Depending on how many years apart, Sarah may literally have seen Liz poop herself.
Miri
Or been in a bathtub/paddling pool together when she pooped.
I’m not intending to ask my nearly-7 year old if she remembers her 3.5 year old sister doing this… Well, maybe if the toddler pulls this one on them at some point… ?
Lanie
I dunno, Miri, I still remember my 8 year old self jumping right on out of the wading pool when my nearly 3 year old brother was having too much fun to bother getting out to go to the bathroom and instead just let his turd float free. I think he’d prefer I didn’t remember, but that memory is pretty imprinted. I’d be prepared to wager your older child remembers too! ?
Maja!
Me and my brother bathed together until I was maybe 9 and he was 7 and the reason I began bathing alone was that he – still at that age – would poop in the water without even telling me. I’ll never forget…
Dr. T
To be fair, there are plenty of people in Indiana pooping themselves right now (it’s part of how deworming drugs work), though it’s far more common in states farther south.
Dr. T
I’m just saying that there are plenty of young adults considering Depends right now.
Thag Simmons
God that Ivermectin shit is the dumbest possible twist to the anti-vaxx saga, to the point where I feel like it had to have originated as a joke or a troll that idiots started taking serious.
Like, the people who lambast people as ‘sheep’ for taking a tested and proven vaccine are literally taking a fucking dewormer meant for literal livestock that does have all the nasty side effects they think the covid jab has. If you wrote that into a story, people would laugh in your face.
Wagstaff
Do you think there are gonna BE any anti-vaxxers left after this pandemic is over?
Thag Simmons
Yeah. Less of them perhaps, but this sort of social contagion is durable.
King Daniel
There were anti-vaxxers 70 years ago (there were even newspaper comics mocking them even back then), there will probably be anti-vaxxers 70 years from now as well.
Thag Simmons
I don’t think it was really a contiguous movement pre-Wakefield. The MMR debacle kinda consolidated a bunch of fringe elements and gave them enough mainstream attention to draw in new recruits.
butting
Even futher: The Root’s Michael Harriot has posted a thread on twitter listing antivax outbreaks in 1706, 1806, 1906, and then Wakefield in 1998 rolling on to today. Every hundred years, almost like clockwork.
BBCC
They’ve been around as long as we’ve had vaccines. Benjamin Franklin argued with them.
Masumi
* Benjamin Franklin was one. Until his son died of smallpox and he changed his mind.
BBCC
Fair enough. I only read his comments after the fact. It boiled down to ‘I hear parents say they’d never forgive themselves if the child died of the vaccine – trust me, it might be the same either way.’
Wagstaff
But those same parents would also be willing to forgive themselves if they let their child die of a virus when they could have easily prevented it with a vaccine?
” WELCOME TO THE DAMNED HUMAN RACE! “
— Mark Twain
BBCC
Well, at the time, the vaccine DID give the patient the virus. It was just a milder form of the virus that was less likely to kill you. “Less likely” doesn’t mean impossible. So, in this case, you were gonna get the virus either way. BUT as Franklin pointed out, if they catch it naturally and die, you’d end up regretting it anyway. So he urged people to give it to their children via vaccine so it would be less likely to kill them.
And eventually a later vaccine came out that DIDN’T give you the virus and people who were vaccinating switched to that one.
Masumi
ooo, that’s cool to know!
Geneseepaws
I thought Ivermectin was that burgh in Scotland?
JA
And the people taking the dewormer are most likely the same people who made a huge deal out of like 10 kids eating Tide pods a few years ago…
deliverything
This might not be entirely a bad thing – people do say these antivax types are full of shit, so maybe a little emptying would be beneficial.
BBCC
They’re also shedding parts of their intestines, Jesus.
hof1991
And they’re convinced that the strips of their intestines they are pooping out are worms. That it’s a good thing that one should do more of.
Needfuldoer
Hasn’t that been a ‘thing’ in quack medicine for a while? I thought they used some household cleaner like bleach to trigger that response so they could claim they were “detoxifying” the bowels or something ridiculous.
At least the nonsense “detoxifying” foot baths just turn their water brown by rusting a steel anode.
Delicious Taffy
A few years back, I stumbled across a dieting forum of some sort, dedicated to pushing a diet of literally rotten cabbage in salt water. They insisted it was a cure-all, anyone who questioned it got banned on the spot, and they were posting pictures.
[The Gross Part – Nasty Warning]
This one regular posted a photo of herself holding up some disgusting mass of cabbage and something suspiciously fleshy-looking, and said something to the effect of “I’m not sure why but this came out and I feel a weird numbness in my guts now.” And multiple people assured her it was normal and a good thing. This seems about on par with that.
Delicious Taffy
There really is no floor to this fucking idiocy, and they’re dragging us all down with them. But I’m not allowed to be happy when their stupidity kills them, because it’s “bad form” or whatever.
I think it depends. I’d say ‘that Perfect Girl’ is appropriate for multiple ongoing threads in that chapter, even though Carla is the one who actually says the line.
The ironic part is that the baptism process may very well result in disassociative identities like Amber’s Amazigirl through trauma, thereby providing indoctrinators with confirmation of its effectiveness.
Spencer
Are you suggesting that baptism causes Dissociative Identity Disorder?
Like, I know I’ve gone off on you a lot, but this just seems like it’s not up for interpretation. What the hell are you saying?
Wagstaff
Where I’m coming from is that at least historically, the baptism process was supposed to destroy the soul so that a completely new one, free of sin, would be regenerated in its place. This was taken to be such a dramatic transformation experience that it was referred to as being “born-again”.
The process emphasized humiliating the individual, having them learn that they were totally helpless to break free of their sinful nature, and that only God would be able to save them from eternal torture. From there they were supposed to just wait for Jesus to come in and regenerate their souls, as nothing else would be an acceptable substitute.
To have an unbearable threat looming over one like that, without any conceivable means of escape, would likely be traumatic for the individual, especially at an early age.
This may lead to a wide diversity of both voluntary and involuntary maladaptive coping mechanisms, of which Disassociative Identity Disorder is one.
Spencer
Look I’m just going to come at this honestly, can you please never talk about anything relating to mental health and its studies beyond your personal experience ever again?
Because you say shit like this all the time, and you say it with full confidence with no regard for what your words mean. You just throw shit out and anyone who has a problem with it is just expected to argue with you until the end of time because “you learn from peer review” or whatever., except you’ve never once in the months you’ve been here changed or modified the slightest belief you’ve had and certainly not since the last time you said something outrageously stupid like “well if you think the afterlife is real maybe we should just kill ourselves.”
Like the theology shit’s just whatever to me, it’s not my beef so I don’t think I’m allowed to raise as much of a fuss I have been, but for the love of god do not try and discuss the origins of complex mental disorders with your pop psych bullshit because I can assure you are speaking with absolutely zero knowledge or authority on anything you are talking about.
David M Willis
cosigned
Wagstaff
Just for the record, it has been confirmed thus far that a likely cause of DID is childhood trauma.
But fine. Seeing that psychology is hardly an exact science yet and how much it’s been changing (not to mention the replicatability crisis within the field I’ve been hearing about), I shall refrain from naming specific, professionally recognized mental disorders.
After all, looking ahead, it’s unlikely that the current categories of mental disorders and their definitions and diagnostics are gonna stay relevant for very long.
?….Liz is kind of cute- Though I got to wonder if she’s even 18 yet, and then I got to realize that I myself am 26 now and I’ve been reading Willises stuff sense I was 17.
17-year-old me stumbled on It’s Walky! around 2004, but got scared off by all the backstory. A few years later I found Shortpacked! and read it through from the beginning. I’ve been reading DoA since day 1.
[Saving Private Ryan aging sequence GIF goes here]
I’ve been reading since i was 13. It’s still kind of a pill that I’m now older than most of the cast and (hopefully) graduating in a year while they’re still first years .-.
…I think this might be the single longest gap between appearances for any character in the entire Walky-slash-Dumbi-verse. 22, almost 23 years since her sole Roomies! appearance.
Considering the way Joyce regards Sarah as the big sister she (thinks that she) never had, seeing her interact with Liz should be a lot of fun. And by “fun” I mean “there will almost certainly be tears.”
192 thoughts on “Prepared”
Ana Chronistic
A NEW
CHALLENGERCHARACTER APPEARS!Ana Chronistic
Sarah has seen ALL THE SHIT
Nono
Depending on how many years apart, Sarah may literally have seen Liz poop herself.
Miri
Or been in a bathtub/paddling pool together when she pooped.
I’m not intending to ask my nearly-7 year old if she remembers her 3.5 year old sister doing this… Well, maybe if the toddler pulls this one on them at some point… ?
Lanie
I dunno, Miri, I still remember my 8 year old self jumping right on out of the wading pool when my nearly 3 year old brother was having too much fun to bother getting out to go to the bathroom and instead just let his turd float free. I think he’d prefer I didn’t remember, but that memory is pretty imprinted. I’d be prepared to wager your older child remembers too! ?
Maja!
Me and my brother bathed together until I was maybe 9 and he was 7 and the reason I began bathing alone was that he – still at that age – would poop in the water without even telling me. I’ll never forget…
Dr. T
To be fair, there are plenty of people in Indiana pooping themselves right now (it’s part of how deworming drugs work), though it’s far more common in states farther south.
Dr. T
I’m just saying that there are plenty of young adults considering Depends right now.
Thag Simmons
God that Ivermectin shit is the dumbest possible twist to the anti-vaxx saga, to the point where I feel like it had to have originated as a joke or a troll that idiots started taking serious.
Like, the people who lambast people as ‘sheep’ for taking a tested and proven vaccine are literally taking a fucking dewormer meant for literal livestock that does have all the nasty side effects they think the covid jab has. If you wrote that into a story, people would laugh in your face.
Wagstaff
Do you think there are gonna BE any anti-vaxxers left after this pandemic is over?
Thag Simmons
Yeah. Less of them perhaps, but this sort of social contagion is durable.
King Daniel
There were anti-vaxxers 70 years ago (there were even newspaper comics mocking them even back then), there will probably be anti-vaxxers 70 years from now as well.
Thag Simmons
I don’t think it was really a contiguous movement pre-Wakefield. The MMR debacle kinda consolidated a bunch of fringe elements and gave them enough mainstream attention to draw in new recruits.
butting
Even futher: The Root’s Michael Harriot has posted a thread on twitter listing antivax outbreaks in 1706, 1806, 1906, and then Wakefield in 1998 rolling on to today. Every hundred years, almost like clockwork.
BBCC
They’ve been around as long as we’ve had vaccines. Benjamin Franklin argued with them.
Masumi
* Benjamin Franklin was one. Until his son died of smallpox and he changed his mind.
BBCC
Fair enough. I only read his comments after the fact. It boiled down to ‘I hear parents say they’d never forgive themselves if the child died of the vaccine – trust me, it might be the same either way.’
Wagstaff
But those same parents would also be willing to forgive themselves if they let their child die of a virus when they could have easily prevented it with a vaccine?
” WELCOME TO THE DAMNED HUMAN RACE! “
— Mark Twain
BBCC
Well, at the time, the vaccine DID give the patient the virus. It was just a milder form of the virus that was less likely to kill you. “Less likely” doesn’t mean impossible. So, in this case, you were gonna get the virus either way. BUT as Franklin pointed out, if they catch it naturally and die, you’d end up regretting it anyway. So he urged people to give it to their children via vaccine so it would be less likely to kill them.
And eventually a later vaccine came out that DIDN’T give you the virus and people who were vaccinating switched to that one.
Masumi
ooo, that’s cool to know!
Geneseepaws
I thought Ivermectin was that burgh in Scotland?
JA
And the people taking the dewormer are most likely the same people who made a huge deal out of like 10 kids eating Tide pods a few years ago…
deliverything
This might not be entirely a bad thing – people do say these antivax types are full of shit, so maybe a little emptying would be beneficial.
BBCC
They’re also shedding parts of their intestines, Jesus.
hof1991
And they’re convinced that the strips of their intestines they are pooping out are worms. That it’s a good thing that one should do more of.
Needfuldoer
Hasn’t that been a ‘thing’ in quack medicine for a while? I thought they used some household cleaner like bleach to trigger that response so they could claim they were “detoxifying” the bowels or something ridiculous.
At least the nonsense “detoxifying” foot baths just turn their water brown by rusting a steel anode.
Delicious Taffy
A few years back, I stumbled across a dieting forum of some sort, dedicated to pushing a diet of literally rotten cabbage in salt water. They insisted it was a cure-all, anyone who questioned it got banned on the spot, and they were posting pictures.
[The Gross Part – Nasty Warning]
This one regular posted a photo of herself holding up some disgusting mass of cabbage and something suspiciously fleshy-looking, and said something to the effect of “I’m not sure why but this came out and I feel a weird numbness in my guts now.” And multiple people assured her it was normal and a good thing. This seems about on par with that.
Delicious Taffy
There really is no floor to this fucking idiocy, and they’re dragging us all down with them. But I’m not allowed to be happy when their stupidity kills them, because it’s “bad form” or whatever.
AbacusWizard
PLAYER 2 READY
Sirksome
Are we finally gonna learn something about Sarah!!???!!!
Doctor_Who
I mean, we know the name of her vibrator, what more is there?
Reltzik
That her Nana gave her a vibrator?
Decidedly Orthogonal
We’ve learned plenty about Sarah. But now we get to learn *more*.
Sa-rah! Sa-rah! Sa-rah!
StClair
Storms are brewing in her eyes.
GeekRyuu
Well, no time is a good time for goodbyes, y’know.
Decidedly Orthogonal
Well…. if Willis wants Liz to remain true to form, tonight’s comic would be a *great* time for goodbyes.
Wagstaff
Looks like we just discovered the identity of the Sister Christian!
Thag Simmons
Well, one at least.
This could be a [iconic example of title that could refer to multiple things] situation where the title has multiple potential meanings.
Wagstaff
Has that also happened with other chapters?
Thag Simmons
I think it depends. I’d say ‘that Perfect Girl’ is appropriate for multiple ongoing threads in that chapter, even though Carla is the one who actually says the line.
MatthewTheLucky
“Sister, Christian roommate. Christian roommate, sister. Introductions done.”
Norah
But Sarah knows that her roommate is no longer a Christian. Maybe Liz is a Christian?
Reltzik
Sarah also knows Joyce is in the closet and you don’t out people who don’t want to be out.
Sombrero
Nah, the storyline will be about Amber becoming a born-again Christian. This is just a decoy.
Wagstaff
The ironic part is that the baptism process may very well result in disassociative identities like Amber’s Amazigirl through trauma, thereby providing indoctrinators with confirmation of its effectiveness.
Spencer
Are you suggesting that baptism causes Dissociative Identity Disorder?
Like, I know I’ve gone off on you a lot, but this just seems like it’s not up for interpretation. What the hell are you saying?
Wagstaff
Where I’m coming from is that at least historically, the baptism process was supposed to destroy the soul so that a completely new one, free of sin, would be regenerated in its place. This was taken to be such a dramatic transformation experience that it was referred to as being “born-again”.
The process emphasized humiliating the individual, having them learn that they were totally helpless to break free of their sinful nature, and that only God would be able to save them from eternal torture. From there they were supposed to just wait for Jesus to come in and regenerate their souls, as nothing else would be an acceptable substitute.
To have an unbearable threat looming over one like that, without any conceivable means of escape, would likely be traumatic for the individual, especially at an early age.
This may lead to a wide diversity of both voluntary and involuntary maladaptive coping mechanisms, of which Disassociative Identity Disorder is one.
Spencer
Look I’m just going to come at this honestly, can you please never talk about anything relating to mental health and its studies beyond your personal experience ever again?
Because you say shit like this all the time, and you say it with full confidence with no regard for what your words mean. You just throw shit out and anyone who has a problem with it is just expected to argue with you until the end of time because “you learn from peer review” or whatever., except you’ve never once in the months you’ve been here changed or modified the slightest belief you’ve had and certainly not since the last time you said something outrageously stupid like “well if you think the afterlife is real maybe we should just kill ourselves.”
Like the theology shit’s just whatever to me, it’s not my beef so I don’t think I’m allowed to raise as much of a fuss I have been, but for the love of god do not try and discuss the origins of complex mental disorders with your pop psych bullshit because I can assure you are speaking with absolutely zero knowledge or authority on anything you are talking about.
David M Willis
cosigned
Wagstaff
Just for the record, it has been confirmed thus far that a likely cause of DID is childhood trauma.
But fine. Seeing that psychology is hardly an exact science yet and how much it’s been changing (not to mention the replicatability crisis within the field I’ve been hearing about), I shall refrain from naming specific, professionally recognized mental disorders.
After all, looking ahead, it’s unlikely that the current categories of mental disorders and their definitions and diagnostics are gonna stay relevant for very long.
sultryglebe
(Amazi-Girl voice): She’s Sarah.
newlland(Henryvolt)
?….Liz is kind of cute- Though I got to wonder if she’s even 18 yet, and then I got to realize that I myself am 26 now and I’ve been reading Willises stuff sense I was 17.
Nono
I wonder if the cross eyed look is intentional.
Schpoonman
I think it’s 2D shorthand for the character looking straight ahead.
Ryek Hvek
or having a part-time gig over at Dragonball-Z
Johan
Been reading this comic since I was a hs senior in 2010 so I get ya.
Schpoonman
I didn’t get into DoA until after my final disastrous attempt at uni, but I also graduated high school in 2010 so when Sal’s new haircut was unfurled…
Yotomoe
Same except a year off. 17-27.
Keulen
Good, so I’m not the only one who think Liz is cute.
Needfuldoer
17-year-old me stumbled on It’s Walky! around 2004, but got scared off by all the backstory. A few years later I found Shortpacked! and read it through from the beginning. I’ve been reading DoA since day 1.
[Saving Private Ryan aging sequence GIF goes here]
zee
I’ve been reading since i was 13. It’s still kind of a pill that I’m now older than most of the cast and (hopefully) graduating in a year while they’re still first years .-.
mrnoidea
26 here! But I didn’t get into reading Willis comics until late in the game — 2018, or 3 years ago.
Doctor_Who
Hank: Joyce, your major is Early Childhood Education, why are you saying you need 10 years of schooling?
Joyce: Because I’ve got at least another six volu- I mean I really want to do post-grad studies!
Nono
Okay, I’m very on board with this storyline.
I like Liz’s design.
Clif
Wait till you see the design for her boyfriend, Jimmy Wilso.
n.
Needfuldoer
I thought his name was Jon.
RassilonTDavros
…I was joking when I predicted this, but I’m not disappointed!
RassilonTDavros
…I think this might be the single longest gap between appearances for any character in the entire Walky-slash-Dumbi-verse. 22, almost 23 years since her sole Roomies! appearance.
Considering the way Joyce regards Sarah as the big sister she (thinks that she) never had, seeing her interact with Liz should be a lot of fun. And by “fun” I mean “there will almost certainly be tears.”
Lingo
Oh dang. Good catch, thought this was a brand-new character!
Thag Simmons
She might as well be.
Keulen
It’s been so long since her last appearance that I forgot she existed in the Walkyverse.
Blibdoolpoolp
Well then, I hadn’t seen that coming but I am not too sure that I have anything against it either. Sarah always took me for an only child.
Decidedly Orthogonal