To the point that, from what I’ve heard, it’s not uncommon for gay people to compare their “Coming Out” stories to see who had it worse, and skits like this one get made (Title: “When Coming Out Goes Better Than You Thought”) – https://youtu.be/UgHwF4CNiJA?si=egeOrVbag1CXxoEw
Aren’t there still places in the US where parents send their kids to be tortured by electrocution until they (pretend to) turn hetero?
Adept
In Finland, our “moderate and civilized” right wing party just voted against bannin “gay-to-hetero conversion therapy”, despite the party officially having that opinion.
Ellegos
So as a GROUP they’re against conversion therapy, but just not as individuals?
Morleuca
electrocution is almost the least of what goes on at those camps
Or commit suicide. Yes. Gay conversion camps. Banned in some states.
Enigmatic Jack
Yeah. The governor of Kentucky just signed an executive order to ban conversion therapy this past week and it was Kind of a Big Deal locally. There are already groups calling it unconstitutional and saying that banning conversion therapy is going to set back mental health care for young people in the state.
If you think parents in YOUR country can’t be insufferable, you just haven’t chosen the right lifestyle to shock or offend them. Parents, are Parents, (except when they’re worse).
thejeff
Yeah, this isn’t just a US thing.
Nor is it an everyone in the US thing, but people can suck. Even parents.
Azhrei Vep
Especially parents. They’re generally the group least worthy of trust.
As of the posting, that’s the Human Bill character from Fortnite. Grey alien with a few skin color options and some outfits you can mix and match. Comes with a little UFO you can wear on his back, too. I hounded the in-game shop obsessively for months, waiting for him to show up when I had the 1800 V-Bucks he cost. Fuck revolving storefronts, they kept me from having basically my ‘sona as a skin for way too long.
Actually it is – Judaism is a matriarchal religion (which, historically, was overridden by Middle Eastern and then European patriarchal societal norms, but course-corrected in the West as time went on).
eh, whatever
Matrilineal doesn’t equal matriarchal – and in this case it doesn’t seem to be terribly old either.
DanD
Judaism is decidedly not matriarchal, and hasn’t been at any point where it was definable as Judaism. Matrilineal, yes, but not matriarchal.
Whether it had Matriarchal elements prior to becoming monotheistic is more than I am able to state, but I will state that despite a lot of neo-pagan claims, there’s very little evidence for matriarchal religions anywhere in Europe or Asia at any point.
Dday
Maybe not so much with the traditional religious affairs, but as a culture we’ve definitely got highly formidable matriarchs that wield a lot of influence and directorial power in the family. Certainly in my family, the ladies are not to be messed with, let me tell ya.
I would lean towards saying it is improvement. By taking this secret trip to meet her son, she is risking her relationship with her husband and thus, is willing to take a large risk for the sake of “supporting” her son.
Is the support steeped in ignorance and baked in toxic levels of control? Definitely.
Would she benefit from Prof. Leslie’s class? If she paid attention, yes.
Is this an improvement over actively trying to change who Ethan is; largely by trying to get him into Joyce’s pants (who was at the time trying to save herself till marriage)? I believe so, as new Naomi makes me ever so slightly less uncomfortable.
Is the improvement sufficient? That is up to Ethan.
yeah her “allowing it” is still her being a homophobic shit
she hasn’t solved her bigoted aggression – just gotten better at hiding it
Dday
Idunno pikachu change is hard, you don’t gotta assume bad intentions automatically
Throwatron
personally, i prefer to choose to assume bad intentions from people who constantly act badly and never attempt to change. it’s actually a completely reasonable conclusion to reach. people deserve the benefit of the doubt when you meet them; after 20 years of living with them, not so fucking much.
Dday
“Attempt to change” is what we seem to be witnessing here. You don’t have to be right about everything to attempt to move in a better direction, I can’t think of any ulterior motives she would have, but it’s possible there’s something I didn’t think of.
Throwatron
I genuinely don’t agree that this is an attempt to change.
She feels entitled to show up unannounced and be received by her child, with no respect for his agency.
She feels entitled to control whether or not he shares aspects of life with his father.
She’s manipulative in the way she removes his agency, by obviously dangling a very important and tense topic she wants to talk about over his head, so he can get scared and anxious about what it might be, and then she extracts his absolute compliance that he will do what she wants him to do (not tell daddy about it) before she actually brings up what she wants to tell him.
She’s a grown woman who fully believes it is her right to tell her grown child, another 20 year old man, another adult person, who he is allowed to be and who he is allowed to associate with.
For you to say that her “allowing” him to be a homosexual, is an attempt to improve herself, you are falling into the manipulative trap of her framing, and you are directly supporting that she is correct about having the right to control her child this way. And I don’t think you actually believe she is right about that, but IMO with what you’re arguing, you support her framing of the situation, and are denigrating Ethan’s agency and humanity.
A terrible manipulative person being oh-so-kind to permit the person she feels like she’s entitled to control, one meager scrap of agency, is not them getting better or improving. It’s purely them recognizing that they have been pulled away from, and trying to correct it, by manipulating their victim back into their life and good graces through the appearance of some acquiescence. But, the thing she is “giving” to Ethan, is the implication that she should continue to have absolute control over his life.
This is not a sweet little Mom coming around to love and appreciate her queer son. She is still fully disgusted and ashamed of who he is. It’s just that, there is nothing that a controlling person abhors more, than losing control of their victim when their victim establishes distance and boundaries away from them. This is just the continuing cycle of her assuming control over Ethan’s life and self, and restricting who he is allowed to portray himself as. Which is probably the first thing Asher will tell him, when he’s allowed to come back out of the closet…that Ethan willfully shoved him back into…because Ethan is terrified of displeasing or disappointing his Mom.
It’s not sincerely nice behavior, even slightly, at all. It’s just a manipulation tactic from an abuser, and it’s shocking to me that people don’t recognize that.
Dday
@Throwatron
Ummm ok that’s a lot of writing. I gather… ok you’re saying her ulterior motive is control? Sure that’s possible, at least partly. She talks like someone that assumes control was a given, like she’s yielding something here.
I’m willing to see this through, if she’s yielding to the idea that Ethan’s sexuality isn’t a choice to begin with, I still see it as progress, personally. If she admits to that, she’d effectively, if begrudgingly, be admitting she was wrong in the first place for trying to control it.
she’s not just a narcissistic parent, but one who’s so invasive to the point to which she entitles herself to dominate what kind of sex her adult son can and can’t have.
These invasions are there to remind Ethan that even in the most private aspects of his relationships and his fucking BODY, he remains under royal rulership.
Frankly if this were happening just outside a state like Indiana, this the kinda shit that would warrant intervention from a social worker at the very LEAST. ?
thejeff
Weird takes here.
This is far better than I was expecting out of her. Don’t get me wrong, it still sucks, but I was expecting her to be trying for the Linda/Carol tier and this isn’t that.
However you try to diagnose pathology and motivation into a couple of sentences.
J-Earl
Throwatron,
You’re right. She’s not doing it perfectly, so let’s give her no credit at all…. OR
some people have no instructions or understanding how to proceed, so they stumble through it doing the best they can with the only understanding they have.
BarerMender
High school thespians act badly. Everyone else acts bad.
clif
And the baddest is the worst.
Bryy
Yup.
She’s getting there, but just like Dorothy, she’s interpreting her growth through the lens of her prior belief system.
Tan
It is simultaneously true both that this is garbage behavior and also that this is improvement over the last time we saw her. She has taken a step in the correct direction, but she still has 900 or so miles (~1450km) to go to reach baseline decent human being.
thejeff
And improvement should be encouraged. That’s how you get people to take more steps.
Daniel M Ball
you make many assumptions, not real practiced in negotiating with other people are you? Especially people who disagree with your choices. Or you haven’t yet had the dubious pleasure of helping someone kick a habit or had to actually work with someone to change their mind rather than condemning them and dropping them. the mere ACKNOWLEDGEMENT of fact is sometimes the first hurdle you’ve got to get over, especially if the person’s used to having to be in control, or having to be stubborn in a conflict-rich environment. She’s shown up to ACKNOWLEDGE a fact Ethan’s been fighting to get her to admit to for years, likely, and she’s finally admitting what’s been in front of her the whole time.
THAT, y’alls, is PROGRESS. The other issues like the controlling/obsessive helicopter/overbearing relationship dynamic that’s been suggested since Ethan’s first appearance on this comic? is also something that has to be worked on, but at least he’s got her to admit to herself that grandchildren are likely to be adopted, not spawned, if they’re linked with her son…and that’s a major thing in some families.
I am holding out to see what it actually entails. We don’t know what is going on behind the scenes here yet. While her wording is horrible, it could be that there is another discussion going on between the mom and dad that would be even worse. This could be her pressuring her son behind the scenes because the dad thought that he needed a break with everything that was going on (and so pressured the mom to stop), or that the dad was threatening to pull the son out of school (aka cut funding) and send him to a camp or something. I do hope that this heads towards one of the better possible options than one of the worst, but will have to wait and see.
I didn’t get the impression Ethan’s dad was the one with a problem with homosexuality the last time they visited. If anything, she probably doesn’t want him to know for fear he’ll take it as permission to explore his own urges.
Throwatron
I bet it’s this. It probably isn’t even that she’s scared Ethan will fail, or do something drastic…she’s scared her co-parent will [checks notes] unconditionally love and support her child in a way that will make Ethan act in a way that she finds disgusting and embarrassing.
She hasn’t changed her mind at all, that him being queer is a bad thing. She simply aims to maintain the level of control over Ethan’s life and self, and deference to her authority, that she has worked so hard to establish for the past 20 years.
thejeff
Where does this come from?
We’ve seen her like 3 times before. The homophobia shone through, but the rest of this seems to be reading a lot into very little evidence.
Throwatron
I mean, she has appeared very few times, but her every expression is drawn as menacing as possible, and every scant interaction she has with any other character has her attempting to manipulate, belittle or domineer them in one way or another, and the overall intensity of that behavior is cartoonish, even for this strip.
So, I agree that it’s accurate that we have little total exposure to her behavior. But, this is also a work of fiction, and she has been deliberately portrayed by Willis as completely fucking reprehensible, every time she’s been on screen. I choose to assume it’s a reasonable reading of the text, that the absolute consistency of her controlling nature in every strip she’s portrayed in, is meant to imply that she acts this way literally all the time. I really don’t see any evidence to the contrary.
Throwatron
I went back and checked. She’s appeared in nine strips total where she actually has a line, or performs an action. She consistently does something reprehensible in every strip she is in.
Strip 1: Meets her son’s best friend on campus. Demands that Amber call her by her first name, even though Amber is clearly uncomfortable with that. Sarcastically attacks Amber with accusations of her turning her son gay, when Amber doesn’t back down from her boundary and comply.
Strip 2: Suggests to her son’s best friend that what he needs to be happy and healthy, is for her to leave him alone, because her support of his gayness is confusing him. She wants to sever her son’s most important social bond, because she believes her failure to be a perfect wife for a gay man is the reason Ethan is having issues with his sexuality.
Strip 3: Is deeply cold to Ethan even after he tries to gain any mote of approval for the fact that he is willfully denying his sexuality to please her. It does not sway her at all. She refuses to give him any validation whatsoever, and does not have a line besides angrily glaring at him. This is also the first time her husband talks all day, despite the fact that he has been there with her for 100% of her panel time. He says nearly nothing, all the time. Big red flag.
Strip 4: Naomi directly accuses Ethan of trying to placate her, and is unmoved until he admits that he thinks he’s found a straight girl who is okay dating a gay man, at which point she admits that his gayness made him a complete disappointment to her, and begins demanding that he begin fucking her, immediately, with aplomb. Which, common sense says, she believes will cure his gayness, because she is an insane person.
Strip 5: The only strip where Ethan’s dad says more than a single word. He says the line that has lead most of us to assume that he is a deeply closeted gay man who keeps arrangements of appearing straight with Naomi to maintain their relationship. Which, if true, also makes her demand that Ethan and his father have no discussion of her permitting him to have a sex life, even more disgusting than it already is. She won’t even let her two owned gays talk to each other, lest they support one another, and lessen her control over them. Divide and conquer behavior. Naomi’s only line in this strip is “FUCK HER BRAINS OUT.”
Strip 6: Naomi meets her sons girlfriend for the first time. Joyce greets her boyfriend’s mother. She doesn’t bother to answer or acknowledge Joyce, at all. She mutters under her breath that Joyce will be an easy lay for her son.
Strip 7: Flashback, Naomi is so uncomfortable seeing her son briefly look at another boy, that she completely withdraws him from his social group and takes him home.
Strip 8: She shows up unannounced to her son’s front door like she owns the place, and demands to be let in. The first thing she says to him is a direct criticism of his appearance.
Strip 9: She demands that her son does not discuss what she is about to say with his own family members, deliberately triggering his anxiety to manipulate him into promising that he will comply before actually announcing what she is going to say. She literally would not have said anything, until he agreed under duress to keep quiet, because like in every other single line she has in the entire comic, she completely tramples the agency of every other character she interacts with. She finally grants her son “permission” to be a homosexual. Also, keep in mind, she is here entirely in secret from her husband, because she also controls what information he has access to, as her personal accessory.
Oh, strip 10 just popped. My prediction that she’s rather have a gay embarrassment of a son, then a dead embarrassment of a son, was correct. Of course, she also implies that her current state of permission, is at least temporary; so, that’s even shittier than what everybody singing her praises, was hoping for. Either way, she fully and plainly confirms that she wishes to maintain control of her husbands and her sons’ sexualities, whenever she deems convenient.
Tl;dr every time she is on screen, the singular unifying theme of everything she has ever said and done, fully implies she is an undercutting, manipulative, controlling person, who feels deeply entitled to the agency, autonomy, and personhood of the people around her. When she’s batting 100 on ten tries, maybe she is in fact like this all the time, and is genuinely not a good person.
I’d say yes, improvement. I’m reading this as “I have a lot of prejudices but I’m choosing you over them”. Which, I think, is less bad than “I have a lot of prejudices and they are more important than you”. Still bad, less bad.
Yah, she’s not being Toedad, and Ethan’s won at least enough ground that she’s acknowledging the facts in front of her instead of railing against them with the pastor at her back.
It’s more like how she was in the Shortpacked universe during her only appearance over there.
Essentially, she’d rather he be with a man than alone. Which… take that as you will.
I mean, I guess if she went from not clearing a bar 1 inch off the floor to clearing a bar 6 inches off the floor, that counts as an improvement, but it’s still a real low bar she’s still not setting any records.
We haven’t heard what her conditions are. Someone who thinks they have the power to allow or not allow someone to have the sexuality they’re going to have anyway will not be above setting terms.
Not everyone has what it takes to be a varsity athlete. Sometimes, you have to take some goddamned time to get them to change decades of upbringing THEY experienced plus decades experienced with YOU.
I have a theory. Naomi’s relationship with her husband is on the rocks (probably because he’s closeted or repressed, and it’s finally starting to leak out). She wants Ethan’s emotional support, so she’s offering tolerance to get him on her side against his father. It’s transactional, and repugnant, and it’s more likely Ethan would sympathize with his father, so she’s trying to win his support before he realizes the truth.
If ethan wasn’t currently going through a depression , it’d be a great opportunity to troll her and like “I only care about 2d /fictional charas” and just hugging a body pillow and accidentally leaking it to like the neighborhood or so
hopefully the ‘permission’ doesn’t mean “i know someone powerful/super rich who also has a gay son”, go be a sugar daddy hunter for the family XD
I have a feeling that seeing her son truly depressed has made Naomi realize how much she actually does want her son to be happy, even if being happy means being with a man.
Ethan still doesn’t need her permission or approval for it, so her approach here is still urgh, but at least she might have the spirit…?
325 thoughts on “Warn”
Ana Chronistic
“HUZZAH! …Asher! Come out of the closet!”
Roadblock: “…now Ethan be spurting like a leaky faucet”
Adept
Or Asher saying something laconic as he emerges out of the closet having heard this.
I hope people’s parents aren’t really this insufferable in the US.
Serendipity
They can very easily be worse!
Stu
To the point that, from what I’ve heard, it’s not uncommon for gay people to compare their “Coming Out” stories to see who had it worse, and skits like this one get made (Title: “When Coming Out Goes Better Than You Thought”) – https://youtu.be/UgHwF4CNiJA?si=egeOrVbag1CXxoEw
Gigafreak
Aren’t there still places in the US where parents send their kids to be tortured by electrocution until they (pretend to) turn hetero?
Adept
In Finland, our “moderate and civilized” right wing party just voted against bannin “gay-to-hetero conversion therapy”, despite the party officially having that opinion.
Ellegos
So as a GROUP they’re against conversion therapy, but just not as individuals?
Morleuca
electrocution is almost the least of what goes on at those camps
Rectilinear Propagation
Still a lot of states where it’s legal to, yeah:
https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/conversion_therapy
David Alexander Mcdonald
Or commit suicide. Yes. Gay conversion camps. Banned in some states.
Enigmatic Jack
Yeah. The governor of Kentucky just signed an executive order to ban conversion therapy this past week and it was Kind of a Big Deal locally. There are already groups calling it unconstitutional and saying that banning conversion therapy is going to set back mental health care for young people in the state.
Daniel M Ball
If you think parents in YOUR country can’t be insufferable, you just haven’t chosen the right lifestyle to shock or offend them. Parents, are Parents, (except when they’re worse).
thejeff
Yeah, this isn’t just a US thing.
Nor is it an everyone in the US thing, but people can suck. Even parents.
Azhrei Vep
Especially parents. They’re generally the group least worthy of trust.
The Lurker
O you sweet summer child! in most of the US (geographically. not population density) that would be considered progressive!
Thag Simmons
Is saying something that should be a good thing in completely the wrong way going to be a theme with her?
True Survivor
I just noticed your deer-elf avatar has a wooden arm. That is very cool.
Thag Simmons
Yeah, she’s got a fun design. She’s from Potionomics, she’s your carpenter buddy.
Thag Simmons
Although I am suddenly feeling very tempted to change my avatar, I’ve been using Saffron for a while now.
clif
So that’s what Saffron looks like. Nice hat.
Yet_One_More_Idiot
Ethan: WELL THAT’S ALRIGHT THEN!
(Doctor Who “WELL THAT’S ALRIGHT THEN!” Toymaker meme)
Zor
“…I mean, it’s a step, but you clearly don’t get how this works.”
C.T. Phipps
“You are my property, Ethan, even though you are an adult. At least until you marry into a new family that will own you.”
“…what?”
“It’s how it works in the Torah!”
“NO IT ISN’T.”
NGPZ
brotha ain’t owned by her nor any shiksa
thiz oppression sure as hell ain’t no mitzvah
Delavan
This is some @maimonodes_nutz level stuff. Nice!
Dday
Naomi aint right but now Ethan wont shvitz
about whether or not he likes tits
Taffy
“… Declaration of Independence?”
clif
Ooo. Nice avatar. What’s it from?
Taffy
As of the posting, that’s the Human Bill character from Fortnite. Grey alien with a few skin color options and some outfits you can mix and match. Comes with a little UFO you can wear on his back, too. I hounded the in-game shop obsessively for months, waiting for him to show up when I had the 1800 V-Bucks he cost. Fuck revolving storefronts, they kept me from having basically my ‘sona as a skin for way too long.
Rolf of Many Doors
Actually it is – Judaism is a matriarchal religion (which, historically, was overridden by Middle Eastern and then European patriarchal societal norms, but course-corrected in the West as time went on).
eh, whatever
Matrilineal doesn’t equal matriarchal – and in this case it doesn’t seem to be terribly old either.
DanD
Judaism is decidedly not matriarchal, and hasn’t been at any point where it was definable as Judaism. Matrilineal, yes, but not matriarchal.
Whether it had Matriarchal elements prior to becoming monotheistic is more than I am able to state, but I will state that despite a lot of neo-pagan claims, there’s very little evidence for matriarchal religions anywhere in Europe or Asia at any point.
Dday
Maybe not so much with the traditional religious affairs, but as a culture we’ve definitely got highly formidable matriarchs that wield a lot of influence and directorial power in the family. Certainly in my family, the ladies are not to be messed with, let me tell ya.
Sirksome
Improvement???
NGPZ
NOPE
True Survivor
I would lean towards saying it is improvement. By taking this secret trip to meet her son, she is risking her relationship with her husband and thus, is willing to take a large risk for the sake of “supporting” her son.
Is the support steeped in ignorance and baked in toxic levels of control? Definitely.
Would she benefit from Prof. Leslie’s class? If she paid attention, yes.
Is this an improvement over actively trying to change who Ethan is; largely by trying to get him into Joyce’s pants (who was at the time trying to save herself till marriage)? I believe so, as new Naomi makes me ever so slightly less uncomfortable.
Is the improvement sufficient? That is up to Ethan.
NGPZ
yeah her “allowing it” is still her being a homophobic shit
she hasn’t solved her bigoted aggression – just gotten better at hiding it
Dday
Idunno pikachu change is hard, you don’t gotta assume bad intentions automatically
Throwatron
personally, i prefer to choose to assume bad intentions from people who constantly act badly and never attempt to change. it’s actually a completely reasonable conclusion to reach. people deserve the benefit of the doubt when you meet them; after 20 years of living with them, not so fucking much.
Dday
“Attempt to change” is what we seem to be witnessing here. You don’t have to be right about everything to attempt to move in a better direction, I can’t think of any ulterior motives she would have, but it’s possible there’s something I didn’t think of.
Throwatron
I genuinely don’t agree that this is an attempt to change.
She feels entitled to show up unannounced and be received by her child, with no respect for his agency.
She feels entitled to control whether or not he shares aspects of life with his father.
She’s manipulative in the way she removes his agency, by obviously dangling a very important and tense topic she wants to talk about over his head, so he can get scared and anxious about what it might be, and then she extracts his absolute compliance that he will do what she wants him to do (not tell daddy about it) before she actually brings up what she wants to tell him.
She’s a grown woman who fully believes it is her right to tell her grown child, another 20 year old man, another adult person, who he is allowed to be and who he is allowed to associate with.
For you to say that her “allowing” him to be a homosexual, is an attempt to improve herself, you are falling into the manipulative trap of her framing, and you are directly supporting that she is correct about having the right to control her child this way. And I don’t think you actually believe she is right about that, but IMO with what you’re arguing, you support her framing of the situation, and are denigrating Ethan’s agency and humanity.
A terrible manipulative person being oh-so-kind to permit the person she feels like she’s entitled to control, one meager scrap of agency, is not them getting better or improving. It’s purely them recognizing that they have been pulled away from, and trying to correct it, by manipulating their victim back into their life and good graces through the appearance of some acquiescence. But, the thing she is “giving” to Ethan, is the implication that she should continue to have absolute control over his life.
This is not a sweet little Mom coming around to love and appreciate her queer son. She is still fully disgusted and ashamed of who he is. It’s just that, there is nothing that a controlling person abhors more, than losing control of their victim when their victim establishes distance and boundaries away from them. This is just the continuing cycle of her assuming control over Ethan’s life and self, and restricting who he is allowed to portray himself as. Which is probably the first thing Asher will tell him, when he’s allowed to come back out of the closet…that Ethan willfully shoved him back into…because Ethan is terrified of displeasing or disappointing his Mom.
It’s not sincerely nice behavior, even slightly, at all. It’s just a manipulation tactic from an abuser, and it’s shocking to me that people don’t recognize that.
Dday
@Throwatron
Ummm ok that’s a lot of writing. I gather… ok you’re saying her ulterior motive is control? Sure that’s possible, at least partly. She talks like someone that assumes control was a given, like she’s yielding something here.
I’m willing to see this through, if she’s yielding to the idea that Ethan’s sexuality isn’t a choice to begin with, I still see it as progress, personally. If she admits to that, she’d effectively, if begrudgingly, be admitting she was wrong in the first place for trying to control it.
NGPZ
she’s not just a narcissistic parent, but one who’s so invasive to the point to which she entitles herself to dominate what kind of sex her adult son can and can’t have.
These invasions are there to remind Ethan that even in the most private aspects of his relationships and his fucking BODY, he remains under royal rulership.
Frankly if this were happening just outside a state like Indiana, this the kinda shit that would warrant intervention from a social worker at the very LEAST. ?
thejeff
Weird takes here.
This is far better than I was expecting out of her. Don’t get me wrong, it still sucks, but I was expecting her to be trying for the Linda/Carol tier and this isn’t that.
However you try to diagnose pathology and motivation into a couple of sentences.
J-Earl
Throwatron,
You’re right. She’s not doing it perfectly, so let’s give her no credit at all…. OR
some people have no instructions or understanding how to proceed, so they stumble through it doing the best they can with the only understanding they have.
BarerMender
High school thespians act badly. Everyone else acts bad.
clif
And the baddest is the worst.
Bryy
Yup.
She’s getting there, but just like Dorothy, she’s interpreting her growth through the lens of her prior belief system.
Tan
It is simultaneously true both that this is garbage behavior and also that this is improvement over the last time we saw her. She has taken a step in the correct direction, but she still has 900 or so miles (~1450km) to go to reach baseline decent human being.
thejeff
And improvement should be encouraged. That’s how you get people to take more steps.
Daniel M Ball
you make many assumptions, not real practiced in negotiating with other people are you? Especially people who disagree with your choices. Or you haven’t yet had the dubious pleasure of helping someone kick a habit or had to actually work with someone to change their mind rather than condemning them and dropping them. the mere ACKNOWLEDGEMENT of fact is sometimes the first hurdle you’ve got to get over, especially if the person’s used to having to be in control, or having to be stubborn in a conflict-rich environment. She’s shown up to ACKNOWLEDGE a fact Ethan’s been fighting to get her to admit to for years, likely, and she’s finally admitting what’s been in front of her the whole time.
THAT, y’alls, is PROGRESS. The other issues like the controlling/obsessive helicopter/overbearing relationship dynamic that’s been suggested since Ethan’s first appearance on this comic? is also something that has to be worked on, but at least he’s got her to admit to herself that grandchildren are likely to be adopted, not spawned, if they’re linked with her son…and that’s a major thing in some families.
Dday
She used to yell at him to fuck ladies
Throwatron
completely normal mom behavior. totally above board.
Kimi
I am holding out to see what it actually entails. We don’t know what is going on behind the scenes here yet. While her wording is horrible, it could be that there is another discussion going on between the mom and dad that would be even worse. This could be her pressuring her son behind the scenes because the dad thought that he needed a break with everything that was going on (and so pressured the mom to stop), or that the dad was threatening to pull the son out of school (aka cut funding) and send him to a camp or something. I do hope that this heads towards one of the better possible options than one of the worst, but will have to wait and see.
MM
I didn’t get the impression Ethan’s dad was the one with a problem with homosexuality the last time they visited. If anything, she probably doesn’t want him to know for fear he’ll take it as permission to explore his own urges.
Throwatron
I bet it’s this. It probably isn’t even that she’s scared Ethan will fail, or do something drastic…she’s scared her co-parent will [checks notes] unconditionally love and support her child in a way that will make Ethan act in a way that she finds disgusting and embarrassing.
She hasn’t changed her mind at all, that him being queer is a bad thing. She simply aims to maintain the level of control over Ethan’s life and self, and deference to her authority, that she has worked so hard to establish for the past 20 years.
thejeff
Where does this come from?
We’ve seen her like 3 times before. The homophobia shone through, but the rest of this seems to be reading a lot into very little evidence.
Throwatron
I mean, she has appeared very few times, but her every expression is drawn as menacing as possible, and every scant interaction she has with any other character has her attempting to manipulate, belittle or domineer them in one way or another, and the overall intensity of that behavior is cartoonish, even for this strip.
So, I agree that it’s accurate that we have little total exposure to her behavior. But, this is also a work of fiction, and she has been deliberately portrayed by Willis as completely fucking reprehensible, every time she’s been on screen. I choose to assume it’s a reasonable reading of the text, that the absolute consistency of her controlling nature in every strip she’s portrayed in, is meant to imply that she acts this way literally all the time. I really don’t see any evidence to the contrary.
Throwatron
I went back and checked. She’s appeared in nine strips total where she actually has a line, or performs an action. She consistently does something reprehensible in every strip she is in.
Strip 1: Meets her son’s best friend on campus. Demands that Amber call her by her first name, even though Amber is clearly uncomfortable with that. Sarcastically attacks Amber with accusations of her turning her son gay, when Amber doesn’t back down from her boundary and comply.
Strip 2: Suggests to her son’s best friend that what he needs to be happy and healthy, is for her to leave him alone, because her support of his gayness is confusing him. She wants to sever her son’s most important social bond, because she believes her failure to be a perfect wife for a gay man is the reason Ethan is having issues with his sexuality.
Strip 3: Is deeply cold to Ethan even after he tries to gain any mote of approval for the fact that he is willfully denying his sexuality to please her. It does not sway her at all. She refuses to give him any validation whatsoever, and does not have a line besides angrily glaring at him. This is also the first time her husband talks all day, despite the fact that he has been there with her for 100% of her panel time. He says nearly nothing, all the time. Big red flag.
Strip 4: Naomi directly accuses Ethan of trying to placate her, and is unmoved until he admits that he thinks he’s found a straight girl who is okay dating a gay man, at which point she admits that his gayness made him a complete disappointment to her, and begins demanding that he begin fucking her, immediately, with aplomb. Which, common sense says, she believes will cure his gayness, because she is an insane person.
Strip 5: The only strip where Ethan’s dad says more than a single word. He says the line that has lead most of us to assume that he is a deeply closeted gay man who keeps arrangements of appearing straight with Naomi to maintain their relationship. Which, if true, also makes her demand that Ethan and his father have no discussion of her permitting him to have a sex life, even more disgusting than it already is. She won’t even let her two owned gays talk to each other, lest they support one another, and lessen her control over them. Divide and conquer behavior. Naomi’s only line in this strip is “FUCK HER BRAINS OUT.”
Strip 6: Naomi meets her sons girlfriend for the first time. Joyce greets her boyfriend’s mother. She doesn’t bother to answer or acknowledge Joyce, at all. She mutters under her breath that Joyce will be an easy lay for her son.
Strip 7: Flashback, Naomi is so uncomfortable seeing her son briefly look at another boy, that she completely withdraws him from his social group and takes him home.
Strip 8: She shows up unannounced to her son’s front door like she owns the place, and demands to be let in. The first thing she says to him is a direct criticism of his appearance.
Strip 9: She demands that her son does not discuss what she is about to say with his own family members, deliberately triggering his anxiety to manipulate him into promising that he will comply before actually announcing what she is going to say. She literally would not have said anything, until he agreed under duress to keep quiet, because like in every other single line she has in the entire comic, she completely tramples the agency of every other character she interacts with. She finally grants her son “permission” to be a homosexual. Also, keep in mind, she is here entirely in secret from her husband, because she also controls what information he has access to, as her personal accessory.
Oh, strip 10 just popped. My prediction that she’s rather have a gay embarrassment of a son, then a dead embarrassment of a son, was correct. Of course, she also implies that her current state of permission, is at least temporary; so, that’s even shittier than what everybody singing her praises, was hoping for. Either way, she fully and plainly confirms that she wishes to maintain control of her husbands and her sons’ sexualities, whenever she deems convenient.
Tl;dr every time she is on screen, the singular unifying theme of everything she has ever said and done, fully implies she is an undercutting, manipulative, controlling person, who feels deeply entitled to the agency, autonomy, and personhood of the people around her. When she’s batting 100 on ten tries, maybe she is in fact like this all the time, and is genuinely not a good person.
Alanari
I’d say yes, improvement. I’m reading this as “I have a lot of prejudices but I’m choosing you over them”. Which, I think, is less bad than “I have a lot of prejudices and they are more important than you”. Still bad, less bad.
Daniel M Ball
Yah, she’s not being Toedad, and Ethan’s won at least enough ground that she’s acknowledging the facts in front of her instead of railing against them with the pastor at her back.
Mr. Random
It’s more like how she was in the Shortpacked universe during her only appearance over there.
Essentially, she’d rather he be with a man than alone. Which… take that as you will.
Reltzik
I mean, I guess if she went from not clearing a bar 1 inch off the floor to clearing a bar 6 inches off the floor, that counts as an improvement, but it’s still a real low bar she’s still not setting any records.
Serendipity
We haven’t heard what her conditions are. Someone who thinks they have the power to allow or not allow someone to have the sexuality they’re going to have anyway will not be above setting terms.
Daniel M Ball
Not everyone has what it takes to be a varsity athlete. Sometimes, you have to take some goddamned time to get them to change decades of upbringing THEY experienced plus decades experienced with YOU.
Needfuldoer
Baby steps.
anon
it would be hilarious if it was some shitty attempt at ‘reverse’ psychology. Like how “don’t date this person” “i’m gonna date her harder”
Am curious about what her reasoning is even tho her phrasing is something that’d come outta a politician
Deanatay
I have a theory. Naomi’s relationship with her husband is on the rocks (probably because he’s closeted or repressed, and it’s finally starting to leak out). She wants Ethan’s emotional support, so she’s offering tolerance to get him on her side against his father. It’s transactional, and repugnant, and it’s more likely Ethan would sympathize with his father, so she’s trying to win his support before he realizes the truth.
Ray
Aw. Isn’t it so sweet that she’s giving him permission to be what he is…
Clif
Well, it’s certainly different.
anon
If ethan wasn’t currently going through a depression , it’d be a great opportunity to troll her and like “I only care about 2d /fictional charas” and just hugging a body pillow and accidentally leaking it to like the neighborhood or so
hopefully the ‘permission’ doesn’t mean “i know someone powerful/super rich who also has a gay son”, go be a sugar daddy hunter for the family XD
Doopyboop
I have a feeling that seeing her son truly depressed has made Naomi realize how much she actually does want her son to be happy, even if being happy means being with a man.
Ethan still doesn’t need her permission or approval for it, so her approach here is still urgh, but at least she might have the spirit…?
Mark