2137 Life Doesn’t Make Narrative Sense.

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The movies Victoria is referencing are Bambi, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, & Clerks. Honestly, if your girlfriend sucked 37 dicks before she got to you it’s not that big a deal. As long as she isn’t diseased, & now it’s just your dick she sucks, it’s fine. She’s a living being with agency, & those were choices she made in whatever kind of moments she made them in. If you have a problem with that, that’s fine too, but on some level that’s on you. Which is part of what the writer was saying anyway. It’s not quite the disaster getting your fapping hand cut off is. Trying to adjust to your off hand is like trying to learn to write with it. It’s never gonna be quite as good.

The girlfriend in a refrigerator is from an old Green Lantern story where, if memory serves, someone kills Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend & stuffs her in there for him to find. Noticing the trend of girlfriends getting killed, or otherwise abused, so the hero could have some kind of personal growth, epiphany, or motivation, is how Gail Simone got in to writing mainstream comics. This was before she took to calling people Nazis on the reg & being generally insufferable. Despite these flaws it’s hard to argue that she can write a good story when she actually makes the effort to give a shit. In any event, harming a loved one is an easy way to skip right over a bunch of stuff to get the plot moving. Not just in comics, but in anything ever, throughout all of the history of media.
In male centric works it’s generally going to be a woman, so it’s not like it’s some nefarious plot to turn women into lesser beings. It’s framed that way now to take a cheap swipe at culture & get attention for yourself for pointing it out. Eventually we’ll get over it being a thing & it will go back to just being a trope that no one pays much attention to.
We’re in this weird generational flux period right now where society is struggling to come to terms with the almost complete self awareness it has achieved & the never ending flow of information. Our primate minds are being overwhelmed all the time. I’m ready to jump right to everyone getting over it and calming down, but really there’s nothing to do but ride it out.
In somewhat related news they finally shut down the restaurants in the nearest town. Coronavirus has come to the middle of nowhere, formerly the safest part of nowhere. Since we live away from things, and the wind comes to kill us sometimes, we already had supplies enough to last for many weeks, so my life isn’t much different that usual. Although I can’t just go get a soda if I run out. If we should happen to run out of toilet paper the shower is right next to the toilet & I’m certainly not above having a power wash after making a deposit. Still, it’s irritating knowing that I can’t just go where I want, even though at any other time I wouldn’t go anyway.
Amazon takes at least 4 days to ship supplies here. Plus they don’t have Dr Pepper, which is the most important thing. There’s also the issue of their price gouging, which is apparently bad when individuals do it, but not when they do… Frustrating times. I feel bad for the city folk who are used to having things all the time right there, so they don’t have emergency supplies.
A friend of mine is a night manager in a big supermarket up north. He’s been sending me updates from the front lines. As fast as they put stuff out it’s gone. People are still deep in panic mode. Luckily for him the staff has first pick of the shipments, so he’s doing fine. They just had a baby so he’s pretty concerned about not infecting her though. As you would be.
What worries me is that it’s this bad for a virus that isn’t a top tier killer. If something worse pops up it will be absolute bedlam…

56 Comments

Been re-reading the archive and the first time these two met. It would be very interesting to see these two get closer.

I thought it was Elongated Man’s wife?

No, Elongated Man’s wife was killed in Identity Crisis which was 2004. The fridging story that spurned Gail Simone into action was from Green Lantern #54 in 1994.

Ah yes, Identity Crisis. Where Batman decides it’s just Super Wrong to meddle with people’s memories and has a grand mal hissy fit over it for like seven issues.

Gods, that arc was so terrible. Even from a structure standpoint, it was a massive load of “Let’s do dramatic shit that never actually achieves anything.”

The final implication of the arc is “The Core members of the League would have Grave Moral Objections to shadier methods of dealing with serious threats, but also are probably just pretending to not know about it, because otherwise the World’s Greatest Detective and a man with the ability to hear a heartbeat on the far side of the city have somehow never caught on to any of this.”

I snorted at panel 3! Something about John’s expressions works really well.

Then I thought about them getting together, which would result in Reggie realizing he’d set them up …

[Copy editing notes for panel 2: heroe’s should be hero’s; refridgerator should be refrigerator.]

Yeah, the “women in refrigerators” trope name seems like giving a misleadingly specific name to a very common and general trope. Which, far from enhancing communication, just makes it worse. Why specify when it’s women? Why not just “killing family members to motivate the hero”? Do we have a separate one for children or parents (well, I guess that last one is “Disney-ed”). It just invites questions about the perspective of the person who coined it, like it’s they who see it as fundamentally different when it’s a female victim, not the rest of us.

And 37…that’s a high number. In and of itself it means little, but it raises a lot of questions about what that person wants in life, and in a relationship. It implies they either have sex at the drop of a hat and/or can’t maintain a relationship for very long at all. And people change, of course, I get that, but it would at least raise an eyebrow and make me wonder if our budding relationship really has any potential to last.

The “girlfriend” in a fridge trope originated with the green lantern story

The trope really didn’t, it’s far older than that. That was just one specific example that someone decided should be the name of the trope.

The reason for the distinction is the frequency ratio. It’s simply that the trope is applied far more regularly to female supporting characters than to male supporting characters.

It got better after Simone and others started calling it out–you are, of course, correct that it’s weak writing regardless of the sex of the character. But Simone was highlighting that it was a form of lazy writing that was considered ‘acceptable’ when doing it to female supporting characters.

It also expanded upon that–at the time Simone was able to put together a huge list of female characters who had been killed or permanently mangled, largely in support of a male character’s story arc. It was nearly impossible to come up with counter-examples in the same numbers.

And yes, to the original post above, superhero comics are a male-centric medium–but is this a case of chicken or egg? One of the things Simone was challenging was the idea that girls had no interest in superhero power fantasies–instead, the reasons for the market’s sausage-fest nature had to do with how the stories were being presented. And no, it wasn’t because of some sort of nefarious plot by the Menz; it was because of the male dominance of writing and editing, creating a completely unconscious bias in how perceptive they were to the problems.

If your lady sucked 37 dicks before she got to you, well, she’s probably pretty alright at it now. You get to experience the fruit of her practice. If my guy got to score 37 women before me then hey, whatever I’ve got down there is nothing daunting. It’s exciting being someone’s first, and early 20’s me was way into that. Now that I’m approaching my 30’s, where many have gotten over much of their uncertainty and know what they’re looking for a little better, seeing someone with experience is refreshing.

And thankfully, people’s mouths are continually flushed with a mild form of acid anyway, so that should take care of that. Always kind of puzzled me how people’s mouths were considered filthy when there’s all that acid-flushing going on.

Probably because mouths also produce things most people find disgusting, such as spit, drool, vomit, and that greenish-brown sludge that you cough up when you’re infected with something nasty.

Still better than being summoned to another world with no way back. You loose everyone (unless they are summoned with you).

John Carter on Mars, Emilio Lizardo, Superman, Luncheon Counters of the Third Kind, The Tempest, it’s a useful trope. I don’t really care for the Cut ‘em Up, device, simple shooting worked for Batman, amiright?

Side characters also get the least complicated relationships; they’re far less likely to have to deal with stress, angst and other drama.

I’d make a great side character; my motto is Live Slow, Die Eventually.

Amazon has Dr. Pepper:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003PD2NY0?tag=duckduckgo-d-20&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1

12 cans for 30$ are you mental? That’s 6 x the normal price.

Amazon is a TERRIBLE place to shop for drinks. I was tempted by some various small-batch brands you can’t find around here, but at those prices, I can’t justify it.

Amazon is a real sleaze when it comes to commodity items.
I can get 18s at the local Shoppers at $5CDN when they have it in stock.

Sadly produce et al is way more expensive here than stateside though we have much better supply chain QA – water logged protein is a given at the discount and states based chains to boost profit margins but no signs of bleached products except at the big name chicken chains.

I’m surprised that Vicky doesn’t mention “accidentally getting killed by the hero while he’s trying to save your life” in panel 2. I think that would kinda suck more than getting killed by someone else.

A virus that *is* a top tier killer tends not to survive. The best situation for a virus is for the host to go on spreading it for a very very long time.

And over the ages, there seems to be a tendency for pathogens to evolve by becoming less lethal.

Not that there couldn’t be worse diseases than this one, of course.

Like the flu; Still a Thing Since 1580!

The really weird thing about COVID-19 is that 50-75 percent of the people who get it will NEVER KNOW THEY HAD IT. Completely asymptomatic, so I hear.

The only good thing, on a varying scale of good, is that it is mostly contact spread.
The regular flue is airborne, much less lethal, infects huge numbers and results in thousands of deaths a year.
If Corona-19 mutated to an airborne pathogen then we would be entering one of those scifi Saturday afternoon matinee specials.
Still not ebola with 90%+ lethality or a few other tropical nightmares just waiting for the stupid to spread them.

Yes and no. The asymptomatic phase can last for awhile (sometimes for a couple of weeks, and in the meantime that person is contagious), but eventually the carrier comes down with the same symptoms as everyone else. It’s not a matter of never feeling sick — it’s just a matter of how long it’ll take and to what degree.

Also, “mild symptoms” aren’t what it sounds like. It doesn’t mean you’ll just get the sniffles or something. “Mild” in this case refers to the medical term, which means “will survive if they aren’t in a hospital getting treatment like being on a ventilator and/or getting a blood transfusion”. “Mild” means you’ll likely have a bad time and feel like you want to die, even if you aren’t actually going to.

From what I have been hearing, no, they actually mean that many people, possibly most people, who get COVID-19 will never have symptoms or only have very mild symptoms such that they don’t even realize they were very sick (like allergies).

There’s a phone-app game called Plague, Inc, where you take the role of a disease, trying to completely wipe out humanity. It’s a common error when first playing to immediately evolve to become a fast-killing machine, but this often has the mistake of both:
1: Mobilizing the response to the disease on a global scale immediately, increasing the speed with which a cure is found, and;
2: Killing off the hosts before they can infect anyone.

The best tactic, OTOH, is usually to evolve multiple angles of transmission while keeping your spread low-key enough that virtually all of humanity is infected by the time the first death occurs. Then you ramp up lethality as fast as possible, throwing the planet into complete chaos.

Of course, the other key strategy is to start in Madagascar, because they always close their ports almost immediately, and if you haven’t infected them when that happens, then they become the holdout for human survival.

I recognized those movies, but glad to know I was right.

No idea how many cocks have been in my mouth though. More than 5, less than 5 million….

I’m forgetful.

I have spent the last three days installing those retractable kitchen sprayers in peoples bathrooms, next to the toilet. As of this morning i have done 28 of them. It’s a good thing I mass produced little cabinets for it before hand.

I was wondering why anyone would do that.
Then I got a RedGreen moment and fully understood why.
Any duck-tape involved?

No duck-tape but I am at 38 now( word is spreading, much like a virus). Today someone asked if I could make it pulse. <_<

The store around here have started to close their public restrooms 'due to paper shortage'.

“Im 37?!? My girlfriend sucked 37 dicks!!” “In a row?” … “Hey! Try not to suck any dick on the way to the parking lot ….HEY YOU .. get back here!” bwhaha one of my favorite lines. I’m going to watch this now. Thanks, Jackie!

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