430

Monsters
Posted on July 2, 2016 by David M Willis

430 thoughts on “Monsters”

  1. Ana Chronistic

    “She’s very, uh… fat.”

    “Really?”

    1. Ana Chronistic

      [/Hank the Cat]

    2. EvilMidnightLurker

      Kumbaya!

      1. DoubleW

        This is a bit out of nowhere, but EvilMidnightLurker, what is your gravatar from?

        1. showler

          That’s The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight.

          From “The Tick”.

        2. EvilMidnightLurker

          Exactly. At the time I wanted to adopt the alias, way back in the early nineties when the show was on, the Unabomber was a bit too fresh in people’s minds for me to be fully comfortable with declaring myself a bomber on the Internet, so I compromised. 😀

        3. Mr. Bulbmin

          So do you extend your name to the “Evil Midnight Lurker What Lurks at Midnight” on sites where it fits?

        4. EvilMidnightLurker

          I do! It usually only fits in signature files though.

        5. gwalla

          CHURCHILL SPACE PONIES I’M MAKING GRAVY WITHOUT THE LUMPS!

  2. AndroidDreams

    YAAAS

  3. Nym

    Last panel Hank. 🙁

    1. David

      Let’s be fair. “Getting Joyce back to Bloomington” was already on Carol’s shit list. So this is a bit more committed than it appears at first read.

      1. Willoughby Chase

        Yep. Even that small act of mercy will cause ructions.

      2. Kitty

        Seriously. I’m seeing a lot of people reading this as him avoiding it, but I read it more as he knows this is a bad space for Joyce. He’s going to face a fight because Carol does not want her going back. And he’s going to deal with that in her place, and probably hopes he can get her to come around in the meantime. It’s not a battle he wants Joyce to have to fight. He’s protecting her as best he can. I personally think it’s the best choice they could make at this time. Too much more and Joyce won’t be able to handle it.

        1. Stairmasternem

          Or perhaps he sees this as a conversation to have on the road. Having it in church, with ears about, may not be best.

          It also reinforces his point. People need time to accept change, some more time than others.

      3. Stairmasternem

        We never saw the end of that argument, perhaps Habk won in the end? Of course Joyce taking the car sans permission almost ruined that.

    2. showler

      Last panel is where Hank shows that Jocelyne is his daughter too.

      That’s a classic example of avoiding a fight that cannot be won at the moment.

      1. Cerberus

        He doesn’t want to say something he can’t ever take back.

        1. StClair

          *touches nose, nods*

        2. David

          Your avatar has problems finding her nose.

        3. David

          Well, when I say nose, it’s just a hole in the face. But it was a nose to us.

      2. Ana Chronistic

        luckily, it’s a fight that won’t have to happen for at least five years! YAY COMIC TIME

  4. Wheelpath

    Too real Willis, too real

    1. Aeron

      It is so hard to speak your comment out loud without concentrating very hard.

    2. Lokitsu

      Joyce’s comments in panel three pretty much sum up the problem for both her and the church members. When you’ve got a lot of shit going on in your life and you run into someone who’s scary or different or whose actions make no sense to you, it’s much easier to label them as monsters (ie. Not human) and then dismiss their viewpoints. Then you can get back to the problems in YOUR life.

      1. JonRich

        ^This. Add in basically all current politics, it’s the same problem.

    3. Volkai

      The perfect level of Real.

  5. March

    Nice dodge, Hank.

    Also, anyone else get the feeling that little pep talk was for himself too?

    1. Leorale

      Definitely. And he needs it to be okay that he still struggles sometimes, that he wants to accept Becky and isn’t a monster, he’s not the jerk congregants even though he’ll probably be a bit slower than Joyce was.

      1. JonRich

        He’s, what, 30 years older? Not surprising.

        Heck, given the kind of upbringing we know he gave Joyce and Jocelyne and their brothers, the fact that he’s this open to changing is pretty surprising in and of itself. I find myself cheering Hank on pretty much constantly now.

    2. Volkai

      The best pep talks help all people involved.

  6. Mr. Mendo

    Yeah, best to let this simmer for a while…

    1. Reltzik

      While we cut to Joe hitting on Amazi-Girl!

      (Because she’s on the market now, and masks and ropes up her to at least an 8.)

  7. Fridge_Logik

    Oh man, he knows. He can’t deal with it, but he knows. I feel for you Hank, trying to make the best of a situation that never used to be so terrible.

    1. Sarah

      I think hank and Carol will end up divorced.

  8. AndroidDreams

    The world is full of grey spaces, nothings black an white
    See the look on those kids faces, dont go starting a fight

    1. Charles Phipps

      Ironically, Hank is seeing the world in black and white. There’s no gray and he’s ABSOLUTELY RIGHT–which is the terrifying part.

      1. lejwocky

        Hank’s journal, October 12th, 1985…

        1. doomprix

          “Zombie Jesus Attacked again tonight, I just don’t understand it I thought it was the other people who were the monsters…not me, NOT ME!”

  9. Matt

    even though hank is older, he seems to be more accepting of the newer era and people than most his age are.

    1. Sporky

      Older people being conservative by default and young people being progressive by default is a hoary cliché with little basis in reality.

      1. Riku

        Really a lot of older people I know are way more liberal/leftist than I am. I think the stereotype comes from people who grew up in or only meet older people from a more conservative setting.

        1. Ravian

          This is especially true when you consider that a lot of old people nowadays are the same people that were in their 20’s during the 60’s. Plenty of aging hippies nowadays.

          There are so many factors that go into shaping our political identities. Parents have a huge effect, but aren’t absolute.

          I’d say that many people do become more conservative as they age (since we don’t always accept new concepts as they appear later in life.) but it’s nowhere near an absolute.

          As an example, my grandmother went from voting for Barry Goldwater in the 60’s to voting for Bernie Sanders a few months ago. My mother thought she’d never see the day when her mother voted for a self-described socialist.

          It all depends on how willing we are to accept new information and allow it to shape our opinions.

        2. Plasma Mongoose

          The old saying is “If you’re not left-wing when you’re young, you’re heartless, if you’re not right-wing when you’re older, you’re brainless”

        3. Kamino Neko

          Which is generally credited to a man whose allegiances changed with the wind. (Or, at least the political wind.)

        4. Inspector Hound

          Um, you have to be careful about vague pronouncements like that. This is one of Those Sayings that get attached to figures people like, as opposed to people who actually said it.

          (It sort of kind of looks like it should be credited to François Guizot, but I wouldn’t put hard money on that bet yet. It definitely was not said by Winston Churchill.)

        5. Kamino Neko

          It was not said by Churchill, but it is almost always credited to him.

        6. Josh

          @Plasma Mongoose
          It should be noted that the “young left, old right” saying dates from an area when republicans were the liberal party.

        7. Plasma Mongoose

          In Australia, the Liberal Party is the conservative party.

        8. carms

          and this is why capital letters are important

        9. JonRich

          @Plasma Mongoose: That’s because in basically every country but the United States, “liberal” still means classical liberalism, like John Locke, rather than FDR-style New Deal politics.

        10. DoubleW

          Who’s on first?

        11. JonRich

          Fun fact: Hillary Clinton was a Goldwater supporter in 1964. By 1969, she was firmly on the left.

          Like Joyce, she changed *a lot* at college. Granted, we’ve only seen, what, a month and a half of Joyce’s college life, but even that has had a seismic effect on her worldview.

        12. Briny

          “Fun fact: Hillary Clinton was a Goldwater supporter in 1964. By 1969, she was firmly on the left.”

          Presumably, by her supporter Steinem’s logic, because that’s where the boys were.

      2. CrazyJ

        The only thing older than that cliche is the average age of Fox News viewers (68 in case you are wondering).

      3. AndroidDreams

        My 89 year old white conservative christian grandma lives on a street primarily lived in by immigrants from all over the world and she loves and greets them all. At my dads wedding she surprised me with an anecdote about a kid that used to live next to her coming back as a trans woman, who had been rejected by her dad and was crying in the street until my grandma took her in, gave her a cup of tea and had a long talk with her. (this is london btw, no we arent all polite my area has more racists than the rest of london) this is a woman who devoted her working and home life to raising children, and has over 30 grown adults who remember that fondly. Old people have no excuse, and alot of christians could actually learn a bit by taking a leaf out of jesus’ book and caring for those around y’all.

        1. mystseekyr

          Not just Christians, everyone can use a bit of that.

        2. goyeastyoungman

          The Christ I know was more interested in how anyone calling themselves a follower of his treated the vulnerable, marginalized and dispossessed in society than much of anything else.

          As far as I can tell, behaving otherwise really does kinda turn claims to Christianity into a hypocrite’s lie. And Jesus had a lot more nasty things to say about hypocrites.

        3. Meme

          *Jesus states he’s not there to overthrow or rule government
          *subsequent church leaders allow persecution “with joy” and spend time on people’s hearts
          *fast forward 2000 years
          *whad’ya think all that stuff meant, bob?
          *i think it means that God hates fags and we should ban gay marriage
          *aight sounds legit

        4. Meme

          Jesus: “Wtf.”

      4. timemonkey

        Older people tend to have met lots of kinds of people and have gotten used to them existing.

      5. Plasma Mongoose

        It’s a fairly accurate stereotype but even with accurate stereotypes, the Exception Rule applies.

      6. Swissaboo

        Funny enough a cohort’s voting record in the US is based on “what party had the presidency and was the economy gold or bad for their first election.” The greatest generation is the only cohort that didn’t vote for Reagan’s first term.

      7. Fred

        I’m 46, so I’m a closer to Hank’s age than to Joyce’s, if I’m not older than he is. Oddly enough, I’m also about to finish my CS degree at a Wisconsin state college. (UW-Parkside, if anyone wonders.) I’m pretty far left. Compared to a sampling of traditionally aged students at UWP, I find that most of them are actually a lot more conservativate than I am. (This isn’t to say that we don’t have wonderfully progressive students at UWP, but on average, the students are a bit conservative.)

        It’s an interesting experience being the old person in the room, expounding on inclusion, and say, how langague is used to enforce gender norms and the binary gender model. (You know, just to pick an example …)

        1. CrazyJ

          I worked in a factory in Racine a couple years ago (close to UWP) and they were older and more than a little conservative. Such that a coworker I originally knew as a classmate at technically college in Minnesota made it point to hide the fact that he was gay from other coworkers. Most of the factory cheered politicians like Paul Ryan and Scott Walker and they always played Fox News in the lunch room.

          Anyway, I’d say the Racine/Kenosha community as a whole is pretty conservative, and UWP not having the best reputation tends to draw students mostly from the surrounding communities (I personally choose to go to differerent UW school myself when I got sick of working in that factory). So really the young people at UWP are still probably more liberal on average than the places they come from.

      8. podian

        The Brexit vote provides a bit of this basis in reality.

        1. Khambatta

          All too true. It was the same with the Indyref as well.

        2. podian

          Well, *now* the Indyref guys have a pretty ironclad argument for the second referendum – the Scots always wanted more to be in EU than to be in the UK.

      9. Snuggly Buffalo

        I seem to recall some Canadian study that suggested people on average actually tend to get more liberal as they age.

        The only reason young people tend to be more liberal than older people is because they tend to start out more liberal in the first place.

        1. thejeff

          Near as I can tell, it’s a matter of how society is changing. Older people tend to change more slowly and thus lag society. Young people start out closer to (or even ahead of) the curve, then slowly fall behind as society moves on.
          There was old saying that you could change from liberal to conservative over your lifetime without changing a single opinion.

          It also varies with topic, since society moves at different speeds and directions in different areas. The US is far more liberal on LGBTQ issues than it was in my youth, but much more conservative on economic ones – though there are some signs of change on that front.

        2. Deanatay

          It may also be affected by when they lived. People who were young adults through periods of prosperity and stability (eg, the 50’s, or the 80’s) tend to support keeping things the way they were. OTOH, people who lived their adult lives during periods of depression and turmoil (the 60’s, or the 00’s) are more open to change.

        3. Cerberus

          This and what Snugglybuffalo says. It’s hard to grow up in the world and not be moved a little forward by its changes, but that rate of change doesn’t often keep up with the world in general and general society.

          And that’s kinda the point of most forms of activism, to make it so the kids these days grow up with less biases and baggage than the groups before them because of the activists fighting to change shit.

          Of course this overall change can change in a second if we decide as countries to retry fascism again (see the overall cultural shift on torture that happened during the Bush years or the success of neofascist movements in various Western countries).

      10. Willoughby Chase

        Older people tend to own houses, have more commitments.

      11. Cerberus

        It has some tiny basis in reality in that people find it easy as life progresses on, to refuse to grow and adapt to that change and hold on to beliefs that may have been viewed as socially acceptable 20-30-40 years ago, but have never been remotely acceptable and now there are political fights about that very thing.

        But that’s a major reason why I’m so pissed at the social framing we have about education and personal growth as something that ends in early adulthood and then you’re “complete”.

        Education is a lifelong thing because the world is not static and you can become the type of bigot you hated if you aren’t careful about noting what groups are fighting for their visibility and the cultural biases against them (see the various ways people who are marginalized in one way will nonetheless perpetuate bigotries against groups with less power on an axis of theirs).

    2. Stairmasternem

      When Joyce defended her friendship with Dorothy, she did so using scripture. Being mic dropped by his daughter made Hank start re evaluating things.

  10. Amanda

    8((((((((((
    I mean yeah, JoyceMom’s a dick. (I forget her name right now) It’s just hard when the kid finally sees their parent for their true colors.

    At least Hank’s got Joyce’s back.

    1. Leorale

      Carol is monstrous. Hank is a-ok.

    2. timemonkey

      The sadder thing might actually be for Hank, he might not of seen this side of her before. As the child Joyce will move away and forge her own life and only deal with her mom when she feels like it, Hank has vowed to live with her no matter what.

      1. David

        Hank might not have seen this side of her before? Joyce had a lot of siblings who have put a distance between themselves and the family.

        1. timemonkey

          She has one brother who the parents disapprove of for reasons we do not know, and Hank seemed to be on the same page. And one sister who is their favorite because they don’t know about her. And one brother who’s just as toxic as carol, probably worse that they like just fine. So Carol’s not showing any horrible side with them yet.

        2. Kitty

          It seems that her behavior towards her children stays relatively kind. She does seem to genuinely care for and love them. It’s more towards Becky that she’s turning her hatred. I’m not sure how she would deal with Jocelyn, though I suspect it would be either a “you were influenced” mentality or a “hate the sin, not the sinner” thing. So I don’t see her disowning or turning against her own children so much as she would probably just drive them away unintentionally (which it sounds like is maybe what happened with the other brother). But other “sinners” outside the family are dangers and therefore enemies in her eyes.
          At least that’s the vibe I get and how I’ve been reading it.

        3. Slartibeast Button, BIA

          Frivolous aside: The comments here lately keep giving me weird flashbacks to the anime/manga Karin/Chibi Vampire.

          (Having greatly different standards for family versus non-family in this case.)

        4. thejeff

          Her behavior towards Joyce probably seems kind to her – I have to protect Joyce from horrible influences by keeping her away from them, “I’d die for you” – but it’s still awful behavior. She may love and care for Joyce, but she shows it by trying to control her, keep her from growing up, cutting her off from her friends at school and almost certainly from her best friend.
          That’s not actually love and care. It’s closer to Ross’s love and care for Becky, though not so drastic.

          I’m sure she’d apply the same love and care to , but not to Jocelyne, since she wouldn’t accept Jocelyne. It would all be about trying to help her not be Jocelyne.

          Also, the fact that she can’t see Becky as part of the family is a big strike against her as well. If Becky was straight and Ross had flipped out for some other reason or just died or something, do you really think she wouldn’t have taken Joyce’s best childhood friend in? As part of the family or the closest thing to it.

        5. Cerberus

          This. Her behavior to Joyce has not been loving, it’s been controlling. That’s probably better than openly hostile like she is to Becky, but it’s still awful and somewhat abusive.

      2. Deanatay

        I actually think Carol has been this way for a while, now. Hank shows the political deflection skills of a man who has been dealing with his wife’s religious fundamentalism for a while, now. Regardless of his own beliefs, he is a peacemaker, who believes that maintaining the stability and safety of the family as a safe haven for his children is more important than a single person’s opinions. He sees Joyce is having trouble, and sympathizes, but he will continue to try and help only in private moments like these, and maintain the familial status quo in public.

        1. Norah

          Yes, she’s probably always been like that, but it probably didn’t start to show up until Jordan started doing whatever it was that made him the black sheep of the family. John probably always agreed with everything he was taught. Jocelyne may not have, but she knew she had to keep quiet and pretend to be Joshua who had the same opinions as “his” parents, so there was no conflict from her. And we see how Joyce enthusiastically embraced her religion, until she saw the damage certain aspects of it could do. And she apparent was always an obedient kid, so no conflicts there either.

          Becky, as Joyce’s best friend, was probably accepted and liked by Carol until she came out. Carol may have seen her as a little too outspoken but she probably liked her just fine.

          So Carol’s opinions and attitudes may have seemed fairly reasonable to Hank because he didn’t actually get to see how she behaved to people close to her if they disagreed with her narrow world-view, at least until Jordan’s situation, whatever it may be. And even then Hank apparently agreed with her, because he hadn’t started rethinking things yet (as he did after the fountain episode wi Joyce.)

        2. Chrysalis

          We have seen some signs of disagreement about Jordan; during the conversation that Joyce overheard, Hank said they pushed too hard with him, while Carol said they didn’t push hard enough. I’m wondering if that’s why they’re more divided on how to handle Joyce and Becky – if Hank is deliberately trying to be more flexible now, while Carol is deliberately trying to be less so.

  11. Teddae

    it’s the beginning of the end of their marriage isn’t it

    1. Clif

      Remains to be seen.

    2. Sporky

      Personally, I’d guess their marriage died a long time ago but they’re just trapped in it. (I was going to say Hank was trapped in it, but who knows, maybe Carol doesn’t think Hank is all that either.)

      1. tim gueguen

        Yeah, they’re part of a conservative community that probably doesn’t accept divorce easily. Splitting might be very hard for them, although it may be slightly more likely since Joyce is now an adult.

    3. magicallady

      isnt divorce illegal for protestants?

      1. Plasma Mongoose

        That was once more true of Catholics than Protestants.

      2. Reltzik

        It varies from denomination to denomination, but there are usually rules allowing divorce in exceptional circumstances. Most notably, if the two are “unequally yoked” — that is, one is perceived as more godly than the other — then divorce is permitted and sometimes even preferred because why force a good Christian to be chained to a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

        1. Plasma Mongoose

          I remember hearing that Puritans will allow divorce if one partner is failing to live up to their “marital duties” by having enough sex.

        2. magicallady

          “we need to bone more, dear”

        3. Heavensrun

          One partner typically = the woman in this case. Religions are generally exclusively interested in the gratification of the husband.

        4. DarkVeghetta

          Pretty sure it’s more about children adding to the flock rather then the gratification of anyone – heaven forbid if people actually enjoy their urges.

      3. Jonathan S.

        Protestantism doesn’t have a central authority – it’s a whole bunch of sects grouped around the idea that the Pope is not in charge.

        1. MrSpkr

          ^THAT.

        2. No I Haven't Had My Coffee Yet

          Just realized that if you substitute God for the Pope, you’ve got a good description of atheism.

        3. JonRich

          Brilliant.

        4. DarkVeghetta

          Well… not really, though possibly yes for soft atheism.
          Strong atheism would in this case state that the Pope doesn’t exist in the first place while soft atheism would state that even if he did, it wouldn’t matter – though, arguably, that would be perhaps a more agnostic viewpoint.
          See, problem is, there are multiple sub-definitions of atheism and while the effect vis-a-vis religion is similar, they come from different approaches/worldviews.
          Perhaps it would be more correct to refer to the end product of unbelief to broadly define atheism, as anything more then that is subject to different viewpoints – yet all of them result in a common worldview.

        5. DarkVeghetta

          *they come from different approaches, but similar worldviews (just realized that part needed to be corrected 😛 )

      4. DSL

        Better ask all the divorced Protestants I know.

    4. Pylgrim

      Not necessarily. We’ve seen ONE point of disagreement between them, one that has come when a somewhat foreign (for their sheltered kind of life) situation entered their lives. Maybe, for every other situation that doesn’t involve behaviour towards gay people, she’s an absolutely lovely person, devout wife and wholesome partner. Automatically assuming otherwise is falling in the trap that Hank is warning Joyce against: believing that anybody who disagrees with you on a point where you are fairly confident of being in the right is a monster.

      1. trlkly

        Unlikely. She shows experience in doing this stuff, and Hank doesn’t seem to think having arguments like they did is all that unusual.

        It doesn’t mean she doesn’t have her good qualities that we haven’t seen. But there’s no way this is the only thing she acts like this about.

      2. Kitty

        Yeah up to this point, they seem pretty solid. Hank is definitely more open minded but he does seem to have hope he can talk to her, so I would think either he doesn’t know how deep her prejudice runs or he knows she can be reasoned with.
        I do get the vibe that their relationship is otherwise good and this is an unfamiliar conflict, either because they’ve avoided it or because Hank’s view is changing. It could be a big enough rift to split them up, but it’s possible there is more to Carol than we’ve seen and she can be worked with.

    5. Stairmasternem

      Hank just got done saying some people just need more time. It’s still up in the air.

  12. JessWitt

    Rocky road to banana splitsville.

    1. Kris

      It’s time they be hittin that old dusty trail.

    2. Plasma Mongoose

      If it was an ice cream it would be far tastier.

    3. Orion Fury

      That sounds good.

    4. Slartibeast Button, BIA

      Now I have that theme song stuck in my head.

      You bastard.

      1. Deanatay

        Maybe this will help?

        1. Plasma Mongoose

          Weird but Tasty video.

        2. DarkVeghetta

          I was actually thinking of the Banana Splits theme song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjS1nrsJhTQ

        3. DarkVeghetta

          And about 2h of old cartoon intros later, I’ve landed at ‘Champion the Wonder Horse’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6CN5Ks2KWI
          The Internet is an amazing and scary place. No regrets.

  13. Kris

    They know you can just practice your faith at home right? You don’t have to participate in organized religion if you don’t want to.

    1. JessWitt

      Some people like the feeling of community, but not necessarily all members of the community.

      1. Boxilar

        Humans are social creatures. We crave community. Rituals create a bond between people. A sense of belonging and oneness that satisfies some thing deep in us. Religion often provides that. I haven’t set foot in a church for a regular service in years. Weddings and funerals and the odd christening are the exception. I went with my mom to a Christmas eve service a few years ago because she asked and my dad had died that year. His death pushed her back towards the Church while simultaneously pushing me away. I’m pretty solidly Agnostic now, but singing Silent Night with the congregation filled me with a sense of belonging and closeness with the people there that I hadn’t felt in awhile. Like a swelling in your heart. The good kind. A devout Christian person would call it being “filled with the Holy Spirit.” I recognize that it was the ritual I’d participated in since i can remember calling to my innermost self. It said, “These are your people. You belong here. You are part of them and they are part of you.” Except I wasn’t, really. The old rituals touch something deep inside me, but the rational part that questioned and poked and prodded the Scripture and the Faith and found it wanting won’t let me fake it. I can’t go back and pretend to believe something I don’t just to belong. Which is why I haven’t been back. I feel so bad for Joyce here http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/amazinglove/ Because this is the moment that came crashing down for her. You can see the Joy on her face in the first three panels as the ritual works its magic and she feels a part of everything. Then her rational, questioning mind intrudes. The magic broke for her. She may take awhile to recognize it, but she’ll never belong again. The break is too abrupt for her. Ironically, Becky may still find solace in a church that accepts her. She’s been dealing with conflict with church doctrine since she became aware of her sexuality. So if she finds a church that’s okay with her being LGBT, she’ll probably keep her faith. She’s known the church was flawed for a long time. Not Joyce though. She had an Idyllic view of the Church, and that’s been thoroughly shattered. I think she’s in a place where she can never go back. She’s in the first stage of grief, denial. Anger is soon to follow.

        1. Kris

          Oh I think anger’s already happened http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/03-when-god-closes-the-door/angry-3/ …doesn’t mean it won’t happen again though.

        2. Boxilar

          Yeah, fair point. The five stages of grief are kind of bullshit anyway. People are more than a bunch of random lists and are far more complex than most of us want to admit. For example, given the way she’s acting, Becky is probably going to go on believing in God despite accepting science and evolution and being treated like crap for being Gay. I think Joyce is more of an absolutist, though. Either God and the church are Good and Real, or they aren’t. There is no middle ground with her. Here’s where the cracks appeared. Pretty soon, the rituals won’t be enough for Joyce, especially with most of the church making her feel unwelcome.

        3. Boxilar

          Forgot mah link. http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/originalsin/

        4. Aurora

          Yeah, the original context for the five stages of grief was a very narrow one: terminally ill people dealing with the knowledge that they will die. In these cases, the stages seem closer to reality, but are still just a rough outline based on individual interviews, rather than any kind of data collection. But the theory caught on and was later expanded to cover a wide range of situations, which is where it really starts to fall apart.

        5. JessWitt

          Very well-explained.

        6. Cerberus

          Yeah, and community is important. It’s a tangible loss to lose one’s community and the support and protections it provides. Especially if said community helped you in a really dark point in your life. And depending on the overall health of that community, it can end up being a situation where that gratefulness for the community lets you get more and more invested in the bad aspects of that community.

          (I’m thinking specifically of all the cracked articles recently interviewing former neo-nazis about how the community that they provided made it easier to fall in with extreme bigoted beliefs or all the conspiracy theorists finding it hard to break away from those false beliefs because the community becomes like a family or various cultists or toxic religious groups actively targeting people struggling with homelessness or drug addiction, because those people will be less likely to break away from the organization because they will associate it with being the thing that got them to a “better place”).

    2. Amanda

      There’s the social aspect that they’d lose for practicing at home, and seeing how even Joyce and Becky were looking forward to seeing people I get the feeling that going to church and socializing with like-minded people is a big highlight of the family’s week.

      So that might be an option, but I’ve always gotten the impression from Joyce that she really thrives more in a social worship situation.

    3. Silamy

      Does that still apply for people who are of a faith that includes communion as a ritual?

      1. Plasma Mongoose

        *wonders if there is a Jesus wine and wafer communion snack packs you can buy for those Christians who don’t go to church.

        1. Boxilar

          No, but there is a recipe for unleavened bread. And any wine will do. http://allrecipes.com/recipe/241680/unleavened-bread-for-communion/

        2. Plasma Mongoose

          Who would have thought that some flour, salt, oil and water can be combined into Jesus flesh?

        3. Ravian

          This is the advantage of being part of a memorialist denomination. We don’t actually believe that bread and wine can literally turn into the actual blood and body of Christ. As such we just use whatever (as its more of a symbolic measure than anything.)

          We don’t even use unleavened bread, someone in our church makes good bread for communion every week.

          I’m pretty sure I’m spoiled as far as religious ceremonies go. I attended a Catholic service at one point and couldn’t believe how bland the communion wafers they used were. (like cardboard) I guess they figured that since they believe it’s going to turn into Christ’s body anyway, there’s no reason to waste money making it taste good beforehand.

        4. Plasma Mongoose

          As someone who was raised as an SDA(I’m agnostic now), I can tell you that while SDAs don’t believe the wafer turns into actual flesh, they do take their symbolism seriously, for example while many Christian denominations believe that sprinkling some water on a person is enough for a baptism, the SDAs believe that you need to to be immersed into water because it’s supposed to be a humbling experience which is why many SDA churches have baptismal fonts.

        5. goyeastyoungman

          I tried a standard issue communion wafer once. I’m not even sure it was bread. It could have been styrofoam. Texture was close enough. Flavor was close enough too…if you want to include transubstantiation, Soylent Grain much?

          I bake plenty, and know my breads. I just can’t figure out how anyone could stomach it. Maybe it is supposed to be Jesus’ toenail? Compacted hair protein? Callous scrapings? Or my personal best bet: eating the wafer is a penance in and of itself. So glad I never grew up in a transubstantiation-style church.

        6. Boxilar

          Well, you’re talking about a religion whose primary miracle is that a dead guy got up after three days and walked out of his grave.

        7. Silamy

          Doesn’t the specific type of unleavened bread matter? Last I checked, Catholics couldn’t use matzah for communion….

        8. fogel

          But isn’t that what Historical Jesus and his Boyz ate at the Last Supper? He was in Jerusalem because he wanted to do Passover there, right? Or is this like the Church moving Easter all around through Spring so it never coincides with Passover in order to pretend, or whatever, that Easter didn’t grow organically out of Passover?

        9. Silly Name

          I assume the communion wafer is simply easier to mass produce than matzah. Plus, they aren’t exactly going for historical realism.

          On Easter: It is on the first Sunday after the first full moon after March 21st. So it can happen between March 22nd and April 25th. In fact, this calculation is based on the Hebrew calendar, and Easter, being a celebration of Jesus’ Resurrection, can’t coincide with Passover, because the Resurrection happened AFTER Passover.

          (It should also be noted that in Latin both Easter and Passover are “pascha”, derived by Hebrew’s “pesach”, and one specifies whether they’re talking about the Christian “pascha” or the Hebrew “pascha”)

        10. Harvey Janus

          AFAIK, at least for Catholics, the only way to get Communion at home is if you literally can’t go to the church.

        11. SunshineTheif

          Even then, you’re supposed to notify your church’s priest and he should send a Eucharistic minister to your house to provide you with the host. Its how my house bound great aunt receives communion.

        12. Cody B

          I’m guessing yes, because Humans be crazy even though the very terminology suggests group worship.

        13. Cody B

          …just gonna leave this here.

          https://www.amazon.com/Remembrance-Individually-Packaged-Bread-Servings/dp/B00E82J28M

      2. Boxilar

        Communion can be performed by the faithful in small groups in most Protestant denominations. I think most more formal Orthodox Churches, including Catholics, require an ordained priest, but I could be wrong. I got super religious during my Denial phase. I still miss a lot of the rituals. I just don’t believe in their purpose anymore.

        1. Silamy

          Their purpose can’t be/isn’t community? That’s why I go to synagogue -heck, that’s why I’m as observant as I am. I don’t know if I believe in God -the existence or not of a deity is largely irrelevant to me. “God said so” isn’t a valid reason, but the sense of belonging, the knowledge that I can walk into darn near any shul in the world and know the rules, the songs, the tunes, that’s why I’m a practicing Jew. It’s my heritage, it’s my religion, but I’m pretty sure it’s not my faith.

        2. Boxilar

          Like I said, I enjoy the sense of community and belonging that come with the rituals. I can still recite the Lord’s prayer and the Apostles Creed. The problem is the rest of it. I went back for awhile right after dad died. I tried to tell myself it was okay that part of me rebelled over the idea of a man literally getting up and walking out of his tomb or turning water into wine or any of the rest of it. Especially the “if you don’t believe you can’t be saved part.” In the end, i couldn’t suspend my disbelief and preform the rituals of the religion and be honest with myself. I am not condemning those who do believe. I envy their faith in a way. But I can never go back while being true to what I am and what i became.

        3. Uncertainty Moth

          Capital-O Orthodoxy is the subset of churches that split off from Catholicism in the 11th century. You’re looking for small-o orthodoxy.

          Sorry about the pedantry, I can’t help myself.

        4. Minotaur

          Funny, I read Boxilar as actually speaking about “Capital-O Orthodoxy”, because they spoke about “ordained priests”.

      3. Ravian

        It depends on what sect of Christianity you are. Catholicism places a great deal of importance on communion (That’s what being excommunicated is all about, you’re denied communion and thus your soul is at risk of damnation.)

        But many Protestant sects (including most non-denominational churches such as Joyce’s.) generally hold that the ceremonial elements are less integral for salvation.

        Communion is generally understood to be less of a holy sacrament necessary for salvation among these churches’ and more of a way to connect to Jesus’s sacrifice.

        Heck, generally speaking it’s not always considered necessary for a priest or minister to bless the communion, one could theoretically do it oneself or for one’s family.

    4. Leorale

      It’s also a little like the difference of watching sports home alone, vs having season tickets with all your super-fan buddies, but moreso.

      1. Reltzik

        … you mean I get to see the catches close in, in HD, with replays of the most awesome stuff, and I can have good snacks at a low price rather than mediocre snacks at an overly inflated price, and the seat is a comfy recliner rather than hard plastic?

        1. inqntrol

          And you don’t have to worry about passing through a furious crowd of supporters.

        2. Leorale

          Yep! My point isn’t that one is better, but that they’re two very different experiences.

        3. Leorale

          Also other hardcore sports fans are JERKS, so this works even better than expected for Joyce’s church.

        4. Silamy

          And that there are people who are hardcore fans of each and don’t understand why you’d ever do the other, given the choice, and other people saying “okay, but why are you watching THAT sport when this one’s way cooler?” and more people going, “but why watch sports in the first place?”

    5. SeanR

      Matthew 18:20
      “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”

  14. Rodimiss

    It’s good to know that at least Hank is in Joyce’s corner for “letting her go back to school and not keeping her home where she won’t learn any more crazy ideas about love and acceptance of people of all kinds”

    1. Reltzik

      Yup! I hereby award those two dad points I was withholding from a couple of days ago.

    2. thejeff

      I think that last line was more “let’s get you out of here before it all blows up”. Possibly with a side of “Maybe I can smooth things out with Carol before Christmas break.”

      1. Cerberus

        If the comic makes it to Thanksgiving, I suspect Thanksgiving dinner is going to be intense and if Jocelyne isn’t out by then, that’s the point she’ll come out.

        1. thejeff

          Forgot about Thanksgiving.
          That’s what? A month and a half away. That’s forever.
          I doubt it’ll take that long for Jocelyne.

          I suspect just getting through today is going to be pretty intense. There’s more to come. It’s early in the day and they’re not safe back in Bloomington yet.
          So far, church hasn’t been nearly as bad as I’d feared. So far. I suspect we’re going to see more of the youth pastor. Hmm, looking at preview panels, there’s a crowd scene with him and Hank coming up, then nothing else with Joyce until back at school with Dorothy in August.
          So maybe we’ll get lucky about church. Or maybe Willis is just hiding it.

  15. Rosicrucian

    He wants so badly to have the answers, but there may not be any…

    1. Orion Fury

      That sounds about right, he is a Dad after all…

  16. Achallenger

    so many questions, so little

  17. TheBrigeedaRocks

    You’re killing me with those last 2 panels man

  18. Cattleprod

    Ah, that moment you realize your spouse is incapable of empathy. Fun times.

  19. Just Me

    Joyce should be old enough now to make her own decision as to which church to belong to. She’s probably still too dependent on her family, but if not this could be a good time in her life to explore her options.

    1. Poz

      She’s already doing it! I doubt it’s sunk in that the church her parents go to isn’t necessarily HER church anymore, but she’s been going every Sunday with Becky and Sierra back at her school. We don’t know much about the church they go to, but Becky and Sierra both seem comfortable being gay and bi there. If it’s the same one they went to with Mary, the main thing Dorothy complained about was the assumption that the Jews had misunderstood their own scripture (which is… not an unusual opinion, in my experience) and you’d think any glaring problems would have stood out to her. But Joyce and Sierra might have decided to try out one of the other campus churches once Mary soured them on the first one. Either way, they seem pretty happy with it.

      Basically, she’s already started that process, it just hasn’t sunk in that that’s what she’s been doing. Her school church was just supposed to be a stand in for home church while she was away. Whether or not it actually does work as a replacement will have a lot to do with what direction Joyce’s faith goes, I think.

    2. Paul1963

      I never wanted to go to church–never felt like it was bringing me closer to God, never really felt a sense of community, it was just Something My Parents Made Me Do–but I kept going until I was 21, because I didn’t want to have the argument I was sure was going to come.
      When I did stop going, Mom didn’t realize it for a few weeks, and when she asked me about it, I just said, “I don’t think I’m going anymore,” and there was no argument.

  20. Silamy

    And the comments will explode in 3…2…

    On a more serious note, poor Joyce. Watching your world blow up like that, finding your safest places to turn out to be particularly dangerous ones, and then having to vocalize all of that to someone who’s a part of all of them is… I don’t have an emphatic enough synonym for “difficult”.
    And poor Hank. Realizing that you have failed to protect your child (because he HAS failed to protect Joyce, in a way. Even though he’s not the one hurting her, even though he’s being tolerant and supportive, he knows that her mother will likely never forgive her for staying close with Becky, or starting to think independently, or feeling uncomfortable in their church. He knows that his little girl doesn’t feel safe or comfortable with her own family or community anymore, and as someone who has helped shape both of those (not saying Hank’s responsible for the church’s attitude. But the choice of that particular church probably wasn’t Carol’s alone), he feels guilty.) can’t be easy, and when your kid is that torn up, and looking at you and hoping they’re wrong, and you both know they’re not… It feels like he’s been looking older, these past few strips, and just… bravo, Willis.

    1. Cerberus

      Yeah, there’s sadly no easy way to say “the organization you belong to is hurting me”. And I really like how well Willis has translated that feeling of losing that feeling of safety a once safe place made you feel. I remember doing my first year at a conference I had been raped at before and just dealing with how that felt so different and alienating compared to the welcoming aura it had before.

  21. Stephen R. Bierce

    I’ll never find another girl like you/But happy endings, it takes two/
    We’re fire and ice–The dream won’t come true    –Starship

  22. magicallady

    i wonder if becky is still eating the wafer out of spite

    1. Clif

      Yes. Making the moment last.

      1. inqntrol

        And Carol is probably still giving her an angry look.

        1. lejwocky

          And somewhere Steve is eating toast

        2. lejwocky

          *cereal (I swear I was thinking it)

        3. darkoneko

          He’s eating WikipediOs

        4. magicallady

          that doesnt sound nutritionally fulfilling, and might be full of junk

    2. tim gueguen

      She may have grabbed the communion plate and stuffed everything on it into her mouth.

    3. Dean

      It’s just really, really dry.

      1. David

        Swill it down with some blood.

  23. Mav

    I like to think it’s much easier to make relationships, especially those you’re born into, but the hardest part is dropping/distancing yourself from the people who make your life unhealthy and aren’t benefitting you in any way. Like the parent who never supports you or the friend that you and everyone else can’t seem to understand being around.

    Go hank though. It’s a painful journey sometimes, but what we want isn’t always the same as what we need, like bitter medicine.

    1. fogel

      “But if you try, sometimes you might just find …”

  24. Kris

    Carol will come around! I’m sure she’s not a complete monster. So maybe you’ll get some cold stares, a couple of passive aggressive comments at the dinner table but eventually……..I got nothin.

    1. magicallady

      carol seems too set in her ways. she might end up pretending becky doesnt even exist

      1. Reltzik

        Becky has too much natural obnoxiousness potential for that to work for long.

      2. David

        I suspect she already pretends some of her children don’t exist. What’s one more?

    2. Romanticide

      Carol may be very bad about Becky for years even, she could come around eventually but for the moment it’s going to be awful.

      1. trlkly

        Problem is, the comic at most covers 1 year. Well, unless he does some sort of epilogue.

  25. Cheshrin

    I have an overwhelming urge to hug them both right now. 🙁 MAN, REMEMBER WHEN THIS COMIC WAS ABOUT POOP JOKES AND PAJAMA JEANS. I MISS THOSE DAYS.

    (Also, obligatory “fuck you Carol” here.)

  26. Touchfuzzy

    Prediction: This whole situation leads to her parents’ divorce, she becomes closer to Joe while trying to understand it.

    All his talk about how it would be easier to not do the right thing. He’s talking about confronting his wife.

    1. darkoneko

      Joyce and Joe won’t bang.

  27. Skizz

    My last, enduring memory, as a commited Christian, was standing up in church to sing a hymn. The only thing that kept going through my head was Heavens on Fire, by Venom. I had to leave, when I could no longer stiffle my giggles.

    1. Boxilar

      The last few times I went to church as a regular, this was running through my head. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSCUhqsy4Nk

    2. Joseph

      I once nearly left a church, and did choose not to bother going back, because – well, quick background. I went to Quaker boarding school, but on Sunday you could choose what church to go to. I went to RC, because it was nearby and relatively quick, and sometimes the angry priest would preach, and he was fun because he was sincere.

      Then the young kinda wet priest organised a children’s singalong, which 1) really stretched out the time, and it was a nice day outside and 2) was hilariously bad. It turns out that ‘ Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam’ in a particular Irish accent sounds exactly like ‘Jesus Wants Me For A Zombie’. I went to Quaker meeting after that.

  28. Cephalo the Pod

    But…Joyce did immediately accept Becky’s situation.

    1. John Brewer

      She always accepted Becky, but accepting the situation took a while.

      1. Charles Phipps

        Joyce tried to check the Bible to make sure it was okay to love Becky. I doubt Carol would be persuaded by her theological argument.

    2. Regalli

      I mean there was the Ethan thing, and the moment where she says ‘a mistake’ before Becky asks her ‘do you really think who I am is a mistake?’ and it solidifies to Joyce, but once it was HER Becky, needing reassurance and acceptance? Not a second’s thought after. Rationalizing it, maybe, but if God had been mistaken I think Joyce would’ve made the break I think is likely still coming for her a whole lot sooner. (I mean, I can see Joyce coming to terms with faith eventually once she sorts out “this is not literal” and the whole trauma interlinking with her fear of sin and hell and sexuality as a result, but I think if and when she does it’s going to be disconnected from a lot of the rules and restrictions and basically much of the Bible itself. She might like Jesus, Jesus was by all accounts an actually cool dude, but I can’t see her coming out of things without wanting to punch Paul of Tarsus in the face. Though that may be me projecting my longstanding desire to punch Paul of Tarsus in the face.)

      1. Orion Fury

        It’s alright, I’ve heard he has a very punchable face.

        1. Regalli

          Maybe if he didn’t keep making shit up about an actual person who actually lived over said person’s actual relatives his face wouldn’t be so punchable.

        2. StClair

          I’m pretty sure there’s a line.
          A long one.

  29. Woof

    I’m kinda expecting to jump back to Becky and Joyce’s mom punching it out in a steel cage.

    1. Brute

      yesss

    2. tim gueguen

      Nah, they’ll be standing in the church parking lot facing each other, sixguns on their hips.

      1. Reltzik

        Both of these theories raise SO MANY QUESTIONS about why a church has these things handy.

        (Not saying they DON’T, mind you. That many small town conservatives, someone’s probably got a piece or two out in their cars. And there is (or was) a church that does cage fights as their main form of worship. No, I am not joking.)

    3. Tomas

      The moral argument for settling disputes with duels was the belief that God would grant victory to the righteous. True story.

      1. Woof

        Becky: “I will not give my life for Toedad’s incarceration, and I know I’ll get no justice here, so I’ll let Jebuz decide my fate. I tote’s demand a trail by combat!

  30. Plasma Mongoose

    Me thinks that Joyce’s mother is going to be a lost cause and they both know it.

    1. Kris

      I don’t think so. I wanna believe anyone can be redeemable, even Carol or her older brother whose name I can’t remember but who I was siding with until he turned out to be a jackass….John maybe? Like they raised Joyce and part of the reason she has such a strong moral foundation is because of them at least a little. Even Toedad’s heart was “technically” in the right place. His horrible, intolerant, misguided heart. Maybe it will take time….a lot of time, but people are capable of change.

      1. Plasma Mongoose

        But this is a Willis comic, which means the odds of her being irredeemable are likely to be pretty high.

      2. Regalli

        People are in fact capable of change, but that first requires them to be open to it in the first place.

        Personally, I get the distinct impression Carol’s gonna end up a lot like my genetically-related Blaine – all but his two youngest children are now firmly out of his control and more or less estranged from him, he hasn’t met any of his grandchildren since the time about a decade ago he refused to take a loaded gun off the coffee table where the toddler could get at it (“you could just put him in the car seat” was suggested instead, I don’t think that daughter has spoken to him since,) he is allotted an impersonal message in Christmas cards and like, graduation (if we bother to tell him we’re graduating and he bothers to respond) in communication towards us, and while my mom allows him some contact with her it is always at arm’s length and with a kind of resignedness at “oh look what he’s done now.” (We still see the rest of his side of the family, and I think they have a similar attitude towards him by now.) In short, alone and never self-aware enough to realize why exactly everyone else is managing to survive in spite of you.

      3. goyeastyoungman

        Sure, his heart was in the right place. Inside his ribcage. Too bad he was a toe without a soul, but plenty of callous.

      4. thejeff

        Everyone is redeemable.
        Not everyone gets redeemed.

  31. DOCTOR BEES

    feels feels feels
    last panel kills me
    That’s the look of a man crumbling inside :\

    1. Minotaur

      …also the slightly smaller font of a man speaking in dread of the future his decision will bring.

  32. timemonkey

    Divorce her and be happy!

    1. Syndicaidramon

      Better yet, don’t divorce her and instead be a positive influence on her and make her see eventually that she’s wrong.
      It CAN be done.

      1. Reltzik

        Because “change the person I love into someone” else is always a sound strategy.

        Honestly? I don’t think Carol can’t be reached. Her passive-aggressiveness means she’s not really strong on the direct confrontation and conversation side.

        But I think Hank, for all of his talk of no quarters, isn’t ready to have that type of honest, no quarters conversation for his wife. I don’t see that last panel as him preparing for his marriage to end. I see it as him separating his daughter and his wife so that the two need not feud and therefore he need not get between them.

        1. Cerberus

          This.

          Carol will change if she wants to change and the fact that someone of her beliefs nearly killing her own child wasn’t enough to sway that iron foundation, means it’s very unlikely that she’ll let herself do that any time soon. And also makes it very likely that she’ll keep on doubling down on the same awful.

          And Hank really doesn’t want to make a decision one way or another right now.

        2. Reltzik

          I dunno. I think I’ll question… not outright disagree with, but question… your analysis where Carol’s strength of faith is concerned, actually.

          Quite often — not always, but it’s far from rare — heavy denial is a function of doubt and a shaky foundation, and those who appear the most fanatic are often those who are the closet to the edge of change, and who are throwing themselves back into the “right” mindset in a desperate attempt to fix themselves and/or please God so that He will fix them. It might be that Carol’s in denial about Toedad’s despicability simply because thinking about it will bring her too close to the doubts she’s running from. (Like I said, not always, so you might be right on. I’m just not thinking it’s set in stone based on the evidence we’ve seen.)

          I can think of several expressions from Carol directed at Joyce and Becky that were… pretty difficult to read, and could easily be interpreted as some degree of doubt or inner conflict.

          Contrast Becky’s faith. She’s not in denial about ANYTHING. (Well, not much.) And she’s got a pretty darn strong and unquestioning faith, one that doesn’t NEED to do things all orthodoxy.

        3. butting

          Hank’s faith as originally shown was pretty strong and unquestioning, and it expressed as nonsense about Hitler.

          I wonder how much of his readiness to change vs Carol’s is a function of privilege. This is a church where I’d imagine the entire leadership team to be male, and where in general the men of the church get to make decisions and the women follow along. Hank’s made his decision, and he will even back it up to Carol with I prayed and this was the answer, we need to take it seriously, but it’s got the whole horrible weight against it of (a) Carol resisting that sort of independence through deep horrific training, and (b) the weight of all the other men in the church. Which I suspect is why she hasn’t reacted supportively (let alone any-sort-of-healthily) to the pressures the Cerberus has identified.

        4. butting

          (meant to say that Cerberus, not the Cerberus. Cerberus is obviously the Cerberus, but that was just a typo)

        5. Cerberus

          Hmm, I can see that. There is the phenomenon where when your belief in something is shaky, sometimes you fight all the harder to try and keep it before you lose it completely.

          Though there is also just the people who believe in something 100% and it’s there lack of doubts that drive their zealous actions.

          I suppose it’s too early to say for certain which camp Carol falls in, though, I strongly suspect that either way she is, she’s not going to be abandoning her faith any time soon and if she is in doubt, she seems to be in the process of doubling down on her hateful beliefs to drown that spark of empathy out.

        6. thejeff

          There’s also the question of how much the problem is actually Carol’s faith and how much is just prejudice – backed up and supported by the faith, certainly, but a thing of its own.

  33. AutobotDen

    That moment when you begin to lose your faith in the belief system that gave you the most meaning in your life. This is when you have to choose where your path will go, and it will be painfully difficult, but it will also be exactly what you need to do.

  34. keet

    hoo boy. what, indeed, about your mom.

  35. Bicycle Bill

    HOORAY FOR HANK!!
    (yes, I know I’m yelling, but there are times — like this — when it is totally appropriate)

  36. ESM

    I find the categorization of all other human beings into “people” and “monsters” to be really creepy and weird. Nothing good’s ever come out of that mindset

    1. Palamdrone

      Especially when you already know your wife is what you’re now calling monsters.

    2. Plasma Mongoose

      Unless you watch certain anime where some of the best people are the monsters.

      1. Reltzik

        ESPECIALLY not when there’s an overlap.

        …..

        Just ask Lady Gaga fans.

      2. Kris

        This seems like loose enough justification to plug Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress. Go watch that. The best people are the monsters.

    3. Pedantic Peanut

      There are no monsters only people. Some people are uncomfortable with that.

    4. zoelogical

      it is, a little, but i guess it makes sense to me when you’re wondering when people are going to start pulling out the torches and pitchforks

    5. Kraken

      “I find the categorization of all other human beings into “people” and “monsters” to be really creepy and weird. Nothing good’s ever come out of that mindset”

      I agree. I can see the use in this situation where you’re choosing a large group of people to associate with. However, generally I feel like the use of dichotomies like this oversimplifies situations and can lead to lots of issues. Especially when you believe that you’ve made it to the “people” side and start using that to downplay or excuse your own “monstrous” behaviour/thoughts/opinions.

      1. darkoneko

        So , bi-party politics in a nutshell ?

        1. Pedantic Peanut

          Well mostly I was thinking it does a disservice to oneself to think in those terms. To be clear here, people CAN be monstrous, but the potential for that exists in every person, ourselves included, and isn’t tied to a single set of beliefs.

  37. Reltzik

    Panel 6: Sometimes not giving an answer counts as an answer.

  38. Cat

    I don’t know if this is intentional but this strip almost feels like a foil to ToeDad. The Christian ideal of sacrifice has been brought up a lot lately in the comic, and I feel like Hank is making one here. He’s putting his entire life as he knows it, potentially including his marriage, in jeopardy to love, support, and protect his child, but unlike ToeDad’s understanding of sacrifice, he does it with no fanfare and no force. He doesn’t even directly say he’s making a stand with Joyce yet the implication is there and I feel as though he’s not saying anything bold in order to spare her any feelings of guilt or worry, much like how Joyce recently asked Becky if she wanted her to yell at Carol about the dress. He’s not saying “don’t judge these people yet” for his sake but saying “hey don’t worry about that right now” for Joyce’s sake because he knows she’s traumatized and her worldview is crumbling around her and she shouldn’t have to deal with everything all at once. Hank’s sacrifice isn’t about him or his beliefs and letting everyone know how much HE’S giving up. It’s about loving his daughter, standing by her side even if those he cares about won’t, and letting her know what she wants is more important than how it will affect him. In this strip, “I would die for you” becomes “Let’s get you back to Bloomington.”

    I mean, time will tell if Hank actually stands by Joyce, but I’m optimistic for a win on the side of love here.

    1. Brute

      thumbs up to this analysis

    2. Cerberus

      I like that. Hank as the anti-Toedad.

      1. Orion Fury

        So he’s Handaddy?

        1. trlkly

          Pretty sure it would be fingerdad. Or, well, fingermom, if we wanted to go all the way.

          But like the Animaniacs and “fingerprints,” it has unfortunate implications.

    3. Willoughby Chase

      “I would die for you” seems to me to have a melodramatic ring about it, an oath made not expecting to be fulfilled … whereas Hank’s statement is more honest and substantial in it’s quiet way.

      He knows there’s some heavy lifting to do just to get Joyce to Bloomington but we sure he’s going to do it, come hell or highwater.

      1. ischemgeek

        “I would die for you,” wielded in the way that Toedad and Carol wield it, is not a statement of faith but rather an act of emotional blackmail and a threat. I would die for you, and I would rather die than lose you, so if I die “protecting” you, it’s your fault. You are now responsible for my life and wellbeing, so you’d better do what I want you to do – because you know I’d die for you.

        It is just the same as an abusive partner threatening suicide if their victim leaves – if you don’t do what I want, I’ll hurt myself, or do something that will get me hurt, and it’ll be all your fault.

        1. Cerberus

          This. It’s an appeal to empathy weaponized into a tool of control.

    4. darkoneko

      He already lost at least one child.

      1. Cerberus

        True. Which might be the reason he’s more receptive to the notion of doing right by his kids this time, because he might be recognizing the pattern of loss as well as how Jocelyne has been deliberately avoiding spending much family time together.

      2. George Wiman

        I lost one child to disaffection, quite permanently. Unless one could take refuge in self-righteousness as Carol has, the grief and pain are nearly unbearable. Hank is determined not to let that happen again.

  39. My1DigitIQ

    Ouch, thats gotta hurt. Instead of thinking about that, LETS GO GET SOME ICE CREAM!! YEAH!!

    1. Reltzik

      Someone else suggested a rocky road to banana splitsville.

  40. goyeastyoungman

    “…And that’s what your holy men discuss, is it?” [asked Granny Weatherwax.]
    “Not usually. There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment on the nature of sin. for example.” [answered Mightily Oats.]
    “And what do they think? Against it, are they?”
    “It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.”
    “Nope.”
    “Pardon?”
    “There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
    “It’s a lot more complicated than that–”
    “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
    “Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes–”
    “But they starts with thinking about people as things…”
    –from Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett.

    1. goyeastyoungman

      Note: I mean that categories are also ‘things,’ and that treating anyone as if they are entirely composed of their categories is wrong, and at the center of many wrongs committed. As my old friend Horton mentioned, ‘a person’s a person, no matter how small.’ Although now that I look at that quote, there’s something almost dangerously hierarchical about the weakness implied in smallness.

      1. DSL

        You’d have done better to stop after the Pratchett quotes, which made your point eloquently and succinctly. Why not consider the Horton quote at face value — that being weaker (than you) is no justification for dehumanization, and being stronger carries with it an obligation to not fall for the dehumanization trap.

  41. Mandy

    Sounds like Hank wishes he could’ve left Carol behind with those old churches. Poor guy.

  42. Terry

    I think that the comments are villainizing Joyce’s mom and others of the congregation a bit too much. I’m not saying that Carol hasn’t done some pretty awful things recently, but it needs to be acknowledged that she isn’t doing them in a specific desire to be cruel. Becky and, to a lesser extent, Joyce have challenged some deeply rooted beliefs. Becky, the representation of unholy and soiled, being held up as a victim of a person who represents a group that is righteous and good by her definition is, to put it mildly, a pretty uncomfortable thing for her to face. To recognize Toedad in the wrong and to show empathy to Becky would require a massive shift in Carol’s way of thinking. A shift that she is not currently mentally strong enough to make.

    Hate the sin, not the sinner. We shouldn’t be holding Carol up in contempt, instead, we should be judging her for what she is: a scared little child lashing out at what is making her uncomfortable. Carol needs to be pitied. Pitied as a child who doesn’t know better and cannot understand in the way that more mature people do. People like her daughter.

    1. bryy

      I almost can’t wait for Carol to go “why do you constantly bring up what Ross did?”

      1. Dana

        Kind of reminds me of “Why do you make everything about race?”

    2. Lolly

      However, in her fear and anger Carol still has the ability to do huge amounts of harm to people who don’t deserve it. The fact that she isn’t being a villain out of malice doesn’t change the possible effects of her actions, and we are all worried about the mental health of Becky and Joyce.

      1. Reltzik

        I also wouldn’t say that it isn’t out of malice. Just because we understand the source of her uncomfort… which IS being expressed hatefully, albeit passive-aggressively… doesn’t stop it from being malicious.

    3. Cerberus

      Yeah… but Becky’s “crime” is being a human being who doesn’t fit the narrow and bigoted way she wants to view the world. And her response to that has been to snipe and grouse at someone who lost everything and make her defend her very existence because the notion of showing empathy to something “diseased” is simply foreign to her.

      And the thing about that is that is a choice on Carol’s part and the parts of a lot of the congregation. Sure, they have a handicap they are working from, but this arc has shown us the clear difference between two folks that are trying in their flawed little ways to be better and someone who has no intention of putting forth that effort.

      She is not a child. She is an adult woman of the 21st century and if she cared she could educate herself so much about the reality of gay people or how to support someone who’s dad has tried to murder her and your own daughter. But she doesn’t.

      And she doesn’t because she doesn’t care enough to and expects due to her privilege to never have to grow up and face the reality of people who have always existed. And that instead it is on them to hide themselves away and let her go on believing they are demons and fight against their rights.

      And it really isn’t.

      1. Cerberus

        And I want to add a short addendum that it is crippling the way bigoted assholes treat treating you like a person is some enormous task that requires “patience” and “going slow”. Like, my folks were super fond of that dodge to get me to shut up about what was going on while they went and found the worst possible people in the world to use to justify their bigotries.

        And it took people just going off and doing the work and not treating it like something I needed to babysit them through like a child to make me realize that holy fuck, it’s really not that hard to treat something “uncommon” like a fucking person deserving of love and respect.

        Nothing good comes from babying bigotry. It just allows people to justify it by the hesitance. How things have changed is by people they know coming out, being visible, being unapologetic. Forcing them to realize and adapt that the people they’ve been trained to hate aren’t monsters, but instead just… people.

        1. Lolly

          No matter what happens, you should love and support your child 100%, and part of being a parent is going to bat for them in the ways that they can’t, and shielding them from as much nastiness as you can. I’m so sorry that you went through that with your parents. No one deserves that from anyone, especially the people who are supposed to love and protect them.

        2. Regalli

          Ditto. Parents should treat their kids like, well, the actual smaller but nonetheless unique human beings they made, not like the kids owe THEM a favor for bringing them into the world. You shouldn’t have to go through that ever, but it sucks especially when it’s the people who claim their job is to love you no matter what.

        3. Regalli

          Seriously. There’s a difference between types like Joyce, making an honest effort and screwing up a few times along the way but being nonetheless unflinchingly supportive about the core “this is you and you are FAMILY”, and types like, well, Carol. Important point number one? If you’re earnestly trying and coming at it from such a disadvantage, like Hank? YOU DON’T SHOW IT TO THE PERSON WHO NEEDS THE HELP MOST.

    4. Regalli

      “Hate the sin, not the sinner” is a kind of shitty attitude in the best of times, and even here it doesn’t work because here’s the thing: No matter what the cause of her lack of understanding, she’s still causing INCREDIBLE amounts of damage to her children. She’s the reason (well, part of it) why Joyce feels so much shame and terror at the idea of having sexual interest, and the direct cause of Joyce’s running away in terror yesterday because she has been taught she’s not allowed to question parental authorities and speak for herself. We don’t know what Jordan’s deal is, but whatever it was is bad enough that Jordan no longer speaks to the rest of the family and she may have been the one doing the disowning there. She’s the reason Jocelyne is still in the closet, because she KNOWS the moment she comes out that support network is gone for good, and you do not go through childhood as an LGBT kid in a religious Christian setting without having at least SOME residual trauma at how LGBT-ness is treated there, and in Jocelyne’s case it was more extreme because it’s at home and constant “gender role enforcing” because they recognized she wasn’t conforming right.

      I don’t care that my genetically-related Blaine doubtless has his own issues including a probable personality disorder. I don’t care that he’s basically made himself dependent on his current wife and children, because you know what? That he’s sick doesn’t make the control he has over said wife and children any less messed up to me from a distance. That he’s sick doesn’t change the fact that he hurt my mom and my grandmother, nor does it change the fact that my mother is still in therapy in part because of the host of issues he gave her. That he’s sick doesn’t mean I’m entitled to share any part of my life with him or call him family, and it doesn’t mean I would give him the time of day if he tried to intrude his way into my life. (Fortunately, I can just get myself disowned on the offchance he does. Hence why I bought a physical copy of Book Five.) I can pity what a sad and sorry existence he currently leads while still thinking that as a human being he is utterly despicable and has been that way for decades. Pity and hate are not mutually exclusive emotions when the object of both has so thoroughly earned it.

      When Carol ends up alone and wondering why all of her children have failed her, maybe I’ll spare a bit of pity for her then. But mostly? It’s a situation she will have brought on herself because her children should be allowed to live their own lives and they do not need someone so utterly toxic in them.

      1. Cerberus

        All of this.

        Carol and the members of the church are harming and have harmed people, creating and extending traumas (like Carol’s whole response to Joyce and Becky’s awful weekend of trauma and horror has been to exacerbate the situation by doing her whole “hardline against gayness” dance and make it all about how “corrupted” Joyce is by refusing to cast Becky to the wasteland rather than bothering to check in on her very traumatized daughter).

        And all the *hugs* for dealing with your very own Blaine.

        1. Regalli

          I’m not the one who has contact with him, I just see where he’s hurt the people I love. But I’ll pass those hugs on, thanks.

    5. TheKelliestKelly

      No, this adult woman definitely isn’t a scared child. She’s empathizing with a man who aimed a gun at her child because his heart was in the right place or whatever nonsense she said. Carol villainizes herself.

    6. vivid

      sorry but no. people can’t hate what i am but claim to love who i am. that’s bullshit.

      1. Cerberus

        This.

        Love that doesn’t accept who a person is and what they are isn’t love.

    7. thejeff

      No, Carol’s not a child. She’s an adult and she has responsibilities. She’s wrong and even if she’s reacting out of fear or something she’s still directly harming her own daughter. (Not to mention her other daughter, who won’t (and shouldn’t) trust her enough to let her know she has another daughter. Or Becky, who should be close to a second (third) daughter.)
      Sure, we can understand where she’s coming from and even empathize with the struggle – though that’s much easier with someone like Hank (or Joyce!) who is at least showing signs of struggling.
      But she’s still wrong. And she’s still failing as a mother and a human being.

    8. ischemgeek

      Are you fucking kidding me?!

      Carol is a person who is bending over backwards to excuse Toedad. TOEDAD, THE GUY WHO KIDNAPPED BECKY AT GUNPOINT, WHO TRIED TO KILL PEOPLE, AND WHO ENDANGERED AND TRAUMATIZED DOZENS AS A PART OF HIS BIGOTRY.

      So is the congregation. They would rather side with a guy who held a school at fucking gunpoint, kidnapped someone, attempted to kill people, assaulted several people, and endangered the lives of dozens (hey, bullets shot into the air can still kill fyi not to mention the lives of the people in the chase which would’ve happened when the cops tracked down his car and that would’ve ended far more violently), than support two kids who grew up in their congregation. They would rather blame those kids as the villains than lay Toedad’s actions at his own goddamn feet where they fucking well belong.

      And you say we’re villainizing them too much?! Come the fuck on.

      By your “logic”, I am villainizing the school officials who used to punish me for getting the shit kicked out of me more than my attackers. I am villainizing my parents who gave me long lectures about “setting boundaries” and “standing up for myself” rather than pressuring the school to do jack fucking shit. I am villainizing the family of the 16YO who sexually harassed me at 8 for the better part of a year because they ensured that at fucking 8, I had a reputation as a tease and a slut who’d probably enjoyed the treatment he was giving me.

      No, these people are not fucking children. They are adults who are wholly responsible for their own goddamn actions. And I don’t give a flying fuck how fucking “scared” they are, that doesn’t give them a pass to pile trauma on top of trauma for actual victims of crime like Becky and Joyce.

      They. Are. Villains. They are the same sort of villains that enable tyranny by not speaking up about it, by justifying the status quo. Well, if Trayvon Martin hadn’t been outside after dark, he never would’ve been killed. Maybe, Trayvon shouldn’t have been targeted for being black in public? There’s a thought.

      Let me be perfectly clear: If you enable an unjust system, you are complicit with it and partially responsible for the consequences of it. These people didn’t hold Toedad’s gun, but they sure as hell planted the seeds of his actions and nurtured them until he could harvest it, and now they’re planing more hateful seeds and nurturing them in not-so-subtle hopes that one of the “young hotheads” will go off on Becky and Joyce before the end of the service. And even if one of the young hotheads doesn’t take the hint, they’re going to make it completely clear where they think the blame lies in this case.

      And the congregation is responsible for that. Not Joyce. Not Becky. That is their decision, freely made. To blame the literal victims for the actions of a gun-toting abuser. And the actual children of the congregation excepted (who, I should note, have been far more decent about this whole thing than their parents), the person responsible for that choice to perpetuate abuse in the absence of the bad actor, is them.

      So, I disagree with you: We are not villainizing them at all. People like that villainize themselves. We’re simply recognizing their hateful bigotry for what the fuck it is.

      1. ischemgeek

        Oh, and FYI: Hank is far from fucking well perfect but he is trying and I have patience for those who try.

        I refuse to have patience for those who refuse to try. Carol and the rest are big into the “refuse to try” camp.

      2. Cerberus

        So much agreement with all of this. There are monstrous wrongs being perpetuated in that congregation right now and it has increased the harm from the event.

        Like, that’s what’s been so awful about this whole trip is that it’s been all about whether or not Becky and Joyce are still christian or should be allowed to be considered as still part of the flock rather than about, someone in our church tried to murder these children, holy fuck, we’re so sorry.

        As you note, these people’s actions are villainous and are harmful, because the excuses of their faith outweigh their empathy and they are unwilling to grow and deal with what’s real, instead preferring to perpetuate the hate that crafted Toedad in the first place.

        And so many *appropriate gestures of comfort* for dealing with all that bullshit.

  43. Cerberus

    Comic Reactions:

    Panel 1: Oh, man, there is so much packed into this one little panel.

    The realization that this safe space is thoroughly poisoned, that Toedad wasn’t an isolated incident, but rather part and parcel of the culture that spawned it and continues to make excuses for it. The realization that that disapproval extends even to those who stand up for the humanity of queer folks, not even close to the degree it is for Becky, but enough to be noticeable, to affect her. And it’s something she is not used to, because she’s white, she’s able-bodied, she was a member in good standing, and the misogyny she had thoroughly internalized. So really coming face to face with what it means to be marginalized and frozen out of your community is something of a new experience for her and a frightening one.

    But I really resonate with the guilt she shows here, worried that what she and Becky are absorbing will inconvenience others, cause that’s something I’ve never been able to deal with well. When shit went down for me at the job that discriminated me out because I was trans, nothing ever got me more down or made me more sad than when someone was fucked over for defending me or getting my back. It happened a couple of times and the guilt made me extremely hesitant to reach out and see another person get fucked over cause they tried to do the right thing on my behalf.

    This is her first encounter with that guilt, hopefully she’ll be able to handle it better and reach out for the aid she needs.

    Panel 2: Oh, Hank, you’re trying, but you got so so far to go and that reflexive defensiveness about the people you were just eyebrow glaring a few strips ago really hammers it home.

    Like, he’s on a good path, don’t get me wrong, but he is also making excuses for slow evolution on moral matters and hand-waving away the casual bigotries of homophobia out of the way it makes his interactions with the world inconvenient. And making excuses prolly also for himself and the way he is still struggling to follow Joyce’s lead and be his old self.

    And I respect that this is hard and sometimes that evolution is slow (even for Joyce, she struggled a lot at first) and I’m in no ways writing off the amazing growth he has shown so far, only noting that those are major worrying red flags for me because my family was fond of those “everyone would find it hard to cope” and “maybe those awful people in your life aren’t monsters and don’t need you shoving it in their face all the time” types of excuses when I asked them to support me.

    And I think it reflects the central tragedy and struggle in Hank’s life. He’s a peacemaker who wants everything to run smoothly, everyone getting alone, and to have the good side of everyone in his life. And here he’s having to deal with the reality that some things aren’t going to hold.

    At the end of this, he’s going to lose things and it might be his daughters, it might be his wife and church, it might be all 4/5 if he tries to hard to cling to a center that will not hold.

    I’m still cheering for him though, because I think he’s more or less got the attitude he needs to see this through. Though that might just be painful optimism at this point if he’s following the same arc as Willis’s actual dad (who I think he’s revealed as being a Trump supporter who’s fully bought into the trans bathroom panic stuff).

    Panel 3: Damn, that resonates. These days I’ve got really bad social anxiety, which tends to not play nice with the casual bullshit and stares of a hostile world. I know from having to bail on things because “the patience for people” is a bit much to handle. And that’s a line I’m sure I’ve said verbatim in the weeks following Orlando.

    And that last line, the world would be easier to deal with if every bigot was 100% awful (and there’s a core that really are as all-around awful as they appear), but so many are selective in their bigotry or just let it form the background poison of the general culture.

    And it’s that stew of casual bigotry that just forms a vile form of normal that can be so frustrating to deal with. A handful of single villains can be stopped, can be arrested, can be handled by a just society. An unjust society? One that simply is okay with the disproportionate way that black and latinx kids (and especially trans black and latinx kids) are treated by the justice system or jailed for petty drug offenses. One that doesn’t blink many eyes at the notion of trans people being denied the right to pee or felons being denied the right to vote or women denied full control over their bodies.

    These things are harder to punch. These things are harder to fight.

    Panel 4: Oh Hank, you’re trying, but you’ve gotta be careful, mate, as this is not going to be a situation you’re gonna be able to hit the snooze alarm on forever…

    Panel 5: And that’s the piece Hank really doesn’t want to deal with. That there might not be any way to “do right” by his daughter (or daughters, though he doesn’t know that yet) and his wife. That at least one will be severely disappointed by his actions no matter what he chooses and so he’ll have to choose one over the other.

    And that action might mean the end of his marriage or the end of any healthy relationship with his daughter(s), leaving him only with the asshole son and a wife who’s increasingly bitter that the rapture hasn’t happened yet.

    Panel 7: YAY, HANK! Yes, it’s a dodge, but this is what Joyce has needed more than anything. Escape and confirmation that at least one parent would let her and Becky escape. That would get her home and not make her deal with what is guaranteed to be a very triggering sermon or a mom still trying to snipe at her best friend and a congregation backbiting at her and glaring.

    To get away from that which used to be safe and get to what is safe now.

    This is Hank walking some walk and while it may seem minor and his motivations are conflicted, this is such a crucially important and impressive action by him.

    Hank, you beautiful bastard, you make me think that this is actually gonna turn out all right in the end for Joyce and her sister.

    1. Lolly

      I’m loving this arc, as hard as it is to see how people are treating Joyce and Becky, and to remember how familiar it looks.. I went to a church much like this when I was still attending, and the members couldn’t seem to accept my odd friends. I was part of a Goth-y theater crowd with more than its fair share of queer kids, and I remember inviting them to church with me, and being pretty shocked at the side-eye and rude looks. I felt downright belligerent about it, but no one was willing to engage in a way that I could fight. It was really eye opening to me, that these people who professed to be so loving and accepting were only that way if you fit into a very narrow profile of acceptability. It made me question everything, and eventually realize that I did NOT need anything in my life that would try to marginalize my friends. But I did tend to write those people off as ignorant monsters. Hank is reminding me that there are those worth saving, despite their problematic views, and as a person with a lot of privilege, I have a responsibility to try to educate and bring people together because my life is not that tough.

    2. Orion Fury

      Home is where your heart is, and even with the attempted rape, it’s school. There she has classes to learn and expand her knowledge, to better herself. She has friends that support, care, and protect her, giving her a base to explore who she is, and who she will become. And she has Becky, her best friend, who needs her now more than ever, helping her to grow out of a toxic childhood and into a mature adult.

      Follow your heart Joyce. Be happy.

    3. Regalli

      Seconded your views on Hank. Dude is clearly trying, and I for one hope he’ll succeed and get there when the time comes… but oh, he is really not doing enough nearly fast enough for the shitstorm on the horizon, and one of the biggest parts of that is his clear blinders to the fact that this ISN’T going to end with Carol and Joyce having a good long cry it out and hug session and everything being back to normal and happy.

      Because if they aren’t willing to accept Becky after the kidnapping at gunpoint, they’re never going to accept her. And if Carol’s not willing to take her children defying their proscribed roles at this, another Jordan is absolutely inevitable.

    4. Doki

      “He’s a peacemaker who wants everything to run smoothly, everyone getting alone, and to have the good side of everyone in his life. And here he’s having to deal with the reality that some things aren’t going to hold.”

      Yeahhh I can really relate to Hank here, but from kinda the opposite direction? I’m a few types of minority (to the point that ~fitting in~ with the status quo has never been an option in most social circles unless I lie about a lot of things), and I ALSO idealistically want to get along with everyone and not make waves. In my case it probably more comes from more of a place of trauma than with Hank, but I can still sympathize, like. A lot. :C It’s really really hard being a pacifist surrounded by a bunch of people with strong – and often VICIOUS – opinions. Even if, in my case, it’s very very clear to me which set is more ethically correct, it’s still hard to deal with the reality that no, I CAN’T be on everyone’s good side, sometimes not even with those in my own demographics. (On that note, this is actually the most I’ve EVER said in public about this kind of thing ahaha that’s how timid I usually am about talking about ~social justice things~.)

      And that said, since I can relate to this? I don’t know if I would have interpreted panel two as a reflexive excusing of the church, but more a cautious optimism that they’ll be less awful than it looks like…? Like, not gonna lie, as a comic reader not in the situation I don’t have too much hope for how it’s going to go. (Although I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised by this trip home so far, it’s been bad, but not LITERALLY EVERYTHING THAT COULD GO WRONG DOES kind of bad. I mean, Hank is better than we all expected. Th-that’s something, right???) But having been in that situation myself? It’s my tendency to hope that people could grow given time and encouragement even when, uh… they probably won’t. I guess for a non-religious people I actually have a lot of faith, I just put it in people, not in things like religion.

      Don’t get me wrong, though, I’ve definitely also been where Joyce is right now! I’m there pretty frequently, to be honest. In me it manifests less as punching bigots in the face and more in not wanting to ever talk to anyone else again because everything seems terrible, but I definitely get the HHHHH PEOPLE ARE MORE AWFUL THAN I THOUGHT AND I REALLY JUST DON’T WANT TO DEAL WITH THEM thing. :C And as much as I hope people can change, sometimes I know I can’t personally take being the one to hold their hand (and I’m in awe of people who have the energy to).

      Aaaaaa I guess I personally tend to be a confusing mix of I EXPECT TO PEOPLE TO BE AWFUL and I BELIEVE IN PEOPLE’S CAPACITY TO CHANGE AND HOPE THEY WILL??? And sometimes it’s really hard to reconcile those feelings. :C

      Also, sorry for making this so much about myself OMG I really didn’t mean to, a lot of the things you said just made me have THOUGHTS I decided to vomit out here. |D I do want to say that I can also really really relate to the guilt you’ve felt just for existing. And as if that’s not bad enough, the fact other people will damn your friends for defending you? It’s an awful feeling. ;~; Hugs if you want them? (Also hugs from a fellow queer person about Orlando because. Yeah.)

      (And I also really to add that I’ve been a long time lurker and always like reading your posts. ;w; I usually agree with you, but even when I don’t you say thought-provoking things. Thanks for putting yourself out there and being so frank about your personal experiences, I know from personal experience it’s hard. ;~;)

      1. Cerberus

        SO MANY *hugs*!

        And I don’t think you should ever feel you have to apologize for things resonating and talking about personal stuff. And I really connected a lot with your rant.

        And yeah, I can see your hopeful interpretation of Panel 2. I’ll have to mull it over my cynicism a bit more.

        And again so many *hugs* from a fellow all-the-things-ian.

        1. Minotaur

          No matter how strong you appear to me in your comments, I gather that this is something you need to tell yourself as well. I hope you remember to do so. You are a valuable human being and your views need to be heard too.

        2. Minotaur

          “This” being the need to apologize for talking about personal stuff.

        3. Minotaur

          …and that you shouldn’t.

      2. Minotaur

        As a fellow misguided believer in the capacity of people to learn and grow, I really appreciate your comment. Thanks. 🙂

      3. Regalli

        Hugs and hugs, yeah. It’s hard to want to believe in people and want things to be solved without more bloodshed when the world seems set on hurting all day everyday.

    5. TemporalShrew

      With regards to your opinion on panel two, I have to take slight issue. It’s not some kind of shortcoming for him to counsel Joyce against considering the people in the church “monsters.” It’s common sense. It’s advising her against being a hypocrite. The second she decides that those shooting condemnatory glances at her and Becky are anything but misguided people with a set of deep-seated beliefs incompatible with a cornucopia of things is the second that she becomes exactly as bad as them. Whether she decides that church is right for her or not, it won’t make the people here monsters.

      Evolution *is* slow, and although that’s absolutely no excuse for the xenophobic behaviour the folks in the church are exhibiting, it is a reason. A reason that anyone not predisposed to villainise should recognise as, while at best distasteful and at worst abhorrent, the natural psychological response of humans in response to unfamiliar or conditioned negative stimuli. Hank’s certainly a bit of a milquetoast as a side-effect of his peacekeeping, but his analysis of the situation isn’t flawed. As much as I’m sure we’d all like for people’s views on “moral matters” to metamorphose instantaneously, they don’t. They can’t. As you say, the world is hostile. Perhaps too hostile for Joyce right now, because there *is* no option good for her. These people can’t be changed so readily, not even in the face of tragedy, and Hank isn’t excusing them, he’s just acknowledging that their rigidity isn’t demonic, just disastrously human. Joyce’s mental state is precarious, and neither optimism nor spite are the solution. Right now, there is no solution.

      1. StClair

        That’s the trick, and the trap.
        It is so easy to imagine that people who don’t share your opinions are either stupid (because if they were smart, like you, they’d see what is clearly true) or evil. That they don’t have reasons (or even excuses) for thinking and feeling as they do, that they can’t be reasoned with, be educated or negotiated with, or even change their minds sometimes. You can just write them off; they’re just wrong, and you can’t change them, so you don’t have to work or put yourself at risk by trying. File them under a label, and stop thinking of them as people, if you ever did.
        Easiest thing in the world. And so very human.

        1. thejeff

          On the other hand, sometimes you have to. Sure they’re human and they have reasons and can be reasoned with, educated and or listened to. In theory.
          But not today. Not by you. Not in a way that’s safe and healthy for you. Sometimes you can burn yourself out trying. Sometimes letting them in where they can hurt you again is too much risk. Sometimes you have to cut them loose and keep them away.

          Because that’s the other trap: It’s so easy to imagine that they can be reached if you just try harder. That it’s your fault if they don’t change because you’re not doing enough. That if you just go back to them one more time, they’ll understand and really change and not hurt you this time.

        2. Sadie

          This. Someone said above that Jocelyne and Hank share the peacekeeping gene, and I agree. I also agree with Hank that it would do Joyce no good to demonize the members of her old church out of self-defense—but Hank’s saying that partially for Joyce’s peace of mind and partially out of his natural peacekeeping tendencies and defense of/hope for his friends and neighbors, while I’m only concerned about Joyce in this conversation. Becky and Joyce (and Jocelyne when she comes out and starts getting the same poisonous glances and worse) owe the bigots nothing, but Hank is free to give them as much time to “come around” as he likes. The important thing is the last panel: “Let’s get you back to Bloomington” means Hank knows this isn’t the girls’ row to hoe. For them, he chooses safety and happiness. He can decide what he wants to do about Carol and the congregation in his own time. [I think I should make a little note about the fact that I’m lumping Joyce in with Becky and Jocelyne—she’s the ally, not the target, when it comes to LGBT-hate, but I’m imagining that if I were the Becky in this situation (unlikely; my parents would be confused if I brought home a lady partner because wait, bi is a real thing? but neither would go all Toedad) I’d be awarding her not just ally cookies but a whole dang rainbow-sprinkled cake, and her trauma is recent, devastating, and a direct result of her allyship. Others’ mileage may and will vary! And now my aside is longer than my comment so I hope I’ve been as clear and kind as I intend.]

        3. Regalli

          Since she’s also being targeted for having the gall to act traumatized by a traumatic event and not just quietly meekly ignore her wrist injury and the fact that she had a gun pointed at her, I consider them to be failing her as a victim on the psychological health front and not just the ally one here. When they’re more distant from it, or it’s a more specific aggression like the dress, then she’s in ally mode. When it comes the time for Jocelyne that’ll be Joyce in ally mode while still establishing herself as apart from the rest of the family (or at least Carol and John.) But right here and now, they’re the ones making excuses for a gunman and complaining that she’s “playing up the injury for attention”.

        4. Cerberus

          This.

          This particular aggression is at her. And it’s at her for being visibly traumatized and injured by the negative actions of one of theirs. And they are responding to that reality by attacking her and pretending her injuries are made up for attention because they find her recent traumatization to be inconvenient to their faith.

          And holy shit is it not on her to weather a storm of triggers and people jumping on her vulnerability to kick her while she’s down so that visual presence can remind them of their negative deeds.

          And I think this comic is such an important moment, because it’s the first time any family member has actually engaged directly with the fact that she’s traumatized. She’s been through trauma and needs emotional care. (Hell, even Jocelyne was mostly on offering good advice for surviving the family rather than engaging directly with her reality as a traumatized person). And thus the first time this weekend someone in her family has actually responded to that versus the merry dance of remaining just enough on Carol’s good side to survive the weekend.

        5. Sadie

          This is a much clearer analysis than I managed, thank you! I love reading all these smart comments.

        6. Cerberus

          thejeff-

          This. I’ve seen so many of those I love just constantly dealing with toxic people, people who just keep adding new scars for them to deal with because they feel they have to. Because “family is important” or because “I made a vow to this person” or because “I don’t deserve anything better”.

          The encouragement to stay and fight is pushed hard and is pushed extra hard on marginalized people, because our general access to rights is so connected to movements like “coming out” or being vulnerable about our pain and humanity.

          But it is not on every individual marginalized person to save every awful toxic person and lead them to education. It is on the toxic person to become better, to grow themselves and if a marginalized person tries to help them with free education, then that is a motherfucking gift they are doing out of love and not their “obligation” for being what they are.

          Leaving when shit gets too much is not cowardice, it’s self care. Cause you can’t fight any battles if you’re just being battered around emotionally 24/7. It is perfectly okay to abandon someone to their bigotries in order to never contact them again. It is also okay to take a break from engaging someone for awhile just to survive.

          Hell, to any marginalized person, surviving and caring for your self are not negative things and you are never “letting down the movement” by doing so. It is much better for all of you to be alive than to burn out and wind up dead.

        7. StClair

          Fair enough. 🙂

      2. Cerberus

        Well, if we’re talking personally, then my personal view is that no one is a monster. Even the most awful human scum on the planet is still a human being and there are motivations and biases that drive their actions and make their individual awful behaviors make sense to them in that bubble.

        And I’m not a fan of treating anyone like a monster, because too frequently it is used to erase the role toxic cultural bigotry has in any awful event. Like, if the Orlando shooter is just a monster, then people can avoid thinking about how we structure being a man in society, how homophobic industries like the prison-industrial complex are, how prevalent messages condemning gay men’s love as “disgusting” are, how men are encouraged to respond to confusing emotions with violence, how latinx lives are frequently demonized as worthless or invasive, and the hate that is spread in families and religions.

        That all being said, I disagree with your analysis on Panel 2 and I disagree because Joyce in Panel 1 isn’t saying “everyone in there is a monster and I hate them”, she said “I don’t think this place likes Becky much anymore. Or me.”

        And this is why I strongly disagree with your framing, because it makes firmly recognizing hate and bigotry as being as hateful as perpetuating hate and bigotry which is actually a common tactic used by society to diminish the voices of marginalized individuals (not accusing you of evoking that, just pointing out my bad experiences with that shape of argument).

        Joyce is not seeing them as monsters, she’s recognizing that a lot of people in this church hate her and Becky for existing. She recognizes this with sadness because this place was supposed to be safe. And Hank reacts to her with a whoa, there, how can you call them monsters, they’re people, it takes a long time to adjust to stuff like that kind of defensiveness.

        And so that is what I’m noting as an understandable but negative behavior (it is very human for privileged folks to react reflexively when people note a negative aspect of a bigoted institution, see all the people who are “whoa, why do you all hate cops” whenever people note the structural reality of cop violence and targeting of minorities).

        As for a good solution for her, he finds one at the end of this comic. Leaving. Just because people are evolving or angrily not evolving does not mean someone has to be present and being hurt by their “slowness” or active rejection of motion.

        It is not on Becky and Joyce to suffer and throw themselves on the brick wall of bigotry in the hopes that a few bricks move to push them along. It is on the individual church and church members to acknowledge reality and grow themselves.

        So, Joyce can leave so this place stops hurting her and Becky. Can go somewhere safe, can regroup and decide what she wants to do (and that’s my general advice to anyone who’s in a really shitty organization or place, leaving is hard and scary but is always an option and it’s not on you to save the souls of everyone if you’re suffering to do it. By all means try cause sometimes it works, but it’s not on you to suffer awful people all your life and their vain promises to change).

        And as a final point, the idea of “if you note the bigotries of others and get upset about it, that’s the exact same thing as being a violent murderer driven by their bigotry and hate” is one that especially bristles me. Especially right now.

        Cause right now, Orlando happened less than a month ago, but the queer community has been allowed no space or time to truly grieve, to get angry and upset, because of this toxic framing that calls us getting emotional and upset about being gunned down, of being terrified to go out of the house, because we note the twisted gun industry that dances on our graves, or the systems of bigotry that encourage shooters like this.

        Went to a march this last weekend, where a sitting state assemblyman straight up said that booing him for bad policies was exactly the same as the hate that bred Orlando. To a queer audience. And no. Fuck that noise.

        Being firm, disliking actions that harm us is not hating people and their humanity, recognizing the harm they cause. No. Just no.

        And so I have little patience for it overall (and major note to say this does not include folks who’ve responded to the Orlando tragedy to trying to blame all muslims for it and encourage violence against them, because yes, that actually would be perpetuating the type of hatred that was at Orlando and would actually be a problem. But just recognizing folks hating us and noting their awful words and having less patience to handle and suffer it and thus remove ourselves from the presence of it or yelling at people who diminish that suffering? Fuck no, is that even remotely the same thing.)

        1. StClair

          Great point on the lack of that in panel 1, which is why it sort of seemed to come out of the blue (and thus be somewhat more alarming, at least to me) in the next few.

        2. StClair

          also, to clarify, and I probably should have waited a bit before hitting ‘enter’ so this could all be one comment:

          Definitely not trying to argue that it’s Joyce’s or Becky’s responsibility to engage or educate, especially not here and now. But I really don’t want either of them to wind up hating, labeling and/or dismissing as a result of this, because that would be a tragedy.

          (One of the worst and most insidious aspects of abuse, IMO, is how it manages to perpetuate itself, by normalizing that sort of behavior and giving those subjected to it no other context or guide for how people should think and act. Fortunate are those who manage to find support and other examples and break the cycle.)

        3. butting

          I see panel 2 somewhat differently — there’s Hank’s question, and then Hank’s statement about monsters v people, and much of the discussion here is around the question being one of rebuke. But this is the Hank who said that he was going to follow Joyce’s lead, and read in that light the question is one of comparing notes on how the both of them are developing and understanding their allyship with Becky. “I’m doing this slowly but I’m not sure about the steps… how did you do it?”

          (in which case, props for not making the question one for Becky to answer. right now she needs them in her corner way more than she needs to engage in theory with them, but for Hank and Joyce this is a delicate way of approaching how Joyce’s choice to be an ally led to trauma. and he’s doing it without painting her as a hero or erasing Becky, and, shit, I’m loving how Willis is doing this.)

          I’m reading the “monster” as a reaction to Toedad: Toedad’s allies are real and present, and Hank’s acknowledging that their presence will mean hell for Joyce and Becky. (though with Becky I’m gonna say, pass that communion tray around one more time, she’s got this…)

          It’s also plausible that he’s got in mind that not so long ago he was one of those who looks like monsters from outside (your point on us-vs-monsters is very much taken), and I can’t help noticing that the way he’s easing her back is saying: “Sorting them out shouldn’t be your burden. Don’t worry about it, I’ll still be here.”

          Which is consistent with the foreground text: he’s making suggestions rather than decisions, other than the one, final, important one: the one she’s wanted her parents to support and validate.

    6. Apostate

      Thank you, thank you so much, Cerberus. That write-up helped me work through some old problems drawn out by today’s comic. Hearing my own thoughts re-worded helped.

  44. TheLurkerAbove

    The moment when you know you have marriage problems.

    1. darkoneko

      Oh I am sure he’s known for a while

  45. MarMar

    That last panel has divorce written all over it.

  46. Bicycle Bill

    “Let’s get you back to Bloomington.”

    Six words.  Six words that say “I love you, and I trust you, and I have complete faith in you, and I will support you so long as I have breath in my body.”

    Joyce, you’re one of the lucky ones.  You’re eighteen, and you get to hear this and see this demonstrated in no uncertain terms.  Some of us have to wait the better part of our lifetimes to find this out.

    1. Regalli

      Agreed. This was what Joyce needed more than anything and this is definitely him delivering on it. Good going there, Hank.

    2. Darkoneko

      I understood that as “…I really don’t wanna think about it right now”

      1. DSL

        That would have been “Let’s get you home.”

        1. thejeff

          No. It’s both. Getting her back to school is definitely support for her, but it’s also “Let’s put off the full-on confrontation with Carol”. Getting her home means that confrontation blows up sooner rather than later.

          I suspect he still hopes if he pushes it off, he can get Carol to accept.

    3. George Wiman

      Seconded. And also six words that say; “Let’s get you out of the blast zone.”

  47. Saaaam

    “Then I gotta find a church that approves divorces.”

  48. pyrpyr

    Ditto on all the Hank love
    THANK YOU HANK FOR NOT LETTING ME DOWN. *crying in vicarious relief*

    But GOD DAYUM the bags under that poor man’s eyes, is it just me or have they gotten bigger and bigger with each panel since yesterday’s strip? o_O

  49. ColdFury

    Man, this strip hits hard. The fact that this comic is even semi auto biographical in regards to Joyce makes it even more painful. Did the author have this conversation with his father one day? Did he wish he had? These are rhetorical questions I would never want the answer to, but they make this comic much more painful, and much more real.

    I feel for Hank in this comic. Is this the moment where Hank first realized that his wife was a lost cause, or just the moment when he recognized that he couldn’t prevent Joyce from realizing much longer??

    1. Cerberus

      Yeah… all the *hugs* for Willis too!

  50. fogel

    Hank! The Dad!

  51. Some1

    Carol: Just you and me husband, the showdown that was always meant to be…Agni Kai!

  52. ZDX

    It really comes across as dystopian scifi/fantasy when I read these comments. I don’t mean that mockingly, just as a comment on my own surprise. I think of the culture described in the comic as weird backwoods inbred boogeyman kind of stuff, it’s something you only very rarely encounter in real life, and even then the law is (at least in letter, if not spirit) on your side. Which basically makes me realize how crazy everywhere outside the Northeast is.

    1. ZDX

      This was fairly off the top of my head, and I don’t mean it as harshly as it looks on a second read. It’s really just me expressing shock that this is so prevalent, when I think of it as a vocal and largely disenfranchised minority.

      1. Doki

        Don’t worry, it didn’t read as harsh to me!

        And I get the effect you mean too*, it can be weird and scary to realize just how many ‘nice’ people actually think things like that. (Plus bla bla geographic demographic differences bla bla.)

        *I don’t actually get this from personal experience, since I’m squarely in a few minority boxes and that’s given me a lot of anxiety about how other people will view me as long as I can remember. But my boyfriend has been through a similar ‘WHOA, NORMAL PEOPLE ARE AWFUL TOO???’ realization, when he realized that, like… even if most people won’t do the MOST radically bigoted things, they won’t exactly stop those who do. Not exactly what you’re describing, but I think the effect is kind of close. ;~;

      2. Doki

        Plus, sometimes even people like me discover biases you don’t expect and get to experience prejudice in NEW AND EXCITING WAYS.

        Like. I actually got as much shit about being vegetarian as I did for being gay when I went to culinary school, which was. Just. UH??? Not the most important axis of discrimination, no, but I was definitely not expecting that LMAO it was WILD.

    2. Tioras

      To be fair, there are PLENTY of backwards churches and red necks in the northeast. Even in Boston, new haven, or providence. You just have to know where to look.

      1. Silamy

        Doesn’t even have to be churches (used loosely here to refer any religious groups and places of meeting regardless of the specific term). I was talking with a peace protester in DC right after I finished tenth grade. Short lady, about eye-level with the star of David on the necklace I wear. I had a hard time understanding her through her accent, and asked her to repeat something. And that was when she started screaming at me that Hitler had the right idea and we needed another Hitler and Hitler should come back. That was my first time encountering overt racism, and it was… eye-opening.

        1. darkoneko

          She must be happy now that Trumpet’s here…

        2. vivid

          “Judaism is at its core (“chosen people”) racist.” what the fuck man

        3. David

          Deuteronomy 7. When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; 2And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them: 3Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. 4For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly. 5But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire. 6For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.

        4. Sadie

          wow. no. just wow.

        5. Regalli

          Um that is maybe not the best thing to say to a group that’s not just religious but also culturally distinct and was targeted as a race in its own right for the express purpose of mass murder? Especially not when members of said group still experience hate crimes for being members of it? Like, in significant numbers?

          Seriously, what the FUCK.

        6. David

          You’ll find a number of genocides (some of them ordered by God) in the Torah. You’ll find that God visits the iniquities of the fathers unto the children in their third and fourth generation. You’ll find that the tribes killed almost the entire House of Benjamin (Judges 20) in revenge for a rape and murder.

          But the injustice dealt out to anybody’s forefathers does not give a free pass to the children. You have factions in today’s Israel who consider it their religious duty to “complete” the genocide of non-Jews in the Holy Land. And overwhelmingly these are not the same persons who suffered in the Holocaust and saw the terrible result of treating people like cattle but rather their descendants who feel their own inhumanities justified by those their ancestors had to suffer, including ancestors having lived 3000 years ago.

          How is tieing right and wrong and claim to life and property into ancestral lines of several thousand years ago not racist?

          The Torah depicts a world of tribal wars and genocide. This is the root of all religions of the book, Judaism, Christianity, Islam. Many have grown their religious practice into something transcending those tribal roots. But those are the roots, and there are enough who use them to construct some moral imperative for killing others. Again, all of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have the extremists who derive their justification from this kind of fundamental religious imperative, with Islam and Judaism also tieing this imperative to their ancestry.

          But bad is bad, whatever your ancestors suffered, and injustice does not justify injustice. The past does not excuse making the world a worse place to live now.

        7. Cerberus

          And you want to say that is on all jews…

          For reasons I am sure that are tooooootally not anti-semitic.

          …

          Yeah, I think the real question is why the fuck should we take you seriously and not as some angry neo-nazi who’s getting banned the second Willis wakes up.

          (again, after Orlando, got no patience for people who exploit an atrocity (everything in Gaza) to argue that a marginalized religion is collectively responsible and perpetuating the harm. LIke, sure everyone, let’s just forget the legacy of colonialism that Britain left in that region or the huge amount of jews in both Israel and the US fighting against the Likud and their actions. It’s time for every single marginalized religion group member is collectively responsible for this shit.)

          (And what’s extra frustrating is that these people would not extend the same views to themselves. They’d be crying crow if people were to blame all Christians for the actions of MassResistance or blame all Americans for the crimes of our government including our well-publicized torture camps. But oh make it a marginalized religion and whoops, suddenly collective guilt is totally a useful thing.)

        8. Minotaur

          I was wondering how David thought his whole rant about Jewish racism could possibly an appropriate response to a Jewish person describing their first experience with racism.

          Glad you’re here to do a better job of telling him it wasn’t.

        9. thejeff

          So not interested in having someone explain what the “core” of a religion is based on a selection of quotes from their holy books – especially from outside. It’s easy and pointless. You can prove pretty much any point you want to make.

          Sure, there’s lots of fucked up crap in the Torah. As there is in the New Testament. And the Koran. And the Book of Mormon. And the Vedas. And others I’m forgetting. There’s also brilliant inspiring stuff in all of them.

          Very little of it says anything about the religions people make out of them. You want to know the core of a religion? Look at the people following it. They’re the ones who decide.
          That means you really can’t say much about the core of a religion as splintered and old as something like Judaism. Or Christianity. They’re too big. There are too many different approaches. Too many different cores. Some look at the text and focus on the toxic parts. Some read the same text and focus on the loving, inspiring ones. It’s the people who make the difference, not the texts.

        10. Cerberus

          Dude, we weren’t asking for a demonstration that anti-semitism is still alive and well these days. There are literal nazis holding rallies doing that for us.

          And definitely echoing the “what the fuck” calls on this one.

        11. Lord Stoneheart

          Well he’s doubling down on collective guilt, so I’m not sure if I should bother engaging.

        12. NotPiffany

          If thinking you’re “God’s Chosen People” makes you racist, there are a ton of Christian sects that are just as racist.

    3. Charles Phipps

      I think it’s a good thing that things have progressed so tremendously in recent years as none of this we see would have been strange or even abnormal anywhere but a few scattered places in the United States as early as the 80s. The opinion of homophobia is changing country wise but it is not something which is “just” regional as it is temporal. We need to remember that when judging lest we ignore just how deep and pervasive it is.

    4. Cerberus

      I feel like a good portion of my activism is to eventually make my life experiences feel like deranged exaggerations to the next generations. Every trans or ace or queer or mentally ill person who grows up going “wait, what? That couldn’t have happened, what?” is a good thing (offer void for straight cis ableminded people in denial that this stuff is happening right now and getting all aggressively denialist about it).

      1. StClair

        straight cis…. mostly ableminded *cough*, not in denial so much as horrified (sometimes quietly, sometimes less so) whenever I hear survivor stories of what they once thought was normal and common.

      2. Minotaur

        Judging from my own experience of mental breakdown and the responses to that by supposedly responsible adults, I would guess that we’ve got a long way to go yet.
        Teaching people to not invalidate the experiences of others would be a good start. Not sure how well that’s going to work, though.

  53. Fwip

    Be very careful about thinking of people as anything but people. It’s the first step to becoming… Well, to becoming like the people in this church.

    1. ZDX

      I mean more like, I am shocked that this seems to be a culture in which many people grew up, when I thought of it as a largely strawman concept based on a few people who I certainly don’t mind judging. But, turns out there are more of them than I thought, and more people grew up that way than I imagined.

      1. ZDX

        Again, I’m just saying I’m surprised because I don’t meet people like that, though I hear about them frequently. This discrepancy used to make them seem like (mostly) a construct, but clearly they are not.

        1. Charles Phipps

          Hell, I used to be that person. Homosexuality was a thing which bad people practiced and I was strongly against (for no reason whatsoever). When I actually met a gay person and my etiquette took over versus my inner opinions, the cognitive dissonance made me analyze my opinions and realize, “holy shit, I am an EVIL ASSHOLE.” That’s the truly scary part of this comic to me that if I’d kept myself isolated–I’d be a monster and I hate that part of my past every day.

        2. Antonio

          This comment made me both happy and sad. I’m glad you overcame your prejudices, but I’m sorry if it was personally taxing. Realizing your worldview is wrong is difficult to experience.

        3. Charles Phipps

          Eh, it’s better than the alternative. I take strength from the fact I feel more validated by my beliefs. I also feel closer to God, ironically, having given into my doubts and knowing just how wrong and twisted my values had been by having absolute faith they were right.

        4. David

          Using your God-given conscience and mind for adjusting your preconceptions and world view is personally taxing. Humanity only has a chance when enough are strong and upright enough to undergo this task.

        5. Charles Phipps

          Well, it did give a karmic reward in I met and married a beautiful wonderful bisexual woman who is glad she was accepted by me (and was not by her ultrareligious family).

      2. Charles Phipps

        Alas, they are very much the majority where I grew up and I’ve lived in three states. I got a bunch of hate speech in my reviews both direct and passive-aggressive because I included GLBT characters in my novels and that was bad–then I got it from locals who read them that I knew personally.

      3. dethtoll

        Let’s be honest — the majority of people are generally small-minded, unimaginative idiots. They might be totally okay with black people (if a bit mildly/ignorantly racist) but hate gay people. They might be totally okay with gay people — or even be themselves gay — but they’re convinced transgender people (read: transwomen) are really covert men out to rape women in bathrooms. They might be none of that, but they’ll believe GMOs will give you corporate-sanctioned AIDS or send death threats to pro-vaccine advocates. And whatever the bugaboo any one person might have, just about most people are absolutely TERRIBLE at debate and critical thinking.

        1. DSL

          Good thing we have you, then.

        2. Sadie

          It’s like they wanted to be their Carla avatar for real but rolled a critical miss.

    2. StClair

      Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. (See above.) 🙁

  54. Plume

    Oh Joyce’s dad. You are awesome.

  55. Darkoneko

    Ok, that last question kinda hurts.

  56. Nobody

    Dan you Willis

  57. Bagge

    FINALLY, Joyce needed to hear that she will not fight her way back.

    1. darkoneko

      I feel it’s kinda awful that it wasn’t a given.

      1. Bagge

        That summarizes her situation pretty well.

  58. BenRG

    Oops! Yeah, it looks like there is a divorce on the horizon! It’s very like Hank to want to shield Joyce from this fact but he’s as bad at deflection and deception as Joyce is! The failure to deñy that Carol is a monster is admission of an impending split to me.

  59. Spaz

    This has probably been covered in the comments before, but if you go to http://jocelynejbrown.com/ you will be redirected back to DoA

    1. Cerberus

      Turns out Willis is just the pen name of Jocelyne. Hence why they have the same kitty. Dun dun dun, universe inception.

  60. Hinotori

    This is one of the things that occasionally makes me struggle with this comic.

    I’m like Joyce (and Willis). I grew up in a devout, fundamentalist household. I turned on that faith and rejected it in almost every conceivable way. Later, like Joyce, my best friend was kicked out of their house for being gay. Like Joyce, they moved in with me, and our friendship was stronger for it.

    However, for all my grievances with religion and believers (and they are countless), I recognize that the people in the church are still PEOPLE. Christians are people. Fundamentalists are people. Even bigots are people. We are products of our circumstances, our environment, our upbringings.

    You can call people ignorant, stupid, mean, or cruel, but they are always still people. I am intensely uncomfortable whenever we use labels like “monsters” to demonize human beings, even if they are hostile. It poisons the well. It chills discourse. More practically, it makes these sort of people continue the delusion that they are the persecuted ones.

    It’s no one’s obligation to reach out and be compassionate to those who do not deserve it. It is not justice, but it is nearly always the better choice. For us and for others. I wish I saw more of that here.

    1. Charles Phipps

      I think Willis does a generally good job of humanizing the issue that’s the scary part of cultural assumptions. While everyone has been grousing about GO SET A WATCHMAN, it really does have a lot of value as a work which points out that people can be decent, wonderful, and loving folk yet have TOXIC beliefs that warp them into monsters. Ironically, I enjoy using the old “half a glass of water and half a glass of sewage is still toxic.” It’s a good guide to racism and prejudice in general because it’s not immediately visible but just lying in the back of a person’s mind eating at your decency.

    2. podian

      All this “us versus them” mentality on both sides is where most of the conflict originates, really – and dehumanising others is a large part of that.

      1. Emma

        The problem with that though (the whole “us v. them on BOTH sides) is it becomes a method by which the oppressed are portrayed “as bad” as their oppressors. Like, for some people that works (humanizing oppressors, bigots, etc), and more power to them, but for others, they don’t need to deal with people telling them left and right “don’t fight fire with fire!!!” and that in a roundabout way, the shitty things others do is THEIR fault because they weren’t nice enough to them or whatever.

        1. Charles Phipps

          As someone stated to me, “Tolerance for intolerance just makes you an enabler.” Then again, I wearing my Social Justice Assassin shirt without irony.

        2. ischemgeek

          Yeah, this.

          I don’t truck with “both sides” nonsense because, speaking plainly: Fighting for my rights and my humanity as a person does not make me “as bad” as the people who would see me imprisoned for being bi or institutionalized for being autistic. It simply doesn’t.

          And if you can’t see that, frankly, you’re part of the problem. Not in the sense of being all moustache-twirling about it, but rather in the sense that you’re enabling a system that sees me as less than human and blames me when someone decides they don’t like the shape of my nose because it exists on the face of a bisexual or an autistic or a woman, who refuses to sit down and meekly accept unjust treatment.

        3. Cerberus

          This.

          The people campaigning tirelessly for me to have fewer rights. To have me driven the suicide or killed in the streets. The people who will celebrate and laugh if I am killed. The people who have wronged me in concrete ways are very much human beings. Have very much human motivations. Are never monsters.

          But me holding my hands in front of my face in defense is not being “as bad” as them, nor is recognizing the active harm of their hatred.

          And that framing is constantly brought out and it is immensely frustrating when you are marginalized and especially when you marginalized in multiple ways, because we’re straight up denied our right, so frequently, to be angry about our marginalization. To grieve our losses because of this “both sides do it” toxic framing.

          Like, mother fuckers, let me breathe. Let me be mad that my family threw me away like garbage because some TERF piece of shit told them to. Let me be mad that an employer was perfectly happy gaslighting me because they didn’t want to befall the consequences of breaking the law while they were breaking the law. Let me be mad that I legitimately believed I was going to die last weekend because of all the people stoking hatred against me and mine. Let me be mad at the casual way my existence and orientation is denied because I have sex. Let me be mad that I have an ever expanding collection of drug bottles just to treat all the symptoms of having to have been through all the shit I have been through.

          Let me be furious. Let me be hurt. Let me be angry that people aren’t willing to put forth the smallest amount of effort to stop hurting me and mine, stop making every day out a triggering chore. Let me be human and petty and small just for a second.

          Not in a way that shits on other marginalized folks, but let me be disgusted at the privileged culture that shelters this shit and makes excuses for it. Let me mourn my dead and cry and be so angry I can’t see that this shit keeps happening.

          Cause our pain doesn’t just go away when we’re expected to be the happy shiny tokens that politely argue on behalf of our existences.

          (And yes, I’d be a lot more willing to put up with these “don’t be monsters, ya guys” comments if they weren’t coming off of Joyce openly acknowledging she doesn’t view her congregation as monsters and is simply sadly acknowledging the harm they are doing to her and Becky. Like there’s a time and a place for that shit (Roz’s comments to Joyce in that one class) but it is not fucking here. Holy fucking shit.)

      2. StClair

        Ideally, I would like to see a world without hate. But I realize that’s a looooooong way off, and quite likely impossible without fundamentally changing what we currently define as human nature. I also recognize that eliminating all the many problems and inequalities that give rise to hate is a necessary (and in itself herculean, if not insurmountable) step that must come before that, and that counseling someone who’s actively, constantly being oppressed and (micro)aggressed against to turn the other cheek is like lecturing someone being pissed rained on to “just stay dry” without even having the decency to offer them an umbrella.

  61. EvergreenFir

    Willis, I got the impression in the last strip some nasty shit went down at a past church… like abuse. Or am reading too much into Hank’s comments.

    1. Charles Phipps

      I THINK it’s just meant to be horribly bigoted beliefs Hank was uncomfortable against certain behaviors. In this case, it was dancing. Which sounds ridiculous ala Footloose but is forbidden at the church my wife grew up in along with makeup and anything but demure dresses of the kind Becky wears.

  62. Charles Phipps

    Hank is also going to face the next challenge many bigots in recovery face where he tries to make excuses for the behavior of others. However, at the end of the day you can’t do that. Like the Cisco Kid said:

    “What did you expect? “Welcome, sonny?” “Make yourself at home?” “Marry my daughter?” You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.”

    1. dethtoll

      A+ for Blazing Saddles reference.

  63. Antonio

    How did Willis make a dad my new favorite character? He’s a dad! A Dad.

    1. inqntrol

      He’s not a Toedad, that’s why.

      1. Tenn

        He’s also not Gendo Ikari. That helps a lot.

        1. Antonio

          Any time I question my parenting, I am reassured I’m not Gendo.

  64. Kaos

    Uh. I feel like there are trouble ahead in his marriage.
    Perhaps because his wife is acting like the people he is trying to avoid.
    She may be a bongo. but i hope that she will redeem herself later on.
    She can’t be all bad.. right?

    1. David

      She still has to make one person from who she is.

      And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out,
      and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for
      thee that one of thy members should perish, and
      not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

      Will the remaining eye include Joyce or not?

      1. Kaos

        I Really hope that she isn’t stupid if she decides to leave Joyce behind because of “reasons” it is sad.

    2. AdgeyRex

      Same. I can see divorce in the future, possibly.

      1. Kaos

        I have to agree with you. Poor Hank to take a tough choice later on. Perhaps she will get a wakeup call before it is too late. but somehow it feels unlikely.
        Wonder if the church foams on divorce?

    3. Kaos

      Uh “Bongo”? how the heck did i end up to write like that instead for B*tch? is it anti swearing censor system? but somehow Bongo sounds like a fool or something not so cool. heh.

      1. Will

        It has been a word filter ever since it got very heavily overused against Roz over a year ago.

  65. fogel

    Do we know about the Browns having to change churches before?

    1. miz

      Yep: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/02-choosing-my-religion/avoid/

  66. Willoughby Chase

    “You can always come back later …”

    Or you can keep on going.

  67. Jake'm

    Damn, that last question hit him like a bullet.

  68. Spencer

    So as for Joyce’s monster comment, I don’t get why folks here are reading this as an approval of that thought process, because Joyce is clearly saying how much she’d rather them all be monsters so she can feel justified in hating them, and now she’s realizing that her mom falls under that same label and she has no idea what to do.

    In short, Joyce just wants to keep thinking the way she always has her entire life and is now realizing how fundamentally toxic that viewpoint is.

    1. AdgeyRex

      Exactly. I don’t think she is condoning that viewpoint, but rather saying it is so much easier if it were a black and white issue. But too much has happened in her life for her to see things that way any longer.

    2. Cerberus

      This. Her comment is the one any burgeoning activist smacks into.

      That life would be so much easier if the forces of bigotry and hatred and awfulness were just a group of awful monsters who can be punched into submission Batman style rather than the chaotic tangle of cultural biases and personal prejudices held every time by a person with human motivations for what they do.

      It’s a part of growing up.

      1. Charles Phipps

        Albeit, she was almost shot to death and people are blaming her and her friend. The banality of evil is still evil because it exists in doing nothing to stop the proactive. It’s still monstrous.

      2. Spencer

        “Her comment is the one any burgeoning activist smacks into.”

        Roz is going to be so shocked when Joyce gets back.

  69. DSL

    Yes, it’s just easier when you can dehumanize them, isn’t it?

    1. Willoughby Chase

      So, tell me, how should we refer to the bigots?

      1. DSL

        By their names. By addressing the argument instead of labeling the person. Otherwise you’re playing the game by their rules, and they’ve had much more practice.

      2. Zed

        Dehumanize yourself and face to Willis

  70. vivid

    there’s definitely value in challenging black and white thinking, but to be honest i am incredibly exhausted by people going on about how we can’t write blatant bigots off as “monsters” or even just “total assholes”.

    everyone has some good in them. i don’t think that’s something that people like me are denying when we write off assholes as lost causes. we know that from experience. we know that people can be so nice about most things but then turn around and be the worst people in the world when it comes to something else.

    when we (or, at the least, i and my friends) call someone a monster or any variety of terms, we mean that they’re horrible enough about the thing(s) at hand that we see no benefit to further engaging them. we mean that we’ve looked at the pros and cons, that we’ve considered being patient, and that ultimately we have come to the conclusion that we simply don’t want to be around this person.

    it seems pretty unfair to expect marginalized people to be patient and kind and understanding with people who believe the kind of things that kill us and keep us on the streets. that’s emotional labour, and we are not obligated to perform it.

    and the thing is, we tend to encounter these types of people constantly, strangers or friends. we have to constantly perform this cost-benefit analysis: do i want to expend the energy to transform this person into someone who doesn’t hate people like me? and even for those of us who like to open minds, it’s obvious that we simply can’t take the time to do that for everyone.

    not holding a bigot’s hand through their journey of discovering that, hey, we’re maybe not filthy sinbeasts does not make us as bad as them.

    please stop saying it does.

    1. Willoughby Chase

      Indeed.

    2. Fishie

      I don’t think the point is that it makes you as bad as them. I think the point is that it is in line with their divisive thinking. And yes, I wholly agree, it puts a burden on you and it’s an unfair one. All people who have been marginalized in some way share that burden and it sucks. At the same time, I guess that’s what moral sacrifice is sort of about. You kick yourself while you’re down in the hope that it will teach others unconditional love. That’s what the whole Jesus story was, I guess. I don’t think you should have to bear that burden if you don’t want it, and I’ve never been a particularly moralistic person myself. But I get why the opportunity is powerful.

    3. trlkly

      Exactly. There’s a huge difference between writing someone off as not worth your time and actively engaging in the same sort of hate that you don’t want directed towards you.

      And, even then, sometimes things build up and you get angry and need to blow off steam. That still doesn’t mean you see them as subhuman. Where you figure that out is in casual conversations, not angry ones. (And I don’t mean the ones where you didn’t know it was a problem.) That’s where you find out if someone truly sees you as subhuman.

      1. Rutee

        It’s pretty much impossible to engage in ‘the same sort of hate you don’t want directed towards you’ as a lone voice disagreeing with a sea of affirming messages about how wonderful you and your opinion are. That’s the problem with this kind of framing. You CAN’T equal the culture. The reason I don’t call people monsters has little to do with fears that can’t materialize, it’s in putting people off their guard (X is done by Bad People, I’m not Bad, therefore I don’t do X)

        1. Cerberus

          This. And this is why I can never take seriously the people who argue that anger and hatred from a marginalized group towards their oppressors is the same as that from their oppressors towards them.

          Like, one angry trans kid writing “die cis scum” on their tumblr wall has no cultural power, has no society backing them up and lending passive threat to their anger, has no legal systems using this hate to remove the rights of cis people, has no power behind them and often is the product of having experienced material harm and being frustrated about it.

          Someone writting “die tr***ies” does have cultural power, is drawing on a legacy of violence perpetuated against trans people for being trans, do have laws agreeing with them that trans people need to be inconvenienced or hurt, and are frequently based on the fact that someone marginalized dares exist in a way that they notice.

          These will never ever be equivalent for that reason. And when the argument against the marginalized frequently scrolls down from that to arguing that simply recognizing and stating out loud that we’ve been hurt is somehow the same bigotry as physically attacking us and murdering us…

          Yeah, I run out of fucks to give, because holy fuck is that victim blaming as fuck.

        2. Charles Phipps

          Everyone loves the underdog until they’re the big dog then it’s “There’s two sides to every issue” or “you’re too sensitive” or “You’re just throwing it in our faces.”

        3. ischemgeek

          But that’s the thing: People don’t love the underdog. They despise the underdog.

          What they like is the big dog who used to be an underdog, and is now calling the shots.

          But they don’t like actual underdogs.

    4. Kitty

      Definitely. It’s not someone’s responsibility to explain to you why they deserve to be treated right. That’s insane. Many are happy to explain things to you and help you understand, but sometimes you just have to be angry and frustrated at the unfairness of it all. And it’s unfair to expect someone to always maintain their composure while constantly having to act as an ambassador and deal with people’s ignorant and/or cruel behavior. When someone’s upset because they’re being treated poorly, it’s understandable if they don’t have a whole lot of patience and sensitivity for the people/person treating them that way.

    5. Regalli

      Totally. When you’ve been fighting that off for ages, you don’t have the energy to discuss ‘and they are of course nuanced human beings in their own right’ because it doesn’t MATTER where their views come from when they’re using them to hurt you, what matters is you get out and get a break.

    6. Cerberus

      This, this, all the this!

      And I think dominant group members forget that for marginalized group members, this constant calculus of engagement is every day, often all day. If I engaged with every hateful glance, half-muttered slur, casual bigotry, I wouldn’t be able to sleep for all I would be doing. I’d just be in a parking lot somewhere forever.

      It is not on marginalized people to save all the bigots. It’s on the bigots to be less shit. And in the meantime, they can fuck right off the hell away from us.

    7. StClair

      I suppose I’d answer that I’m well aware that there are many people who are savvy and don’t subscribe to that sort of lazy, black-and-white thinking. I’m not really addressing those people (except, see below). On the other hand, I’m just as aware that the world is full of people who do. Which is a problem.

      And that, to my shame and regret, does sometimes include myself. When I’m full of passion, low on spoons, and/or convinced of the righteousness of my cause, I can find myself going to some very bad places. Don’t let you tell yourself that you’re too good and mindful to ever fall for that, ever get caught up/tripped up by emotion, or that it’s okay this time because you’re really sure that you’re right and they deserve it.

      … or maybe that’s just me, and I’m full of crap. Make your own judgments. Just keep thinking. That’s all I ask.

      1. StClair

        blergh, failure of thinking spotted…
        clearly I am addressing the people who I think have a chance of listening, because, yes, I do tend to write off a whole lot of others. and yes, I recognize this does have a chance of provoking/pushing the intended audience into the sort of defensive reaction usually described in terms of “not ALL _____”/”well I’M not like that”.

        bleh. now I’m all muddled. thinking’s hard, which is why people tend not to. maybe I should just ask Willis to delete these last few. :p

  71. notoriousDLB

    as a homo and a Christian from a religious family, these panels are cutting me so deep

    1. Cerberus

      *hugs*

  72. Ardie Bea

    Panel two and three, I don’t think Hank is saying the church people are (or could be) monsters he’s actually (because he’s her Dad) reading Joyce’s mind a little, and putting words to her thoughts so she can recognise and respond to them – and that’s what she does. She recognises that if they are people, then that requires her to deal with them with a degree of empathy and understanding – and that’s (quite validly) more than she can do right now. Fair enough. It would be so much easier if they really were monsters (which both of them know is not the case). Hank has, in an understated way, made the temptation to dehumanise visible – and then he’s said (Panel 4) “We (you) don’t have to deal with this right now.” I don’t think he’s trying to avoid conflict so much as he’s looking after his road-rashed-raw daughter.
    The great part about this is that by using the term ‘monsters’ which Joyce is feeling but may never have verbalised to herself if left to herself he also legitimises her experience of their monstrous behaviour. And it is monstrous. Go Hank.

    1. Sadie

      Yeah, I like the way Hank’s lines in the fourth panel allow Joyce the choice: someday, when her trauma is less recent, she can come back and fight for her fellow congregants to be better people, or she can write them off, but she doesn’t have to make that choice now. I think that Joyce thinks it would be easier if they were monsters instead of hateful people because of Joyce’s all-in personality: she wants to know Right Now if any of them are good people and she wants to run away from or punch the rest. It’s fair to expect someone in the congregation to offer a show of support now, but Joyce isn’t being fair to herself to expect that she should be able to sort the sheep from the goats right now, because both compassionate and bigoted Christians are just people.

  73. cmd1095

    Ok so Hank does realize his wife is a piece of shit masquerading as a human being. Good, now I can relax a little bit and not be afraid of him suddenly pulling a 180 and becoming toedad 2.0

  74. wakeangel2001

    hey look, an honest churchgoing christian who ISN’T some kind of fanatical zealot!

    1. Rutee

      Which one, the main character, her off-screen best friend, or her father?

      1. Cerberus

        Clearly it’s none of them because Willis obviously only writes bigoted Christian strawmen due to his evil atheist ways. 😉

        1. Spencer

          Cerberus don’t be silly, you’re forgetting the most crucial aspect.

          The good Christian must be an old straight white man who thinks gay people should keep it to themselves but really just hates the sin and not the sinner, and anything outside of this criteria is tumblr pandering Ess Jay Dub political correctness.

  75. RandomRedMage

    I think he has been handling this whole situation surprisingly well.

  76. davidbreslin101

    “We don’t know that these folks are monsters yet. They could still be people.” Pretty useful line. Could do with that kind of thinking here in Britain right now- half the country hates the other half (and vice versa) over recent events.

  77. Oberon

    Ah, the “finding our religion” shuffle. While I never experienced it myself, I had a childhood friend who was baptized into more religions than he could count while his parents went from church to church across a few years looking for the one to which they wanted to be members.

    Not surprisingly, that friend turned out to be an atheist. I think when you place your religion on the same level as window shopping it has to lose some of the shine. It’s like comparing several different bags of crap, looking for the one with the least offensive aroma.

  78. Tenn

    So, in the Walkyverse, Hank and Carol were kind of OK and chill, just pretty creepy (but in a sort of funny way) about getting grandchildren.

    Here in the Dumbiverse, Hank is working his way closer and closer to awesomeness, while Carol is basically just a pair of passive-aggressive buttcheeks with vocal cords.

    Sooooo I guess they cancel out or something? (HA HA HA HA no)

    Also: Yay, Joys & Becks are going backs! That means they’ll probably be back at IU in like a month or so. 😛

    1. StClair

      just in time to see Amber melt down completely!

      1. Spencer

        I am curious to see how much Becky and Dina contribute to that, cause to them Amber’s the awesome superhero who saved Becky and she’s why Becky’s coming back to the dorm tonight.

        Dina also seems to be the most cognizant of Amber’s dissociation, so I’m thinking she’s going to provide us with an outlet for Amber to actually talk about her DID without setting off a red flag that, say, Ethan or Dorothy would immediately register as troubling.

  79. Theluxland

    Dad is nice 🙂

  80. Neeks

    “If I keep smiling at you, will you stop asking difficult questions?”

  81. Tenchan

    Why do I get the feeling that Joyce is going to be tackling the divorce of her parents in the near future?

  82. Killian

    “Is mom a monster?” “Ummmm…. We’ll figure that out at Thanksgiving…. Maybe we can put it off until Christmas break if you go home with one of your friends….”

  83. Paul1963

    I really feel for both Joyce and Hank here. They’re both seeing the cracks in a structure that’s been a huge part of their lives, and it’s very difficult for both of them. I want to give Joyce a hug, because that’s about all I could offer her in this situation.

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