Manly Guys Doing Manly Things

Huh... it seems like someone took a good, long look at how B was able to be happy and decided to emulate it in his own way. Good for him.

Bannana bread and fish being very good places to start.

Bet he's learnt some killer muffin recipes/bribary.

edited 6th Nov '17 9:35:37 AM by Euodiachloris

More with Tank.

Talky stuff, no real punchline. Which I'm fine with, for the record. Part of the purpose for Rock's agency is to help socialize fictional badasses, and even with the implication of "comic" not every strip has to have The Funny(tm).

It is amusing that supposed stigma of not going all the way with your cybernetics if you start with them at all.

I love the way he summarizes cyborgs like Robocop or Raiden as "five pounds of flesh strapped to a robot".

Raiden has been described as half a skull on top of an android.

Eh, I still think it's pretty funny, in an understated way.

Part of it, of course, is that the comic has shown that five-pounds-of-flesh-strapped-to-a-robot isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Also, heh, Tank's comments are a Call-Back, of sorts, to Commander's comments about people accepting his body. All in all, looking at Tank is like what I imagine looking at Commander B was like some years before the start of the comic.

No punch line, but some references provide levity. One was to Daft Punk.

Closure.

That's... kind of a strange angle to think about. How does domestic abuse work when both partners are giant muscly men?

The same way it works when they aren't.

Whether or not a person is physically capable of defending themselves from assailants has almost no bearing on domestic abuse one way or the other.

edited 20th Nov '17 1:31:05 PM by TobiasDrake

See: Last time tank was prominently featured.

See also: Psychological and emotional abuse. And financial abuse.

Domestic abuse doesn't always fall into the stereotypical structure. Yes quite a bit is male physical abuse of women, but many other scenarios exist and people are often afraid to speak because they won't be taken seriously.

And I'll note that part of the reason people are reluctant to come forward is because they know that this particular line of argument is inevitably going to be brought up: "Why didn't you just fight back?"

This is especially true of male victims; there is an assumption that men inherently cannot be abused or raped because they'd just punch out anyone who tried.

Unless it's prison rape. Then it's wacky comedy.

edited 20th Nov '17 3:21:25 PM by TobiasDrake

Oh, and if you're a man, you also are expected to just sit and take any kind of abuse if the abuser is female, and especially if she's white and you're not. Even if, for example, it's some racist white woman who is captured on video physically attacking you.

You're right, of course. It's just hard to envision, I think, at least for me. Domestic abuse is pretty strongly tied in the popular subconscious with traditional gender roles.

Exactly. I thought this strip was great because it showed two fairly equally strong individuals, but that there had been a power dynamic at work beyond that. More powerful and I really appreciated it.

The assumption is usually one way, so the way this was framed was really refreshing in how it subverts expectations.

Is "angry wife beats husband with a rolling pin" as ingrained comedy element in the west as it is over here in slavland? It's presence is quite illustrating of both the existence of abuse and the attitude about it.

it used to be. Not so much in British comedy, which leans more on "browbeaten" rather than physical violence. A lot of UK Soaps actually have done some interesting segues on the reversal of that sort of relationship.

Enshrine @3311 - that's the perfect response. I sometimes have to deal with non-romantic abuse along those lines as part of my job (not towards me, but the people who come to deal with my workplace - I deal with an aspect of employment law). One instance I remember in particular was when a guy who was built kinda like Commander, but a bit more realistic (not quite as tall or muscular, but the guy was big and fit), was being hit by a woman on the small-ish side, and some tried to justify that he should deal with it because "it's not like she could threaten him." Bottom line is, it doesn't matter if the recipient can "take it" or not. It's wrong.

@3318 In the U.S., it's more and more rapidly becoming a Dead Horse Trope. Emotional abuse is still rip-roaring fun way more often than it should, but physical abuse of partners, regardless of who is doing the abusing, is thankfully much less common than it used to be.

The only time I can remember the whole rolling pin thing was back when I watched Courage The Cowardly Dog and Muriel would hit Eustace with a rolling pin whenever he was being mean to Courage. Eustace was so malicious most of the time that it's kinda hard to sympathize, but if that was more prevalent in other things I could see that being a bit of a problematic trend.

Honestly, a better overview of how it plays out (and how it's becoming much less common) can be found on Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male.

New one.

http://thepunchlineismachismo.com/archives/comic/hes-gonna-be-okay

I was gonna say, those three encompass most partner activities.

True love is being able to do all three at once without hating each other afterwards.