Motley Crue content has NOT aged well. The music videos on YouTube have terrible audio.
adam Black
crushed
Jim
That’s just because the people who posted them obviously don’t
have the technical skeeells to upload clean audio – if they had ripped
256K audio from a CD, then it would sound fine.
ocbrad1
Actually, Stephen is correct here. The production quality on Shout at the Devil is crap, even for the early 80s on an up and coming hair metal budget. Other contemporaries had far superior production (Def Leppard’s Pyromania, Van Halen’s 1984, and Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell, for example), but Crue did better with Theatre of Pain and Girls, Girls, Girls. But yeah, lots of the uploaded videos were compressed into crap before they were uploaded.
This whole storyline seems to be demonstrating the difference between crimes of passion and calculated crimes. Ross is your stereotypical crime of passion person – he thinks he is doing the right thing, but acts emotionally based on his biblical framework.
Blaine on the other hand, while he is certainly acting based on emotions (resentment about paying tuition and getting beat up, anger/outrage at being forced to spend money in a way he does not want to), does so in a way that is very calculated and he *wants to hurt people.* He has NO illusions that he is doing this for anyone’s good but his own.
While people in the first category certainly can cause a lot of harm, the redeeming thing about them is that IF you can get through to them emotionally and/or rationally, they will potentially change their actions. Like Joyce when she looked up ways to reconcile homosexuality and the Bible! (After first dating Ethan, who she thought she was helping.)
For people in the second category, it is a lot less likely.
I am not sure how much of it is concern, and how much of it is guilt. Like, in Ross’s mind, I could see him thinking this is a whole other magnitude than what he did last time. At “least” then, he was kidnapping one girl, and not a half dozen kids in his eyes to lean on for information.
Then again, who knows. Ross has demonstrated himself to not be a particularly good dude, to put it mildly.
I’ve seen enough of Ross to understand he’s not evil.
Freezer
Just stupid and single-minded enough that he might as well be.
Needfuldoer
Don’t forget ‘easily manipulated’, that’s been a key factor to his indoctrination and to Blaine’s control over him.
Sam
Yeah, he’s not a ‘hurts people just to see them suffer and with his own selfish desires as the only reason for his actions’ type of person. He might not be a great, good or even decent person, but like, if God came down to Earth and said to him ‘this is not right’, he would skew towards being the type of person who would listen. And like, he has shown reservations towards hurting Mike and while he hit him with a car, we didn’t see him actually injure Mike or involve himself in the fight afterwards in any meaningful way.
Hurting teenagers is a clear moral line for him that Blaine finds easy to cross and he… doesn’t find it nearly as easy to do so.
thejeff
No, he’s a “My daughter is my possession and I will threaten her and abuse her to shape her into what I think she should be, even if I have to hurt her friends or get us both killed” type of person.
temperaryobsessor
No if God came to earth and told him he was wrong he would likely either accuse him of being Satan, blatently choose to misunderstand him or think God was a hippy destioned for hell.
thejeff
Let’s not go too far here. He’s not Blaine. He’s not a cartoon supervillain. He’s a different type of evil.
He’s not fully on board with this part of the plan as much because it doesn’t lead to directly to getting control of Becky again as anything. That lets him wonder about the methods.
Probably guilt of hurting people and also that fact her knew and loved Joyce since she was young and really being brain washed into thinking he’s saving his daughter by doing this.
He’s an asshole but he’s also a bit tragic. He has strong convictions but man are they shitty.
His injuries probably were from Mike. Sure, he grabbed the rope to prevent himself from taking the same fall Mike did, but his momentum would have resulted in him getting smacked HARD into the building, which probably would have resulted in him taking a somewhat less impactful fall than Mike did.
Azhrei Vep
I dunno, Doc. Amazi-Girl’s got some muscle on her, and a scooter to the chest swung by a strong person can do some serious harm. I think most of this may be her.
Dr T
Don’t forget, Blaine is wearing a flak jacket.
Liquid Len
But he also had cracked ribs from the first fight that probably have not fully healed
I broke my rib once and don’t remember it hurting nearly as bad as Blaine is selling this, but then again I was also on painkillers and not wearing a mask and kidnapping people so maybe the situation is different.
Agemegos
A simple fracture of one rib usually doesn’t get displaced, and is painful but not too bad. Ross got curb-stomped by Amber and is implied to have broken ribs from that. Then Amazi-Girl said “Keep reminding me about the ribs” and hit him in the ribs with a scooter, besides kicking him in the ribs at least twice, Then he fell off a building (though he caught a rope and we didn’t see what he hit).
He likely has multiple fractures of several ribs, which is a lot worse than an undisplaced simple fracture of one rib. He might even have an injury to his lung.
Meagan
You mean Blaine, not Ross.
Agemegos
Indeed I do.
Icalasari
> He might even have an injury to his lung.
We can only hope it is causing him to slowly and painfully bleed out internally
Agemegos
Well, that would be nice. But having his chest fill up with air from a tension pneumothorax, collapse his lungs, and make him slowly asphyxiate is a tempting alternative.
And when presented with such a pair of alternatives I like to ask “why not both?”
Jaime
I had a hairline crack in a rib once. It was manageable with lots of painkillers but I couldn’t do anything too active for quite a while. I’m betting Blaine has sustained a *lot* more damage than one barely-cracked rib.
I’ve read that, if you break your ribs badly enough, the broken bones can poke into your lungs. That is the point at which you need serious medical care to not die, and it’s excruciatingly painful. I’m guessing that is the case with Blaine, especially since he is gasping like he can barely breathe.
Let’s hope his injuries catch up to him before Amazi-Girl/the police/anyone else needs to…
Shane
If he’s wheezing (he is), who knows, maybe there’s even some bleeding in his lungs. Punctures in the lining of the lungs can get infected and go to sepsis.
Agemegos
It uncommon without a penetration from the outside. Blaine has more to fear from a tension pneumothorax leading to a lung collapsing.
Justin Baker
I broke a rib once, didn’t have opiates, it hurt to take a deep breath.
Agemegos
Yeah, I cracked a rib playing football (Rugby league, in the school playground at lunchtime) when I was fourteen, and it wasn’t too bad, except if I coughed or laughed. I had to sleep on my back and give up clarinet practice, running, and swimming-training for a few weeks, but I got through it without pain relief. Which goes to show that there are broken ribs and broken ribs depending on which are broken, where, how badly, and whether the break is simple or multiple. Because most people get a lot more pain than I did.
Part of me is thinking right now, that if Blaine really does have the kind of mob connections to have agents positioned in the hospital that can have Mike assassinated “with a phone call”, then he’s extremely stupid to do something like this that will draw attention to them. There’s no business benefit to any of this to make the risk of acting so openly worth taking. Any connections he does have will probably bail.
At no point in all this has Blaine demonstrated any sense of intelligence. For one thing, consider the fact that he allegedly has these mob connections but still teamed up with an uncooperative brick like Ross. And spent CONSIDERABLE money to do so.
I’m like 60% sure he’s lying, and the next 30% is ‘he called in the other stooges/had Asher call in contacts who are similarly low-tier’. No way he has actual clearance for this escapade.
Also, you know. A 13-year-old boy took one look at his receipts, realized they were rotten, and could yell he was committing tax fraud (With some degree of ‘how’) five years later on the fly. Sure, said kid was Mike, but he’s not supernaturally smart or anything so Blaine cannot possibly be cooking his books all that well.
Dr. Gonzo
As a psychopath(or at the very least antisocial disorder) Blaine has above average intelligence. However, he has poor impulse control and An inability to learn from past mistakes.
He also seems to think lowly of others, likely making him see Ross as an easy mark that can be manipulated with no trouble. See also him refusing to believe Amber was Amazi-Girl just a couple strips ago.
EvilMidnightLurker
Is the above average intelligence actually guaranteed?
Agemegos
Not really. It’s part of the “sexy psychopath” syndrome: people write up psychopaths who seem intelligent and charming (a) mostly because dull and charmless people with otherwise psychopathic traits tend to lose hard before they are twenty-five (a survival bias) and (b) because a lot of the people who are interested enough in psychopaths to make a special study are a bit englamoured.
Tarnagh
On the other hand, that investment in Ross might be pretty smart of Blaine. If his plan is to set it up to make Ross look like the fall guy for all the bodies Blaine seems to be planning on piling up.
He’s probably lying. Blaine’s a mob stooge not a mob boss. It’s kind of implied he’s the accountant. Asher’s grandpa “owns” him. At best he paid a few hundred bucks to some idiots who probably don’t even carry guns. He can’t hire assassins. Any guy Blaine could hire probably couldn’t even get into the same room Mike’s in, plus his parents are probably there too if Mike’s in a coma. It was a line of bullshit to try and motivate the hostages.
It’s implied that he is the owner-of-record for a building supplies firm that Asher’s gramps launders money through. He is described as a “stooge”: one who knowingly allows himself or herself to be used for another’s profit, a dupe.
Regalli
Yeah, he’s not even the accountant, he’s just a shell.
220 thoughts on “Hnnnk”
Ana Chronistic
if looks could kill
…well, I’m sure even Joyce would be fine with that
Stephen Bierce
She got the Looks That Kill
That Ki~i~ill…
Stephen Bierce
Motley Crue content has NOT aged well. The music videos on YouTube have terrible audio.
adam Black
crushed
Jim
That’s just because the people who posted them obviously don’t
have the technical skeeells to upload clean audio – if they had ripped
256K audio from a CD, then it would sound fine.
ocbrad1
Actually, Stephen is correct here. The production quality on Shout at the Devil is crap, even for the early 80s on an up and coming hair metal budget. Other contemporaries had far superior production (Def Leppard’s Pyromania, Van Halen’s 1984, and Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell, for example), but Crue did better with Theatre of Pain and Girls, Girls, Girls. But yeah, lots of the uploaded videos were compressed into crap before they were uploaded.
clif
I don’t know about kill, but that’s certainly some nightmare fuel.
EvilMidnightLurker
If looks could kill they probably will in games without frontiers, war without tears
Wizard
Please consider yourself upvoted.
Liquid Len
Seconded!
Allandrel
Do we really want to see Ross lying on the floor, begging Joyce “Please, please baby don’t hurt me no more?”
Mada
JOYCE SMASH
(I hope.)
Kyoulkoa
Eyebite
Anthony Paoli
That’s a hell of a spell.
Joyce has leveled up quickly.
Hugo Bedward
So judging from the April 19th preview (https://dumbingofage.tumblr.com/post/190407425082/april-19-2020), we’re gonna jump back to the campus soon.
jeffepp
Well, Joyce CAN teleport…
Sunny
Only while she has Fuckface on her head, though.
timemonkey
Or to Dorothy.
Deanatay
Or to Potential New Friends!
bryy
Cue Carol, right?
Like, right as she is beating him, right?
Rose by Any Other Name
My wife, reading this over my shoulder: “It’s murder Joyce!”
He Who Abides
Huh. Mine just asked “So, who’s gonna die first?”
Opus the Poet
Joyce has already decked him once, and her wrist has healed enough for round 2 to be fatal. Even bound in duct tape she’s dangerous.
p!enapple
Toedad looks… concerned… almost as if he is thinking
Illithid
It’s counterintuitive to me, as a hardheaded atheist, but maybe Toedad isn’t completely an asshole.
temporalshrew
I think Ross has realized at this point that he’s in way over his head, and that a lot of this is way fucked up, but he can’t back out now.
Bicycle Bill
The hell he can’t.
Needfuldoer
Not without LoSInG BecKY’S SOUl to THE dEvIL.
Meagan
This whole storyline seems to be demonstrating the difference between crimes of passion and calculated crimes. Ross is your stereotypical crime of passion person – he thinks he is doing the right thing, but acts emotionally based on his biblical framework.
Blaine on the other hand, while he is certainly acting based on emotions (resentment about paying tuition and getting beat up, anger/outrage at being forced to spend money in a way he does not want to), does so in a way that is very calculated and he *wants to hurt people.* He has NO illusions that he is doing this for anyone’s good but his own.
While people in the first category certainly can cause a lot of harm, the redeeming thing about them is that IF you can get through to them emotionally and/or rationally, they will potentially change their actions. Like Joyce when she looked up ways to reconcile homosexuality and the Bible! (After first dating Ethan, who she thought she was helping.)
For people in the second category, it is a lot less likely.
DailyBrad
I am not sure how much of it is concern, and how much of it is guilt. Like, in Ross’s mind, I could see him thinking this is a whole other magnitude than what he did last time. At “least” then, he was kidnapping one girl, and not a half dozen kids in his eyes to lean on for information.
Then again, who knows. Ross has demonstrated himself to not be a particularly good dude, to put it mildly.
Foxhack
I’ve seen enough of Ross to understand he’s not evil.
Freezer
Just stupid and single-minded enough that he might as well be.
Needfuldoer
Don’t forget ‘easily manipulated’, that’s been a key factor to his indoctrination and to Blaine’s control over him.
Sam
Yeah, he’s not a ‘hurts people just to see them suffer and with his own selfish desires as the only reason for his actions’ type of person. He might not be a great, good or even decent person, but like, if God came down to Earth and said to him ‘this is not right’, he would skew towards being the type of person who would listen. And like, he has shown reservations towards hurting Mike and while he hit him with a car, we didn’t see him actually injure Mike or involve himself in the fight afterwards in any meaningful way.
Hurting teenagers is a clear moral line for him that Blaine finds easy to cross and he… doesn’t find it nearly as easy to do so.
thejeff
No, he’s a “My daughter is my possession and I will threaten her and abuse her to shape her into what I think she should be, even if I have to hurt her friends or get us both killed” type of person.
temperaryobsessor
No if God came to earth and told him he was wrong he would likely either accuse him of being Satan, blatently choose to misunderstand him or think God was a hippy destioned for hell.
thejeff
Let’s not go too far here. He’s not Blaine. He’s not a cartoon supervillain. He’s a different type of evil.
He’s not fully on board with this part of the plan as much because it doesn’t lead to directly to getting control of Becky again as anything. That lets him wonder about the methods.
Dr. T
That look is just what Ross looks like when he is constipated. He’s still trying to work prison food out of his system.
Koms
Best answer
Johan
Probably guilt of hurting people and also that fact her knew and loved Joyce since she was young and really being brain washed into thinking he’s saving his daughter by doing this.
He’s an asshole but he’s also a bit tragic. He has strong convictions but man are they shitty.
Meagan
I think ‘feeling’ is more accurate. Feeling confusing feelings that he does not know how to reconcile with this thoughts, which are mostly biblical.
Kravis
*And that was when Toedad bursted into flames*
Sirksome
I’m really starting to think Blaine’s dying.
Hugo Bedward
He ain’t dying but he’s severely wounded (probably inflicted by Amazi-girl after Mike fell) and hasn’t gotten medical help yet.
Dr. T
His injuries probably were from Mike. Sure, he grabbed the rope to prevent himself from taking the same fall Mike did, but his momentum would have resulted in him getting smacked HARD into the building, which probably would have resulted in him taking a somewhat less impactful fall than Mike did.
Azhrei Vep
I dunno, Doc. Amazi-Girl’s got some muscle on her, and a scooter to the chest swung by a strong person can do some serious harm. I think most of this may be her.
Dr T
Don’t forget, Blaine is wearing a flak jacket.
Liquid Len
But he also had cracked ribs from the first fight that probably have not fully healed
JetstreamGW
I doubt it. Looks like he might have a broken rib tho.
Sirksome
I broke my rib once and don’t remember it hurting nearly as bad as Blaine is selling this, but then again I was also on painkillers and not wearing a mask and kidnapping people so maybe the situation is different.
Agemegos
A simple fracture of one rib usually doesn’t get displaced, and is painful but not too bad. Ross got curb-stomped by Amber and is implied to have broken ribs from that. Then Amazi-Girl said “Keep reminding me about the ribs” and hit him in the ribs with a scooter, besides kicking him in the ribs at least twice, Then he fell off a building (though he caught a rope and we didn’t see what he hit).
He likely has multiple fractures of several ribs, which is a lot worse than an undisplaced simple fracture of one rib. He might even have an injury to his lung.
Meagan
You mean Blaine, not Ross.
Agemegos
Indeed I do.
Icalasari
> He might even have an injury to his lung.
We can only hope it is causing him to slowly and painfully bleed out internally
Agemegos
Well, that would be nice. But having his chest fill up with air from a tension pneumothorax, collapse his lungs, and make him slowly asphyxiate is a tempting alternative.
And when presented with such a pair of alternatives I like to ask “why not both?”
Jaime
I had a hairline crack in a rib once. It was manageable with lots of painkillers but I couldn’t do anything too active for quite a while. I’m betting Blaine has sustained a *lot* more damage than one barely-cracked rib.
I’ve read that, if you break your ribs badly enough, the broken bones can poke into your lungs. That is the point at which you need serious medical care to not die, and it’s excruciatingly painful. I’m guessing that is the case with Blaine, especially since he is gasping like he can barely breathe.
Let’s hope his injuries catch up to him before Amazi-Girl/the police/anyone else needs to…
Shane
If he’s wheezing (he is), who knows, maybe there’s even some bleeding in his lungs. Punctures in the lining of the lungs can get infected and go to sepsis.
Agemegos
It uncommon without a penetration from the outside. Blaine has more to fear from a tension pneumothorax leading to a lung collapsing.
Justin Baker
I broke a rib once, didn’t have opiates, it hurt to take a deep breath.
Agemegos
Yeah, I cracked a rib playing football (Rugby league, in the school playground at lunchtime) when I was fourteen, and it wasn’t too bad, except if I coughed or laughed. I had to sleep on my back and give up clarinet practice, running, and swimming-training for a few weeks, but I got through it without pain relief. Which goes to show that there are broken ribs and broken ribs depending on which are broken, where, how badly, and whether the break is simple or multiple. Because most people get a lot more pain than I did.
Dave
Part of me is thinking right now, that if Blaine really does have the kind of mob connections to have agents positioned in the hospital that can have Mike assassinated “with a phone call”, then he’s extremely stupid to do something like this that will draw attention to them. There’s no business benefit to any of this to make the risk of acting so openly worth taking. Any connections he does have will probably bail.
Bagge
Plot twist: Blaine is extremely stupid.
Regalli
At no point in all this has Blaine demonstrated any sense of intelligence. For one thing, consider the fact that he allegedly has these mob connections but still teamed up with an uncooperative brick like Ross. And spent CONSIDERABLE money to do so.
I’m like 60% sure he’s lying, and the next 30% is ‘he called in the other stooges/had Asher call in contacts who are similarly low-tier’. No way he has actual clearance for this escapade.
Also, you know. A 13-year-old boy took one look at his receipts, realized they were rotten, and could yell he was committing tax fraud (With some degree of ‘how’) five years later on the fly. Sure, said kid was Mike, but he’s not supernaturally smart or anything so Blaine cannot possibly be cooking his books all that well.
Dr. Gonzo
As a psychopath(or at the very least antisocial disorder) Blaine has above average intelligence. However, he has poor impulse control and An inability to learn from past mistakes.
DrWattson
He also seems to think lowly of others, likely making him see Ross as an easy mark that can be manipulated with no trouble. See also him refusing to believe Amber was Amazi-Girl just a couple strips ago.
EvilMidnightLurker
Is the above average intelligence actually guaranteed?
Agemegos
Not really. It’s part of the “sexy psychopath” syndrome: people write up psychopaths who seem intelligent and charming (a) mostly because dull and charmless people with otherwise psychopathic traits tend to lose hard before they are twenty-five (a survival bias) and (b) because a lot of the people who are interested enough in psychopaths to make a special study are a bit englamoured.
Tarnagh
On the other hand, that investment in Ross might be pretty smart of Blaine. If his plan is to set it up to make Ross look like the fall guy for all the bodies Blaine seems to be planning on piling up.
Dr. Marcus Wallaby
And a prime example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Sirksome
He’s probably lying. Blaine’s a mob stooge not a mob boss. It’s kind of implied he’s the accountant. Asher’s grandpa “owns” him. At best he paid a few hundred bucks to some idiots who probably don’t even carry guns. He can’t hire assassins. Any guy Blaine could hire probably couldn’t even get into the same room Mike’s in, plus his parents are probably there too if Mike’s in a coma. It was a line of bullshit to try and motivate the hostages.
Agemegos
It’s implied that he is the owner-of-record for a building supplies firm that Asher’s gramps launders money through. He is described as a “stooge”: one who knowingly allows himself or herself to be used for another’s profit, a dupe.
Regalli
Yeah, he’s not even the accountant, he’s just a shell.