit for this than the two I found. Hmm….
… yeah, okay. Even if someone argued that it doesn’t count because Carla intended for Mary to take the pie, it would still be ATTEMPTED criminal conversion, because Mary was operating under the belief that Carla did not consent to having her pie taken.
This is the same way that stealing a bait car that the cops fully intended for you to steal is attempted car theft and buying a packet of perfectly legal sugar from an undercover narcotics agent is still attempted drug possession.
You’ve gotta go up to at least forty cakes for any criminal charges to stick.
Well, that’s just terrible.
It includes the price of the skates I’ll bet.
If it doesn’t, it should. “Convenience charge.” XD
Delivery surcharge. Maybe even shipping and handling, since it was packaged up and brought to her doorstep. “Handling” is vague enough to hide extra fees in, just look at infomercials.
I just hope the…
BILLINGSWORTH IT
GET IT?
…
GUYS?
Nicely done. Have a pie.
Noice.
They say living well is the best revenge.
Carla proves that living awesomely is even better.
The greatest revenge is a life well lived, unfettered and unbroken by the hatred and sabotage of others.
It’s why my sole act of revenge against the fuckhead who calls himself my father was proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could survive without ever contacting him again, never allowing myself to ever let him bully me into reparative therapy, without any safety net at all.
And it’s even better when the lies they tell family to tear you down and build themselves up backfire spectacularly in the process.
Yup, I don’t think my dad was prepared for me to stop fighting for my humanity with the family and just accept my disownment once and for all. But it meant that all the people he had power over he couldn’t use anymore and he no longer had any means of accessing me and my life.
Cerberus: well lived, unfettered, unbroken, and celebrated. ‘Cos what you post here is sheer, generous, deeply-appreciated magic.
I know I’m not the only one from the pentecostal world who thinks so, which delivers a to-me beautiful irony: the tribe this non-entity surely imagines is squarely behind him is one that he’ll find cheering you on if he ever goes looking.
It’d serve him bloody right.
“Cerberus: well lived, unfettered, unbroken, and celebrated. ‘Cos what you post here is sheer, generous, deeply-appreciated magic.”
+100
Go you 🙂
Just wanted to say that.
You win.
So it WAS just a Flash and a Pan.
I was halfway expecting that bouncing bowling ball to connect with one of Mary’s feet. But I guess Carla doesn’t believe physical pain is ridiculous. Financial pain, however…
The financial pain is just rubbing salt on the delightfully fresh wound. Gotta get it while it’s still raw.
Actually this is Flash and the Pan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZBuag4Nw8Q
And that is the look of defeat on Mary’s face.
I’d say it looks more like utter confusion.
Both. Both is good.
That’s deep.
But not too deep.
Dangit, I was so ready to be first commenter, or at least second to Ana Chronistic. Better luck tomorrow night/morning.
Would this file under evil cannot comprehend good?
I guess so.
I’d say this one is more like awful cannot comprehend epic.
Oh, totally. Mary genuinely believes everyone is as twisted and evil as she is, and doubtlessly assumed that Carla was going to come at her with every ounce of venomous retribution she deserved. Instead, she got completely outsmarted and humiliated with no damage whatsoever. Look at that face, she doesn’t even know how to process it. “…She let me LIVE?!”
This could be the first step on a long road to reform for Mary. She’ll never get over being a self-righteous asshole, but she might just learn to let people exist and refocus her reflexive intolerant hatred on more acceptable targets.
Who is this woman, what sort of devil is she
To have me caught in her trap, and choose to let me go free?
First time ever posting, but this is gold. I love you.
Yup. It’s the failure of her imagination brought on by the inflexibility of her hateful beliefs. She believes that everyone must act like her, taking everything personally and seeing themselves as epic avatars of good or evil (mostly evil). Just as petty, just as desperate to win at all costs, just as giddy to utterly destroy.
But Carla is not Mary. Their positions are not equivalent. Their actions are not equivalent. One is full of genuine violence and intentional attempts to emotionally wound and destroy hurt her. The other throws a pie in her face and shoots up some lights. Because Carla is not some “other side” for Mary to battle against. She’s Carla. And she’s human. And she’s done being the stand-in for some asshole’s “moral crusade”. Especially in the context in comic she is in of the last couple of months of endless bullshit intentionally hateful legislation.
Cerberus, as always you’ve nailed it. This is exactly what’s awesome about Carla here.
(Wipes a tear) That was beautiful. Just beautiful.
Works for Me, Mr. Willis!
Carla FTW
Let me put this out in front, I don’t like Mary. I also don’t like a lot of the other characters either, Carla included. I mostly hang out and just read the sad adventures of Joyce.
But didn’t this whole thing start over a pair of roller blades?
They were quads, you insensitive butt
It escalated when Mary went to Ruth because she didn’t think Carla ‘belongs.’
Yeah, but it did kind of start because Carla’s a horrible neighbor. Not taking Mary’s side here, just saying Carla isn’t exactly a great person to be around.
It amazes me just how many people seem to think wheels on carpet are this incredible imposition.
So much this. Skates on carpet? Not really much in terms of noise.
Because it was never about noise. It was never about Carla technically breaking the rules. It wasn’t even about Carla being rude and refusing to respect Mary’s inherent “superiority”.
It was always about Carla being trans and that being an affront to Mary that needed to be torn down a peg.
And that has now been spelled out quite explicitly in the comic, so I think all the various Mary denialists can fuck right off now with this desperate bullshit and zombie mythology, cause it wasn’t any more convincing the first time around when everyone was pretending that Becky not using $20 to magically fix her life made her a user and an abuser to everyone around her.
It started long ago, because Mary wanted to hurt and humiliate Carla the entire time. The skates were just an excuse to go forward with it.
Mary is always looking for excuses to hurt and humiliate other people. It’s how her worldview operates.
Well, it is against the rules, and the comic did in fact portray it as annoying. Plus, Carla clearly set out to annoy Mary on purpose long before Mary started spouting transphobic crap at her (prior incidents notwithstanding).
Fact is, we like Carla, but we like her in the same way that we like the average sitcom character: she’s entertaining to watch and she seems fun and clever, but God we’d want to punch her in the face if we ever had to actually spend time with her in real life.
Eh, I’d describe some of the cast like that (mostly Ruth and Malaya), but as for as “love to observe through a one-way mirror” characters go, Carla’s pretty mellow. She’s an annoying butthole but that’s not the sum total of her character, and has been blatantly compassionate at times despite her repeated insistence that she’s an unflappable badass prankster who ain’t got time for your rules so put it in the suck-it bucket.
They’re both horrible people. The difference is that Carla is just horrible and annoying. Mary is horrible, sanctimonious, and bigoted.
Plus, Mary reflects a position of way more societal and political power.
Carla is horrible and annoying. Mary is horrible and oppressive.
You’ve seen how often Mary checks her door, right? The *slightest* noise in the hallway sends her scampering to open it?
No. Carla was not being a horrible neighbor. If it had been quiet hours? Yeah. Then you can make the case Carla was being a jerk. In the middle of the day? There is no fucking WAY Carla’s skates, on carpet, could make more noise than, say, the couple one room over going “What do you want to do for lunch?” “I don’t know, what do YOU want to do for lunch?” back and forth for *an hour*, no could it have been louder than people outright *talking in the halls*.
No. Mary was looking for something to complain about Carla about-and I suspect Carla’s been around long enough to *realize* this fact, hence, ignoring Mary’s complaint. If she was, in fact, really bothered by the sound, she could have taken it to the RA. She instead decided to destroy property.
This this this this this.
Mary is a curtain-twitcher. Billie quietly exiting Ruth’s room down the hall is enough to get her peering in the hallways hoping to get a scoop she can “use” to tear someone down.
Hell, this plan relied on that habit of Mary’s to even work in the first place. It couldn’t be more spelled out in comic if Willis inserted himself as a 4th wall breaking author insert to literally spell it out.
I’m honestly curious whether Mary came out because of the skating noise or not. My assumption she did because she really was just annoyed by the noise and wanted Carla to stop (which she didn’t because she’s Carla). The thing is, EVERYTHING AFTER THAT, is Mary being a hateful vindictive transphobe scumbag. It’s a distinction a lot of people are hung up on and which confuses me.
Mary came out because of the skating noise. Just like Mary comes out for every other bit of noise in the hallway. But remember, even if it was just “skating noise”, she knew, just like everyone else in the hall, who’s always on skates. It’s not like she heard skates and then found out it was Carla, she had to know (or at least assume) it was her from the start. So the transphobe bigotry kicks in even before she opens the door.
Yup, on that floor skates=Carla. And it’s a large part, arguably the entire part, of why things escalate as quickly as they do on Mary’s part.
I don’t doubt that, it’s just I think Mary isn’t smart enough to have come up with a convoluted hate plan. She’s Chaotic rather than Lawful Evil. It was a spur of the moment act of evil which she kept escalating because, well, she’s an awful phone of every conceivable type.
Are you suggesting that wheels on carpet is so annoying that it counts as a good enough reason for Mary’s bigoted actions, her blackmailing of Ruth, and her bullying?
Allow me to counter with: Fuck that noise.
Seriously, this this this. I’m so fucking done with that fucking transphobic denialist shit once and for all.
Cause fuck. That. Noise.
I hate loud and obnoxious neighbors. None of that makes a damn bit of difference when hate speech is involved. The big difference to me? Replace Mary with Billie and the whole skate story becomes a fun bit of slapstick humor which ends with the (presumably easily removable) glue. Mary? Blackmail, abuse, and hatespeech.
Small point.
Her skates were permanently disfigured and ruined owing to her using high-grade glue that melts plastic:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/wrong-2/
But yeah, point stands because even if Carla had actually been loud and Billie had poked her head out, Billie would never have escalated to trying to destroy her skates in the first place. And Carla would have been far more receptive to being told to knock it off.
Yeah, it was a moment of unfortunate realism which turned what seemed like funny slapstick into a nasty bit of vandalism. So, yeah, the glue business became a lot less funny (not that it was all that funny to begin with) when it damaged her property.
The glue bit was when it crossed the threshold from “annoying but ultimately harmless” to “of course you realize this means war”.
Throw in Billie or nearly anyone else the whole thing ends with “New skates? Awesome.” That’s assuming anyone else bothers opening the door.
Much like Carla’s “Parkour!” didn’t escalate into a war with anyone, despite being louder and more dangerous. (Though I’ll admit to some disappointment it didn’t escalate into a rooftop race between Carla and Amazi-Girl.) 🙂
Ooh, that would have been cool.
Assuming you’re replying to me, then no, I am not suggesting that. Not at all. I am suggesting that people’s actions should be judged independently of the actions of those around them, or, simply put: other people’s bad behavior does not justify yours. Mary is absolutely a horrible person. The fact that Carla was annoying does not justify Mary’s horrible actions. Likewise, the fact that Mary was horrible to Carla does not retroactively mean that Carla has done nothing wrong.
Carla was making a very slight amount of noise in the middle of Friday morning. It’s a dorm, you deal with it. If it was quiet hours, sure, complain to the person and if that doesn’t work, go to the authorities. But I guarantee you, there will be 3 people playing music and a 4 in a Madden tournament at some point that day, all of which are louder than Carla. Mary has to learn that not everything is going to conform to her wishes, and adapt, or she’ll never last a semester.
Oh for the love of… Are there still people who try to insinuate that it’s all Carla’s fault because she was “too loud”? They’re fucking skates rolling on carpet. There’s no way those are any louder than whatever other noises you expect college students to make during the day. Mary doesn’t give… a… flying… fuck about the noise. All she cares about is finding any excuse in order to try and impose her will on others and “win”.
Welcome to the next few months of every appearance of Carla, brought to you by the type of fucks who try and argue Becky’s selfish when she’s literally sacrificed herself to save people’s lives.
It’s like a new posting rule needs to be made: be mindful of coming to the defense of bigots, you may be everacted.
I got accused of being transphobic for being on Mary’s side right up until the hate-speech which, well, is apparently an easy mistake to make when you’re siding with a known transphobic bigot against a trans person. Huh. Who would have thought. One should always be aware it’s never just the incident but all the circumstances around the incident.
It’s something that really bothers me here, because Carla was clearly at fault right up until that point. Well, until the glue thing, actually. That was taking it too far. Still, the fact that Carla is trans does not excuse her actions or mean she has no flaws, but apparently any criticism of her means you must be siding with Mary and be a transphobic bigot, because nobody here understands the concept of nuance.
I think said eviscerators were aware of Mary’s motivations at the time. To my knowledge they won’t argue that Carla can be/is a jerk, it was just a disproportionate reaction at the time.
But I’ll never argue the fact that dealing with people is just hard. Too many different views to ever make everyone happy.
Light noise pollution and annoying personality vs destruction of property and assaulting the very dignity and respect that all human beings deserve and purposefully attacking a person’s sense of identity.
Seems a totally equal situation here. /sarcasm
It’s not a vs. thing. People’s actions are independent of other people’s actions. It is possible for both parties to be wrong in a conflict, and it is also possible for them to be different degrees of wrong. The fact that Mary is far worse than Carla does not mean Carla is not wrong. To invoke Godwin’s law, I could murder a dude and say it’s okay because at least I’m not Hitler, or I could just not murder a dude because it’s wrong, regardless of whether or not other people have done worse.
^ THIS
In person, if I say something is mean, I always get told “No, what would have been mean is [something 10 times worse].” All it does is deflect the issue. Someone doing something awful doesn’t become less awful when compared to Hitler or whatever.
They’re both antagonizing each other, and either one of them could have stopped. But they didn’t. You can’t control other people, but you can control how you treat them.
While I fully agree that neither is in the right here (Mary for being a bigoted, controlling, all-around terrible person & Carla for being the obnoxious human she is), I still stand by the notion that it isn’t an equal situation. Yes Carla could be a better human, but so could Mike. Mike antagonizes everybody and everybody brushes it off. Carla is being purposely targeted by Mary for being trans, and if she didn’t retaliate (in a non-violent manner), Mary would continue to feel as if she had some power over Carla – just as she exerts power over Ruth.
Can people just stop being bigots and hating on Carla and Becky for existing? That’d be great.
@Tacos Oh, for the love of… are there still people who don’t blame isn’t exclusive to one party in any given conflict? It is possible for Mary to be horrible and transphobic and for Carla to be annoying simultaneously, and for the incident to be a result of those two things combined, rather than entirely one single person’s fault. And yes, it’s true that Mary is actively looking for reason to make others’ lives miserable. That fact is completely independent of Carla’s actions. Carla broke the rules by skating in the halls, and refused to stop when asked to. Similarly, the fact that Carla was an annoyance does not justify Mary’s transphobia and horrible treatment of Carla. They are both at fault. Not equally at fault, what Mary did is way worse, but Carla is not completely blameless.
Actually I just went back and reread it, Ruth just sorta’ instantaneous transmissions herself there all of a sudden. Like some sort of super hero….hmmm.
I figured she was on her way to tell Carla to stop making a racket.
Unless she has Super Bigot hearing or something.
Wait, am I forgetting something here? When did Mary do that?
I think Dalrint might be referring to this:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/03-when-god-closes-the-door/misplaced/
“Misplaced freak”, Bob damn is Mary a walking pile of shit.
It did. And then it escalated, as these things tend to do.
You’re right, Carla really should be billing her for those too.
Not really. I mean, yes, it started in the comic, from what we’ve seen, with the rollerblades. Mary overreacted, Carla took it badly, Mary went nuclear, Carla went slapstick. But I can almost guarantee you that Mary’s been consistently rude to Carla starting well before the rollerblade incident. As someone that transitioned while working, the LEAST offensive thing a Godbotherer of Mary’s ilk has done to me is preach to me, in a car, while we are driving to a job site. I’ve also been shunned, threatened, fired, and publicly humiliated. And amongst my friends, I’ve had one of if not the smoothest transition.
🙁 Fuck those people, you’re a rockstar.
So much this. Godbotherers aren’t typically subtle about their hatreds. And Mary has been anything but subtle.
Also *hugs* for dealing with that shit.
And yeah for the denialists, that shit happens all the fucking time to trans people. Like, I’ve had folks literally spit on me as if warding an evil spirit, been discriminated out of jobs for being trans, been disowned by my family for being trans, been publicly humiliated and threatened with death on far too many occasions, and had a pleasant evening explaining to my girlfriend on her birthday dinner treat to me that the reason we weren’t getting served ever was because they were hoping to get us to leave because they didn’t want a (slur for trans woman) in their restaurant “scaring off” the other customers. And that wasn’t the first dining experience I’d had where that happened.
Refused to be served in a restaurant? What was the Chef Special, Crow?
I absolutely hate that you got disowned for being transgendered.
When my son came out to my wife and I at the age of 12, I made it very clear to my entire family that he is a boy, will be treated like a boy, referred to as a boy, and that I would unequivocally cut out anyone that had a problem with that.
I am not about to allow anyone to mistreat my son the way you were and it makes me sick that your parents would not do the same for you. I hope that you have found peace.
People like you make the world a better place. Thank you!
This right here.
I have much better family now. Saw them over the weekend, even. It’s small, made up of just my aunt and uncle and cousin. But it’s something. And it’s supplemented by created family.
So I’ve been very lucky in that respect to have a piece. A piece too many trans kids don’t get to have.
I’m always so very happy to hear how you’ve advocated for your son. You’re a great parent and he is very lucky to have you.
I know this sort of stuff happens, I have seen it happen, I’ve read and heard numerous stories of it happening, but every time, it brings the same gut reaction of “… Fookin’ really?”.
If someone isn’t trying to actively make other people around them uncomfortable, just… Leave them be.
These hateful bigots really need to just stop, take a deep breath, relax, and actually realize that (a) if their religion is correct, then 1) Jesus loves trans people as much as he loves anyone else; 2) God made them that way so who are they to say God was wrong when He did so; and 3) judging people like that is so, so very wrong, uncool, and against the direct commandment of God. As is treating anyone with anything less than love and compassion; (b) trans people are fucking awesome, and tend to be fantastic, wonderful, beautiful people with more inner strength than these bigots could ever hope to have ; and (c) just fuck off already. It’s not about you, asshole. It was never about you. You don’t want to deal with them? Then just open your eyes, see their actual stated gender, and move the fuck on. Because the world is changing, we are realizing that the extremely limited and limiting outlook we used to have is not all that there is by a very, very long shot, and those of us in what used to be the shadows are actually full of more glorious colours than you have ever seen.
Don’t run from it, embrace it. You’ve been seeing the world in black and white, and now you’re getting a full rainbow. I know it seems scary. But there isn’t anything to be frightened of. It’s bright, and loud, and glorious, and if you want you can be a part of all that colour and glory too. You just have to be willing to stand and embrace it, instead of trying to pull all the colour out of the world again, and shoving it back into that millennia-old box of yours.
The world is just awesome. Come join us in it.
“God made them that way so who are they to say God was wrong when He did so”
Unfortunately most Religious people don’t think God made them the way they are. Most Religious people are dead certain that gay and Trans people are Gay and Trans because The Devil lied to them and told them it’s okay.
That’s what I always heard when I went to Church and it never sat right with me. Might have also contributed to me denying that I was Bi for so long too.
To do otherwise would be to admit that their God specifically made people one way to torture them and have them suffer to prove their faith. Which makes the god botherers itchy. Nonetheless, it’s the position they retreat to after “they’re literally demons taking human form” and “made a sinful choice” and “led astray by Satan” have all run their courses.
Unless you’re a Calvinist.
No-one really seems to like Calvinists.
Even Calvinists don’t really like Calvinists.
Not trans but yeah same on bi front.
The least offensive thing I’ve got from a god-botherer is someone spending their entire work-day passive-aggressively quoting Bible verses at me. Well, that’s tied with the god-botherer who refused to talk to me at all for two years after I told her what I think of a god who believes loving someone is a crime worthy of eternal suffering.
(I might live up to the angry atheist stereotype a bit* whenever god-botherers start in on me for existing while bi.)
*Okay, a lot. As in, I have told people that their god is unworthy of my worship and that if their god runs heaven, I’ll take hell in a heartbeat. Protip: If you ever want to completely gobsmack a god-botherer, use that retort. Just be sure to leave shortly thereafter, while they’re still doing the stunned-silence thing because some god-botherers get violent if you reject their beliefs so unambiguously once they come back to their senses.
I just have to thank you for reminding me of the term “godbotherer”. I’ve always loved it, but it had slipped out of my usual vocabulary. I need to remember to work it back in more often.
You’ve definitely never owned a good pair of rollerskates…
At the absolute worst, Carla was being kind of obnoxious. Going to the RA and saying “Hey, my neighbor is skating in the halls and making a racket, can you do something about it?” would have been a reasonable response if the skating was really THAT much of an issue.
Mary instead chose to purposefully and deliberately destroy Carla’s property, in a way that could have gotten her badly injured, and then GLEEFULLY threw transphobic abuse at her. She was just waiting for an excuse to treat Carla badly, and skating in the halls was that excuse.
Yeahh…. if that was a “racket” though, where was everyone else complaining?
Mary made a whiny passive-aggressive move to get her own way over an AFFRONT TO ALL THAT IS DECENT, who cheerfully and quite rightly told her to get bent.
I was under the impression the glue stuff would be easily cleaned off but that’s clearly not the case. Then again, Mary is the kind of person who doesn’t play harmless pranks.
My point isn’t that Carla was actually making a racket, but that if it was the ACTUAL noise that was bothering her, Mary would have been entirely reasonable to go to an RA about it. I would’ve thought she was overreacting a bit, but it wouldn’t have made her a bully.
Assuming a reasonable non-Mary character, going to the RA isn’t an option because Ruth is a verbally abusive and physically threatening individual who hurts people for no (apparent) reason.
But in a reasonable world, Ruth would be able to strike at Mary for hate speech and not be blackmailed for it because of her sexuality. Ruth would be fired for her violence and vandalism while Mary would be on her way back to Hateopolis, IN.
She’s not being blackmailed for her sexuality. From what I can tell Ruth isn’t allowed to to have a sexual relationship with any of the students she’s responsible for. Since it’s a single sex dorm yes it only turns up in cases of same sex attraction, but the rule is about preventing abuse of power.
Considering the language Mary used I’ll eat my hat if she wasn’t at least partially motivated by the fact that it’s a relationship between two women.
Given Noel was the RA on Felicity and had a romance with her, I think that’s a questionable assertion. Then again, Ruth SHOULD be fired for a hundred other offenses. The romance element? Nothing.
And I quote: “defiling the cheerleader”.
Whatever the actual authorities would think, in Mary’s mind it’s the sexuality.
thejeff-
Yup, Mary spelled it out rather explicitly why she felt Ruth was primed for blackmail and it was “defiling the cheerleader” and “allowing perverted vagrants” to stay (i.e. hasn’t discovered and kicked out Becky).
In Mary’s mind at least, it’s all about the sexuality and if Ruth was merely abusive and not queer, she might have still tried to game her to be her pet gopher (hell, that’s what she tries to do back in the Whiteboard Ding Dong Bandit arc), but she would not have stalked and hunted her or blackmailed her for this.
Mary “finally” had an excuse to take her bigotry and leverage out for a spin, and relished in the opportunity.
Well, at the absolute worst she was being a reckless and dangerous nuisance but it wouldn’t have mattered even if she was actively and intentionally antagonizing Mary; bigotry is not an acceptable means of punishing someone for a transgression. It is never justified. If Mary had just stuck to being a general ass in retaliation to Carla’s being an ass the dynamic would have remained one of two douchebags who deserve the aggravation they inflict on each other but Mary took it into a place of oppression which is indefensible.
This. Yes, Carla was being a butthole. Being a butthole is kind of Carla’s thing, and I honestly didn’t feel bad at all for Carla when she faceplanted because wacky slapstick violence happens all the time in this series. Then Mary decides to be a bigoted asshole and suddenly all bets are off and it stops being an equal conflict between two annoying jerks.
Like, I feel that attempting to mitigate Carla’s actions (which to be perfectly clear amounts to just being kind of a pest), does her character a disservice. Like we’re saying that the real reason Carla didn’t deserve to be misgendered is that she’s That Perfect Girl, rather than misgendering being a fundamentally unacceptable response regardless of circumstance.
The main problem I have with that way off looking at it is that Mary was a bigoted asshole all along. It didn’t start out an equal conflict between two annoying jerks and only stop when Mary misgendered her. Her bigotry drove the whole thing, it’s just that we weren’t clued into it at first – largely because we didn’t know Mary knew Carla was trans.
The other is that if we decide it’s only the open misgendering that matters, not the choice of targets to harass, we legitimize subtler forms of bigotry. This doesn’t show up much these days with transgender people, because it’s still pretty much socially acceptable to be open about that, but it’s very common with racism. There’s a lot of discrimination and prejudice you can get away with as long as you’re not burning crosses and calling people “nigger”.
Carla didn’t deserve to be misgendered, but she also didn’t deserve to be harassed for being trans even if Mary never blatantly said it.
But yeah, Carla’s not That Perfect Girl. She could have avoided the conflict, at least for the moment. She’s canonically an annoying jerk, though that’s more an informed characteristic than anything we’ve really seen on screen. Which has even been lampshaded with the “sometimes we forget you’re an asshole” bit.
You do understand the concept of “escelation”, right?
I assume that Congresswoman De Santo has already blown in like a hurricane, licked most of the pie off Marys face, and then left before anyone fully noticed her.
Someone needs to write that fanfic.
Seconds later (she’s got a really fast metabolism), Robin dies of Mary poisoning.
Suddenly Ms. Bean has an idea…
*Cut to a giant pie with a thought bubble coming from it.*
Thought bubble: Why did I expect this to work?
It probably would have, in Shortpacked.
That despair in panel 3 is even more delicious than the pie itself
Mary, stop and think about what you just said, that machine could have done anything to you. Think of that next time you fuck with Carla.
That IS an important part of the message.
Oh I am pretty sure she is already.
Carla-love intensifies
That was perfect. The build up can be worse than the event a ton of times.
“What’s my Name?”
“Oh I’mma spell it out for you.”
You win!!!!
Carla and Deadpool would get along so, so, SO well. It almost scares me to think about it, because these two combined would be a fucking force of nature and we’d all be doomed, but in the greatest, most entertaining way ever xD
Ehh, depends on who’s writing Wade at the time, plus how interaction with Carla would affect his conscience…
…under the right circumstances, they could just as easily save us all. I’m game for either.
I’m just gonna… add this to my list of stuff to draw…
Shit, I never did make that ToeDad one. I’ve got work to do.
*Glances at sketchbook.* Hrmm… nah, I’ll leave it to you, for now, that Knightfall armor Amazi-Girl didn’t work out. Did get a pretty good Carla sketch into my ongoing page of Willis fanart though. I wanna get at least Becky added before I post it online.
I was SO hoping she’d somehow quip on Mary saying GODdamn but the sucking jesus’ wang bit satisfies me
Aaand, fade to black.
I love how Mary is too confused to be properly angry. “Wait, WHAT???”
hoisted on her own petard
I’m in love.
Well played.
And Mary, it’s really quite stupid to make an enemy of a tech heiress. Especially one who, apparently, might be some sort of engineering major.
Anyone know what “Ruttech” refers to?
rutten technologies? maybe?
Carla is apparently still a rich heiress with inventor parents in this universe, and Ruttech is her parents company.
So it probably doesn’t mean anything.
Carla having parents who aren’t Joe and Rachel is still weird to me.
They ARE Joe and Rachel. An accident with an experimental time machine stranded them in the past (our present).
Maybe it’s Joe’s dad! Joe’s dad is just Roomies!-era Joe, right?
That’s a question for Slipshine.
The company owned by Carla’s family apparently. (Which is a callback to/paralleling of Ultra Car in Shortpacked!)
Apparently the DoA-verse counterpart of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites
My, my! Such language!! ^___^
now mary’s speechless, this is delightful
That is brilliant. Carla also made it a point to throw it in Mary’s face that her parents are wealthy (and probably IU donors), so the administration is likely to be more inclined to see Carla’s side in any dispute between her and Mary.
Yeah, that’s a nice bit of shade on top of everything.
I love Carla so much right now.
I wanna use Carla’s first panel bubble when I’m with testy bigots.
Carla’s the best. 11/10 for super satisfied.
Damn! You…Willis, that was perfect.
Here lies Mary. Rest in porkrinds, ya jerk.
Here’s hoping that’s an expensive pie.
Oh, Carla can price it however she feels appropriate, and naturally R&D materials are expensive as hell. 😀
Especially if she’s using highly calibrated standard reference whole milk powder, [$1,056 per 50g] which of course she would be, because replicability is the essence of science.
This was beautiful.
Re: alt text–yes we are, Willis my man, yes we very much are. 😀
That fourth panel is life.
Cerberus called it beautifully.
Interesting point: Carla dropping in her parents. I read that as… hm, not a threat, exactly? More of a warning, I guess, that if Mary continues this escalation Carla has a lot more resources to call on. Possibly with pull with the university given what we’ve seen of how the admin deal with wealthy and/or politically important people.
Carla’s clearly in the right here, but I’m not sure I like this side of her: Rubbing her family’s wealth and privilege in Mary’s face and (as Foamy pointed out) not-so-subtly invoking her parents’ money and business connections as a threat.
As someone who grew up in a *very* poor family, I’ve been in situations where a wealthier classmate or colleague has used their wealth and privilege as an excuse to talk down to me or threaten me, so this exchange raised a lot of red flags. If Carla were cis-gender I’d almost be tempted to side with Mary and that really bothers me. 🙁
Carla’s been doing a fantastic job standing up for herself here, overcoming Mary’s bigotry with smarts and style, and I’d hate to see her reduced to invoking class privilege and using money and threats to solve her problems.
Eat the Rich, but not for sheltering their kids from cissexism. There’s a reason this is the first she’s actually mentioned it.
Yup.
Like Becky’s irrational jealousy of Dorothy, this is Carla’s actual flaw.
I wouldn’t honestly say that either, any more than I’d villify an upper class black family buying nice, upscale clothing to try to mitigate racism. By all fucking means, use your wealth to insulate yourself from, or prevent, institutionalized hate from affecting you. Just don’t pretend later that the institutionalized hate doesn’t exist, or that ‘merit’ prevents it.
That is true.
I meant more the snotty rubbing in of the wealth and the “do you know who my parents are” style of it rather than using the wealth privilege to mitigate at least some of the transphobic abuse.
A is B, here. It’s not mitigating it in the best way, but it /is/ still mitigating it. Threatening someone with a legal defense team isn’t something poor people can do, but it’s a legitimate defense against actionable hate.
Very much agree. I fully support people using what little privilege they can to forestall or protect where they can against bigotry for their marginalized identities.
With all due respect, this is a very different situation.
Firstly, Carla wasn’t born into an underprivileged family, she was born into a life of privilege in a nuclear, White, upper class, presumably-college educated family, and while her gender identity has undoubtedly led to hardship, her class privilege inherently already provides her a great deal of insulation from social injustice in a way that being from a black family, even an upper class black family, does not.
Second, what’s at issue her isn’t Carla using her family’s connections and resources to build her… do we have a name for it yet? I’m gonna call it the “Revenge-O-Matic”. That was using her resources to balance the scales and push back against Mary’s bigotry, and that’s fine.
Rubbing her class privilege in Mary’s face and going as far as to subtly threaten her with it is, I worry, a step to far, especially for a nice girl like Carla, and I hope Willis is careful not to let her slide down that path. 🙁
Look at all the hate Caitlyn Jenner gets for how much wealth insulates against transophobia. It buys you some major freedoms and major means of fighting back, but it doesn’t make you any less trans in a transphobic world.
For me it’s a great characterization point. Yeah, Carla takes that single aspect a bit to far when she namedrops her parents, which is rather telling given how careful she has been to minimize the fallout in all other ways. It is a little crack in her armor that shows that, yes, Mary did indeed get to her more than she lets on.
Of course, that’s not news to Billie.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/03-when-god-closes-the-door/machinations/
Pah-friggin-leeze, all of you. Until and unless Willis has Carla show otherwise, this is not yet anything more than Carla letting Mary know: “I’m not as insignificant/unimportant/helpless as you think I am.” Fire away, Carla.
I mean, I agree that this really isn’t Carla, like, intentionally rubbing her wealth in Mary’s face, but I don’t think Deja’s perspective is wrong either. Carla’s cold, swift and absolutely ridiculous revenge did come from being able to access technology that she wouldn’t be able to get if not for dipping into her fabulously wealthy parents’ pools of resources.
Like, I’m bi and that comes with a side order of social issues (restricted to heated online discussions for me, as I’m pretty hush about it IRL), but I’m also a white dude living in a first world country. I unilaterally benefit from that, and at the same time can face shit due to my sexual identity. One doesn’t negate the other.
Now that Bagge brings it up, I’m not entirely unconvinced that Carla invoking her parents’ tech firm isn’t actually showing a crack in her armor, and falling back onto something she can rely on in a time of need.
It’s not really different. Carla’s trans. She lacks privilege on one axis, and has it in spades on another. Carla’s family isn’t trans, but I’m not discussing her family’s behavior except as it relates to their daughter. This situation is the definition of intersectionality. This isn’t some weird word we use as a shibboleth.
Mitigating the discrimination their daughter unduly suffers is absolutely class privilege, but unlike nearly every other instance of class privilege, *THIS IS ACTUALLY OKAY*. You are *still mitigating undue discrimination*. This is using your privilege to do some actual fucking good in this world. This is literally what you SHOULD be using it for. What is even better is doing it for more people, and maybe Carla’s parents do (Maybe they don’t.)
If this fit into an overall pattern of Carla even mentioning her family background, I’d be a lot more concerned. But if the only way you can get the rich girl to talk about or mention her wealth is if you repeatedly threaten her safety, well, not nearly so much. It’s still not ideal – Carla shouldn’t be the only trans girl who has access to this. But there’s nothing wrong with a trans girl having defenses. This is itself a good thing.
I do wonder if there isn’t a better way to say it though, one that doesn’t enforce the rich kid name drop of DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM!?
I agree – this looks less like gloating/bullying than like Carla simply cutting off another of Mary’s options before she can try it. Carla knows enough by now to realize that Mary’s blackmailing of Ruth is not just a way to hurt multiple same-sex couples at the same time, but also a way to gain the twisted authority she wants to have over everyone on the floor. As Rutee mentioned above, Carla hasn’t brought up her parents to anyone else (that I recall) – not even in the middle of arguments. I think Carla bringing up her parents here is a subtle (by Carla’s standards) way of saying that if Mary tries to take her utter defeat in the prank war and turn it into a contest of authority/influence, Mary isn’t likely to win that either.
Mary responded to Carla’s skating by destroying her skates. Carla may have mentioned Ruttech to warn Mary that damaging the very expensive experimental lasers would result in a big company coming after her for the damages.
OK DoA tech is advanced over ours, probably because Willis doesn’t want to make the mistake of giving everybody flip phones right before iPhones came out. Right Dan Shive?
Somebody linked to a YouTube of lasers that do pretty much this in real life in the last strip. I forget who. It’s freaky as hell.
I think it was Bagge.
It was AeroQC. This is the video they linked to. And here’s a story about it (or another similar tech from the same people).
well there would have been too much property damage for Nokia’s, and too much soul crushing damage when a character’s iPhone breaks. Flipphones are the middleground.
Does Dan read DoA?
He follows Willis on Twitter.
It got better. Elliot has IPhone superpowers now… somehow.
Magic.
Ahahaha I knew those were lasers.
… we’ve never seen Carla’s parents, have we? I mean, Joe’s not her dad in this universe.
… Is he?
He’s a year younger than her, so I’m gonna go with no.
Joe’s dad is basically Joe with a beard, apparently. So I guess it’s possible that Carla’s dad is Joe-with-a-beard…?
Given how much he gets around, it’s possible that EVERYONE’S dad is Joe-with-a-beard.
He’s like Mike, only he doesn’t need nickels.
(Yeah okay most of the moms in the strip wouldn’t go for him especially when they love their own spouses but I had to make the joke anyway.)
Panel 5
The Face of Defeat.
Looks like she got served humble pie.
C’mon people I know we got puns in us somewhere
*Reluctant slowclap*
Lucky, really, that Carla is a member of the Upper Crust.
*More reluctant slowclap*
All right, pun away. Pie give up.
Yeah, I understand your tin-y bit of reluctance. It’s not like these puns are the cream of the crop. But our quality standards have gone down because we’re on the happieness-high of having seen Mary get her just desserts from Carla’s Confection Contraption Perfection.
I really love your gravatar, by the way. I have good feelings about Brun.
She’s intriguing so far.
Yeah she’s easily my favourite already despite being new!
Just walk away, Mary. Shrug it off, let this whole thing die, and everyone’s life gets better. Yours included.
This was intended as a general post and somehow it ended up here. Weird.
It was also pretty important that the machine didn’t actually do anything to Mary because then Carla would be liable for whatever happened. The pie-in-the-box, on the other hand, was entirely Marry’s fault.
I was hoping this would have a great payoff, and there could be no better payoff than this. Go Carla!
This is great. Not only has Carla gotten vengeance, but with only a few words and a light show, she seems to have mentally broken Mary. She’s so freaked out she doesn’t even have sclera anymore. And that line: “The one thing that angers you more than anything else in the world is that I exist.” Does that count as a badass boast? Cause I’m going to count that as a badass boast.
Well played, Carla. Also, dig the turtleneck.
mmm much satisfaction now i can sleep content tonight
That pie was just a pan filled with whipped cream. Cost 6 bucks tops! You’re clearly rich Carla don’t be a Scrooge about it.
It’s not the actual price of the pie, it’s that Mary took it and in the process of taking destroyed it depriving Carla of the pleasure of consuming it. Assuming that there was something besides whipped cream in it, which I’m gonna go with because it makes billing Mary so much better.
Whipped cream and ants.
Yeah, but is Mary WORTH an expensive pie?
…. pay no attention the the expensive lasers. It’s not like those are actually getting expended in this process.
absolutely satisfied. This is amazing.
You’re right alt-text, that I am indeed satisfied with how this ended. Of course, I’d’ve been more satisfied if Mary then fell into a black hole but whatevs.
More satisfying than I expected. Huzzah!
Here’s an audio version of Mary’s dialogue from today’s strip~
And now all I can picture is Carla leaning against a wall, munching a carrot, and saying, “Eh, what’s up doc?”
Man that pies going to put her back a bit
Yeah I am pretty satisfied that Carla finally admits that she is an annoying person.
She has never hidden it. She takes great pride in it.
Like how Becky takes pride in her lesbianism.
Yup. And how Becky takes pride in being a babbling goofball.
(Another comparison is that Carla’s jerkiness and Becky’s goofiness are both used as self identification and as a layer of defence).
OTOH, Becky’s a lot better at keeping her front going.
I think the only time we’ve seen Carla drop her front was when she was misgendered?
No, we’ve seen her not be a jerk a lot. That’s the only time she was rendered speechless, but we’ve seen her let the jerk persona slip a bunch.
Honestly, Carla’s pretty bad as being a jerk. It’s a mask and she wants to be known that way, but she has trouble convincing people of it.
As Rachel said back in the Whiteboard DingDong Bandit: “Sometimes we forget you’re an asshole.”
IIRC, in an earlier comic, Carla said something about needing to establish her jerk cred with the incoming freshmen.
Yeah, same comic. It’s all these new freshmen. I’ve gotta build mind share all over again.
One of my favorite bits with Carla. Her first real bit of character definition.
She wants a rep as an asshole, but it’s something she has to work at. It doesn’t come naturally.
Partly, as Cerebus keeps saying, she just has no more fucks left to give, but partly I suspect sadder than that: It’s better to be disliked for something that you control, even something that isn’t really you, than to be disliked for what you are. Better to be a jerk and have people dislike you than to try to be friendly and have them hate you anyway for being trans.
…are you reading the same comic as me? Carla “the jerk, ask her, she’ll tell you” Rutten?
She is a jerk! thats the entire fucking point! She’s a jerk but she still shouldn’t have to put up with Mary’s shit! Acting like she’s the second coming of Jesus ignores like half of her personality, and those are interesting parts.
You misunderstand. Her jerkiness is an informed trait. She insists she’s a jerk, but honestly? Aside from some sass and occasional obnoxiousness, she’s pretty mild in the actual unpleasantness department.
Yeah, that’s kind of been my impression. I had never seen her actually be a jerk. Hell, she even was apologizing to AG for holding her down after she attacked Malaya and threatened her and the rest of the group in the Wal-Mart parking lot. SHE APOLOGIZED FOR DEFENDING HERSELF AGAINST THE THREAT OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE.
Mike, on the other hand, is a real jerk. I don’t even buy the notion he does it to help others (with the possible exception of Ethan).
Being seen as a jerk is her safety net. She never wants to be the powerless victim again. Never wants to show that vulnerability to those who would do her harm.
When the chips are down, she’s a bit of an ass, but she’s often helpful in major ways and even drops the sass when she sees another solitary victim in distress.
But she is scared to drop the mask of sass all the time because of people like Mary who take her silence after the misgendering as a call to go on the offensive and an excuse to harass her further.
So better to be seen as a jerk who’ll prank you into next week. No one actively fucks with a jerk.
“MORE COOKIES PLEASE!”
Carla has annoyed herself all the way into my heart for the entire time she’s been present in this comic 🙂
Little eggs, so cute.
And fuck yes, Carla is a jerk, but more importantly, she’s hit that fuck it point that so many trans people hit and is not in the mood to passively absorb constant transphobic abuse without response.
Is it bad that I’m finding myself unable to hate Mary. She’s like a foot smaller then Carla! She’s adorable!
like an angry piece of pie
Smol bigot.
But does Carla want that piece of pie for herself?
In my head she does. Oh yes she does.
I don’t know, at least Peridot is redeemable.
Speaking of, I like to think Peridot got “you clod” from an episode of The Simpsons.
She got it from it being a reference to dirt. They’re gems.
I know, I just like considering other possibilities. I wouldn’t have even considered it before reading “Don’t Cry For Me, I’m Already Dead.”
Take out the text from any of the panels and you can use it a slipshine ad banner
Maybe. How does that work with the fifth panel?
This is a mic drop of epic proportions 😀
“You’re annoyed that I exist” is a GLORIOUS and accurate assessment of Mary by Carla and it’s beautifully satisfying that Carla says that to her while Mary has pie in her face lmao. This entire strip is just so, so, SO satisfying. I’m in love.
Yes, so much. It’s just beautifully played and so utterly emphatic.
Ok, gotta say, while I still fear that this could spiral out of control, especially where Ruth is concerned (because while Mary is a demon spawned from Satan’s canker sour pus, she isn’t entirely wrong about Ruth’s behavior), as far as Carla is concerned, this was amazing and perfect. It’s not violent or overtly aggressive, it’s entirely based on Mary sabotaging herself- there’s nothing Mary can justifiably do (though I’m sure she’ll try), and it’s awesome.
This isn’t over. Not by any means.
Month’s not over yet, alt-text. I’m not letting my guard down that easily.
That said, props to Carla for getting one over on Mary.
In comic, true; we just started October.
I read it as being a real-time reference, though. Since this is the strip for May 31, it is the end of the month. Even if the dorm blew up next strip, that would be June 1 – the month would be ending on this mic drop.
Yeah, I was kinda tired last night when I posted that so it slipped my mind that this is the strip for May 31, not May 30.
Still not letting my guard down, though. Drama is coming.
-insert that gif of Orson Welles in Citizen Kanes doing that slow clap-
Not gonna say much on this cause sure other people *glances at Cerberus in particular* probably gonna do a much better job at it. Just really wanted to join in on the applause and state my satisfaction with the outcome and my enjoyment at seeing Carla one-up Mary in the best way possible: by shoving her existence in Mary’s bigoted face.
I had also wanted to see what I got if I got rid of my own Gravatar and did the random one. I was not disappointed.
You realize that in that Citizen Kane scene he’s applauding something bad (a performance by his wife) and trying to get other people to support him? It’s not really the kind of reference you should be making to something you like. :p
..dammit. I just see it so much around the internet as applauding things people like I didn’t realize the context.
Welp, insert appropriate slow clap gif of your choice.
A bad performance from his wife that she was only giving in the first place (she was no opera singer and knew it) entirely because he pushed her into it, all to try to salvage his own reputation. He’s applauding to make the other people who are afraid of him applaud with him, to try to force a farce into reality…
…which is why I was amused watching that slow-clap gif turn from a sarcastic reaction into a sincere one over time as it lost its context, because that’s exactly what his character was trying to do…
…which is kind of amazing and genius.
There’s a great big pile of Hollywood politics tied up in the backstory of the film, too. A lot of people really, really disliked Randolph Hearst and he was making movies starring his mistress; Hearst regarded the film as an attack on him and the character of Kane’s wife as an attack on his mistress, and did his level best to end Welles’ career over it.
I would hate to see Carla and Mike butt heads. That could get ugly real quick, with a lot of collateral damage.
That might get so intense it ends in a Slipshine comic.
Ordinarily, I’d agree with you, but Carla’s gay. Not even all the anger in the world would make her feel like hate-fucking Mike.
At least…I don’t think it would. Depends on how angry he could make her.
Is Carla gay? I don’t recall her mentioning her sexuality in this particular iteration.
OTOH, Mike and Carla being so angry at each other they break the 4th wall and spitefully have glorious hate sex while arguing over if the encounter is canon or not would be a good conclusion to an all out prank war.
She’s homoromantic asexual, just like her counterpart in Shortpacked! This has been confirmed by Word of Willis. She’s also already mentioned her romantic orientation in comic here:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/03-when-god-closes-the-door/spilled/
IIRC, Carla is ace with a bit of a romantic towards girls.
F*cking got ’em. Get rekt, Mary. GO CARLA!!! *applauds wildly*
Comic Analysis:
This one’s prolly gonna be long… so keep in mind that it’s me who’s saying that.
First up, holy fucking hell do I love Carla. Like not only has she played every part of this prank to absolute perfection, building it off of all of Mary’s flaws and demonstrating the truth of her intentions, but she’s done it without once falling into Mary’s game. Even here, she keeps Mary on the back foot and keeps her emotional reality buried until that brutal Panel 4 and it shows how practiced Carla is as well as how done she is to ever again play the weak and defenseless victim, stitching up her cuts and bruises all alone ever again.
Panel 1: Yes, Mary, that’s it. Just spelling out her name. Because what Carla says in Panel 4, but also because none of this is about injuring you like you do. It’s about embarrassing you, getting you off center and reminding you that Carla is not just some thing to pass off.
Carla has a name. And that name is Carla, not some rando thing they slapped on the birth certificate back when they didn’t know any better. And she is a real person and not your tool.
Also, holy fuck do I love Carla’s sass here. Just a beautiful dismissal to get her so shocked and angry that she completely moves out of her fighting stance and into her hurt and confused pose she adopts for all the remaining panels.
Panel 2: With frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads! Also, I’m pretty sure Mary’s spreading blush is the blush of someone who’s actually thought about what it would be like to suck Jesus’s wang.
Maybe that’s what was in the web searches Carla alluded to back in her first Patreon bonus comic.
Also, nice name drop on the parents. Yes, it’s a bit of snooty rich girl “do you know who I am”-ism, but it’s also yet again a potent reminder that Carla did not spring forth from Satan’s bowels to personally torment Mary. She’s just a girl with a name and with parents and with a full life. Not a political tool to act moral at but a person.
A person with a “fuck the world” attitude and a love of skating who would have happily skated down the hall doing her thing and never giving Mary the time of day if Mary hadn’t tried to turn her into this grand symbol and tool in her ongoing war on queerness.
Panel 3: Yes, it could have done anything, but it also couldn’t. Because that machine doing something to you would have given you an out to play victim. To pretend like some bigots on Willis’s twitter timeline that Mary is some abused scared little girl cowering from the big bad trans. Like Pat McCrory when he tries to call trans people bigots oppressing him and his little state just because he tried to strip their right to pee away and make it a literal crime to go to the bathroom.
If it did something to her, then Mary could have posed and preened and argued about rules. This way, Mary played herself and the machine hits the hammer home with the most hurtful thing she could experience. The coup d’etat.
Panel 4: I love everything about this panel. If I could have a big gay wedding with this panel and it was sentient and capable of consenting to that, I would host it this evening, I love it so much.
Like, first up is her face. Before this her face is all smiles, reveling in her plan going off without a hitch and Mary’s impotent rage about it. But here, she’s deadly serious. She shows the anger and hate and hurt that Mary unlocked in her by deliberately misgendering her and abusing her with transphobia.
She’s painfully real with her and cuts to the heart of the matter.
And that matter is that Carla’s existence is at the heart of everything so far. It’s what has incensed Mary and made her target her in the first place. The fact that Carla exists, Mary has decided to treat as an affront to her personally. An attack on her God and her Church and the new enemy number one now that the battle is being lost on queer marriage and related rights.
Carla exists and that brings Mary to rage, makes Mary hate her, makes Mary try and eliminate her by one means or another. And it’s not isolated, it’s part of a giant society that tells trans people that they are worthless, that they’d be better of eliminated, that their existence is an affront to man and God and society and society is perfectly within its rights to try and shut them out of public spaces so that their suffering is never seen by “normal” people.
That showers and vomits hate onto trans people to the point where our suicide numbers and homicide victim numbers are multitudes higher than most every other minority group out there minus maybe sex workers (which is a group that includes a large damn number of trans folks thanks to rampant societal discrimination).
It’s why all the Mary denialists are so full of shit when they try and claim that this was ever about Carla being loud in the halls or that the transphobia was incidental and not central to their very conflict.
This aspect, the right of Carla to exist has always been the point. And Carla is done playing around with that. She exists. She is Carla. She is she. And she’s not going to politely smile and tolerate transphobic bullying like she’s back in HS in central Indiana.
This is the panel that is this whole arc. The summation and the callout that cuts through the bullshit. And it’s why I’m fully 100% done with any “estrogen can’t melt steel beams” conspiracy theorists who still try and deny after this that Carla’s existence is not the central pivot point of this entire conflict. Is not the thing that Mary hates most and cares about most.
And it’s why Carla is badass, because she’s what us trans people wish we could do without facing the potential of literal death and abuse and jail time for not just politely smiling and absorbing the latest round of “golly gee whilikers, ya sure want me dead” thrown at them.
Panel 5: Never change, Carla. Never change…
Well, actually, definitely change, it’s part of growing up, but in this instance at least, bully on you for using your class privilege to do what we could only dream of in standing up for yourself and your rights as a human being.
*Applauds*
“I am Carla, I exist. I have the right to exist.” Yup, Carla has done very few things that don’t spell out that message in shiny blue laser letters. And that is awesome.
I literally just said I wasn’t gonna say much outside of applause cause was expecting excellent analysis from people like you and, well, here it is.
And also, seconding the motion that Mary denialists who treat this as simply about rollerskating in the hall or simply wanting to downplay or ignore the very real damage that is done by Mary’s transphobic actions as basically being full of shit.
it’s also yet again a potent reminder that Carla did not spring forth from Satan’s bowels to personally torment Mary. She’s just a girl with a name and with parents and with a full life. Not a political tool to act moral at but a person
This is so beautifully expressed, I almost cried.
I love your analysis and I love how you’re completely 100% fucking DONE with Mary apologists, damn right, if you could see me now you’d see me standing up and applauding. Take a fucking bow.
You’re the best, Cerberus, for real.
At first I thought there was no way this perfect gem of a comic strip could possibly be any better, and then I saw there was a Cerberus analysis to go with it and I was proven wrong.
here, have another Orson Wells clap for the pile.
‘Yes, it could have done anything, but it also couldn’t.’
I feel like she’s also just learned a healthy fear of Carla with that line. She has seemed like she genuinely believes that machine could fuck her up, and in doing so she may demonize Carla more, but she also has to admit that she is smart.
And I do mean a healthy fear, I am not meaning that Carla has terrorized her (any more than living while trans, at least)
Like it’s been said before, the ‘noise’ is just a convenient excuse for Mary to spew her vitriol. The existence of anyone who doesn’t share her exact worldview, which is hardcore fundie apparently, offend her on a molecular level, assuming that fundies believe in that. If you share her views, then maybe this isn’t the comic for you.
Also, I did not know that about estrogen. Learn something new every day.
Well, we did cause 9/11, donchaknow:
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2016/05/13/pastor-anne-graham-god-let-911-happen-because-of-transgender-people-in-bathrooms/
Do you think fundie asshats like this ever realize that they make their god look both evil and incompetent?
If the guy’s pissed at transgender folks, and he’s omnipotent, then shouldn’t he be using targeted lightning strikes or something, rather than assholes in planes hitting a non-related target?
Or previously, when the Phelps clan started crowing that he was killing soldiers in Iraq because I don’t hate my brothers-in-law… so can their idiot of a god not tell the difference between a housewife in North America and a kid carrying a gun in the Middle East? Or is his aim just really, really bad?
Honestly, they spend a lot of time standing around yelling “My god hates love and people who are trying to mind their own business, and he couldn’t hit the broad sign of a barn with a hurricane! Repent!” You’d think they’d at least want to make him look competent, wouldn’t you?
It’s good Old Testament theology. God is making Babylon conquer Israel because they’re not sufficiently keeping to the Covenant.
More to the point, it’s a simplistic answer to the Problem of Evil. God is punishing the people because they’re not faithful enough. And yes, God believes in collective punishment.
Theidiocy, it BURNS! …. wait, it’s called “theodicy”? …. I like theidiocy better.
Seriously, I like my theory of “God has bad aim” better. Hurricane Katrina was supposedly to punish New Orleans for promoting a gay lifestyle, and yet left the predominantly-lgbt sections of town relatively untouched? That’s not the kooks being wrong about it being God’s judgement (or, you know, existing at all), that’s God having bad aim! STDs being God’s judgement upon this nation… and being most prevalent in the conservatively religious parts of the nation? That’s not because they won’t do proper sex education including condom use, that’s BAD AIM!
Yeah, I’m standing by this theory, and if I’m wrong, may lightning strike the southern-baptist church down the street from me!
(… why do they have a lightning rod, anyway?)
Also, don’t forget “Touchdown Jesus”, which God smote with lightning that clearly was not meant to show disapproval of ostentatious demonstrations of faith, but must’ve been the libruls’ fault somehow, and God’s lousy aim just kicked in….
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/16/touchdown-jesus-statue-burns-down
The old testament make him look evil, incompetent, insecure or all 3, most of what is not Jesus directly when you think about it.
um… as a Jew, the “old testament” is my holy book. It’s not all bad. It has the ten commandments, it provided laws that gave women an equal right to inherit property and it only allowed slavery as a punishment for the worst offenses and even then with lots of protections for the slave.
It may not be -all- bad, but by and far, the old testament is depicting a god so hideously evil and self-absorbed (wiping out humanity for not worshipping him enough? Talk about narcissism), the best way to describe it would be a downright psychopathic monster.
again, what a lovely way to talk about my religious beliefs. You have all the right to feel that way, but do you really need to call my holy book evil like that? Do I go around calling the New Testament God a monster for letting everything that happens in the Book of Revelations happen? Do I go around citing all the more questionable parts of the Quran as evidence that Allah is evil? No, because those are just part of the story.
Also, the Noah’s Arc situation was also because they had become selfish, violent and doing stuff like human sacrifice. Noah was a lecherous drunkard and yet was still supposedly the closest thing to a righteous person the world had at the time. Think on that.
Considering the stuff god does in that old testament… There is no way, no way, ABSOLUTELY NO WAY that a good supernatural entity wrote that book. If it weren’t humans that wrote it (which it was, of course), then it would have been a devil that wrote it just to see how many people could somehow think of it as holy. It is filled to the brim with absolutely disgusting behaviour from a so-called “loving” god.
Take for example Abraham. God commands him to kill his son, just to prove his commitment to god. That is disgusting behaviour. It is inexusable. It is horrible. Any god that wants me to sacrifice a child of mine is not a god worth worshipping. It is a useless wannabe “god” that can stick its immortal essence up its own ass. Sure, god stopped Abraham in the nick of time, but it should damn well never in a million years have made up such a vile and heinous test of worship in the first place.
Then the whole Adam and Eve story. So many things that is so morally wrong of god in that story, topped off by a healthy dose of pure misoginy, as Eve gets a significantly harsher punishment than Adam for the exact same offense, for absolutely no real reason at all. An offense that they could not have understood the consequences of in the first place, considering they did not know about evil.
And god having bets with the devil about people, and killing off all their loved ones just for the sake of winning that bet… Fuck such a piece of shit “god”, fuck such a piece of shit story, and fuck everyone that tries to tell me that this is a holy book which morals I could learn something from.
And no, I have nothing particularly good to say about those other two books either. More evil disguised as good a lot of the time, and we would be better off without them altogether.
not that Mary is not a bigotted douche for her hateful interpretation of it
Carla rocks so awesome~
Rock, rock, Carla rocks!
One wonders if now Mary will make it her goal to expose the nefarious doings of Ruttech, as obviously it has to be crooked since its founders coddle an abomination like Carla.
I’m overall pretty neutral on Carla; don’t love her, don’t hate her. But she does grind down Mary’s gears, which tips her into the “like group” for me.
yay! Cano, actual, written out proof that Carla’s parents are rich + the name of the company they own!
*canon
But are her parents dead?
She’d have to become Shtick Shift because the role of Grim’n’Gritty Frank Miller Batman already went to Amber.
Someone comes out into the hallway and tells Mary off for loud swearing, because they’re trying to study, dammit!
Honestly that would just be icing on this whole “Fuck You Mary” cake
oh damn
that would be hilarious <3
If it was mixed dorms it’d probably be Mike.
… I’m having trouble seeing why it not being mixed dorms would STOP Mike.
The line seemed to imply he’d step out of a room. To my knowledge he’s barely been seen by us, so perhaps a case of Schroedinger’s Mike?
Apparently the building is co-ed, just that wing is the ladies’ wing. He could totally do it.
I’m sorry Willis, but this month’s end will not satisfy me unless Becky also gets promised puppy hugs
She’s right, Mary: that was her pie. It was in her box. You had no business taking that box out of her hands and getting that pie all over yourself. That was a perfectly yummy pie and you ruined it.
technically it was Billie’s box
Not after Billie gave it to her.
Not Mary’s box. That’s all that matters.
lol. Jesus Wang.
I’ll take Mary’s most googled search term for $100, Alex.
Jesus is the truth, the wang and the life of the party.
One of the best fundy-chanter responses I ever heard was, “I don’t want Jesus to come into my life, I want Jesus to come into my mouth.” (This was at a Pride parade.)
That one made them quail for a second, it was great.
(The closest to a good one I ever had was screaming “JESUS NEEDS NERDS!” and throwing a small box of Nerds candy – underhanded! – at one of them. He snarled at me and caught it, and then looked at it, and got so confused because I just gave him candy and he didn’t know how to respond to that. 😀 )
I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of pointing that according to the weird “lust is the most important sin” rules fundies rant by, my trans queer ass is way holier than theirs simply because I’ve never experienced lust in my life (cause ace, not cause of any actual effort on my part). Tends to make them shift to making “be fruitful and multiply” rants, but is amusing initially for the quick moment of abort.retry.fail that happens.
If they start shouting “be fruitful and multiply”, tell them to read 1st Cor 7. Paul explicitly telling people “Don’t marry and don’t reproduce”.
Seriously, Paul’s writings are about 90% contradicting the rest of the Bible.
Ah, but you see, to the type of people who make these kinds of arguments. That part of the letter from Paul is merely a guideline (because Paul gives in later and says “oh, all right, if you must get married, here’s how to be a sexist asshole”, whereas those rules for roles for husbands and wives are deadly serious and literal, because something something, literal means whatever we want it to mean in the moment.
There’s no method of arguing here that doesn’t end in absolute disappointment, is there?
And that was the vast majority of my youth.
Yours and mine both.
Carla somehow manages to both take the high road AND pie Mary in the face? best comic ever! (and yes i’m including batman ones)
I know, right? Carla is scary good at this.
Just yesterday I made a post about Mary’s character development.
And here we are.
Never expected Carla to give Mary a cream-pie, who would have guessed that Mary was Carla’s type.
Yotomoe
You win 100 Internets.
I kind of want to see what stupid ass conclusion Mary will come to.
I… Wow… Panel 4 affected me, a lot more than i thought it would. I actually started crying. I relate too hard.
*hugs* Yeah, that Panel 4 is powerful as fuck and hits deeply close to home.
Best birth month ever. Thank you so much for strong trans characters, Willis. It means an awful lot to me. It’s not often I get a transwoman to look up to in fiction.
*hugs*
Also, ditto, cause that was put beautifully.
It occurs to me that there are currently two trans characters being simultaneously awesome (1 stepping up for her little sister and one totally crushing Mary with style and grace).
Go Willis!
Per the hot text: yes I am more than satisfied with how this month is ending.
*Bravo*.
And with today’s outburst about the machine and how all it does is to spell out Carla’s name, I believe that Mary now joins the list of characters who have dropped the F-bomb.
Just walk away, Mary. Shrug it off, let this whole thing die, and everyone’s life gets better. Yours included.
She won’t. Cause Mary refuses to lose. Especially to someone she sees as “beneath” her.
She would have escalated no matter what Carla did or didn’t do. But she’s not about to stop now, though she may back off specifically going after her a little and focus more on Ruth who she feels she has more power over.
I can hope.
It’s a nice hope.
Thank you. That means a lot.
I think Carla broke Mary a bit there, I approve
And so Carla never left Mary alone forever.
http://i.imgur.com/qnZnsH5.jpg
(Carla in a skirt is my lifeblood, I don’t care what anyone says.)
And this is a part of the reason why I downloaded the Imgur app.
There’s nothing more fun than a friendship forged from mutual loathing. I’ve had a few of those in my life, and they are just the weirdest thing to go through.
Great for honing your debating skills. Less fun as the years wore on, though.
I have noticed that a few of your older drawings can no longer be accessed due to sad panda going kaput…this displeases me
to be fair if I was using sadpanda 2 things are probably true about those drawings.
1. They’re on my laptop, which is all but trashed at this point
2. They’re not very good.
Hey, if I wrote a fanfic shipping those two and posted it to the Dumbing of Age tumblr, would you read it?
You’ve sold my genderqueer ass on this ship, and I have no idea how. Mary is a terrible person, we all know that, but you’ve sold me.
I would, just for you *wink*
Keep an eye out on the Tumblr in the next few days, then. I’ll write it as quickly as I can.
What’s the URL of your DoA tumblr?
Oh, and by the next few days I mean as soon as it’s moderator-accepted. If you like it I’d be willing to divert energy from this book I’m writing to add to it, definitely, and in general I’d love to hear feedback, especially from the inspiration himself.
I received it, but today might be the wrong day to post it on the blog. I have only skimmed it, but Mary is…. very Mary in it, and all that that implies. Maybe when nerves are a little less raw…
Although I doubt Carla and Mary will ever get together, I wouldn’t put it past Willis to have a plot twist where someone goes snooping through Mary’s stuff and finds several drawings of other girls on the floor in various states of undress.
… Now, I feel it my moral obligation to learn how to bake a pie so that I can send it to Carla. But, she exists in a different world… so… the UPS fees would probably be prohibitive.
Hah, we could take up a Kickstarter collection to have a local bakery make one and deliver it to Willis for us. What town is he in, again?
Also I am thinking banana cream, how about you guys? 😀
Maybe Willis could run a kickstarter for an alt-universe storyline which is basically Mary getting hit by a lot of pies?
… nah, it would get old after a while. Stale, even.
Sweet pickle!
Oh so satisfying, the only way that could make it more was if I had a pie to eat right now.
This goes as the best DOA storyarcs of all time.
Boop!
These last few strips have been sooooooo satisfying. A person doesn’t always “win” in life, but getting the upperhand on people like Mary make it all worthwhile.
Off topic but fantastic avatar. I approve! Dedenne <3
Thank you!
What if Willis let the commenters write and draw the strip for a month
Willis: okay let’s see what happened while I was gone. Hmm starting of with 3 days worth Danny and Ethan making out…wow they are really getting into it….dammit guys that’s supposed to remain on Slipshine! That’s weird, in the fourth strip Mary dies, but in the fifth strip she comes back to life and declares her love for Carla…and then they make out. Ooh some Joyce and Becky strips! Okay so Dina has found a way to clone herself like 20 times and now they are all making out with Becky. Look is every strip going to involve people making out!? Okay a strip with Carol and Sarah, there is no possible way that this could lead to…..OH GOD DAMMIT!
I for one would insist on at least one panel of Daisy still not getting any.
Amidst the giant orgy of people making out is just Daisy in the center, arms crossed, sourest expression on her face you’ve ever seen.
Unfettered democracy is a beautiful thing.
Is, is Carla now better than Mike??? I’m .. conflicted.
well, Mike fav guy, Carla Fav girl for now, they can duke it out to death later…
Soooo many questions answered. And questions to go with those answers.
You know, about a week ago I was wondering what law the comment section would debate next. Got it today. I real think the I’ll send you the bill part was just a joke, I know I’ve heard it before.
In any case, kudos to Willis for taking what could have been a story about “Ally Angst” and turned into a story about Carla arising and seizing the day like a transgendered Newsboy Christian Bale tech genius.
I just hope Carla videoed all of this.
So, to summarize what went down, we learned that Bonnie committed suicide, and Ross, to cope with this while retaining his faith, became overly protective and emotionally abusive of Becky, out of fear she would “be damned to hell” too.
We learned that Jacob doesn’t give a single damn about Ethan being gay, and likely knew the whole entire time.
We…well, okay, we already knew that Mary hated Carla. We just don’t really know why. But Carla’s making it evident that Mary is envious of her for whatever purposes. Parents, maybe? Intelligence?
And finally, we learn that Joyce has learned to tap into her inner hulk and become one BAMF.
Wait, when did we learn about the suicide? I feel I missed a detail.
In the flashback when they broke into the house, she finds Bonnie dead on the bed with a bottle of pills.
Here: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/03-when-god-closes-the-door/ghosts/
(and by she I meant Becky)
Thanks. I must’ve missed that day’s strip.
… Man, that throws Becky’s chipperness in a whole new light, dunnit.
Attempted. Said so in the TW.
That was an attempted suicide. It still hasn’t been confirmed how she actually died.
Thanks for beating me to that. It’s never been clarified in-strip so it’s fair that people missed that, but I feel it’s important for people to acknowledge that attempt =/= success.
Of course, that still leaves some very sad unanswered questions.
For whatever reason, in the back of my mind, something always told me that Bonnie had cancer. Maybe I pulled that from a different comic, or misinterpreted a comment somewhere.
Ross doesn’t really seem like he was a dick back then so much as he was later on though. It doesn’t excuse him, but it makes me wonder what lead to this man’s switch.
And for folks to know why we know that–it was in the ‘trigger warning’ for that strip, which explicitly stated it would contain an attempted suicide.
Yup, just saw that this morning when I reread some strips. This is what I get for staying up for 23 hours, I guess…
…Mary hates Carla because Carla is transgender. Like, that it is literally the entire point of this. Mary considers Carla to be a goddess abomination who belongs in the boy’s dorm because Mary views her as a male and was willing to use blackmail and any other means necessary to force her view on the dorm. And Carla’s revenge her is to literally rub her very existence in Mary’s face, both through pie and her name in flashing lasers.
*godless abomination. Damn typing on phone
Apparently your phone noticed that you were talking about Carla and felt that that was a far more fitting word to use.
Ha, agreed! I was going to say something similar (but less cleverly phrased).
I like your typo. Can I keep it?
“Mary hates Carla because Carla is transgender.”
Today I learned something new. Thanks.
Now I’m even more curious what the hell is in Mary’s head.
Yeah, what Whammy said. It has been very clear for some time that Mary hates Carla because she’s trans, and that’s all there is or needs to be to it.
And the thing is, when the fundamentalists started losing their anti-queer war – and badly – in the late 90s, they began making plans then to take this war against us multi-generational, to embed it into their religion – to move it from an issue of moral policing to a core belief, a central and critical tenet of their religion and tribal identification, as they did with the abortion-rights fight 20-25 years earlier.
The degree to which they’ve succeeded at that should manifest in the next 10 years or so.
Anything goddess does, they no doubt also view as abomination.😄
Huh, this should have been a reply to Whammy.
So this is the time when a true beliver pulls out a gun, right?
Toedad and all that.
I’d be honestly surprised to discover that Mary has a gun. She seems more like the type to believe that her privilege is such a good first line of defense and offense that she doesn’t actually need a second.
I in no way approve of what Carla did, but the logic is flawless.
Why don’t you approve?
I just don’t see the point in pranks. Even revenge pranks against people like Mary.
I’m surprised that no one’s pointed out how Mary is breaking the third commandment by taking God’s name in vain.
Mary is also supposed to love thy neighbor but she’s not doing that either.
Carla kinda did it for us, didn’t she?
Yeah, Carla already admonished her, in perfect form.
Mary probably tends to follow the Bible when it’s in her favour, or it means she can insult/harass people and have the fallback that she’s just expressing her religious beliefs. It’s kinda like the Pirate’s Code, more like guidelines than actual rules.
Where’s the Kaboom?!
There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom!
I think Mary’s ego just went kaboom.
Carla is easily one of my new favorites. ~<3
Yes Willis, yes we are.
I suppose it says something about Mary and how she perceives social interaction (and, possibly, her perception of which of the two of them are the true ‘victim’ in this matter) that she’s genuinely shocked that Carla didn’t cause her serious harm with her gimmick.
Maybe she was looking for validation by victimhood or maybe, like the legislators of North Carolina, she thinks that all transsexuals are, by definition, violent sexual predators. Either way, Carla simply telling her in such a dramatic and, ultimately non-violent way that she isn’t going away any time soon seems to have given her food for thought.
What was that? It was the sound of the mic being dropped.
GO CARLA!
Carla YES!
I’ve been reading this comic for a good while (by “a good while” I mean probably a year but I caught up on it in three days when I started reading so it feels like a lot longer) and I’ve just gotten around to starting commenting. Also: Go Cerberus! I love reading your commentary on all the comics and your insight is grand.
I LOVE TRANS REPRESENTATION.
That is all.
I love your gravatar!
Thanks!! I love yours too!
Becky’s of the world unite!!!
Hmmm. A parliament of crows, a school of fish, a terror of tyrannosaurus (yes, that is the official term because of awesome).
A… Multitude of Becky… A Binge of Becky… A Blast of Becky….
No, it doesn’t quite come to me.
A Band of Becky?
Cue the instruments *tweedledoooooooo*
A nuked closet of Becky?
I like “a pride of Becky”, for some reason.
Ooooh that’s a good one.
Nailed it!
I’ve been waiting for that joke. Was debating on posting it.
I don’t know where to add to the very long discussion about whether Carla has a case or not in regards to the pie, but this reminds me of an article I once read about a woman whose lunch – homemade by her husband – would constantly be stolen at work. One day, to find the culprit, the woman’s husband made the lunch extremely spicy to the point that the man cried out in pain an got a very upset stomach.
Going down the internet article rabbit hole, I saw that in similar scenarios, even though the thief was not supposed to steal the lunch, it was deduced that it was a planned attack on the thief and they were prosecuted.
In any case, Carla got what she came here for, and it to have Mary buy her a pie. She got her crowning moment, she played her like a fiddle, and she got her right where it stings most. Carla feels vindicated and the last line (and perhaps a bill in the mail) is salt on the wound and nothing more.
… I also wonder if poor Willis, after thinking of a non-violent and blameless solution to Carla’s predicament, ever expected such a heated debate about Carla suing Mary over pie.
The internet is astounding.
Because ~obviously~ thievery isn’t a problem, but having a planned response is. /sarcasm
I totally agree with your assessment; regardless of the legality bits Carla did what she came here to do, and she did it fabulously.
Since the invention of Dumbing of Age, there are 5 strips that were rated as the most passionate, the most amazing. This one left them all behind.
Y’know, today is my birthday, so thank you for today’s comic, Willis. ~_^
And go Carla! You rock!
FWIW, I strongly suspect that Mary will never see an invoice for that pie. It was just Carla’s way of delivering a final ‘gotcha’. We Brits call that ‘rubbing it in’.
WARNING! POTENTIAL SPOILER AHEAD IN THIS COMMENT1
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From Willis’s preview posts on Tumblr, I think that there will be a ’round three’ (the skates incident being very much ’round one’) that will include a shouting match in the corridor. Given the location and the apparent time-frame, I will be very interested to see if Joyce is present, gets involved and how it affects her view of those from a similar religious background to her.
I’ve said this before but I think that a Joyce/Carla friendship, as bizarre as it would be, might be an interesting and fruitful narrative direction to take the strip, especially in the contrast between Dorothy and Carla.
I can definitely see a Joyce/Carla friendship developing and that serving a similar narrative role as Joyce’s interactions with Ethan before Becky came out in helping get her adjusted to the concept of trans people before her sister comes out.
I also would be very curious because Carla is way more confident in her identity than Ethan and less likely to take shit, so I can see their interactions going in some interesting narrative directions because of that as well as Joyce’s likely ignorance to start.
Does Joyce even get the concept of trans people? I know one of the things she said was “that’s Carla, she gets her own room for some reason.” I wonder what she’d think of that?
She did get some pamphlets from that one event since then.
I’ve mostly come to terms with this. Mary and Carla have a rivalry born of mutual hatred in which they commit acts of violence towards each other. Mary is a transphobic narrow-minded bigot who’s been shown to be increasing abusive, a stalker, and even violent, and so we are happy that Carla got the best of her.
What bothers me is the quick transition of Mary’s image from a hateful, but mostly harmless character into this dangerous, scary mustache-twirler. She goes from engaging in cartoony rivalry with Carla to misgendering her and blackmailing the RA to get away with it. She goes on to give these wild speeches about how homophobic and disgusting she is and how she’s going to make Ruth turn the floor all good and Christian, but she ends up not really doing anything. Every piece of dialogue out of her mouth is designed to make you hate her, and it’s all so sudden that it feels out of place.
This whole arc is a cartoony mess; half Saturday morning Tom & Jerry, half those old Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories with life lessons about systemic oppression swapped out for the realization of a trans person’s autonomy. These two parts of DoA are good on their own, but they shouldn’t have been mixed together.
Nah, Mary has not changed. She has skulked around and plotted and snooped and hated. She just finally acted on it.
And as for mustasch twirling…
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/clear/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/expelled/
But it’s not sudden. It’s been foreshadowed back to Mary spying on Billie & Ruth and making not quite definite comments about lesbians to Billie. This goes back at least two years of real time.
She knew about them and was deliberately holding it in reserve. The blackmail was obviously coming. That it would be triggered by her going after Carla wasn’t, partly because we didn’t know she knew Carla was trans.
And she’s working on making Ruth turn the floor all Christian and homophobic, but Ruth’s managed to twist out of the way so far. It’s only been a day or two.
Yeah, it’s been nearly 2 years since Mary did the scheming villain hands after spying on Billie and dropped her little “Hey Joyce, you look to be standing next to my target, what do you think about how hellbound lesbians are” nastiness:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/clear/
After that, she’s glared at a 12 year old for being nice to her because Mary was convinced that her whole family must be evil, and openly hoped for her roommate and Becky to get pregnant and drop out of school, and then everything in this arc. And before that there was a whole arc where she rejected Joyce and Dorothy because Dorothy was an atheist and told Joyce that “if evil weren’t nice, no one would bother with it” and went on a rant to Dorothy about how awful her roommate is because she’s not down with ableist language.
Mary being a giant piece of shit who schemes and goes for the underhand kill has been lampshaded for a long time now. It’s only really a surprise if you’ve been ignoring all of Mary’s comic appearances up to now.
Okay, I concede that. I should have picked up on it. I still think that the change that occurred when they started focusing on her character was way too strong, and that the stuff she blackmailed Ruth for is a little silly and just put in to make her look like a villain. Transphobic people are awful, but like…not actual villains?
Transphobic people are definitely actual villains. Lots of them are very aggressive about their “disapproval of our lifestyle” which basically means they think we are making up our genders which to be quite honest, is saying that I don’t deserve to exist because I don’t exist on their terms.
Uh yeah they kind of are.
maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe don’t say stuff like “transphobic people aren’t villains” when, like, right now at this very moment they’re offering cash money to cisgender children to out transgender children in school bathrooms
What’s that line from Shortpacked! about one’s hyperbole being one’s reality, cause damn is it so applicable here.
Fuck, being trans right now is the most surreal and horrifying experience with the daily new awful that some bigot with real political power is pitching everywhere.
Hell, there was the school official a bit ago who argued that pepper spray for all students would be great because the students could use it to “defend themselves” from trans people who try and enter the “wrong” bathrooms.
It’s fucking terrifying out here.
People don’t even understand what it MEANS to be trans, either. Example: an elderly lady in a Superstore bathroom said a very transphobic thing to another lady in the bathroom regarding me, assuming I was a translady because of my short hair. Like, lady I’m actually following what you say you want here. (Not what you really want because you’re a bigot and want my existence gone.)
A villain is by definition a character in a a piece of fiction. I’m not saying that anything a transphobic person does isn’t terrible, I’m saying that your portrayal of this character would be better suited to a caped anti-crusader with plans to take over the world and henchmen. I am saying that you are a bad writer who does not know how to write realistic antagonists.
Villain, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary is: a character in a story, movie, etc., who does bad things; a person who does bad things; someone or something that is blamed for a particular problem or difficulty
Also, as a trans person, I can confirm that I have met people in real life who are like Mary – bigoted and looking for any reason to cause you trouble. People like that DO exist, whether you’ve met them or not. I have been spared most of the more heavy stuff because I am not out, I just “look” LGBTQ+ at the moment.
I’m saying you’re a bad reader who somehow has missed the hundreds of comments on these pages saying that these things have happened to them repeatedly in their own real lives — including some coming TO YOU, RIGHT NOW, saying “this shit is real” — and so your dumb, obnoxiously tonedeaf comments mock them with your stupid willful ignorance.
You are the villain, right now. A real life one. Go away.
I am very ashamed that you share both my gravatar and my nickname, you transphobic prick
A state legislator in one of the Shithole States declared that if he found a trans woman in the bathroom with his granddaughter, he would ‘stomp a puddle in his [sic] chest’. Think about the imagery that’s meant to conjure up, then tell me transphobes aren’t over-the-top villains.
I personally have been threatened with a beating if I’m ever seen going into a women’s restroom. It’s absolutely over-the-top “cartoon” villainy. Except it’s real- which is terrifying.
Yup, had one of those while I was in the women’s restroom. When I left the stall, I actual fast-walked out the door, because one of the woman was preparing her handbag to take a swing at me. Ah, Orange County mall bathroom. Fun times.
You know, I just remembered something. A couple of decades back worked with a transgender woman. Nice, caring, determined worker; someone who you want working a line alongside you. Was told that ‘he has to use the men’s room, because he’s making women nervous’.
Unfortunately… Mary is on the light side as far as transphobic bigots go. Most of the times they’re much much worse than that.
CONTENT WARNING: AWFUL AWFUL TRANSPHOBIA (seriously, take care of yourself)
Like, there’s a huge number of dedicated transphobic movements dedicated to finding the dead names of transgender children in order to hurl it at them until they kill themselves. The groups frequently keep track of “confirmed kills” which are trans kids they’ve convinced to kill themselves. Slightly less awful versions of these nonetheless find the dead names of trans kids and stalk and harass and try to drive them to suicide, because of ideas that trans people are somehow trying to infiltrate women’s spaces or steal all the butch lesbians away to become men.
There’s also the proposed law Willis is citing which is a proposed Kansas bill winding its way through the legislature which would offer $2500 to any cis student who spots a trans kid trying to use the bathroom. And a similar law that was proposed but will probably die in committee to make using the “wrong” bathroom a sex crime requiring trans people to become registered sex offenders if they try to pee.
And of late the fuckers who brought us the Hobby Lobby decision are currently setting forth lawsuits arguing that teens who have seen a trans person exist have suffered emotional distress and violence and sexual harassment and thus trans people must not be allowed to use bathrooms or locker rooms to spare said children from said distress. Similarly, that same group has started passing out instructions for megachurches telling parishioners to use specific talking points against trans kids including telling them that their genders are not real and that they are child molesters. Kids are encouraged to say these things directly to the trans students’ faces.
There’s also the bigots swarming all over Willis’s twitter mentions to argue that Willis is in favor of the beating of women because Carla is “a large and overbearing man who gets off on the threatening, intimidation, and violent assault on a scared, small, defenseless woman who has done nothing wrong”.
We have no shortage of current staff writers for major American newspapers penning articles musing about the genital states of transgender teenagers in order to argue that their genitals constitute a sexual assault on their fellow students simply by existing in a non-congruent configuration (this is extra awful because these same bigots also made it so nobody under the age of 18 is allowed to receive any form of SRS or even hormones because “they might change their mind” and “we need to be sure”. They are currently also trying to ban puberty blockers cause nothing helps a trans kid more than going through the wrong puberty because some bigots think they understand your gender more than you.)
And in an average day, anytime I go out, I tend to get my fair share of the t-slur yelled at me, people spitting, people literally hiding their kids eyes as if looking upon me will infect them with the trans, mumbled hatred, and lots and lots of death glares. It tends to make any public outing extremely stressful and anxiety-inducing.
Not to mention that shit like this is pretty common:
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2016/04/22/3771366/dave-hannah-edwards-transgender-kindergartner/
Yes, that’s right, an entire community of parents and hate groups went out of their way to bully and harangue a kindergartner for daring to be trans and seek the bare minimum of accommodation and harassed the school out of extending even the smallest amount of support for said kindergartner lest the kindergartner ever believe she is a full human being.
I mean, I’d love to live in a world where the likes of Mary is a strange comedic exaggeration. I hope we can get there.
But currently, the most common reaction from trans folk when Mary let forth her transphobia bomb was “Oh man, that’s a familiar situation”.
We are the marginalized population in the spotlight and that means a lot of awful as the bigot groups swirl and hover and it is not publicly understood yet that we are fully human or deserving of access to even the barest human rights. And there’s a dedicated attempt to smear us all as child molesters people should be scared of, should attack, should feel good about destroying as monsters. And that leads to a lot of harassment, a lot of discrimination, and a lot of literal violence and death by people who feel they have wiped out one more monster from the world.
Mary? Mary is the easy mode of all that.
Is your writing published somewhere linkable?
You sum things up extremely succinctly, while retaining full holy-shit impact. I would like to direct people to this kind of thing when needed.
(right now I’ma go chill out though. it will be super nice.)
What do you mean they’re not villains?
They espouse hate and violence towards people who’ve done nothing to them except not conform to what they want.
Yes, they are villains. All of them are villains. They also deserve pain inflicted upon them greater than the pain they’ve inflicted upon others, both physically AND emotionally.
Find a more worthwhile group to brownnose.
Plus all her spying bullshit started after Ruth slapped her, while Mary is a vindictive bongo she does have reasons for how she acts, she’s stuck with a roommate she can’t stand and from her perspective her R.A. is completely incompetent, has threatened her and slapped her when Marry asked her to do her job. Plus she has complained about noise and wanting to be left alone a couple times before the Carla arc so her getting pissed about how Carla acts doesn’t come out of no where, she just goes about solving her problems in the most horrible way possible.
I’d forgotten about the time Ruth slapped her. While I don’t think it excuses Mary’s behavior with Carla, it is probably fair to say that if Ruth was doing a better job as RA thing never would have gotten as out-of-control as they have.
Carla would have been asked to respect the rules about skating in the hallway. Mary would been recommended to look into changing rooms or moving to a different floor. Etc.
Although we’d have missed out on some very entertaining updates if that were the case. 😀
Real quick, if you ignore all the skillful foreshadowing that DYW does. Mary’s actions were totally in line with her character. She’s just drawn that way. Readers might read her another way, as is their right, but Mary’s character is well defined and established as a contrast to Joyce.
A transphobic person suddenly throwing out transphobic slurs in order to hurt another person? Good heavens, yes, how cartoony. Surely that has never happened in real life.
Oh, good gravy miss daisy, say it ain’t so? /southernbelle sarcasm
Due to your gravatar I am 100% convinced that Mike is actually saying this sarcastically right now. Thank you.
But the thing is she’s not acting like a “Mustache Twirler” she’s acting like a Bigot which we’ve always known she was.
Bigot doesn’t mean frothing madwoman or felon. Someone can have hateful beliefs and otherwise be a perfectly good person who everyone who didn’t know of their hatred would want as a neighbor. That’s what’s so goddamn terrifying about bigotry. One of the most disturbing moments of my life was when my grandpa, who I’d loved and respected for years, said he wished he had a couple of [*black gentlemen*] to help him move.
“Someone can have hateful beliefs and otherwise be a perfectly good person who everyone who didn’t know of their hatred would want as a neighbor.”
You’re not wrong, but what, we’re supposed to ignore that Mary is very bigoted? Like, she said bigoted things, so yes, she is a bigot, we (and a lot of the characters) aren’t people who don’t know about her bigotry. We’re not those people.
But Mary kinda was someone like that. She went to church with Joyce and Dorothy (and I think Sierra). She smiled, she was happy to bring them along, she chatted with them afterwards.
And then Dorothy admitted she wasn’t Christian, and so Mary got surly, told Joyce she shouldn’t interact with Dorothy because she’s a sinner, and walked off. She was pleasant until something she disagreed with came up.
Not to mention, we’ve had instances of characters acting like what you describe. Off the top of my head, we have Joyce’s mom mentioning how proud she is to tell people back home about Sarah, because it means that their daughter isn’t a racist.
Man, it’s kinda wild to think that all this arc has been a single weekend. Danny is angry and depressed after finally standing up and asserting himself, Amber is on edge and slipping over after losing an important point of support, Dina is likely to become clingy from being separated from possibly the first someone she feels emotional around, Sal grows increasingly aloof as her few attempts to be involved with others in any capacity ends poorly for her, Mary is headed towards neurotic and is likely to double down foolishly after finally facing backlash for her bigotry, Ruth is suffering having largely lost her own support and is now being blackmailed, Walky is being forced to face his own limits and maybe begun to acknowledge them, and Sarah is acknowledging that she is not only caring about people but also getting attached to their presence.
Combined with their own misadventures, arriving back at the university may not be the smoothest ride for Joyce and Becky as everything seems to be on edge including them.
Panel 4
“brr, did we suddenly lose 20°C in there ? Where did those ice stalagtite come from ?”
Hey, Willis gets Spite As Survival Mechanism!
Or, Carla does, anyway.
Spite as survival mechanism got me through high school alive. I can’t knock it.
Also, add awesome points to Carla: She has the guts to go, “Hmm, this person seems pissed off that I exist, and is a total dickbag to me as a result of the fact that I exist as me unapologetically. How about I exist so aggressively that they can’t possibly ignore my existence as my revenge?”
All of this. Spite can keep one alive when one is reeling from bigotry and abuse. And Carla’s response to getting hit with that bigotry is just so beautiful and on point.
Still chuckling over “do you suck Jesus wang with that mouth.”
Ah, poor Mary. Your mouth is neither Christian nor Midwestern Nice now is it?
Mind you, from the previous strip, I thought Mary was going to lay off and whack Carla. I think these two will make a fine couple.
I want to work for Ruttech.
Alternative Book 6 title?
+1
Mary’s stunned silence is a little too much for me. It makes for a satisfying conclusion, and it’s not all that unlikely, but it’s just a little too perfect. Like when you fantasize about destroying your enemies with a perfectly executed argument (or machine for ridiculous revenge), they never talk back, but in real life they almost always do. Unless Mary gets in a rejoinder in the next strip or so, if only something dumb like “Don’t think you’re special, I hate lots of other people”, I’m afraid I have to take one point away.
Of course you’re several million ahead with this amazing strip.
That’s kind of what makes it work for me. Carla builds and drags a huge machine in front of Mary’s room with nobody noticing, has an extending robot arm in a cardboard box that hits Mary in the face with a pie, and then everything is timed perfectly with a laser light show.
It’s super cartoony and over the top in a way that, thematically, works perfectly with Carla’s character.
Eh, seems in character for Mary to be dumbfounded by this.
Also, if Mary has any sense whatsoever, she won’t scream, “Next time, Gadget! NEXT TIME!” because announcing that she doesn’t plan to back off is just poor strategy. Of course, doing so would also be totally in character for her.
I love your icon, person with a very long name that I could’ve typed out in a shorter amount of time than it took to type this entire thing!!!
I looked at this strip after a long weekend of not looking at this site. My immediate thought: Wow, Mary got a little frisky.
in the last panel mary looks like she just got out of a very strange orgy
Willis cannot end the month until we say we are satisfied with our care.
*snif*
Yes, Willis, we are satisfied with our care.
I’m not crying you’re crying.
I think this is definitely Carla’s best move – no damage or anything, just harmless neon lights that will bother Mary to no end.
That said, I would’ve left the pie out. Maybe I’m just worried the bits of pie left behind might have repercussions. Maybe I just think it’s a shame to waste a delicious pie. /shrug
Still, love this.
Actually, since Mary STOLE the box from her, she was never offered it, she was never given it, if she complains about getting a pie in the face, she is the only one who would get in trouble.
We know she took the box but she’ll probably say it was shoved into her face.
Not to mention all it takes is to have someone in charge be a Mary 2.0 and shit hits the fan.
Case in point: being afraid of biased authority should not stop you from doing your thing. If the authority DOES react in a biased way towards you, gather a proof, record it, and go on a crusade against them. Which reminds me, did Carla record all of this? It’d be smart of her to have done so, and it’d make for a really good family memento.
Case in point 2: when speaking about American universities in the current day and age, if anything the authority will be heavily biased against Mary. Though, how can they show such a bias in this situation? I haven’t heard of a college staff being so brazen as to do anything to a college student just for filing a bullshit complaint against a trans student. I don’t expect anything more than rudeness in answer to Mary’s complaint, and even I’d answer with rudeness in such a situation – provided something has strained my nerves and I can’t keep my cool.
1) “Should not stop” is very strong. It depends on how badly they’re likely to react and how much you can afford the consequences or the crusade. Sometimes it’s worth it. Sometimes you can change the world for the better with such a crusade. Sometimes you just get crushed.
2) The actual transgender people who’ve spoken up in these comments are much less sanguine about where the bias would lie, even in universities in this day and age.
this comment is actually a kudos.
Those are tasty.
Skipping over the stupidly depressive arguments about the world being full of nothing but bigots (Which isn’t true). There are dozens of ways Carla could bill her for the pie. Maybe it came from the school cafeteria and she told them to put it on Mary’s account. Or maybe she found a place willing to bill her later and had it set up to send it to Mary’s room instead of hers.
Is there a reason you mistrust the words of people who suffer bigotry every single day of their lives?
Aside from the fact that I’m gay and don’t?
That’s not really a reason to mistrust the people who do. Your experience is not everyone else’s experience.
Well, yes of course not ALL people are bigoted, but enough people, and especially enough people in power, are that it becomes dangerous for ALL marginalized people.
and my friends wonder why Carla’s my favorite.
She just moved up to a close second in my book.
well i hope mary doesn’t go psychotic and kill
I had that same problem in college. It’s like my existence was the bane of everyone else who sweat too much about their futures.
get rekt m8
Yep, we are.
This really is the perfect way to deal with self-righteous snobs.
Yesssssss. I’ve been waiting to see Mary finally get what’s coming to her. And yes I before anyone else says it I am 100 percent aware of the fact that my avatar makes this comment funnier.
Just wait ’til Mary tells her Facebook friends about this.
It doesn’t surprise me that Mary, being a hateful, bigoted person, assumed that Carla was going to do something more damaging than a pie to the face and some lights. Because it’s what she’d do.
That was brilliant.
Carla is now best pony.
We are supremely satisfied, alt-text. ^_^
I would try to elaborate, but this is so goddamn* awesome in every fucking* way that I don’t know where to begin.
*Worry not for the wang of Christ; I shall not fellate it.
Jesus, she broke Mary!
…I approve 😀
Yes.
The month ended splendidly.
I have some concerns about this strip.
1. If Mary was any other religion, would you think it would be okay to say something like what Carla did in the first panel? Allah, Buddha, etc.?
2. Carla name-dropping just makes her sound a bit spoiled. Was that really necessary? What purpose does it serve?
3. It’s not that she hates Carla’s existence. She asked Carla to stop being noisy and to stop breaking the rules. It doesn’t bother her that Carla *exists.* What bothers her is Carla’s personality and how it affects her. You can dislike someone without wishing they didn’t exist. Mary didn’t treat her differently from anyone else–because she hates *everyone*–until Carla continued to disrupt Mary’s studying. Seems like a pretty big leap to assume that Mary hates her because she’s trans since she was angry with her lonnng before the transphobic remarks.
4. And just for curiosity’s sake… why did Carla feel compelled to skate in the hallways when it’s not only against the rules but also not nearly as big a space as anywhere outside? It’s not like they have curfew.
There is a joke in your name but I am not going to take it!
1. If Mary were from any other religion then it would be pretty awful of Carla, but Mary is someone who uses her religion as justification to belittle and discriminate, and also being part of the biggest religion in the US kind of tips the power scales to the point where one crack at someone who uses her religion entirely to cause pain isn’t going to make me raise my shield. If she said this to, say, Joyce or Becky, and in a completely different situation because neither of them would do something like Mary did here, then yeah, that’d be pretty crappy of her.
2. Carla is a rich white girl with fabulously wealthy tech genius parents, so being spoiled is probably likely. Also she’s explaining where she got the hardware.
3. Mary does, in fact, hate Carla for existing, because Mary has decided that Carla is a weird sex monster who shouldn’t be allowed near her. Mary made it abundantly clear that she hated Carla for being trans when she told her she was going to drag her to the boy’s dorm where “she actually belongs.” If Mary had said “I’m going to drag you outside because you’re an obnoxious hooligan disrupting my precious study time!” then this wouldn’t be a debate, but it’s how it happened. She also recently called Carla a “misplaced freak.”
4. Carla was skating indoors, and continued to do so after finding out it annoyed Mary, because because Carla is an annoying butthole with no regards for your rules, grandpa. Doesn’t make Mary’s response even remotely justified.
Thanks for implying that I’m stupid. :))))))))))))))) I have a Master’s degree in English and spend a lot of time analyzing various forms of literature, and one way that I do that is to ask people’s opinions so I can see how people see the text and to look beyond what is directly presented in it. I have a genuine curiosity about this storyline, and the only way to get people’s thoughts is to ask for them!
I promise that I’m not siding with anyone, neither Carla nor Mary. I personally think that neither of them should be antagonizing each other like this, but that’s not my point at all. I never once said that Mary’s actiosn were justified.
I read the strip, found some points of interest, and thought I’d ask some questions for people to think about.
Wondering why she was skating indoors doesn’t make me a grandpa, by the way. Just curiosity there, because I have skated in places that shouldn’t be skated in, and it’s just not as exciting as she was making it out to be. 😛 Again, they don’t have curfew, so why not go where there’s more space outdoors? Just seems like she’d be hampering her own fun.
She was skating inside because, as she carefully explained to Mary “New skates!”. And frankly because she always skates everywhere as has been emphasized several times.
As for being angry before the transphobic remarks, if someone was harassing a black man and after a few minutes called him a nigger, would you assume that was the moment racism became a factor or would you realize that racism had been driving him all along, even if you didn’t realize it before then.
I also find your stress on “I’m not siding with the bigot or her victim” interesting. Sometimes there is a right side.
But wouldn’t skating on carpet not give her the best experience on her new skates?
And that’s fair. I think she hates her for two reasons, then, you know?
I’m just asking questions as a third party trying to understand the situation from different angles. *shrug*
Mary shouldn’t be a bigot, but Carla also should respect that at least one person in this comic is trying to study. XD But seriously, the situation didn’t need to escalate like this. Mary definitely doesn’t need to be transphobic, but she did ask Carla multiple times to let her study. Not saying it’s justification or anything. They’re just acting like children.
1. Given how she uses her religion maliciously, absolutely.
2. It’s her way of saying that Mary can’t use her religious ties and/or any authorities to exercise her bigotry toward her. It destroys Mary’s ability to appeal to authority to get the “misplaced freak” out of the women’s dorm, which is where she belongs.
3. She absolutely hates that Carla exists. Skates on carpet are very quiet, and even if she was being legitimately disruptive it’s no excuse to destroy $700 skates- which Mary has suffered zero repercussions for, by the way- and attempt to excise Carla from the dorms on transphobic grounds. Her whole crusade has been because of Carla’s trans status- the skating was just what gave her an excuse to start it up.
4. No idea. It’s not the primary concern- though she should have done her skating outside, yeah.
Something I’ve noticed is that no one can agree on what a nice pair of skates costs.
It’s also still the same day, so there’s plenty of time for Mary to cool off and buy her a new pair of skates. And I’d bet that since she has that kind of glue, she also has something that can dissolve it.
Hmm, the word “excuse” always rubs me the wrong way. I’m sure Carla skating was a legitimate disturbance, so to show her bigotry better would probably show Carla doing something far less annoying. Less annoying = less reason to say or do something about it. So if she were to react violently to something smaller, then it would be far more apparent how deep the bigotry goes. That’s just me as a writer and someone who studies language and literature.
1. If the person had been using their religion to spew hate at Carla, and then proceeded to say *major prophet/god-dammit* it would be perfectly fine for her to have said “do you suck *insert major prophet and/or god of religion here* wang with that mouth?”
2. It’s a bit out of character for Carla, but to me it looks like she’s trying to use what privilege she has (wealth/class) to cut off an avenue for Mary to do damaging things. It could also just be Carla getting a little too into the prank and being like the Cartoon Villain. Honestly, she’s a flawed character and this shows one of those flaws.
3. Mary certainly hates Carla’s existence. She has made it clear on MULTIPLE occasions that since Carla isn’t a cisgender straight person, she is a problem. Mary repeatedly calls her a “freak” and even says to “go back to the boys’ dorm”. Mary hates trans people because she is a bigot, and her religion is her justification for her bigotry. Really, there is no justification for bigotry.
4. Because Carla does what she wants. And honestly, she probably just didn’t want to take her skates off from coming inside, and she prefers to wear them all of the time.
Good point about showing one of her flaws. I agree that it seemed out-of-character at first, so if she continues to name-drop later on, that’s a good, consistent flaw.
Well, she called Carla a freak *after* she asked her to stop skating. I’m not saying she’s not bigoted–I just don’t think that’s the particular cause for this incident.
Perhaps it is her existence that she hates, but she hadn’t gone out of her way to show that until Carla wouldn’t move from out in front of her door. I think I’m going to reserve this set of thoughts until we see more interactions with the two of them later on. This is really the first extended time they’ve been around each other, so I’d prefer to see more interactions with each other before I decide that she hates Carla specifically because she’s trans or anything else down that extensive rabbit hole.
And it just seemed to me like she was doing the kind of skating that would be better suited for the outdoors, especially with how small that hallway was.
Thank you for responding not only civilly but also in a way that shows that you genuinely thought about my questions. 🙂
1. I’m not even seeing what you could be upset about here. Leaving aside the various things that make that exchange only possible because of Mary’s brand of Christianity, it’s someone shutting up an asshole. Oh dear.
2. I read it (said so earlier) as a warning to Mary that Carla can keep escalating and that Mary’s apparent default approach of getting someone with power to do her dirty work is going to hit rocks if she tries it. It’s basically saying “check yourself before you wreck yourself”.
3. At this point I have no idea how anyone still thinks this. Mary’s character has been depicted as hateful since pretty much her first appearance and the current arc has been really, really clear that her actions w.r.t. Carla (and others!) aren’t born out of any legit complaint but because she’s hateful, power-hungry, snoopy, and evil.
4. Who cares.
Wait, why do people think I’m upset? I was just posting some thoughts/questions I had since I like to interact with others about storytelling!
The first question came from seeing some edits of Mary as a Muslim, so I was curious about what people would think, since everybody likes to crap on Christianity so much. I wanted to see if it was a double-standard. Clearly it isn’t.
And yeah, Mary hates pretty much everyone, so it seems a bit senseless to assume that she has a specific reason to hate Carla, but that’s just me.
As for “who cares,” I do, because I’m curious. It just seemed, in the narrative sense, a bit unusual. I have skated in stupid places before, and it’s not particularly excited. Mostly cramped. If Carla is about maximum fun/amusement, which is how she seems to me, then why choose to skate in a place that would cramp her style?
I kind of wonder if we’re reading the same comic. I don’t really want to legitimize Mary’s hate of Carla by saying she has a “reason” for it– that makes it sound, you know, reasonable– but she does, specifically, hate Carla because Carla is trans and Mary is a titanic bigot. This is crystal clear as of when Mary called Carla a boy.
That’s fair. I would guess she hates her because of her personality as well, though. It would be like living next to SpongeBob.
Foamy: StrawGirl is pulling one of the oldest troll tactics in the book: Asking disingenuous, loaded questions to bait people into reacting, then backing off and claiming, “I’m just asking questions!” when someone gets annoyed with them.
Rinse and repeat ad infinitum.
Also called JAQing off.
Are you serious?
I’m legitimately asking questions because I want to see how people think about things. >_> This is the kind of stuff my peers and I did in my grad-school classes.
Your fatal mistake was coming at this as a “third party” devil’s advocate, insisting on being impartial in the face of REAL WORLD experience.
This isn’t a sheltered grad-school class, but an online forum with people who actually have had to deal with jerks like Mary.
If you haven’t already, you gotta stop. The devil does not need more advocates.
I understand that. But I’m asking questions because other people have had experiences that I have not. I’m here to learn.
I don’t identify as cis or straight, but I don’t intend to apply my own life to other people’s. That’s the point of asking. 🙂
Eh, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do right now.
*exciting
I knew I should have read over this one more time before I posted it. >_>
I’m now going to use “do you suck Jesus’ wang with that mouth” when someone tries to ram religion down my throat.
A big thank you to whoever fixed the site/server. It now loads fast and more importantly, doesn’t hang requiring endless reloads.
That doubles my joy at seeing Mary get her “just desserts” bill. 🙂
“No, but I did something to your mother with this mouth.”
For a nickel?
I think probably my favorite part of this is that nothing Carla did is against the rules. If anything, if/when Mary complains about this, she’ll just get in trouble for stealing Carla’s pie. Just… well done
Beautiful.
Oh and I need to add this comment just to make the comments a nice even 666.
I hate to report that the comment numbers are now higher and the devil has been subdued.
On the bright side: My deadname was literally the 666th most popular name for afab babies the year I was born, so I’m basically Satan – and I approve this message.
I swore to myself that I’d never fall in love with another fictional character again, but dammit, the waifus just keep piling up! #TeamCarla