My Facebook groups are blowing up over this image.
Blue is read as the bully/the not-nice one, and it’s read as “not like other girls” commentary pitting women against each other, despite the fact that Blue is responding to Blonde’s diss.
I really feel like I’m on a different planet from the Gen Zrs reacting to this image. It’s not even divisive because everyone else but me and the author, seems to see Blue as the asshole in this scenario.
My point is that Blue doesnt owe Blonde niceness at all, because Blonde wasn’t nice to begin with. A snarky comment is about what’s deserved and hers was a really Diet Coke one, which didn’t attack Blonde on the basis of any marginalized identity.
I’m seeing Blue as the one being picked on but Gen Zrs see Blonde as the victim, or the author as the jerk who is pitting women against each other.
I wonder if this is a generational thing.
I feel like Gen Z reads this as two equally mainstream mall shoppers trading quips, or even as a “basic”/“normie” being picked on by a sneering hipster, with the implication that the “normie” is the victim and the trendy girl is in the “in group.”
As a Gen Xr who grew up in the 80s in the San Fernando Valley, Blue would have been the member of the out group and Blonde would have been the socialite/“mean girl.” And Blue may have been drawn to her particular look and or crowd on account of othering and bullying by mainstream people to begin with. I feel like a lot of Gen X snark culture arose as a response to bullying and gaslighting by mainstream people and by Boomers/older, it was a psychological coping mechanism. Blue’s snarky comeback preserved her self esteem, and deflected the insult. It’s how I and a lot of my Gen X friends might have responded to a similar insult.
So anyway it’s interesting to me how apparently nobody younger than me reads this image as “appropriate response to some jerk just walking up and insulting you.”
*Epistemic status: completely half-baked, don’t take this as gospel or even as a real pronouncement*
I’m 24, and I’ve noticed similar rhetoric from people my age and younger. I think my generation took the backlash against “not like other girls” a bridge too far and wound up replicating the exact conditions “not like other girls” girls were responding to in the first place. “Don’t sneer at popular things just because they’re popular” (which, btw, I agree with) turned into “not liking popular things means you need to get over yourself”. In the name of celebrating women whose harmless interests get ripped to shreds, we’ve moved past basic reassurance and into a sort of…celebration of mediocrity. It’s harder and harder to find anything genuinely *original* in modern female youth culture, because it’s out of style. The anodyne “relatability” of group identity is what’s in. If you can’t tie your interests, your thoughts, your Self, to a broader schematic in some way, if you are genuinely and fundamentally individual, you need to get over yourself and get woke.
I have a post in my drafts about how I was super on board with ending girl hate when I still thought it meant “women should stop bullying other women” instead of what it apparently actually means, which is “women should stop resenting the women who bully them.”
This is what I’m talking about.
Wait, Blue is the mean one here?
I would never even have seen that reading. She was minding her own business being quiet with her little skull when Blonde walked up to her and said something judgmental.
Dude, wtf.
No no, she was being weird in public, which clearly displays hostile intent and justifies anything that might be said or done to her in response.
…/s
😤
I think if Blue were saying “why can’t you mind your own business” or “why can’t you be quiet” “why can’t you cultivate your own garden of delights, why must you piss on mine?” we/I wouldn’t be reading her as bad at all. Even if Blue were responding “Why can’t you fuck off?” I don’t think Blue would be seen as the aggressor here.
As it is I can tell you exactly why she’s reading as a bully – the implication is that Blue thinks the only way to be interesting is to be Blue.
Well, that and the relative value of those insults has shifted in the couple of decades since the mall goth/prep wars were staged in the food court between the Hot Topic and Hollister. “Uninteresting” is a much more cutting insult than “abnormal” in the age of social media curation.
Blonde came up and said “You are different,” Blue responded with “You are valueless” (because being interesting nets you friends and an audience and creates a personal brand for heavy social media users – if you’re uninteresting on social media then you’re shouting into the void and deluded for thinking anybody would care). It’s not seen as bullying because Blue responded it all, it’s seen as bullying because Blue responded disproportionately.
It also doesn’t help that Blue is *totally* normal these days. Blonde’s comment is nonsensical – just today I was talking about how difficult it was to buy black lipstick after Halloween in 2002 but now you can go into any drugstore and buy it year round. Jenna Marbles, the blond prep queen of youtube, the GoGo Dancing, College Sports Playing, Clubby Girl queen herself wears demonia and black moon cosmetics. The extremely popular preppy girls in high school are getting mermaid ombre and rose gold dye jobs. Blue is saying that Blonde is boring but nothing about Blue seems all that weird, so her confidence that she’s the interesting one here seems misguided at best. Blue owns a “Normal People Scare Me” shirt and shares bratty Tinkerbelle memes on facebook. Blue took a quiz that told her she was a raven in a past life and when she shared it your data got passed on to Cambridge Analytica. Blue is the basic bitch of goths and so seeing her calling a basic girl boring makes you want to knock her down a peg. A box of Splat and a paperweight from Spencer’s don’t make you interesting, Megan. Yes we’ve all seen your my little pony skeleton tattoo, Emma.
Which is part of why what immediately struck me about this comic is exhaustion.
I’m so tired of hearing goths talk about how preps wear a uniform or
how it’s better to be alone like me than a clone like you (it’s almost as tired as pointing out that goths like to go out and be unique by wearing a lot of black together). It’s a comic
that feels old and predictable to me, a person who used to own a lot of
Emily the Strange merch and collected Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
comics.And I know there are still people out there who are still getting bullied for being goths and for whom this is a fresh, new pain. I know that there are a few kids for whom this kind of thing is still relevant. But it reads like a goth mom wrote a comic and tried to come hang out with the fellow teens.
(Also blue is extremely me in 2003-2006, my prime edgy teen years of being fucking awful to people at the slightest provocation. Yes, I was totally bullied, no my reaction of “fuck your family, fuck your life, you’re useless and stupid and will never amount to anything because you’re boring and small and destined for a life of quiet desperation, full of longing for things too foreign for you to even articulate” was not an appropriate response to being called Morticia.)
So like I’ve got some projection going on here but I think that’s part of where your split is.
Also kids, it’s always cool and totally okay to tell your bullies to fuck off. It’s a time-tested, evergreen way to tell someone they’re being an asshole. You don’t have to be nice to your bullies!
Yeah see, my impression reading the comics is that Blond is a fictional villain, someone who exists mostly only in the head of the author to justify Blue’s crappy attitude on what counts as “interesting. The list of things that’d get you bullied in my highschool was way to fucking long but blue hair and a slightly macabre aesthetic was not on that list.
The obsession with “normal is boring” cuts waaay to close to assholes I’ve known who use superficial differences to belittle other people. They just swapped out the aesthetic look and language a little bit, otherwise it’s the same old shit.
I feel like, as a general rule, you don’t get to expect politeness in response to insults. I feel like, in any sort of multi-cultural society, you need to be really careful with the concept of “well, they escalated it” or “it was a disproportional response”.
If you receive an insult in response to something you said, you were probably being insulting, and the other person probably thinks they were perfectly proportional. More importantly, Blonde can solve the whole problem by just not insulting them in the future. (And let’s be clear: “Ugh” and crossed arms is pretty clearly unfriendly, not ‘nonsensical’)
Blue, on the other hand, does not have nearly so easy an “off” switch for what Blonde is saying, and it is ridiculously unfair to expect Blue to comprehend *checks* 12 paragraphs of Modern US Teenage Cultural Norms before responding to an attack.
TL;DR: If you don’t want shit, don’t start shit.
Just because your particular cultural bubble doesn’t run in to Blonde often, doesn’t mean she doesn’t exist. I’m a woman who has never been cat-called, and neither have most of my female friends. That doesn’t mean cat-calling doesn’t happen. Invalidating someone’s lived experiences and their own observations of their local reality is… well, a fool’s errand, unless you know the author personally and can actually speak to the situations they have faced.
Seriously, other people might as well live in Alternate Realities for how differently age and location affect one’s experiences. As the internet brings us together, it becomes an increasingly important skill to be able to look at a piece of media and realize that it’s speaking to someone else’s reality, not yours.
If none of that makes any sense, I’ll just point out that in my own lived experience, I never face racism. It would be bullshit to call racists “fictional villains” invented to justify “crappy attitudes”. The much more logical explanation is that I’m white, and live in America, and white people in America don’t tend to face racism.
TL;DR: One person’s “fictional villain” is another person’s lived oppression. Think carefully before dismissing that oppression just because it doesn’t match what you face.
I’d like to point out the number of times I say “reads as” in those twelve paragraphs. I don’t expect Blue to consider anything because Blue is a cartoon character.
But in the discussion of “why are two groups interpreting this comic in completely opposite ways” I think the answer is that one group sees this as a familiar pattern that has been expressed in media they grew up with and the other group sees this as a familiar pattern in comics that are used to own the normies/libs/sjws.
If you want to get super specific with it I think the visual shorthand of Blonde’s gray blush in the second panel is over the top and signals mortification/shame/fear that younger readers are primed to exclusively feel sympathetic to but that isn’t as deeply ingrained in older readers. If blonde was stamping her foot or merely looking affronted I don’t think you’d see this division in interpretations.
And again, even if Blue had said “fuck off” I don’t think you’d have the same division, but coming back with “you all laugh because I’m different, I laugh because you’re all the same” reads as a shallow and fake.
Again and again, Blondie is being an asshole here. But Blue is written in such a way that she sounds like an asshole too.
“Why are two groups seeing this comic so differently?” Was the question and I think “because it’s not written for both groups” is the answer, which wouldn’t be a problem except that it was presented to both groups and both are surprised by the other’s reaction.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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