Nobody is arguing that kissing at a protest is never appropriate under any circumstances, but there is a time and a place and some protests are absolutely not appropriate venues for that kind of conduct. Waltzing into an encampment protesting the genocide of a minority that you, as a white woman, are not a part of, and laying one on another white girl’s lips prominently enough to feature in the media would reasonably be considered a faux pas in that context.
she MIGHT have a kind of sort of leg to stand on in the picture (which wasn’t their doing), but talking about them walking around or having bumped uglies in their own room as something they shouldn’t do is kinda stretching it imho.
Its coming across as a little more pointed at the fact they are doing what they are doing, and less that it only happened at the protest.
Clif
But they have now accepted that it was a problem. Asma is good.
Corey C.
Only Dorothy seems to realize she done goofed. Joyce is stubbornly stuck in the “my fantasy came true and I can kiss my future wife anytime I want and anyone who says otherwise is a hateful bigot” part of her relationship. Asma’s trying to take off the rose colored glasses, but Joyce, being the romantic idiot she is, refuses to part with them.
Nymph
She isn’t talking about them fucking though, they are. She asked if it had escalated into anything else that became a problem. Joyce is the one who decided that was probably the fuckin, and Dorothy agreed.
Throwatron
also keep in mind that Asma is assuming that both of them are cheating on somebody else right now, and that at least one of them has likely done so before, because that’s the last information she heard on the topic. which, I don’t suspect is on Joyce or Dorothy’s radar, at all.
I’d buy this if we had the slightest bit of evidence that Joe or Walky even know her actual name–that is to say, if she had a friendship with them. Then, it might be in the slightest tiniest way her business if the girls are cheating hussies. Right now, though? Nah.
I’ve said before–these two have screwed up a lot in this arc. But not one bit of it has anything to do with what Asma’s talking about, which is making it easy to (mis)read her as being homophobic, and still leaves me convinced she’s actually mostly envious of their relative freedom to express their affections.
Envy
Asma is at least aware that Dorothy was in a relationship *and* she probably thinks Joyce is a habitual “other woman”.
I’m kind of confused which of the many later events Asma is talking about, actually. Can you enlighten me? It seems like J&D are clear on it, given quoting the timing.
When did the comic ever mention the people being genocided were some kind of minority group? From my recollection the comic has never mentioned anything about the conflict besides it’s being committed by a made up country with a really dumb name. Like yeah, we the audience understands what it’s supposed to be, but this the major writing issues with Willis adamantly not wanting to date the comic as it means we can’t actually discuss the issue from within the story since it has to be abstracted like this. If the protest was about pseudo-Israel killing Muslims it’s kinda weird that no one acknowledges that fact (you think Dorothy might have something to say being Jewish), especially when they’re talking to Muslim woman. It’s clear Willis is trying to use this as a way address the criticism, but the problem with what they wrote has everything to do with the specifics which the comic can not address and the result is that it makes both parties come off as weirdos who care way too much about what the other does/thinks considering they’ve had only a handful of conversations.
The Blueprint System
The fact that dorothy and joyce are white has been repeatedly mentioned in-comic as relevant to the distastefulness of the photo of them, implying that the people being targetted are not white. This is also supported by the extra focus on Asma and Raidah caring about this conflict in a notably different way than other people do. Dorothy also explicitly mentions fascism being at work, and fascism targets marginalized people by definition. And lastly, *you cannot do a genocide on a group with social, political, and financial power*. The state will not defend that. This isn’t set in a magical fairtale land. It’s effectively our world, but time tracks differently.
Needfuldoer
It’s the implication.
(Don’t write an I/P parallel into your comic if you don’t want people to read I/P into it.)
thejeff
I do agree though that while the comic at least implies that Muslims are the targets of the Bulmerian genocide, there aren’t the same hints that Jews are the perpetrators. Other than it being an I/P parallel, but there’s been an attempt to focus on the Muslim characters in the aftermath, but nothing even hinting that Dorothy or Joe’s Jewishness is relevant.
MarshallBanana
This. Arguing based on plausible deniability that this is a reference to I/P seems rather silly, doesn’t it?
Cameron Stone
Yeah it’s always a minority group but it could be a white minority group, maybe a Russia v. Ukraine type of thing (even if that’s not genocide quite yet). We don’t know, because the comic won’t actually bite the bullet and commit to anything! And if it’s not going to do that then it really shouldn’t be doing it at all.
Li
Not really relevant to your point but it still seems worth pointing out that Russia, at least, is not uniformly white. It’s part of Asia, there are plenty of ethnic groups there that are extremely Russian and also if you saw them on the street you’d swear were, for example, Han Chinese.
Willing to bet Ukraine is similarly not uniformly white.
Big Z
Interestingly, just due to its location, Ukraine is weird that way — something like 96% of the population is Ukrainian, Great-Russian, Belorussian, or Romanian… the largest non-“East/Central Slav” ethnic group is Crimean Tartars at 0.5%.
Li
Well, my point is kind of that “Ukrainian” need not mean “white”, just as “Russian” doesn’t necessarily mean “white”. I wasn’t saying Russia has a big population with Han Chinese ancestry, I was saying Russia has regions that are 100% Russian and always have been but do not look white.
Li
(Whether or not a Russian census would agree with this, I don’t know! But I was not talking about immigrants or descendants of immigrants, the way I would be if I were talking about “American” not meaning “Indigineous, frankly, but for the sake of this conversation white”.)
Li
Ugh that was supposed to be strikethrough.
“American” not meaning “Indigineous, frankly, but for the sake of this comparison white”.
Li
Like let me use a more concrete example because it’s similar:
One of my professors this semester has people guess his ethnicity. The guesses are always kind of a mixture. He gets “middle eastern???” a lot. He would probably get “white” a lot more if he weren’t visibly Muslim. That sort of guy.
He is actually ethnically Chinese. Just from non-Han Chinese ethnic group, of which there are many.
Big Z
See, this is close to my heart for a different reason, in that I am also 50% Central Slav and grew up in the kind of Appalachia where I was still catching racial slurs for that in the late 1980s. I’m somewhat sensitive about how Slavic ethnicities are perceived. 😀
I’m not actually sure WHAT you’re trying to get at, I’ll be honest, I’m mostly just interested in pointing out that Ukraine is kinda “uniformly white” (or, at least, uniformly East Slavic) in terms of the ethnic groups that populate it in a way that Russia isn’t.
Big Z
(now if we’re going at this from the direction thejeff stated, there IS a significant ethnic divide between Ukrainian-ethnicity Ukrainians and Russian-ethnicity Ukrainians, and IIRC that’s even supposedly Putin’s main stated causus belli along with not-as-spurious-as-Ukraine-would-like accusations of neoNazi groups having a fair sway in some areas).
Li
I dunno, maybe I fully misread what Cameron was saying, “but it could be a white minority group” and then listing Russia vs Ukraine just sounded like it was taking for granted the fairly popular USAmerican perception of Russia as being all-white, when it isn’t. I don’t know as much about Ukraine. So I prefaced my comment with saying it wasn’t necessarily relevant to their specific point.
I know that Europe has different ethnic groups going on, and I know whiteness is super conditional and not a very coherent idea, which leads to white supremacy not always benefitting the sort of people USAmericans picture when we think “white”. I know Eastern Europeans are a whole… category for European xenophobia/racism.
I’m not getting at, or meaning to get at, anything about Slavic identity. Only that there are Russian ethnic groups that even USAmericans would look at and assume “Chinese” rather than “Russian”.
I don’t know if that helps at all because I’m not sure what I’ve stepped in here, but I am sorry.
Li
(Not that USAmericans can’t also be super racist to Eastern Europeans, obviously, which I don’t need to tell you bc you were just talking about having experienced that…
I was just kind of cataloguing what I know about European xenophobia/racism.
And all of this is complicated because race isn’t concrete, it’s literally all just skin deep, etc., so I am struggling to communicate at all what I’m talking about lol.)
thejeff
Basically minority groups in other countries don’t have to break down along the same racial/ethnic lines we think about in the US or even in “the West” more generally.
Li
Yes exactly.
The Queer Agenda [frog memes]
Prior to the (latest) Palestinian genocide, I did see quite a few watchdog accusations that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was genocidal under international law (in that one of the aims was to destroy them as a distinct people and culture.) Worse war crimes upstaging other war crimes.
Or, here’s a thought–it could be Sudan from awhile back. The government (Muslim) went after a bunch of minority groups in Darfur (also Muslim) and damn near took them off the roster of humanity. And no one who wasn’t Muslim bothered to do anything about it.
Really, the main reason this tracks to I/P is the call for disinvestment by the protestors. This has only been a cause celebre for US students twice in my lifetime–South Africa and Israel.
And there are similar pictures from ant number of other protests around the world in the decades since. There was nothing wrong with them kissing.
And running the photo on the front page was literally the bets thing Daisy could have done for the protest. If you want to get White Middle-Class Normies on your side (SPOILER: You do, if you are serious about the aims of your protest), then showing a conventionally attractive pair of obviously harmless white girls getting tear gassed is a great way to do it — especially when the next-most newsworthy photos would be of a student beating the crap out of, like, a dozen cops. If you support the protests, then you would desperately want to distract public attention from students beating the shit out of cops, because that would be a good way to ruin the lives of everyone involved in the protests.
Like, seriously, we know the cops started it (SPOILER: If there’s an “it,” cops will >always be the ones to have started it), but if the protest becomes known for student-on-cop violence, then the hammer will squash everyone there. Depending on who is President in the DoA-verse right now, people who look like Asma might get simply disappeared.
Have you considered that using bold type a lot will not actually make people agree with your opinion that White Middle-Class Normies are universally only interested in empathy when manipulated by girls kissing (spoiler: having your worst and whitest impulses stoked does not necessarily put you in a positionto be helpful).
Who said they were interested in courting the assistance, allyship, or opinions of “middle-class white normies” who only care about an issue with their faces on it. That won’t be good allyship, they won’t be able to help anyone but themselves, and they’ll abandon the cause as soon as someone says something they don’t want to hear.
White cishet people have to unpack their own bullshit before they can help me in any meaningful way. And plenty of them do! Plenty of them genuinely come to help and put their bodies and time and money on the line for the cause. Those tend to be among the people it’s worth reaching out to.
Because, shockingly, those are the people who it’s actually helpful to have around. People no one has to tiptoe around and do a ton of extra labor for whenever they falter or get confused.
White Normies punch waaaay above their weight in protest movements, because white normie politicians listen to them. This is, literally, Protest Movement 101.
If you can get a dozen white grandmothers to attend your march, you put them in the fucking front row. How do you get them to attend? Well, letting them see their white normie granddaughters get attacked by cops is an absolutely time-tested way of energizing them to do that.
Notice that none of this involves changing the point of your protest or “softening” your message; the whole point of white normies at a protest is (a) to shield more vulnerable protesters, and (b) to create a permission structure for other white normies to come on board and put pressure on white normie politicians, who have the power to actually do what you want done.
This isn’t centering white normies, it is just using them as effectively as possible.
Frankly speaking, when I’m evaluating what tactics to use at a protest, as a cis white man I’m going to listen to the guy with a white-male pfp LAST.
Nymph
Oh sorry, I can see how you were confused!
I was disagreeing with you. Strongly. Not requesting further elaboration <3 Thanks so much!
GreyICE
Ray, thank you. I swear some of these kids are well meaning, but as someone in their 40s, yeaaahhh they have no idea what they’re doing with these movements.
The curse of every movement, but if you want things to happen you do want the white allies (not the white moderates, but the white allies). Guess what, there’s a reason that Greta Thunberg gets a lot of attention, she knows it, and she uses it.
not someone else
As someone else in their 40s, this discussion has been going on between our groups for many years and despite continually editing us out of the history books you’re still wrong. <3
Comic’s been making some people mad, they are trying to contain it to one thread to not interfere with people who are just here to read the comic and vibe.
I mean that don’t really work well when it’s near the top and gets really long but ya know the thought is what counts
EpochFlame
it’s giving similar vibes as NGPZ’s past “Let’s talk about a completely unrelated topic to the possibly-triggering comic content” threads from past storylines
oh yeah, I think Laura did that too, although yeah maybe I am the one who started that, heh
Laura
I was copying from you, NG. *Waves.*
I don’t really follow Asma’s train of thought, here…
?
zee
not really. It is in fact, the exact opposite. It is explicitly about discussing the comic. Just in a way that’s negative about the current, very polarizing storyline
Vyse
it’s only similar in that it was a thread built for a specific discussion. the difference is that the “let’s talk about something else” threads were off topic, and willis asked for the threads that weren’t about the comic to stop. this thread is specifically meant for discussion about the comic, but for the people who didn’t like the topic to have a space talk about it in hopes that the people who have stronger feelings towards the negative will restrict it to here.
unfortunately, it’s always been god awful to read the comments section not so much due to the content within, but because the comment box layout doesn’t make it easy to tell who is replying to who and where a thread stops and ends. i very often have to hold my cursor over the left edge of an avatar so i can scroll up to see who they’re replying to, and that no longer becomes doable once the replies no longer nest posts. there’s no tumblr or disqus indent bar that shows connecting comments, or a “replying to x” comment within posts to link directly, and it gets ever harder to tell where the containment thread starts and ends the longer they get.
i would honestly suggest the webmaster change that, if for nothing else but accessibility. it’s rough on people with visual impairments.
Needfuldoer
Does it really do all that much anyway, since this comment system doesn’t let you collapse threads?
Makes them easier to scroll past, I suppose…
Vyse
i’d argue it doesn’t make it easier, since it’s so hard to tell when the threads end. i’d do unholy things if it meant the webmaster would implement the ability to collapse threads.
Needfuldoer
As long as it doesn’t involve Disqus. Bleh.
Vyse
i second you there. disqus might have a better layout, but i don’t care for the rest of it.
630 thoughts on “The beginning”
Reaver
*Wheeze*
Their faces in Panel 2 made me do a spittake..
Doctor_Who
Panel 2 and panel 4 are both great.
Decidedly Orthogonal
I’m with Joyce. Anyone claiming religious basis for controlling others’ behaviour can get stuffed.
thejeff
I agree with you there, but it’s far from clear that’s what Asma’s doing.
UrsulaDavina
? Happy, Happy Halloween, Halloween, Halloween Happy, Happy Halloween, Silver Shamrock ?
Bryy
Happy Halloween!
NGPZ
awe hell yeah >:3
*plays “Tombstone Arizona” by Mr Sauceman on hacked muzak*
Deanatay
THIS IS DUMBOWEEN THIS IS DUMBOWEEN
DUMBOWEEN DUMBOWEEN
In this comic
We call home
Everyone dance to the Dumbing Song
In this comic
Don’t we love it here
Everyone’s waiting for the next surprise
Steamweed
Looking forward to the upcoming Burton-Willis confab!
Mr D phone posting
Happy Halloween peeps!
eh, whatever
? London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down, London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady! ?
That tune?
Rabid Rabbit
Cause
Doctor Stein makes funny creatures
Lets them run
Into the ni-ight…
AntithesisConundrum
ANGY JOYCE GOES >:<
AntithesisConundrum
Hm. More like >:c
Acher4
Protest – Riot Kisses Vol. 103727171
https://www.gettyimages.at/detail/nachrichtenfoto/couple-kiss-near-police-officers-in-the-middle-of-the-nachrichtenfoto/865779418
Kindly reminder… ?
Dot
Nobody is arguing that kissing at a protest is never appropriate under any circumstances, but there is a time and a place and some protests are absolutely not appropriate venues for that kind of conduct. Waltzing into an encampment protesting the genocide of a minority that you, as a white woman, are not a part of, and laying one on another white girl’s lips prominently enough to feature in the media would reasonably be considered a faux pas in that context.
Pocky
she MIGHT have a kind of sort of leg to stand on in the picture (which wasn’t their doing), but talking about them walking around or having bumped uglies in their own room as something they shouldn’t do is kinda stretching it imho.
Its coming across as a little more pointed at the fact they are doing what they are doing, and less that it only happened at the protest.
Clif
But they have now accepted that it was a problem. Asma is good.
Corey C.
Only Dorothy seems to realize she done goofed. Joyce is stubbornly stuck in the “my fantasy came true and I can kiss my future wife anytime I want and anyone who says otherwise is a hateful bigot” part of her relationship. Asma’s trying to take off the rose colored glasses, but Joyce, being the romantic idiot she is, refuses to part with them.
Nymph
She isn’t talking about them fucking though, they are. She asked if it had escalated into anything else that became a problem. Joyce is the one who decided that was probably the fuckin, and Dorothy agreed.
Throwatron
also keep in mind that Asma is assuming that both of them are cheating on somebody else right now, and that at least one of them has likely done so before, because that’s the last information she heard on the topic. which, I don’t suspect is on Joyce or Dorothy’s radar, at all.
Freemage
I’d buy this if we had the slightest bit of evidence that Joe or Walky even know her actual name–that is to say, if she had a friendship with them. Then, it might be in the slightest tiniest way her business if the girls are cheating hussies. Right now, though? Nah.
I’ve said before–these two have screwed up a lot in this arc. But not one bit of it has anything to do with what Asma’s talking about, which is making it easy to (mis)read her as being homophobic, and still leaves me convinced she’s actually mostly envious of their relative freedom to express their affections.
Envy
Asma is at least aware that Dorothy was in a relationship *and* she probably thinks Joyce is a habitual “other woman”.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-16/01-not-so-smooth-criminals/whatshername/
Minivet
I’m kind of confused which of the many later events Asma is talking about, actually. Can you enlighten me? It seems like J&D are clear on it, given quoting the timing.
Cameron Stone
When did the comic ever mention the people being genocided were some kind of minority group? From my recollection the comic has never mentioned anything about the conflict besides it’s being committed by a made up country with a really dumb name. Like yeah, we the audience understands what it’s supposed to be, but this the major writing issues with Willis adamantly not wanting to date the comic as it means we can’t actually discuss the issue from within the story since it has to be abstracted like this. If the protest was about pseudo-Israel killing Muslims it’s kinda weird that no one acknowledges that fact (you think Dorothy might have something to say being Jewish), especially when they’re talking to Muslim woman. It’s clear Willis is trying to use this as a way address the criticism, but the problem with what they wrote has everything to do with the specifics which the comic can not address and the result is that it makes both parties come off as weirdos who care way too much about what the other does/thinks considering they’ve had only a handful of conversations.
The Blueprint System
The fact that dorothy and joyce are white has been repeatedly mentioned in-comic as relevant to the distastefulness of the photo of them, implying that the people being targetted are not white. This is also supported by the extra focus on Asma and Raidah caring about this conflict in a notably different way than other people do. Dorothy also explicitly mentions fascism being at work, and fascism targets marginalized people by definition. And lastly, *you cannot do a genocide on a group with social, political, and financial power*. The state will not defend that. This isn’t set in a magical fairtale land. It’s effectively our world, but time tracks differently.
Needfuldoer
It’s the implication.
(Don’t write an I/P parallel into your comic if you don’t want people to read I/P into it.)
thejeff
I do agree though that while the comic at least implies that Muslims are the targets of the Bulmerian genocide, there aren’t the same hints that Jews are the perpetrators. Other than it being an I/P parallel, but there’s been an attempt to focus on the Muslim characters in the aftermath, but nothing even hinting that Dorothy or Joe’s Jewishness is relevant.
MarshallBanana
This. Arguing based on plausible deniability that this is a reference to I/P seems rather silly, doesn’t it?
Cameron Stone
Yeah it’s always a minority group but it could be a white minority group, maybe a Russia v. Ukraine type of thing (even if that’s not genocide quite yet). We don’t know, because the comic won’t actually bite the bullet and commit to anything! And if it’s not going to do that then it really shouldn’t be doing it at all.
Li
Not really relevant to your point but it still seems worth pointing out that Russia, at least, is not uniformly white. It’s part of Asia, there are plenty of ethnic groups there that are extremely Russian and also if you saw them on the street you’d swear were, for example, Han Chinese.
Willing to bet Ukraine is similarly not uniformly white.
Big Z
Interestingly, just due to its location, Ukraine is weird that way — something like 96% of the population is Ukrainian, Great-Russian, Belorussian, or Romanian… the largest non-“East/Central Slav” ethnic group is Crimean Tartars at 0.5%.
Li
Well, my point is kind of that “Ukrainian” need not mean “white”, just as “Russian” doesn’t necessarily mean “white”. I wasn’t saying Russia has a big population with Han Chinese ancestry, I was saying Russia has regions that are 100% Russian and always have been but do not look white.
Li
(Whether or not a Russian census would agree with this, I don’t know! But I was not talking about immigrants or descendants of immigrants, the way I would be if I were talking about “American” not meaning “Indigineous, frankly, but for the sake of this conversation white”.)
Li
Ugh that was supposed to be strikethrough.
“American” not meaning “
Indigineous, frankly, but for the sake of this comparisonwhite”.Li
Like let me use a more concrete example because it’s similar:
One of my professors this semester has people guess his ethnicity. The guesses are always kind of a mixture. He gets “middle eastern???” a lot. He would probably get “white” a lot more if he weren’t visibly Muslim. That sort of guy.
He is actually ethnically Chinese. Just from non-Han Chinese ethnic group, of which there are many.
Big Z
See, this is close to my heart for a different reason, in that I am also 50% Central Slav and grew up in the kind of Appalachia where I was still catching racial slurs for that in the late 1980s. I’m somewhat sensitive about how Slavic ethnicities are perceived. 😀
I’m not actually sure WHAT you’re trying to get at, I’ll be honest, I’m mostly just interested in pointing out that Ukraine is kinda “uniformly white” (or, at least, uniformly East Slavic) in terms of the ethnic groups that populate it in a way that Russia isn’t.
Big Z
(now if we’re going at this from the direction thejeff stated, there IS a significant ethnic divide between Ukrainian-ethnicity Ukrainians and Russian-ethnicity Ukrainians, and IIRC that’s even supposedly Putin’s main stated causus belli along with not-as-spurious-as-Ukraine-would-like accusations of neoNazi groups having a fair sway in some areas).
Li
I dunno, maybe I fully misread what Cameron was saying, “but it could be a white minority group” and then listing Russia vs Ukraine just sounded like it was taking for granted the fairly popular USAmerican perception of Russia as being all-white, when it isn’t. I don’t know as much about Ukraine. So I prefaced my comment with saying it wasn’t necessarily relevant to their specific point.
I know that Europe has different ethnic groups going on, and I know whiteness is super conditional and not a very coherent idea, which leads to white supremacy not always benefitting the sort of people USAmericans picture when we think “white”. I know Eastern Europeans are a whole… category for European xenophobia/racism.
I’m not getting at, or meaning to get at, anything about Slavic identity. Only that there are Russian ethnic groups that even USAmericans would look at and assume “Chinese” rather than “Russian”.
I don’t know if that helps at all because I’m not sure what I’ve stepped in here, but I am sorry.
Li
(Not that USAmericans can’t also be super racist to Eastern Europeans, obviously, which I don’t need to tell you bc you were just talking about having experienced that…
I was just kind of cataloguing what I know about European xenophobia/racism.
And all of this is complicated because race isn’t concrete, it’s literally all just skin deep, etc., so I am struggling to communicate at all what I’m talking about lol.)
thejeff
Basically minority groups in other countries don’t have to break down along the same racial/ethnic lines we think about in the US or even in “the West” more generally.
Li
Yes exactly.
The Queer Agenda [frog memes]
Prior to the (latest) Palestinian genocide, I did see quite a few watchdog accusations that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was genocidal under international law (in that one of the aims was to destroy them as a distinct people and culture.) Worse war crimes upstaging other war crimes.
Freemage
Or, here’s a thought–it could be Sudan from awhile back. The government (Muslim) went after a bunch of minority groups in Darfur (also Muslim) and damn near took them off the roster of humanity. And no one who wasn’t Muslim bothered to do anything about it.
Really, the main reason this tracks to I/P is the call for disinvestment by the protestors. This has only been a cause celebre for US students twice in my lifetime–South Africa and Israel.
Ray Radlein
And there are similar pictures from ant number of other protests around the world in the decades since. There was nothing wrong with them kissing.
And running the photo on the front page was literally the bets thing Daisy could have done for the protest. If you want to get White Middle-Class Normies on your side (SPOILER: You do, if you are serious about the aims of your protest), then showing a conventionally attractive pair of obviously harmless white girls getting tear gassed is a great way to do it — especially when the next-most newsworthy photos would be of a student beating the crap out of, like, a dozen cops. If you support the protests, then you would desperately want to distract public attention from students beating the shit out of cops, because that would be a good way to ruin the lives of everyone involved in the protests.
Ray Radlein
Like, seriously, we know the cops started it (SPOILER: If there’s an “it,” cops will >always be the ones to have started it), but if the protest becomes known for student-on-cop violence, then the hammer will squash everyone there. Depending on who is President in the DoA-verse right now, people who look like Asma might get simply disappeared.
not someone else
Have you considered that using bold type a lot will not actually make people agree with your opinion that White Middle-Class Normies are universally only interested in empathy when manipulated by girls kissing (spoiler: having your worst and whitest impulses stoked does not necessarily put you in a position
to be helpful).Nymph
Who said they were interested in courting the assistance, allyship, or opinions of “middle-class white normies” who only care about an issue with their faces on it. That won’t be good allyship, they won’t be able to help anyone but themselves, and they’ll abandon the cause as soon as someone says something they don’t want to hear.
White cishet people have to unpack their own bullshit before they can help me in any meaningful way. And plenty of them do! Plenty of them genuinely come to help and put their bodies and time and money on the line for the cause. Those tend to be among the people it’s worth reaching out to.
Because, shockingly, those are the people who it’s actually helpful to have around. People no one has to tiptoe around and do a ton of extra labor for whenever they falter or get confused.
Ray Radlein
White Normies punch waaaay above their weight in protest movements, because white normie politicians listen to them. This is, literally, Protest Movement 101.
If you can get a dozen white grandmothers to attend your march, you put them in the fucking front row. How do you get them to attend? Well, letting them see their white normie granddaughters get attacked by cops is an absolutely time-tested way of energizing them to do that.
Notice that none of this involves changing the point of your protest or “softening” your message; the whole point of white normies at a protest is (a) to shield more vulnerable protesters, and (b) to create a permission structure for other white normies to come on board and put pressure on white normie politicians, who have the power to actually do what you want done.
This isn’t centering white normies, it is just using them as effectively as possible.
Taffy
Go back to the power scaling forums, nerd
Big Z
Frankly speaking, when I’m evaluating what tactics to use at a protest, as a cis white man I’m going to listen to the guy with a white-male pfp LAST.
Nymph
Oh sorry, I can see how you were confused!
I was disagreeing with you. Strongly. Not requesting further elaboration <3 Thanks so much!
GreyICE
Ray, thank you. I swear some of these kids are well meaning, but as someone in their 40s, yeaaahhh they have no idea what they’re doing with these movements.
The curse of every movement, but if you want things to happen you do want the white allies (not the white moderates, but the white allies). Guess what, there’s a reason that Greta Thunberg gets a lot of attention, she knows it, and she uses it.
not someone else
As someone else in their 40s, this discussion has been going on between our groups for many years and despite continually editing us out of the history books you’re still wrong. <3
Dot
Hater containment thread ⬇️
Donovan
I hate this and knowing it was a later insertion makes it worse
Reaver
Genuine question: How do you know which ones are a later insertion?
Dot
Anything with Asma showing up between the protest and basically next June was retrofitted per word of willis
Reaver
Ahhh, Damn you Willis and all that then
KM
Willis stated originally he didn’t have a strip with Asma until next year so at minimum anything now with Asma is an insert.
Nono
Asma’s next appearance was originally slated to be like, mid 2026. So any strips involving her are later additions.
Bittersweet
The next non-insertion strip with Asma features Carla in it and was apparently roughly a year after the protest strips
Donovan
I’m sorry I’m being more directly salty about this than I have been about anything before but. MAN.
EpochFlame
why has there been a “hater containment thread”? what’s up with that
Reaver
Comic’s been making some people mad, they are trying to contain it to one thread to not interfere with people who are just here to read the comic and vibe.
I mean that don’t really work well when it’s near the top and gets really long but ya know the thought is what counts
EpochFlame
it’s giving similar vibes as NGPZ’s past “Let’s talk about a completely unrelated topic to the possibly-triggering comic content” threads from past storylines
NGPZ
oh yeah, I think Laura did that too, although yeah maybe I am the one who started that, heh
Laura
I was copying from you, NG. *Waves.*
I don’t really follow Asma’s train of thought, here…
?
zee
not really. It is in fact, the exact opposite. It is explicitly about discussing the comic. Just in a way that’s negative about the current, very polarizing storyline
Vyse
it’s only similar in that it was a thread built for a specific discussion. the difference is that the “let’s talk about something else” threads were off topic, and willis asked for the threads that weren’t about the comic to stop. this thread is specifically meant for discussion about the comic, but for the people who didn’t like the topic to have a space talk about it in hopes that the people who have stronger feelings towards the negative will restrict it to here.
unfortunately, it’s always been god awful to read the comments section not so much due to the content within, but because the comment box layout doesn’t make it easy to tell who is replying to who and where a thread stops and ends. i very often have to hold my cursor over the left edge of an avatar so i can scroll up to see who they’re replying to, and that no longer becomes doable once the replies no longer nest posts. there’s no tumblr or disqus indent bar that shows connecting comments, or a “replying to x” comment within posts to link directly, and it gets ever harder to tell where the containment thread starts and ends the longer they get.
i would honestly suggest the webmaster change that, if for nothing else but accessibility. it’s rough on people with visual impairments.
Needfuldoer
Does it really do all that much anyway, since this comment system doesn’t let you collapse threads?
Makes them easier to scroll past, I suppose…
Vyse
i’d argue it doesn’t make it easier, since it’s so hard to tell when the threads end. i’d do unholy things if it meant the webmaster would implement the ability to collapse threads.
Needfuldoer
As long as it doesn’t involve Disqus. Bleh.
Vyse
i second you there. disqus might have a better layout, but i don’t care for the rest of it.
ZombieKyrik