Nope, you really can’t.
on November 18, 2017 at 12:01 amLet’s spell out the subtext here because I can’t remember if it was ever explicitly stated.
When Mary says, “Nope, you really can’t [plan things this well],” as she avoids eye contact, this is a clue. Mary wanted to marry a doctor. And so she poked holes in her condoms or whatever, schtupped Peter (who she might have been dating beforehand), and, whoops, they gotta get married now. “You can’t put your JOB in jeopardy,” she freaks, because that’s what she truly values.
Sal knows the score, though. Not, like, this specific score, but Mary’s general over-all score.
Was this sussed out by the original IW! readers? I forget. The last panel is kinda non sequitur-y without figuring out Mary’s being deceitful.
This is the last time we see Mary outside of a cameo until the end of the Walkyverse, I’m fairly certain. I remember wanting to rehabilitate her somewhat in “Is A Song Forever?” by showing her having remorse and learning to move on, but the sweet siren call of Evil Mary pulled me back for this storyline. It’s how she wants to be, I’m sorry.
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Yes, we did.
“And if this is Mary’s last appearence, I will be very sad.
And when I’m sad I kIlL ThiNgS… :evil:”
So much has changed.
I for one am glad that casual death threats are no longer considered “the hip way to talk, because it’s funny”.
Well, one person did and everyone else just called her a slut.
Wow, that triggered a spurt of early 2000s phpbb2 forum nostalgia! See kids? That’s what Internet discussion looked like before it was taken over by Disqus and Facebook.
So pretty much the same then.
❤️
Man, I was totally reading panel two then, I thought it was her not wanting the kid and not being able to bring herself to be honest about it because he’s just listed off everything a good Christian girl is supposed to want out of life.
The look on her face, plus the bland agreement, plus her expression in the “contraceptives really hate me” panel a few strips back all combined to give me the strong feeling that she seriously does not want to be a mother (but won’t take the abortion route again when marriage is on the table and she’s at the place in life when she “should” be getting married and starting a family), and I figured we were supposed to infer that she’d created her own comeuppance for her “evil” by not being able to express that and trapping herself.
Yeah, that’s how I was interpreting it too.
Yeah, a little too subtle, Willis. You should be like Mary and take direct action.
That was my reading too, but goddamn, her dishonesty turned out to be worse above and beyond what I was prepared to have expected.
Deep down Mary’s evil? It’s not like she tries to hide it very well.
Just under the skin is a kind of deep.
She’s evil both deep down and on the surface.
It permeates her entire being.
Wow, this subtext completely flew over my head up until now. I thought it was just a general “Mary puts the needs of herself and those in her immediate circle over others” bit.
Well, I mean, Sal here is an attempted genocide who almost wiped out a whole continent, and being free, she could conceivably do it again.
I’d probably call the cops too, to be honest.
Yeah, she’s evil because she’s “backstabbing” them.
Dayum, I had never picked up on that.
I didn’t read the.original run, but I also didn’t pick this up on the current release.
Sabotaging her own contraceptives to marry a person is one kind of gross.
Doing it to a person who would go in whole-heartedly to a marriage spurred by an unplanned pregnancy? Exponentially eviller.
Glad Willis explained it.
“So, you didn’t bother to alert us until after the escaped felon and her accomplice had vanished into the night? I think that this makes you an accessory too! You’re under arrest!”
Probably easy to go ‘they threatened to kill us until we treated him, then absconded before we felt safe enough to call you guys’.
Well, that really changes my reading of Walkyverse Mary. She’s not a hypocrite who had a moment of weakness and the consequences caught up with her, this hypocrisy was completely deliberate.
And the whole calling the cops thing… if it had been as simple as a criminal convicted of attempted murder showing up at your house and you call the cops because you’re afraid for your life, that would be perfectly reasonable. But Mary makes it clear it’s about two things, judging Sal and protecting her own ass.
Are Peter and Ruth the only Walkyverse glasses characters who are drawn with the “single lens” thing, so we can see their eyes better?
(And is there a name for that?)
Nope, never thought that, didn’t look at anyone else’s reaction, finding out for the first time now.
It’s not like Mary comes off as all that nice regardless. Like, she brings the sun out long enough to deliver a heartfelt apology to Sal, then it’s all “what did you do” and “you ungrateful bitch.” So in panels 1 and 2, in my original reading, she brings the sun out long enough to appreciate her husband and the many beauties and mysteries of God’s plan that have given an unworthy wretch like her the life she’s wanted… and then in panel 3 she promptly throws her old “friend” under the bus, using the convenient fact of Peter’s life-saving job to quell any internal or external debate.
I think one reason the intended subtext would never have occurred to me is that Mary, in all her prior appearances, wasn’t really a planner. She tended to just follow whatever impulse entered her head, whether driven by lust, thirst, guilt, or her fragile, perky self-image. But people do change. Some improve, some decline, and some just kinda go sideways.
I have to be honest, I never caught the implication. I always saw Mary as a tragic character more than an evil one, brought up in an environment with (presumably) a strict moral upbringing, and somehow convincing herself that being part of a group made her a moral authority. Not that far off from where Danny started in Roomies, if far more vindictive.
In Is a Song Forever, she’s ostracized from her own group and thrown into a world where no one really wants her, admittedly due to her own actions. The abortion ruined any veneer she had of moral superiority and her attempts to maintain it had already cost get Danny and co.
I therefore choose to read this revelation as less of an act of evil or maliciousness, but rather one of desperation. Mary’s defining character trait to me is a need to be part of a group, preferably as the most beloved and coolest one in that group. This act, despicable though it may be, is her attempt to get in good with her original group one final time, to undo what the abortion cost her.
But, and remember this is a tragic flaw, Mary insists on controlling her friends and relatives, in manipulating others, and her pride allows her to delude herself into thinking it’s for their own good. With a bit more confidence and, ironically, faith in others, her story probably would have had a happy end.
That’s the thing about good villains though- they think they’re the heroes no matter what.
Well, except Dr. Doom
Speaking of Is a Song Forever, it appears to be out of order in the storyline dropdown (which seems to think it’s the first Roomies story)
Well, DAMN. I misread Mary’s discomfort here entirely in this arc and amazingly enough it was for something that could, somehow, make her even worse.
Originally posted:
March 8, 2003