Dumbing of Age

Tonight we have another scene change back to DeSanto HQ, and Robin continues to baffle everyone as to how she was elected in the first place.

And is it just me, or is Willis switching scenes a lot more frequently recently?

makes it seem like more time is passing.

Hmm, I guess it was two days instead of one, i forgot they had that 2nd waking up sequence where she brings Leslie Twizzlers.

Yellow shirt is a qt

Have we seen her before? Was she in the Walkyverse?

>took her pants with her
>now is not even wearing them
>still has the lamp

Robin does not belong in a position of political power. She belongs in a goddamn therapist's office.

Isn't it just so goofy, quirky and endearing, user!?

What's that? It's actually disturbing in the context of an ostensibly grounded story? Oh.

This, pretty much.
There really is little room for characters with overt one-dimensional quirks like Becky, Robin, and even Dina. Dina's an insult to autistic people, but DoA fans let it pass because MUH QUIRKS.

This woman is an absolute moron.

Is this what Willis thinks "quirky" people are like in real life? That's they're just this relentless caricature of a person who throws out joke after joke after joke in the vague hope that SOMETHING sticks? Because if it is, wow. That's some hardcore accidental shade being thrown right there.

So wacky, I can't wait to see what's in store for this character.

No wait, that's the opposite of how I feel.

This is mostly unrelated, but it reminds me of when the podcast Biggest Problem brought in Bits as a problem. Just people who relentlessly have to turn everything into some joke.

>Have we seen her before?
Yes, everywhere because the characters all have similar faces.

Ima call her Dina Sr.

Uh, and I guess I should expand. It was the idea that people like that are exhausting to deal with and might have a disorder [citation needed].

But yeah, I dunno if any of Willis' depiction or her is supposed to make Robin seem likable, but her aggressive quirkiness does the exact opposite.

Her name's Frieda and yeah, she's appeared before. I don't remember if she was in the Walkyverse but I wouldn't be surprised. Even Chloe turned out to be from the Walkyverse as a cashier who sold Walky and Joyce condoms, I think.

And yeah, she's basically Dina sans hat and with more boob.

I think it's time for DeSanto to fuck off back to the capital or whatever cause this plot is getting boring.

I thought that was Dina.

>HUG
>ASS
what did he mean by this?

So she's just walking around with no pants on now?

Pssh, no, she's not JUST walking around with no pants.

She walked out of Leslie's house with no pants, pushed her way past reporters with no pants, presumably threw her pants in the back seat of her car with no pants, drove away with no pants, was followed by media driving with no pants, and then walked into her local office to confront her subordinates with no pants.

She's doing a ton of stuff with no pants.

Is he making a trump parallel?

There's a lot of Shortpacked Robin (+ Leslie) bleeding through, but yes.

Time is occurring in random pockets. The laws of causality no longer apply.

With all the subtlety of a brick the face.

So what is it?

For a second, I thought she called him "Whitey".

Well its a fitting level of subtlety fpr trump thrn

I wish you a swift recovery from your stroke, user

I'm gonna go with "HUG an ASSAulter"

Even Rapin' Ryan needs a hug once in a while.

Willis is trying to tell a story here you heaten

Maybe, but I'm having trouble seeing it

He doesn't seem to be trying very hard.

That New Featurettes thing was actually faintly funny.

Robin? Try everyone in this fucking comic.

GETTING?

She's Dina with Mary's hair. Just like the other guy is Danny with a soul patch.

That's because the Trump stuff has all been tacked on within the past year. She's mostly just been a glad-handing politician, which made her come off as a Clinton parallel.

Wasn't that guy one of Willis' strawmen for Shitpacked?

No. Just her sister

Under a good writer, Dina and Frieda being sisters could be used as a parallel to Roz and Robin by giving them a healthy, loving relationship despite their differences in personality and politics.

It would work better with a more solid setup. What we have here is the punchline alone.
There should have been a scene in Leslie's house where the Buffy DVD shelf was found or shown, followed by Leslie or Robin talking about featurettes.

I can't really see how that'd be anything more than a "sensible chuckle" punchline. It'd work best as part of a back and forth between three people where two of them get off topic.

That's a fair point.
I just also see the presentation of the joke as a shoddy means of building character. That is, we're told that Leslie has a complete run of Buffy DVDs and we're told why she has them, but we don't actually get that straight from Leslie. It's second-hand information.

It doesn't build character at all. It tells us nothing that hasn't been apparent ever since we saw Leslie's apartment (she's a big sci-fi/fantasy fan) nor does it reveal anything new or alter pre-existing ideas about her. Buffy was a fairly popular tv show with a huge mainstream fanbase, if he want to reveal something about Leslie through her interests he should have used something that would have actually reflected something concrete. Give her something incongruous like the complete James Bond series or Gor novels.

It reveals that Leslie has a large collection of Buffy DVDs, implying a sense of completionism and possibly some kind of OCD.

Whether or not any of that is important is what the real issue is, and as you've stated it tells us nothing we couldn't already guess or even NEED to know in this present moment. It's almost like when Willis said that it was more important that we see Mary's blackmail fall apart rather than Walky having a human moment with Bilie and Ruth, or when he implied that such a scene was less important than knowing that Walky is Billie's emergency contact.

I can't believe I'm still salty about that.

Either way the establishing two characters both enjoy popular and fondly remembered show is banal even by Do a standards

Completionism and possibly some kind of OCD isn't indicated by her having the complete box set of a show she likes, if Willis wanted to indicate that he should have said she had both the original and rereleased boxsets despite the only difference being the featurettes.

The Billie's emergency contact thing is the worst because having Billie's emergency contact being Walky's parents instead of Walky would negate the need to actually develop the idea as it'd feed into what we already know about Billie and her relationship with the Walkertons compared to her relationship with her dad.

You guys know you can stop reading this, right? I finally quit in February. I had to transition off onto Questionable Content for a few months, but now I'm completely clean of both. You can be too, if you just try!

>if Willis wanted to indicate that he should have said she had both the original and rereleased boxsets despite the only difference being the featurettes.
y'know, that's actually how I interpreted the strip. I thought Robin was saying that Leslie had both the old and new box sets.

Well, my bad, then. Turns out Leslie just enjoys Buffy and is a stickler for special features.

>The Billie's emergency contact thing is the worst because having Billie's emergency contact being Walky's parents instead of Walky would negate the need to actually develop the idea
I never looked at it that way.
Do you think Willis is going to write a scene with Walky's parents where they outright say that they would rather have Billie as their daughter than Sal?

>'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
>'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
>'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
>'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'

The funny thing is that both Sal and Billie are treated the same way by their respective parents, mostly ignored.

>Give her something incongruous like the complete James Bond series or Gor novels.

I doubt Leslie would like either since Bond and Tarl Cabbot are cisgender white males who probably represent the patriarchy or some such bullshit

Robin was meant to just be an awful person in the DOA-verse, but then Trump got elected and Willis got to scared he'd be seen as endorsing the evil bad guy if he had a character that was sorta likable but also meant to be a bad guy, so he just turned her into Shortpacked-Robin.

I think he posted something retarded like "I'm sorry everyone... I'm so sorry" with the comic that came out the day after the election, and then his audience went all "I just don't think I can laugh at Robin anymore since my country has become literally WW2".

He's a pussy who couldn't follow through with his plan so he reverted to her original character, even though he used to get anal-devastated whenever someone claimed characters hadn't changed from his last comic.

To be fair, the Gor novels are pretty rapetacular and some Bond stories are almost hilariously racist; You Only Live Twice had a public garden in Japan so deadly that the Japanese visit there in droves so they can kill themselves.

That's the point. By giving Leslie interests like those it would subtly flesh her out and provide a reason why she was willing to overlook Robin's positions only to reject Robin; she's willing to forsake her principles in the pursuit of her pleasure but unlike a problematic book or movie Robin isn't an inert object.

Willis only has himself to blame, he's the one who turned Robin into Trump instead of keeping her a stock, sleazy politician.

Ehhh, seems a step too far to me; maybe have a few Conan novels or Hammer Horror DVDs as a guilty pleasure. I get what you're saying, though.

...

Ha! Excellent! Don't remember seeing this before, is this a new one?

I drew it today.

i dont even read this comic. i just find it incredibly refreshing to see a webcomic getting dissected and criticized without butthurt fanboys insisting such things are sacrosanct.

Great idea, but the text gets damn near illegible halfway through.

www.blambot.com/

That's because I have shitty handwriting.

Well, that's what blambot is for