Sees like a dangerous sport – not least because it gives an excuse to put Derby Pie out into the world year round and not just on Derby Day. Who puts nuts in pie, anyway? Kentuckians are weird.
lol i feel sorry for daisy if she’s frustrated but at that point it can’t be that hard to find a one night stand
Jamie
*gestures at arc that happened on-screen*
Freemage
Eh, it’s likely more difficult for homosexual students, tho’. The potential dating pool is smaller, and since many gay kids realize their orientation when they fall for someone of the same sex, that means that a lot of them are already off the market. And of course, given that this is freakin’ Indiana, there’s still a non-zero chance of a genuinely hostile reaction if you try fishing without making sure the person is going to be interested in your bait.
Blue
Except that there are dating apps specifically for those kind of connections. If Daisy was real and not a gag she’d have no trouble.
Sal: “That’s my point. Danny and I’ve been on way more than three dates. We’re just doing what we feel is right without limiting ourselves to some arbitrary clock. We can fuck if we want or not fuck if we want – we’re free to do whatever.”
**NOTE: I am not even attempting to do Sal’s accent**
Yes, exactly. Sal and Danny are taking things at their natural pace. There aren’t arbitrary milestones or rules. Sal was crude, sure, but her advice to Lucy was sound and healthy.
Does Malaya have ANY redeeming qualities? I’ve never seen Malaya be even a basically decent person. Mike was an asshole, but he was their asshole you know? Every single time I’ve seen Malaya he’s (?) looking down on others and talking shit about them.
She’s honest or at least has no filter what so ever. She’s great self-confidence though largely in areas where it is misplaced. She has been helpful before, I think, though only by sheer accident.
She has a lizard, that’s pretty cool.
Also, Marcie seemed to like her, though I don’t recall why.
An overly-honest person will sometimes come off as an asshole because of it. But sometimes an asshole is just an asshole.
Leorale
Shortpacked!-universe Malaya mainly defined herself by hating everything around her. Personally I don’t find this endearing or honest or anything — in a real-life person, I wouldn’t even call it a personality. Willis has a real soft spot for jerks, though!
C.T. Phipps
Glass Onion: “It’s a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth.”
Only time its worked is when she’s being a jerk to Mary and that doesn’t haven’t nearly enough to balance out all the time she’s judgmental and condensending to non a-holes.
i mean i assume she got along with marcie well enough on their one on one hangouts/group stuff if she was able to develop a crush on her, unless marcie is some masochist that has like ‘step on me’ energy
personally i like malaya because theyre funny! i don’t need a character to be a “good person,” necessarily, just to bring something fun to whatever scene they’re in.
Mike was WAY worse than Malaya ever was. In fact, that’s the entire point of Malaya, and Carla, and to an extent Becky, and probably more characters that I’m forgetting: men get to be curmudgeonly jerks or snarky assholes or what have you in fiction and be considered lovable scamps for it, but any other gender doing the same is liable to get panned by the audience.
Except Becky and Carla both have considerably stronger fan-bases than Malaya. Not saying you’re wrong about Mike getting the white guy pass–hell, even he acknowledged it. But I am saying that including Malaya in with those other characters ignores the lack of an upside to her personality.
I enjoy Mary as a character, even as I root for her comeuppance–arguably, BECAUSE of her periodic comeuppances. But for me, Malaya’s sole redeeming quality is Fuckface. If Malaya suddenly joined Lyman in Jon’s basement, but Fuckface stuck around and just was hanging in the background periodically, I’d enjoy the strip more overall.
JBento
Becky and Carla are also white, and there’s an Extra Leeway afforded to people/characters for reasons other than gender.
Archieve
I think part of the problem is Malayas holier-than-thou attitude, one of the reasons I found her interactions with Mary entertaining aside from Mary comeuppance is she just trolled Mary because she and Carla decided to, Malaya wasn’t trying to dress her actions up as being rightoues. No ‘your so fake I just have to call you out’ bs.
JBento
Carla’s near-entire shtick is telling everyone how much better she is than them.
MM
I don’t think the fact Carla’s mission to find a way to irritate everyone she comes in contact with includes doing it with a smile on her face really qualifies as more of an “upside” than Malaya’s approach.
Oh, wait, I guess she occasionally uses her parents’ ridiculous wealth to influence things. That’s certainly useful, but again, not sure it counts as a personality “upside.”
thejeff
The smiling isn’t really the upside to Carla. It’s that we regularly see her help people out, while pretending she’s a jerk who would never do anything nice for someone else.
Patching up Amber’s head wound. Joyce’s jug shoes. The whole thing with cookies and checking on Ruth.
She’s obnoxious and if people don’t like her for that reason, that’s cool. It’s what she’s aiming at. But don’t miss what lies underneath that cover.
Malaya is abrasive, and she could stand to be kinder to people. She’s far from my favorite character.
Redeeming qualities:
• They genuinely loves their pet iguana, and will let others handle him.
• They are mean to Sal, and unfair to her, but they are often also spot on, and that can be entertaining for the audience, and also helps with Sal’s growth.
• I don’t know why they are so mean to Lucy, but they are not usually mean to Joyce. They’re mostly only mean to Sal and Lucy.
• They did learn ASL for Marcie’s sake.
• They genuinely enjoy roller-derby.
• They’ve never been a bigot, like Mary, or physically abusive, like Ruth. They don’t scheme against others like Mike did. Mike literally had long cons going to break people up or humiliate them.
In fact if we look at it Malaya comes of worse than she is because she’s not as prominently featured as others in the cast. We mostly see her from other characters’ perspective, usually Sal, and they can’t stand each other.
Ironically, we know quite early on why Malaya doesn’t get along with Sal, and we can guess why she doesn’t get along with Lucy: she doesn’t like fakey people. Okay, Malaya can be fakey sometimes too, but that’s besides the point. Sal could probably get Malaya on her side if she had a sincere talk with her about her insecurities. Lucy could probably earn Malaya’s respect if she got mad or acknowledged Malaya’s behavior hurt her. So far, Sal’s reactions to Malaya’s prodding just confirms to them that Sal is just acting cool and is just annoyed Malaya sees through her facade. Lucy, on the other hand, is such a people pleaser, she’s unfailingly kind and smiling no matter what Malaya says, and they would interpret that behavior as fakey.
Of course, neither Sal nor Lucy owe Malaya anything. She ought to offer them some grace. Nobody is “fakey” for the love of the game. We’re all just trying yo figure ourselves out, especially in college.
I think their meanness to Sal is more a confrontational style of being social. Turn the dial down, definitely, but it reminds me of bros insulting each other. I think that part of their personality is male coded, as the kids say, which might be why some people might give Mike a pass for being much much worse, and a character they perceive as female doesn’t.
Another redeeming quality:
They are ready to throw down against an aggressor. Of the entire cast, I think they’re the most likely to punch a nazi. Others might work themselves up to it, or wait until night to put on a jumpsuit to track them until they broke a literal law. If Malaya sees some dapper Nazi talking to a tv camera, dressing up their genocide talk in veiled slogan, they cross the street just to sock them in the jaw on camera.
HueSatLight
And a non-hypothetical situation, when half the main cast was abducted, Malaya came with Sal at the prospect of getting to fight assholes.
decent person? nah, being convinced you’re the only authentic motherfucker out there is pretty self-centred and being a dick about it is definitely bad
decent character? sure, the antics are very entertaining
I like Malaya’s iguana. Malaya, not so much. I might start to like Malaya, or at least fine her less annoying, if she didn’t assume Sal is being fake for no reason whatsoever.
To be fair Sal never said anything about whether or not she wanted to fuck, just that Lucy shouldn’t be pestering people for double dates if all she really wants is sex.
This. Though it seems like now that the idea has been spoken aloud, she has to admit that she does indeed wanna fuck, and why’d Lucy have to go & open that can of worms? (Or should that be worm?)
172 thoughts on “Bullshit”
Ana Chronistic
The enemy of my enemy is still a hipster
Clif
This strip was hilarious.
Psychie
“The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy, no more, no less.”
-Maxim 29
shadowcell
Dumbing of Age Book 13: Goddammit, Malaya
Dana
That’s every book though.
elebenty
#GDM
Thag Simmons
Pretty sure that title has already been used
NGPZ
??? ??
Roller Derby?!?!? HELL YEAH!!!! ???
True Survivor
Sees like a dangerous sport – not least because it gives an excuse to put Derby Pie out into the world year round and not just on Derby Day. Who puts nuts in pie, anyway? Kentuckians are weird.
Laura
Hi NG,
Today I passed a field of mustard flowers. I remembered how you told me to go lie down in one, and I smiled. 🙂
NGPZ
Awe how sweet! ?
Or should I say, spicy and savory? ?
Like a big warm, tingly, sunny yellow blanket! ☺️
Simply salubrious!
shadowcell
alternatively:
Dumbing of Age Book 13: If You Wanna Fuck, Just Fuckin’ Fuck
shadowcell
this comment brought to you by Daisy, who really wants to fuckin’ fuck
anon
lol i feel sorry for daisy if she’s frustrated but at that point it can’t be that hard to find a one night stand
Jamie
*gestures at arc that happened on-screen*
Freemage
Eh, it’s likely more difficult for homosexual students, tho’. The potential dating pool is smaller, and since many gay kids realize their orientation when they fall for someone of the same sex, that means that a lot of them are already off the market. And of course, given that this is freakin’ Indiana, there’s still a non-zero chance of a genuinely hostile reaction if you try fishing without making sure the person is going to be interested in your bait.
Blue
Except that there are dating apps specifically for those kind of connections. If Daisy was real and not a gag she’d have no trouble.
Zero
At least that only happens in Indiana.
Thag Simmons
Someone introduce Daisy to Alice, we know she’s only allowed to get wins if it makes Jennifer look bad
Kaiyalai
Consider: “Dumbing of Age PONOGRAPHIQUE Vol1: If You Wanna Fuck, Just Fuckin’ Fuck”
Rose by Any Other Name
Sal: “That’s my point. Danny and I’ve been on way more than three dates. We’re just doing what we feel is right without limiting ourselves to some arbitrary clock. We can fuck if we want or not fuck if we want – we’re free to do whatever.”
**NOTE: I am not even attempting to do Sal’s accent**
Carla's #2 Fan
These days she just sounds like Benoit Blanc to me
anonymsly
Sign me the hell up for Sal the famous private eye who chews up and spits out rich entitled A-holes.
cbwroses
I’ll watch that.
JBento
Sallock Holmes and her companion, Dr. (of IT) Danny Wilcoxson.
BarerMender
Or: Sal: I’m not discussing the details of my love life with you. You little twerp.
pope suburban
Yes, exactly. Sal and Danny are taking things at their natural pace. There aren’t arbitrary milestones or rules. Sal was crude, sure, but her advice to Lucy was sound and healthy.
Mark
See discussion of why Joyce and Joe are not sprinting to find a deserted room….
Zero
Yeah, I’m not sure how Lucy got her conclusion from what Sal said. It’s almost the exact opposite.
MisterJinKC
Does Malaya have ANY redeeming qualities? I’ve never seen Malaya be even a basically decent person. Mike was an asshole, but he was their asshole you know? Every single time I’ve seen Malaya he’s (?) looking down on others and talking shit about them.
C.T. Phipps
She hates fakey poseurs like Sal.
Ugh.
So fake.
True Survivor
She’s honest or at least has no filter what so ever. She’s great self-confidence though largely in areas where it is misplaced. She has been helpful before, I think, though only by sheer accident.
She has a lizard, that’s pretty cool.
Also, Marcie seemed to like her, though I don’t recall why.
Archieve
Heavily implied Marcie likes Malaya because of the similarities with Sal, her first crush.
Tan
Malaya is not honest.
e.g. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/05-as-long-as-its-free/steal/
An overly-honest person will sometimes come off as an asshole because of it. But sometimes an asshole is just an asshole.
Leorale
Shortpacked!-universe Malaya mainly defined herself by hating everything around her. Personally I don’t find this endearing or honest or anything — in a real-life person, I wouldn’t even call it a personality. Willis has a real soft spot for jerks, though!
C.T. Phipps
Glass Onion: “It’s a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth.”
True Survivor
Good point.
BarerMender
“So round, so firm, so fully packed.” That may be why.
nobodybasically
Malaya’s pronouns are she/they/whatever.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/01-this-bright-millennium/pronouns/
Freemage
Not sure that’s a ‘redeeming’ quality for her. It’s a neutral fact of their preferences, which says nothing about whatever as a person.
k
It’s a response to MisterJinKC using “he(?)” to refer to Malaya
Archieve
Only time its worked is when she’s being a jerk to Mary and that doesn’t haven’t nearly enough to balance out all the time she’s judgmental and condensending to non a-holes.
anon
i mean i assume she got along with marcie well enough on their one on one hangouts/group stuff if she was able to develop a crush on her, unless marcie is some masochist that has like ‘step on me’ energy
bwooom
personally i like malaya because theyre funny! i don’t need a character to be a “good person,” necessarily, just to bring something fun to whatever scene they’re in.
Kim
YEAH! 😀 I love Malaya!
Dave
Mike was WAY worse than Malaya ever was. In fact, that’s the entire point of Malaya, and Carla, and to an extent Becky, and probably more characters that I’m forgetting: men get to be curmudgeonly jerks or snarky assholes or what have you in fiction and be considered lovable scamps for it, but any other gender doing the same is liable to get panned by the audience.
Freemage
Except Becky and Carla both have considerably stronger fan-bases than Malaya. Not saying you’re wrong about Mike getting the white guy pass–hell, even he acknowledged it. But I am saying that including Malaya in with those other characters ignores the lack of an upside to her personality.
I enjoy Mary as a character, even as I root for her comeuppance–arguably, BECAUSE of her periodic comeuppances. But for me, Malaya’s sole redeeming quality is Fuckface. If Malaya suddenly joined Lyman in Jon’s basement, but Fuckface stuck around and just was hanging in the background periodically, I’d enjoy the strip more overall.
JBento
Becky and Carla are also white, and there’s an Extra Leeway afforded to people/characters for reasons other than gender.
Archieve
I think part of the problem is Malayas holier-than-thou attitude, one of the reasons I found her interactions with Mary entertaining aside from Mary comeuppance is she just trolled Mary because she and Carla decided to, Malaya wasn’t trying to dress her actions up as being rightoues. No ‘your so fake I just have to call you out’ bs.
JBento
Carla’s near-entire shtick is telling everyone how much better she is than them.
MM
I don’t think the fact Carla’s mission to find a way to irritate everyone she comes in contact with includes doing it with a smile on her face really qualifies as more of an “upside” than Malaya’s approach.
Oh, wait, I guess she occasionally uses her parents’ ridiculous wealth to influence things. That’s certainly useful, but again, not sure it counts as a personality “upside.”
thejeff
The smiling isn’t really the upside to Carla. It’s that we regularly see her help people out, while pretending she’s a jerk who would never do anything nice for someone else.
Patching up Amber’s head wound. Joyce’s jug shoes. The whole thing with cookies and checking on Ruth.
She’s obnoxious and if people don’t like her for that reason, that’s cool. It’s what she’s aiming at. But don’t miss what lies underneath that cover.
Thag Simmons
Has iguana.
Sean Smith
Taught herself ASL so she could talk to Marcie.
JRivest
Malaya is abrasive, and she could stand to be kinder to people. She’s far from my favorite character.
Redeeming qualities:
• They genuinely loves their pet iguana, and will let others handle him.
• They are mean to Sal, and unfair to her, but they are often also spot on, and that can be entertaining for the audience, and also helps with Sal’s growth.
• I don’t know why they are so mean to Lucy, but they are not usually mean to Joyce. They’re mostly only mean to Sal and Lucy.
• They did learn ASL for Marcie’s sake.
• They genuinely enjoy roller-derby.
• They’ve never been a bigot, like Mary, or physically abusive, like Ruth. They don’t scheme against others like Mike did. Mike literally had long cons going to break people up or humiliate them.
In fact if we look at it Malaya comes of worse than she is because she’s not as prominently featured as others in the cast. We mostly see her from other characters’ perspective, usually Sal, and they can’t stand each other.
Ironically, we know quite early on why Malaya doesn’t get along with Sal, and we can guess why she doesn’t get along with Lucy: she doesn’t like fakey people. Okay, Malaya can be fakey sometimes too, but that’s besides the point. Sal could probably get Malaya on her side if she had a sincere talk with her about her insecurities. Lucy could probably earn Malaya’s respect if she got mad or acknowledged Malaya’s behavior hurt her. So far, Sal’s reactions to Malaya’s prodding just confirms to them that Sal is just acting cool and is just annoyed Malaya sees through her facade. Lucy, on the other hand, is such a people pleaser, she’s unfailingly kind and smiling no matter what Malaya says, and they would interpret that behavior as fakey.
Of course, neither Sal nor Lucy owe Malaya anything. She ought to offer them some grace. Nobody is “fakey” for the love of the game. We’re all just trying yo figure ourselves out, especially in college.
HueSatLight
I think their meanness to Sal is more a confrontational style of being social. Turn the dial down, definitely, but it reminds me of bros insulting each other. I think that part of their personality is male coded, as the kids say, which might be why some people might give Mike a pass for being much much worse, and a character they perceive as female doesn’t.
Another redeeming quality:
They are ready to throw down against an aggressor. Of the entire cast, I think they’re the most likely to punch a nazi. Others might work themselves up to it, or wait until night to put on a jumpsuit to track them until they broke a literal law. If Malaya sees some dapper Nazi talking to a tv camera, dressing up their genocide talk in veiled slogan, they cross the street just to sock them in the jaw on camera.
HueSatLight
And a non-hypothetical situation, when half the main cast was abducted, Malaya came with Sal at the prospect of getting to fight assholes.
Yeet
decent person? nah, being convinced you’re the only authentic motherfucker out there is pretty self-centred and being a dick about it is definitely bad
decent character? sure, the antics are very entertaining
Keulen
I like Malaya’s iguana. Malaya, not so much. I might start to like Malaya, or at least fine her less annoying, if she didn’t assume Sal is being fake for no reason whatsoever.
Blume
How do any of you like Mike… I can’t understand it. I’ve never seen Shortpacked or Roomies, is that why?
Dr. T
Sounds like Danny is gonna get a surprise this evening.
anon
that being the next slipshine, or some kinda two stories/couples split between the next one would be interesting
Steve C
That would make me get a shipshine subcription.
RassilonTDavros
At last, an opposing force to unite them all.
Pergola
One jerk to rule them all, One jerk to find them…
newlland(Henryvolt)
Sal: If you wanna fuck just fuck.
Lucy: So does that mean you and Danny…
Sal: Ah never said anything about taking my own advice.
Archieve
To be fair Sal never said anything about whether or not she wanted to fuck, just that Lucy shouldn’t be pestering people for double dates if all she really wants is sex.
saltchocolate
This. Though it seems like now that the idea has been spoken aloud, she has to admit that she does indeed wanna fuck, and why’d Lucy have to go & open that can of worms? (Or should that be worm?)
BBCC
Nope, too late, you are friends now.
Bryy
So the arc is gonna end with whatever drama happens at the roller derby.
Got it.
Jamie
Gotta make sure Amber’s present, after all.
StClair