419

Comforting
Posted on July 30, 2017 by David M Willis

419 thoughts on “Comforting”

  1. Ana Chronistic

    well, Joyce, just think of how easily you can finish the job now!

    1. Ana Chronistic

      (I’d say the thing of the current administration but we should know better)

  2. Doctor_Who

    And with that, Amber’s terrible secret is revealed.

    She just wasn’t high level enough. She needs to get back to killing spiders, if she wants a shot next time.

    1. Doopyboop

      Favorite comment. You win it. Good job.

    2. Stu

      Eh, not really – I took the “I tried” as just “I tried to kill him”, which directly addresses Joyce’s statement.

      1. TJ

        Yeah, she tried to kill him, and could not.

        Because she was not high level enough. Gotta get some grinding in to fix that.

        1. Cholma

          There’s some wild pigs in the Barrens that need killing for hides! Get to it, Amber! (but oh lordy, lordy, stay out of Barrens Chat*!)

          * I haven’t played WoW in almost a decade, but I’m guessing some things never change.

        2. Shadowydreamer

          Alas – Barrens and most of old world outside of Orgrimmar are ghost towns.

        3. Tawdry Quirks

          Barrens chat isn’t what it used to be, in part because the zone got split up with Cataclysm. The closest to the old Barrens chat, or at least on the server I played on, would be Westfall chat. Alliance city chat was a close second. Chat in Horde zones was surprisingly reasonable.

          Haven’t played since the new expansion (computer that could run WoW croaked a few months before Legion, and I’m certain it wouldn’t have met min specs for the expansion), but I don’t imagine chat has changed that much in the past year-and-a-half.

    3. Shadowydreamer

      Alas – Barrens and most of old world outside of Orgrimmar are ghost towns.

      1. Shadowydreamer

        *pokes her computer*

        Stop being weird.

        1. Dean

          Maybe there’s an echo.

    4. SgtWadeyWilson

      “Die, hated arachnid!”
      “I just made second level!”

  3. miados

    dun dun dunnnnnnn

  4. Mr. Mendo

    Well, this is a new wrinkle…

  5. Stephen Bierce

    *plays Steely Dan’s “Josie” on the hacked Muzak*

  6. Miguel

    Ryan Lives……. Yay.

    1. Tacos

      For now anyways.

      1. Opus the Poet

        Parts of him still survive.

        1. Deanatay

          They rescued his liver for donation. The remains of his head went into cryofreeze (rich parents). The rest was mulched.

          So, technically alive.

    2. mister gray

      I still hope hes in a coma and has brain damage so he can’t be a threat.

      1. Ana Chronistic

        from a knife?

        I imagine jugular damage might be enough, tho–hard to smooth-talk anyone w/o that intact

        1. Mr. Bulbmin

          The temples are surprisingly fragile. You can live through it, but a good knife there can and will do some serious damage to the brain.

          . . . Don’t ask.

        2. Edward Starsmith

          Enough blood loss for enough time can result in irreversible brain damage, as can a blood clot forming and breaking off from just about any serious knife wound. It’s not common, but it does happen.

          … Paramedic for 10+ years, RN for 30+

        3. Needfuldoer

          Maybe she shoved him down the stairs and he got a concussion and skull fracture?

      2. Reltzik

        Maybe he’s…. no longer intact.

        1. SgtWadeyWilson

          He’s been out of tact for a long while now.

      3. Gravatar Not Found

        I know the blind-and-mute combo is a lot more realistic than locked-in syndrome or tetraplegia (bonus points for neuropathy), but hey, I can dream.

  7. butts

    she’s saying

    what all of us

    were thinking

    1. Tomas

      You’ve got the wrong name and avatar to go all deep like that.

      1. Knuf Wons

        I think that’s the *perfect* name and avatar to go deep with!

        Lol please don’t kill me

      2. Deanatay

        deep butts

  8. Mr. Random

    Aaaaaaand Things are about to get dark.

    1. Fridge_Logik

      They haven’t already?

  9. Passchendaele

    oh goddamnit he’s alive. maybe we’re lucky and he had to get facial reconstruction surgery so he doesn’t look like his normal evil self?

    1. butts

      maybe we’re lucky and he’ll be in a coma forever

      1. Passchendaele

        in this webcomic, that could be one month (but yesssss that would be a great end for him, to die weak and alone). :p

    2. Danieleon

      he had facial reconstruction surgery and now he could be anybody, he could be in that very room right now, it could be Dina, it could be Joyce, it could be you, it could even be me

      1. Mephron

        Don’t worry! He’ll turn red in a minute.

    3. mra

      I’m glad that he isn’t dead. The experience of watching someone be killed, or killing them yourself would be far worse for Dorothy and Amber to experience not to mention the mood it would set over the school. Not that I care for his well being in anyway, it’s more for the other’s sake. Now that Amber is not a killer, I would be just fine with him getting hit by a car or killed in some other way the students of the school wouldn’t have to watch.

  10. QueerBitch

    I’m so torn because on one hand I’m Joyce. I wish someone would just kill anyone who’d ever sexually assaulted me or anyone else.

    But on one hand I’m Amber and have the same fears she has about becoming my abusive dad and if I was ever the one to personally do the violence against the abuser myself I’d be really crushed about it…at least if it involves “losing control’ of myself…If it was a well thought out and controlled plan to off some abuser…I’d be more cool with it since it doesn’t mean I’m having a violent outburst like my dad…

    I don’t know. These situations are difficult.

    1. Halpful

      “I don’t know. These situations are difficult.”

      yup. they are, and I’m starting to suspect they should be. “simple” solutions to complex human problems seem to have a bad track record.

      1. Clif

        Any problem can be solved with enough high explosive.

        1. Cholma

          “When in doubt, C-4.”
          “Jamie wants a big boom.”

        2. AgentKeen

          Who are you, Doc Holiday?

      2. Hana

        Thank you.

    2. C.T Phipps

      We know Ryan is guilty because we’re gifted with the God’s eye view of the universe (thanks to Willis a.k.a God of the Multiverse). However, it’s the Batman dilemma played seriously. It’s not about whether the Joker deserves to die but whether it’s a good thing to make Batman a killer. Because that’s a torment he doesn’t need to bear.

      1. Emperor Norton II

        And then a lot of writers in the 2000s have made Batman being the kind of person that ends up torturing people, sometimes to such an extent that I’m wondering if killing someone would actually make much difference in his mind.

      2. Kris

        Unless it’s Batman v Superman. Then Batman’s a murderer and no one cared. Or the time he set a guy on fire in the Tim Burton film.

        1. C.T Phipps

          Ultron: How could you save the world!? You’re all killers!

        2. a4lbi

          Also, “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you” in Batman Begins.

          Ah, the magic of technicalities.

        3. Pat

          That wasn’t even a technicality. It was just a lie.

          He didn’t die randomly, but directly because of things Batman did. That’s what “killing” means.

        4. Needfuldoer

          Yeah but then they figured out both their moms were named Martha, and they instantly became best friends.

          What the hell, DC.

        5. joy2b

          That’s one of the few parts of the whole storyline that makes me want to laugh with recognition. I’ve known guys whose best friendship had no grounding aside from having a fistfight during their first week of school, or a shared fav tv show. I had a life altering friendship because I told someone who was lonely and interesting that he seemed like someone I should know.

          So, this is one of the few ideas that makes sense to me. A couple of lonely guys (who really should know each other) bond through a brawl and a completely minor seeming connection.

      3. Hana

        Good points.

    3. Cerberus

      Yeah, I’m in exactly the same frame of mind where I’m both Amber and Joyce here. Terrified of becoming my abusive dad or the monster people think DID people are doomed to become. But also really really wishing death upon my rapist.

      1. Deanatay

        Some wishes are just better NOT granted. I am a believer that violence damages the inflictor as much as the inflictee (not sure if words, but anyway), if in different ways. Both feelings are valid to feel, though.

  11. Yossarianduck

    That hovertext is some good-ass synchronicity.

    1. Needfuldoer

      The factory Congress belches filth into the sky…

  12. The Mad Academic

    Um… according to the little hover text the AHCA passed. But according to everything else it didn’t. Unless the motion to DISCUSS the proposed bill passed. That seems more likely.

    1. Cheshrin

      “As I was drawing this.” The comic’s on a buffer, so this was written and drawn a while ago. He’s talking about a few months back, when the HOUSE passed its version of the repeal and repalce bill. The most recent stuff has been about the SENATE.

    2. Yumi

      “the House,” not Congress.

    3. nobodybasically

      The House passed a bill a while back but the Senate refused to even look at it, planning to craft their own bill and then reconciling it with the House’s.

      Thankfully the Senate failed to pass anything.

    4. Josh Spicer

      The actual bill did not pass the first rounds (due to one Mr. McCain giving it his biggest thumbs down) so they’re having the Senate look at it again, I guess?

      How the system seems to change every time I learn it, but right now, ObamaCare is still active.

      1. Ferret

        Hold the phone. McCain doesn’t get all of the credit on this one. McCain gets partial credit, shared with Collins and Murkowski and he gets a lesser share of it for voting to bring it to discussion in the first place.

        1. Pat

          They should probably share some with the other 50-ish that weren’t that evil in the first place.

        2. thejeff

          I’d like to extend a little special credit to the Senator who returned from cancer treatment to oppose the effort to repeal the ACA.
          No, not him.
          Mazie Hirono, the Democrat from Hawaii.

        3. Orion Fury

          For me it did seem bad at first, but he didn’t like any of the plans, and wanted that out there and shut down, so the could move on to do other things. Hopefully better things for the people of the country, but [Insert Diatrad About Politics and Internet Here]

      2. Onihikage

        Due to how budget reconciliation works, McCain allowing the bill to proceed to a debate/vote, then ensuring it failed to pass, means the Republicans can no longer propose any Obamacare repeals via budget reconciliation (which only requires 51 votes) for the remainder of the fiscal year. This was definitely intentional on his part – had the bill died in committee, they could have brought it back at any time.

        So, until next year at least, any bid to replace Obamacare will require 60 votes to pass in the Senate – a number which necessitates bipartisanship.

        1. Remmington Steele

          By which time the 2018 mid-terms will have started.

          Why Mitch Mcconnell still has a job is a mystery.

        2. Victor Riley

          I know… he’s the most openly corrupt politician I’ve ever seen. Back in 2016, he actually said that the NRA should have a say in the who the next Supreme Court Justice is (when it was still vacant).

          Seeing as how the NRA is not a government organization, but a private one… why should they have jack-all to do with it? McConnell might as well have just worn a t-shirt that says, “I’m corrupt, and open for business”.

        3. fogel

          So that’s why Trump is barking at McConnell to change Senate rules so just 51 are needed for all votes ….

        4. hof1991

          turns out they can and are trying to bring it back. Failed voted was on a substitute amendment not the underlying bill. But
          McCain and two brave women are still nos. Plus all Dems.

        5. StriderHLC

          This has gone viral on twitter, but it is not actually true. There is nothing stopping McConnell from bringing it back at any time, and in fact it’s already on the calendar (which doesn’t necessarily mean a vote is imminent, just that it can be brought up again).

          This fight doesn’t end until the GOP starts to make good-faith attempts to address the ACA’s shortcomings or loses one of the two houses of Congress.

    5. Agemegos

      The House of Reps passed it on 4 May. The Senate rejected it on 27 July.

    6. Abel Undercity

      The Senate bill was called the BCRA (Better Care Reconciliation Act).

  13. newllend(henryvolt)

    The ACHA passed… riiiight.

    1. Fart Captor

      It did. It was the senate version that failed.

      1. newllend(henryvolt)

        So if it passes in the senate it becomes law but if it’s just the house that means it’s optional or something?

        1. Nightsbridge

          That’s how legislation works? A bill must pass both house and senate before becoming law.

        2. Needfuldoer

          That’s one reason the Senate healthcare bill was such a nail-biter. There were more than three Republicans against it at the beginning, but they were convinced to vote yea because the House gave them a “yeah, pass it and we’ll ‘start debating‘ *wink wink nudge nudge* as soon as it gets here” pitch. In reality, the Senate bill would have been rammed through the House with no changes and gone straight to the Oval Office, because there are parts of our current government that are so desperate for a win that they’ll pass and sign anything that earns them brownie points. Thankfully three Senators saw through this dog-and-pony show and maintained their ‘no’ votes.

          The next bill to watch is the bipartisan sanctions against Russia. If it gets signed, it puts the president in a tight spot because it contradicts so much of his messaging. If it gets vetoed, there are enough votes in favor in Congress to override. If it gets ignored, it automatically becomes law 10 days after it was put on his desk.

        3. Shiro

          Both legislative houses need to pass it before it goes to the president to be signed. If it fails at any point, it dies*

          *kind of, there are revival measures that can be taken but they mostly don’t work

        4. Fart Captor

          It has to pass both chambers to become law, but passing one chamber lowers the number of votes they need to pass it in the other (if they don’t want to make too many changes)

        5. Makkabee

          House versions always require just a simple majority. The Senate is more complex. A bill there only needs a simple majority on the final vote, but the minority can filibuster — refuse to end debate — and it takes 60 votes in the Senate (out of 100) to pass a cloture movement to force the end of debate and require an up or down vote on the bill.

          If both houses of congress pass different versions of a bill, then they come up with a reconciliation measure drafted by a committee drawn from both houses, and the reconciliation bill requires a simple majority in both houses to pass — no filibuster there.

          The Senate has changed filibuster rules recently, eliminating the filibuster for judicial nominees, which is why Gorsuch got confirmed without any real debate. The GOP leadership forced a vote after a joke of a hearing.

        6. Ferret

          No it doesn’t. A bill always requires a majority vote to pass either chamber. The Senate just has weird rules, specifically that to actually bring a standard bill to a vote and end discussion requires 60 votes. The reason why the Senate version of the AHCA only needed 50 is because it was being run through as a budget reconciliation bill, which only requires 50 votes to get through.

        7. Egg

          Just out of curiosity, are you American?

      2. Reltzik

        ALL the Senate versions failed.

  14. Goki

    So…. maybe we can see what stopped Amber? Maayybe? After all, if she killed him, no jury would convict her. (No I don’t want Ryan dead, I want him in prison with the tag “Rapist and “Guilty of Sexual Assault).

  15. Irredentist

    Now do you get it Joyce? Don’t get me wrong, those eyes of burning passion are great, but she’s still got some learning to do. You can’t brute force every problem in the world. Just most of them.

    1. newllend(henryvolt)

      True, though self defense seems like the #1 time for brute force should be a option. Killing him though is…I don’t know.

      1. C.T Phipps

        Ryan was an awful person who was trying to kill them. That doesn’t mean he didn’t hurt Amber by forcing her to relive one of her most hated and traumatic memories. The last time she faced a monster who was trying to kill one of her friends.

        Which is not how she stabbed Sal but emotions are complex like that.

        1. Jason

          …I doubt he intended to kill anyone? I mean, I might be wrong, but ending someone’s life in cold blood is a hell of a jump. For anyone.
          I can’t remember what he said but talking big isn’t the same as genuine intent- especially if the intent involved intimidation.
          I uh, wasn’t a fan of that scene, so I’ll admit that it’s very possible that there’s a detail I missed or didn’t remember.

        2. thejeff

          “doubt he intended to kill anyone”?
          He came stalking them to their dorm with a knife. What the hell do you think he intended to do?

        3. Fart Captor

          He even told them he was going to maim Joyce. Even if he stopped there, Amber was clearly going to get worse if he’d gotten the chance

      2. Deanatay

        Calling what Amber did ‘self-defense’ is only technically accurate. In truth, Amber severely outclassed Ryan in terms of combat skill (he didn’t know this, of course). She could easily have disarmed and restrained him with a minimum of damage to his person. The fact that she didn’t severely strains the myth that ‘she was simply defending herself’.

        1. Fart Captor

          The fact that she could win the fight does not mean she had reason to think she could safely restrain him without hurting him, much less that she could KEEP him restrained until help arrived.

          It sure as hell did not obligate her to take the risk that he might get free or regain control of the knife.

        2. joy2b

          Amber has more fitness and combat experience than most, but it’s not easy to say how much flexibility she had in that fight.
          – She doesn’t have a reach advantage.
          – She doesn’t know his combat style or experience.
          – She doesn’t spend a lot of time sparring with people who she doesn’t want to hurt.
          – She couldn’t trust him to respond reasonably to a lock if he’s desperate. A lock works on someone unwilling to risk breaking a bone (and the artery next to it).
          – It was a knife fight. Fair knife fights tend to end with everyone involved losing blood faster than an IV can put it in. The winner is the one who survives long enough to die in the ambulance. The fact that they both lived argues for cartoonist mercy, a weird lack of clumsiness on his part, and restraint on hers.

        3. thejeff

          That’s a perfectly rational argument dealing with normal people. Amber’s playing by superhero rules. She took the knife away from him casually, without hesitation or effort.
          This is like some punk trying to stab Bruce Wayne.

        4. Fart Captor

          If she could’ve ended the fight so damn easily, and she TRIED to kill him as she said? Why is he still alive?

          When she fought Ryan’s bros individually, she did in fact handle them very easily, like a pro. But one important detail you need to consider is that even though they all went down pretty easily, none of them stayed down. That took a lengthy, drawn out fight and Sal’s helpt to leave them all in a heap of bruises.

          And that was just a fist-fight. A sloppy, public brawl against amateurs whose only investment in the fight was the obligations of the Bro Code. Ryan on the other hand, was irrationally angry AND already resigned to his life being ruined began. He already had nothing to lose, and clearly was not worried about going to jail if he killed someone. That makes a person very dangerous.

          Especially because Amber is not Batman. She couldn’t just bonk him on the head and knock him out until the authorities arrived. She couldn’t just produce a rope out of nowhere and tie him up securely.

          She had three options to ensure that she and Dorothy remained unharmed, after she disarmed him:

          1) Flee, giving Ryan the chance to tackle her from behind, regain control of the knife, and use it on her and then Dorothy.

          2) Throw the knife out of reach and attempt to restrain a much taller, larger, and possibly stronger person until help arrives. FYI: This is very difficult. Even if Amber is stronger than him, his height and weight give him considerable leverage to allow him to twist out of her grasp, or potentially just knock her over and land on her. Odds are not good that she would be able to restrain him for long.

          Even if Dorothy snapped out of her panic / freeze response immediately and called for help, the odds of him breaking free before someone reached them were high.

          It’s a bad option.

          3) She could KEEP the knife, and try to restrain him by threatening to stab him with it. Except he was pretty clearly not afraid of her stabbing him (either because he didn’t believe she would, or he was just to angry to care), because he still immediately attacked her after she took it away.

          Since he’s so much taller than him, holding it to his throat from behind isn’t really an option. Just pressing the blade against his back would be less threatening, and even if she held onto him with the other arm, he still has the previously mentioned leverage to get away, and apparent lack of concern about getting stabbed, and it would still take minutes for someone to get there.

          So still not a good option.

          4) She could keep him busy fighting until help arrives, hitting him just hard enough to keep him from getting the knife back.

          Again, she’d have to do this for at least a couple minutes, against someone desperate and unpredictable. Even if she kept him away from the knife at first, she’s going to tire, probably faster than Ryan will, because again, he’s got reach, weight, and leverage on his side. She’s got speed and skill, but she only has to tire enough to give him an opening, and he only needs to get the knife back for a moment and get one good slash or stab in to suddenly be winning the fight, if not ending it.

          So it’s another really bad option.

          5) Her final option (and best) was to act swiftly and decisively right at the start of the fight to incapacitate him and leave him unable to continue attacking them, before fatigue or injury could take away her advantages of being faster and more skilled.

          The only way we’d seen her take somebody out of a fight before was by simply pummeling them until they stayed down. That is basically a more violent version of plan #4, with all the same drawbacks. Even if the odds were strong that she could literally beat him into submission on her own (and I’d put those odds around 50/50 at best), that still leaves the knife in play.

          If she doesn’t use the knife, she has nowhere to put it, so she’s just got to hold onto it, leaving her with only one hand she can attack or defend with.

          Her best option was to use the knife on him. Either to kill him or to remind him that going to jail is probably better than going straight to Hell.

          ** Its also worth noting that none of these scenarios even accounts for the possibility of Ryan having a second weapon on him, or him finding a sufficiently large blunt object to use as one.

        5. Fart Captor

          TL;DR: All of the less-violent options that Amber had would have required her to risk her safety (and by extension Dorothy’s) for the sake of ensuring Ryan’s. She has no obligation to take that kind of risk.

  16. Danni

    ryan dying is preferred, but the act of killing him would’ve weighed on amber so much.

    1. Needfuldoer

      The case would have been in court for years!

  17. Bicycle Bill

    This is an entirely different side of Joyce that I am seeing here.  Joyce as the Angel of Vengeance, with the flaming sword and the seven seals, ready to lay waste to the world.  And frankly, it scares me more than just a little.

    1. Barnabas_Truman

      I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR OVER A DECADE TO RE-USE THIS FANART

      https://get.google.com/albumarchive/117394285793076405413/album/AF1QipPjkjNx7BGNpv9e29VodPqljzLeVZa4qE_dmrms/AF1QipPaQxrSps70IKlI-KCZ2QWt3WRb0xMwb34z1jno

      1. David M Willis

        Wooooooooooo

      2. zoelogical

        wOw

      3. Shiro

        I think this is the only comment I’ve ever seen from you and it gets two thumbs up, A+

        1. Barnabas_Truman

          I used to post comments all the time on the It’s Walky! message boards back in the forgotten era of Keenspot and Nightstar. These days I’m too busy with everything else but I still read the comic regularly and occasionally wade into the comments section.

      4. Lingo

        Finally, your day has come!

      5. KingMonster

        I AM JOYCE! KNIGHT OF ERINYES! PREPARE FOR THE FLAMES OF VENGANCE!!!

  18. Shiro

    I can’t analyze this one objectively, because my terrible, immediate, and unapologetic reaction is “GOOD.”

    I will never cry for a dead rapist.

    (this next part’s stupid personal rambling so you can skip it without missing anything related to the comic)

    I dreamed about the dude who did that* to me last night. Happens, occasionally–we were friends before it happened, fuckbuddies even, and usually these dreams revolve around him apologizing, begging forgiveness, and making things right, and we end up friends again. Because at my core, that’s the kind of shit I’m an utter sucker for, Steven Universe’s “hugs fix all villains” theme is my jam.

    That’s not what happened this time. I dreamed I met him walking into my workplace, and he recognized me immediately, and wanted to catch up. As if nothing had happened. I’ve already decided, should that ever happen, I don’t know him. He is a stranger to me. And that’s what dream-me did, and he laughed, and asked was I still mad over that silly little misunderstanding? Said I was living in the past, oversensitive, needed to move on, was poisoning myself–you know the lines.

    I’ve never felt such pure crimson rage in a dream. I don’t remember what I did next, and that may be a good thing. I don’t know what I’d do in real life, should this very plausible situation play out sometime in the future. I just don’t know.

    *a decade down the road, and I still hesitate to use the big scary r-word as it applies to me. Most times I’m strong enough to get the word out. Tonight I’m not, and it’s easier to tiptoe around it than force myself to write it. Stupid brain thing, but those happen.

    Thanks for letting me ramble.

    1. Cerberus

      *appropriate gesture of support*

      And yeah, I get that feeling a lot. If someone came up to me and said my rapist died in some horrific shop accident, I don’t think I’d blink back a single tear. The fucking shit he’s left me for fucking years… yeah, I understand that feeling a lot.

      1. Shiro

        *appropriate gesture of support right back*

        I feel that, hard.

        Threads like this make me wish VR was scifi movie levels already, because I’m feeling some kind of support group/movie night with ice cream hybrid right now? With pillow and blanket forts? I feel like that’d be cozy.

        1. Cerberus

          That would be absolutely amazing! *has virtual ice cream pillow fort night*

        2. Rukduk

          That would be really nice.

    2. Halpful

      *agos*

      1. Shiro

        Thank you

    3. Irredentist

      We all find the strength to carry on somehow, despite what we have suffered. Whether it be from rage or otherwise. I am grateful that there is a place like this where we can share our thoughts and experiences, more or less without fear of condemnation. I too have known what you speak of, and I also fear to say it. I am sorry that you have felt it too, and I hope that together we can try and prevent others in this world from knowing our suffering.

      1. Shiro

        *appropriate gesture of support*

        I feel that. We all support each other as best we can, and we’re all stronger for it. I’m sorry that happened to you, but I’m glad you’re here with us.

    4. Jaime

      I’m so sorry. *appropriate gesture of support*

      1. C.T Phipps

        *Compassion*

        1. Shiro

          Thank you

      2. Shiro

        Thank you

    5. Rukduk

      *appropriate gesture of support*
      I want to preface what I’m about to say next with the statement that I have not personally ever been raped and as a result will never fully comprehend first hand the damage that does and I want to offer you all the sympathy possible. That said, two of my friends were raped. One later committed suicide because of it. I’ve seen what life was like for them, and then just for her, for years. If there was anyway for me to go back in time to keep that from happening, I would pay any price to take that option. Because I would rather live a thousand years with the fact that I killed someone than see her in pain. If I could find the pieces of filth responsible, the only thing stopping me from killing them would be whether she (friend) would ever have any sense of closure or relief that way. While I personally understand Amber’s fears here, I could live with myself with rapist blood on my hands if it meant they would never hurt anyone again.

      1. Shiro

        I feel you. Long after the fact, I found out that my two best friends at the time had been experiencing something eerily similar almost concurrently to me. Like I said, my dreams about this dude mostly center around reconciliation, but the ones that hurt my heart-sisters? Death’s too good for them.

        1. Rukduk

          I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…to bring up more pain if I did it’s just…I was trying to be supportive and I failed. I ended up ranting about my own feelings. I…kinda do that a lot I guess I’m sorry. I just…I’m not sure how to put into words properly the sorrow for you that I feel when I read that comment. It’s…it’s painful and raw for me to even read and I only have second hand experience. The only thing I can think to say is something my therapist for my own issues once told me, “Anger. Rage. Fury. Whatever you want to call it. It’s never a bad emotion. It’s never unhealthy to feel that way. The only thing that truly matters is what you do with it. That’s the only thing that can be judged.” And, if it makes you feel better, I’d still say you were a good person even if you did have a meeting like the one you dreamed and you reacted violently. At that point I’d only be concerned about how you would process such an event. Sorry again. I’m rambling. I do that when I’m unsure of how to finish my thoughts.
          …
          Also, would it be ok with you if I used the term “heart-sisters” in the future? I’ve never heard it before but I really like it. It’s beautiful and…accurate i would say.

        2. Shiro

          No no, you’re good! I was trying to do the shared experience thing but I’m just in a really grim mood so my tone was probably wonky. Your comment reads as supportive, and I appreciate it. And this follow-up, too. Thank you 🙂

          And of course it’s okay! I’m flattered 🙂

        3. Rukduk

          Oh, ok. Thank you. Sorry, I have problems communicating how I feel at times. I didn’t think your tone was wonky. I was just…afraid I’d awoken a memory about your heart-sisters you wanted sealed if that makes any sense?

    6. Jason

      Sending cute animal internet hugs. (Those are always good, right?)

      I’ve been there. I was raped and it took me a few years to even realise that the word “rape” was applicable. That was the point when the shock, pain and processing began for me.

      Everyone’s healing journey is different and that’s totally okay. You have my best wishes for your journey of recovery and healing, whatever form it takes.

    7. ailorn

      When you’re ready, I highly recommend seeking out a counselor you are comfortable with that also specializes in EMDR. There is a book called “Getting Past Your Past” that talks about what EMDR is and how it works. It’s a very straight forward read. EMDR is the most effective form of treatment that I know of that helps someone resolve residual trauma. There are many factors that go into how fast people progress with it and how much they can handle. I’ve seen it work miracles and have been helped by it myself. It doesn’t have to stay like this.

  19. Scar Man!!!

    Bright blue eyes can be very scary

  20. Carms

    cw rape
    Dem feels. Joyce, you can’t hope that someone kills someone else without also wishing that first person becomes a murderer.
    Like, you see comments on stories about rapists and pedophiles going to jail, ‘i hope you get whats coming to you’ ‘hell yeah prison rape is exactly what you deserve’, but like, those comments are NECESSARILY SUPPORTING RAPISTS. eye for an eye doesn’t just make the whole world blind, it also makes everyone into eye-gouging monster-people.
    ‘that person deserved to die’ alright fine, but did *I* deserve to kill them?

    1. Spencer

      I mean, what is Joyce supposed to feel? The guy tried to rape her and murder her best friend.

      1. Carms

        Joyce wishing Ryan was dead is subtly but importantly different from wishing Amber was the executioner. Amber doesn’t want to be an executioner.

    2. Fart Captor

      Yeah, but you know what? Fuck Ryan. He deserves it.

      1. Fart Captor

        (Being murdered, not the other stuff)

      2. Carms

        BUT DOES Amber deserve to be saddled with his death?

        You want someone revenge-murdered or revenge-raped, you take that shit on yourself. don’t wish that blood onto anyone else’s hand, regardless of how deserving it is of being shed.

        1. ValdVin

          I agree with you. I don’t think she’s in a healthy position to decide this, and the more she lets bits like this out, the more it makes me think she’s never had the professional help she needs*.

          She thinks she wants to, maybe would think that’s a catharsis, but that’s usually bullflop, and that Blaine had a big hand in guiding her down that road–nuff ced.

          (Disclaimer: Spousal Ms ValdVin is an LCSW. No, we didn’t me that way.)

        2. Deanatay

          BTW, it’s canon that Amber has never had therapy – her (insert naturally-occurring expletives here) father vetoed it, on the grounds that ‘it’d turn her into a wuss’.

          Also, another in the camp of ‘people Amber (not Amazi-Girl) beat to within an inch of their lives, but that we deeply, darkly wish she had beaten a few inches further’.

        3. Fart Captor

          No, she doesn’t, but Joyce isn’t complaining here. I don’t even read this as her telling Amber she SHOULD have killed him.

          She’s telling Amber she would have supported and been grateful for her actions even if they had gone much, much further

    3. Shiro

      I won’t ever support punitive rape comments, because rape is not a fucking punishment. I’m not even 100% sure I support punitive death comments. What I am sure about is that some people need to be removed from the population for the common good, and that serial rapists are among those people. How they’re removed isn’t important.

      1. Rukduk

        When it comes to comments about punitive death I always ask myself, “In this situation would a death keep other people from being hurt or killed?” Because “punitive death” implies a punishment. And a judicially/legally sanctioned killing isn’t about punishment. It’s about prevention. The only purpose a death penalty serves is to prevent a serial offender from killing or assaulting other individuals. In the case of a serial rapist, aside from permanently crippling said criminal, the only true way to properly remove the threat they pose to others is to take that criminal’s life. It’s not something I enjoy, but it is most definitely something I condone.

  21. Rukduk

    Ok. That’s a lot to digest. But one of the important things to draw from this, that I hope Amber can draw from this, is that she feels guilty for having tried to kill someone who attacked her and friend with a knife and who was also a rapist. The fact that she feels this bad about nearly using lethal force in that situation, that’s a good sign. People who hurt or kill people and don’t feel guilty or ashamed are the ones who need to be watched out for. Not someone as torn up and self-hating as Amber is in that final panel. It’s why PTSD for soldiers is such a big thing. Killing another human being, even in self defense, is a very psychologically damaging thing and doesn’t feel entirely natural. And another important thing is this; Amber restrained herself. She had enough self-control to disable and not kill scarboy, even though in the moment she was attempting to. That shows that, on a fundamental level Amber isn’t a killer. And to be on the verge of tears after harming a piece of scum like scarboy in self-defense out shame and self-loathing, that’s a piece of proof that Amber isn’t Blaine and isn’t a monster. A monster wouldn’t be this ashamed or traumatized by what they’ve done.
    ….
    TL:DR I want to find an appropriate way to comfort Amber, and Amber is a good person who desperately needs treatment for PTSD and a good doctor in charge of such treatment. What she does not need is to be isolated and kept away as if she were dangerous because that will only feed into her “monster” narrative.

    1. TheGrammarLegionary

      I’m not sure Amber actually did restrain herself… We’ve seen where Amber’s rage goes. She put her father in the hospital, and that was before Danny pulled her away. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with everything else in your comment, and whether it was her own restraint or someone else’s that kept Ryan alive that night, Amber still REALLY needs therapy and support. But I think we all have to acknowledge two possibilities; she stopped herself from killing him, or she had to be pulled away again.

      1. fogel

        Or she was trying, but failed. Just because you are trying to kill someone doesn’t mean that you’ll succeed, even Amber. Unless AG stopped her?

        1. Needfuldoer

          So in this case, does she take after he father too much, or not enough?

        2. ValdVin

          From what we know*: She’s never tried to kill someone before. The only knife use was stabbing Sal’s palm.

          Maybe the cops got there? Maybe she saw enough blood and other stuff that she thought she did?

          (*Correct me as needed.)

        3. thejeff

          If you’ve got a knife and a helpless target and you’re trying to kill them, it’s pretty easy to succeed. Unless you stop yourself or someone stops you. You just keep stabbing.

          We don’t know exactly what happened, but there’s as yet no indication that anyone else was involved. It’s real unlikely the cops showed up quickly enough.

          Most likely case at this point is that she stopped herself – probably later than she thinks she should have.

  22. Yumi

    So I’m just gonna ramble about some thoughts that I’ve had, because it’s sharing time or whatever.

    I’ve thought before about whether or not I could kill someone, not someone specific but just in general. And I think I could, but probably couldn’t live with myself afterward, so I’d probably just murder-suicide it. And now I kind of wonder if Amber had any plans for what she’d do herself if she succeeded in killing him. I know it was a pretty immediate situation, but it takes me like a second to think of killing myself, so I could see it being possible.

    My imagined reasons for killing someone would be if they hurt someone I cared about. I know enough people that have been hurt–in this instance usually referring to rape– that I’ve felt the words “do you want me to kill him” in my throat before, but I’ve never actually said them. And it’s interesting because I don’t want to kill my rapist and don’t actually have a desire for him to die at all, but if my best friend was raped, and I was in a bad place with myself, and she wanted me to…

    I wonder what Amber was feeling when she was trying to kill him; I wonder if she had thoughts about killing herself after or that she’d spend her life in jail. Because I’ve had multiple points where I thought I was going to kill myself, but I got through them, which is great and all… but when you’re on the other side of those moments, still alive, it’s like…well, I didn’t think to prepare for this.

    And anyway, I really need Amber to be in therapy, because this comic alone inspired what I’m going to talk about in therapy this week.

  23. Sylphiod

    That made me loss support for joclye and amber.
    He was an awful br of trash human being and jail is where he belongs, but wishing people dead for what he attempted to do, not even succeed in doing, makes you scum. Joclye not as much as him. But amber for the excisive self defensive and wish she killed him herself. Congrats you made amber unredemable and she was right. She is a monster.
    (Good job by the way it’s written quite well leading into it. Showing her as a worse and worse person.)

    1. Halpful

      Nope. You’ve got a lot to learn about both human beings and spelling.

    2. Shiro

      What the FUCK is wrong with you

      1. Rukduk

        I’m going to go out on a limb and say copious amounts of upper-class white privilege with at least a dash of patriarchal misogyny. I think we just found tonight’s “That One Guy”. It’s honestly got me shaking my head in my hand.
        …
        Either that or it’s just a troll that we’re all currently feeding.

        1. Jaime

          I’m sure they’ve got a bridge to get back to – those goats should be along any time soon! ?

        2. Sylphiod

          Absolutely correct I’m obviously a white supremacist, patrichary. I said he was an awful piece of shit didn’t I.
          I’m sorry I find wishing death on people no matter what they do awful.
          I do hope that he rots in prison in universe just like becky’s father but I don’t wish death upon either of them and think extremely poorly of anyone who wishes death upon others.
          Partially because of thantophobic to the point I have panic attacks, partially because I have received deaththreats in the past. But noooo, noooo I’m just a white supremacist, patriarchal troll.
          Probably a Nazi to.

        3. Jaime

          Sylphoid, I strongly suggest you read some of the comments below to help undertand why your comment upset a lot of people here.

        4. Rukduk

          Ok. That’s my fault. The initial comment came off as very dismissive and abrasive, so I made an incorrect assumption. I don’t think I can apologize enough for that assumption. It’s just that, every once in a while we get these people in the comments that say very hurtful things, and when that happens I get very passively aggressively angry. Your initial comment reminded me of when those types of people do comment and it was wrong of me to make that assumption. Once again, I’m sorry. The subject of rape and sexual assault makes me very emotional and quite honestly not in the best headspace. I’m not trying to excuse but explain my earlier response to you, and I am sorry. And now I need to go see if there are any other apologies I need to make. Last night was not a good night for me.

        5. Rukduk

          Just to add. I probably didn’t explain why I was apologizing very well. At first it was just because learning you had received death threats in the past had actually both feel like an ass and get a much better feel of where you were coming from. Then, before finishing the above comment, I read your interactions below (especially with Jaime) and that helped me see your viewpoint a bit more. We all feel very strongly about things. So the second part was trying to apologize for lashing out at you.

    3. Jaime

      Um…I have been sexually assaulted. One in six women in the U.S. have been the victim of rape or attempted rape. I think that unless something like that has happened to you (and I apologize if it has happened to you personally – I don’t want to make assumptions about your experience), it’s not okay to judge someone else’s reactions to and emotions about it.

      Wanting to kill someone who hurt you and/or people you love does NOT make you “scum.” Feeling satisfaction that someone who hurt you was hurt in their turn does NOT make you “unredeemable.” It makes you HUMAN.

      When my father was emotionally abusing my mom, my sisters, and me, I used to fantasize about his death.* I had elaborate daydreams about the deaths of all the people who bullied me in middle school; sometimes there was a natural disaster, sometimes I murdered them. I didn’t act on any of these fantasies but then again, neither my dad nor the middle school bullies pulled a knife on me. None of them sexually assaulted me. I honestly do not know what I would have done if that had happened. That does NOT make me “scum.” It makes me someone who was hurt and wanted to strike back at those who hurt me, like Joyce and Amber.

      *To be fair to my dad, at that time he had gone through what was basically a mental breakdown. He was not in full control of himself and I honestly believe he did not consciously mean to be hurtful. My mom did NOT put up with that for long at all; she gave him an ultimatum. He could either drastically change his behaviour, go into therapy and on medication, or leave. He chose to leave. It’s years later and now he is re-married to a lovely woman and doing much better personally and mentally. I didn’t have the perspective as a teenager to realize how mentally unwell he was and how much that drove his actions. Please note, however, that I am *explaining,* not *excusing* his behaviour.

      1. Jaime

        Edit: H3ll, I think it’s not okay to judge someone else’s reactions to rape/sexual assault/sexual harrassment even if it HAS happened to you. Everyone’s personal experience and reaction is valid. I misspoke because your post sounded a lot like the “hand-waving” people who have never experienced such things do to blame the victim.

        And yes, spell and grammar check would not go amiss.

        1. Sylphiod

          You are correct, reading this I overreacted I still personally see wishing death upon someone and acting towards causing someone death to be awful, so I will retract anything I said about joclye. I have a strong reaction to it.
          I am extremely sorry to hear what has happened to you.
          My personal reaction to someone calling for the death of another person is disgust, I am an atheist and see it as a horrible thing to end someone’s only existence.
          Anyways just to clarify, you are right it was an overreaction to something that ulterly disgusts and terrifies me to the point of panic attacks, and I apologize for it.
          What they did was not awful as what he attempted to do, but that doesn’t change it being an awful thing.

        2. Jaime

          Thank you for your response and your sympathy. *I* certainly have said/posted some very unfortunate things (both on this website and elsewhere) when something triggers a strong visceral emotional reaction in me.

          I think these kinds of conversations are very important. I myself tend to speak more than I listen (if you couldn’t tell by the walls o’ text I’ve been posting) but I am working on that. I have learned a lot by “listening” to what other people who post regularly on this website have to say. As I recommended above, try reading through the other comments and see what you think and maybe go from there. 🙂

        3. Sylphiod

          I also realized I made a grave mistake with how Amber was acting in the last panel, for some reason I felt she looked proud and was agreeing with Joyce. Having someone point it out realized that what’s said was even more awful then I intended. Now I feel more like an arsh. Anyways I will continue reading through, I’ll try to make a better understanding comment tomorrow.

      2. a4lbi

        Yeah, I’m just gonna say “THIS.”

        Also, hugs offered.

        1. Jaime

          Thank you! ?

      3. Rukduk

        *appropriate gesture of support*
        Honestly, every time I hear that statistic or hear a story like yours, my heart breaks for people such as yourself. But, it’s stories that I need to hear if I’m ever going to be able to help.
        …
        Also, I would just like to add that humans are tribal by our nature as social creatures. Our natural instinct when someone we recognize as part of our “tribe” is threatened is to protect them by any means available. And when a member of our “tribe” is hurt, we want to make sure that whatever did it never targets our “tribe” in general and that member in particular ever again. The reason I’m using the word “tribe” in quotation marks is because we generally don’t think in terms of actual tribes anymore. We replace it with “social clique”, “friend group”, “union”, “brothers in arms”, “posse”, or in the worst case “gang”. But they still generally refer to the same concept as “tribe”. It’s just now that we focus more on emotional kin than blood kin relations in the modern day.

        1. Jaime

          Thank you. ? It makes me very sad to know that what I’ve experienced is only a small fraction of the abuse what so many other people have…when I say I’ve been “lucky,” I don’t mean that ironically, which is terrible.

          In regards to “tribalism;” I really really REALLY wish we could focus on the positive rather than the negative aspects of those ties. For example, a lot of people take strength from and pride in their cultural background. I’m a member of the union at my workplace and we stick up for each other; my union is the reason I have healthcare and sick days and raises. I’m a member of a bunch of fandoms and I really like being able to talk to people who care about Stephen King and Wonder Woman and H. P. Lovecraft and Steven Universe as much as I do!

          These are healthy, positive “tribes.” Yet the dark side of tribalism is what I encountered in middle school; my mom couldn’t afford to buy me the expensive clothes other girls wore (side note: given how I was growing, I can’t blame her for refusing to buy a $100 pair of jeans I’d outgrow in a few months!), I was already kind of realizing my Queer identity and wasn’t boy-crazy, I was clumsy and didn’t know how to do my make-up and hair to look like everyone else, and I was a bookworm with glasses and braces and bad social skills. I was outside the “tribe” of the popular girls and was made to suffer for it.

          I’m not saying we should do away with tribal allegiances. However, IMHO, we need to examine what purpose they serve and how they affect others who are outside the “privileged tribes.”

        2. Rukduk

          Oh tribalism can be incredibly positive. It’s probably the only reason our species has come as far as it has. The one real downside to tribalism is that it creates this sense of “otherness” to people outside the tribal group. And that “otherness” leads to things like racism, sexism, etc. But when it’s not promoting “otherness”, tribalism is a beautiful thing that creates a sense of belonging and the means to survive.

    4. Derek

      you’re saying that no person, no matter how terrible they are, deserves death for their actions? that’s some hardcore pacifism there
      normally I’d say that’s a valid point of view, but something tells me me you’re busy here to hate on Amber :/

      1. Sylphiod

        Yes, I do believe that. If I didn’t believe that I would have already gone and finished myself off, I hate myself to that extent.
        Anyways yeah you are correct about me not likely Amber. I haven’t been a fan of amber since she punched Danny, but my view would be the same if for example Amber beat up Danny to point of brokenness bones and crippled him and joe said he tried to kill Amber well protecting Danny, my opinion would be the same of joe.

        1. DinaWho

          Since when did Amber ever punch Danny o_o

        2. Gecko

          Hang on. When did Amber punch Danny? I don’t remember that.

        3. Derek

          Amber never punched Danny, what are you talking about

    5. Makkabee

      Rather appropriate that that opinion came from someone with a Mary icon.

      Amber wanted to kill someone, a horrible someone who delights in hurting and killing others, but she didn’t, and she feels guilty about even wanting to kill in the heat of the moment, and for THAT you write her off as unredeemable?

      1. Sylphiod

        Wait she does feel quilty I was matching Joyce’s face to Amber. Boy do I owe an apology.

    6. Fart Captor

      It’s great that you’ve lead such a charmed life that you’ve never been hurt so badly as to wish harm on the person who did it to you, but you’re being an incredibly judgemental ass.

      People have the right to be angry when someone has hurt them like this. They have the right to feel rage. They SHOULD.

      If you can seriously claim that Amber’s actions were justified self-defense, but think she’s a monster for how she felt while she was defending herself, then either you’re incredibly naive about what it’s like to be fighting for your life, or there is just something seriously wrong with you.

      1. Delicious Taffy

        There’s that term, again. “Charmed life”, with a negative connotation to it. I don’t understand why it’s seen as a negative thing for someone to have been lucky enough not to be subjected so some of the various horrors of life. I’ve seen this elsewhere, as well and it just doesn’t make sense to me. Like, can you really blame a person for being in such a low-risk environment? Isn’t that basically the ideal for quite a few people on this site alone?

        1. Jaime

          I personally think it’s equivalent to the idea of “privilege.” Yes, we can’t choose what family/race/culture/time period/geographical location/socioeconomic class into which we’re born. Some of us are more privileged than others due to no action on our own part.

          I think the negative connotation of “charmed” comes when people don’t recognize their privilege. I’ve over-shared some of the hardships I’ve experienced. Yet I am a white person who was born in the U.S. to U.S. citizens who were also born here. I am cisgender. I was born and grew up in the Northeast U.S., which meant that I was exposed to more liberal attitudes than a lot of people in this country. I grew up in a middle-class household, bordering on upper-middle-class. I always had access to good schools. I had and have a mom who always supported me.

          I’ve talked (probably too much) about the abuse and harrassment (including sexual assault) I’ve suffered. But I’m well aware that what I’ve experienced is a pale shadow of what a lot of other people, less privileged than me, have experienced.

          I try really really REALLY hard to remain aware of the fact that I am “lucky” and I am privileged. That doesn’t mean that my experience is invalid; rather that my experience has been better than that of a lot of other people who weren’t as “charmed” as I was due to an accident of birth.

          I think the idea of a “charmed life” carries a negative connotation when the person with the life in question assumes that their experience applies to everyone else and makes value judgements about other people based on their privileged experience. I kind of hate the phrase “check your privilege” for various reasons (mostly because I’ve had primarly white cis het men saying it to me) but I think people who don’t acknowlege and explore their privilege can maybe be “blamed” for assuming everyone else comes from the “low-risk” environment they do.

        2. ischemgeek

          What Jaime said.

          And also the whole charmed life thing is pretty hand-in-hand with the whole privilege thing.

          Like, very often you’re extorted to “walk a mile” in the shoes of someone who is mistreating you – but that damn near always goes down the privilege and power gradient. I was told by teachers who had great relationships with their parents and were firmly in the “kids these days think getting told ‘no’ is abuse” camp to walk a mile in the shoes of the guy who would punch the wall next to my head and threaten to kill me. I was told by my parents to walk a mile in the shoes of the kids who harassed me all day every day. I was told by my father to walk a mile in the shoes of my mom, who berated my sister and I for how much junk food we ate, how we dressed, etc – and who would manipulate and sabotage me out of following my interests and into doing what she felt “appropriate” for me. I could go on.

          My point isn’t that priviledged/ charmed people don’t deserve empathy. Of course they do. My point is that empathy needs to go both ways – and very often it doesn’t.

          Instead of coming down in judgement of Joyce’s feelings, try to understand exactly how hurt she was by Ryan that she wishes death upon him. Think of how much emotional damage has to be done to someone as genuinely good-natured and giving as Joyce is, to make her wish death upon a person. Spite and hate don’t come naturally to Joyce – but she hates Ryan. Consider where Joyce is coming from, before you judge her.

        3. butting

          So much yes to both Jaime and ischemgeek.

          I’m also thinking: I’ve got a charmed life in this context myself. Friends though have come to me in need (even after all these years I find it hard to unpack just why that is) which has gradually made me sharply aware of what others go through.

          And I see others around me going through their charmed lives oblivious to what’s around them, oblivious to how many of their friends have been raped that they just don’t know about. (Vimes when he hears a racist joke? that’s me with rape jokes. oh, and racist ones, too.)

          I always have to wonder: why don’t they know?

          That question can be turned around as why do I know, and I can’t answer that. But I look at how the pushback against rape culture is gradually getting louder and louder, starting (that I noticed) with Thelma and Louise (aw the Geena Davis Institute YES) and growing and growing, with MRA mass shootings and rapists turned free and media where stories like those on this page are more and more open and common.

          And I think… but, people are seeing all this, yeah? And seeing the stats? And realising that those stats apply to those they know, those they care about, and that there might be stories there that they haven’t been told?

          Sometimes they do. But many don’t, and I can’t figure out any reason other than privilege for that.

          (the ugliest one I’ve noticed is: someone buys into MRA myths, and pushes back against the stats because “they’re saying I’m a rapist!” … which they’re not, the stats are pointing at where the victims are, but when I hear that argument my batsense starts tingling, y’know?)

        4. ischemgeek

          One of the times my father threatened to kill me was a blow up that got started when I replied to “Do you think I’m a rapist?” during a conversation about date rape with “If you ever used alcohol to knock someone out so she’d have sex with you, hell yeah I think you’re a rapist. That’s rape.”

          I have a bad case of poor brain to mouth filter. I just blurt shit out when I am anxious. Which often gets me praised as brave but no my anxiety level just hit the point where I can’t brain about social rules anymore and I start saying what I am thinking.

          But in all honesty my answer to that question in that context is damn near always gonna be yes if I am being honest. People don’t ask that question except to emotionally blackmail you into giving a pass on sexually predatory behavior.

    7. OBBWG

      Joyce is speaking out of extreme, if justified, anger. She knows not what she is saying. Hopefully, Amber will explain to her why trying to kill Ryan was wrong. Amber realizes she did a terrible thing and, in her mind, is absolutely unworthy of thanks. Joyce, given her background, will understand this very quickly and will regret her statement.

      Amber fully understands the horror of what she did. I read the “I tried” as regret, not pride. She wishes she had had more control. She realizes she became the monster. This makes her very redeemable. You must recognize you need redemption before you can seek it. This may be her turning point.

      1. Fart Captor

        I think Joyce knows exactly what she’s saying. What she doesn’t understand is the psychological damage it would’ve done to Amber.

        And what Amber needs to understand is that she didn’t “become the monster”. She defended herself and her friends from a violent rapist. That she should not be ashamed for having been so enraged that she wanted to kill him in that moment. There is no more appropriate situation to have such feelings.

      2. OBBWG

        My main point was that both characters are redeemable, regardless of your opinion about what happened. I did a little bit too much placation in my previous post, so allow me to clarify.

        To paraphrase Dorothy, it is easy to wish someone dead in abstract, but actually being there changes your perspective.

        In my personal opinion, whatever Amber did was justified. She was there. Ryan came at her and Dorothy with a deadly weapon. Ignoring the legal implications, if she had killed Ryan, he brought it on himself. If she had merely disarmed him and held him until the police arrived, that would have been her equally correct choice. She had to make the decision in reality, not in abstract.

        Joyce spoke out of justifiable anger, but she was not there. Had she been there, she might have had a different opinion.

    8. Cerberus

      Then I am a monster by your account, because I absolutely have wished people dead in the past and will continue to do so in the future.

      1. BigDogLittleCat

        I’m another Scum Monster and feel no guilt about it. If I had the power to wish people to drop dead, I expect I’d use it.

        It helps to know that an internet stranger would blast the people who want to hurt you and your friends, know that this internet stranger sees red on your behalf and is wishing right along with you.

        1. BigDogLittleCat

          “If it helps”

      2. ischemgeek

        Same.

        Personally, it isn’t ones’ thoughts and emotions that decide whether they’re good or not, your actions decide it. I can fantasize about hurting the folks who made hurting me into their sport for a decade all I want – and then the very same day I can donate money to help one of them out from a personal tragedy, because as much as my subconscious wants me to think I am, I am not, in fact a monster.

        By giving them the empathy and care they refused to show me, I reject the hold their abuse had over me. I will be the better person – not because I have to be, but because I want to be.

        Even as some small dark part of me hopes the ones who haven’t had the guts or decency to apologize in the decade since then die in a fire. I acknowledge my dark side. It exists and it’s part of me. On the other hand –
        I am not my darkest impulses. I am the sum of my actions. What I think never makes its way out of my head. What I do and say is what has the power to make someone’s life better or tear their world apart.

        1. ischemgeek

          Note: The above holds true of damn near anything. It doesn’t matter if you hold progressive thoughts if you do not also take progressive actions for example. Like if you live in Canada and vote for a Conservative party candidate so you get lower taxes and fuck trans people who want to use the bathroom (when literally EVERY OTHER PARTY is against bathroom bills here), then you are, at best, an enabler of transphobia. I don’t care how much you “don’t mind” trans people – by your actions, you hucked trans folks under the bus for your own gain, and I’ve got a problem with that.

    9. Smiling Cat

      Heh, it’s usually only my subconscious that calls me scum.

    10. QueerBitch

      Can you imagine having such a perfect life and such an ignorance at how the world works. Deaths HAVE benefited society as a whole. Fucks not given. I love when corrupt dictators die. I love when rapists die. Forgive me while I ignore your overly moral spoiled bullshit.

    11. 3oranges

      I don’t see how you can think nobody actually deserves death, without also thinking nobody actually deserves to be written off as a monster.

      1. ArcaneDarkness

        I’m not him, but also I also disapprove the capital punishment in every case.

        If someone isn’t a psychopath, the society had a hand on making or allowing the person to end up that way, and society therefore should do the civilized thing of putting in jail for life.

        If the person is a psychopath, it is actually born this way and not completely responsible, and society therefore should do the civilized thing of putting in jail for life.

        1. thejeff

          It’s possible to disapprove of capital punishment and also wish people dead. Hell, I think we massively overuse “life without parole”. With many of the same class and race problems found in the death penalty.

          However, in cases like this, where you know the guilt because you’re personally involved or where the death occurs trying to protect yourself or others – no sympathy.

          It’s also worth noting that Amber didn’t kill him. And I suspect, for all Joyce’s rage and fear, she also wouldn’t be able to if it came down to it.

        2. 3oranges

          I also disapprove of capital punishment, full stop, but I’m not the one willing to dismiss Amber as a monster just because she’s unstable and lashed out at someone threatening to torture multiple people.

    12. woobie

      I’m sure that Ryan, or IRL people like him, made more than one attempt. And likely went farther without bottles to the face and bats to the head.

    13. helpersea

      I wish my rapist was gone. The justice system is damn near useless for helping survivors or for punishing rapists so don’t act like that’s the area everyone ahould rush to support. It just exposes victims to a stream of more trauma with the incredibly likely chance justice wont be gotten. And society does everything it can to dissuade survivors and invalidate their feelings and trauma. Like you are doing right here. Right now.

      If someone killed my rapist I would thank them. The world wpuld be better off. The only regrets I have about that is I didn’t do something when I had the chance and if that makes me irredeemable than so be it.

    14. Minder

      How fucking dare you.

      1. Minder

        Terror and disgust does not excuse this. I am sorry for your experiences. I would never wish your fears on anyone. But we are not scum.

  24. Emperor Norton II

    “I tried.”

    She tried. She actually tried to kill another human being. She did not talk about it, she did not wish for it, she did not put up a fake bravado or even genuine anger.

    She tried to kill another human being.

    And sure, it was self-defense, and sure, it was a scumbag that most likely would’ve tried to kill her if she had fought back.

    But the thing is… No matter how justified it is; to kill someone else with your own hands is something that is just about impossible to walk back from. It’s a hard line to cross even for “normal” people; people that aren’t already struggling with depression and anxiety and generally have to fight their own brain every day of their lives.

    If Amber had succeeded… Well, I think she’d would then end up killing herself over it. She would consider herself such a great monster that the best thing she could do now was to remove the monster from the world.

    And this is why it would have been so much better if Dina was allowed to work with Amber uninterrupted. Because Joyce is waaaaay out of her league here. Joyce may think she’s comforting Amber, but the only thing she managed to do was reminding Amber of how close she came crossing that line that, for her, would be a final condemnation nail in her coffin.

    Dina was making progress in making Amber hate herself less for what she did. Dina was reminding Amber that it is not a monster thing to do to try and protect your friends.

    And all Joyce achieved just now by barging in, was to remind Amber of the main reason she hates herself so much right now: That she genuinely tried to kill another human.

    Dammit, Joyce! I love your good intentions and everything, but dammit, your actual actions are not meeting up with said intentions, and no matter how much I love you in general, I cannot help but think you are, right now, paving a certain road with those intentions.

    Because Amber tried.

    1. Spencer

      I might be projecting my own views here, but I feel the same way. I think if Amber actually did kill Ryan she would eventually kill herself over it.

    2. Emperor Norton II

      *If she had fought back, but without the skills she possesses.

    3. Halpful

      welp, that “actually” woke up some memories. huh. I’ve tried. I was young and in a blind rage and thankfully I’m rather crap at hurting people. yeah… it’s very unsettling to discover you’re capable of wanting that. it wasn’t even anything big that made me snap, barely even bullying. but for a second there before my memory cut out, I honestly wanted to kill her.

      it seems ironic, somehow, that it happened at a christian summer camp. and it only just occurred to me that, afaik, nobody tried to talk to me about it afterwards, not even the adults who were there to pull us apart. I just went off and sat by myself for a while feeling stunned, and then it was dinnertime, and I don’t remember anything more.

      1. Emperor Norton II

        *AGOS*

        And I’m pretty sure you’re glad that you never succeeded at it.

        Also, could it possibly have been because you’d faced a lot of low-level bullying and teasing (and sometimes it would be hard to tell which was which) over a period of time, and what they did to you was that proverbial straw breaking the camel’s back?

        1. Halpful

          yup, it was the last straw, probably on the last day of camp too.

          and… I don’t think I ever considered the *possibility* of succeeding at it. there’s a wall I bounce off when my thoughts go even a tiny bit in that direction, like, it just does not compute. I might as well have been wanting to blow up the moon.

          I think part of that is that nobody takes it seriously when the harmless little white girl tries to be violent. so if everyone else didn’t act like it was a big deal, I probably guessed that I wasn’t supposed to make a big deal of it either.

        2. Emperor Norton II

          I’m not surprised it was a back-breaking straw. I like to say that bigotry usually is more like water-drop torture (one drop is harmless; ten thousand drops in a row is not…And it never stops), and the same can often be said about bullying.

          And in case it wasn’t clear, I am also very very glad you never succeeded at it.

    4. Sylphiod

      Yeah I misplaced the emotion Amber showed in that last panel, I’ve already realized it and well it doesn’t excuse it I have apologized.

      1. Emperor Norton II

        Well, my original comment was never a response to you; just my own feelings on things. But I do know the context about your own posts, including your full-on apology further down; so just in case you happen to read this, know that I bear you no ill will whatsoever.

  25. Jaime

    I’m…really torn here. On one hand, Joyce is absolutely intruding and that is not okay. Amber doesn’t “owe” Joyce catharsis or closure or anything like that. Come on, Joyce, have a little empathy for how Amber might be feeling right now and realize she may NOT want to hear from you *at all.* IMHO, Joyce is being inexcusably dismissive of Amber’s wishes and personal boundaries.

    On the other hand, I’m not sure a bulldozer would stop Joyce at this point because she *needs* to say this. And maybe Amber “needs” to hear it? (I’m really not sure about the latter – Joyce is definitely violating Amber’s stated wishes and I’m not sure I can ever call that a positive thing.) Amber has been calling herself a “monster.” But there is a good chance she saved Joyce another incredibly traumatizing experience with Ryan. Given Ryan’s propensity for violence, it’s possible she even saved Joyce’s life. As I’ve said elsewhere, I am a strong believer in non-violence. However, I don’t find it in me to condemn Amber, even a little tiny bit, for what she did to Ryan. I’m glad she didn’t kill him. That’s about it. And I say that mostly because Ryan wasn’t worth Amber becoming a murderer.

    As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m familiar with this level of rage and with the fear of what I might do in that kind of rage. So far in my life I’ve thankfully not landed up in a situation like Ryan did with Amber. However, I *have* cut people I loved to pieces verbally in a way that ended relationships for good and/or left lasting scars years later. It IS really scary and sad to realize that the only reason you didn’t do more damage is because of circumstances preventing it, not because you thought “better” of it.

    I REALLY WANT TO SEE JOYCE AND AMBER IN THERAPY. I sincerely hope that we find out that part of the conditions of Amber coming back to the dorms and school is that she has to go to therapy, because she needs it to deal with how she is feeling and what she’s done. IMHO, Joyce needs it too. She came to college with a particular worldview that is being challenged over and over. After this strip, I think Joyce is capable of Amber/Amazi-Girl levels of violence and rage and that worries me for her.

    1. thejeff

      Yeah, I’m torn here too. Joyce is crossing boundaries and is very likely not the right person for this job. OTOH, “leave me alone to wallow in my self-loathing because I’m a monter” isn’t really something I’m comfortable with either.

  26. C.T Phipps

    The difference between you, Amber, and all the evils of the campus from Toedad to Sir to Blaine to Ryan is that you don’t WANT to do the evil that you do. The others do. That’s not a small difference even if the others might pretend to remorse.

    1. Spencer

      Amber doesn’t do evil. She loses her temper sometimes, but she doesn’t do evil.

      1. C.T Phipps

        She wanted to beat Sal within an inch of her life. She is fully of fury and hate and loathing she wants to release. Not evil, no, you’re right, but pain she wants to share.

        1. Spencer

          I mean, yes, but there’s a difference between trying to do something awful because you’re still reeling from childhood trauma and eventually overcoming it, and “evil.”

        2. C.T Phipps

          Everyone has a reason. It’s often a shitty reason but everyone does.

        3. Fart Captor

          No. There’s a difference between doing something terrible because you’ve got it worked up in your head that you’re doing a good thing, and doing something terrible knowing damn well that it will hurt people who don’t deserve it

        4. thejeff

          Is there?

          My gut instinct says yes, but an awful lot of evil in the world has been done by people who’d been convinced they were doing good things.

        5. Fart Captor

          Yes, there is. Both are bad, but one is dramatically worse.

          And in this case, she didn’t even go through with it. Sure, she still did some bad things before she finally backed off, but Phipps was talking about what she WANTED to do to Sal.

          And unlike Mary, who thinks God is on her side, or Robin being careless and uninterested in the consequences of her actions, Amber believed she was doing right because she was letting a painful childhood trauma skew her judgement. Her actions were still bad, but nowhere near what I would call “evil”

        6. C.T Phipps

          Bigotry is a kind of warm fuzzy cushion that allows you to think “those people” are bad and you are good. It’s the ugliest form of human belief because it can turn otherwise good people into vile ones as they now have a target for what they perceive as righteous wrath.

        7. Fart Captor

          In this case “those people” refers to “people who held a knife to my friend’s throat and threatened my life”.

          Racism played a part in her subsequent actions, but the situation was much more complicated than that. And again, I’m not denying that she did bad things. Stalking, harassing, and attacking Sal were all bad things, leading her down a worse path. But it was one she turned back from. We she finally confronted Sal, she couldn’t go through with it.

        8. thejeff

          In this case, I certainly agree. Less so as a general rule.

    2. butting

      She’s aware that she exults in it though (take a good look at her closeups in the red panels we’ve seen), and is probably misreading that: I think she’s seeing it as her being evil and broken (or Amazi-Girl telling Amber that she’s evil and broken), when it’s far more likely to be her reaction to not being under anyone’s power at that time, and not understanding the subtler ways that Blaine has set her up for that.

  27. Brian

    i dunno, I don’t see a problem with rape being punishable by death.

    1. Irredentist

      Well, that gets into a broader issue about capital punishment in general, I suppose.

      1. C.T Phipps

        I admit, my attitude toward capital punishment is ambivalent despite the fact it’s against my beliefs. I’m against capital punishment but primarily because so many innocent people and particularly minorities get it while white rich rapists get probation.

    2. Smiling Cat

      I generally agree, but I’m not particularly objective about it.

    3. Ferdinand Rosenthal

      To be fair, we have total picture. And then Ryan went after them for revenge, allowing Amber to defend herself, which can and does include killing your attacker.

      In the real world, we have to add how we juggle the power of the state to the problem.

      It’s been a long road to grapple SOME power out of the armed bands we call governments, and taking the immediate power of death out of there hands is a cornerstone of our present civilization, where we go over everything, put them to trial under the impartial law (in theory, of course, I will not sugarcoat it – its not perfect), and then kill them with the sanction of the citizenry via jury or by the state.

      And even then, mistakes happen. Someone innocent dying can often lead to a slippery slope that leads more people who are innocent dying; which is why life-long imprisonment has become more and more palatable: locked away, forever away from civilization, stripped of our most natural liberties/freedom of movement and decision making, maybe even penned off so much they don’t even see anyone else or other inmates for the rest of their lives.

      We sometimes scoff at that: “Why do they get three meals a day, a warm room, hygiene, and clothes on their backs when X, Y, or Z don’t”, but being stuck in one place, under the hard power of law, sometimes so much to the point of being devoid of human contact for decades, could be argued to be a fate worse than death; and if they’re not out there harming other innocents or even criminals of a ‘lesser evil’, then I’d say that’s justice, if not even revenge, enough.

      1. Ferdinand Rosenthal

        And I’m fully aware of how, across the west, there are problems. Problems with the state and agents of the state being partial, throwing their social norms against victims, and how many rapists chillingly go, how many Juries and Judges and Lawyers decide that the rapist deserves another chance, was just making a mistake, that the victim is just blowing the situation out of proportion.

        But I would warn that immediately thereof going into death for rapists or murderers is a bit of a wrong reaction.

        What we should do is to enforce and reform the system, to take the matter seriously, to train the agents of the state and its long arm with more discipline and sensitivity, to oil the wheels of justice with efficiency. And I would say the same for a lot more of society’s problems with the system overall. I do not bar more radical action, of course, nor will I scoff at total apathy or disillusion – such is totally understandable – but the apparatus isn’t just going to go away without action, gradual or instant, peaceful or aggressive. Nor will whatever follow it benefit from a disconnected citizenry, which may just end with the status quo. And we have tools to change it, from throwing ourselves into the beast to operate it or throwing ourselves at the beast to make it yield and change, and that is, even in these seemingly dark days, still possible with concentrated effort and bloodless sacrifice and public servitude.

  28. Kris

    Normally I’d advocate that killing is wrong but…eh. *shrug* kinda don’t care this time. That makes ME the monster! We’re ALL monsters now!

    1. a4lbi

      *waves from under the bed*S’up

  29. matt

    Welcome Joyce, to the other side of humanity; where those who do such horrible acts do not deserve forgiveness and you only wish death upon them. They say that ‘god’ forgives all sins? Well, humans don’t. And Neither should ‘god’.

    I quote ‘god’ because i’m not a believer. I believe in Kharma and its various forms of retribution.

  30. L!ghtn!ng

    So, he’s not dead? Hm, I’m not sure yet how I feel about that.

  31. OBBWG

    While others do character analysis, here is a quick writing analysis.

    Joyce and Amber do something close to a role reversal. Upbeat, happy Joyce wishing death on someone. Dark, violent Amber regretting she was as violent as she was (my take on the last panel). Both staying completely in character while doing this. Wow. Just Wow.

    1. Makkabee

      But it’s not really a role reversal, because Joyce’s generally upbeat personality has always included (though generally masked) a capacity for rage. It doesn’t come out for trivial reasons, but it’s there. Remember, JOYCE is the one who put the scar on rapist douchefrigate’s face.

      And we’ve seen Amber in this self-loathing place a lot, too. Angry at her own (perceived) weakness, angry at her capacity for violence, feeling the need to create an alternate persona because she feels the real her just isn’t good enough.

      It’s true we haven’t seen these aspects of Joyce an Amber’s personalities playing off each other before, but it’s not really a reversal of their usual interaction either. It’s an entirely new dynamic for them.

  32. Queen Anthai

    All I want for Christmas is to know that Ryan is in jail for decades.

  33. C.T Phipps

    I don’t know if Willis would go there but does anyone else think that Mary might have been one of Ryan’s previous victims? One of the silent ones? It seems crazy but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where that story went.

    1. Cerberus

      It’s possible. She’s absolutely a prime target by his MO.

      1. C.T Phipps

        That would be a fucking dark explanation why she’s in a dramatically different kind of mood than her usual self.

        1. Cerberus

          It would. I don’t think it’ll happen though because the comment threads would be a flaming sewer after it’d be revealed.

        2. Smiling Cat

          Wouldn’t be the first time.

        3. C.T Phipps

          I agree. It’s not like Willis has shied away from pouring fear gas into Gotham’s sewer and then microwaving it.

        4. Ferdinand Rosenthal

          If Mary, say, was a victim of his sexual predation, I’ll still feel terrible for her. No one deserves that, and if her actions, her lashing out and bigotry, stems from that, maybe even just to reclaim some power she felt she has lost, then there is chance for engagement and discussion and dialogue and re-empowerment in universe, as much, I hope, as would be possible if it happened to someone I knew in real life who I could help.

        5. Ellen

          There’s precedent for posting a new strip with comment section closed, isn’t there?

        6. Ferdinand Rosenthal

          IIRC, Carla and Mary’s big scene and the revelation that Carla is trans got some people acting like total dickwads. A huge mess.

        7. Pablo360

          Willis will obviously restrain himself to spare his fans the hahaha I can’t finish that sentence

          But yeah I doubt it’ll happen

        8. Tomas

          Oh heck, I think you’re right. This could be the secret sympathetic backstory people have been expecting ever since Mary first started kicking puppies.

    2. rabid rabbit

      Lots of people have speculated about that of late. And it would lend a different complexion to what she says here: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/02-choosing-my-religion/avoid/

  34. Keulan

    While Ryan’s a horrible shit, it’s probably better for Amber that she didn’t kill him.

    1. Minder

      That’s how I feel about it.

  35. Irredentist

    As the topic of the day seems to be about the morality of taking a human life, perhaps I should take a side? I will preface this by first saying that I do not in general support capital punishment as practiced by contemporary nations. In my opinion human life should not under any circumstances be sacrificed unless absolutely necessary. But how do we define necessity? Self defense is the obvious answer. But how about about discouragement? One of the primary bases of punishment is that it will discourage others from committing the same crime. If we assume that this is indeed effective, is execution of rapists justifiable, even if unnecessary? An interesting question.

    1. C.T Phipps

      At the risk of pointing out the Wall between Fiction and RealityTM, Ryan is an objectively evil character that we can judge with more certainty and absolute guilt than tends to be the case in reality.

      THE MAKING OF A MURDERER documentary, for example, is as close as you’re going to get to the uncertainty of real life criminal proceedings.

      1. Irredentist

        Absolutely, and therein lies one of the key problems with capital punishment.

      2. Jaime

        Despite my anger problem, I strongly oppose capital punishment, for many of the reasons you’ve already stated (especially including how it’s so often racist – poor Black men get killed a LOT more than rich white men).

        In real life, very few people are born rapists (I’m leaving aside the discussion of sociopathy because that’s a thread in and of itself.) In real life, something happened to make Ryan into a rapist. Did he grow up in an environment that promoted rape culture? Did he internalize the social acceptance of rape and sexual assault/harrassment in the U.S.? Was he abused and/or even raped himself? (Note: I am NOT SAYING AT ALL that people who have been abused necessarily become abusers themselves!) We don’t know. We don’t know what brought him to this point and made him into this person. That makes him easy to hate.

        I know I’m a bleeding-heart liberal. However, I’d much rather spend my time, anger, and energy on trying to CHANGE the things that lead to rape and other crimes. I was on twitter earlier today and saw a lot of people reacting to a tweet by Will Saletan. He said that parents should prevent rape by teaching their daughters to say “no” to men more forcefully because “men sense women’s willingness to yield.”

        Excuse me a moment.

        ?????????????????????????????

        Okay. I feel a wee bit less stabby. But I was encouraged to see how many people called him out on his bullsh!te, including by posting articles and studies debunking his ridiculous victim-blaming claim.

        To me, capital punishment is essentially closing the barn door after the horses have already escaped. IMHO, we need to CHANGE the ideologies that lead to atrocities like rape and violent crime in general. That’s a lot harder and more expensive than simply killing people who committ these crimes but, IMHO, ultimately a lot more effective.

        1. C.T Phipps

          My wife, a survivor of assault herself, asked me how people who were assaulted could become sexual predators themselves. I said something like, “They don’t but it’s a lot more common than anyone ever admits. Therefore a lot of predators are sexually assaulted because there’s so much out there unspoken. Victims don’t always become victimizers, there’s just a lot of victims.”

        2. Jaime

          My mom is (among other things) a doctor of clinical psychology. Her speciality is working with some of the most mentally unwell people out there. (For example, she once had a patient who was almost definitely a serial killer. She also worked at Danvers State Hospital – the inspiration for Arkham Asylum – before it closed down) There is a serious limit to what she can tell me about her patients because of doctor/patient confidentiality, but I worked for her in her private practice for a while so I could legally know a little bit more than I could just being her daughter. And of course there is a serious limit to how much *I* can disclose specifics about her career and patients.

          However, mom has said that almost all of her patients experienced some type of severe trauma in their lives before committing the atrocities they did. She has said, “You can’t abuse a child and expect anything good to come out of it.” It can become a vicious cycle that we really as a society need to break.

          I don’t want to say too much, because I’m honestly not that hard to find online. However, my mom was the victim of severe abuse. And, from what she’s told me, her mother and father both suffered far worse abuse from their families than she did. The only kernel of empathy for my mom’s parents I can find within myself (especially for her dad, my maternal grandfather – my mom still won’t tell me most of what he did to her) is knowing how much they in their turn suffered when they were children who couldn’t fight back. They identified with the aggressor and internalized the abuse as “okay” and passed it down to their children in turn.

          I just have to add that my mom is the *perfect* example of how it is possible to break the cycle of abuse! She made a conscious decision to reject and not propogate the abuse her parents inflicted upon her, and went into psychology to help others who suffered as she did. She has never ever EVER abused me or my sisters and instead has pretty much been The Best Mom Ever. I’m probably objectively too old to be calling my mom for advice and support all the time, but I still do because she knows All The Things! ?

          Okay, I’m having my feels and being TMI all over the comment section again. It’s probably time to get some sleep. ?

    2. thejeff

      @Irredentist: In terms of deterrence, I doubt the death penalty for rapists would do anything. If anything, it would make it even harder to get convictions. The problem with rape and the legal system isn’t that the penalties aren’t harsh enough, it’s that it’s so easy to get away with. And, in the non-forcibly grabbed the victim off the street variety, so often socially acceptable.

      Find away to get the current penalties applied reliably and that’s where any deterrence will come from.

      1. Jaime

        According to statistics I’ve seen, at least in the U.S. the death penalty has NOT acted as a deterrent on violent crime. And, due to our appeals process (an entire other discussion), death row inmates actually are INCREDIBLY expensive for taxpayers and the prison system.

  36. Sam

    TW: rape mention.

    On one hand in response to Joyce I am like: !?!?!?!?

    And on the other I am like: Calm your anxious self down self. Of course that is a messed up thing to say but Joyce has every right to be really mad and wish he was dead when he planned to rape her and likely had raped others before her. No one would say he didn’t deserve it – legally and ethically it would still be wrong but Joyce couldn’t go outside by herself because of him while he was off potentially harming other girls and getting away with it, that can make people feel justifiably angry to the point where wishing death on such people is more morally grey than black or white.

    This strip over all has made me feel pretty tense and anxious though, I don’t think I want to even read it again.

  37. Aphrodite

    From my point of view some people deserve to die. (Is that bad? my mom has several times said to me, quote “you can be really cold and calculating”)

    My outlook is: if you kill a murderer they will never murder again, if you kill a rapist they will never rape again. (For those who watch the daredevil series I pretty much agree with the Punisher)

    1. C.T Phipps

      I became deeply uncomfortable with Frank Castle when I thought about all those guys dealing drugs in the 80s who were treated as slavers and mass murderers he killed. Because they treated narcotics as a Judge Dredd Type A felony.

      1. Aphrodite

        Drugs are a gray area for me, if you’re an adult then it’s your body and you should be allowed to do what you want with it, but if you sell heroin to 12 year olds then you deserve a Judge Dredd style execution. (From my point of view)

    2. Cerberus

      There are some people who only really live to actively make the world worse. Serial rapists and abusers, bigoted politicians who make their living spreading hate and trying to harm people. When they finally die, their reigns of terror end though the harm they did lives on.

      I wouldn’t advocate for killing them all, but I’m not overly inclined to deliver performative grief for their passing.

      And there’s a few for very personal reasons involving friends and mentees no longer with me, who I will go out of my way to piss on their graves for.

      1. Aphrodite

        Abuse and bigotry are far to broad to say every one of them needs death.

        1. Cerberus

          Which is why I specify those who spend their entire lives enriching themselves actively making people’s lives less survivable and actively worse. And specified serial rapists and abusers.

          Like, being a bit of a bigot, yeah sure, you might have other redeeming qualities. Being a rapist or abuser, maybe you can get your shit together down the line. But if you spend you’re entire life making everyone else’s life worse?

          Then yeah, no tears for their funeral.

          And for the pissing, I’m reserving that for those whose direct actions caused the deaths of those close to me.

        2. C.T Phipps

          I tend to view the world in terms of Twin Peaks.

          You have the Ben Hornes who are evil because it makes them rich and they don’t think of the consequences of their actions.

          You have the Leland Palmers who are evil covered by a mask of good and societal approval.

          You have the Leos who are just violent cruel men and probably high on substance abuse.

          You also have the Bobbys who aren’t evil but do bad things because they’re weak.

          You also have the BOBs if you believe in supernatural evil–things which are inexplicable in how much they hurt and corrupt for seemingly no reason at all other than to be shits.

        3. C.T Phipps

          Speaking of which, Cerberus, I wanted to make a comment that I’ve mentioned you to my wife. I use you now as an example of someone who has been a force for good in your social circle and a supporter of the rights for people who have had theirs severely shit on. You’ve helped inspire her to do more for trans rights in our area.

        4. Cerberus

          Aww, thanks. That makes my day.

    3. Queezle

      I am with Gandalf on this one:
      “many that live deserve death. some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Ten do not be to eager to deal out death in jugement”
      Its not that I don’t think the world would not be better of with out some people but who am I to make that call? Or anyone realy?

      1. Eldritch Gentleman

        Maybe those who are in danger of falling victim to such a person? In my country there was a case of one guy who was terrorizing and assaulting people but Police didn’t really do anything about it. Finally he went too far and several guys from that village killed him and then They went to prison. Doesn’t sound like Justice to me.

        1. Cerberus

          Ironically enough, things would be better if we had functional police and justice system. If rapists went to jail, if white collar criminals went to jail, if those who promoted hatred for their own enrichment went to jail, if those who steal countries went to jail, there would be no need to hope for extrajudicial eternal justice to befall them.

          Some people cannot function in society without hurting others and need to be separated humanely until they can if they can.

        2. Eldritch Gentleman

          Very much so.

        3. Aphrodite

          Who will judge what “promotion of hatred ” is?

  38. C.T Phipps

    But yes, I’m going to join the rounds of everyone here that isn’t really caring about a one-dimensional but all too realistic scumbag like Ryan getting the blade. I’m sorry to say the only reason I am glad he’s alive is not because he’s an in-universe human being but because it will make Amber’s healing easier knowing he’s just going to be in prison for the rest of his life.

    1. Aphrodite

      First time offense and a teenager or early twenties, i suspect a 5 to 10 years sentence, not life.

      1. Fart Captor

        Any sentence can be a life sentence if you die before they release you! He could always end up getting severely constipated while in prison and perforating his lower intestine. Or getting some kind of super-diarrhea and pooping himself to death

        1. butting

          And then his ghost could haunt Cyclops? … plausible.

      2. butting

        Let’s not forget that the charges aren’t just attempted rape and possible actual rape (hell, hope not) in the recent past, but assault (at the rally) (though, tricky since it involved Amazi-Girl and Sal), stalking with intent to harm, felony aggravated assault, maybe threatening to kill, and possibly even attempted murder.

        Rape reports with no backing evidence typically don’t go anywhere, but I can see that if a few women who’ve encountered Ryan in the past came forward to the DA then there might be just that much less incentive to work up a Stanford plea bargain.

        1. thejeff

          Or if some previous victims had already reported and had rape kits done, but couldn’t identify their attacker, DNA testing could easily link him to them.

  39. Cerberus

    Comic Reactions:

    Oof, this one is tough cause I see exactly where both of them are coming from.

    Panel 1: Like, here we get Amber’s situation. She’s out of spoons and not feeling social contact and can’t really handle being comforted or talked to at the moment. And she’s asking for time and distance. And well, it makes absolute sense why. She’s been through hell, she’s just coming off a major anxiety attack, had a disastrous interaction with her mom and knows she’s low on her ability to interact with people without vomiting all her stuff at them and potentially hurting them.

    And I’ve been there so many times. Knowing I’m too low on spoons to be good company and thus needing to be left alone.

    But there’s also a side to it that supports Joyce here. Amber has tended to isolate when dealing with bad things in ways that have left her with even less resources than usual and she’s going to at least need a safety plan tonight if nothing else.

    That all said, consent is the key part of all this. You can’t support someone against their will and doing so just fucks with shit. And what Amber needs right now is to believe that her requests and wants have value and she’s not just this toxic monster to be around and that means letting things settle before she starts talking with people.

    Panel 2: And it feels this scene is part and parcel of Joyce’s evangelical culture bad instincts with regards to consent. People in crisis in that faith are always to be supported with Jesus and never ever allowed to put up boundaries to take care of stuff themselves.

    Panel 3: Though thank you so much Joyce for closing the door on all this.

    Panels 4-5: And here’s where I also understand Joyce’s point of view. And think she’s doing something positive here. Most people would come with sympathy and treat her like a poor victim (which she doesn’t feel like at the moment) or like a monster everyone should be scared of (thanks Mike, you cockbag). But Joyce does something important here.

    She treats Amber’s violence as heroic. And that’s meaningful, because the Amber alter has been focused on the idea that AG’s violence gets to be heroic and serve the greater good, while her own violence is a feeding of a dark part of herself and monstrous and abusive.

    In reality, AG’s violence isn’t always good and she frequently finds an excuse to commit assault for crimes like petty theft. And Amber’s violence isn’t always bad even if it feels like it, seeing as how her most recent action saved Joyce and Dorothy and so on.

    And given that Dorothy has been ghosting her, it was important that she heard this from Joyce. The gratitude, the assertion that her violence was heroic and didn’t go far enough.

    And that pairs nicely with Dina’s point and Joyce’s past. All three of them have committed an act of violence to save a loved one. Dina tackling Toedad, Joyce punching Toedad, Amber stabbing the fuck out of Rapist McGee to protect good friends. And so if Amber insists on viewing her own action of violence as monstrous, then she must spread that to all of them as well and she’s not going to do that, because she knows their violences did not detract from what they sought to do and were dependent on the situations they were in.

    And that’s the lesson Amber needs to internalize right now. That her dad was awful not because he was and is physically violent, but because he found any excuse to use it on people who couldn’t fight back without massive consequences. Used it on people he swore he loved. Used it to control the people in his life and order them around to satisfy his ego.

    Amber is not going to become that person, even if the voices in her head and her anxiety insist she will, that every violent fantasy or fight response to trauma is proof of her dark path. That her enjoying being violent is proof she is addicted to it, that it is a poison running through her.

    And that’s going to be a long path. It might be a path she never finishes. I know I’m still balking and terrified by the narrative that I’m “doomed” to become violent and frequently worried about my more violent thoughts towards those who go out of their way to harm me.

    But it’s still a message she needs to hear, though maybe not right now when she’s out of spoons.

    1. Derek

      Dorothy is ghosting Amber?? huh? when did that happen?

      1. Spencer

        Dorothy said she wanted to avoid her interview with Amber, and the implication was that she was too traumatized to go near her.

        1. Cerberus

          What Spencer said.

        2. DinaWho

          I don’t think she can truly be said to be currently ghosting Amber though… Amber has been off campus and (it seems) out of contact with the rest of the cast for the past several days. Dorothy’s not communicating with her up to this point is no different from the amount of contact she’s had with Ethan, Joyce, or Dina.

          Now if Dotty continues to actively avoid Amber/not respond to messages she sends now that she is back on campus, then I would feel comfortable calling her behaviour ghosting.

        3. Fart Captor

          I still think she just couldn’t, because Amber wasn’t on campus, and Dorothy just couldn’t tell Walky that because he doesn’t know her secret identity

        4. Halpful

          that wasn’t how I read it. she’d told Amber she wasn’t going to be doing interviews any more just before not-ryan showed up. So there was no interview scheduled in the first place. (and/or what fart captor said)

        5. ischemgeek

          And I don’t blame Dorothy for that.

          A few years back, I was first on scene at a workplace accident. Small explosion, fire, blood and fuel and glass everywhere. Small in the scale of workplace accidents (and nobody killed thank goodness) but the second-worst thing I’ve ever seen (the worst being a bad collision with one dead and two critically injured on the highway that I was also first on scene for). I had to put out the fire and then escort the victim away from the fire and then wound up in hospital myself as a secondary casualty because asthma and smoke inhalation don’t mix well.

          Anyway, in the first week, I would shake if I had to go to the hallway where the room it happened was in. Which was bad cuz my office was across the floor. And I couldn’t talk to the casualty for a couple weeks because flashbacks (hi person I’m talking to ohai I’m looking at the wall now because if I look at your bandaged hands I see them with the skin sloughing off again) and it was hard to go down or up the stairwell we used to evacuate (they did clean the blood spatter off the floor right? Okay, I’m just seeing things).

          So, yeah. I can totally understand why Dorothy might need to avoid Amber right now. It sucks for Amber, it really does – but on the other hand, post-traumatic response is a thing and it can be a real bastard.

          And OTOH, I can also get a bit of where Amber’s coming from right now because after that incident the last thing I wanted was to get told I was a hero for having my trauma response be basically put out fire, get casualty away from fire. No thinking was happening in my head. My head was going “OHFUCKOHFUCKOHFUCKOHFUCK” as basically my only conscious thought and my body was just doing shit on its own. Turns out the shit my body did was the right shit, so yay, but it’s not like I consciously had anything to do with it.

          People were praising me for keeping my cool and being calm in an emergency – and they didn’t get that I totally and completely panicked, and it’s just that I have this weird thing where I compulsively plan for all manner of possible disasters and “workplace explosion” was one of my plans. Conscious me was off in panic-land and subconscious me executed what I’d previously planned out.

          But that’s not heroic or good judgement. I’ll cop to good preparation – but seriously if anything had not gone according to plan, I would’ve frozen. Because I was frozen. And the what if doesn’t bear thinking about.

          Which is not exactly the same sort of thing (Amber’s situation is more emotionally fraught because Blaine is an asshole) but OTOH I can really really sympathize with the kind of acute discomfort that comes from being praised as heroic for having a lucky panic response. It’s like impostor syndrome except you genuinely are an impostor.

        6. Cerberus

          Oh yeah, I fully 100% support Dorothy doing right by her own mental health needs here. Like it’s absolutely okay of her and anyone else to ghost when they need to.

          But yeah, depression is good at taking little things like that and morphing them into value judgments. Someone ghosting for their mental health ends up can become “they think you’re a monster and are running away” in a depressed brain.

        7. ischemgeek

          Yep agreed. It is a prime case of conflicting MH needs. Amber needs people to reassure her she isn’t a monster. Dorothy needs to re-establish a sense of normalcy and security. Dorothy can’t take care of herself around Amber. Amber being ghosted makes her more convinced people hate her.

        8. thejeff

          But it’s not even clear she’s doing that. She’d already cut off the interviews before the attack, apparently due to her work overload. She hasn’t had the opportunity to ghost Amber since she got back, even if she was going to.

    2. Tomas

      What do you mean by spoons?

      1. butting

        Spoon theory.

        (see also joy debt, which probably applies more if you’re more functional but doing some extra load — even if out of self-care — will drain you to the point of needing a bunch of time to recover.)

        1. Halpful

          “joy debt” is not a phrase I’ve heard before, and google isn’t helping. is it like compassion fatigue?

        2. butting

          Compassion fatigue’s related to helping/being aware of others, isn’t it? Joy debt is more of: I can spoil/reward myself by going out and having some fun with friends tonight, but it’ll mean that tomorrow I’ll have to pay that back and will probably be too wrecked to even get out of bed.

      2. StClair

        It’s become a common metaphor in some circles.
        Imagine that everyone only has a certain number of action points, tokens, etc etc, and they need to spend some of these to do anything, including mental work.
        In addition to spending them, there are many things that can temporarily or long-term reduce the total number of spoons you have to work with.
        And if you run short of spoons – because you cannot muster the mental focus, physical strength, pain tolerance, etc etc – some tasks are just going to have to get left undone. If you’re chronically short, this means you can never do everything you need to, or catch up, and things pile up higher and higher…

      3. Sam

        It is a commonly used term now for essentially energy points for the day and every action, even emotional actions, may cost them, or they may not depending on exactly how much actions drain you as an individual but the point is to get across the idea that some people struggle to get through each day.

        Sometimes good events or a good rest may increase the spoons for a few days, sometimes bad events or bad rests may reduce it for a few days – the number of spoons each day is likely never quite the same as there are likely +1s and -1s that occur but the result is that people don’t have enough to always hang out with friends or enjoy entertainment or do all the chores they want to even if their mind is nagging them to do so.

        My empathy can seriously screw me over in this regard because when someone I care about tells me they are in a really low mood, I can end up in one too and can’t enjoy anything any more and feel so empty that I just sit doing nothing for hours because my empathy has tossed out the entire cutlery drawer for them so they aren’t the only one suffering.

  40. Derek

    on the subject of capital punishment, I think Amber would be 100% justified in killing Ryan, because she knew with CERTAINTY that he was not only a rapist scumbag, but that he was planning on hurting (and maybe killing) Dorothy and Joyce as punishment for his hurt ego.

    The problem with capital punishment as enforced by a judiciary system is that there’s always a chance of error. And how do you take back a wrongful conviction when that person is dead? they’re gone forever

    TL&DR: executions should only happen if it’s absolutely certain the accused is a terrible person

  41. Cerberus

    Panels 4-5 (cont): And from the Joyce side, damn do I know this feeling well. Like, rapists leave their poison for fucking years. At this point it’s been about 9 years since my rape and I still have flashbacks and body triggers and PTSD jags about it. And every sexual assault I’ve been through just compounds it all.

    All so some fuck could get a few moments of enjoying getting away with shit on someone who was practically a corpse because I was dissociating so hard. It’s infuriating. And there are days, especially soon after an assault that I’d pay money to see my assaulters or my rapist tied to some trees Warren-during-the-Dark-Willow arc style and flayed alive.

    There are currently moments when I want nothing more than to ring the neck of some transphobe passing laws to kill me and my friends or the taunting treasonous fascist fucks of the GOP. That anger and hate runs through me and while I’m slowly making piece with the alter who carries that. It still makes me anxious because that worry that I’m going to become a monster quickly follows it.

    But yeah, this anger and rage is real and valid and important, which is why Joyce wants to be heard here. Because she’s been suffering in silence in the shadows, not even being able to go outside again and Amber gave her an amazing gift. Gave her peace of mind, a chance to vicariously live through her act of violence and get some small measure of payback for all she’s been through because of his drugging ass.

    But again, this whole thing is about consent. Despite how much she needed to say that, it also needed to wait until Amber was ready to hear it.

    Panel 7: And this panel, it’s powerful. Because she’s haunted by the fact that she tried, that she had the capacity to kill a man and would have done so if she’d had her full way. That part of her wanted to kill him for making her scared, for threatening her, to make up for all those years being scared of knives and entitled abusive shithead men thinking they could take everything while giving nothing back.

    She hates that that’s in her. But she doesn’t seem to grasp that a trauma response is not the same as her always and that wanting to kill someone who threatens you is not the same as deliberately planning to murder someone. Which again, is not something someone in that state is going to be prone to accept.

    But there’s also a hint in it. Like, a little spark that something in what Joyce said got through. She’s not holding calm and emotionless, she’s finally letting herself cry. She’s finally talking about the part that actually made her scared. Ill-timed or not, Joyce’s words seem to have gotten through to her a little bit and I’m grateful to it.

    Who knows, this might even be the beginning of the two of them supporting each other, because if I know Joyce, she’s not at all going to let this end here without over-showing her support for what Amber did and what that meant to her.

    Alt-text: Yup, that night I wanted to stab the whole damn world. I wanted to personally kill every Republican on the planet. Seeing the House vote to kill me and so many of my friends, patting themselves on the back and having big huge kegger-style parties full of smiles at getting a “win”, any “win” at the expense of real human lives, and demonstrating that they fully believed they had rigged our democracy to the point where they could openly kill us without reprisal. Yeah…

    I still loathe the GOP and everyone who voted to support them. I still loathe everyone who continues to support a criminal gang of murderers and abusers who are literally planning on exciting new ways to kill all of us for short-term money and “the glory of God”. I still feel that murderous rage when I watch the news.

    I’m trying to learn to be okay with that feeling.

    That all said, I’ll gladly punch a nazi the next time I have an encounter with one if I can overcome my freeze response (I mean, I stood my ground nonviolently last time a neo-nazi wanted to kill me, so, yeah…).

    1. Rukduk

      *appropriate gesture of support*
      As I said in the comments a couple days ago, I have cousin very dear to me who desperately needs Obamacare. And because he’s trapped in a child’s mind he doesn’t understand anything politics-wise. When the AHCA passed the House, I was tempted to use this family reunion vacation I’m on to pick up a gun for the first time in years. I occasionally do hunting (it’s one of the habits from growing up in northern Michigan I can’t quite shake) but I switched from using a gun to using a bow after one really bad night where I very nearly blew out my brains. But that night. That fucking night. I wanted to use this current vacation to buy as much ammunition as possible, “borrow” every gun my family members own during the night, and then drive all the way to D.C. and pop as many of those bastards under Paul Ryan in Congress (preferably starting with him) as I could until either the D.C. Police or the FBI or the Secret Service brought me down. Those were a very bad couple of weeks. Eventually I convinced myself not to do it, mainly by asking myself how my mother and my friends would react, but it was a close one. I honestly don’t know how I feel about what I was thinking of doing now. On the one hand, I’m glad that I talked myself out of something like that, so my mother wouldn’t have to see her oldest baby-boy show up on national news as a domestic terrorist. On the other hand, I still feel like those pricks deserved it. They celebrated. They fucking celebrated.

      1. Cerberus

        I’m glad you’re still with us.

        1. Jaime

          Me too! *offering appropriate gesture of support*

      2. Vulcanodon

        Me three! Post election was really rough, and watching them strut around like a bunch of frat boys after a game…

      3. Rukduk

        Quick addendum. This was also before the surgery for my thyroid cancer, so I was suffering from some very bad side effects thanks to an unbalanced amount of thyroid hormones. I felt like my own body was killing. Made my headspace even worse for making decisions.

    2. C.T Phipps

      *sympathy*

    3. Emperor Norton II

      “There are currently moments when I want nothing more than to ring the neck of some transphobe passing laws to kill me and my friends or the taunting treasonous fascist fucks of the GOP. That anger and hate runs through me and while I’m slowly making piece with the alter who carries that. It still makes me anxious because that worry that I’m going to become a monster quickly follows it.”

      I don’t know if you ever read it, but I made a reply to you yesterday that touched upon this.

      1. Cerberus

        I did. It was really valuable. Thank you.

    4. Scar Man!!!

      Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you convinced me that total pacifism, not just avoiding full-on war is total bullshit

      1. Cerberus

        Aw, thanks. And yeah, there was a time I was all in on pacifism too, but yeah, there’s a lot of nasty ways it gets exploited and there is a time and place for violence as well.

        1. Scar Man!!!

          The first step was definitely when I heard that Gandhi told the Jews of Germany to resist non-violently. Like, what the fuck?

  42. Cmd1095

    I’m a bit surprised to see Joyce being this hostile to Ryan, yes he deserves it but Joyce saying she wishes he were dead is big considering her usual personality. It’s a bit jarring. But not really what I want to talk about.

    More and more I’m empathizing with Amber here. While my issues come from different forms of abuse than hers, we share a lot of things like viewing ourselves as monsters, having to suppress violent urges… and in the case where we’re forced to fight we lose ourselves in our rage.

    I have not been driven to that point in many years, thankfully, and it’s possible I might be able to fight seriously without losing it now, but I don’t know. If I were pushed to the point where my back is against the wall in a situation where I or someone I wanted to protect was in danger, and I wasn’t strong enough to handle it with my normal level of restrained effort, I’d probably kill the person I was fighting, not with a knife though, I’d probably do it with fists in my blood rage.

    And this knowledge is hard to live with, because not only do I know I’m capable of ending a life… something most normal people would find abhorrent, but I honestly think I’d likely ENJOY it if I was driven that far. All of the repressed anger and emotions would form an alter much like AG, but I don’t think it’d be nearly as heroic… the opposite seems more likely.

    I live in constant fear that I will someday be driven to that, while the monstrous part of me craves that catalyst so it can stop being repressed and run wild.

    Amber has those same repressed emotions of anger and aggression, and she DID act on them and let them run wild. I can only imagine how she must be feeling. After the lengths she went to to suppress that part of herself and channel it to something positive, it got free and hurt someone anyway.

    All things considered, based on how well I’d handle this, Amber is handling this remarkably well… unfortunately that’s not saying much since something like this would push me over a line I don’t think I could return from.

    As for Joyce’s words, she’s not helping. I’m imagining if I went through this and was in Amber’s shoes, I wouldn’t want to hear that monstrous side of me was good, I’d be desperately trying to repress it again, and more encouragement for it to come out would not be helpful.

    Maybe this will go over better than I imagine it will… but I’m inclined to say it won’t

    1. Cerberus

      Yeah, it’s a really tough emotional place to be, and I doubt the fact that it was a trauma response is providing her much comfort at the moment.

      1. Cmd1095

        Yeah it’s likely worse for her than it would be for me, because the violence itself is directly related to a trauma. For me violence is a result of my mistreatment as a way to push back, but it’s not directly tied to any traumas… Well none that I can consciously remember at least, I repressed some memories of one event so maybe that’s got something to do with it.

        For her the violence itself is something that terrifies her, whereas for me it’s just the fear of what I’d be capable of doing with violence. She’s scared of that and of the thought that her enjoyment of violence makes her like her dad and whatnot

  43. Untes

    Don’t kill people. I mean, it’s pretty simple stuff. Don’t do it guys.

    1. Fart Captor

      Please step down off your high horse immediately.

    2. Shiro

      Don’t rape people and you won’t stand a risk of being killed for being a rapist. I mean, it’s pretty simple stuff. Don’t do it guys.

    3. Ferdinand Rosenthal

      I will relay that information back to my family in 1936, the Spanish Civil War will go swimmingly for the Nationalistas thereof.

    4. Gojira

      To paraphrase Caesar as he killed Kiba, “Ryan is not people.”

      1. ArcaneDarkness

        Ryan can not be many things, but human he is.

    5. C.T Phipps

      I don’t think people should kill people but I don’t blame people who kill in defense of themselves or even in vengeance for assault. If I have compassion for a murderer for no reason, I should have more for one with a big reason.

    6. ArcaneDarkness

      I do agree with you that we shouldn’t kill people. I also think not every time it’s a simple decision (specially if you are defending yourself).

  44. Cerberus

    Today’s musical interlude brought to you by angry riot grrls fed up with rape:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2ybKzN869A

    See also the collected works of Hothead Paisan.

    1. McBogue

      Wow, that brings back memories. I worked with 7YB once way back when, and they definitely were some kick-ass ladies with zero fucks to give.

      They’re also partially responsible for the worst hangover I’ve ever had.

  45. Gojira

    What is “not Ryan” made of if a superwoman with a knife could try to kill him…and fail?

    1. Rukduk

      Human body is paradoxically both incredibly fragile and incredibly tough. But my money is on his knife being of poor quality and just a flashy show piece. Just sharp enough to cut, but quickly dulled and made of poor steel with a nice finish to look authentic.

    2. Fart Captor

      You can survive a surprising amount of stabbing. Even more slashing, as long as you don’t bleed out

    3. Emperor Daniel

      He Ryan.

      Ryan is just his middle name, as he himself said previously.

      1. Emperor Daniel

        And my post looks incoherent. I meant to say he is named Ryan.

    4. Tomas

      Tuck and roll.

      But seriously, it’s not impossible. People have survived grizzly bear attacks.

  46. brasca1

    Unless Ryan’s defense attorney gets him a probation (which is sadly probable) he is looking at prison time and unless he gets protective custody there is quite the possibility he will be a victim of some of the bigger rapists. As such killing him would be a form of kindness.

  47. NF

    The last 3 panels are frigging iconic.

  48. Gojira

    He’s got adamantium plot armor!

  49. Remmington Steele

    “The path of the righteous woman is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is she, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for she is truly her sister’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my sisters. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

  50. butting

    (necessary background: my hardcore pacifism and revulsion at punitive death are kinda privileged here, ‘cos I live in a country that’s (a) not the US and (b) rejected capital punishment a long time ago. and I’m much like Joyce and Hank, only with the experience to’ve dealt with the contradictions they struggle with. uh, so possibly more a Sierra. who rocks, btw.)

    Several of those close to me have been raped, and by “several” I mean “around twenty.” Don’t ask me to count ‘cos it hurts too bloody much, and that’s just speaking of the hurt a mere friend feels. There’s a bloody epidemic around us (and I look at the disclosures we’ve seen on this page and others and try not to weep).

    But two days are burned into me:

    1. The evening my closest friend called to tell me her uncle had died. That was a hard one, and I’ll always be proud of how she processed it. (the funeral was a long way away, so the option of that torture wasn’t on the table thank heavens.)

    2. Being in court to support friends when their rapist was sentenced (to nearly two decades). A whole bunch of pain, but investigative and prosecutorial teams are up there with my very favourite people.

    I’ve not seen healing as the result of any outcome. Dealing with culture that enables rapists in the first place, by figuring out how (as a culture) to not objectify people as things to transfer our own desires onto, how to have a culture that instinctively prioritises consent… shit, gimme those. Please, please, gimme those. Any day now, yeah?

    Until then I’m bloody grateful that we have writers like Willis (Lois McMaster Bujold tops my private list, so if that’s your buzz too then yeah, he’s in pretty good company) dealing so damn well with the agonies and hurts and lacks of solution behind all this. Because it helps us articulate the hurts and struggles and why they’re important, and those are dead important discussions to have.

    IMO.

    (and to reiterate privilege: I haven’t been sexually assaulted myself, but have simply listened to friends and tried to do what little good I can. which I’m guessing puts me closer to the issues than some, but leaves me a long way from the axe edge that I know others live with.)

    1. Emperor Norton II

      “Dealing with culture that enables rapists in the first place, by figuring out how (as a culture) to not objectify people as things to transfer our own desires onto, how to have a culture that instinctively prioritises consent… shit, gimme those. Please, please, gimme those. Any day now, yeah?”

      Oh gods, yes, yes, yes! All of this!

  51. Bagge

    Ouch

  52. zoelogical

    there’s like…this knot of a violent thing that’s been edging here in this story. idk i’ve made some Chara comparisons in the past and undertale is probably semi-relevant to this, and that is in this: when do you make the decision to be violent? when do you stop? is it all or nothing, or a continuing thread? do you ever truly stop being the person you’ve been? is there something redeemable in you, after everything? are you even still a person?

    and like – there’s this sense of the violence rising up in Amber as toxic and painful and choking. more like bile than release. like each time is a choice and a series of choices that she does not walk away from. but each time it is irrefutable as a response – what else could she have done? what else could she still do?

    and it is something clawing out that refuses to be seen fully, caked in her like a swirling black hole or poison or…something. a part of her that refuses to be shut away. the things that she does and the person she is do not conjoin. it is something that is almost impossible to integrate, something that separates her from the rest of “normal” humanity. something painful to talk about and even more painful to experience.

    there was no joy in Amber beating up Ryan. there was just – the action. the thing that she was bound to do, the thing she was always going to do as a reaction to this sort of intrusion. the thing she would hate herself for doing even as she did it. this bloody vicious thing that will not rest and that she does not quite understand even as she has maintained it as a part of herself.

    it is something alienating and horrifying and monstrous and traumatizing, because that is how she experiences it. she didn’t kill. she doesn’t kill. but what she does isn’t always that much better.

    idk i’d make a flannery o’connor reference but o’connor tends to be much more intellectual and singular about her characters in their crucibles. for amber the crucible of who she will choose to be never freaking stops, because she’s always in that flight or fight situation. she carries it with her. and she’s always failing her own tests – of what a good person should be, of what she herself should be.

    she can’t be normal. but then again, nobody is. if Amber wants to be comfortable with herself, she has to accept herself for the person she is as the person who has her experiences and skillsets. no one else can tell her what’s that like, because it’s something everyone has to do for themselves. (although i am sure that…the experience of someone else’s acceptance would help a lot.)

    …it’s that this violence inside her scares her as much as empowers her, and for good reason.

    1. thejeff

      I think a good part of Amber’s problem with her actions is that there was joy in it. It’s that joy as much as anything that leaves her wracked with self-loathing afterwards.

      1. zoelogical

        mmm.

        see like – i think with most times she’s violent, it’s a little joyous, and it’s the joy of doing something she’s good at and something she can morally justify to herself. that’s amazigirl’s thing. that’s the reason for the alter – someone who can be violent without being morally compromised, who can engage in this without the complicity of being Amber. of being her father’s daughter. of whatever the things were that Blaine made her do. it’s using those skills in a way she’s reclaimed. to me, this wasn’t reclaimed. this was pointed to the heart of her trauma.

        i know she was grinning when she attacked Ryan, but i don’t read that as like – a happy grin. it’s more of an “i’m terrified but i’m still going through with this” grin. because Amber’s time has come to prove that she’s not still that scared little girl unable to defend herself and her friends. she’s not weak. she can be more than what she was. but who she is isn’t someone she likes very much.

        she’s grappling with her own monstrosity. this part of herself that is capable of this. i think that – if she’d been fully joyous in her battle-rage against ryan, she wouldn’t be able later to hate herself for it. maybe like – a sort of pleasure, but in the pleasure of doing something she knows how to do, that she’s good at. efficient and sharp and knowledgeable and just – better than ryan at this.

        but all the time the horror screaming at her, the one good thing that Dorothy is safe behind the door, the knowledge that she is doing what she thinks she has to do but –

        she made it so that he can’t get up and do it again. she didn’t kill him. i don’t know if that’s restraint or being restrained. idk i’d like to think it’s possible that she’s really just not as bad as she thinks she is; but that doesn’t mean that, y’know, the place where she is isn’t still super bad.

    2. Halpful

      I don’t think I properly understand this since I haven’t played undertale and I’m avoiding spoilers… but… it seems pretty dark, and I feel the need to point out that for mostly of history, human beings were killing each other on a pretty regular basis. violence isn’t all that unusual or special, historically speaking. we’ve just managed to build a society where there are much better options 99% of the time, and trained a lot of those instincts away. (and I hope that continues, since violence does seem toxic and I wish nobody ever needed it.)

  53. Phil Dog

    Wait… does Joyce still not know she’s Amaza-Girl? REALLY?

    1. Rambling Idiot

      Why would she? Amber looks nothing like Sal.

  54. Zaidyer

    I’m with Joyce on this one. Ryan should be dead and Amber shouldn’t feel bad for deciding to kill him.

    I also think “If I’m as violent as Blaine, I’ll become as vile as he is” is just another one of his control programs, and some day Amber is going to have to realize this.

  55. Rambling Idiot

    In lieu of whatever dumb, unfunny thing I would normally write in one of my comments, I will try to be helpful. Though this may be clear to some it may not be to others so Judge not lest ye be judged I guess. That is to say for those unfamiliar with the verse is that it is easy to point at what someone has said or done and say that it is wrong, that stealing or wishing death on another is clear cut wrong. But if you were in a situation in which you must steal bread or starve your child, where you wish the death of the person who ruined your life, would you like it if somebody pointed to you and said “you are wrong and vile”? My point being, it is easy to say what Joyce said is bad and wrong, but what about if it were you, if it were someone you cared about. Even if in that situation such as Joyce’s you would not say as she does, would you blame her for feeling deep hatred for Ryan? A hatred that is so overpowering it doesn’t matter to her if it’s right or wrong? My point being it’s very human what Joyce is feeling, so can you really blame a human for acting human?

    1. Rambling Idiot

      God I’m bad at summarizing.

  56. WingedBeast

    Let’s note one thing. I think most of us are glad, for the sakes of Amber and Joyce both, that Amber didn’t kill Ryan. And, there’s some discussion on whether or not it would have been that much of a tragedy.

    But, one thing I do want to say is that both are more than allowed their feelings on the topic.

    Ryan attempted to rape Joyce. Whether or not she would have done it herself and regardless of what her feelings would have been had Amber actually had killed him, Joyce is allowed to feel that he should be dead. Not necessarily act on it, but she’s allowed that anger.

    Similarly, Amber is allowed to feel bad about acting on a similar anger. She’s allowed to feel bad about not being able to stop herself from trying, about feeling like the monster spawned by her monstrous father, about feeling like the choice is between that and weakness.

    Yes, yes, murder bad. I’m not going to debate that topic. But, what I will debate, here, is feelings okay.

    And, considering that both Joyce and Amber come from upbringings that would have looked down on their respective feelings, a little support in contextualizing those feelings and coming to a healthier place through that is a thing to hope for.

  57. Emanuele

    Joyce what the fuck. I was under the impression you were better than this.

    1. zoelogical

      why?

    2. newllend(henryvolt)

      Wishing someone dead and actually killing them are different things.

  58. BenRG

    Really, Amber? I find that difficult to believe. Killing someone with a knife isn’t that hard, especially when one is strong and skilled.

    I am going to go out on a limb here and speculate that the entire assault was one long blackout for Amber and, in truth, she doesn’t know what she was thinking or trying to do. She’s just trying to build false memories backwards from what she knows and her own hatred of herself.

    1. Nono

      The physical act is easy, the mental act and aftermath is torturous. Especially when you’re doing it close-range with something like a knife, which is miles different from doing it with a gun or something.

    2. Liliet

      Same here. Maybe a part of her tried, but the only thing that could have stopped her was another part of herself. Even in the moment, she did still have that mental block preventing and protecting her from doing the unthinkable, even if she’s not feeling all that protected by it right now.

  59. KingMonster

    Be careful, Joyce…

    Only the Sith deals in absolutes…

    Also, even though that’s Star Wars, I keep getting “Joyce as a Decepticon” in my head canon.

  60. @zombieundergrnd

    There is no try.

  61. Sylphiod

    I’d like to apologize for my above comment, to jocye, Amber and to anyone who read my comment.
    I would like to start off with nothing I say is an excuse for the awful things I said.
    First off I confused Amber’s and Joclye’s face so I felt that Amber enjoyed that she tried. Realizing that it actually changes a lot, she showed remorse for what she did, which negates everything I said.
    I would like to talk about my point of view, I am thantophobic, which generally means I have a fear of death. It’s to the point I suffer panic attacks and am sometimes unable to even move. But I believe death to be there worst possible thing that can be done to a person. I am also an atheist and do not believe in the afterlife.
    I am also sucidial, not that I want to die, that I want to kill myself. I hate myself every fibre of my being, the only good quality I have is my cowardance that has kept me aliveness to this day.
    I have a knee jerk reaction to anyone calling for the death of anyone, especially in non constant life threatening scenarios and stories such as this.
    I took this philosophy to avoid killing someone who I find so abhorrent that I despise that I want to beat up. Now why I feel this way goes back to when I was a kid and is long, complicated and admittedly silly and nonsensical now that I am an adult, I’d rather not go into it. But suvice to say it was not due to mental or physical abuse by anyone besides myself.
    Anyways well this does not excuse my rude and awful comment, I hope you can all understand it was a misunderstanding due to me misreading the image and my own knee jerk reaction to the idea of wishing death upon someone.

    To everyone who did reply. I never said that you should feel bad when certain people die, as there are probably awful people who people should not mourn for, my grandfather who past away when I was two, hearing what he did, I do know feel sorry I didn’t know him, or myself included. I’m just a rando on the internet my opinions are likely wrong, plus you have it from me that I’m not a good person and probably very jaded so please don’t take anything I say as how you should feel or believe.
    TLDR; I made a wrong opinion based on a misunderstanding.

    1. Sylphiod

      *i do not feel sorry for him

    2. Sylphiod

      Everyone who commented has the right to be upset with what I said, and well I hope those who I haven’t responded to realize that I am now aware of how awful what I typed looked liked and can be taken especially considering I misread read what Amber’s emotion she was betraying.

      1. Tomas

        It happens. I once saw a flame war break out over the subject of whether Love Actually deserves to be counted as one of the all-time great romantic films.

    3. Minder

      Thank you for apologizing and for saying your reaction was a knee-jerk response.

    4. Fart Captor

      That sounds like an incredibly good reason to have the reaction you did, and I don’t think you’re a bad person, and you don’t need to be so hard on yourself.

    5. Rukduk

      I’m going to comment here again in case you didn’t see the apology I sent on the original thread. I made a base assumption about you based on that comment and that was an incredibly stupid and just wrong for me to do. So I want to reiterate that I am incredibly sorry.

    6. Jaime

      Can I just say how *wonderful* it is to see people actually *talking and listening* to each other on the internet? I LOVE this community! ?

      Sylphoid, I am very sorry for what you’ve experienced. *appropriate gesture of support* If I’m not over-stepping my bounds, I want to say that I really hope you have someone to whom you can safely talk about these things. I myself have been suicidal at certain points in my life and I still sometimes have suicidal ideations. Therapy has helped me a lot, as has talking to other people who have had the same experiences as I have.

      IIRC, we can’t include links in comments on this site. But the number for the National Suicide Hotline is 800-273-8255. If you just google “National Suicide Hotline” you’ll find their website, which includes a chatroom as well.

      Please be well and take care of yourself.

      1. Halpful

        This. 🙂

        (Also, you can do one link. Two links goes to moderation.)

        1. Emperor Norton II

          (And unless the links go to r/redpill or bad porn sites or shit like that, they are usually approved. Might take some time before Willis gets to them, though.)

  62. Delicious Taffy

    I honestly think Joyce’s intrusion here is doing much more harm than good, at this particular moment. Not only is she cutting off an existing conversation uninvited, she’s also overriding the feelings of everyone involved to talk about her own. Sure, maybe Amber could benefit from knowing how much she’s helped Joyce, but this is not the time for it.

    1. newllend(henryvolt)

      Weather or not this confrontation is helping or not is yet to be decided. But as for it being a intrusion, well I don’t think that’s the case. Joyce was the one who had been haunted by Ryan for weeks and he just recently came looking for her, this completely involves her.
      We also can’t forget that much like Amber Joyce has been dealing with her own post dramatic stress induced rage due to a hell of a lot of stuff including Ryan.

      I had said once that Amber and Joyce are very similar, as if being two sides of the same coin, and now their in the exact same boat. I want to see where that goes.

      1. Delicious Taffy

        She literally just barged in uninvited. That’s intrusive.

  63. newllend(henryvolt)

    Ryan deserved what he got, but as far killing goes well I can understand why, but understand doesn’t mean agree. I can’t hold anything against Joyce for how she feels but I can also see why Amber is so down on her despite that fact that I still say she’s not the bad guy here.

    Taking a life It’s easy line to cross, but even if you have the motive and maybe the drive the question is what happens to you afterwards?

  64. Chris (the other one)

    Whose hand is on the door knob and what are they doing?

    1. Bicycle Bill

      I figure that this is Joyce’s hand, and she is pulling the door shut behind her (leaving Dina on the other side) so that she and Amber can have some privacy.

  65. Tomas

    Damn, Willis, are trying to kill me? I’m too old to be typing, “Ow, right in the feels.”

  66. Jerry

    So… why did she think Blaine would be proud of her?
    She FAILED AGAIN!!!

    1. BenRG

      Right now, Amber is all over the place, mentally and emotionally. I doubt that she’s having anything approaching a coherent or consistent reaction.

  67. Eldritch Gentleman

    Amber would benefit from having some barbarian relatives.
    “You shanked him a bit for trying to hurt your friend? Hahaha good start little one, next time I’ll teach you how to cleave them in half with an axe!”

    1. Bicycle Bill

      Amber does have at least one barbarian relative, and his name is Blaine.

      1. Eldritch Gentleman

        Blaine is no barbarian. He only abuses the weak, a true barbarian is always looking for something bigger, stronger and nastier so he can axe it in the face and proclaim he is the raddest dude.

    2. Scar Man!!!

      That is so wrong, but so funny

      1. Eldritch Gentleman

        Imagine Amber in a minimalistic leather outfit holding either a big sword or axe, standing on the corpses of her slain foes with Danny (equally undressed) clinging to her leg XD

        1. Bicycle Bill

          You realize that although that mental image is hotter than the fires of hell, it is absolutely worthless in terms of protection or practicality?

        2. Eldritch Gentleman

          If I wanted protection I’d put Amber in hella cool full plate armor.

        3. Scar Man!!!

          Is Danny still in a loincloth in this version?

        4. Eldritch Gentleman

          Maaaaybe… or maybe stylish finely made silk white shirt and pants. The prince to Black Knight Amber (somehow I imagine her in that bulky black armor that makes her look like a small tank. And no silly boobplate, totally smooth front.

  68. Minder

    Joyce may not be saying it to the right person, but she’s absolutely right. For what Ryan could have and absolutely would have done to those three girls that night, killing him would be a proportionate response to the danger.

    And for fuck’s sake, no, it isn’t horrible for her to be saying Amber should have killed him, she was just saying something she NEEDED to say to validate her own awful trauma and how upsetting it is to think people might be sad about what happened to the guy that tried to rape her and wanted to carve her face with a knife that night. This isn’t Amber and Joyce trying wholeheartedly to get across something for the purpose of wanting to make her feel better. Joyce is ANGRY. She wants Amber to be angry. She NEEDS Amber to be angry. She needs Amber not to be upset that a demon was finally exorcised from Joyce’s life that nothing else would have accomplished, where even Amazi-girl failed. Fucking stop with saying that Joyce is in the wrong here.

    The MISTAKE is that these are not the words Amber needs to hear right now, they are exactly the wrong ones. Joyce does not know that because Joyce’s trauma is coming from somewhere completely different. She does not know Amber as anyone but a quiet, enigmatic but tempered dormmate who has…history with Ethan and turned out to be in the right side of an argument during a moment of rage at Joyce for dating him.

    Joyce doesn’t know Amazi-girl’s identity. She thinks Amber thinks Ryan was just ‘some rapist’ or that Amber doesn’t understand how much harm and pain that means compared to what anyone could do to him. Joyce doesn’t know. She’ll (maybe) regret these words, and it was the worst possible time and place for the recipient, but they’re words Joyce needs now and also Amber will need when she is ready to hear them. But poor thing, the tragedy here is that time is not now 🙁

  69. Vulcanodon

    Hugs to several commenters above, struggling with aftermath of sexual assault.

    In real life a person like Joyce will be thought of as too “clean” to have violent feelings, or sexual feelings, or let’s face it, any feelings. She’s just a darling, kind person and she would never. She doesn’t express feelings that are at odds with her public persona because she has learned it is not safe to do so. When she told her brother she was angry? He didn’t listen; he told her to get “centered” and walked out on her. THIS is why people are lonely and struggle in their pain. (Way too much personal experience here)

    Here she is in a room with two other people who have attacked a person in defense of someone they cared about. She can be honest.

    1. Vulcanodon

      Really curious what Dina is making of all this. Some people think of her as a little kid (she isn’t, and even if she were, little kids have feelings too)

      1. Jaime

        The way I “read” the illustrations, it was Dina’s hand on the doorknob. Maybe getting ready to make Joyce leave if she upets Amber too much?

        1. Vulcanodon

          I hadn’t thought of that, but yesterday Dina was wearing long sleeves and Joyce’s forearms are bare. Also the angle of the forearm in Q is toward Joyce, so I think it’s Joyce.

        2. Fart Captor

          Also, the skin color doesn’t match Dina.

    2. Vulcanodon

      Amber has two friends in the room supporting her in very different ways. (Dina is being much more respectful, Joyce in a way that I’d expect since she was brought up in an evangelical church). But they are supporting her. She’s probably spent a lot of time staring out windows in the last three days and she needs to know one way or another that she isn’t a monster.

      In her place, I don’t know how I would even.

    3. Vulcanodon

      Should change “doesn’t express” to “seldom expresses”

  70. Victor Riley

    Yeeeees, Joyce… come to the Dark Side.

  71. shammers

    Nooo Dina

    NooooooJoyce

    Noooooo Amber

    My girls are hurting D:

  72. Gesc

    When she says she tried I get the feeling she was going to, but was stopped.

    Who stopped her? Sal? Maybe herself? Just stood there, soaking in someone else’s blood.

    Yeah, I’m really worried about Amber.

    I’ll omit my thoughts about Joyce because there’s enough of that here already.

    1. BenRG

      I suspect that Amazi-Girl did. For the very first time, her ‘golden alter’ (as Cerberus describes her) stepped up and took responsibility with Amber rather than just letting her be the villain of the piece.

      1. thejeff

        Oh god I hope not. That leaves Amber as the monster who needs to be stopped by the golden Amazi-Girl – who didn’t take over until after Amber demonstrated how much of a monster she is.

        That would just reinforce their problems.

  73. Derek

    killing rapists has been acquitted in real life (at least in Texas)
    http://abcnews.go.com/US/charges-texas-father-beat-death-daughters-molester/story?id=16612071

  74. Ivy

    Jeez, you want amber to go to jail?

  75. BenRG

    I think that this scene will end with Amber actually surprising herself by being the one to help Joyce confront her rage and not let it make her act out-of-character. In the process, she’ll be forced to confront just how pointless and useless her self-loathing is in terms with dealing with “Red Amber'”s anger control issues.

  76. SomeUnregPunk

    Everyone in this comic needs therapy.

    1. Hari

      Absolutely. College is a super challenging time. It truly is. It is especially challenging when you have trauma and other things to deal with. Then you are around other young adults who have problems THEY don’t know how to deal with and they try to interact with each other and make friends or find romance and all those inner demons can collaborate and kick one’s ass.

      College is so romanticized in the US. It’s when you have all this fun with your friends! You’re away from your parents and ON YOUR OWN (or so you think.) Yeah! Best four years! Woo hoo! Party! And then afterward you know you’ll have the PERFECT JOB with the perfect spouse etc. etc.

      Then reality kicks you in the nuts and you feel cheated that you didn’t have “THE EXPERIENCE.”

      It’s a really rough and emotional time. Are there good times? Of course! But when you are that age, you really don’t have a lot of worldly experience and you really haven’t been around too many people who are too different from you.

    2. Emperor Norton II

      If it hadn’t been for the fact that Willis only uses quotes from his characters as book titles, this should be a book title!

      …So if only there was a way to convince him to make a strip where someone says “Everyone in this dorm needs therapy.”

  77. chris73

    While I can understand Joyces anger I’m not sure she gets the implications of what shes saying in that (admittedly never having killed someone myself) I’m guessing that killing someone would take a massive toll on you so did she really think through what might have happened to Amber had she killed Ryan?

    1. Hari

      The odd thing is, sometimes not even the abuser’s death sets you free, even if it’s something you’ve hoped for deep down in your soul. Part of you is fucking PISSED at what happened to you and then there’s the “at least he won’t harm anyone else after he’s dead.” But sometimes all that shit still is there. And unless one gets a lot of therapy, it will continue to haunt. =(

  78. Hari

    This really hit me in the heart. I’ve been in both Joyce’s situation with sexual assault stuff and Amber’s situation with coming from an abusive household and having ALL that anger pent up and not knowing how to express it.

  79. burntnorris

    Jesus christ.

  80. Orion Fury

    Well, someone is considering accepting the challenge to join the Dark Side…

  81. Emperor Norton II

    OK, so I’m making a follow-up too here.

    Now, I was definitely no fan of Joyce barging in yesterday. I was also no fan of how she told Amber that she wished Amber had killed him; because that’s exactly what Amber is currently hating herself for trying to do.

    BUT, be that as it may… The second panel and the top of the fourth panel. Those things were right things to say, I think.

    Because yes, she’s not listening to Amber’s wishes, that is true. But at the same time, Joyce has spent weeks in utter misery because of gashface. And now, because of Amber, that threat is gone.

    It cannot be overstated how immensely much of a relief this must be to Joyce. And thanking Amber fully, from the bottom of her heart… That is something she must do. She’s compelled to do it. There is no way Joyce can not thank Amber and remain Joyce.

    And if panel two and the top part of panel four had been the only things she’d told Amber… Then that could possibly be something that would be good for Amber to hear right now, despite her initial wishes not to be thanked and comforted. And between her and Dina, they could possibly have gotten her on a better track.

    And that’s why I got rather upset with her wishes that Amber had killed him; because there seemed to be a way to reach Amber, and then it suddenly went in a different direction.

    1. zoelogical

      oh. oh!

      this is why Joyce was sitting outside on the wall by herself. this is why she felt safe enough to.

      1. Emperor Norton II

        Exactly. To be able to do that again must feel like getting out of prison. A mental prison, created by Gashface. Even if she’s still not entirely comfortable (as shown a few strips later), it’s still a massive leap forward for her.

        That panel is perhaps the best panel with Joyce in this chapter.

        1. Puckish Rogue

          Its pretty good but it’ll be topped when/if Joe and Joyce ever have another date

        2. Emperor Norton II

          You want to see Joe getting punched again?

        3. Puckish Rogue

          No punching! I mean like a proper date, where Joe realises a date isn’t something he has to go through to have sexy times, he can just enjoy the company and Joyce understands that a date isn’t the first step towards becoming a Mrs, she can also just enjoy the company

          Two people just enjoying each others company, I think it’d be good and healthy for both of them, Joyce might be able to understand Joes situation a bit better (his parents divorce) and Joe might be able to see Joyce as more than a potential notch on his bed post

          I don’t think it’ll ever happen but it’d just be a nice thing to see

        4. Emperor Norton II

          I like what is going on your head. It seems like a nice place.

          But Joe will get punched.

        5. zoelogical

          i kinda prefer joyce punching Toedad out but it was such a good moment

          …joyce supporting becky is Up There Too

          …all moments with joyce growing up and taking ownership of her life and who she is going to be are a++++

        6. Emperor Norton II

          Hence why I said “in this chapter”.

  82. Dracke

    I cant blame or condone either of them but both of them need help

    1. Emperor Norton II

      You know what?

      I think this is probably the most succinct and accurate comment about this whole strip.

  83. Jay

    Last time I saw a story about teenagers that needed psychological help this badly, I was watching Neon Genesis Evangelion

  84. Jeremy

    Ah, back to absurd melodrama. I cringe with every crash into the ground when we’re reminded they’re actually 18 and say/do hyperbolic things to try to affect seriousness. Yuck…just, yuck. I can’t even be mad.

    1. Jeremy

      Also, I think a part of Amber obviously held back. She has the physical ability to kill. I don’t think we’re doubting her physical training or skills. Thank god there’s more rational thought and true morality to her than she realizes.

  85. AlexDenton

    No, Joyce, you’re sweet but fuck off, you’re making it worse.

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