Yeah, the gravity part seems to be on her side in this.
Clif
And then Amber realizes how important Amazigirl is to her and leaps after it.
Inahc
nah, she just keeps walking down the stairs, and it lands on her head 🙂
Rabid Rabbit
Unfortunately, in her emotionally hightened state she forgets all her training and ends up in a full-body cast. Sal, feeling bad, visits her every day and mistakes her constant paralysis for the effects of the cast.
HeySo
Gravity? ON HER SIDE? Clearly she’s actually a supervillain, then, since gravity’s whole shtick is keeping people down. 😐
And wrap it around a brick. And throw it through a window. Of a store with a display of televisions you fancy.
And…wait no, now you’re looting. Nevermind, ignore all that. Though as a way of firmly rejecting your identity as a superhero it would be pretty effective.
Gotta remember to scream out “AMAZIGIRL IS DEAD. LONG LIVE LOOTERGIRL.”. Then, later on, you reveal that you were actually the evil twin, and the real Amazigirl was just trapped in your Lootcave. But then, it’s revealed that you were actually the real one after all, and you were just trying to trick the third duplicate of yourself.. and then your first duplicate sacrifices themself for you, but later on it’s revealed that was also a trick.. but then it’s revealed that the third duplicate was the real one all along, and we were just being presented the narrative through an unreliable narrator!
Anyway, meanwhile the real Lootergirl has already stolen everyone’s hearts…and the entire city. Way to let us down, Amazigirl(s).
Deanatay
Someone reads a lot of Spider-Man… and is very bitter about it…
Nope. No one but Dorothy and Ruth has, and Ruth was basically forced into it.
Speaking from experience, there are a lot of dumb, wrong reasons to not get treatment when you’re ill, especially with brain issues which people somehow think is different than, say, kidney failure or lung cancer.
and has anyone even reminded her therapy is a thing that exists? given her dad’s attitude towards it, I wouldn’t expect her to think of it… or be willing to go without a friend bribing her into it, really.
Deathjavu
Doesn’t seem like anyone around her has quite grasped how bad the dissociation and PTSD is, and thinks that she’s just choosing to play a role rather than having a serious mental disorder. We, the audience, know perfectly well how bad this is, but we’ve seen more than anyone else.
Danny could have maybe identified it, but…Danny…not the most observant.
Inahc
well, dorothy did see enough to ask ruth to keep an eye on her, iirc.
two people who are seeing therapists, but somehow they didn’t mention it to amber. at least, not that we saw.
Regalli
Yeah, I was actually thinking last night about who knows what, and basically no one has a full set of facts.
Ethan knows about the holdup and stabbing, the abuse, that Amber is AG, that Sal is on campus, and he probably has as good an idea of there being a dissociative split or PTSD as anyone. He doesn’t actually know and recognize Sal, at least as of Joyce’s party.
Danny knows there was A Backstory with a holdup, the abuse, the inexplicable-to-him enmity with Sal, and was in a conversation where Amber detailed the car chase from her perspective and was correcting herself on whether things were her actions and thoughts or AG’s, including her saying she basically didn’t have control of her body. He didn’t seem to have fully connected that Amber meant that literally she is not AG, at least pre-breakup. He doesn’t know what’s up with Sal, and doesn’t know Amber stabbed her.
All the rest might know AG’s identity and/or Blaine being bad news, if that, but even when Amber or AG talk about dissociating or ‘I told you I didn’t beat him up, but Amber did,’ they still don’t realize that’s actually what’s going on. (Though actually that’s happened a couple times. I can’t remember whether or not Joe was present at the time, but Amber flat stated to Stacey and Richard that she dissociates.)
Oh and Mike knows some degree of this shit, but from past experience anything he offers will make matters worse and that might be his intent.
Interestingly enough, NO ONE has connected Sal’s role in this, and Amber hasn’t shared with anyone that she doesn’t remember things when AG comes out anymore or that she’s trying to get rid of her.
BBCC
I wonder how Ethan, Danny and/or Walky would react to Sal’s role in this?
Regalli
I know, right? Ethan doesn’t really have a relationship with Sal, and if I remember right he said something when AG told him she was on campus like ‘okay, but I’m not worried and it doesn’t haunt me anymore.’ But Danny and Walky? No idea how that would go for either, except that I could see Walky taking sides and I don’t know for sure which one he’d pick.
BBCC
Ethan said “It’s definitely crazy we’re all going to school together but it was a very long time ago and she was a kid. We were ALL kids. I mean, she’s probably changed or she’d be in jail instead of college, right?’
In other words, Ethan has the forgiveness potential of a saint. He may feel differently if confronted with Sal in the flesh but who knows?
thejeff
Danny’s picked up a few more big hints since they broke up. There was a conversation about Sal and about who actually broke up with him and another later one where Amber talked about “sharing this 5’2″ meat vehicle”.
I don’t think we’ve really gotten to see how he’s reacted to those or what conclusions he’s drawn.
I suspect Ethan knows even less. Amber’s disassociation has been progressing and most of Ethan’s experience was before school started. He knows about Amazi-girl, but as a secret id thing, not as an alter. Obviously he does know about all the backstory.
And you can’t really blame them. It’s not an easy thing to grasp. Hardly the first conclusion anyone is going to jump to, especially with the super-hero secret id bit as an excuse to talk about the two as separate without really letting on.
Regalli
Absolutely. Even when she’s talking frankly about it, it’s so difficult to grasp some psychologists don’t believe it actually exists. Much less a bunch of college freshmen who haven’t taken a psych class in their lives. (I would be a bit more leery of Stacey and Richard, because if I angrily responded to adults in my life that I dissociate after something traumatic like that they would freak out… but then all the adults in my life probably have an above-average vocabulary with regards to psychology and mental illnesses.)
deliverything
It certainly doesn’t help that there were many much-publicized cases of people being misdiagnosed with Multiple-Personality Disorder (as it was known at the time), resulting in people sometimes denying the existence of legitimate cases even when faced with the evidence.
Drunk Mike
She framed it as a joke with Stacey and Richard.
thejeff
Yeah, she started with “I stab people who piss me off” and ended with “I disassociate and fight criminals”. I might be worried, but it wouldn’t really be the disassociate part I was concerned about – more the threats of violence.
Of course, they both know about Ryan, so it can all be taken as a reference to that.
DovahQueen
It can takes months to years before something as common as depression is recognized as an issue for someone, and that can be by trained professionals. I mean, shoot, it took almost 15lbs of unintentional weight loss and sleep disturbances for me to recognize how big a problem my mental health was giving me, and I was a college educated, licensed healthcare professional the entire time it was happening. It would be frankly amazing to see a college freshmen string together something as complex as complete disassociation and an entirely separate personality in a person they’ve known for less than a semester.
Maybe we could expect Ethan to recognize the severity of her struggles before anyone else, simply because they’ve been close for so long, but he’s making some huge life adjustments himself right now. I will say though, that between Ruth, Dorothy, and Ethan, I’m surprised that no one has pushed her strongly toward a counselor.
me
Including Sal.
Emily
Even without it being the result of a dissociative split Amazi-girl should really stand out as a big enough crisis point to try to get her to get help.
Freemage
College freshmen, though? Honestly, most of them are just bemused by the idea of a ‘caped superhero’ on campus. A few have some insights into the idea that this is symptomatic of deeper troubles, but as noted, most of them don’t grok the idea of ‘therapy’, either.
thejeff
Because she’s a superhero. And that’s apparently kind of just accepted. Like the way no one recognizes her and she can skirt the laws of physics – like the stunt choreographer is in her corner.
Yumi
Yeah, I’ve had friends with parents who…well, they suck, but maybe not as much as Blaine?…and anyway, I’ve had to basically aggressively support them into considering therapy.
Deathjavu
My dad was very against therapy, seemed to think it was all pill pushing. Several of my friends pushed me towards it saying that it was unreasonable not to get treatment with the symptoms I had. Getting treatment, and medication for a little while, was pivotal in rebuilding my life over the last 6 years. Now I am a mostly functional adult!
I don’t take my dad’s advice anymore.
not someone else
Amber is honestly far enough down the abused-kid rabbit hole that I’m not convinced she understands that anything she’s experiencing is a problem rather than her just deserts for being a terrible human being. Even the blatantly not-normal shit like flashbacks and losing time.
Fredderika12
She is suffering from toxic shame from her abusive upbringing. That means she can’t let go of the shame from the mistakes she has made- or even things that just felt like mistakes to her. All the things she thinks she has done wrong are still hanging around in her head, making her feel worthless- hence the flashbacks. But I doubt she has heard of toxic shame- I’ve suffered from it most of my life, and didn’t know what it was till recently- so she probably does think all her negative feelings toward herself are legitimate. She feels ashamed of things Blaine would have criticized her for, like social awkwardness or lack of control over her feelings; but she also hates him and is even more ashamed of anything he might praise her for, like solving problems with violence.
Regalli
I mean, she knows it EXISTS, since she’s the source on the ‘Blaine negotiated self-defense classes rather than therapy after the incident’ bit. But any ideas she has about it are probably pop culture Freudian shit rather than, say, CBT or something else that could actually help her.
Billie is technically supposed to be going to something as well, but has never actually went. Pretty sure Sal had experience with therapy but it ended poorly because Sal’s life. And of course Joyce has the business card for someone Roz gave her after the party.
I actually wonder what IU Counseling’s like. I know some big campuses don’t have the staff to support the student population, so there’s either obscene wait lists, a limit to how many times you can come in a semester, or both. (The worst horror story I heard was students with suicidal impulses getting thirty day waits.) Or maybe it’s one of the ones that also offers/outsources students to online therapy appointments. There’s a chance that might actually work better for Amber, though I can’t report on it without firsthand knowledge and it probably varies depending on service.
And of course any benefit is dependent on the therapist and your rapport with them. Especially in a case like Amber’s- probably an IU psychologist could easily diagnose and treat the anxiety disorder and PTSD, but even if she felt able to confess that she’s the campus vigilante, except that that’s an alter… DID’s a lot more hit and miss with professionals, and it’s pretty clear that anything threatening AG’s existence isn’t gonna work. She might actually do best on some kind of support forum.
Darn it, the link didn’t work. It’s the strip “Shrink,” from July 2, 2017.
Regalli
Yeah, makes sense. We just don’t know if there is a limit per term, but a few years ago looking at things IU at least seemed to have a student-run counseling group for depression with a page on the official Counseling Center site, so I’m pretty hopeful they have their shit together there. Still, I cede to anyone with actual experience.
Can she afford therapy? The university probably doesn’t have much in the way of free mental health and her Mom was just barely getting by before Ryan’s parents sued her.
Campus will have a counseling center free to students. Like I said upthread, how good that is is wildly variable even without Amber’s particular difficulties in play, but I don’t know IU’s specifics enough to say whether there’s any chance in hell of it working well. And that probably wouldn’t cover summer either way, and Amber’s issues are clearly the kind that are going to take years of working with someone.
Possible Stacey has health insurance that could cover it, but I don’t have much hope.
235 thoughts on “Go away”
Ana Chronistic
GRAVITY, MY NEMESIS
butts
(air resistance?)
Yumi
Yeah, the gravity part seems to be on her side in this.
Clif
And then Amber realizes how important Amazigirl is to her and leaps after it.
Inahc
nah, she just keeps walking down the stairs, and it lands on her head 🙂
Rabid Rabbit
Unfortunately, in her emotionally hightened state she forgets all her training and ends up in a full-body cast. Sal, feeling bad, visits her every day and mistakes her constant paralysis for the effects of the cast.
HeySo
Gravity? ON HER SIDE? Clearly she’s actually a supervillain, then, since gravity’s whole shtick is keeping people down. 😐
Tacos
CURSE YOU AIR RESISTANCE!!!
Walky_Talky
“It’s time to try defying gravity
I think I’ll try defying gravity
Kiss me goodbye, I’m defying gravity
And you won’t bring me down”
a/snow mous/e
Huh, I never realized that song was supposed to be from the point of view of air resistance…
toby
you gotta tie a knot in it first
Doctor_Who
And wrap it around a brick. And throw it through a window. Of a store with a display of televisions you fancy.
And…wait no, now you’re looting. Nevermind, ignore all that. Though as a way of firmly rejecting your identity as a superhero it would be pretty effective.
HeySo
Gotta remember to scream out “AMAZIGIRL IS DEAD. LONG LIVE LOOTERGIRL.”. Then, later on, you reveal that you were actually the evil twin, and the real Amazigirl was just trapped in your Lootcave. But then, it’s revealed that you were actually the real one after all, and you were just trying to trick the third duplicate of yourself.. and then your first duplicate sacrifices themself for you, but later on it’s revealed that was also a trick.. but then it’s revealed that the third duplicate was the real one all along, and we were just being presented the narrative through an unreliable narrator!
Anyway, meanwhile the real Lootergirl has already stolen everyone’s hearts…and the entire city. Way to let us down, Amazigirl(s).
Deanatay
Someone reads a lot of Spider-Man… and is very bitter about it…
Stu
So is Amber actually getting professional help at this point, or…?
Yumi
Guess
Clif
She gets occasional advice from Mike. Does that count?
Jon Rich
Yes, but he’s the wrong kind of “professional.”
me
For a nickle.
carms
lol u funy
butts
hah yeah right
and if you pull the other one it plays yankee doodle
Reltzik
Or.
Deathjavu
Nope. No one but Dorothy and Ruth has, and Ruth was basically forced into it.
Speaking from experience, there are a lot of dumb, wrong reasons to not get treatment when you’re ill, especially with brain issues which people somehow think is different than, say, kidney failure or lung cancer.
Inahc
and has anyone even reminded her therapy is a thing that exists? given her dad’s attitude towards it, I wouldn’t expect her to think of it… or be willing to go without a friend bribing her into it, really.
Deathjavu
Doesn’t seem like anyone around her has quite grasped how bad the dissociation and PTSD is, and thinks that she’s just choosing to play a role rather than having a serious mental disorder. We, the audience, know perfectly well how bad this is, but we’ve seen more than anyone else.
Danny could have maybe identified it, but…Danny…not the most observant.
Inahc
well, dorothy did see enough to ask ruth to keep an eye on her, iirc.
two people who are seeing therapists, but somehow they didn’t mention it to amber. at least, not that we saw.
Regalli
Yeah, I was actually thinking last night about who knows what, and basically no one has a full set of facts.
Ethan knows about the holdup and stabbing, the abuse, that Amber is AG, that Sal is on campus, and he probably has as good an idea of there being a dissociative split or PTSD as anyone. He doesn’t actually know and recognize Sal, at least as of Joyce’s party.
Danny knows there was A Backstory with a holdup, the abuse, the inexplicable-to-him enmity with Sal, and was in a conversation where Amber detailed the car chase from her perspective and was correcting herself on whether things were her actions and thoughts or AG’s, including her saying she basically didn’t have control of her body. He didn’t seem to have fully connected that Amber meant that literally she is not AG, at least pre-breakup. He doesn’t know what’s up with Sal, and doesn’t know Amber stabbed her.
All the rest might know AG’s identity and/or Blaine being bad news, if that, but even when Amber or AG talk about dissociating or ‘I told you I didn’t beat him up, but Amber did,’ they still don’t realize that’s actually what’s going on. (Though actually that’s happened a couple times. I can’t remember whether or not Joe was present at the time, but Amber flat stated to Stacey and Richard that she dissociates.)
Oh and Mike knows some degree of this shit, but from past experience anything he offers will make matters worse and that might be his intent.
Interestingly enough, NO ONE has connected Sal’s role in this, and Amber hasn’t shared with anyone that she doesn’t remember things when AG comes out anymore or that she’s trying to get rid of her.
BBCC
I wonder how Ethan, Danny and/or Walky would react to Sal’s role in this?
Regalli
I know, right? Ethan doesn’t really have a relationship with Sal, and if I remember right he said something when AG told him she was on campus like ‘okay, but I’m not worried and it doesn’t haunt me anymore.’ But Danny and Walky? No idea how that would go for either, except that I could see Walky taking sides and I don’t know for sure which one he’d pick.
BBCC
Ethan said “It’s definitely crazy we’re all going to school together but it was a very long time ago and she was a kid. We were ALL kids. I mean, she’s probably changed or she’d be in jail instead of college, right?’
In other words, Ethan has the forgiveness potential of a saint. He may feel differently if confronted with Sal in the flesh but who knows?
thejeff
Danny’s picked up a few more big hints since they broke up. There was a conversation about Sal and about who actually broke up with him and another later one where Amber talked about “sharing this 5’2″ meat vehicle”.
I don’t think we’ve really gotten to see how he’s reacted to those or what conclusions he’s drawn.
I suspect Ethan knows even less. Amber’s disassociation has been progressing and most of Ethan’s experience was before school started. He knows about Amazi-girl, but as a secret id thing, not as an alter. Obviously he does know about all the backstory.
And you can’t really blame them. It’s not an easy thing to grasp. Hardly the first conclusion anyone is going to jump to, especially with the super-hero secret id bit as an excuse to talk about the two as separate without really letting on.
Regalli
Absolutely. Even when she’s talking frankly about it, it’s so difficult to grasp some psychologists don’t believe it actually exists. Much less a bunch of college freshmen who haven’t taken a psych class in their lives. (I would be a bit more leery of Stacey and Richard, because if I angrily responded to adults in my life that I dissociate after something traumatic like that they would freak out… but then all the adults in my life probably have an above-average vocabulary with regards to psychology and mental illnesses.)
deliverything
It certainly doesn’t help that there were many much-publicized cases of people being misdiagnosed with Multiple-Personality Disorder (as it was known at the time), resulting in people sometimes denying the existence of legitimate cases even when faced with the evidence.
Drunk Mike
She framed it as a joke with Stacey and Richard.
thejeff
Yeah, she started with “I stab people who piss me off” and ended with “I disassociate and fight criminals”. I might be worried, but it wouldn’t really be the disassociate part I was concerned about – more the threats of violence.
Of course, they both know about Ryan, so it can all be taken as a reference to that.
DovahQueen
It can takes months to years before something as common as depression is recognized as an issue for someone, and that can be by trained professionals. I mean, shoot, it took almost 15lbs of unintentional weight loss and sleep disturbances for me to recognize how big a problem my mental health was giving me, and I was a college educated, licensed healthcare professional the entire time it was happening. It would be frankly amazing to see a college freshmen string together something as complex as complete disassociation and an entirely separate personality in a person they’ve known for less than a semester.
Maybe we could expect Ethan to recognize the severity of her struggles before anyone else, simply because they’ve been close for so long, but he’s making some huge life adjustments himself right now. I will say though, that between Ruth, Dorothy, and Ethan, I’m surprised that no one has pushed her strongly toward a counselor.
me
Including Sal.
Emily
Even without it being the result of a dissociative split Amazi-girl should really stand out as a big enough crisis point to try to get her to get help.
Freemage
College freshmen, though? Honestly, most of them are just bemused by the idea of a ‘caped superhero’ on campus. A few have some insights into the idea that this is symptomatic of deeper troubles, but as noted, most of them don’t grok the idea of ‘therapy’, either.
thejeff
Because she’s a superhero. And that’s apparently kind of just accepted. Like the way no one recognizes her and she can skirt the laws of physics – like the stunt choreographer is in her corner.
Yumi
Yeah, I’ve had friends with parents who…well, they suck, but maybe not as much as Blaine?…and anyway, I’ve had to basically aggressively support them into considering therapy.
Deathjavu
My dad was very against therapy, seemed to think it was all pill pushing. Several of my friends pushed me towards it saying that it was unreasonable not to get treatment with the symptoms I had. Getting treatment, and medication for a little while, was pivotal in rebuilding my life over the last 6 years. Now I am a mostly functional adult!
I don’t take my dad’s advice anymore.
not someone else
Amber is honestly far enough down the abused-kid rabbit hole that I’m not convinced she understands that anything she’s experiencing is a problem rather than her just deserts for being a terrible human being. Even the blatantly not-normal shit like flashbacks and losing time.
Fredderika12
She is suffering from toxic shame from her abusive upbringing. That means she can’t let go of the shame from the mistakes she has made- or even things that just felt like mistakes to her. All the things she thinks she has done wrong are still hanging around in her head, making her feel worthless- hence the flashbacks. But I doubt she has heard of toxic shame- I’ve suffered from it most of my life, and didn’t know what it was till recently- so she probably does think all her negative feelings toward herself are legitimate. She feels ashamed of things Blaine would have criticized her for, like social awkwardness or lack of control over her feelings; but she also hates him and is even more ashamed of anything he might praise her for, like solving problems with violence.
Regalli
I mean, she knows it EXISTS, since she’s the source on the ‘Blaine negotiated self-defense classes rather than therapy after the incident’ bit. But any ideas she has about it are probably pop culture Freudian shit rather than, say, CBT or something else that could actually help her.
Billie is technically supposed to be going to something as well, but has never actually went. Pretty sure Sal had experience with therapy but it ended poorly because Sal’s life. And of course Joyce has the business card for someone Roz gave her after the party.
I actually wonder what IU Counseling’s like. I know some big campuses don’t have the staff to support the student population, so there’s either obscene wait lists, a limit to how many times you can come in a semester, or both. (The worst horror story I heard was students with suicidal impulses getting thirty day waits.) Or maybe it’s one of the ones that also offers/outsources students to online therapy appointments. There’s a chance that might actually work better for Amber, though I can’t report on it without firsthand knowledge and it probably varies depending on service.
And of course any benefit is dependent on the therapist and your rapport with them. Especially in a case like Amber’s- probably an IU psychologist could easily diagnose and treat the anxiety disorder and PTSD, but even if she felt able to confess that she’s the campus vigilante, except that that’s an alter… DID’s a lot more hit and miss with professionals, and it’s pretty clear that anything threatening AG’s existence isn’t gonna work. She might actually do best on some kind of support forum.
NotPiffany
Dorothy was able to get an appointment after the incident with Ryan, so I think Amber would be able to, as well.
NotPiffany
Darn it, the link didn’t work. It’s the strip “Shrink,” from July 2, 2017.
Regalli
Yeah, makes sense. We just don’t know if there is a limit per term, but a few years ago looking at things IU at least seemed to have a student-run counseling group for depression with a page on the official Counseling Center site, so I’m pretty hopeful they have their shit together there. Still, I cede to anyone with actual experience.
brasca1
Can she afford therapy? The university probably doesn’t have much in the way of free mental health and her Mom was just barely getting by before Ryan’s parents sued her.
Regalli
Campus will have a counseling center free to students. Like I said upthread, how good that is is wildly variable even without Amber’s particular difficulties in play, but I don’t know IU’s specifics enough to say whether there’s any chance in hell of it working well. And that probably wouldn’t cover summer either way, and Amber’s issues are clearly the kind that are going to take years of working with someone.
Possible Stacey has health insurance that could cover it, but I don’t have much hope.
butts
ohhhhh there’s the red panels
Yotomoe
probably not the best time, but I’m not known for tact or timing
https://imgur.com/a/YRmGcRb
butts
smoosh boobsh
newllend(henryvolt)
?
Bagge
No, no. I needed that.
Doctor_Who
This pleases me.
Looks like it pleases Walky too.
Marsh Maryrose
I need to have “I’m not known for tact or timing” translated into Latin so I can use it for my heraldic motto.
Fred Garber
Google: Quia non notum mihi leo vel apto
Ryek Hvek
Sometimes, a finger is just a finger. Sometimes.
Sunny
I disagree, the timing was perfect.
Yumi
I hate when things refuse to be as dramatic as you demand.
Doctor_Who
Anyone know if there’s an app that simulates the sound of dramatically slamming the receiver of an old phone down?
I feel like “I HATE YOU AND IT’S NOT YOUR BABY ANYWAY!!!” – *deet* lacks dramatic flair.
Yumi
Just try to yell and replicate the sound right as you go to hang up.
newllend(henryvolt)
Not as Dramatic as leaving it in the Dumpster on a rainy day like in Spider-Man 2 but you get the point.
Spaz
Oh.
Oh GOD.
Did JJJ get the Spiderman suit cleaned before he got into it?
Did Peter Parker clean it before he got back into it again?
newllend(henryvolt)
The expression of your Gravattar really makes this comment.
cookie1995
I wonder how many Spider-man related works have homaged that “Spider-man no more” cover cause there has been a few
ShinyNeen
No no, Amber, this is, uh, this is good! Drama negated, r-right?
Oh geez… : (
Larkle
Physics, how dare you.
Doctor_Who
The sworn enemy of every superhero.
LookingIn
Except Batman…because, well he’s Batman
HeySo
After all, he can breathe in space solely by glaring space into submission.
Kernanator