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These two have a weird, somewhat icky relationship.

I’m sorry you’ve never been this close to a sibling, assuming you have any.

Yeah I’ve never felt sexually jealous of my sister and neither has she. I’m beginning to understand why incest porn is so popular with you people.

Oh, I see. You don’t understand what is going on and assume it’s sexual. No, Jess is talking about the inevitable growing apart that will come when Ed finally has a life that isn’t this shitty job in a shitty town. She’s looking ahead to a future where one day she will know her brother as a name in her phone contacts, who is too busy with his kids, wife, career, or all three to do more than talk once a month. And she is mourning that loss before it has happened.

And frankly? The fact that you thought this was sexual says a lot about you. You might be on the spectrum, since this is clearly emotional and not sexual in any way.

Bro you gotta quit it with the armchair psychologist shit. People read stuff wrong all the fucking time. There was at least one line that could have been read differently out of context on the before page (“take you away from me” was fucking icky to me, I don’t possess anyone in any shape or form. I guess my sibling dynamic is different than theirs.) You could have spelled that shit out for them like you did without implying someone is on the spectrum for being socially inept in like, ONE situation.

My kid sister and I were like that, until she started dating and I caught he first hubby drinking and cheating. I beat the crap out of him and she never forgave me, even after she caught him too and divorced him. Life is hard but I wasn’t going to let a selfish a-hole to hurt my baby sister!

You were a selfish asshole who hurt your sister. That’s why she never forgave you. Maybe next time try doing the adult thing and telling her what you saw and letting her choose how to deal with it.

Someone has read too much Better Days….As a twin chick with a twin dude. There is nothing sexual about this. It is hard to understand unless 1) you are close to someone who is a twin or 2) you are a twin. There is a bond that looks different to most.

Ya’ll tellin on yourselves if you find them having a close bond being “weird”.

There’s “close bond” and there’s ‘I’m jealous of you having a girlfriend’. They’re very, very different things.

Oh man, these angry lecturing takes are really terrible.

Exactly.
*sarcasm follows*
I ALWAYS take advice, + my life lessons, from the grouchy people on the websites, and on the webcomics’ sites.
“You showed us the better way, internet heroes!” *wry smile*
:)

No, there isn’t. This is why people often get jealous when their close friends get significant others and suddenly don’t have as much time for them anymore. It’s why people will regularly get jealous if their spouses start spending more and more time with work or a hobby or a friend group. It’s why pets sometimes get angry at a newborn baby, taking away their attention. Your statement implies that you think that literally the only thing a girlfriend provides is sex, as that is the only logical way to think that being “jealous of girlfriend” means “she wishes she was sleeping with him.” Which, uh, okay, I almost never use this word because it’s so abused, but that actually is misogyny, so maybe think about that.

Yeah this is me and my brother to some extent, neither of us are gay. Please stop pushing your bad interpretation you apparently want to have.

Some people are close with their siblings and some aren’t. Twins are typically depicted as being really closely bonded, as they go through life stages together, and have a person right there who has been through and seen the same things.

Jess likes her life. She has support, stability, security, in her status quo. She and her brother are close and get, they still live together even though they’re out of their parents’ house. Eventually, that will change though as they move down the paths that will finally split them into different families.

Her phrasing may seem weird to some but I don’t see anything gross behind it. It’s just someone who is afraid of losing the person who is essentially a constant in her life.

That’s how I see it, too. :)

I also suspect that a lot of the “weirdness” comes from the fact that Jess is only now, for the first time in the meta-narrative, really being this vulnerable in front of her brother. Coupling this, we have knowledge that she hasn’t ever set a boundary of “Ed’s things are Ed’s” really speaking (between Handheld consoles, clothing, and depending on point of view, romantic interests – all in the comic no less), that this ‘bonding’ moment can be a bit off in general.

Of course, if Ed wasn’t fine with a lot of the playful teasing, he would have spoken up long ago, but it *really* is a bit of an unusual action on Jess’s behalf. If not given the benefit of the doubt, one could easily argue this is just another attempt to retain control of the status quo, too – something even Ed is pointing out in the story.

Regardless, being able to see this as a very… different action from Jess than the typical bravado usually being belted out is not hard to spot. I genuinely don’t think it has anything to do with incest – if anything, I almost think this has less to do with Ed getting a girlfriend, and more to do with Ed actually having a “Happy” life outside her circle, and more importantly, the self-realization that she has to stop making it about herself. Jess’s always deflected it as “they came onto me”, but she never denied claims that she didn’t tempt prior paramours before – and Nina’s able to resist that, canonically. We don’t really have much in the way of history of Ed’s prior flings as to how Jess consoled her brother – though given her nature of teasing and flaunting, coupled with a lack of strong defense to the title of ‘sabotage’, that there is a chunk of the story which doesn’t paint the best of lights (we can only assume, for better or worse).

Jess went and got intimate with Brooksie, but now has matured enough to realize that eventually, Ed’s going to have the right to take his own partner (a much more positive, if not bittersweet, revelation and character growth Jess probably needs in the story), and that may lead to parting down the road, but she has also slowly been purposefully avoiding this realization at least a few times before.

You know, basically what you guys have said, except I feel it could be not only guided by future loneliness but also self-realization of past mishandlings of situations in the past. We’ll only know, one page at a time.

Sometimes I think Ed and Reggie have more in common than either of them will ever know.

I agree. I think the reasons for them clashing have as much to do with their many similarities as they do with the different ways in how each chooses to handle their own baggage.

Everybody’s fighting over something stupid. I’m just sitting here wishing you sold stickers. I’ve gotten back into webcomics since buying a new laptop, and am trying to cover it with them.

To me this whole argument feels really bizarre. I’ve had friends that were jealous when I became closer with someone else, heck, even I have felt those feelings a bit on a few occasions. Why would it be any different with siblings? Not everything has to have some sexual undertone; a lot of people are just scared of losing the people they hold closest to them. It’s a normal human.l emotion–it’s just how you act upon feeling it that can lead to issues.

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