572

Properly
Posted on April 20, 2017 by David M Willis

572 thoughts on “Properly”

  1. Ana Chronistic

    For this next segment, Walky will be playing the part of Russia

    1. Stephen Bierce

      *plays the sleigh ride to Siberia movement of the “Lieutenant Kije” suite on the hacked Muzak*

  2. AnvilPro

    Finally, a teach who understands Joe

    1. Delicious Taffy

      I was going to make a comment about “banging Joe” not equating to “understanding Joe”, but then I realised.

      1. Shiro

        This is at least one class where Joe is coming by his grades honestly.

        1. Koms

          Coming by teeheehee

        2. Bagge

          At least they will have lot of fun roleplaying material after this! I don’t begrudge them that.

        3. Dark

          I would find it ironic and simultaneously perfectly logical if Joe is the only person in the class to come out with a perfect grade.

  3. Kris

    Walky is a man of the people.

    1. inqntrol

      Everyone will get pajama pants for free.

      1. JessWitt

        And butt taco shirts.

    2. 3oranges

      Walky is apparently the men of the people, or maybe the people of a man.

    3. Deanatay

      He needs to work on his voices.

      And practice saying ‘rabble’ over and over, apparently that sounds the most like lots of people speaking indistinctly in the background.

      1. Mephron

        or “rhubarb”, which apparently sounds like the same thing.

  4. Danni

    walky, shut up

    1. Kris

      Whoever he is he shuts up for all of us!

      1. nothri

        Nice.

  5. Questionor

    HARUMPH!

    1. Kensou

      Give the governor a HARUMPH!

      1. shadowcell

        you watch your ass.

    2. Joe Covenant

      REVRIINN!!

  6. Nono

    Leslie, go with your first instinct and be a proper educator.

    1. C.T Phipps

      Leslie’s home is threatened. I’m fairly sure this is what qualifies as a personal emergency.

  7. Saaaam

    That’s how most TAs get their job anyway

  8. Cephalo the Pod

    I’m not sure what would be funnier: Walky attempting to do a different voice with every sentence or NOT attempting.

    1. Dex

      My first thought was: “Is… is he even bothering to change his voice for all of these?”

      I’m so glad I wasn’t the only person to immediately wonder that.

  9. tim gueguen

    You just know Walky is doing all that while making zero effort to make the voices sound different.

    1. Passchendaele

      I imagine him changing his voice for a few times and then getting lazy and not even bothering with that anymore. 😛

      1. Tan

        I imagine him not changing voices, but doing the thing where you try to make it sound like it’s further away.

  10. Fart Captor

    Phew. Came dangerously close to being sensible there for a moment

  11. Haven

    Walky is a master of ventriloquism.

    also, due to the regrettable commodification of education, this is like if you’re working at mcdonalds and when someone orders fries you yell “now YOU must work the cash register!”

    1. Princet

      Technically it’s more like if said customer said “I could do your job easily” on an earlier day, and they’ve come back, and you’re like “I’m gonna go randomly, so do my job now.” It’s still a really weird and bad thing to do, but it’s not quite a random selection.

      1. Princet

        replied to the wrong comment somehow

        1. Princet

          No wait, I didn’t, can I delete these additions somehow?

        2. Leorale

          Unfortunately there’s no edit or delete. (I’d do way fewer self-replies if those existed.)

      2. Leorale

        But, teachers think about how to present things in advance, and prepare lesson plans. They don’t usually get put on the spot and hafta teach a class with zero preparation.

  12. BBCC

    Fuuuuuck this plan. Seriously Leslie, what the SHIT? It is not okay to throw students into a situation they are unprepared for with no warning or compensation. Roz is not paid to teach. She is not a professor, a TA, or even a grad student or close to graduating. She’s a first year undergrad who didn’t even volunteer for this.

    I love Leslie but jesus this is not her best moment.

    1. fillerusername

      Yeah like…jesus. Plus making Becky late for her shift is not cool either.

      1. BBCC

        I guess going now will give them an hour to do this. Hope she lives close by?

        1. fillerusername

          Hopefully but considering how unpredictable Robin has proven herself to be Leslie has no way of knowing how long this could potentially take.

        2. BBCC

          Yeeeep. This can go badly in so many ways and I just….kinda wanna shake Leslie really hard and yell “This can wait until later’.

        3. Leorale

          Does this school do 50min classes, or 90min classes? My school had both.

        4. BBCC

          50 minutes, it seems.

        5. ellernock

          well, I mean, this is college. I’ve had classes that have lasted 4 hours before in college. hell, when I went to art school, I’ve had 6-hour classes. it honestly depends on the class how long it goes.

        6. BBCC

          Very true, but according to Ruth, 50 minutes is common enough to be the reasonable assumption.

        7. Leorale

          Yes, my studio art classes were at least 3hrs each. (any shorter and you’d just be getting into it when it was time to wash all your brushes.)

          For a lecture, though, I think 90min, with a stretch break in the middle, is pretty maximal, and a 50min class is most likely. 35min, if she lets them out early.

          Just teach the dang class, Leslie.

        8. ischemgeek

          When I was in undergrad, I would sometimes take night classes to work around my extra-curricular schedule and also give me an excuse to avoid my terrible roommate. Pretty common for those to be 3 hrs with a 10 min break in the middle.

        9. AndieStardust

          50/90 minutes?! omg you guys all have it good. my shortest lecture class was 2 hours i think. mightve been 3. granted, my current classes are baking or art classes now so minimum of 6 hours each.

        10. Abel Undercity

          Luxury.

          When I went to school we had 27-hour-long classes that would only start once we completed three shifts at mill for tuppence a month. We never knew where the classes were held so we had to find them using naught but tracking skills and a lodestone hung from bit of string. Once we got there the professor would thrash us all with a broken bottle while we recited Aristotle’s Metaphysics from memory. One word out of place and he would kill us all, and dance on our bodies while singing Glory Hallelujah.

          And we were lucky!

        11. Deanatay

          Jus’ gonna leave this here, old man…

        12. Deanatay

          Huh, not sure how I screwed that up…

    2. MM

      On the other hand, Roz did recruit Leslie for the “derail my sister’s career” campaign, so…

      1. fillerusername

        And??????? Roz is Leslie’s fucking STUDENT. They are not on level playing fields.

      2. BBCC

        Roz has not been recruited into anything. Recruited implies consent.

        1. Flakky

          Reintroducing the draft. Roz’s number is up.

        2. BBCC

          I’d say the draft isn’t really recruiting either. Saying ‘shut up, do this, you don’t get a say’ isn’t real recruiting.

    3. Kris

      I think we need to practice a little suspension of disbelief here. Normally this would be ridiculous and morally questionable if not completely frowned upon, but in some cases this is just a silly universe where teachers can cut class to confront their local congresswoman who’s squatting in their apartment.

      1. Shiro

        Yeah, same thought. Obviously this is super unprofessional behavior and would be punished in real life, but…wacky comic shenanigans logic lol. Like breaking into Becky’s house before.

      2. fillerusername

        This is a comic where actions have consequences and however “wacky”
        the situation may appear on the surface it is completely possible that this situation will backfire horribly with Becky being disillusioned with Leslie and Roz being humiliated because an authority figure put them in a position they never should have been so sorry if I can’t be super excited about it.

        1. Commodore Jeep-Eep

          Possible? More like probable.

        2. Roborat

          Comic? huh, and all this time I thought it was an historical documentary.

      3. Delicious Taffy

        Is that not a regular occurrence in your region? Around here, we have to deal with that pretty often.

      4. BBCC

        Comic wacky shenanigans apply to things that bruise possibility, like Sal’s hair curling on shock or Galasso existing or Robin having her job or AG’s physics bruising stunts. This is very much possible and very much a dick move, and I can almost FEEL the consequences coming from this.

        1. Kris

          Ehhh..maybe? Can I say that? The comic plays a little fast and loose with these things sometimes (like Becky has been squatting on campus for at least a few weeks now and following friends to classes and hasn’t been reported yet. Do teacher not take attendance?) and honestly that would be a fairly dark direction to go, especially after all the buildup. Becky finally meets Leslie just to be used in a ploy to remove a troublesome congresswoman from her apartment which ends with what? Becky hating Leslie? Both of them potentially losing their jobs? Roz being thoroughly humiliated for trying to teach a class she’s not ready for? It just seems like a really pessimistic viewpoint. It could happen. I won’t deny you that. And yeah this can leave a bad taste in your mouth when analyzed. Soooo…I don’t know I’m on the fence now.

        2. BBCC

          In my experience, no, university teachers do not take attendance, except in classes where attendance counts for your grade (which is usually tutorials/labs/seminars/etc.) They don’t care. They have their degree, the school has your tuition, if you wanna mangle your degree path, that’s your own problem. And if Becky asked to sit in, the professor might be okay with that (assuming she’s some student who has a free hour to kill). And the reason she’s not been reported for squatting is that the kids in that dorm (minus Mary, who can’t prove it) are actively hiding her.

          Things with Robin could go either way, but I’d be surprised if Leslie weren’t at least called before a disciplinary board of some sort for this stunt.

        3. Kris

          See in my college experience there was a security team. They would literally check you at the door for your school I.D. My mom would have to wait in the lobby just to pick me up. All classes had attendance checks because some only went once a week and others lasted FOUR hours! Maybe it’s different when you live on campus though.

        4. BBCC

          I have never lived on campus. My campus was very large with multiple buildings though, much like this one.

        5. Heavensrun

          That sounds -Bizarre- to me. I’ve either attended or taught at three different universities in my life and none of them are remotely like that.

        6. Dara

          _Super_ bizarre. And I’ve attended or taught at five.

        7. Dragon_Nataku

          Been to five unis so far. I can’t even recall having a student ID for two of them, didn’t use two of the others for anything except taking up space in my wallet. For the uni I’m at now you only need them to a) get into the library, b) get into the dorms (if you live there), c) get into only one of the like four parking garages on campus (and none of the parking lots, so I dunno what’s up with that one specific garage. Do they keep gold there??), and d) some (a very small fraction of; certainly not all) professors will require you to show your ID during exams to make sure you’re not some random person hired to get an A for someone else.

          In related news, I once had a very very needy friend who would drag me to her developmental bio class quite often because I always skipped my epidemiology class (I got an A anyway before anyone says I was killing my own GPA), and nobody cared that this random student suddenly started showing up halfway through the semester. It was in a huge lecture hall so there was plenty of space. Usually in the smaller sections if you ask the prof if your friend can sit in on the class it’s fine if there’s enough seats.

        8. Roborat

          Are you sure you aren’t confusing university with prison?

        9. Knayt

          Becky showing up to classes doesn’t mean much – outside of a couple of classes (which tend to be grad level) teachers tend not to care if someone who isn’t actually a student shows up, as long as they’re quiet and there’s space for them. I showed up in plenty of classes I wasn’t actually in in my early undergrad years.

    4. Leorale

      Not to mention Becky really doesn’t know enough about this situation at all..?
      Why are they in such a rush? We know that Robin will still be there after Becky’s shift, that’s kind of central.

      1. Goblin Scribe

        Well, Becky knows about as much as anyone.

        Roz is getting thrown under the bus, but I disagree with those who think Becky is being taken advantage of. She knows what she’s getting into.

    5. Aninhumer

      I don’t think it’s that bad. Ultimately she’s not forcing any actual responsibility for this class onto Roz. She may have put her on the spot a bit, but she’s free to walk off if she doesn’t want to do it, or even if she starts to feel uncomfortable while trying to teach.

      I read this more as “This class is now study hall. Roz, have fun with that.”

      1. BBCC

        That is not what she said. She said ‘Roz, you said you can teach this class, prove it.’

        That is straight up her throwing Roz into the teacher’s role with no prep at all. And even if this were study hall time, Roz isn’t trained to be a study hall monitor either.

        She can cancel, but that doesn’t make it okay for Leslie to try throwing her into a role she is not suited for, did not ask for, and has no training or education for while Leslie still gets to pocket the cheque at the end of the week.

        1. Jago

          Roz DID say “I can teach this class” at some point. Which is why Leslie is commenting on that here, I think. Besides, I’m sure Roz can do it, she’s shown to be very self-sufficient. Even if she doesn’t, I kinda want to see her take on it.

        2. Emily

          Yes Roz said that which is what makes this so wildly inappropriate and petty because it makes it clear that Leslie is doing this to humiliate her as much as as an excuse to ditch her teaching duties which is supremely fucked.

        3. Commodore Jeep-Eep

          It’s the same people that retained the Puddinghead; that admin is asleep at the wheel.

        4. Jago

          Not sure if you meant for that to sound assuming and dismissive, and I can’t make you respect other people’s opinions, but I would like it if you did. Otherwise there is not really room for discussion.

        5. BBCC

          The ‘her’ I referred to in my first paragraph is Leslie.

        6. CoMa

          Having the ability to do it (for Roz) is one thing – and in this class it could actually be a relatively legitimate course of action for Leslie to call Roz up on her “I could teach this class” for a bunch of reasons (the least pedagogical one being petty because of the statement), but no matter the reason, Leslie would still need to be present in the lecture for this to have any kind of meaning and lesson value. She’d need to be present to lead the class, correct Roz and simply make sure it’s still a class and not some kind of circus. Even with Walky’s reaction – how likely would it be for the other students to really stay and not leave?

        7. CoMa

          I just realised trlkly did mention my main point already (just a few comments below mine) so I’d love to direct the attention of the reader of this onto their comment

        8. CoMa

          Though I do also agree with BBCC (petty reason= not ethical or pedagogical in any way; I shouldn’t have used it for “legitimate course of action”) *sigh* – my main point is basically: no matter the reason – it’s definitely a no-good action because Leslie wouldn’t be there.

          (sorry, I seem to have a bad day with phrasing today)

      2. Liliet

        ^^^ I agree with Aninhumer

    6. trlkly

      No. This is a perfectly moral thing to do. Roz has arrogantly claimed she could teach the class, because she already knows all the material.

      Furthermore, her arrogance is once again causing problems. She tried to shove Leslie under the bus, when she knows that she is just as responsible. But all she cares about is her sister being outed.

      So Leslie is being a good teacher and trying to teach her some basic humility. It’s not a bad thing at all. There is nothing unethical about it.

      The only problem really is that Leslie won’t be there to watch, and, if Roz is even a quarter as smart as she claims to be, she’ll just stay up there until she’s sure she’s gone, and then send everyone home.

      This is why it’s important not to gloss over Roz’s flaws, as it leads you to think that she is some innocent person that someone else is preying upon, rather than an asshole getting her just deserts.

      Hopefully, she’ll get some humility kicked into her and become this great person you all want her to be.

      1. BBCC

        Being an arrogant asshole does not justify petty, unprofessional bullshit and if you think it does, I hope you never have any kind of subordinate at work. It is not okay to throw people into a situation without prep, notice, or even agreement. A teacher trying to humiliate a student by setting them up to fail is unethical, as several actual teachers have already said.

      2. Ari

        I’d like to see Roz get a chance to teach the class with proper warning and Leslie as a backup. This just seems… unprofessional.

    7. Robert

      So I guess Leslie just likes to make a never ending supply of bad decisions in order to undo the last series of bad decisions she made the day before?

    8. Killjoy

      If it were anyone but Roz, I’d agree.

      But Roz… Roz totally deserves this. Reaping what she sows, the chickens coming home to roost, just plain old effing karma.

      Don’t write checks your ass can’t cash, Roz.

      1. BBCC

        No. Roz being an arrogant asshole doesn’t make it okay for Leslie to be unprofessional and petty and ditch her class with an untrained student.

    9. Jason

      I don’t disagree, but Leslie has literally had her home invaded by someone who, upon being physically removed, literally broke into the building in order to return. And this person is in a position of power. Leslie likely is extremely stressed, has had her safe place very literally taken from her, and has no idea where to turn.

      Is this a bad thing to do? Hell yes. Is it understandable that Leslie might do something stupid due to the stress of her situation? I sure as hell think so.
      When we’re stressed, parts of our brain literally stop working. One of the first things to go? Reason. This is the sort of thing that Leslie will probably regret THE MOMENT reason returns to her and she’s capable of thinking it through- but right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s beyond that.

  13. Reflex76

    Hate to be the only one out of it so: What’s Walky’s one man crowd a reference to?

    1. Delicious Taffy

      Don’t worry, I’m not sure, either. Maybe Roger from American Dad!?

    2. Jed!

      I don’t think it’s a reference to anything. He’s just being silly, as per usual Walky.

    3. RacingTurtle

      I’m wondering too. It really seems like people are referencing something with the “HARUMPH” comments and I don’t know what. Hm.

      1. thejeff

        Go watch Blazing Saddles.

        1. RacingTurtle

          IT WAS BLAZING SADDLES?!

          WHY HAS IT BEEN SO LONG SINCE I’VE WATCHED BLAZING SADDLES

          I AM DOING LIFE INCORRECTLY

      2. Questionor

        Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzbhbetwYFU
        But really, go watch Blazing Saddles.

  14. Adj

    I love the “Oh no, she called my bluff” look on Roz’s face.

    1. Shiro

      Kinda same. I mean yeah, this is ludicrously unprofessional, but maybe Roz might learn a bit about her own relative competence level, and maybe stop speaking over people?

      1. Sorrischian

        When I was in high school, we actually had a choir director pull this exact move on a student who was convinced that he could do a better job. It was, as Shiro says, ludicrously unprofessional, but it definitely put a stop to the constant “well, I’d do it this way…”

    2. Killjoy

      And it’s not just that Roz said she could do a better job teaching the class.

      It’s that the Robin situation is one that she actively tried to set up, damn the consequences, purely for her own benefit.

  15. fillerusername

    Okay a) I was kind of hoping Roz would go along considering Robin’s her sister and b) Leslie don’t make Becky late for her shift over your problem:(

  16. Passchendaele

    THE SILENT MAJORITY
    IS SILENT MORE:
    WE DON’T KNOW WHO HE IS
    BUT THE MAN SPEAKS FOR US.

  17. Shiro

    …this is about to go very poorly, and Roz knows it.

    1. inqntrol

      The expression on her face says it all.

    2. fillerusername

      How well do you think anyone let alone a freshman with no teaching experience would do put in a position like this with no warning? Leslie is being a dick right now and I’m hoping Roz proves everybody wrong and actually does know her shit because I don’t think she deserves to be publicly humiliated because Leslie can’t be bothered to do her job today.

      1. Shiro

        I…don’t disagree with you on most of that? Like yeah, this is wildly unprofessional and Roz is being set up to fail. She doesn’t nearly have the skill set, education, or experience for this.

        But it might do her some good to get a practical lesson in why she shouldn’t be speaking over the class, as she has done previously.

        1. fillerusername

          Does she really need to learn that lesson today? Like this? This could potentially be deeply humiliating for her and it is literally only happening because Leslie wants to inconvenience another teenager last minute. Plus I think Roz kind of already learned a harsh lesson today about how people see her with her earlier Becky interaction. I think one a day is enough.

        2. Shiro

          I mean she didn’t learn her lesson before when Leslie told her straight up to stop speaking over her, so yeah, this is a pretty good way for her to learn she doesn’t know everything in this particular arena.

          Again, like I have repeatedly said, Leslie is being a bad teacher in this instance, but lemons into lemonade, maybe we’ll get some character growth out of it.

        3. a4lbi

          “I mean she didn’t learn her lesson before when Leslie told her straight up to stop speaking over her, so yeah, this is a pretty good way for her to learn she doesn’t know everything in this particular arena.”

          Shrug emoji of agreement.

          When talking fails, sometimes you have to get creative.

        4. Leorale

          She bragged way back on the first day of class, and Leslie knows that since then, Roz mentioned to her sister that it’s her favourite class because she learns even though she didn’t expect to. Roz has already gotten the lesson that she has more to learn, and Leslie knows it.

          Now, Roz still interrupts people on her high horse, and that’s poor classroom behaviour, but this is just not productive.

        5. Minder

          Uhh, when Leslie told off Roz to stop speaking over her (and leave the class), Roz stopped speaking over her and left the class.

          Roz came in to this class thinking she’d already learned everything there was to know. As I keep pointing out, and I understand it may be difficult to remember, but it is stated outright Roz has since acknowledged she was wrong and that she can indeed learn from Leslie and others.

        6. Krys Brynhildr

          Well, I read that as wanting her to shut up and sit back down, you know, instead of shutting up and storming off.

          From a writing standpoint, yeah, this definitely seems like its a necessary taste of humble pie for both Desantos, but the rationalizations it requires are not great, or very sensible. I really doubt it’ll destroy Roz’s self esteem or anything regardless, but it does seem built to be a karmic moment due to all the disruption she’s caused in the comic so far.

        7. Minder

          “ROZ! OUTSIDE!”

        8. Minder

          But the karmic moment we can agree on because even after all this shitstorm of accusations flying I AM STILL LAUGHING AT THE OH-SHIT LOOK ON ROZ’S FACE

        9. Tomas

          Roz does not get “deeply humiliated”. Her mind doesn’t have the wiring. This is a girl who produced a sex tape just to make a point.

        10. Fart Captor

          Dude. That only means she isn’t ashamed of her body or her sexuality, not that she’s shameless and can’t be humiliated.

          The idea that a woman (or anyone) SHOULDN’T be ashamed of either is kind of exactly the point she was making

        11. Tomas

          I’m not ashamed of my name, but I still have trouble introducing myself to large crowds. What Roz did shows that she has no performance anxiety, and it’s far from the only example. It’s likely that Leslie chose Roz not out of spite, but because Roz was the only student up to the challenge.

        12. Fart Captor

          Ah. That is a very different thing, though I’m not sure that’s a given either.

          The ability to overcome anxiety is not proof of it’s absence. Feeling she had bombed at something she’s built much of her identity on knowing well would definitely be humiliating for her, even if the public speaking aspect was no sweat

        13. BBCC

          You want to show someone they’re not that great a teacher? You give them a fair shake. Give them a week’s notice to prepare and say “Hey everyone, we’re gonna have a lesson delivered by one of your peers today, so let’s see what we can learn from Roz!”

          Even an actual teacher would have a problem being thrown into another person’s class at no notice because they didn’t feel like getting their teacher on. Throwing an unexperienced unqualified student into that situation is beyond unfair.

        14. fillerusername

          THANK YOU

        15. C.T Phipps

          I’m genuinely confused at the level of importance people are assigning a 1st year class.

        16. Liliet

          Same tbh

        17. Shiro

          Well yes, I don’t disagree with that. Leslie is being a bad teacher here. Literally, I keep reiterating this point in almost every comment I make because it doesn’t seem to be registering. Leslie is being bad here.

          But best case, Roz gets a dose of perspective and character development.

        18. BBCC

          Oh yeah, I get you there – from a out of universe perspective, this is going to be a delightful train wreck and I’ll be right there with you enjoying it with popcorn.

          In universe though, this is super shitty and I do object to the idea this is a good practical lesson. But you were arguing that for an out of universe perspective, so I don’t disagree. This is gonna be delicious.

        19. Leorale

          Can confirm, have taught classes, and being surprised with a classroom with zero notice or preparation is a nightmare scenario.

        20. zoelogical

          yup

        21. trlkly

          No, if you gave Roz time to prepare, then Roz could churn out a lesson that she could teach, even though she couldn’t actually teach the whole class. If she truly knows the material, and can teach, she can do it right now. (I did it once in high school math.)

          Roz didn’t say “if you gave me time to prepare, I could teach this class.” She said she could teach it, since she already knows everything it covers. And the lesson plan is already there. A substitute could do it. Why can’t she, if she’s so smart?

          And you still keep leaving out that this isn’t just about teaching her that lesson. Roz threw Leslie under the bus. She is partly responsible for what happened with Robin. So now Leslie is showing her what that is like, by throwing her under the bus.

          You were the one who chastised me for saying you should try to be better than the other guys. Well, Leslie isn’t trying to do that right now. She’s got something more important to deal with–convincing a powerful bigot the human cost of her beliefs.

        22. BBCC

          A substitute gets more than zero notice and prep. Roz has not. Again, throwing a student into a situation with zero notice is not giving them a fair shake as a teacher, since many many teachers would struggle being thrown in under these circumstances, as many ACTUAL teachers here have attested.

          Roz said she could teach the class. Being the teacher entails notice, prep time and ability to develop lesson plans. It does not entail being sprung into a class without any kind of notice.

          If so, that’s reaaaaaalllllly fucking petty and unprofessional of Leslie. I have more respect for her to think of her like that. Leslie is the authority figure here, as such she’s the one with duty of care, and yeah, she’s being shitty right now.

          And if that goes well, good for Leslie. That doesn’t make unprofessional bullshit okay and I suspect a chat with the Dean is in her future.

        23. Liliet

          “A substitute gets more than zero notice and prep” …I feel like Ukrainian education system might have given me a biased perspective on that >_>

        24. BBCC

          That makes sense!

          Generally speaking, no notice and no prep situations are not very common around here, from what I know of. Generally there’s at least a ‘Hey, are you free to sub this class?’ and the class usually hasn’t started class time yet – at the very least that gives them whatever time they need to get to the classroom to get their head in teacher mode.

      2. Nono

        On one hand, it would be great for Roz to get some comeuppance.

        On the other hand, this isn’t the way to do it.

      3. hof1991

        Been in classes where students taught a part of a session, but only with a lot of notice and a narrow scope. Like, three weeks from now you will present on the New Guinea campaign in WWII. This class seems to be very loosely structured in the best of times, so no one is sure what Leslie would have taught today.

        Bad Leslie. Bad. Half the class gets “lessons” from Roz while walking down the hall in their dorm anyway. This is going to be their chance to talk back to her with a few pointed questions.

  18. Owlmirror

    Reginald, Duke of Thingley, is clearly a man to be heeded!

    1. Bagge

      A very common name

    2. Remmington Steele

      That’s pater’s name, Remmington son of Reginald. A name to be borne in this our winter of discontent.

  19. Valerie

    *disAgreement

  20. Delicious Taffy

    Okay, but that’s literally ONLY Walky telling them to go for it. Since when is he the authority on swaying opinions?

    1. Shiro

      Since he suddenly gained the ability to throw his voice to every point in the room

      1. Delicious Taffy

        Every point in the room that’s centered on his mouth, anyway.

  21. fillerusername

    I’m a uncomfortable with Leslie putting Roz in this position, so I’m rooting for Roz to prove herself here.

  22. Reltzik

    …… on the one hand, I wanna say, “No, Leslie, don’t do that to Roz.”

    …. on the other hand, Roz kinda sorta deserves it.

    1. fillerusername

      No she doesn’t.

    2. Dandi_Andi

      Absolutely not. As much as I dislike Roz, being a braggart with alarming disregard for the people she gets mixed up in her machinations to derail her sister’s political career does not mean she deserves to have Leslie thrust her into a situation she is woefully underprepared for. Doing something harmful or reckless entitles you to the consequences of your actions, not to whatever awful thing someone decides to do to you.

      1. Sev

        I’d say this is happening as a consequence of her actions. Two to tango, sure, but Roz has brought about pretty much every part of this situation that’s backfiring on her, much of it knowingly and intentionally.

        And even if this had happened by chance, I’d still say she ‘kinda sorta deserves it’.

        1. Reltzik

          Yeah, I shoulda been clearer. Does he deserve it? No. Does he kinda-sorta deserve it? Yeah.

          Or more explicitly, ON THE BALANCE, no she doesn’t deserve it. But she did rack up a few bad karma points that makes her a bit less sympathetic on the subject.

        2. Reltzik

          *she and she. Damn, I suck at pronouns even for cis people.

          …..

          * no this is not a sign that I’m subconsciously subscribing to Cerb’s “Roz is a gender-non-normative-egg” theory. I’m not deep enough for my subconscious to take over like that.

        3. Cerberus

          Muahahaha!

          *continues sending out evil “Roz could be a non-binary egg” vibes into the aether*

        4. Leorale

          Oh nooo, it’s the liberal agenda! ::melts into rainbows:: what a horrible fate

      2. C.T Phipps

        “Just because I tried to destroy my sister in a media revenge scheme doesn’t mean I should have to have a mildly uncomfortable situation with no real consequences.” What?

        1. Dandi_Andi

          Where do I start?

          Her attempts to derail her sister’s political career are not a “media revenge scheme”. Robin openly supports legislation that discriminates against and harms vulnerable LGBT+ people. Roz has mentioned that she has tried engaging her sister about her politics, but has gotten nowhere. Her schemes to damage her sister’s campaign are genuinely altruistic.

          What I believe Roz has done wrong is that she fails to consider the consequences for anyone else involved in her plans. She encouraged Leslie to try to seduce Robin without any concern for what it would do to Leslie. Sure, Leslie is responsible for her own actions, but Leslie’s involvement doesn’t absolve Roz of her culpability in encouraging and facilitating it.

          Roz did screw up here, but making a mistake, however harmful, does not mean you deserve whatever awful thing someone else decides to do to you. Had Laslie called Roz out for her involvement in the scheme, she would deserve that. If she gets caught up in the political fallout, she would deserve that. Leslie being unfair to her in an unrelated, arbitrary way? She doesn’t deserve that.

        2. thejeff

          Are they altruistic? They’ll certainly help people (to the fairly minor degree that replacing a single Representative does.) Worthwhile at least.

          That doesn’t mean her motives are pure. Much like her interest in the RA position, she could be far more interested in the personal consequences – not being dragged into her sister’s campaign to support things she opposes so strongly.
          I’ve also been wondering lately if her motivation with Leslie was less innocent than it seemed. That she may have reacted to learning Leslie was interested in Robin by deciding that she was a lost cause. Anyone capable of falling for Robin isn’t worth considering, so there’s no point in worrying about her.

          The counter of course is that she does do at least some advocacy work that does appear to be pretty clearly altruistic.

        3. Dandi_Andi

          Perhaps altruistic was the wrong word. Her grandstanding suggests to me that he motivations are at least a little bit based in wanting to present herself as a heroic figure. I only mean that I don’t think she’s motivated by a petty revenge plot against her sister.

    3. Fart Captor

      I’d say she deserves this particular moment. Just not Leslie actually leaving her like this

  23. JessWitt

    *Rhubarb rhubarb*

    1. Deanatay

      *rabble rabble*

      1. Remmington Steele

        *barney barney*

  24. Schpoonman

    This is the point where I would stand up and walk out of class. Nothing of value is happening here today, and I either have material that needs studying or video games that need playing.

    1. Leorale

      Those internet videos aren’t gonna watch themselves.

  25. Whammy

    It is moments like this that the comic gets its name, where bad decisions are being made all around. Like, definitely not cool just throwing Roz on the spot like that plus the questionableness of taking Becky to meet Robin. Like, might as well take Walky’s suggestion and just end the class. Obviously nothing gonna get done here today.

    1. fillerusername

      Yeah like seriously. Just assign the reading and cut class short. It feels like she’s trying to punish Roz for being annoying in the past not actually teaching any kind of lesson here. Or more likely she’like, “If it works out cool, if it doesn’t Roz gets taken down a peg so also cool.” And that feels…gross to me.

      1. Tadpole7

        Personally I’m fine with Roz getting this opportunity. I use to go to class with some people who thought they could teach the class. They were often one of the major distractions for the class.

        Roz can always refuse, or class dismissed.
        Professional no but not something as a student I would of cared one way or another.

        1. fillerusername

          She could refuse but Leslie made it a pretty personal challenge. Now Roz has something to prove.

        2. Tadpole7

          I will say for all the fall out her class looks to be a learning experience. Which is more than I can say for some of my classes many years ago.

          That said, if Leslie was anywhere in a proper frame of mind non of this would be going on. I’ve almost never seen anyone in such a state make smart decisions, I including myself. Right now it’s a glorious flaming wreck. The fallout is going to be emotionally brutal when all the pieces stop moving..

  26. Rei

    LESLIE NOOOOOOOO

    …I guess this is also Leslie’s payback to Roz for sassing her earlier in the semester?

    1. Delicious Taffy

      Well, Leslie’s nothing if not unprofessional.

    2. fillerusername

      I’m starting to think it might be? Or maybe unconscious resentment. If Leslie wanted to pick a student to teach the class Dorothy is right there and would have been the logical option. Her picking Roz seems like she’s just trying to prove a point and the point is that Roz isn’t as smart as she thinks and that’s fine but she’s doing it publicly.

    3. Emily

      A teacher should not be getting payback against a student, especially not for something as petty as “sassing her”. It’s both incredibly unprofessional and a blatant abuse of authority.

      1. Commodore Jeep-Eep

        For the sake of trying to salvage her fucking booty call at that.

        1. Derek

          pardon?? to salvage a booty call? Robin is a fucking HOME INVADER, you honestly think Leslie still wants anything to do with her after this mess??

        2. Lailah

          I don’t think so, but I’m open to the possibility I’m wrong.

  27. BBCC

    Seriously, Leslie, your students won’t die from three cancelled classes in a three class a week semester long class (and if it’s a full year class I’ll be even more pissed off).

    1. Heavensrun

      She has no reason to cancel class anyway, because she shouldn’t be leaving in the first place. “I want to kick somebody off my couch at home” is not a valid excuse to skip your damn job. I am extremely disappointed in Les here.

      1. BBCC

        If she WAS going to leave, she should have cancelled, or assigned reading or self study or SOMETHING.

      2. Emily

        I’ve just been getting rapidly more disappointed in her as this arc has progressed.

  28. Kernanator

    Ah yes, I’ve gone through the “you think you know this class so well, try to teach it” shit before.

  29. Inara

    I, for one, welcome the glorious trainwreck that awaits us. I’m not sure which track it’s coming on, but there’s enough bad decisions going around that *something’s* about to go off the rails.

    1. Keulan

      With this many bad decisions, there might be multiple trainwrecks coming.

      1. Sev

        Oh I certainly hope so.

    2. Dara

      A still more glorious clusterfuck
      Yes a trainwreck, and a wonderful one
      A classroom filled with 400 billion Dumbs
      It’s the calling of the Walky way

  30. valis_kr3

    Walky seems to imitating what a pro trump rally looks like.

    1. Deanatay

      One guy pretending to be the voice of the people?

      More like Bill O’Reilly.

  31. Mav

    Why doesn’t Becky finish her shift and Leslie teach the class and then they can talk about lodging later? Rather than inconveniencing the other students. It must be at most what, a couple of hours?

    1. Delicious Taffy

      But they’re hot-headed NOW, gosh dang it! Waiting until they’ve had time to consider things would take too long and they might wind up having to form something resembling a plan beyond “Take a homeless gay girl to confront my local representative, as well as her punch-happy, pissed off friend.”

    2. Shiro

      Because comic and because that doesn’t make for good pacing. Also because Roz needs character development.

      1. Killjoy

        More like Roz could use more character.

    3. zoelogical

      also because attacks on Robin work best when you have a high enough buff from enabling the Most Amount of Hijinks Imaginable

      1. Liliet

        ^^^ the biggest reason

    4. Smiling Cat

      It’s called Dumbing of Age, not Reasonable of Age!

  32. Mr. Random

    I honestly think this’ll be interesting.
    Roz may not be a great person, or a good one, but she does have legitimate views and reasons for what she does.
    At the very least it’ll be a good discussion.

  33. Sophran

    Roz can fall on her face for all I care, she’s earned that, but Leslie is being really unprofessional right now. This is not how you keep a job when you are already in a controversial position at the school.

    1. Pearl

      “in a controversial position” you mean a lesbian?

      1. Joe Covenant

        That’s a bit of a leap.

        When you and your entire private life are being discussed openly throughout your workplace, then that’s a *controversial* position, no?

        Her sexuality might be a part of said discussions, but it is not the crux of the controversy…. more the fact that a senator has barricaded herself into Leslie’s apartment (so to speak)

        1. Pearl

          No, Joe, there would be no issue with a sitting US senator being spotted at a bar or even going home with a straight professor. Joe Biden is married to a straight professor. The literal only issue here is that they’re gay and nobody expected Robin to like girls, that’s the only reason there’s any discussion at all.

        2. thejeff

          Well, having an affair with a Congresscritter would probably hit the news, if briefly.

          Having one with one who condemns everything you supposedly stand for along with your very existence, would be controversial even if it wasn’t a same sex relationship.
          Meanwhile, an established relationship with an openly gay congresscritter wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.

        3. Pearl

          It’s not an affair because neither of them are married.

      2. Sophran

        Yup. Schools only care about the nature of controversy and bad press in situations like these. Not that it wouldn’t happen with straight people.

        It is unfair for us gay people that we are heal to different standards for conduct, but that is how society works, and Leslie is likely in a bad position at work where the school could be looking for reasons to fire her and this will not help that matter.

        1. Pearl

          My dude this is some really bad analysis, Leslie has zero indication that anyone’s looking to fire her and should not have to be constantly on guard for that. That’s not at all a reasonable standard to hold someone to.

  34. Rukduk

    I like to think that inbetween panels four and five someone did an awkward cough. Also, “Listen to the man” is probably why no one listened to you Walky. Plus one final thing: Joe’s face in panel six is the face of someone who’s wondering if they’re still drunk.

  35. DaveM

    (Walky puts on fake moustache)
    “Hello, I’m Yklaw and I normally sit very quietly in the back of the class. And I say we should cancel todays class”
    (Walky rips off moustache)
    “I like the way Yklaw thinks!”

    1. 3oranges

      If he wants an easy disguise, he’s a dead ringer for Duke Reginald of Thingley.

  36. Jude Deluca

    Give the governor a HARUMPH!

  37. Cass

    Come on, Leslie, you’re better than throwing an unprepared student into your place to skip out on teaching!

    The proper way to skip out on teaching is to hook your laptop to the projector, load up Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Corpse Bride or something similar on Netflix, and tell them to come to the next class prepared to discuss the manic pixie dreamgirl trope and how the movie plays with it.

    1. BBCC

      Hell, if she took two seconds to head into the department meeting room and say ‘Hey, Vivian, can you sub for me? I have to run home.’

      1. Liliet

        “a substitute normally gets more than zero amount of prep and notice”

        1. BBCC

          Yeah, it’d still be a dick move for a substitute or another regular teacher, but at least a substitute or regular teacher. Still a dick move, but not as much as throwing an untrained student into the mix because you feel like being vindictive.

    2. zoelogical

      for extra points go with a shakespeare movie on youtube like Twelfth Night, where there’s loads of crossdressing

  38. UltraKyrie

    rofl walky

  39. Leorale

    Leslie. You can do your terrible plan later, Robin will still totally be camped in your house this evening.
    Why won’t these drawings of people listen to me

    1. Delicious Taffy

      Weird, right? Like, we can see they’ve got ears, so it’s not like that’s an excuse.

  40. Power Stranger

    What a bad teacher

  41. a4lbi

    Put up or shut up, Roz!

    1. a4lbi

      Please don’t take this comment seriously. We all know this is a bad idea.

      1. Power Stranger

        TOO LATE BLAAARGH

      2. StClair

        Nah, it’ll work out fine.
        Roz’s self-assessments are always accurate, and she’ll do just as good at this as she would have with the RA job.
        (Okay, that second part for sure.)

        1. BBCC

          Roz would have known she was RA ahead of time and unlike teaching, she actually had qualities that would make her a good RA (ex. lots of resources, experience with grunt work and responsibility, lots of knowledge of social issues Dorothy doesn’t have, passion, and not being the kind to bother downstairs with shit she should be able to handle herself).

      3. Joe Covenant

        It’s a comic strip…
        People will often act unlike *real* people from time to time.

        (I often think people tend to forget that at times)

  42. Optimal Optimus

    Hmmm… you better watch yourself, David. I have a feeling Dorothy may not find your antics so entertaining right now.

    1. Shiro

      I’d be surprised if Dorothy was paying a bit of attention to anything but her phone right now.

  43. StClair

    But she said she could teach this class.
    Just like she said she would have been a great R.A.
    She should be taken at her word, yes?

    1. Minder

      Both the strip and the idea people might not think Roz didn’t 100% have this coming to her have me in helpless giggles for the past two days. Just look at her face!

      1. Emily

        She didn’t have this coming to her though. Being kind of a shit in class does not mean you deserve a teacher actively trying to humiliate you. Like what the hell is wrong with people in this thread this is a blatant and vindictive abuse of authority no matter how poetic it may seem in the abstract.

        1. Commodore Jeep-Eep

          She’s a staff member that was appointed by the same folk who retained the Puddinghead, and who can’t control her goddamn fucking desire for congress with a congresscritter that has fucked her over and has dragged two students into her self-destruct radius already. This is par for the course.

          Also, the massive enjoyment of watching Rox getting dumped on ever since she had the temerity to challenge the blond girl for the position is getting creepy.

        2. Commodore Jeep-Eep

          Flaming typos.

        3. Roborat

          Now that is a good name for a band.

        4. Krys Brynhildr

          See, I’ve basically always disliked Roz for her general attitude and the way she seems to pay very little mind to any destruction or disruption she leaves in her wake at her best, or how much self righteousness and glorification of that destruction and disruption she has at her worst.

          So, you know, seeing her get knocked down a peg from how self centered and egotistical she constantly seems to be does seem like it would be satisfying as a reader.

          Doesn’t mean I didn’t facepalm over how bad of an idea all this is shaping up to be in every regard, but bad idea or not, I can’t help but hope this convinces Roz to think a little more before she talks down at others or tries to leverage people into going along with some sort of scheme without thinking about the consequences first.

          Leslie really needs to get it together though, cause yeah, horrible ideas seem to be becoming the new routine for her, despite plenty of “good intentions”.

        5. Minder

          “Social change isn’t created from making small, polite splashes. That’s why I prefer the bigger ones.”

        6. Minder

          Leslie’s desire for Robin seems pretty controlled at the moment, the real problem is Leslie has trouble putting her foot down and keeping it there and has no idea what to do / feels trapped and helpless against someone that cheerfully responds to reality and reason with a refusal to listen to reality or reason.

        7. Minder

          You’re right, and I don’t really believe Roz actually, factually deserved being put on the spot like this. The poetic justice still has me in fits of laughter if only because I know Roz is not going to begrudge Leslie over this based on their history of interactions and this is very likely to end with Leslie apologizing and Roz coping to having ‘deserved that’ for her rude assertion at one point that she could do Leslie’s job without any effort.

          (though from an ethical and professional standpoint in a real-world university context, Roz is indeed the victim and Leslie is wrong for thrusting her into the job that Leslie has been hired to do herself)

        8. StClair

          I think Leslie will apologize, yes.
          I don’t think Roz will.

        9. Minder

          I never said Roz would apologize. I said she’s liable to admit she deserved it.

  44. Tacos

    One of two things I could see happening: either Roz fails spectacularly at trying to teach or she tells everybody to do self-studying for the rest of the class.

    1. BBCC

      Yeah, sounds about like what Leslie would deserve.

      “So how did class go?”

      “I dismissed them as soon as you left, seriously what the FUCK?”

      1. Sev

        Yeah this would be my solution, interesting to see if Roz will be too proud or too flustered for it.

  45. Dandi_Andi

    Wow. Leslie seems to be really fond of terrible decisions. Throwing fuel on the fire currently camping on her sofa by bringing a high profile homeless lesbian teenager into the mix? Brilliant. The press swarming her house is absolutely going to identify Becky in no time at all and they will have a field day with it. Throwing another high profile freshman under the bus to do it? I can’t imagine her bosses being thrilled with the decision. Leslie is self destructing hard here. Nothing about this can possibly end well for her.

    1. BBCC

      The only way I can see this not biting her in the ass hard is if the Dean doesn’t find out, because he will have a FIT.

  46. AY

    who sits in front of Roz?

    1. BBCC

      Joyce.

      1. spoopyfox

        i dont think so. Joyce’s hair is up today. Also she sits next to Walky and behind Dorothy in yesterday’s panel I think

        1. BBCC

          Good point! I thought it was her because their hair colour is similar, but it’s probably not her.

  47. Keulan

    Walky is this strip’s Greek chorus.

    1. Chris

      Whoever this commenter is they speak for all of us!

  48. RogueParasol

    Leslie…no. Please no. I understand what you are trying to do, but you need to stop thinking that Robin is a) rational, b) trustworthy, or c) ever a good idea. In all likelihood, meeting Becky is not going to magically turn Robin into a good person and/or good girlfriend or fuck buddy material, just as meeting Leslie did not make Robin into a good person and/or good girlfriend or fuck buddy or friend material. By all means, get her off your couch by whatever means you can, and hope some of your lessons stuck, but don’t drag Becky into this expecting it to fix things.

  49. zoelogical

    i can see the logic behind this decision because like out of all the students, Roz is the one most educated about social justice (probably) and the one who has the most to say (probably). Leslie seems to subscribe to a mode of teaching that is very conversational and more about groupsourcing ideas and worldviews to come to a united conclusion. it’s very…Carl Rogers, i think: more about accepting people as they are, and presenting alternatives.

    Carl Rogers, for instance, would hold classes where the students would all teach each other, and his role was basically that of a moderator. He was a sociologist and this was grad school, so basically people would just bring up things they were interested in and hold a discussion about it, and people got really into it and it sounds super fascinating. I would totally try that, 10/10. but like: he also let people know what he was doing beforehand. it’s not cool for Leslie to just spring something like that on Roz.

    this whole thing has been half-baked from start to finish. but like i, for one, am very curious to hear from Roz about how she got to where she is and what the social justice things she most cares about are and why she thinks they’re important and what she would like to tell the whole class once given the opportunity. so!!

    lmao this is why dorothy had to be on her phone, so that nobody would be able to say “stop this madness”

    1. Liliet

      Same here. I honestly don’t think putting Roz on the spot like this is a bad idea. And I don’t think it will necessarily be a public humiliation: Roz is fairly socially aware, people mostly like her, and Leslie is leaving immediately after this. If she thinks she can’t do it, she can always just do what Walky suggested and dismiss class, nobody will be against it, and it’s not like Leslie has the right to expect anything else. On the other hand, if she thinks she actually has something to say that Leslie doesn’t, she gets a fair try, and again – the situation is unconventional enough that I don’t think failure will be counted against her in any way.

      Like… I’ve had classes cancelled because the windows in the room were banging too loudly in the wind and the teacher was annoyed. This class was going to be a disaster either way, and now it will at least be a memorable disaster.

      1. BBCC

        This is by no means a fair try – a fair try would entail advance warning and prep time. This is putting her on the spot and doing that with a student is a terrible idea. If this goes well, it will be a testament to Roz and no thanks to Leslie.

      2. Bagge

        I think you are right – this will not necessarily be a bad thing for Roz – but it’s not a fair chance for her to teach either. AT BEST this will mean Roz loosing her chance to prove her chops.

        But it’s not certain. We’ve already seen Becky lash out against her, and there is already friction between Roz and Dorothy. It wouldn’t take much for the students to take this opportunity to turn against Roz – just because Leslie felt vindictive.

      3. zoelogical

        i think… putting Roz on the spot in an uncontrolled environment is a bad idea. Like, Leslie has no control over what happens to her or what the other students might or might not do. fair try is kind of really determined by what your comparison is: if it’s a fair try for Roz as compared to Leslie, it’s not really, because Leslie has had education in teaching and has had time to make lesson plans. If it’s a fair try for Roz as compared to the other students, sure, but they shouldn’t have been put in this situation to begin with. It’s not what they’re paying for.

        But I think that it’s a good opportunity to see Roz back up her talk with actual information.

  50. Bagge

    I friggin’ love Leslie. Her heart is in the right place. Her affirmation of and genuin love for Becky is obious. She is a really good teacher who goes the extra mile for her students and tries to reach out even to the troublemakers. She has a great taste in movies and has not deserved a fraction of all the shit she has been given. I realise she is in a horrible situation and suffers from fresh trauma.

    That said – WHAT THE FUDGE, LESLIE????!!!

    YOU DON’T PUT A STUDENT ON THE SPOT LIKE THAT.

    Neither the class or Roz will benefit – they are already distracted by Leslie and Becky, and Roz have had zero prep time to give them an interesting leccture.

    And even worse, Leslie begins the whole thing by undermining Roz’ authorothy and turns it to some sort of bullshit proof of her ability to teach the class. It’s an open invitation for the other students to challenge her.

    This could have been Leslie empowering Roz and giving her the chance to grow as a student and teacher and show her stuff. It’s not. This is Leslie using her authorothy as a teacher to bring Roz down. This is a blow aimed at Roz’ self esteem and self image (in a field that is important enough for her to wear a condom hat in her free time), and this is handing the other students ammunition against her. This is NOT DONE.

    And it would have been SO EASY to do right. Pull Roz aside and ASK if she is OK with taking the class, and if she hesitates, let her know that she can have a lecture in a few weeks instead if she is OK with it. And then present it to the class in a POSITIVE way. “OK, today Roz has the floor – I know you all will learn a lot!”

    And if Roz doesn’t want to have the class, have them do some reading or set up a discussion group or something. Or just cancel the class – it’s not like it hasn’t been done before, for crying out loud!
    http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/compete/

    It’s a great idea to let Roz teach. But not like this. Not without forwarning and preparation.

    I actually think Roz will pull this off, but that’s not thanks to Leslie. And her lecture will be worse than if Leslie had given her a decent chance.

    1. Minder

      I really think that regardless of how Leslie’s actions are indeed as negatively impacting as you say, she didn’t think about this course of action for one moment: it’s not at all about Roz teaching the class, it’s just a saving throw so Leslie can go through with this scheme. The burn on Roz’s earlier bragging from Leslie is there (and, it is a SICK BURN at that, holy fuck I’m crying) but ultimately it’s a smiley face band-aid Leslie slapped over a gap in her plans. And no it’s not good that she did that without stopping to realize that she was deciding anything of great or long-term importance. I doubt she would have thought to let Roz teach if Leslie wasn’t more vested in getting to her apartment right now and had a conflict of interest for canceling class too many times

      1. Bagge

        I hope you are right, because if she’s doing it out of spite it’s even worse.

        But even if she didn’t think, that’s really, really bad when it comes from a teacher.

        And again, it would be SO EASY to cancel the class or do some reading assignment or just pull Roz aside and ASK her if she’s OK with taking the class.

        1. Minder

          It totally would have been easier to cancel the class but…okay, I actually cannot remember because keeping track of time in this comic is so difficult to wrap my head around, but didn’t she already cancel class once for this Robin fiasco? This hadn’t occurred to me before when I first read this strip but SICK BURN notwithstanding Leslie may genuinely just not want to get furthering behind on the curriculum by canceling too many times and actually assumes Roz has a fair enough shot at teaching the class.

  51. Anowan

    Sorry I’m here. Sorry for everything I will write and make you read. I’m pretty upset right now so there is a risk that this will be triggering, I’m so sorry.

    My mother broke up our filial bond with me. She said we should see other parental figures/daughter substitutes, basically.

    I thought the mess in my head was a result of the mess in my life, the mess of my childhood.
    She argues that the mess is genetic, that it was in my head all along, that the mess in my head created the mess in my life (and my childhood), and that she had no input whatsoever despite being, you know, my mother.

    If I was always going to be this broken, why should she try ? Why should she care ? I’m but a pain to her.

    I don’t take it as lightly as I would like.

    She reaffirmed that I’m way too entitled and that I don’t deserve her understanding, that my feelings don’t deserve to be heard because they do nothing but hurt her. And she doesn’t deserve it : she Did Nothing Wrong.

    [CW rape]

    She says I’m horrible since the rape. But I remember her saying I was horrible before that, for different reasons. And what she and her husband said to me when it happened – that the guy was way too nice to do this so I must be lying, that if I was sleeping I could not not consent so it was okay, that those things happened to basically everybody when they were young and there wasn’t so much drama so I was exagerating… My mother told me they said this in order to tone down my emotions because they sincerely thought it would tone down the trauma.

    [/CW]

    … All of this looks, in retrospect, like a symptom of a lack of respect for what I feel, for what I say, for what I live. When what I do/feel is non-conform with what they want me to do/feel, they try pushing buttons like I’m a toaster that doesn’t deliver bread until it works, or until I burst in anger “for no reason whatsoever”. There were other crisis like these, where my mother and her husband acted like I was a Problem in their lives to solve and not a human being.

    To this critic, my mother answers : “You’re way too entitled. Who told you you deserved more than I already gave you ? You’re just rewriting history in search of a reason to hate us.”

    My mother told me she wouldn’t call me anymore and that I wasn’t obligated to call her unless it’s to say sorry for all the pain I caused her and her husband.

    [CW daddy issues (sorry I don’t know how trigger warnings work)]

    She told me to call back that abandoning manipulative bastard of a father I have, who didn’t speak a work to me in five years (apparently verbal abuse is free speech, but reminding him that it’s abuse is so toxic that he got me out of his life entirely). She said he wasn’t so bad after all. It doesn’t seem like it’s important, but in this private language of implicit stuff you develop with your close relatives, it means that I deserve the abandoning manipulative bastard.

    [/CW]

    Sorry I inflicted this mess on you.

    [TW ableism/psychophobia]

    I write to convince myself I’m not crazy (sorry for the ableist/psychophobic word, I was raised with this idea that being “crazy” is the worst thing you can be).

    [/TW]

    I write to convince myself that I’m not an angel, I Did Things Wrong, but I’m a person, not a Problem.

    I write to convince myself that maybe I’m genetically susceptible to depression and trauma, but with other parents it wouldn’t have kicked in that soon, and that often.

    I write to convince myself that it will be okay.

    Sorry if you actually read all that.

    Sorry I bursted in here – I know you all have your own problems to deal with, and that’s hypocrital of me to inflict my problems on you when I never give time to the other commentaries like these.

    I wish you a very nice day.

    1. Liliet

      …I’m having similar problems right now, if ah, on a much smaller scale. And I am weirdly grateful to read this right now. It reminds me that yes, these problems are real, and other people have them too, and other people are affected, too.

      I really hope you’ll be able to resolve or escape this dumpster fire of a situation. You are at fault for nothing listed here, and nothing you could have ever said or done warrants that kind of behavior. You deserve to never again have this happen.

      And if you can’t, cope. Survive. It will get better one way or the other, if only just by emotional detachment so people who should be closest to you won’t be able to hurt you like this anymore.

      I’m rooting for you.

      1. Minder

        It’s real. The feelings are valid. And I’m rooting for you as well.

      2. Anowan

        Hey Liliet,
        Thanks for your answer.

        I’m sorry to learn that you have problems of your own, but thank you so much for saying that you found help in my outburst of self-pitying bad english. It soothe the guilt I feel for writing it.

        I don’t know if I can help you, but I want to tell you that whenever someone tells you you have no basis for your memories, ask yourself what basis they have for their own. Only their trust in themselves ? But why would they undermine your trust in yourself ? Why are they more reliable than you, objectively ? Even if you have a neurologic disease that prevent you from trusting your memories, wht would they shove it in your face in order to win an argument ?

        Maybe I’m “à côté de la plaque”, as we say here (I think I could translate it as “I missed the point entirely”), but well. I wish you courage in what you go through.

        I root, trunk, branch and leave for you. (That was terrible.)

        1. Anowan

          *leaf
          The pun is ruined
          All the puns are ruined forever

        2. Liliet

          Thank you. You’re… yeah, pretty spot on >_>

          And never feel guilty for something like this. People who don’t want to read this can just scroll past. This is a good platform for speaking openly like this… and also, you definitely shouldn’t feel guilty for not responding to other people’s posts like this. It’s not an obligation, it’s an opportunity – if you don’t feel like taking it, you never have to. Some people feel better after asking for help, others feel better after reading others’ asking and trying to help them. We’re all in this together.

    2. Leorale

      That sounds incredibly sucky, and it’s 100% reasonable to feel upset about any piece of this, let alone all of it at once. You needn’t be sorry for having feelings or for writing about it. I’m sorry that it’s happening.

      1. Anowan

        I’m sorry too that it’s happening.

        Thank you for your answer ! The thing is, in my education, it’s never reasonable to feel upset about anything ! My father only thought about his own pain and silenced me, my mother only knows restraint and think all of this it’s my fault for not mastering said restraint ! And my lack of restraint is a toll on my mother’s restraint, so my mother’s husband’s mad at me too ! Hurray !

        (I now feel calm enough to joke, this is good, this is real good.)

        1. Liliet

          Ah, so your parents have the right to feel upset about whatever, and it’s totally reasonable for them to behave unreasonably because of their emotions, but you should be the paragon of shining reason, calm and bigger-person? Oh, how familiar this sounds… >_>

    3. BBCC

      ALL of the appropriate gestures of support.

      You’re not a hypocrite. You don’t deserve to be abused and you didn’t deserve your rape. I’m sorry you’re feeling so bad right now, I hope you feel better soon, and we’re here if you need to talk.

      1. Anowan

        Thank you for your answer, BeeBeeCeeCee. (I never know how to pronounce your pseudonym in my head).

        I’m not a hypocrite but I should care about people more ! I put a note to search for other calls for help in the commentaries. Not today. Today is work and selfcare. Tomorrow is being there for other people. This is selfish, but not too selfish.

        I know I didn’t deserve abuse or rape but I… I don’t know why I know it. My mother is spot on on this : Who told me ? Would I be happier if noone made me believe I could have better ? Or would my sense of injustice have tingled nonetheless ? (All those questions must sound really weird from other people’s point of view.)

        I feel better because, well, I usually am back on my feet if I’m obligated to do stuff, and it’s workday today ! Thank you so much for being here.

        1. BBCC

          You got the name right!

          It’s okay not to be good at reaching out or have the energy to do so for talking with others about personal stuff, and taking a day to recover is not selfish. You gotta look out for your mental health. That said, I think wanting to be better at helping folks is admirable. I think you can do it!

          From what I know, when people don’t believe you, it makes it worse. I think the injustice sense would likely still be there. It doesn’t sound weird, it sounds like your mother has a thing for gas lighting. She’s full of crap.

          Good! Being able to regain functionality quickly is a good skill. No problem! <3 I hope your day goes well.

    4. Heather

      Man I’m sorry you’re going through that: please keep reminding yourself that your mother is full of shit. Because she is. What a horrible woman. I hope you find the family you deserve to have.

      1. Anowan

        Thank you for your answer Heather.

        She’s not all horrible. When my mother says things like the stuff I quoted before, she’s not maniacly laughing like some cartoon villainess, she’s crying and expressing her pain. She’s rationnalizing and justifying abuse, but I… I tend to rationnalize my mistakes too. If it’s a default of character, not a choice, can I blame her ? I’m a bit lost on this.

        I have a boyfriend whose understanding seems limitless and I’m grateful that he exists and that I have the privilege to worship the ground he walks on, while he worships the ground I walk on for some reason. But sometimes I wonder if he’s not a bit, you know, partial ?

        That’s why I came here, to see if the eyes of strangers could find in my testimony something I didn’t see, something that would tell me what I missed, that my mother is right and I need to change and apologize to her.

        And, wow, these strangers, who could be jaded to see so much calls for help everywhere, are pretty unanimous, and I’m heartbroken by your kindness.

        1. Liliet

          Yeah, my mom isn’t a completely terrible person either, and whenever we have a fallout, I miss her company terribly actually… but here’s the thing. If you want to claim the title of ‘reasonably decent person who is trying’, when someone tells you how you’ve hurt them, you don’t launch into 10000 explanations about how they deserved the hurt and pile up the shit on them, you apologize and try to make them feel better. Like, yeah, rationalizing your mistake is human nature, but there is a subtle difference between whether your intent is to make the other person feel better or worse after talking with you, and whether you’re even taking that into account when trying to make yourself feel better.

          A subtle distinction.

        2. StClair

          Most people aren’t “completely terrible”. And because we aren’t, ourselves, we generally try to look for the parts that aren’t and make excuses (particularly for loved ones). But that really shouldn’t be the standard.

    5. RacingTurtle

      That sucks, Anowan. 🙁

      If you want to check out another community that talks about shitty family stuff—but only if you want to—Captain Awkward has a bunch of relevant letters.

      1. Anowan

        Thank you for your answer RacingTurtle.

        And thank you for your suggestion, but I think I’m not strong nor wise enough to help anyone.

        1. RacingTurtle

          I’m so sorry I didn’t explain myself better. I meant it as a suggestion of another place on the internet you could go where crappy family situations are understood and you wouldn’t be alone, even if you just lurk and never say anything. I really didn’t explain that at all, and I really am sorry. You deserve so much support. *So* much.

        2. Leorale

          Yes, Captain Awkward is the best.

    6. Lailah

      Holy shit, that’s terrible. I’m really sorry you’re getting terrible shit piled on you like that. I can’t imagine that pile of shit. I don’t know what to tell you. I really hope things get better, and feel free to talk, and in the interim, I’m rooting for you. That’s just a shit deal to get from a parent.

      1. Anowan

        Thank you for your answer, Lailah.

        Is it a pile of shit ? Because it’s my life, and everybody has a life, and everybody deals with it and some people must have it worse, right ?

        I don’t know. Somebody said that the fact she actually said this time that she wouldn’t call me anymore is progress. I guess it is.

        1. Lailah

          Some people have it worse. That doesn’t mean you didn’t get a bum deal. That just means other people have bummer deals. Your parents especially should be taking what happened to you seriously, and be supportive, not… that. That’s just thoroughly terrible. I dunno how to get them to realize it though =/

        2. Lailah

          Or if you should even bother, rather than cutting them out entirely. I’d certainly understand that impulse, having done it.

    7. zoelogical

      -offers hugs-

      it sounds like you’re better off without her, as much as that may suck to hear. you don’t need and don’t deserve someone in your life who won’t take your concerns and struggles seriously. i’m glad you found a place to let this out, and i hope you continue to take care of yourself.

      1. Anowan

        Thanks for your answer and for the Internet hug, zoelogical. What’s great about Internet hugs is that they don’t trigger my touch aversion, yay !

        That sucks to hear. Entitled little me would like to keep at least one parent, but it doesn’t seem like it’s possible right now.

        Well, sometimes my mother took my struggles seriously. And she made me sit at the kitchen table with no possibility to escape so that I explained in length to her how everything was MY FAULT. In retrospect, that was not so good parenting.

        1. zoelogical

          Hooray! Affection without triggers! 😮

          It’s not entitled of you to want to keep one of your parents. I mean, who doesn’t want things to work out well, right? But whatever you choose, knowing that you have the option to leave can be a very…freeing thing? Your mom can have whatever emotions she wants, but they shouldn’t have to be your problem. Your job needs to be to take care of yourself and your emotions. And that may sound selfish, but continually sacrificing yourself for others is a good way to ensure that you don’t have much of a self anymore. It’s better to maintain yourself so that you have things to give that don’t drain you.

          I would suspect that is not so good parenting, yes. It can be really hard to change dynamics once they’re set in place like that. :/

    8. Anowan

      You’re all so nice I’m crying I’ll answer to all of you a bit later. All the thanks to you.

      1. BBCC

        Thank you for trusting us to vent <3 Stay safe.

      2. Anowan

        Oh my stars I just realized it was really fucking late in the US and you nonetheless took the time to answer me
        Cue the tears again
        I don’t deserve your support

        1. Cerberus

          Yes. You do. You always deserve this support.

          I know it’s probably really hard to believe that given the hell you’ve just been through, but trust us when we say you very much deserve to be given support in your hour of need.

          This is really the least we can do for you.

        2. Anowan

          Cerberus, I can’t even begin to describe the honor you make me by considering that I deserve anything coming from you. You lived a brave, so brave life and despite all the energy you devote to fight injust and unfair oppression you’re a wonder of kindness and strength and I can’t english enough to express my admiration.

          I’m a spoiled abled white cis educated brat who thinks she deserved better even though the universe is cold and there’s no warmth but the one we dare to create ourselves.

          Thank you so much.

        3. Liliet

          You stop right there. No such thing as ‘first world problems’. Just because someone somewhere has more enumerated reasons to hurt, doesn’t mean that they are hurting more than you, nor is it reasonable to even begin trying to compare. That you are cis, white, able, educated, not currently on fire, not currently starving, have access to internet, not in sex slavery, not lost in woods, not currently in a car crash, … has no relevance to this situation AT ALL.

        4. Cerberus

          You are not spoiled and you are deserving of this care. You having privilege does not discount the hateful abusive things that have happened. Others having suffered worse doesn’t make the hurt of what happened to you less.

          Like, I’ve been there and I’ve done the same thing as you know trying to dismiss horrible awful points in my life because “others had it worse” and it didn’t do me any favors*. What you are seeing now, what you admire is me moving out of that and acknowledging and processing that hurt instead of trying to dismiss it for “not being bad enough”.

          *I did it to my rape because my ex’s rapes were so much more horrifying and awful. I did it to my disownment and abuse by family “because homeless queer youth have it worse”. I did it to being threatened with death multiple times (well no one actually physically hurt or touched me so maybe I was overreacting to the folks pointing knives or openly plotting coming back around to hurt me…).

          What happened to you is real and harmful and awful and you are very much allowed to feel fully upset and traumatized by it, because it IS traumatizing. And I know it will be hard, because it is so easy to blame yourself and minimize your hurt (at least it is if you’re anything like me), but please do try to be kind to yourself.

          You deserve care. You deserve support. You deserve someone hiding a dead fish in your mom’s favorite clothes. *giant hug*

          Please let us know if you end up needing support or resources as you deal with the emotional fallout of all this. I know from experience how awful it can be trying to scramble your life together after something like this.

        5. BBCC

          It’s fine. We were up in the comments anyways, you didn’t make anybody stay up later. The only variable you can control is yourself, not others.

        6. Anowan

          “The only variable you can control is yourself, not others.”

          THIS. IS. SO. SPOT ON.

          I’m trained from childhood to predict the behaviour of my parents in order to avoid crisis, so I naturally try to calculate everything that could happen in order to control social situations.

          I don’t want to control or manipulate people, but I can’t let go of the automatic behavioral computation.

          Yeah, sorry for revealing just now that you are supporting a bad person.

        7. BBCC

          Hey, no, stop right there. Trying to anticipate variables is not necessarily a bad thing – it’s a valid way to survive. Trying to actively force and control people wouldn’t be great, but counsellors can help with that. And just trying to predict how things will go isn’t that bad. Just don’t beat yourself up for the actions of other people.

        8. StClair

          Yeah, that’s not bad, that’s… learned survival skills. Like “I shouldn’t touch things that might be hot without checking first.”

        9. Liliet

          When you are worried whether you’re being manipulative, ask yourself these questions:
          1) “Am I trying to deliberately hurt this person by doing this?”
          2) “Am I taking into account the possibility that this person might be hurt by me doing this?”
          If the answer is yes, reevaluate and come up with a different plan. If the answer is no, you’re golden, carry on.

        10. Reltzik

          The only thing wrong with you posting all of this here this late at night is the fact that there isn’t a super-universally-known dedicated 24 hr safe place for venting and support that everyone can go to instead.

          And that’s not your fault. That’s on the rest of the world.

        11. Anowan

          You’re funny ! I laughed at your joke ! Thank you for joking !

      3. Halpful

        *Jedi hugs*

        I second the recommendation for captain awkward, and also there’s resources at r/raisedbynarcissists (I hope I spelled that right)

        You sound really strong and thoughtful. I hope you find people who do treat you like a human being. Everyone deserves that.

        1. Anowan

          I don’t feel strong nor thoughtful. I don’t feel anything but the stockphrase “you’re bad and you should feel bad”. Thank you for your kind compliments.

        2. StClair

          Please consider the possibility that this is not an accurate (self-)assessment.

          I live with depression, have for a while. I am painfully aware that sometimes my brain flat-out lies.

        3. Halpful

          It gets better. Being aware of it is a really useful skill, so it’s awesome you already have that. 🙂 With some combination of CBT, DBT, mindfulness etc. you can learn to feel good about yourself. I made peace with my depression … Gosh, more than five years ago now. Since then it only wakes to protect me from bigger threats, and goes back to sleep in a few days.

        4. Halpful

          Augh, I didn’t notice that StClair isn’t Anowan. Oh well, the advice is the same either way 🙂

        5. StClair

          And it’s appreciated! 🙂

    9. Cerberus

      *offers giant hugs*

      This is absolutely awful and you are absolutely allowed to vent and feel awful about it.

      As someone who’s parents disowned them and tried to pull very similar stunts in trying to engineer a power-play where I was to feel like I “owed” them an apology for being “selfish”, I can say categorically that your mom is full of shit and that while it will hurt like ever loving hell and be really scary, you will be better off without her and anyone that would willingly stand by her as she does this.

      That she would blame you for your assault and try and use your PTSD as a weapon to dismiss you, that she would give these ultimatums… what she is doing is abusive and hateful whether she would ever admit it or not. And would be untoward and vile regardless of whatever you are being made to feel you have done to “deserve” it.

      Honestly, you could have strangled kittens for fun and it still wouldn’t make this kind of behavior from your mom okay or you a “deserving” victim for it. What is happening to you is something you don’t deserve. What you actually do deserve is people who care about you and love you and don’t make you feel you have to jump through hoops for love that will never come.

      I don’t know if you have other folks in your life that can provide that. But know that we are willing to be that for you at the very least, to the extent that we can and we love you and think you are deserving of so much more than the shit plate you’ve been given.

      You are awesome as you are. *emphatic appropriate gesture of support*

      1. Anowan

        Thank you for your answer, Cerberus. You being the wisest, kindest, strongest woman I know of, I’m feeling honored and undeserving of it.

        … Funny you talk about using PTSD as a weapon. I don’t want to think she does it on purpose, but she does it. All this phone call originated from the fact that she told me IRL “I think you’re an alcoolic like your father” instead of “I think you’re an alcoolic” period.

        I talked with her about it, about how she used my father as a scarecrow for bad behaviour, and her answer was : “Well if I can’t compare you to your father in an ordinary conversation then I can’t talk to you about anything and you have a problem”.

        I tried to underline that it logically suggested she had no other subject of conversation beside comparing me to my father, which is absurd, and she answered : “Oh, because we have so much topics to talk about, with you sulking me since your [TW]rape[/TW]”. So it’s my fault again, like always.

        I do have friends and a boyfriend in my life, but I was disillusioned with friendship after [sorry TW again]the rape : so much people ditched me because I was no more fun[/TW]. I always fear close ones won’t support who is in the right, but who they know best.

        I came here because I thought advice and support would be a bit more objective since I’m a stranger to you all, but that’s hella biased : if my mother came here to rant about her entitled lunatic daughter who won’t forgive That One Time when she was a tiny bit inconsiderate to her, wouldn’t you have supported her too ?

        I’m lost in the fog of “everything is relative, your pain is relative, your responsability is relative, just feel bad ’cause at least that’s a solid value.”

        Thank you again so much for answering me.

        1. Cerberus

          Honestly, I’d probably loathe her.

          Largely because, from what you describe, she reminds me a lot of my ex’s awful abusive mom. Same using any little thing to belittle her, same using her ex-husband’s mental illness to attack her coping responses or any time she tried to talk back or have an honest conversation about conversational boundaries or deescalation, same weaponizing of a “selfish” accusation to shut down debate, same overwhelming narcissism, same weaponizing of PTSD from traumatic events to try and discount her objectivity.

          The things she did to my ex, the way she bullied her out of her dream out of a petty small-minded need to control, the fallout from that that got passed down in abuse to me? I will never in my life forgive that woman for the harm she did and what you describe sounds like the same type of turdbucket.

          And honestly, I get narratives like this from shitty parents all the time. It’s why “selfish” is one of my red flags. If the parents come in about the kid being “selfish” or “never letting things go”, it’s almost invariably revealed that the parent is abusing their kid (emotionally, physically, and/or sexually) and that “what the kid refuses to forgive her for” was a legitimately traumatic event that has never been properly processed with the kid in a way that lets them heal.

          Again, my ex’s mom was fond of that ploy, arguing that my ex would never forgive minor things in the past, which were alcoholism to the point of neglect and emotional abuse, because occasionally she’d try to build a relationship with her by talking about those times and how they affected her only to get shut down and accused of “always bringing it up” and never just forgiving her.

          The end result I hope will provide hope for you. This last two years, my ex has finally escaped her mother and never spoken to her and her mental health has been steadily improving. It was the same for me in escaping my shitty parents. It will suck in the short-term. Oh god will it suck and hurt in the short term and it is absolutely okay to let it suck and hurt and feel awful. But in the long term, well, it seems I’m becoming healthier and healthier and it’s been easier and easier to see the extent of awful they tried to do to me in the name of love.

          Also, *hugs* you can be kind to yourself about those you’ve lost transitioning through this time. PTSD is awful as is suffering concurrent abuse and it’s easy for friendships to implode during those stressful times. The friends who stuck there with you through it, the new friends who’re used to you being a mess that might cancel or flake on stuff for mental health sometimes? They’re the ones that’ll make this hurt less.

          Again, I hope this provides some comfort, but when I escaped my family, I was grateful to the only part of my family that didn’t suck. Cause when I was saying all the things you are saying now, they said strongly that what my parents did was wrong, that I deserved real support and being seen as a full human being, and they were supportive and understanding of my PTSD and the messiness of my recovery.

          Their care helped me through. I hope you find the same for yourself in this time. And if you don’t have it, hopefully we can replicate it at least in some small way for you here.

          *massive hugs*

        2. Halpful

          That “never letting things go” bit sounds like another piece of my own puzzle, thanks 🙂

    10. Minder

      Oh. Oh, man. Jeez. I’m so sorry. You do not deserve what she’s putting you through. What they’re putting you through. Have the gall to say you’re entitled is BS, garbage and self-rationalizing trollish nonsense, and I know it doesn’t and can’t stop the pain but she is wrong. Heart goes out and if it’s hard to reply to these comments please don’t feel like you have to or are obligated.

      1. Anowan

        Hi Minder and thank you for your answer.

        I know she’s rationnalizing and protecting herself from the mistake that is little me, but she has a point : if I stopped to resent her, if I stopped to expect better, I wouldn’t be so frustrated, upset and angry. Where is that damn brainswitch again ?!

        Thank you for telling me that I don’t have to answer but I would feel terrible to put you through a reading that horrible and not telling you afterwards that I got better, and that you helped.

        1. Minder

          Badbrain is worst brain. I stand exactly by what I already said and that it’s not on you to shoulder guilt for being let down when you hope to expect humanity from other humans. You deserve humanity. It’d be worse if the letdown didn’t upset you and I hope you find aforementioned brainswitch soon because it’s so hard to stop blaming yourself undeserved in that frame of mind, knowing and also knowing doesn’t make the thought process stop. *insert sympathetic heart emojis* Best of wishes.

        2. Halpful

          You might need your anger for now, to protect you. When you’re safe, and you’ve built strong boundaries, it’s a lot easier to process and let go of those feelings.

    11. Chris Phoenix

      Wow. Speaking as someone who has cut ties permanently with a parent –
      1) Just from what you’ve listed, if she actually stays away, you will be better off in the long run. If she doesn’t stay away on her own, I hope you have the strength and resources to keep her out of your life.
      2) It’s clear that you shouldn’t give any weight to anything she has ever said about you. It’s awfully hard to un-hear things, but the more you can, the closer to reality you’ll be.
      3) Being so close to someone so destructive for so long can really mess with your picture of what’s healthy. She is NOT HEALTHY. Find friends with happy families and watch how they interact – try to learn what healthy looks like, and then INSIST on it.
      4) You owe her NOTHING. I believe some parents do so much damage that it cancels any obligation a child has to them. She seems clearly over that line.
      5) This is terrible and traumatic – get all the support you can.

      1. Anowan

        Thank you, Chris Phoenix, for your answer.

        1] The worst thing is I KNOW THAT. My father kicked me out of his life and I stopped having one panic attack each week after his weekly call. It was obviously for the best ! But I must secretly be a five years old child because it feels SO UNFAIR !!

        2] Even stuff like “Of course we think you’re good, we tell you all the time, do you only pay attention when we negatively criticize you so that you can pretend we never positively criticize you, you’re terrible” ? Or “You know I think you’re immature and unskilled but when I look at young people your age I must admit you’re not so bad” ? Oh, shucks, that’s about the best things I remember !
        3] For a long time I thought every parents were like that and I just wasn’t fit to have parents at all. It’s weird to think that it’s Not Normal.
        4] I admire so much families where… I can’t find a good expression. “Filial devoutness” ? Where that thing is implemented. Why can’t it be like that with mine ? I also admire swift and happy divorces, why couldn’t theirs be like that ?
        5] Thank you so much. I’m tired of needing support. How will I repay all this support ?!

        1. Liliet

          This IS unfair. It’s unfair to have to cut out PEOPLE WHO SHOULD ALWAYS HAVE YOUR BACK AND BE YOUR SUPPORT NETWORK out of your life. Like… family is supposed to be the people who will be there for you if something awful happens. Like, if you’re in a fire and all your belongings perish, family is supposed to be the people who you can always count on letting you stay with them, feeding and clothing you. It’s a RIGHT, a default expectation of something you’re supposed to have.

          To have to refuse that, to have to push people who are supposed to fill that position away, to go on your own – it IS unfair. You don’t have to be a five year old to think that. Also… five year olds do tend to have a pretty keen sense for justice and fairness, once they have all the information relevant to the situation that is, I say as someone who works with them regularly >_> we could all take a lesson or two from five-year-olds really

        2. Liliet

          Oh, and re: repaying support… There is only one possible form of ‘repayment’ applicable to something like this: pay it forward. If someone else around you needs help, and you see that you can help, have the resources and ability to help, do it. Engage your empathy and pay attention to other people. That’s… really it. Also note the ‘have resources and ability’ part. Only people who CAN and people who FEEL LIKE IT are engaging you here. That’s all you have to repay really XD

        3. Cerberus

          Support is freely given, you owe nothing in return. And if we were to demand recompensation we would be genuine villains and abusers.

          You are in pain and need support, so we give it to you freely, because you need it, because you deserve it. You don’t owe us anything in response. We’d do the same for anybody in your terrible awful position.

    12. Optimal Optimus

      I’m so sorry you’re going through this. It puts my problems in perspective. I mean… my mom was a bully. She was an absolute genius at destroying any sense of self-worth that I had, but she was always there for me – in her own fucked up way. I have nothing but compassion for you. I will close by citing the big man himself: “It’s never as bad as it seems. You’re much stronger than you think you are.” – Superman

      1. Anowan

        OK thank you for your answer but with all due respect Optimal Optimus let me not be your perspective.

        My mother protects only herself, and I can only benefit from her protection as long as I do everything she says and/or the origin of the problem can be traced back to my father.

        My mother burns the bridges in the belief that she has already been there for me more than enough times and that I don’t deserve that anymore. A similar situation where she wouldn’t have would still be shitty.

        You’re worth taking proud in yourself. Where do you think your mom learned to be so bold ? If you’re made of her DNA, what right has she to demean you as if can’t you be as fierce as her ?

        I hope you find people who’ll help you grow tall and strong and won’t force you into tortured shapes. I root for you, little bonsai !

    13. Bluewind

      I know you have read so many replies, but let me add mine. I am the daughter of abusive parents and the ex of an abusive partner. My best friend is the daughter of an abusive mother. They twisted our realities. Made us believe lies. Made us question our reflection, our memories, our thoughts, our emotions, our beliefs, our everything. There was gaslighting. They controlled us. When we left, our new homes became an extension of their own as they tried to take power over us. The more distant we put between us and them, the more confusing the world became. We questioned everything about ourselves trying to separate lies from truth in the knotted mess that was our lives. And even when you kick them out of your life, limit contact, or they do one of their temporary bans, they are still there in the back of your mind telling you all those things they always have. It’s like brainwashing. The good news is that it does fade with time and will get better faster with a support system you can talk to about these things to have someone tell you that something is bullshit or you actually do have a good memory or they think you’re a good person. Go see a therapist too and maybe look into trying a mild antidepressant or something because all that abuse and brain rewiring tends to leave us needing a little help in that department. Then one day, do something that makes you feel more like the real you. Join a Dungeons and Dragons group. Mark a reminder of this time with a tattoo from a good artist. Cut and dye your hair. Reclaim your body and mind. One day you will look in the mirror and smile instead of avoiding it all together. It takes time, therapy, boundaries, and possibly going no contract, but you get there eventually. They made you ashamed to talk about it. We won’t.

      1. Anowan

        Hello Bluewind and thank you for your answer.

        I didn’t mention it but I see a shrink. Saw her two days ago, next appointment in thirteen days. I got her a page full of notes from the phone call with my mother in order to prove myself that my insecurities didn’t originate from nowhere.

        I’m incomfortable with the idea of taking meds. For reasons that may or may not be psychophobic but are more likely to be than not.

        This is pretty solid advice but it just doesn’t resonate with me right now. I’m sorry. I hope you’re in a good place right now.

        1. Dandi_Andi

          It is ok to be uncomfortable with medication. I haven’t dealt with your kind of trauma, but I do deal with depression and anxiety. I was medicated for a while in my teens, but I never settled on a medication that helped with my symptoms and didn’t have unacceptable side effects. Ultimately, I used medication just long enough to stabilize me while therapy focussed on learning coping strategies. Meditation, breathing exercises and such get me through the day. The important thing is finding what is going to make you the happiest and healthiest. I’m glad you have a therapist to help you through it.

        2. Bluewind

          I’m glad you’re seeing a therapist. It takes guts and it helps. And I’m glad you showed proof. Keep it. Later on when she guilts you, you’ll have it so you won’t forget her true colors.

          Never apologize for feeling uncomfortable about putting something in or on your body. You aren’t telling others to get off theirs. You’re cool.

          If getting on long term meds makes you uncomfortable, perhaps look into meds that you only take as needed. I’m on Paxil every day and it really does a good job, but I still occasionally have a bad day, so I take half a Trazodone. It was originally prescribed as a sleep aid, but they found it helped with depression and anxiety too. It’s also very mild. Half the dose people take for sleep is all I need. I’m not saying go take this on the advice of a stranger, but to show you that you have a lot of options.

          And it’s okay if it doesn’t resonate now. It might help later or it might help someone lurking in the background. You never know 😉

    14. JBento

      All the support.

      You did not consent. The baseline is “not consenting,” not “consenting.” You did nothing wrong, and while some people need to watch the “she does not want tea” clip, your mother needs to have it implanted into her fucking eyes.

      On the upside (presuming you’re an independent adult, and quite probably even if you’re not), she’s not going to call you any more, so that’s a plus, assuming she keeps to her promise. Do not call her. Do not call your father. Some bridges are meant to be burned, though possibly only after they’ve been blown up through the liberal application of high explosives.

      1. Anowan

        Thank you.

        Yep, I’m aware of consent, I learned as much as I could of the rape legislation in my country and results of previous trials for affairs ressembling mine, and I sued the ass of that little shitty rapist who watched soooo many videos about consent when TomSka made it trendy, and understood nothing. Made me unwelcome in my mother’s house, she loved the coward. (The rapist. Not TomSka.)
        Apart from the occasionnal flashback, I’m through with this event. What I’m not through is the lack of support from people I thought were supposed to support me.

        I know I shouldn’t call them back. That part is harder. Despite being a grown-up twenty-six years old woman (shit I’m old), part of me wants parents. 🙁

        1. StClair

          For what it’s worth, I’ve got twenty years on you and I miss my parents very much sometimes. 🙁

          (I got really, really lucky on my set, as I began to find out as I got older and started hearing about other families – first from friends, then from others, like you.)

        2. Jhon

          Only two people can be your parents.
          Any number of people can be your friends.

    15. Anowan

      Okay everybody !

      You’ve been wonderfully supportive and I thank you. I tried to answer your answers, but I didn’t answer your answers to my answers to your answers, and I’m sorry for that. It’s the evening here and I’m willing to put this “weak-day” behind me, so I’m not coming back to see if you posted other messages.

      Tomorrow there will be a new comic and new commentaries and I just feel grateful that I’ve had the privilege to be with you on this thread of commentaries during this day.

      I’m better now. Looks like I needed that pile of “holy shit that’s terrible please be okay” you threw on me :’)

      Let’s see each other another day, on another topic.

      Thank you again.

      Have a nice rest of the day.

      1. Anowan

        TW death i don’t know i’m so sorry i’m breaking

        Okay so the “I won’t call you again” was very litteral because my mother just wrote me an e-mail to say that I purposefully hurt her because my father manipulated me when I was a kid and that she Did Nothing Wrong and that I’d be better off dead.

        Sorry, I said I was not coming coming back but. This is too. I’m shaking. My boyfriend isn’t home. Don’t know when he’ll come back, soon I hope. I don’t dare to ask him to come back. I wrote an e-mail to my shrink. I don’t know if she’s okay with me sending e-mail. I said to her in the e-mail that it was okay if she didn’t want me to write her e-mails anymore so I hope I did not invade her privacy too much (it’s her professional e-mail but it still feels like I’m harassing her).

        I’m nothing. I’m really nothing but a bad memory of a terrible relationship to her. Anything non-conform is nothing but my father’s reminder. I can’t. I don’t care anymore if she has PTSD of her time with him as I suspect. Oh who am I kidding of course I care. Not the good kind of caring. She wishes I’m dead ?! She wishes I’m an unspoiled memory of a perfect girl I never was ?! I’m so sorry I can’t I can’t I’m putting trigger warnings on this post and posting it I can’t think I can’t I can’t I can’t I am really nothing ? nothing ? nothing ?

        1. Anowan

          I’m not litteraly breaking I’ve had episodes like these before it will pass it will just suck I’m not in danger I’m just shaking and unable to think straight

          I’m searching for someone close I could Skype with the time it passes

          I’m not in danger of any kind, you know the kind I’m talking about

          Sorry to use you as witnesses I just feel nothingness

        2. Anowan

          I’m not shaking as much so that’s good news.

          Still searching for someone to tell me live that it will be okay.

          Boyfriend’s damn phone battery died.

        3. Anowan

          Dang it there’s a litteral police shooting happening and everybody fears a new terrorist attack I really chose the better fucking day to have one of these

        4. Anowan

          OK I found two friends who can help, I’m managed, thank you very much for having been here, everything will be okay, they just have to tell me I don’t deserve to die until my boyfriend comes back, they can’t fuck that up, nobody can fuck that up.

        5. Fart Captor

          Oof. I’m glad you were able to get a hold of someone.

        6. Anowan

          Also I’m not leaving this thread alone until tomorrow, what was I thinking ? If you put more messages I will read them, I promise. Thank you so much.

        7. Fart Captor

          Good. I myself am not great at being supportive, but you deserve all the comfort and support you can find, and so much better than the treatment you’ve gotten from your parents.

          There’s a lot of great people here, and I’m glad you found us.

        8. Halpful

          You’re not nothing to us, and you totally don’t deserve to die. You deserve love and support and comfort and acknowledgement… There’s something beautiful in you that reminds me of myself (um, maybe that sounds weird… Oh well), and I think maybe I’m seeing a tiny bit of what makes my husband and friends think so highly of me. 😉

    16. Rukduk

      You don’t need to apologize for bursting. And it’s ok to “burst” around us. Other people have listed their experiences, and it’s ok for you to write about yours. If writing helps you then write. Write a wall of text. Write so long that it needs too take several comments. Just write. None of what you’ve listed is your fault. And it’s not “hypocritical” to write about your problems without having offered support for someone else’s. And, sorry I couldn’t type this sooner. Pain’s…something we all experience in some form or another. For some of us it’s worse than for others. For some of us it’s more constant. For some of us the sources are so horrid it makes it worse. There’s no consistent amount of pain from anything, no certain level you have to reach to ask for help. So never be ashamed or afraid to talk about anything here. Just say what you feel you need to say, and we’ll listen.

    17. Commodore Jeep-Eep

      Can’t manage anything that ain’t already been said, but *hugs*.

    18. Li

      /gently adds to the hug supply.

      You don’t deserve any of the things your mother said to you, you don’t deserve the other things you’ve been through either, but you do deserve support and to be listened to.

  52. Heather

    Leslie why are you so full of bad decisions this week. If you’re going to do this first shit plan, just CANCEL THE CLASS, you don’t out another second shit plan where you spring it on a student to take over with no prior warning.

    It’s fine if you don’t like Roz but it’s affecting your professionalism.

    Perhaps if Roz had had a week or two to prepare this would actually /mean/ something with regards her ability to teach the class crack. (Of course since asa student Roz also has to concentrate on things besides teaching unlike you it’s not entirely fair to compare but you know… it’s something vaguely achievable). It could be a learning lesson for her, even if it turns out she’s good at it. But Leslie, even if she’s shit at this moment and you think you can be smug about it, it proves absolutely nothing about her abilities. You’re such a shit teacher yourself in this moment.

  53. Liliet

    I am so confused about how everyone yells that it’s literally impossible to teach without any preparation. It’s… possible? If you have lots to say on the subject and haven’t had a chance to say it to these people before, it’s entirely possible to cook up some activity or discussion on the spot for this one time. An extended lesson plan requires planning, but Roz is being given a carte blanche here. I’m pretty sure she can cope one way or another?

    1. Liliet

      I mean, like… that’s what substitute teacher do a lot of the time? Have the necessity to teach sprung on them with no notice and end up doing whatever is their thing to do? Or they can try and follow the lesson plan, which Leslie can absolutely give to Roz.

      And yeah, substitute teachers get paid for this and Roz doesn’t, but this is genuinely a learning opportunity here. It makes sense.

      Yes, the situation is highly unconventional, but this class was a disaster before it even began because of Leslie’s face in the papers, so like… this isn’t really much worse.

    2. BBCC

      Possible, sure. Fair or reasonable, no.

      1. BBCC

        And substitutes are trained to teach and step in when needed. Roz is not. They also usually get called sooner than the instant they are needed – like at least the amount of time a drive to the school takes.

        1. Yumi

          I’m not saying what Leslie’s doing is right, but “substitutes are trained to teach,” ummm…

          Not necessarily.

        2. BBCC

          A substitute teacher is generally still a teacher. Because teachers aren’t generally tools who throw someone not in any way qualified to be a teacher to teach in class.

        3. Yumi

          I am speaking as someone who has been a substitute teacher:
          The amount of training required to be a substitute teacher is incredibly minimal. As someone who is about a week away from being a full-fledged teacher, I’d have to disagree with “a substitute teacher is generally still a teacher,” though in some districts the requirements might be stricter.

        4. BBCC

          I’m guessing your requirements for being a substitute teacher were more than ‘showed up to a month’s worth of classes’. I’m not sure what they are, but I’d hope it requires more than that. A substitute teacher has done whatever the district requires (be it entered a grad school program, have a degree in the relevant subject, whatever) and is therefore qualified as a teacher for that district. Roz has not.

        5. Yumi

          Again, I am not commenting on the situation as a whole, just the comment, “a substitute teacher is trained to teach.” Now, Roz wouldn’t meet the requirements of the company I subbed for, but those requirements were essentially “90 college credits in any area.” Now, I was also studying teaching along with my English major, so I think I was decently qualified, and I cared enough that I would (re)teach myself whatever the students were learning so that I could help.

          I am not commenting on the situation in the comic, I am not defending Leslie’s actions, I am responding to the comment “substitutes are trained to teach” because from what I’ve seen over the last year, I’m honestly amused by it.

        6. Yumi

          Honestly, if you want to argue about how this situation is different than substitute teaching, I would think your main argument would be that substitute teachers make the choice to be in that position.

        7. BBCC

          A substitute teacher has been hired as a substitute teacher. Ergo, whether they’re trained in education or not, they are a teacher and have the appropriate training (whatever the district deems appropriate training) to be a teacher. Roz does not have that.

          You are right, subs have consented to teach and Roz did not. That’s another factor in the what the fuck, Leslie? issue.

    3. Bagge

      What BBCC said.

      Also, Leslie does not set Roz up to succeed – she sets her up to fail. She COULD have said “OK, we all know we have lots to learn from Roz – so pay attention! I know she can to this.” rather than “If you are so smart, prove it.” The way Leslie frames it it is not giving a student a chance to be teacher for a day – it is a test.

      I still think Roz CAN do it, but Leslie is not giving her a fair chance.

    4. Lailah

      Substitutes are given materials. They may ignore them, or add to them, but they’re given something to work with.

      I mean, I don’t get this wave of anger from a commentariat that was out for roz’s literal and figurative heart a few weeks ago/a week ago, but it’s not comparable at all.

      1. thejeff

        Because we can simultaneously hold “Roz is being shitty and needs to stop” and “Hey, Leslie is being shitty to Roz and needs to stop” in our heads?

        1. JBento

          But if every character stops being shitty to the other characters, the comic ends! D8

        2. Lailah

          Oh no. That’s not sufficient for the knives that came out for Roz. Especially not given that Roz’s primary fucking crime was doing the same thing that the simultaneously canonized Dotty was doing – except with immediate instead of long term, nebulous gains. I picked my metaphor for a reason. Y’all weren’t just saying “oh, Roz is behaving kind of badly.”

      2. Yumi

        Again, not saying what Leslie is doing is right, but, “Substitutes are given materials,” ummmm…

        Not necessarily.

        1. Lailah

          Generally! And have, at least in high school, where I’ve actually dealt with substitutes (Both as a student and observing as an adult), have completed that level of education. Roz is literally taking the class she’s been thrown into with zero notice.

        2. Yumi

          Yeah, I’m not commenting on the situation as a whole, just on the comment that substitutes are given materials. I’m speaking as someone who has been a substitute teacher and is like a week away from being a full-fledged teacher. Now, I would agree that generally being given materials has been my experience, but not always.

    5. zoelogical

      public speaking is super difficult, varying from person to person. public speaking on short notice is even worse. and Roz doesn’t have to just speak for five minutes, she has to manage the class for about forty-five minutes. with zero prep time.

      this was not fair at all.

  54. Josh Spicer

    Give the man child a harumph.

  55. Grethelwvier

    Omg! “Listen to the man! Whoever he is he speaks for all of us!” in the gender studies class is so humorous but also so tragically accurate to real life, and I’m dying. Bless you Willis.

    1. RacingTurtle

      Holy crap, that is hilarious! I got distracted by the Roz/Leslie stuff and missed this hilarious nuance, so thanks for pointing it out, commenter-person! 😀

      1. Grethelwvier

        Especially since the man in question is asking for said gender studies class to be canceled.
        (Though we know Walky just wants to not have classes in general, as a piece of fiction, it’s still indicative.)

    2. Lailah

      Oh god. Yes. Thank you. That would have gone unnoticed by me tonight.

    3. Gwen

      Yeah, I snorted out loud when I read that. I did accidentally troll a male acquaintance into mansplaining sexism to me a couple of months ago. (I was trying to tease him for how he’d been acting in the rest of the discussion, but I think that bit went over his head).

  56. Nono

    Couldn’t Leslie just do like… a field trip for the whole class to her house? That would still be a teaching moment, and confronting Robin with a class full of doubtful people might be more effective.

    1. Shiro

      …I think that might manage to actually be more unprofessional than what she settled on. Also, if standing in front of them talking didn’t work the first time…

  57. CJ

    Dang, the moment of behaving reasonably came and was gone.
    Why is “I have a shift soonish ” an good reason to go over to Leslie place right now?
    The class (minus Walky who doesn’t want to be there much anyway) is stunned by what Leslie is doing here. Damn it Leslie, you cannot fluke two classes in a row, you’ve got a responsibility for all the students in your class here.
    I think Joe fears where a lesson lead by Roz might lead.
    As to Roz being asked to take the class: It’s not like she was asked to suddenly teach advanced calculus. With all her politicizing and stuff, she should be able to pull this off, there’d be not much difference to facilitating a political meeting. Which is why Dorothy probably would be a better choice, if you did it at all, because she doesn’t need other people to agree to her pow so much.
    But, but,… Leslie get a grip!
    You don’t need Roz setting up a discussion about traitors to the movement without you being there to facilitate (and you’re in no place to facilitate this topic anytime soon) and what other topic is she going to start on in this moment? You do need to remember your a teacher and teach first, sort of you life after.

    1. thejeff

      Oooh. Hadn’t considered that. If my recent suspicions about Roz’s feelings about Leslie and her crush on Robin are right, this could be a very interesting class.

      Probably won’t go that direction though.

  58. RacingTurtle

    I am so unbelievably pissed off at Leslie right now. It doesn’t matter what Roz and Leslie’s history is at the moment. This would be a ridiculous stunt to pull on a student who was as difficult as ten Rozes. I’m close to Leslie’s age and have taught similarly-sized college classes, and I am just gobsmacked.

    I’ve been sad that Robin/Leslie is not a good romance in this universe. Is Leslie on some sort of reverse character growth arc so that she ends up an appropriate match for Robin (i.e., a horrible person)? My brain is full of wild-ass speculation like that right now. Is this a dream sequence? I am currently incapable of making reasonable guesses as to where this is going, only unreasonable ones, ones that belong in April Fool’s Day comics.

    I know things will be fine—as fine as they get in DUMBING of Age, anyway—but apparently today’s strip has hit a nerve for me. Yikes.

    1. Minder

      For the record, Leslie/Robin was not a good romance for a VERY large chunk of the other ‘universe’ either.

      This is about confronting the flaws in Robin’s base personality that make her in a real-world context awful and selfish instead of zany and fun. It is also about confronting the flaws–and I think they are flaws, as much as they are good marks of faith and character–in Leslie’s base personality, which make her too permissive of Robin’s and others’ flaws to see sometimes when her kindness is being taken advantage of. It is a problem when Leslie’s willingness to accept and overlook unforgivable behavior and politics in someone like Robin because of a crush or a hope of changing Robin’s mind directly harms or can harm undeserving & vulnerable people, Leslie herself included as well as Becky and Joyce.

      But I’m a bit sad at all the flak Leslie is getting in the comments, and not because her actions here aren’t wrong. They are wrong. She’s just desperate and not thinking clearly. I think this is something she is going to look back on later with deep shame, and it wouldn’t be wholly undeserved, and at the end of the day she still isn’t a bad person unworthy of sympathy as long as she can acknowledge her mistakes and use that knowledge going forward without forgetting the impact of what she HAS done.

      1. RacingTurtle

        I know! I can enjoy a good trainwreck sometimes. Leslie/Robin in Shortpacked! was a trainwreck. I was totally on board for this trainwreck yesterday. Today’s strip just…hit a nerve, I guess.

  59. Gesc

    I know it’s not the case, but it makes you think how little does a teacher think of their class if they can ditch it and put a student in charge at a moment’s notice just like that.

    You have a responsibility to these people too, Leslie. Robin isn’t going anywhere, as you have learned these days.

    This is a very shitty thing to do.

  60. BenRG

    Oddly enough, I thought that something like this might happen but I wasn’t expecting Leslie to effectively cancel the class to make it happen! There is no way that this can end well for any of the participants at this point!

    Oh, and Walky? Seriously, this may have been cute and tolerated in high school (probably due to your parents’ money) but, in a young adult, it’s just irritating.

  61. cmd1095

    Leslie, you can just take Becky to meet Robin AFTER her shift, or you know, on the next day or something. This doesn’t need to be an immediate thing, clearly Robin is going to be sticking around for a bit longer whether you like it or not so there’s really no rush

    1. Temperaryobsessor

      After Becky’s shift sounds like a good idea, next day not so much. The last thing she needs right now is another night of Robin as she is and she knows it.

  62. Heavensrun

    I am with the “What the hell, Leslie?” crowd here. This is exceptionally irresponsible, unfair to Roz, disrespectful to her students, and not likely to end with anything good happening.

    If I was in that class, This is the point I would be stomping out of the classroom to head for the dean’s office.

  63. Cerberus

    Comic Reactions:

    Welp… this is a flaming tire fire.

    Panel 1: Ah, professional Leslie, segueing into the lesson. I’m very glad I won’t have any cause in the course of this particular comic page to doubt your professionalism or be quietly disappointed in you. Yup.

    Panel 2: Okay, lemme lay this out. Part of me is enjoying the car wreck of how this arc is going, because it’s such an amazing clusterfuck and it’ll be entertaining to watch the flaming tires go spinning into the buildings, but I also try and observe this as the pseudo-realistic world that it is.

    And we’ll see Leslie’s… decision later, but it’s worth noting that this is all the reason she needs to completely abandon her code of ethics. And it’s a meaningless empty reason. Oh, dear, she has work. Okay. Stick around on campus or find a Starbucks to hold up in until Becky’s shift ends, meet up then to go home. Or just suck it up and stop using a freshly out baby gay to solve your problem. Fuck, you theoretically got some kind of means of contacting the campaign, so just call all her goons to extricate her. You’ve seen her aide and how little respect he has for her.

    So yeah, the decision she’s about to make is some deep level bullshit and deeply unprofessional as a teacher.

    Panel 3: Oh Walky… Oh Walky… that said, yes, this would have been the much better action than what she actually decides to do. It’s not the end of the world, hell, very few people would blame her for ending a class given the personal crisis she’s going through. I’ve had teachers do a last minute cancellation for less before.

    1. Reltzik

      Just let me say…. thank you.

      Thank you for making me feel less guilty about enjoying the tire fire.

      1. Minder

        I mean, we all know what day it is, just let it blaze.

  64. OnyxIdol

    All of this is getting a bit grotesque.

  65. Cerberus

    Panels 4-5: But. I can understand on a level why she’s tempted by this.

    1) She really doesn’t want to be here today. Her peers are mocking her, she’s wanted by the press, her students are likely to respect her less and she’s going through a major crisis and being stalked by a person who not only refuses to understand no, but is high ranking enough that you can’t even call the cops on them.

    Like, having to work a lot of days when I’ve been an emotional wreck and going through hell, I can definitely feel the urge and desire to run screaming in the other direction away from trying to push yourself to teach a class.

    2) She’s desperate, scared, and completely out of sync. She basically had a deeply frustrating and miserable night, followed by the morning from hell and no chance to settle into a morning routine. She’s been made a local, possibly national news story and she really doesn’t have any idea how she’s going to get rid of Robin. I said before that panicky trapped people don’t make the best decisions and this is a prime example of that.

    3) Becky is energizing her. Like, yeah, it’s fucking stupid of her to prioritize this over almost anything else or not just wait till Becky’s off work. But we saw how much of a wreck Leslie was at the beginning of class and how much getting to help Becky mattered to her. And so, yeah, the temptation is likely strong to follow and stay with that feeling, especially as she likely feels like a traitor to the queer community right now and reclaiming her house to give a more permanent roof to Becky is definitely something that feels like it could redeem that feeling.

    4) She probably feels like this is a very singular moment. She doesn’t know if Joyce will bring Becky again or even how bad of a situation Becky is in right now. And so I imagine part of her is strongly wondering if she lets Becky go off to work, will she miss the chance to make this offer again in the future?

    Now, does any of that excuse what she’s about to do? Fuck no. But I can at least understand the impulse driving her.

    Panel 6: Others have deconstructed this, but this is awful awful form.

    1) It’s a disrespect to the class to leave a student to teach your class for no compensation to cover your butt. Both to the other students and to the student you deputize who is thrown into a situation they are ill prepared for, are unlikely to be respected in, and very likely to fail while you take the paycheck for their free labor.

    2) I can respect the petty shade of this, especially as I imagine Leslie partially blames Roz for setting this all in motion in the first place. But holy shit is this a bit cruel. Like, putting her on the spot, calling her out on something that was just 18 year old bravado and asking her to prove it? That’s ice cold. And we see it on her face. That level of shock and distress is not something you ever want to cause as a teacher.

    3) I can respect the artisinal aspect of the pettiness, but at the end of the day, this is vile practice. As a teacher, you never want to tear down a student like this and set them up to fail and suffer like this, especially without even having the decency to set up a failsafe so you can bail them out if need be. Like, it’d be different if she set her up to succeed or had students present short topics to the class while she was in the class to observe. But just running out the door and leaving Roz to the wolves with nothing she’s formally prepared? No, ick.

    And while this might feel like partial revenge for Roz’s role in the whole Robin mess, that’s fucked up. Like there’s no good reason for a teacher to take even mild revenge on a student for something the student does to the teacher. Yeah, discipline them or set stricter boundaries, but don’t turn them into an object lesson.

    Like, I’ve loved Leslie as a teacher and I imagine when she’s got a hold of her life again she’ll be that amazing teacher she has been in previous classes, but this is a deep black mark that she’ll owe some major apologies to her students and especially Roz for.

    Panel 7: Again, it’s a bit of Oh, Walky… but he’s also right. If she is going to bail on the class, end the class. Call a personal emergency, say you don’t got it in you today, pull the plug. Yeah, it might be a bit unprofessional given they know the reason, but it’s less unprofessional than throwing a random student in front of the class and running out the door and frankly if the Dean stopped by looking for Leslie and saw this or a student complained about it, she’d have no one to blame but herself for the fallout.

    I don’t know why she isn’t. I mean, I’m excited and interested to see what Roz makes of what she’s been given, but that doesn’t even remotely make what Leslie did okay.

    1. Gesc

      Seriously, if she cares about her class there is no reason to do this. Just end it, don’t throw mud at it while putting Roz against the ropes for no good reason other than to be petty.

      And really, the moment she leaves, the class will most likely follow suit, which only undermines her authority even more. Why should the students care about a teacher that doesn’t care about them? Wouldn’t be strange if someone used that argument.

    2. Minder

      I agree with all of this on an intellectual level and don’t see any good argument against it, especially as you pointed out people may see–and this never even occurred to me in Leslie calling on Roz here to lead the class–Leslie’s request as some form of poetic ‘revenge’ or comeuppance for Roz’s role in setting Leslie up with Roz’s sister. I hadn’t considered it as anything more than a well-timed callback putting Roz in a position of having to very abruptly put her money where her mouth is on that one time she made a disrespectful dismissal of how hard it’d be to teach a gender studies class for someone so educated like her!

      All that aside, though.

      Like.

      For all my understanding of why Leslie’s decision was ethically not okay on a professional level.

      I just can’t stop laughing.

      1. Cerberus

        I mean, yeah, part of me wants to see how utterly catastrophic this trainwreck can get and is willing to begrudgingly give props to the petty shade, but way more of me is also just appalled as a teacher. What she’s doing is really not okay on any level and there was a much better solution right at hand. Abandon the class for a personal emergency while profusely apologizing.

        But yeah, the small part of me is also really curious to see how Roz does with this responsibility.

        1. Minder

          And none of that is arguable! I work with students as well and obviously and if these guys weren’t fictional characters, and I wasn’t so familiar with Willis’s narrative style / how he likes to deliver punchlines that punch…let’s call it poetically (if not justly, for all aforementioned), this moment presented as-is in a real-world or even a fictional would probably bother the hell out of me. Leslie’s actions toward Roz aren’t excusable or okay at all and, okay, as much as it’s satisfying to read Roz doesn’t actually deserve what Leslie’s done here because that’s not something a professor has any right to do.

          …And I type all that, and I scroll back up to the top of the page, and I just burst into helpless giggles all over again at Roz’s face oh my god I just can’t

        2. Reltzik

          The BORING and SENSIBLE answer is that Roz just says “class dismissed” and everyone walks away with almost no damage done at all.

          ……

          I’m like 87.3% sure that’s not what’s going to happen. Because DYW.

        3. Bagge

          She CAN do that, but that would still undermine her authority as a Person Who Can Teach This Class.

          Remember – Roz WANTS to do this. She wants to prove herself, she wants to tell her peers about these awesome things she wants and she quite possibly see the merits in having taught a class as a freshman.

          By putting her on the spot, Leslie takes that frankly admirable desire and turns it into a trap. It’s just a shitty thing to do, especially since it would be so easy to do it right (pull Roz aside and ask if she is OK with it, and then endorse her to the class).

          I still think Roz will manage a half-decent class session (if the other students allow her), but it could have been much better if Leslie had given her a chance.

        4. Cerberus

          Yup, she’s now made it both a challenge to her pride and a direct questioning of her capabilities and knowledge base.

          Yeah, Roz can back down, but if she does so, there’ll be a social cost and a nasty message to internalize and she’ll have been “put in her place” which is not one you really ever want to feel especially when you don’t fully deserve it from a person with considerably more power than you and who you can’t really get any real measure of revenge without fucking yourself over.

          And that’s really shitty to do to anyone. Because it sets her up either into a no-win task that is almost guaranteed to make her look sub-optimal (because she hasn’t had time to prepare a real lesson and at best will be working off of someone else’s lesson plans) or refusing that obvious trap and having it be interpreted as cowardice, incapability, or having been “put in her place”.*

          *And that last one I imagine stings even more because Robin frequently “put her in her place” as a control mechanism.

          It’s genuinely fucked.

        5. Bagge

          Sadly, Leslie seem to have real trouble distancing herself from her “just one of the pals” teaching persona.

          It’s a great way to create an informal teaching environment, but in the end of the day Leslie is the teacher. She is the one who is paid to keep structure, provide guidance and grade. She is never just “one of the pals”, and she has toed that line a bit too many times, in her interaction with Walky, Joe and most especially Roz.

          When one of the pals gets vindictive or overly defensive or singles you out a bit too much, it can hurt. But when the teachers does it, it’s just shitty.

        6. JBento

          The TURNABOUT answer is that Roz leads everyone in a field trip to see the Leslie+Becky/Robin meet-up. Because that’s a teaching moment if there ever was one.

        7. Lailah

          I’m one of the folks most on Roz’s ‘side’ (Inasmuch as she gets an amazingly high amount of undeserved flak – rn my money’s on the perfect storm of racism and being the sister of the Trump analog, since RL the trump family is 100% complicit in the jackassery), and like, yeah, this is shitty of leslie, sure, but I can’t really get /mad/ about it. It’s enabling wacky comic hijinx (and unlike Robin’s constant waka-wakas, it’s not really interjecting it in an extremely serious moment). It’d be like getting mad about someone dropping a banana peel on the ground – sure, that’s littering, and it’s a little shitty, but while I might get mad at an RL litterer, someone setting up classical physical comedy is helpful in, well, /entertainment/. And incredibly inept actions and bluff calling in entertainment is generally funny.

          Granted, I’m not a /teacher/.

        8. Minder

          I have also noticed you around the past few days playing Hated Character Defender™. I didn’t think we’d have to shift this soon from Roz to Leslie in terms of “people acting like character [x] is the root of all evil,” though (and no I’m certainly not talking about Cerberus, just thread placement being a coincidence that I wanted to respond to your comment)

        9. Lailah

          I mean, I genuinely like Roz. Not uncritically, but I like basically all of The Dumbs, in varying capacities (Even Mary; though possibly not Walky). This actually pointedly doesn’t include Leslie as a group, though I like her individually as well; I’ve taken ‘The Dumbs’ as the kids who are, you know, coming of age. Which is 100% of the kids.

          I like Dotty /better/ than Roz, though you wouldn’t know it from my comments about most of this series of kerfluffles. What does bother me, though, aside from the probable perfect storm of racism intersecting with undesirable political happenings, is that, in general, most bad behavior gets castigated to this degree. Which is fairly unproductive, because it renders everything exactly equal (It’s not). Sometimes, some actions are just sort of shitty, potentially worthy of censure, but are not the end all of bad actions. I also think it’s telling what gets this treatment, and what wasn’t – it was amazingly difficult to get basic fucking racism on AG’s part acknowledged at /all/, and it was almost always rendered in its most sympathizable form, but Leslie is unprofesh and it’s a horrible act, nearly universally reviled in the commentariat? It /is/ unprofesh, and is shitty, to be clear, but is it really worse than AG reinforcing racist structures, or Mary being her nearly everything-ist, but in particular heterosexist and cissexist, self?

          Some folks, I’m less worried about, Cerb included (I mean, she’s a teacher. Teachers being assholes is intensely personal for her), so yes, this is a coincidence of thread placement for me.

        10. Minder

          I genuinely like a lot of characters in this strip too, though a lot of the fun of enjoying Mary as she was, simply being there and the worst got taken it out of for me in Book 6 when she did The Worst. Most characters I like / dislike on a basis of being boring (Dorothy and Walky have both been stuck there for me since like Book 2), or else it’s a situation like Roz where I get increasingly annoyed by people going and accusing characters for increasingly wild and silly things that make no sense at all and ignoring the things that DO merit legitimate criticism by mistaking them for things unrelated or about a hundred times worse.

          Granted, at this point the comic gets so much traffic and people are so analytic of it that if plenty of strips that ran earlier without incident were to have come out in 2016 we’d have way more characters’ pictures on the dartboard being shot at right now.

        11. Cerberus

          I agree with a lot of this thread and yeah, a lot of the strength in my response definitely comes from being a teacher so bad teaching practices are something that definitely winds me up pretty fiercely. It’s the reason why I’m probably more negative on Jason than pretty much anyone else.

          And yeah, this is awful, but it is kinda shitty that outright racism, stalking, homophobic abuse get less flak than fucking up.

          And that’s what this is. A fuck up. A big fuck up in my opinion, but based on Leslie’s previous actions, I fully expect her to acknowledge, own, and apologize for her fuck up and the parties it has harmed when she’s no longer in this awful stressful situation. Because that is the character she has shown so far in all of her dealings.

          And I trust Willis to show that necessary acknowledgment and contrition in a future plotline, likely with a personal apology to Roz for pulling this stunt with her.

        12. Minder

          Yeah, and I think Pearl’s got a point too that people are very quick to jump on Leslie here on the basis she’s acting unprofessionally and it’s terrible of her to throw a student in front of the class unprepared when, hah, Jason was acting unprofessionally and he literally told a student in his class he thought she was hot when she came for math help and then had sex with her twice

          Jason (and I like Jason, though not for his so-called “principles”) had nothing affecting his decision-making. Leslie’s got a crazy woman living in her house who brought a lot of paparazzi friends.

          People may not be gung-ho about Jason’s greatness but I’ve never seen the comment section go off on him to such a degree let alone turn with this vindictiveness in a matter of days………

          Which, well, people are certainly liable to voice betrayal or disappointment in judgment form when beloved characters are the ones suddenly making terrible decisions instead of bores like Jason, but…I don’t think it’s without cause to think there’s some element of it being she’s a Lesbian™ and Jason isn’t.

        13. Pearl

          Damn. When you’re right, you’re right.

  66. Hellespont

    Unless Leslie is handing over the actual lesson plan to Roz, this is going to be a 30 minute study refresher, led by what I am guessing is her best student. Meh, I would have just dropped the class, but all five threads of this should be interesting.

  67. Pearl

    roz (a straight girl who has tried to make herself an authority on LGBT issues for political gain) literally just had leslie (a lesbian) humiliated by the national media and gloated about it and ABSOLUTELY has every intention of using this power play as leverage over leslie in order to justify further class disruptions/general undermining of her authority. roz absolutely NEEDS to be taken down a peg on this one. she’s not some defenceless damsel in distress she’s a conniving manipulative hetero who uses and exploits people, including leslie.

    1. Minder

      Oh my stars and garters you wonderful human, where were you for the past week’s worth of Hated Character Defender™ when other commenters were actually agreeing with these ludicrous statements and I was aiming for the high score (and apologies for misposting this down below first, it was meant as a comment reply)

      1. Pearl

        i been crushin it out here for approx. a week my dude starting w the strip of roz gloating abt it

        1. Minder

          ok then let’s start with “for political gain” if we’re assassinating Roz here because despite the politics used a metaphor for the so-called RA debate it was not actually an election with votes. and Roz didn’t even want the position itself. she wanted to get away from an abusive roommate.

          and “make herself an authority on LGBT rights” is not quite what I took away from her crowing about her sister’s picture in the newspaper being spotted with Leslie. but either way I think Roz’s cheerful bragging that her awful sister had been slammed in the media before an election for Congress? an election that was going to decide future voting on legislation for reproductive rights (Roz’s foremost priority, as she’s stated repeatedly)? that celebration of hers was not necessarily contingent on whether or not Roz wanted to be picked for RA. She’d have been happy for the queer folks on her floor being bettered by Robin’s media scandal and election chances even if there was nothing at stake for getting them to like her.

        2. Pearl

          An annoying roommate. Not an abusive one. Mary hasn’t done anything to Roz, and never will, because Roz is straight. She doesn’t have the same things at stake regarding a shared room with Mary that, say, I would. She has a roommate whose politics don’t align with hers. Not the end of the world. That’s what allies are for. They make personal sacrifice in order to shield the marginalised people they’re the allies of and to address the situation in the long-term. Roz is under no obligation to do those things, but insofar as she wants credit for being a totes good ally, she actually is under an obligation to do those things.

          And by “political gain” I don’t mean in the like, votes sense. I mean like her social cred.

        3. thejeff

          Mary hates Roz. Mary hates Riley because she’s related to Roz. She may not have done anything specific to Roz, but if so that’s because she hasn’t found a way to pull it off yet. She’s not just “a roommate whose politics don’t align with hers”, she’s a blackmailer.
          If she got anything on Roz, she’d absolutely use it. Or save it for the worst moment. That Roz is straight wouldn’t stop her.
          That Roz is completely open about all the kinds of things that Mary’s likely to target is probably her best defense, but everyone has secrets and she’s got to be constantly worrying if Mary’s learned something she could use.

        4. Lailah

          …No, there’s no ‘shielding’ for her being in a room with Mary, except inasmuch as a queer person /might/ get the room instead. There’s no gain whatsoever to be roomed with her. And given that Roz gets an extra helping of sexism that wouldn’t be standard for a lot of potential room bearers (What with them not being as proudly sexually active), /and that we can also be confident she’s getting racist horse shit from Mary too/, that is an unreasonable demand unless you think all oppression comes down to heterosexism – which I’m confident you don’t.

          Hetero ally or not, there’s no good reason for her to deal with Mary, except inasmuch as someone has to.

        5. Minder

          “Enjoy your victory, Roz. I hope you choke on it.” These are words Mary says to Roz like a day before this strip in-comic time. Their relationship may indeed not be an abusive one per se as you say, because it is a relationship between roommates and their power dynamics are even. However the arrangement is still a toxic one for Roz who has nowhere else but school to hide from her sister’s equally toxic and horribly controlling campaign. Billie even steps in to intervene on Roz’s behalf when Mary says these words to hold Mary to the counter-blackmail that Mary needs to stop being horrible to everyone on their floor, roommie included.

          And Roz being only after credit is…not at all conceivable to me and that accusation is another for which I defend her, because as much as Roz does not mind at all to brag about herself, she isn’t doing any of this–not fighting for reproductive rights, not arguing that queer people as well as women are dehumanized by Republican policies and that this is a bad thing–for credit’s sake. She does them because she believes in them. When called on her shit appropriately, Roz stops and grudgingly and checks herself like the time when Leslie called her out for talking over her. Roz has not done that again and she has told her sister that Leslie is her favorite teacher FOR calling Roz on her shit. Roz wants to learn to be better even if it is not happy for her whenever she has to realize she has things left to learn.

          And I also don’t think she was happy about swinging the election ‘in their favor’ wrt the queer people on her floor because of the RA thing, either. The sweet outfit she wore that day was for the RA thing. I guess it’s not stated outright so we can agree to disagree but for the record, Roz got only flak that we see for boasting (and exaggeratedly imo) about her role in the media story to her floormates (Meredith, Dorothy, Mary) and was likely self-aware enough to realize that bragging wasn’t a magnanimous move for someone trying to get approval, which is not something she would grab for at any cost like Robin.

        6. Pearl

          I wish there was a like button on this format, because these are all really good points. Frankly, I’m more upset with Roz over her inaction re: Carla and Becky than I am over anything she’s actually Done and like Yeah maybe I haven’t given her a completely fair shake but…. I’m still with Becky in not believing that she wouldn’t send Becky down the river if that was what she needed for her RA position, and gloating was far enough out of line that I still feel really justified in being mad about it.

        7. Minder

          I actually don’t know whether Roz knows Carla is trans, now that you mention it. Roz has done nothing negative to Becky and I would say that her inaction to actively help is mostly because she keeps her distance from Joyce outside of class–I can’t recall if they’ve interacted much since Toedadmaggedon but since Roz now going to be aware of exactly what the reason was for Joyce’s sudden change of heart, Roz might either be too ashamed of herself to approach Joyce and Becky now or else wanting not to hurt them by her presence unnecessarily. Either way she’s been part of the group effort on Clark Wing to keep Becky’s secret hidden and she WOULD NOT have ever put Becky’s living situation in jeopardy for an RA position that she’d be this flip about in front of the residence manager.

          For the last part I’d have to know which instance of gloating in particular you’re talking about to argue about why I’d say Roz is not in my opinion a bad person for it, because (and I have never been unwilling to acknowledge this…it’s kind of her thing) Roz is kind of an asshole and full of herself to an unflattering degree.

        8. Fart Captor

          What did Roz EVER do to Carla? They’ve literally never interacted.

          There’s only even one strip that they both appear in

        9. Minder

          THIS WHOLE FIRST PARAGRAPH GOT CUT OUT BUT INSERT IT AFTER THE FIRST SENTENCE but re: Carla this is all we see of Roz being present at all in Carla vs. Mary and she’s not any reason to know about the Worst Thing that Mary did since only Ruth overheard.

        10. Pearl

          Both fair points, Minder. The gloating I’m mad about is the one that took place like 5 strips ago where she was totally smack-talking Leslie in front of Becky and Becky called her out for it.

        11. Minder

          Okay. This strip is the one in question, and there are several things you can take away from Roz’s words here. Disappointment in Leslie is one of them, but that is not the same as smack-talking unless we’re broadening the definition to include any statement expressing disapproval or condemnation over a grievance.

          I think it’s also noteworthy with the styling emphasis how Roz specifically corrects “prejudiced girl” to “woman in a position of power which she was using to destroy the lives of others.”

          The “woman” in the latter quote is not talking about Leslie. The difference Roz points out, whomever she is really taking issue with, is that Joyce and Robin are should not be equivocal to in Becky’s eyes when one is an adult and a voter on national legislation and one is a freshman girl who harbored prejudices; as even that as in, harbored, past tense.

        12. Pearl

          Nah, sorry, cannot sign off on this one. That sort of linguistic micromanagement is still really annoying. I think it’s telling that Roz’s contribution to Becky’s homelessness crisis has been changing her choice of words from “girl” to “woman”.

          Now I could go into a whole thing here about how Becky’s affirming both Leslie and Robin’s humanity here and allowing both to be vulnerable and admitting that life is messy and people aren’t perfect and the standards to which Roz holds people to are in Becky’s view a secondary concern to that stuff, but it’s 4 AM and I just woke up and there’s a new comic.

        13. Minder

          I thought it over and yeah, in terms of language I think you’re right that Roz’s language is less important than what she’s saying here de facto about Leslie or moreover that she’s jumping on Becky unsolicited in a conversation with a friend.

        14. Fart Captor

          Messed that link up: http://www.dumbingofage.com/tag/Roz+carla/

    2. Jago

      “Conniving manipulative hetero” is a hilarious-sounding combination of words. Or at least used in this sense and sentence.

      1. Delicious Taffy

        Now I want to include an NPC in my game who rants about “Those conniving, manipulative heteros” all the time.

    3. Emily

      Yes yes, Roz is the devil and should be drawn and quartered we know. Chill dude she’s not that bad.

      1. Pearl

        This might be the Islamic Studies in me talking, but being asked to teach a class doesn’t seem “that bad”. Roz does not respect Leslie as a person or a teacher, and this will hopefully teach her some humility.

        1. Emily

          At this point I don’t respect Leslie as a person or teacher either I think Roz was just ahead of the game.

        2. Commodore Jeep-Eep

          Yeah; this woman has hit the ‘fire her already’ threshold, especially as she’s enmeshed students in her idiot drama, and I want nothing more than to watch Willis take a flamethrower to the Robin/Leslie ship because it needs to be sunk with prejudice.

        3. JBento

          If Islamic Studies teaches you that it’s okay to throw a student to the wolves without advance warning, preparation, or consent for the sake of your personal problems, then Islamic Studies is a terrible class and no-one should take it. Or maybe you’re just a crappy student. Y’know, one of the two.

        4. Pearl

          So either I suck, or my entire field of study sucks?

          I dunno guys I don’t think embarrassing a student is necessarily like…. the kind of thing you guys are making it out to be.

        5. Pearl

          A student serious about their intended field of study should be ready to handle unexpected questions and challenges, and if they’re not, they should know that.

        6. Pearl

          With the amount of allyship points Roz is after, she *better* have taught this class multiple times to much more hostile audiences than this one. That’s her *job*.

        7. JBento

          Roz is a student. Teaching is not her job. It’s LESLIE’s. And no-one is expected to do impromptu teaching and be good at it. ACTUAL teachers aren’t, let alone teenaged, first-year students

        8. Delicious Taffy

          No, Roz’s “job” is not to teach hostile classes. Her “job” is to learn the subject matter, because she is a student. She is not an independent agent with no ties to the educational process. If she wants “allyship points”, there are more ways to “get” them than teaching a class she’s not qualified to teach. Simply having some bravado and confidence in her existing knowledge is not even remotely the same as having a lifetime of experience with the things taught in the course material. Handling unexpected questions and challenges is all well and good, but there’s absolutely no valid reason that this should necessarily lead to teaching the subject matter to other students in the same class.

        9. Lailah

          Man, you are reading a different comic if you think that’s her fucking goal.

    4. ischemgeek

      I… appreciate the need for Roz as a character and why she is the way she is (her college experience has been one long exercise in jumping from the frying pan into the fire and back again between her sister and Mary), but I genuinely dislike her as a character.

      Because she’s exactly the kind of straight activist who likes to use me and my life history as a prop. Which I really dislike. I see her more charitably now than I did a few months ago (back when I thought she was one of those who was just doing it to feel More Activisty Than Thou), but onnn the other hand, I still don’t like her and her tendency to use people in exactly the same way her sister does while condemning her sister’s tendency of using people. Hypocrisy, thy name is Roz.

      That said, Leslie is totally being unprofessional here. I like Leslie, a lot, but you don’t get your student to teach a class by dropping it in their lap. Cancelling class would be a better approach.

      1. Pearl

        See… you get it. Roz has repeatedly demonstrated that she wants to get credit for being a progressive but she has no interest in actually engaging people like Mary and Robin She wants to insulate herself from people like them, and she might be Down to reduce the amount of harm they do, but not in a way that requires personal sacrifice.

        Compare to Becky who’s all-in to engage a federal politician and Joyce who’s actually practicing proper allyship, who is all-in to protect Becky while she does that and is constantly questioning her own beliefs.

        1. thejeff

          Engage people like Mary and Robin?

          Well, she’s engaged Robin her whole damn life – to very little avail, though Robin’s picked up a few buzzwords. Likely because she’s Robin’s baby sister and Robin’s not going to listen.

          As for Mary – What do you want her to do? Mary’s not reachable by anything a Roz could do. Just stay there and keep anyone else from having to live with her?

        2. Fart Captor

          Pearl, I want you do a little exercise for me. Go find a transphobic, homophobic bigot. The sort like Mary who is totally happy to bully and harass someone into suicide. Try to engage with that person, face to face, and change their views even slightly.

          Actually DON’T do that in person, because that shit is unsafe.

          Maybe give that a try online and report back on how you feel after hours of arguing have accomplished fuck-all. Or tell us just how many bigots YOU’VE tried to engage with, particularly if you had to beg them for your humanity, or that of someone close to you.

          You’d still be wrong, but if you’re going to pull this kind of gate-keeping bullshit, you better at LEAST be out there practicing what you preach.

        3. Pearl

          I literally went to a Christian college in northern Iowa for most of 2015 where I was out about being Muslim and a lesbian. I’m also majoring in Islamic Studies so that I can counter the homophobic discourse that’s popular in the Muslim world.

          I was also homeless for like, my entire adult life until this last August for reasons explicitly related to me being gay.

          Your gotcha is my entire life so far and also my intended career path.

          Roz, btw, is straight and does not have to convince Mary of her humanity. Unlike Becky, who got that exact pitch 10 seconds ago and signed up immediately.

        4. Fart Captor

          Great! Good on you. Although that just leaves me more confused that you think not reaching out to MARY makes her a crappy progressive. Even ordinary small talk with Mary has been shown to be futile.

          Or her sister. The whole reason this arc started was that Roz needed help getting through to Robin.

          Bringing up Joyce would seem like a far better example. She definitely refused to engage with her, even when it became clear she was open to learning and changing.

          Like, Roz definitely flawed, and makes plenty of mistakes both as an activist and as an ally, but I don’t see how THAT is the thing you’re hung up on.

        5. Pearl

          Actually, even in this conversation, I’m very sure that while many people will say that they have nothing against lesbians, they’ll just find ways to say that lesbians are abusive for not immediately agreeing with them (Robin) or failing to respect boundaries in short bursts in stressful situations (Robin) or for living in denial (Robin) or for inviting younger lesbians immediately and unconditionally into their lives (Leslie) or else we’re just too stupid to make basic decisions about whether or not we should be introduced to other human beings (Becky). Like as great as a lot of y’all seem to think you are about lesbians, I do not feel the love tonight, and I’m literally here to engage a hostile audience and try to get them to analyse their weird tendency to cast every lesbian available as abusive and predatory while ignoring and excusing the actions of the straight women around them.

          It’s not “the thing I’m held up on”, it’s one of the many bones I have to pick with Roz, and a fairly minor one, again I don’t judge her at all for wanting to not live with Mary anymore, I live off-campus for the same reason, I just cannot handle roommates, but there’s a fundamental philosophical difference between me (+ becky) and you (+roz) regarding whether people are fundamentally reachable or not. I say yes, you say no,

          (joyce says stop, and walky says go go go)

        6. Fart Captor

          I don’t disagree with you about Robin being reachable. I disagree with you about Roz not trying to reach her. Her gloating about Robin being outed didn’t sit well with me, but she DID try. Leslie has a far greater chance of succeeding, not just because she’s more knowledgeable experienced, but because Robin seems to actually see her as a peer rather than her twerp little sister. Hell, I think meeting Becky has a good chance of working, because I think Robin will see a lot of herself in her, and won’t be able to deny her humanity to her face.

          I even think Mary might be reachable. Just not by Roz. Roz’s sex-positivity and Catholicism (specifically, Mary’s hatred of both) make that seem impossible to me. Someone Mary actually respected might have a shot, but so far Joyce is the only person whose even gotten close. I don’t see how Roz could pull it off.

        7. Pearl

          Y’know, that’s the thing is I’m actually closer to Mary’s opinion re: sex positivity than I am to Roz’s. Roz starts the conversation with Mary from a position of presumed moral superiority, which is going to make most people, especially someone like Mary who is also very self-righteous feel defensive and territorial. There’s conversations that could happen both on religious tolerance and on sex that if handled non-accusatively and using their shared vocabulary as Christians (i draw on MY shared vocabulary with Christians quite often, and I’m /Muslim/) I feel like absolutely might bear fruit. Yes, Mary views Roz as a promiscuous blasphemer, but Roz views Mary as things that are in many ways worse, so it doesn’t really feel to me like a lot of attempt has been made to establish that sort of common ground. And since they’re both straight it is essentially a moral equivalency; nobody is at existential risk here. And trying to reach out and establish common ground is far from unchristian, I think most would agree.

          I do agree that Leslie has a really good chance of succeeding, though. When Robin saw that she’d upset Leslie, she proactively took steps to try to make it right, her response was “wanna hang out and make space to talk about it?” and it well and truly challenged her and she reacted like a moron and she’s really freaked out right now for obvious reasons which I think is making her act even more… aloof, than she typically does, to my reading, but she has a lot of respect for Leslie.

        8. Fart Captor

          I feel like you’re making some assumptions there. We’ve only seen one or two conversations between Roz and Mary, and I don’t think we’ve seen the kind of conversation you’re describing.

          There’s only been twelve strips that they’re both tagged in, and in most of those, they’re just both in the background. The only conversation we really see is this one:

          http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/dark-presence/

          We HAVE however seen how Mary reacted to Riley, who was nothing but friendly towards her. Mary didn’t just dislike her, but actually got exasperated by her presence. I strongly doubt her initial reaction to Roz was much better.

        9. Pearl

          The dynamic I described is in that conversation, actually! Granted, I didn’t remember that converastion when I said that, but it’s pretty clear to me that Roz’s intention is to corner the gotcha economy and that supercedes her admittedly extant attempt to exchange ideas. Mary isn’t really being much more hypocritical in that conversation than Joyce was early on.

          Roz does make a sincere attempt to exchange ideas, but it’s clear her patience runs out fairly quickly, which granted given the insults to her family members is understandable, but Roz herself went into the conversation with a fairly judgemental attitude.

          Basically, I’m having a really hard time seeing a sheltered 18 year old tell me that it’s “conspicuous” to be unmarried at 30 and trying to take that seriously. That statement isn’t malicious. It’s naïve. To me that reflects a lot of things Mary thinks about herself (that her value as a person is contingent on her ability to attract a man), and those aren’t pleasant things to think about yourself, and I would see that as an opportunity to open the door to a discussion involving gendered class consciousness.

          The dynamic between them involves mutual distrust and impatience over some things about which I think we all at least profess the correct opinion (gay’s okay etcetc) and correctly find the opposing view very unsympathetic, but it’s a fairly equal dynamic from that exchange, and Roz could absolutely be doing more than trying to just wash her hands of the whole situation so she can go back to ignoring the homophobic and transphobic things Mary does to the people on her floor who are *actually* vulnerable.

        10. Minder

          This has nothing to do with the argument downthread, by the way, but just pointing out Robin isn’t a lesbian.

        11. Pearl

          Source?

          She’s not married. At 30, that’s… ;p

        12. Fart Captor

          Minder means that Robin is bisexual.

        13. Pearl

          I know what Minder meant, but that isn’t a source, it’s a conflicting headcanon, unless I missed something.

        14. BBCC

          She’s bi in Shortpacked and Word of Willis is sexualities always cross over.

        15. Lailah

          Robin spent significant lengths of time trying to bang both men and women in SP! She was just as incapable of speech when Ethan was naked except for … I want to say pancake batter, as Amber, she just recovered more quickly.

          She is not straight. She isn’t a lesbian. Her label for herself was ‘indefinably queer’. Most people would use bisexual, because outside of DoA there aren’t a lot of bi people in fiction (And there are even fewer bi hispanic women).

          In fairness tho, there aren’t exactly a lot of hispanic lesbians in fiction either.

        16. Derek

          She actually does have to convince Mary of her humanity, not for being queer, but for being an unapologetic sexually active woman. Mary obviously thinks she’s less of a person for it

        17. Pearl

          That, unlike being gay, is a choice. You could make the same argument of many views Mary holds that devalue her in Roz’s eyes.

          Mary and Roz are on absolutely equal footing re: being women. If it’s a conversation about the role of women in society, I feel like Roz can go there.

        18. Minder

          I am so sorry to hear about your experiences in college and adulthood on account of your sexuality. I hope your life is in a better place now and that you have some kind of shelter and security since last August.

        19. Pearl

          Aw, hey, appreciate it. Christian college wasn’t actually that bad, I didn’t really run into any malice or anything, some sincere ignorance, but (as you might have been able to guess by now) that sincerely doesn’t bug me very much. In some ways the know-it-all atmosphere of the upper class liberal college I go to now in the pacific northwest is more upsetting. Iowa kids were totally willing to admit they had a limited worldview and couldn’t relate to some things, and that’s a lesson I’m glad I learned from them.

          The academics weren’t up to the standard I’m used to, though, and there was obviously no Islamic Studies program, so I peaced out, came back here, and I’m, I’d say, safe.

        20. Minder

          That both does and doesn’t surprise me about Iowa/Christian college, although my experience in college was public university and Oklahoma–I ran into a damn shocking wall of prejudice there I had never experienced before as an elementary/middle/high school student attending Catholic school in a metropolitan area. And I am so glad to hear that you are safe and wish you the best on your career / education stuff on that front!

        21. Pearl

          Oh, well I grew up in northern Wisconsin, so… that was a much worse climate in terms of prejudice.

          and, thanks, likewise to you! I hope you’re in a better place now?

        22. Minder

          I am! I was never in what I’d consider danger there, given I had people openly admit within earshot that I was somehow miraculously exempt from whatever racial prejudices they were giggling about for reasons that I’m absolutely certain had nothing to do with the fact that I can pass for white.

        23. Pearl

          LOL. Ah, geeze, what a mess.

        24. Pearl

          Also, what gate exactly am I keeping?

        25. Fart Captor

          The “good progressive” one. You were on about it yesterday as well, and it sounded very much like you felt Leslie would be failing as a progressive if she gave up on Robin, despite having tried multiple times now, and having her home broken into.

          Like, I agree it’s important to try and engage with people like Robin, but not every one of them. Not all the time. Not everyone has the same social or persuasive skills or emotional reserves. Everyone needs to do what they can, but if “what they can” isn’t very much, that’s a limitation, not a failure.

        26. Pearl

          I said almost literally the opposite of that. I said that giving up on Robin wouldn’t be morally condemnable at all, but it’s also not the high road. You don’t deserve credit for taking the high road if you aren’t taking the high road.

          Like, since I’m a lesbian, I actually do get to keep the gate for who’s a good ally to lesbians and who’s not, and Roz setting the two lesbians closest to her down the river is not good form.

          Further, since Leslie isn’t approaching this situation in an allyship capacity, she doesn’t have to worry about “failing as a progressive” or whatnot. Keeping herself safe is her foremost obligation.

        27. Fart Captor

          As I said, that’s just the impression I got. It seems I misunderstood.

          I’ve seen lots of arguments structured like “I’m not saying ___ is a bad person, but [list of things clearly intended to be moral failings]” where it’s just a way to condemn someone without looking judgemental, and I don’t often see it used sincerely, so I think that colored how I read what you were saying.

        28. Pearl

          It’s cool, Captor. I think a lot of people are similarly exaggerating my distaste for Roz. I find her annoying for sure and I think her actions should be named as what they are. But at the same time, if I’m not advocating giving up entirely on Robin or even Mary, I definitely think Roz is like, redeemable. I think a lot of people are reading this as “okay, so which character do you like and want to marry, and against whom have you sworn a blood oath that will not be erased until one of you has perished?” with no ground in the middle for like….. well all of these characters Have flaws.

          Sometimes getting through to people takes a long time and isnt accomplished after one conversation or three conversations or a hundred conversations, but when I was still counting my age in the single digits I had a friend, a Zionist and a Republican, and the two of us regularly exchanged political beliefs, and this lasted until well into our teens. But his challenging me led me to have a much better analysis of the world around me than I ever would have, and I found out years later that upon reaching adulthood, he went to Israel, greatly disliked what he saw, and became a communist.

          So, y’know, I don’t believe in giving up on people in general, I think bigotry is only really possible in situations where you’re never forced to confront the humanity of the groups you’re othering. I think most people only have so far they’re going to hold out before they do something redeemable once they start getting support from people in the othered groups that they aren’t getting from the bigots around them. But that strategy relies on building a stronger community, and frankly right wing people are often much better at that in the USA by leaps and bounds, which is why it doesn’t often work here.

          It’s fundamentally a task in the best of circumstances, though, and it’s not where everyone’s time and energy and resources belong, for sure, but I think American “progressives” make a major mistake in writing off such huge swathes of people and condemning people who don’t.

        29. Lailah

          No. You literally don’t get to set that bar – not alone. There’s, you know. The rest of us. You are /not the fucking empress of the queers/. Not even of just the lesbians. Keep that in fucking mind. What some of us appreciate isn’tg oing to be what all of us do.

          I’m not going to tell you to be happy with her. But I’ll damn well not have my (not uncritical, but still extant) approval washed off either. As far as the narrative goes, it looks pretty clear she has nothing to do with the media storm that hit her professor and her sister, except inasmuch as she gave them a chance to have common ground (and checked with her professor first, and almost definitely exposed herself to misery to do it), and as near as we can genuinely tell, her goal was to help, well, _everyone_ by helping her sister grow a damn heart (and I can fully believe that Robin can only learn to care about others by empathizing with them – by being fundamentally like them. I watched Robin in both universes – she’s kind of selfish).

          Yes, she then went on to use this terrible thing as a prop and is insinuating credit. That’s still terrible. But it’s not the only thing she did – and if what you want is for her to have to suffer to prove it, _well mission fucking accomplished well before this plotline_. We saw her on stage with her sister, and she said that she agreed to help Robin out _herself_. She’s almost definitely suffering for this (although she shouldn’t have mentioned it to bloody /Leslie/, at the same time I can’t see how to tell us this given that Roz is a secondary character. The likely best chance would have been an even bigger distraction in a very major plotline. Though possibly doable)

          Again, NONE OF THIS means you have to like her. You don’t have to consider her your ally. But I damn well consider her mine. And my biggest complaint, aside from her behavior with the insinuating credit, is that she, to borrow a malapropism, ‘didn’t go too far enough’ when she was with Joyce in class. The idea that sunshine and roses is ‘the high road to be taken at every opportunity’ is one I’m amazed you haven’t had beaten out of you yet – some people are shitty, and will not change. Learning to identify /them/ is as important as learning when to back the hell off. Not everyone can be convinced of your basic humanity. Not everyone is worth your time – if only because you will likely be driven mad by such. And it’s just as much ‘the high road’ to not deal with people who will not learn. And people are generally not acting to take credit for the high road in any case.

        30. Pearl

          I’m not really digging your insinuation that I’m going to have something “beaten out of” me. Stronger people than you have tried.

          What I’m seeing is when Roz can use gay people to get back at her sister, she’s all for it, when people right under her nose are being insulted and blackmailed by her roommate or when there’s a homeless lesbian in the same dorm, she does and says nothing. No words of support, no list of resources, no “mary you’ve gone too far”, nothing. I had a lot of allies like Mary while I was on the streets, I assume.

          I say I assume, because if I’m right, I’d never know it, because they didn’t do anything.

        31. Lailah

          It’s not any individual. It’s the world. It’s shit. It’s a lot of shit. You’ll learn to deal – you’ll also learn that some people aren’t worth it. Hopefully you’ll actually fucking listen to me say it, rather than, for instance, watch multiple communities collectively pillory themselves to try to help someone who ‘they’re just so sure can learn’ when after multiple years it’s increasingly obvious they’re manipulating the people around them. It’s not always about the outright bigots, though it is also about them. I kind of want our yoofs to not have to learn everything the hard way.

          And that’s. Not what happened. Her goal isn’t to get back at her sister. Her goal was to try to help her sister not be an /evil/ politician. And, what with being family, the preferred method was to help her stop being evil. Not to force her to stop being a politician by ruining her. She didn’t use anyone to ‘get back at her sister’, except inasmuch as helping her grow a heart is kind of low key getting back at her (I can totally imagine some dumb cheap shots from Roz to Robin in the hypothetical Good End aftermath – I’m pretty sure she did just that in SP!, after all)

          Like, what the hell are you actually expecting? You have listed at least 3 seperate jobs for Roz, and I’ve pointed out another. Roz is one fucking woman. She literally can’t know everything, and she can not do everything. And bluntly, demanding a hispanic woman deal with extra helpings of racism because of some nebulous concept of allyship is fucking racist.

          Now, probably the best thing to do would be to ask Leslie for the resource plop earlier, which she had the time to do, sure. But that’d be horning in on Leslie and especially Becky’s narrative agency – it arguably diminishes Becky’s arc for a straight ally to do this. And they’re both fictional characters, so that’s kind of an actual fucking consideration – especially when folks like to also watch us be primarily responsible for good things that happen to us. And it’s /definitely/ the safer bet for an actual flesh and blood straight ally, tow rite the story with the queer characters primarily doing their own shit rather than having ‘allies’ be great. So that’s an extra reason I’m not going to get het up about whether or not fictional ‘allies’ are doing enough. I’d rather they not, /in fiction/.

          I /do/ understand, though, wanting them to do more, even in fiction. It’s not like, as a rule, they do enough in real life, after all, so there’s that. And there /is/ something to be said for pointing out the groundwork and support that has to exist before we can do something. I feel like we have enough of that with Joyce, and others.

        32. Pearl

          And, yeah, you’re right re: Roz’s motives with Robin and I’ve ceded in a different thread that I was being unfair towards her in terms of actions she has taken, but I still haven’t at any point seen her go to bat for an actual individual gay person in her actual proximity. Fictionally, I see your argument, I don’t agree with it personally, but I see it, and my dislike of roz isn’t like, a complaint about the narrative, I just don’t like her. I don’t appreciate her inaction in situations that call for action and I’m still mad at her for gloating over something bad happening to Leslie and Robin and I am still with Becky in questioning her actual conduct on an interpersonal level.

          also… has mary, like, actually done anything racist? like on a harmful unaccountable level?

          by the way that was a really specific example and are you alright? it kinda sounds like you’re the one who got somethin beat outta you

        33. Lailah

          …Then you don’t see my point. A great deal of that inaction _was narratively motivated_. It’s not the right time in the story for something to happen. It’s not the right /person/ to cause that. As an ally, her place in fiction is, by most metrics, going to be at best background support. The queer people should be the primary folks helping themselves (Heck, Willis has seen criticism of that with Billie and Carla, what with Billie being Cis-; and Billie /is/ queer. And it’s just now occurring to me how I should have pointed out that a world where the LGBT alliance actually means something is a much nicer one than the real world – aspirational, really. Dammit B). Roz had probably one plausible way to help Becky without shielding her from Chloe, and it makes it less a story of queer solidarity – if there was a nominally good, nominally hetero- person to do it, it’d be Joyce (For a couple of other reasons, some of which relate to Joyce’s own story). By taking issue with her inaction, _you are taking an issue with the narrative_. They’re linked.

          “Has mary done anything racist” On camera, only limited jabs at Billy. But she’s from the same evangelical subculture as Joyce, who having been on camera more, has done innumerable racist aggressions. The difference is, Mary is hateful. She worships Ronald Reagan and wants to bang Paul Ryan. Are you really going to doubt she does and says shit more racist than baseline?

          I’m fine. I didn’t trust either of the manipulative shits. I’m not the one who got burned. I’m not the one who dealt with emotional or physical abuse for misplaced beliefs in the unfailing underlying goodness of others. But folks I liked did. Learn from the mistakes of others. It’s much, much better for you than to learn shit the hard way. Some people are terrible. Some of them are the obvious bigots. Some of them are ~white liberals~ who just need “a little more understanding :)” Insisting that you have a duty to try to engage everyone as if they were fundamentally decent people is, _at best_, setting yourself up for emotional exhaustion or the crushing weight of failure the second your energy drops for any reason (and it will, because that’s just straight up a thing that happens to everyone). At worst it’s an invitation to either physical abuse of yourself, imputing to marginalized groups completely amoral duties out of ~principle~, or both. Hell, you’ve already imputed a duty to deal with racist bullshit, to be a ~hetero ally~, and I was thinking of jackass pacifists when I first wrote that.

          Equally to the point, you live in an era with renewed fascism – and fascists do not care. They have no desire to engage like decent people, and tend to view any opportunity to do so as a time to play, because they do not care about the rules of, for instance, debate. Or fair play.

          This actually doesn’t mean engagement is a lost cause – but engagement alone is pointless in the case of most bigots, faced with strangers. The most obvious example is that kid who got converted out from the Stormfront Founder’s household – some fools like to point solely to his jewish friends. But by the kid’s own words, that was only part of it – part of what drew him in to an engagement was the scorn of the campus at large. And equally critically, that kid was trying to reaffirm the superiority of white people by learning about medieval europe, taking a focus on it in his education – being faced with nearly ceaseless evidence of the historical backwater that was Europe? It forces you to acknowledge that typical white supremacist views hold very little water.

          Every link in the chain was important in that case. Engagement _is_ still a good thing sometimes. But it is not the one right approach, often not the right _solo_ approach, and is _still_ something to be careful of – and engaging /stranger/ bigots like they are people who will understand if they’re just shown ~kindness and understanding~ is an extraordinarily good way to, again, at best exhaust yourself physically and emotionally. Plenty of people before you tried it. The last 400 years have not seen a shortage of kind people who would be considered queer in some way now.

        34. Pearl

          I mean, if you wanna really dig into that argument I’d say there aren’t that many tactics that haven’t been tried ad nauseum over the past 400 years. I mean, if you think nobody’s ever tried punching a fascist before…

          They’re all important things to do. Yeah, the average person doesn’t belong engaging fascists and risks doing a lot more harm than good by doing that, especially in a public arena. But there’s some people who like, aren’t terrible at it, and those contributions are important. I mean, me personally, I have arthritis in both hands and can’t raise my voice, but I’m smart as shit and I’ve been involved in social organising since 2009, so, like, personally, most of my contribution actually is just talking to people. Both people who suck but who I have some sort of strategic leverage over, and people who I love dearly and have known for years, long enough to know them through some pretty scary phases. I mean, I’m in both categories, it’s not like I’ve had great politics since the day I was born.

          More to the point, Mary isn’t like, the Grand Wizard. She’s a college freshman who doesn’t know anything and has a worldview that sucks for her and leaves her socially ostracised from the rest of her peers but against which she doesn’t have any meaningful analysis.

          This is just a philosophical discussion at this point. I’m Islamic Studies. The whole point of my religion is that the first Muslims were kicked out of their home and sought political exile from the leaders of their city-state, who were deeply invested in acts of misogyny, racism, and violence in order to safeguard their local economy, which was based on idol worship and maintained mostly for the sake of a few powerful families. The people of Mecca used to kill, torture, and wage war against the early Muslims and we have detailed accounts of how a lot of them came to accept Islam anyway, even after doing that. Was there a time for violent resistance? Sure. But that doesn’t mean you walk around punching college freshmen in the face for being annoying and not realising people don’t like Ronald Reagan. It does mean you don’t turn your back when you see people committing acts of injustice against people who are vulnerable.

          Liberals aren’t very good at that, because like Mary, they’re stupid and think they know a lot more than they do. But as you said, white supremacist views (liberal and fascist alike) hold very little water and distancing yourself from the whole matter does absolutely nothing to force anyone to confront them.

        35. Lailah

          I don’t advocate any one tactic be used in isolation or to the exclusion of others. Much less punching, since I’m a pacifist. That’s the fucking point. I don’t say “only do one thing.” I in fact, said as much – “every link in the chain was necessary there.” What part of that sounds like “only do one thing”, exactly? I’m not imputing a duty to do only one thing, and saying otherwise is a moral failing. To the extent I’m imputing a duty, it’s to act (and preferably, to act wisely). I am advising you act with some concern for your own wellbeing, because at the end of the day, I want you to be well – both physically, and emotionally.

          Mary isn’t the Grand Wizard? No shit. What’s that got to do with her being a more-than-average racist jackass, exactly? There’s a reason I said ‘more than average’ and not ‘grand fucking wizard’. Expecting people to deal with racism to be ~good allies~ is racist horse shit. It’d certainly be super of them to do so, but it is not the bar to set unless you’re a fan of kyriarchy.

          Also, talking pacifism while deliberately elliding the military conquest of the region is the sort of jackass bullshit I expect from pacifists I don’t actually know. Yeah, no shit the time for violent ‘resistance’ passed. It was the time for violent occupation – including the destruction of the idols that had been worshipped prior to the spread of Islam in the area (the hell should I care if they’re ‘worshipping idols’ anyway?), and the conquest of the surrounding lands as well. I don’t really have a problem with that military occupation or conquest, what with having been the victims of violence and it having been a more unavoidable norm of the time, but I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t just that. And acting like they were followed by a group that can be distinguished by not being misogynist, racist, or violent is just a tiny bit laughable. Less, however, is believable if you meant that; and to be clear this is because we’re referring to a nation that existed on eartha t literally any point in history.

          (also, given that nearly every fascist regime to date in history has been surplanted with violence, I wouldn’t undersell that. Obviously, the movements that were defeated before becoming the state, had much more varied methods of defeat, and were not generally defeated with violence, though some of those were as well; generally state violence)

          The one talking about punching Mary rn is you (though, to be clear, I have no problem when she was punched, what with her trying to enact violence through socially acceptable means). What I said, is that it’s racist horse shit to expect Roz to deal with Mary’s racist bullshit – and that I can promise you she has to deal with racist bullshit. I pointedly did not talk about how to deal with her at all. The mass shunning she looks like she’s getting for having been a complete asshole seems like a potentially promising start – the problem is, there’s nobody really close to her, so I’m not sure it will actually help her learn. I would like for her to grow and not be a heterosexist asshole. I legitimately and unironically like Mary. If she does not, then that’s a fucking shame. I certainly hope the harm she causes is minimized, though, and the mass shunning should at least help with that in the dorm.

          The closest I said to “punching people is the way to do things” is that I referred to jackass pacifists. Because I’m a pacifist. And I am no stranger to pacifists elliding the importance of violence in good social change – in talking about how, suddenly, pacifism is very important in the face of violence – but not when violence is being visited upon vulnerable people.

        36. Pearl

          I’m still not convinced that Mary is actually racist in an above average way towards Roz. I mean, granted, if you want to headcanon Mary as being really racist, I’d say that’s pretty well supported, but until Roz says something or we see something it isn’t canon. Roz has complained about a lot re: Mary, and she’s never mentioned Mary being racist towards her.

          Regardless though, I don’t actually want her to put up with racism, but the thing is that in the course of proper allyship you actually do incur some risk yourself. That’s why I give Joyce credit for allyship, and not Roz. It actually does mean that something bad happens to you for someone else’s sake.

          My advice to her as a person and if I were her friend would be to stop putting herself in ‘allyship’ positions she isn’t prepared to back up with action, not to put up with racism for shits and giggles.

          And you’d be surprised how much of a diversity of opinion there is on events after the Prophet’s death within the Muslim community, but I would personally avoid repeating historically inaccurate revisionist talking points re: Islam in a discussion of antifascist tactics. Yes, society was not perfect when the Prophet (saws) died, and in my view will not be until the Day of Judgement, but if you want to look at an example in history of where racism and misogyny and oppression were greatly lessened in a short stretch of time, and many things that were acceptable in a society became unacceptable and rightly so, the lifetime of the Prophet is a good one.

          And I’m the last person to make apologies for any Islamic empire after that one, really, (my family are Greeks and we lived through the Ottoman occupation, we came to the USA in 1914, I’m literally in the process of authoring a paper about sexual violence against Greek women during the occupation, so, trust me, I have some familiarity with these issues) but that said, sixth-century Arabs did not have the population to wage conquest of much of the known world in the fashion you suggest. There were skirmishes involved, but it wasn’t Operation Iraqi Freedom over there, which isn’t to say that there were no war crimes ever, but it’s disingenuous to compare sixth or seventh century Muslims to a military occupation in the modern sense in which we understand that term.

        37. Lailah

          Okay, so you’re going to ignore that she’s already done minor racist shit, and that she heavily supports two administration that actively persecuted hispanic people, one as we speak, to say that Mary isn’t more racist than average. To Robin. Who is Hispanic. Okay, either your opinion of the average is taking into account evangelical trump supporters, who are more racist than baseline, in particular to hispanic people, you have different standards of white people in general (Which, I’m bluntly okay with, esp rn) or you are just flatly ignoring the obvious so you can try to say ‘headcanon’. And ‘Roz hasn’t complained about specifics’ is pretty weak when she doesn’t generally mention any other specific. “I LIVE WITH MARY! DO THE MATH!”

          Yeah, okay, ‘allyship carries risks’. Sure, to a degree. One of those risks is that sometimes, you don’t get the help it’d be swell to get. After all, I assume that you do not outright approve of the lovely strain of gaycism that some of us get to put up with. Imputing someone a duty to deal with racist horseshit in the name of ~allyship~ remains racist. Go find a white hetero to deal with the extra-racist. I assure you that there are plenty. Placing extra burdens on nonwhite people may be typical, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually good. Your ‘advice’ ellides that the ‘allyship’ you expect her to do includes… racist horseshit.

          I’m not talking about revisionist talking points. As I said – ‘less’ is believable. Not knowing the specifics of tribal relations in the region, I find it entirely believable that less racism occurred after the conversion of the region to islam. That it became less sexist is similarly believable. I objected to ‘No’; I specified this is because we’re talking about a place that existed on Earth at some point. Less is still a material improvement, which is good.

          I didn’t say the known world. I said the region. I’m not really clear on where the exact borders for early Mecca ended, because it’s not my specialty and I’m not really concerned with it. I don’t think I’d ever use ‘the known world’ construction for any empire’s conquests, because at pretty much every stage, people knew about places – undeniably, not just apocryphally – well outside their grasp. But there were military conquests, and of the surrounding region; and I do know that they were not entirely defensive. Like the rule of pretty much any other set of kings, Early Islam is a poor way to attempt to show the virtues of pacifism.

    5. Derek

      She was gloating about her sister being undermined, not Leslie

  68. Kilgaen

    Walky channeling his inner Calvin.

  69. Minder

    Oh my stars and garters you wonderful human, where were you for the past week’s worth of Hated Character Defender™ when other commenters were actually agreeing with these ludicrous statements and I was aiming for the high score

    1. Minder

      SHIT this was a comment for two threads above ignore it here or hope it gets deleted I’m sorry

    2. Jhon

      No need to apologize. I think the concept of HCD™ deserves wider airing.

  70. Emily

    Goddammit Leslie, what happened to your capacity to make good decisions?

    1. Minder

      She’ll regret this later but Leslie sometimes needs a wakeup call when she’s wrapped up in the moment before rethinking her decisions, it’s just more unfortunate on her presentation to us readers because unlike other characters doing this she is older and a teacher. I don’t think she deserves slak per se but I think her behavior is in line with the mess of chemicals ravaging her brain right now between giddiness and trauma; she’ll end up looking back on this with a clear head probably not clear of conscience

      1. Emily

        She’s a grown ass woman in a position of authority she doesn’t get to abuse a student because she’s having a rough time in her personal life.

        1. Jago

          Abuse a student, what?

        2. Emily

          She’s literally just thrust Roz into a position where pretty much the only likely outcome is humiliation which she’s basically guaranteed by making sure the whole class knows that this is at least partially her getting back at Roz for a some dumb remark she made weeks ago.

        3. Commodore Jeep-Eep

          And she’s leading two other students into her blast zone, one largely high on the fumes on finding someone Like Her, with no ability to smell trouble coming over that and is going to do massive damage to them, largely in service of her idiot crusade to reform her abuser because that women Makes Her Vadge Happy.

          If she gets the sack for this, it would be deserved.

        4. Pearl

          So, Leslie’s a horny lesbian who can’t make good decisions because of her lady parts and Becky (who is not a student, btw) is so ecstatic at the sight of another lesbian that she loses all decision-making capability and can’t be trusted to consent even to being introduced to another human being?

          “abuser” they’ve known each other 12 hours. Abuse is a long-term dynamic that’s exploited and exacerbated by one party over the other, it isn’t just any individual instance of boundary crossing.

          It sure is a coincidence that you don’t seem to like any of the lesbians in this comic.

        5. Delicious Taffy

          That sure is a strong “non”-accusation you’ve thrown, there. I’m sure it’s entirely warranted and justified, though, so you do you.

        6. Fart Captor

          jfc Pearl. Just stop.

          Abuse is abuse no matter how brief.

        7. Temperaryobsessor

          What qualifies as abuse for you? Like exactly how long does Robin need to maintain this to qualify? I thought about this because the fact that this appears to be the start of a potentially abusive relationship makes people blaming Leslie for her apparent relationship with Robin worse because it lessons the support network she needs to figure out how to get out of this.

        8. Pearl

          Right now, it doesn’t even look like the start of a potential relationship.

          I don’t think Robin’s trying to like force Leslie’s hand into marriage or anything or intends this as a permanent solution, and if I’m wrong about that I’ll stand corrected, but right now there are extenuating circumstances at play here. As is, Robin is an annoying houseguest in an emergency situation begging aggressively for support and making an ass out of herself in front of a girl she likes. She’s not an abusive partner or a stalker.

          People blaming Leslie for what’s going on is awful, but Robin isn’t encouraging that or doing that or even demonstrably aware it’s happening. If I’m dating someone and I crash my car and lose my means of transport it doesn’t make my girlfriend abusive. It might mean I need her to drive me places, but it doesn’t make her abusive.

        9. Fart Captor

          It doesn’t have to be intentional to be abusive. She has repeatedly brushed aside every attempt by Leslie to set a boundary.

          And she isn’t a fucking house guest. Guests are invited. Welcome. Robin broke in, and refused to leave.

          She hasn’t been begging for support. She never even ASKED. I like her and I am boggled by this.

        10. Delicious Taffy

          “If I’m dating someone and I crash my car and lose my means of transport it doesn’t make my girlfriend abusive.”

          What the fuck does that even mean??? How is crashing your car while in a relationship even remotely similar to a politician breaking into someone’s house and disrupting their life? Is the car an analogy for having a beer with said politician, and the wreck is the break-in? Because if falls right the fuck apart, at that point, since we’re talking about abuse. No, your fucking girlfriend isn’t abusive because you crashed your car and now need rides. Your girlfriend is completely incidental to the situation. Robin is not incidental, she is the driving force of the problem, so the comparison is completely worthless.

        11. Pearl

          It doesn’t have to be intentional, but it has to be a long-term dynamic which is exploited. It’s not just a one-off. Stealing money from a person Can be an abuse tactic, but not every mugger is an abuser, and if I steal someone’s wallet, it doesn’t make me an abuser, it makes me a wallet thief. You shouldn’t steal peoples’ wallets, but it’s not abuse.

          Btw, “annoying houseguest” isn’t my words, it’s Leslie’s, from one comic ago. Some people don’t say what they’re thinking directly for all sorts of reasons, I know a bunch of people who don’t say outright when they need support, and that means miscommunications happen and wires get crossed and feelings get hurt and that’s not the end of the world, that’s life, I’ve been there, I know a great many people who are there, asking directly for help is a great skill that not everybody has. And not everybody who lacks it should be tarred and feathered.

        12. Pearl

          Robin’s responsible for breaking into Leslie’s house. She’s not responsible for Leslie’s coworkers talking smack on her. Yes, it sucks that they’re doing that, yes if this is an abusive situation that isolates her further, but it’s not something that Robin did, and it’s not fair to blame her for it.

        13. Pearl

          The first response was to Captor, the second was to Taffy.

        14. Delicious Taffy

          Leslie’s coworkers “talking smack on her” is a direct result of both Robin and Leslie going out for drinks together. I have not brought them up at all, much less contested this point. I am speaking solely about Robin’s intrusion where she absolutely is not wanted.

          Leslie left the bar, went home, and was alone when she fell asleep. She woke up to an invasive politician. The media only surrounded Leslie’s home because of Robin’s presence, since for all anyone knew, she was just some rando Robin had met in a bar. All media coverage of this incident is entirely due to Robin’s presence. She is responsible for bringing it to Leslie, “blame” be damned. In fact, it was Robin who asked Leslie out for drinks in the first place, thereby instigating the entire date.

        15. Pearl

          Temperaryobsesser was the one who brought up the paparazzi, not you.

          That said, way to be forthright that you think Robin is being manipulative and abusive literally by asking a girl out.

        16. Fart Captor

          Way to completely ignore Taffy’s actual point.

          Leslie booted Robin out of her class in disgust. Robin came back and to talk to her. Leslie only agreed because of some choice flattery and because of Dorothy telling her about how she was trying to get Ryan’s name.

          At the bar, Leslie cut it off and left because while she was still clearly physically attracted to Robin, she wasn’t willing go through with that. She then woke up to find Robin had somehow gotten not just into her home, but her bed. Without her consent.

          It was pretty clear Leslie was NOT okay with that, even though she didn’t immediately shove Robin out the door. Though when she eventually did I would think that would make it very clear to everyone that Leslie did not want her there.

          She may still be attracted to Robin on some level. She may still be hoping that Robin will change and become someone she could date without hating herself. None of that changes the simple fact that Leslie quite clearly wanted Robin out of her home.

          Not being willing to try physically wrestle her outside and barricade all the doors and windows to keep her from breaking in again IS NOT GIVING HER PERMISSION TO STAY.

        17. Delicious Taffy

          It’s alright, Captor. I’m used to people resorting to deliberate misdirection when I start making too much sense for them. Still, I’m going to engage this particular bit of unpleasantness: “That said, way to be forthright that you think Robin is being manipulative and abusive literally by asking a girl out.”

          Are you fucking serious, dude? No, really. Is that honestly the best you’ve got? You have no rational response, so you just make shit up that nobody ever said and argue it as if they did? Like, do you think I’m so fucking stupid I won’t notice this bullshit? It’s pathetic. If you don’t have anything reasonable to say, just shut the fuck up and sit in your own sad little world.

          I don’t normally get this nasty toward people, but you’re honestly being a complete asshole, making things up and attacking someone with them, like they ever said any of the insane shit nobody but you ever even thought about.

        18. Temperaryobsessor

          I thought about the whole Robin may be abusive she seems to feel entitled to Leslie from early Shortpacked even when Leslie is trying blantently refused to be that. She’s seems to be using every weakness Leslie admits too against her.
          I thought about this because I thought about how Rozz’s comment, blaming Leslie for liking Robin as well as every one elses just makes it harder for Leslie to get the energy to kick her out especially if she starts to believe Robin is the only person who still likes her.

        19. Derek

          seriously, where do you get this notion that Leslie is still dreamy eyed over Robin and is not in fact trying to throw her out of the house like the creepy stalker trespasser she is?
          Literally all of Leslie’s words and body language tells us she’s no longer enamored with Robin anymore, she’s highly stressed and unhappy

        20. OnyxIdol

          I would only call it abuse if Roz had a hard standing among her peers. As she is, from what we have seen, well respected, I don’t think she is in danger of humiliation.

        21. Jago

          The worst Leslie could have made here was a joke at Roz’ expense. Because Roz said she could teach the class. That’s not ABUSE. It’s a mean joke at worst. This will not result in Roz being terrified and hurt. Not in permanent physical or mental harm. At worst she will be a bit embarrassed.

          Stop throwing this word around until it has lost all meaning.

    2. JBento

      Every decision Leslie makes that is even Robin-adjacent is terrible in a plethora of ways. Since Robin is the congressional representative, Leslie needs to either get her shit together or move out of Indiana. Actually, If Robin is the congressional representative, most everyone should probably move out of Indiana, but I digress.

  71. Torra

    I totally get why Leslie is doing what she’s doing, she is that desperate for Robin to be out of her home that she is willing to give up pretty much anything, plus this isnt really the first time Leslie has acted unprofessional so this doesnt hit me as toooo much of a surprise. This is definitely stepping wayyy over the line though, especially challenging Roz to take over the class. Roz can be grating, but as a teacher you have to rise above that kind of stuff.

    I mean this “plan” is pretty much terrible and is going to make her lose a lot of respect with the class, especially with Roz and Joyce. I mean, Joyce already had to firmly state last strip that she wasn’t comfortable with Becky seeing Robin because of how Robin *is* which just goes to show that Leslie isn’t thinking rationally right now. And to cancel a class/make a freshman take over is clearly not OK

    But anyway, I don’t think Leslie is thinking clearly or logically right now, we know she tries to have the kids best interests at heart (all that Becky research!!) but now isn’t her finest moment. She is just too desperate to get Robin *out*

  72. Commodore Jeep-Eep

    Drawing two students into a lust-addled scheme involving a congressperson, leaving another to flounder as petty professional revenge…

    That women wants firing for this, and I hope that fucking legacy ship from the last comic gets killed with the fire it warrants.

    1. JBento

      Are you considering Roz to be one of the “two students?” If so, I’m not sure that applies. Roz knew EXACTLY what everything was about and, unlike Becky here, she knew full well how Robin was like. I see it more like a joint plan that didn’t work, at the loss of Roz’s helicopter rides. Throwing her to the wolves like this is, of course, unacceptable.

      If you’re NOT counting Roz as one of the two students, I’m forgetting something – that’d be Becky and…?

      1. thejeff

        Joyce is going with.

        Becky’s not a student, but is a baby gay that Leslie should not be dragging into her hot mess.

        1. JBento

          Oh, so she is. That’s who I was missing then.

          I don’t know why, but the “baby gay” expression amuses me to no end. I think it’s the alliteration.

        2. Emily

          A gayby if you will.

    2. Derek

      There’s nothing lust-addled about Leslie anymore and there hasn’t been since she PHYSICALLY THREW ROBIN OUT OF HER HOUSE.
      Leslie is desperate to throw out a creepy stalker out of her house, stop trying to pretend her rashness here is based on lust

      1. Liliet

        Seriously. People keep framing this as Leslie dragging students into something involving her crush and like… this has stopped being about her crush since the moment she woke up and discovered Robin next to her. The only way her crush is remotely relevant to the situation is that it’s what led to her drawing Robin’s attention. Everything since? Yeah, nothing remotely relevant to it.

      2. Commodore Jeep-Eep

        I’d have hoped so, but she was still visibily thinking about it just before she showed SU to Robin, and frankly, I have no belief in her common sense on this front or for her ability to avoid being weak at the knee again; one of the few win scenarios is that she is the one that Joyce slaps, so she finally gets it in her head that it isn’t gonna work.

        I want the LesBin ship burned to ashes, the ashes sprayed with holy water, and then scattered to the 4 corners of the earth, but I have no regard for her common sense any more.

        1. Derek

          I’m hoping you’ll recall that they watched Steven Universe BEFORE Leslie threw Robin out of the house. Anything after that was not okay and not consensual on Leslie’s side, she is NOT crushing anymore

  73. OnyxIdol

    Others have pointed out that what Leslie is doing is shitty and wrong, and it is.
    I’m optimistic however that Roz can pull this off.

    1. JBento

      I’m not. Much of a teacher’s work is something that takes place OUTSIDE the classroom, plenty of it on their own time. Knowing a subject, and even knowing how to teach a subject, is a very different beast from being prepared to teach it right the fuck now.

      1. Yumi

        This is true, but also part of that has to do with the overall structure of the class, goals, curriculum, standards, etc. I actually think Roz could succeed in this (if the class corporates, which is a big “if”) in that it’s something she’s fairly interested in and passionate about. Not that she’d be prepared for Leslie’s job, but for one class? I feel like she could handle it.

    2. Deviant

      I wouldn’t call it shitty and wrong. Mildly irresponsible and unprofessional though.

    3. Jago

      Yeah, me too. She seems like the kind of person who could totally do that.

    4. Jhon

      I think she could, once she comes out of shock. Roz has many favorite topics. She could rant on one of them for a few minutes and then start a discussion.

      The problem right now is enforcing class discipline. They’re all stirred up and ready to break for freedom.

  74. DarkoNeko

    Roz is gonna need a lot of care for that burn.

  75. ChessboardMan

    “Wait, did you just hold a grudge?”

  76. C.T Phipps

    All I know is that my teachers sometimes had to cancel class or didn’t show up because of personal business because life goes on. ONE SINGLE CLASS being missed is not going to ruin their education. Hell, we even had a rule where you could leave after 15 minutes of them being a noshow.

  77. JBento

    “Injurious invective of your decision. Disparaging comment concerning your parentage.”

  78. caesaria82

    Has anyone pointed out the typo in the word ‘disagreement’ yet? There’s a A missing? Just figured I’d do that, in case no one had yet lol.

    Re this strip: I love the humor Walky is written with. He’s very #relatable, as the kids say 😉

    1. Andy

      That might be dialect, but if so, it needs an apostophe – “dis’greement!”

      1. JBento

        “Dis ‘greement, dis ‘greement right ‘ere, dat’s the ‘greement I was talkin’ about.”

        1. Delicious Taffy

          “Well, now, that’s a mighty fine ‘greement. S’pose I can pull ‘er up for ya, if ya like. How much ya want for ‘er?”

  79. RandomDude

    “Whoever This Man is, He Speaks for All of Us” would be a pretty good title for the next book.

  80. Gwen

    I’m voting for a class field trip to Leslie’s house!

  81. timemonkey

    You people are so negative, this is going to be hilarious on all fronts.

    1. thejeff

      I can think it’s going to be lots of fun (and lots of pain) in a story sense, while still thinking it’s a series of horrible decisions on Leslie’s part.

      1. timemonkey

        DUMBing of age. It’s called that for a reason.

    2. Delicious Taffy

      What do you mean, “You people”, huh? That some kinda dig at those of us who don’t identify as people?

  82. Luna

    Tbh the fact that going after Becky’s shift at work just seems to be a non-option for no given reason messes with my suspension of disbelief more than anything else. I kinda get it for pacing’s sake and not dragging the story line out but… it’s just such an obvious solution, it really is distracting…

    1. void

      If it makes you feel better people can be stupid and not think of obvious things.

      1. Luna

        Sure, but the way Becky goes from ‘Oh, we can’t go right this second? Guess we can’t do it at all, ever!’ still comes across as pretty artificial for the sake of moving things along. Just as an example, if her line was more like ‘I’m working the whole rest of the day, no way I’ll be up to face a politician after all that’, it’d feel more natural? At least for me, anyway.

        1. Liliet

          She’s not in regular contact with Leslie. I wouldn’t be surprised if neither her nor Joyce had any way of contacting Leslie at all, or knew of anywhere to find her outside of class hours. From her perspective, this is an accidental contact with a stranger who will drift away on the waves of life after this, much like someone you’re accientally on the bus with.

          She’s a kid, okay?

          And Leslie is not thinking straight >_>

        2. Delicious Taffy

          That some kinda dig at her bein’ gay? 1v1 me.

        3. Pearl

          Been homeless, can confirm

        4. Luna

          ??? Leslie just offered her house as a place for her to stay, Joyce has multiples classes with Leslie a week, and there’s ought to be a directory for teachers with further contact info (also I sincerely doubt a teacher as committed to student outreach wouldn’t make that information available). This really is nothing like an accidental, once in a lifetime encounter. It is the exact opposite- a deliberate choice to meet someone who could help her.

          And anyway, my point isn’t even that Becky’s doing something wrong? It’s that this is a single example of kinda clunky writing pulling me out of the story. This comic is really good and transitions smoothly a lot of the time, so it was especially surprising.

        5. JBento

          You should read the hovertext from two days ago. It’s the… hovertext… that keeps on… hovertexting? Uh…

  83. Cheshrin

    Les.

    Les there are so many reasons why this plan is awful.

    LES, THIS IS THE WORST PLAN, C’MON.

    1. JBento

      C’mon, it’s not the WORST plan. At least so far, there has been no mention of pineapples, possums, or even an iron sheet 5 feet by 5 feet.

      1. StClair

        The kind of plan where someone loses their hat?

  84. Yumi

    Anyway, I need to get a haircut, and what if I just went in with a picture of Becky.

    1. Schpoonman

      Do it do it do it.

    2. Delicious Taffy

      I double dare ya.

  85. MitchellTF

    …This comic is awesomesauce. No matter what problems you have? The comedy is gold.

  86. C.T Phipps

    Why is Leslie doing this NOW? I suspect it’s because she’s been driven slightly crazy by Trump squatting in her home.

    1. Delicious Taffy

      And that’s on top of the Robin problem. I mean, what’s he even there for? He’s just kinda there, squatting in the corner and grimacing at a pile of McDonald’s hamburgers he brought with him. He won’t let anyone eat them.

  87. anonymsly

    Leslie, this is an unperfect and jerky way to get revenge. I mean, taking Roz up on her weeks-ago claim that she could totally teach this class with a ‘prove it, hotshot’ is uncalled-for, even if she kind of is the ultimate architect of making your home thoroughly unsafe by virtue of the creepy stalker who doesn’t see you as people currently installed there.

    Rise above the desire for revenge, Leslie.

    1. Emily

      The ultimate architects of Leslie’s situation are first and foremost Robin and secondly Leslie herself. Roz is at best a distant third.

  88. Liliet

    Just to clarify my position on this: I wouldn’t ever do anything like this, and don’t think it’s anything remotely approaching a good idea… it’s just that if one of my uni professors pulled something like that it would be like ‘shrug just another day of higher education’. I’m surprised at the amount of ire this good ol’ ‘bad decision time’ shenanigan is drawing. It’s not like she’s pulling this with little children, these are college students. They are resilient enough for a teacher to do some stupid shit without SCARRING THEM FOR LIFE IRREVOCABLY >_>

    1. Emily

      You had exceptionally terrible professors than because this is extremely inappropriate.

    2. Pearl

      There’s a general pattern where whenever a lesbian does something morally grey, its negative effects get exacerbated like 5x in everybody’s perception. Especially if there’s romantic feelings involved.

    3. Minder

      Yeah, like I understand why some of the teachers & professors in the comments would be of the opinion this is totally unacceptable, I also understand why a class full of college students would probably just think of it as another weird thing to happen in the middle of a hugely dramatic semester.

      I mean, that doesn’t make it different from a “if this were a real university [x]” standpoint, but last I checked Willis isn’t writing this as a college professor and he certainly wasn’t writing this with Leslie being a bad person even though she makes bad decisions.

  89. John

    Ignore all the haters, Leslie. You’re awesome, as always.

    And shut up, Walky.

  90. Hescotti

    Somehow I read this as Walky only saying the last two lines in his panels. So a few pro-class cancellers and Walky chiming in.

    Yes, I know that’s wrong.

  91. Tenn

    Anarchy in the US!

  92. Stella

    I’m sure for the sake of comedy / storyline Roz is going to give teaching for an hour a shot. But, uh, I am 100% sure that if this ever happened irl, as soon as the actual professor was out of the room, everybody would just leave.

    1. Pearl

      Unless somebody had a crush on the substitute….

    2. Vulcanodon

      I would totally hang around to watch a fellow classmate try to teach the class.

      1. Jhon

        It happened to me once. French class. We had just read a short story, and the teacher asked me to go over the discussion questions. In French. Then she left the room. I proceeded to embarrass myself in a mixture of pidgin French eked out with mime. When she returned I breathed a huge sigh of relief. But instead of rescuing me, she sat down in back with a big grin and allowed me to flounder until the end of the period. (I got an A in that class. I earned it.)

  93. Briny

    Exercise for the group: How would it even be possible to not pass this course? So far as I can tell, you show up, bicker with the other students, wait until Leslie either leaves, decides to cut the class off as a failed experiment (say, with Robin), or the class period ends.

    If there’s a hint of any sort of rigor, I dunno where it is.

    (Mind you, this is not a criticism of the existence of Gender Studies as a field in the first place. But I think if Leslie even said the phrases “Academic paper”, “assigned reading” or, lets say, “Judith Butler”, heads would explode Scanners style.)

    1. Pearl

      Maybe it’s an easy A class, but it’s a class that virtually everyone in applies almost immediately to their everyday life. Robin’s an awesome teacher for teaching the subject material in an accessible way that changes people. I’ve been in classes like that.

      I’ve also been in super difficult classes that the majority of the class failed, and I worked super hard and passed and walked away from that changed too, but I wouldn’t say one method is better than the other.

      1. Pearl

        I think Leslie would be very bad at being a harsh grader.

    2. Fart Captor

      Several of my philosophy classes had a similar format. If it’s like those, grades would be mostly based on a number of papers / essays, maybe a quiz here and there, and a lot of in-class discussion of assigned reading material.

      Basically the professor would lead the discussion, but the goal was to get the students to do most of the talking, so that the professor could gauge how well everyone was actually comprehending the material. (As a result, missing class would be particularly bad for your grade)

      Leslie’s class probably isn’t nearly as discussion based (since a core part of philosophy is learning how to build and dissect arguments), but that part of her class is much more interesting than seeing Leslie giving lectures or handing out assignments.

  94. Minder

    welp i just got off work and see 500+ comments, on a scale of 1 to 420 BLAZE IT how high is the tire fire

    1. Delicious Taffy

      Oh, it’s fuckin’ huge. We’ve reached at least 400, by now.

  95. Roborat

    I am not going to comment on Leslie, many people have said it much better than I can. I do love the deer in the headlights expression on Roz. The only question is: is Roz going to rise to the occasion and crush this, fail miserably, or some other third outcome? Only the Willis knows, but whatever develops, I am sure it will be entertaining.

  96. chris73

    One of the things I enjoy about this strip is that everyone reads the same strip but there’s a helluva lotta different interpretations of said strip which leads to interesting discussions

    Which is all good

    1. Minder

      It sure is cathartic to argue in a place where citations actually matter!

  97. egg

    ok leslie bad idea but i have definitely wanted to do that before

    1. egg

      i have phrased this in a way that implies i’m a teacher. i’m ain’t a teacher.

      1. Tomas

        It also implies you have a closeted gay Republican United States Congressional Representative crashing on your couch with no way to get rid of them.

        1. Pearl

          That part’s true.

  98. Tomas

    “Always preach the gospel. If necessary, use words.”

    Yeah, this is Women’s Studies and not Christian Theology, but same principle applies. Leslie could teach for a hundred years more and never give a more effective class lecture than this.

  99. Anikiki

    Give that man a “HARUMPH!”

    HARUMPH!

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