didn’t walky literally go like “la la la i can’t hear you” last time booster tried to give ‘advice’/say that he can’t handel genuine emotions? He prolly would’ve been dismissive of it lol
Petition to alter the site’s markup so that whenever Walky is tagged in a strip (and Booster isn’t), then they are automatically added to either side of the strip, like bookends, making that face.
Yeah, but also he would’ve immediately guilted Walky in some soul crushing way about what an obvious sham his relationship with Lucy was and kept needling him the entire time. Kinda like how he bought Walky pajama pants to undermine his relationship with Dorothy. Who jnows if it would help but it would change things.
fridge_logic
Given how much promise the Walky/Dorothy ship had if they had time to grow together and how rough Walky’s love life has been since then I think Mike did more harm than good.
Actually he probably would’ve bullied Lucy even more than everyone else did.
Wraithy2773
…I dunno. Bullying Lucy just feels a little too simple for Mike. He was an asshole, no question, but he was a sportsman, damn it! He’s not going to prey on only the easy targets!
TulipKitten
I feel like Lucy would straight up murder Mike. She’s emotionally intelligent enough to give him a run for his money.
Miri
… I somehow don’t feel entirely comfortable with jokes about Lucy murdering the person who was murdered…I think if you’d said “figuratively eviscerate” or something it would have been far enough from what actually happened to him while making the same point?
clif
I’m sorry you feel that way, but Mike will live forever in our hearts and minds where Lucy cannot touch him.
Dragonfire
Y’can’t murder Mike twice.
In this universe.
thejeff
Mike lives in Amber’s heart and mind, but not forever.
Taffy
He’s dead anyway, it’s not like he’s gonna complain.
Mike would have solved this in the same way a pipe bomb solves a leaky faucet. Yeah you don’t have the old problem, but you now have several more worse problems
that is a very Mike face he’s making (and apparently expecting) in panel 4.
but IMO, same problem as panel 5, in that Mike pretty much always had that face. (pure coincidence, I’m sure.)
I think they’re referring to Walky’s expressions in panels 4 and 5, which are both very Mike-esque.
StClair
Actually I’m referring to what Walky says in panel 5, not Booster’s expression. Fully unpacking/killing the joke (ha):
Walky is wanting Booster to give him The Mike Expression (panel 4) as a warning that he’s being stupid. However, Mike always had that expression, possibly because Walky was always being stupid. To be actually useful, MikeBooster Replacement Mike would need a different signal for when Walky is being exceptionally stupid… but the rest of panel 5 suggests that, nope, that needle is just constantly pegged all the way over. Readings are always off-the-scale, on the high end.
I think that, whether or not him and Lucy ever go back to being a thing, he does care about her and does feel bad he did badly by her. There are plenty of cast members who dislike him, he doesn’t tend to sweat it much.
He enjoyed her company, and probably feels like he didn’t do enough to help her handle his parents.
They’re still in town right? Entirely possible he chews them out and either prompts positive change or inspires them to join the next iteration of the league of evil parents. One of those is more likely than the other.
The knowledge that he screwed this up and genuinely DID do poorly by her can’t be helping. Like, he agreed with her “fuck you”. (And I don’t think the failure here WAS entirely on Walky, and that some of the things he handled poorly were understandable missteps – but there were a lot of opportunities to clear things up in less loaded context, and that ball was in his court.)
And he definitely does like and enjoy Lucy platonically. He may well potentially have romantic feelings for her, he hadn’t been thinking of her in that context for long, all of his friends are girls. Either way, he’s likely damaged his platonic relationship with her, too (and with how long she was harboring that crush, we don’t know if she WANTS to be friends platonically with dating off the table. Or she could quite reasonably need a break before she could hang out with him in a platonic context.)
I’ll just say that Lucy got too excited and Walky was just trying to do things slowly, but with Linda’s comment and Lucy’s insistence in the church it only caused the bomb to explode too soon, which is disturbing because who knows what. What would Lucy really do after she finally used common sense?
In my opinion, it’s not going to be any good, because she said that she should be brave enough and those words cannot be exactly coherent if we take into account that she is a naive girl who received her strong blow from reality and that bravery that she says There may be many people affected by all this.
I think over the course of the last year of panels Walky has been coming to terms that he isn’t just some chill dude that can coast through life like he thought, he is noticing the constant mistakes he makes and has made and wants to stop making them. He wants to be better but after living like that for his entire life it is going to be VERY HARD to kick those bad habits and I think its eating him up inside, he wants help and nobody who used to help him is around besides Dorothy and she isn’t the best person to ask atm.
In addition to the last interactions they had, he is aware of what he said with too much confidence and if Dorothy finds out what just happened…, it is not going to be good.
cbwroses
Didn’t he simply say he was going to be faithful?
He wasn’t unfaithful so, while the overall situation might be awkward to discuss with her, there’s nothing that he’d have to walk back if he decided to talk to her.
I say it, because he seemed to want to show that he has already gotten over Dorothy, but who knows how the latter would take it into consideration, since she is not in a good moment either, but if it were the opposite….. hurray (despite The way he flaunts his integrity to Lucy bothers me, I still like the Walky x Dorothy)
cbwroses
That was not and is not my take on that scene, but if that’s how you took it, that’s fine.
Him and Lucy breaking up wouldn’t mean he’s not over Dorothy so still nothing to walk back even if he was trying to convey that.
reread your comment, and yes, it seems like I got sidetracked, it’s because that moment really bothered me because after the obvious rejection, his “words of encouragement” felt… the opposite. It seemed like he told her “You’re just having a bad day, the next day you’ll be fine.” Obviously he didn’t say it the way I wrote it, but I noticed it that way.
cbwroses
I read my comment again.
I don’t know what you think is being misconstrued or what you think I don’t understand, but I wrote exactly what I meant.
Saying “I’m in a committed relationship and I’m staying faithful” is not the same thing as “I want you to know know that I’m over you”.
He can be over Dorothy without that being the point of that conversation, which is the implication when you say he wants her to know that.
Being over Dorothy is not contingent on his relationship status.
He can be single and still be over her.
That’s why the point was about him being faithful, not about emphasizing to Dorothy that he’s over her.
Hell, he said, either in that same strip or the one after that, that he didn’t want to be the reason that she fails; that doesn’t indicate a lack of interest to me.
That’s pretty much the same attitude he’s had since they first took a break, that he doesn’t want to drag her down.
That’s not even a possibility if he has no desire to get with her.
That aside, I do agree that he was treating her as if she was just having a bad day.
I’m pretty sure that was how it was supposed to come across.
He wasn’t really hearing her, I think partly because he wanted to leave the situation and partly because he puts her up on a pedestal.
cbwroses
It occurs to me that you may have been saying that you read my comment again vs telling me to read my comment again.
If so, I apologize for writing so much.
I hate to be misunderstood, so I tend to over explain myself if it seems like that’s happening.
At no point has Walky ever implied that he didn’t like Lucy. He does. He’s just not in love with her, and has kinda been sleepwalking through this attempt at a relationship with her.
And right now, she’s hurting, and its because of him. There’s other, deeper stuff going on here too, of course, but “my friend is hurting because I fucked shit up” is going to be a factor regardless.
I don’t see the sleepwalking through the relationship. He’s not in love with her – which isn’t surprising, given that it’s been a week. And he’s not jumping at the opportunity to have sex with her – for what are likely complicated reasons, but might well not reduce to “no attraction”.
Honestly his “I like to be liked” is now running into “she isn’t a good fit for you and you have to realize that” which is I think why Booster is the one he talks to first. Booster is the one who can tell him outright that this relationship was only heading one way.
Mmm just because someone’s a good fit for you doesn’t mean you have to be with them. I’ve met plenty of people who were a perfect fit for me on paper but the chemistry just wasn’t there
I still think Walky does have tender feelings for Lucy, and would have shown them more if he hadn’t been constantly back-pedalling from Lucy’s intensity.
I am pretty sure he actually likes Lucy and cares about her. He is however an emotionally stunted person, which in the way his mother glorified him and gave him constant approval, causes issues because now he thinks he is in the wrong when someone gives him approval. Like Joyce leaving the church and growing, Wally is leaving his parents and growing.
If Booster is supposed to be there to make faces at you every time you screw up, Walky, they’d never be able to do anything for themself. They’d be attached to you 24/7. I approve of Booster’s shit-eating grin, BTW.
188 thoughts on “Job description”
Ana Chronistic
“Why didn’t you magically teleport in like Joyce and fact-check me at the first whiff of shenanigans??”
cbwroses
Too busy reading Amber’s fanfics.
anon
didn’t walky literally go like “la la la i can’t hear you” last time booster tried to give ‘advice’/say that he can’t handel genuine emotions? He prolly would’ve been dismissive of it lol
Doctor_Who
Petition to alter the site’s markup so that whenever Walky is tagged in a strip (and Booster isn’t), then they are automatically added to either side of the strip, like bookends, making that face.
clif
That face. I don’t know about Walky, but I shall have nightmares.
Decidedly Orthogonal
If I wasn’t mad busy getting ready to travel, I’d have a greasemonkey script for you in a couple of hours. ?
Pergola
A Booster face I didn’t need.
Opus the Poet
That seems like a resource hog, but if it makes you happy…
NGPZ
???
Sirksome
Walky’s actually right. Mike would’ve solved this.
MM
By fucking Walky’s mom for a nickel?
Yotomoe
Someone has to.
Needfuldoer
There’s solid evidence it’s happened at least once.
Lysbeth
The nickel is solid evidence. He still has it, because once he banged walky’s mom for a nickel, he asked for a refund.
Sirksome
Yeah, but also he would’ve immediately guilted Walky in some soul crushing way about what an obvious sham his relationship with Lucy was and kept needling him the entire time. Kinda like how he bought Walky pajama pants to undermine his relationship with Dorothy. Who jnows if it would help but it would change things.
fridge_logic
Given how much promise the Walky/Dorothy ship had if they had time to grow together and how rough Walky’s love life has been since then I think Mike did more harm than good.
Mym
I keep reading your name as my name
Too expensive
Sirksome
Actually he probably would’ve bullied Lucy even more than everyone else did.
Wraithy2773
…I dunno. Bullying Lucy just feels a little too simple for Mike. He was an asshole, no question, but he was a sportsman, damn it! He’s not going to prey on only the easy targets!
TulipKitten
I feel like Lucy would straight up murder Mike. She’s emotionally intelligent enough to give him a run for his money.
Miri
… I somehow don’t feel entirely comfortable with jokes about Lucy murdering the person who was murdered…I think if you’d said “figuratively eviscerate” or something it would have been far enough from what actually happened to him while making the same point?
clif
I’m sorry you feel that way, but Mike will live forever in our hearts and minds where Lucy cannot touch him.
Dragonfire
Y’can’t murder Mike twice.
In this universe.thejeff
Mike lives in Amber’s heart and mind, but not forever.
Taffy
He’s dead anyway, it’s not like he’s gonna complain.
Dante
Dude I adore your icon, I laughed out loud
PedanticJerkass
Why should Mike have been subjected to such torture? Even for a nickel.
Sajuuk-Khar
That’s Charles’s job and frankly he’s welcome to it
John Campbell
I wonder if Linda still charges him the nickel.
Miri
I’ve periodically wondered if Mike charged nickles or paid them
Dante
Depends on the mom
Shorduie
I can’t prove it but I just know if Mike ever met Walky’s mom he’d be like “yo I want a refund”
Thag Simmons
Mike would have solved this in the same way a pipe bomb solves a leaky faucet. Yeah you don’t have the old problem, but you now have several more worse problems
Sajuuk-Khar
Mike would’ve told him something like “just go ahead and bang Dorothy, it’s what you REALLY want anyway.”
clif
Mike would have been right. But uncomfortably right, so still on brand.
Nate
It’s painful to see how much he misses Mike. As someone coming up on the anniversary of a close friend’s sudden death, I can relate.
Mark
Sympathy, same here.
Morleuca
Mike would’ve solved it by seducing both of them, possibly at the same time.
Opus the Poet
Three-way FTW!
Mym
Oh no, is Walky going to have to handle his Mike emotions at last??
StClair
that is a very Mike face he’s making (and apparently expecting) in panel 4.
but IMO, same problem as panel 5, in that Mike pretty much always had that face. (pure coincidence, I’m sure.)
clif
Mike’s face never once reminded me of the Joker.
Needfuldoer
I think they’re referring to Walky’s expressions in panels 4 and 5, which are both very Mike-esque.
StClair
Actually I’m referring to what Walky says in panel 5, not Booster’s expression. Fully unpacking/killing the joke (ha):
Walky is wanting Booster to give him The Mike Expression (panel 4) as a warning that he’s being stupid. However, Mike always had that expression, possibly because Walky was always being stupid. To be actually useful,
MikeBoosterReplacement Mike would need a different signal for when Walky is being exceptionally stupid… but the rest of panel 5 suggests that, nope, that needle is just constantly pegged all the way over. Readings are always off-the-scale, on the high end.Erica
Huh, Walky is actually upset. Because he really likes Lucy? Or because, as he said to Lucy, he just wants everyone to him?
Erica
*like him
Yotomoe
Little of column A, Little of Column B
DailyBrad
I think that, whether or not him and Lucy ever go back to being a thing, he does care about her and does feel bad he did badly by her. There are plenty of cast members who dislike him, he doesn’t tend to sweat it much.
Thag Simmons
He enjoyed her company, and probably feels like he didn’t do enough to help her handle his parents.
They’re still in town right? Entirely possible he chews them out and either prompts positive change or inspires them to join the next iteration of the league of evil parents. One of those is more likely than the other.
Regalli
The knowledge that he screwed this up and genuinely DID do poorly by her can’t be helping. Like, he agreed with her “fuck you”. (And I don’t think the failure here WAS entirely on Walky, and that some of the things he handled poorly were understandable missteps – but there were a lot of opportunities to clear things up in less loaded context, and that ball was in his court.)
And he definitely does like and enjoy Lucy platonically. He may well potentially have romantic feelings for her, he hadn’t been thinking of her in that context for long, all of his friends are girls. Either way, he’s likely damaged his platonic relationship with her, too (and with how long she was harboring that crush, we don’t know if she WANTS to be friends platonically with dating off the table. Or she could quite reasonably need a break before she could hang out with him in a platonic context.)
Coatl
I’ll just say that Lucy got too excited and Walky was just trying to do things slowly, but with Linda’s comment and Lucy’s insistence in the church it only caused the bomb to explode too soon, which is disturbing because who knows what. What would Lucy really do after she finally used common sense?
In my opinion, it’s not going to be any good, because she said that she should be brave enough and those words cannot be exactly coherent if we take into account that she is a naive girl who received her strong blow from reality and that bravery that she says There may be many people affected by all this.
Switchchris26
I think over the course of the last year of panels Walky has been coming to terms that he isn’t just some chill dude that can coast through life like he thought, he is noticing the constant mistakes he makes and has made and wants to stop making them. He wants to be better but after living like that for his entire life it is going to be VERY HARD to kick those bad habits and I think its eating him up inside, he wants help and nobody who used to help him is around besides Dorothy and she isn’t the best person to ask atm.
Coatl
In addition to the last interactions they had, he is aware of what he said with too much confidence and if Dorothy finds out what just happened…, it is not going to be good.
cbwroses
Didn’t he simply say he was going to be faithful?
He wasn’t unfaithful so, while the overall situation might be awkward to discuss with her, there’s nothing that he’d have to walk back if he decided to talk to her.
Coatl
I say it, because he seemed to want to show that he has already gotten over Dorothy, but who knows how the latter would take it into consideration, since she is not in a good moment either, but if it were the opposite….. hurray (despite The way he flaunts his integrity to Lucy bothers me, I still like the Walky x Dorothy)
cbwroses
That was not and is not my take on that scene, but if that’s how you took it, that’s fine.
Him and Lucy breaking up wouldn’t mean he’s not over Dorothy so still nothing to walk back even if he was trying to convey that.
Coatl
reread your comment, and yes, it seems like I got sidetracked, it’s because that moment really bothered me because after the obvious rejection, his “words of encouragement” felt… the opposite. It seemed like he told her “You’re just having a bad day, the next day you’ll be fine.” Obviously he didn’t say it the way I wrote it, but I noticed it that way.
cbwroses
I read my comment again.
I don’t know what you think is being misconstrued or what you think I don’t understand, but I wrote exactly what I meant.
Saying “I’m in a committed relationship and I’m staying faithful” is not the same thing as “I want you to know know that I’m over you”.
He can be over Dorothy without that being the point of that conversation, which is the implication when you say he wants her to know that.
Being over Dorothy is not contingent on his relationship status.
He can be single and still be over her.
That’s why the point was about him being faithful, not about emphasizing to Dorothy that he’s over her.
Hell, he said, either in that same strip or the one after that, that he didn’t want to be the reason that she fails; that doesn’t indicate a lack of interest to me.
That’s pretty much the same attitude he’s had since they first took a break, that he doesn’t want to drag her down.
That’s not even a possibility if he has no desire to get with her.
That aside, I do agree that he was treating her as if she was just having a bad day.
I’m pretty sure that was how it was supposed to come across.
He wasn’t really hearing her, I think partly because he wanted to leave the situation and partly because he puts her up on a pedestal.
cbwroses
It occurs to me that you may have been saying that you read my comment again vs telling me to read my comment again.
If so, I apologize for writing so much.
I hate to be misunderstood, so I tend to over explain myself if it seems like that’s happening.
Coatl
Well, it bothers me how he said it, it just remains to see how this chaos intensifies
Wraithy2773
At no point has Walky ever implied that he didn’t like Lucy. He does. He’s just not in love with her, and has kinda been sleepwalking through this attempt at a relationship with her.
And right now, she’s hurting, and its because of him. There’s other, deeper stuff going on here too, of course, but “my friend is hurting because I fucked shit up” is going to be a factor regardless.
Bash
I think this is when Walky realizes that a relationship that looks good on paper won’t work without romantic feelings.
thejeff
I don’t see the sleepwalking through the relationship. He’s not in love with her – which isn’t surprising, given that it’s been a week. And he’s not jumping at the opportunity to have sex with her – for what are likely complicated reasons, but might well not reduce to “no attraction”.
Sirksome
To me, even now Walky reads as more upset that he messed up than that Lucy dumped him which was the problem from the start.
DashWallkick
Honestly his “I like to be liked” is now running into “she isn’t a good fit for you and you have to realize that” which is I think why Booster is the one he talks to first. Booster is the one who can tell him outright that this relationship was only heading one way.
Erica
Mmm just because someone’s a good fit for you doesn’t mean you have to be with them. I’ve met plenty of people who were a perfect fit for me on paper but the chemistry just wasn’t there
Mark
I still think Walky does have tender feelings for Lucy, and would have shown them more if he hadn’t been constantly back-pedalling from Lucy’s intensity.
Drewsadar
I am pretty sure he actually likes Lucy and cares about her. He is however an emotionally stunted person, which in the way his mother glorified him and gave him constant approval, causes issues because now he thinks he is in the wrong when someone gives him approval. Like Joyce leaving the church and growing, Wally is leaving his parents and growing.
EAG46
If Booster is supposed to be there to make faces at you every time you screw up, Walky, they’d never be able to do anything for themself. They’d be attached to you 24/7. I approve of Booster’s shit-eating grin, BTW.
RassilonTDavros
Booster’s shit-eating grin is the best possible replacement for Mike’s permanent scowl.
anon
would booster even be listened to versus dorothy’s advice? lol
Doopyboop
Booster’s outfit here is CUTE. Love those overalls.
Yotomoe