One Day, Part 2, page 6
on August 25, 2013 at 12:01 amUgh. This page.
My biggest question now is… why Ruth gotta be traumatized by this? I mean, I might know the answer, and that answer might be that this story formed in my mind when I was young and stupid and thought sex was a bigger deal than it is. I dunno, do most teenfolks want to hurl after they do it for the first time? This story could have played almost exactly the same if Ruth and Ryan went off to be smoochyfaces for a while. It could even have been pretty damn the same if Ruth enjoyed it! But naw, dawg, had to “pile it on.”
I was trying to go for parallels between how Danny is and Ruth was, but Danny’s breakdown and buildup didn’t center around sexual humiliation. Ruth’s did. I want to hope that this is the case because I was more open with writing sex stuffs at this point in time versus before with Danny, and not because Ruth is a Girl and this is how Girls Have Trauma. Did I do this because this was Ruth, and Ruth had to suffer the biggest trauma, and at the time I believed sex was the worst thing ever… or did I do this merely because she had ladyparts? Decide for yourselves, I guess. Sometimes not even the author can navigate his own mental quagmires.
Regardless, it feels too much like an accidental Rape Origin. And that just seems kind of random and tacked on. Ruth can lose her confidence in herself in several other ways.
I hate this page. Like, bury it with all those Atari E.T. cartridges. Nuke it from orbit, just to be sure.
It’s precisely why Dumbing of Age Ruth has a completely different “origin.”
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Personally as a teen type girl person my first experience was because I wanted to do it with the guy I chose…same as Ruth has done. I don’t understand why she is so upset, she is not super religious like Joyce and wasn’t forced. But…Mr. W. if it helps any, maybe she thinks she should feel that way?
I did not feel badly about my choice…but the times being what they were, my parents would of killed me had they known. So they never knew.
I felt guilty for not feeling guilty. This is truth, odd, but truth. And maybe that’s some of what Ruth is going thru.
That was pretty much my experience as well, even looking back I don’t see it as much of a mistake as I felt I should have at the time. I suppose if you have really built it up ridiculously for yourself that it has to be perfect you’re going to react poorly (most people’s first times suck). But unless they feel pressured into it or are raped I’m going to guess most girls first time is less traumatic than they expect
Maybe Ryan was just super bad at sex.
…Why do I keep trying to justify not-good stuff?
Well it could be the false feelings that Ryan had for her, but that explanation wouldn’t seem very plausible unless she had some sort of empathic ability. That or the high level of maturity came with very low self-esteem. I just like over analyzing stuff.
Maybe once the hormones leveled out, Ruth realized she should have waited or something?
I guess it’s mostly “My first time was with someone I don’t care about whatsoever! My preconceived notions of the importance of your virginity are tearing me apart!” which makes sense, in a way.
“I hate this page. Let’s just forget about it.”
Or you could put it in the queue.
“Yeah, let’s put it in the queue.”
It could be the dawning realization that she did something she herself felt deeply uncomfortable with for no other reason than to please someone you respect a lot more than they respect you, and that the act meant more to them than the person they were doing it with, and moreover that they’re not nearly the high bar of deep thought you perceived them to be, resulting in deep-seeded feelings of idiocy for ever having been suckered in and the fact that all the time spent together had no other meaning than building to this…
*sigh*
This storyline hits me harder than I want it to.
Yeah, I completely get why this makes Willis want to cringe in retrospect. It definitely does smack of “women have to have sexual trauma”. But, well, that’s more or less how I felt after I lost my virginity? Despite an areligious upbringing, and the fact that I was relatively certain my parents and his would all be supportive, and our genuine affection for each other, I STILL felt like the world’s biggest slut. It’s not this page being unrealistic that makes it frustrating, it’s the fact that – as Willis notes – there’s no reason for it to be this particular kind of horrible self-doubt, and good reason (the Danny parallels, avoiding needless sexual trauma stories) for it not to be.
Forget about Ruth for a second. Let’s look at Ryan. Ryan seems to be a healthy young man with no predisposition to narcolepsy, yet here he is, completely asleep in the middle of the day.
Yes, I know that he just had sex. That changes nothing. Sex is not a powerful and irresistible sedative, especially to a young man of that age who should be thinking “How quickly can I get it up again for Round 2?”
You don’t know my husband. He conks out pretty much right away most of the time.
Yeah, it actually is a normal thing. When I read “Sex is not a powerful and irresistible sedative,” my first thought was, “what? That’s EXACTLY what it is!”
Moreso for men than women, apparently. According to a sex study, men’s brains release a greater amount of sleep hormones during their orgasms than women’s do.
Yeah, it’s a normal thing for people who have sex in the evening right before they go to bed. The prolactin, the oxytocin, and the vasopressin has much less effect in the middle of the day when the body’s biochemical cocktail is geared keep you up, alert, and moving.
I’ve been the teenage male having sex in the middle of the day, and I can tell you that though I might’ve be feeling pretty mellow after climax, I was in no danger of rolling over and slumbering, if for no other reason than I was a teenager having sex in the middle of the day, and I didn’t want to get caught by either my family, her family, or the appropriate authority figures, location dependent.
I don’t know if Ryan is also a preacher’s kid in the Walkyverse, but regardless, there’s only so relaxed he can be with one ear constantly cocked, listening for the sound of car in the driveway or keys in the door.
“Yeah, it’s a normal thing for people who have sex in the evening right before they go to bed.”
LoL, again, you don’t know my husband. 😉
And anyway, you said something earlier about a round two… maybe they did have a round two, we don’t know they didn’t.
I’ve tried to tell myself that masturbation should help me sleep, but I don’t seem to find myself very convincing.
It’s probably because I’m not very good in bed (pun intended).
I always imagined that her experience was… less than stellar, here. In my mind, I see Ryan being in such a hurry that he didn’t bother to pay her any attention, and she probably had an uncomfortable and possibly painful time of it, physically.
I’d buy that if she stopped after “…my body.”
As soon as she starts agonizing over right vs wrong, I think it moves beyond ‘oh shit that hurt and sucked’ and into…something else.
Well I was also going to say that maybe he was rather… for lack of a better word, pushy about the whole thing. Like maybe she wasn’t quite ready but he begged her or guilted her into it, and now she’s regretting it because she feels violated.
Well, I admire you facing your past head on even if it makes you want to torch it.
I love this page. I can imagine being Ruth – self-sufficient, convinced of her own maturity and superiority. Sex carries so much uncertainty, so much unfamiliar ground, and for someone like Ruth – someone like a younger me – getting carried into that experience could be earth-shattering. One thing led to another, maybe she didn’t say no when she wanted to, maybe she didn’t realize she could say it, maybe she didn’t realize wanting to say no was an option, but whatever the case may be, she didn’t think it through. For someone so sure of themselves, it’s a perfect opportunity for crippling regret.
And I don’t think it’s necessarily a “rape” origin. We don’t know what happened, and to some extent that rings true for me. It feels as though Ruth doesn’t even know what happened, or how she should feel about it – “it shouldn’t be wrong.” And that’s so true, so real.
So even if maybe at the time this came from a place of believing sex is the worst thing, or that the trauma girls had was always sex-related, it resulted in a page that speaks to experiences that people do have, and connect to meaningfully. Whatever its source, that doesn’t cheapen its value, at least not to me.
Quite interesting. Thank you for your perspective. I was reading through the comments to see if I could find just such points of view.
I wouldn’t hate it so much if I were you. I mean, sure, if the story is going to come along later and try to say that it’s like this for all girls, then that’ll be bad. (First-time Roomies reader. Hi!)
But take me, for example. I’m a female that was raised in an extremely conservative, sex-is-bad-outside-of-marriage-and-even-in-it-you-shouldn’t-really-admit-to-enjoying-it kind of household. By the time I first had sex, in college, I had really broken away from that kind of belief system in a big way. Still, because that belief that sex is shameful and wrong was so ingrained in my all through my childhood, I spent the whole day after the Event shaking and constantly having to remind myself that I hadn’t done anything wrong. And I didn’t even believe in all of that anymore! Indoctrination can run deep.
Don’t know if Ruth came from that kind of background or not. I just started following Shortpacked about a year ago, and don’t really know how to go about breaking into the other comics. (Hoping to use Bring Back Roomies as a jumping-off point.) But if her life was anything like mine, I buy her reaction completely.
I wrote a big gushy thing about this series and what it might mean to us, but can sum it up as:
This isn’t who you are, but is who you were and how you got to here, you might not like it, but it is here for the world to see.
Good on you. Thank you.
-Bem
Walky, I’ve actually been meaning to ask you for advice about this sort of writing for a while. Because I have very similar regrets about some of my own writing as you have here.
I started a webcomic about two years ago, with absolutely no previous writing, drawing, or storytelling experience. My skill was amateur at best, and my characters were walking tropes. And even though I’ve improved GREATLY in all aspects since then, I still have to live with some of the decisions I made at that time.
In the comic, I have two female characters (presently). One of them is a sex-positive genki metalhead (who’s everyone’s favorite), and the other is a sexually-traumatized gamer girl. When the gamer girl was in high school, her prom date forced himself on her, and she was too nervous to stop him. And then in college, her boyfriend, whom she was in love with, was only using her to cheat on HIS girlfriend.
These experiences have made her have trust and confidence issues, and are the basis for the romantic conflicts that happen between her and the protagonist. And even though this backstory is only one part of her character, and doesn’t completely define her, I still can’t help but feel guilty over writing what basically amounts to a Rape Origin story. Especially since it continues to be a huge influence on her current romantic situation, so I have to keep bringing it up and making it an important thing. When I first wrote her story, I didn’t even think about the possible tropes and harmfulness that I might be playing into, and every time I think about it, I could go back and change it all.
So, my question for you is, how do you handle feelings of regret over things you wrote in the past? Do you simply have to leave it be, and learn from it, so it doesn’t happen again? Because it’s fucking hard to leave something like that alone, especially in comics, where you know that every new reader is going to be seeing that story when they go through it.
I know this was directed at Willis, but I had to weigh in.
When you’re starting out with a creative process it’s very easy to do things to your characters with no thoughts to the future and simply because some part of you is saying “Hey, this’ll be edgy.” That you feel shifty about it means you’ve gained the confidence to not rely on shock tactics for your drama and are judging yourself for doing so. The thing is, what you did doesn’t have to be what you’re stuck with.
Your characters can move forwards with their lives and what you put in their past may actually take them forwards in different ways than you’d expected. Remember, these things are in the past for your characters and no matter how horrific the event, it shouldn’t be defining anyone. This is one element of their lives but not all of their lives.
Maybe you could put a character in therapy, or have them hash things out with someone else who has gone through similar things. Something that will help them to move on with their lives a bit more. As time goes on you phase out the ways these events affect everyday life and views, lessening them rather than removing them.
In short, let your characters live in spite of what happened and they may surprise you with where they’re able to go and how little the big bads you assigned when less mature with your writing affect them as they go.
Thank you. That’s amazing advice and it almost made me well up.
I see Furie got to it a few years before me, but as he so eloquently pointed out, a singular event regarding a certain subject doesn’t have to forever define a person’s views on sed subject. People change and time will dull most any wound. More so if events help along with the healing process. Some things will stay with you forever, but the conclusions you draw from them can and will differ throughout one’s lifetime. Also new experiences have a way of influencing old ones at times, even if only slightly. But it’s early morning and Fury already sed all that needed to be sed… not to mention it’s been 2 years and then some since the question was asked towards someone other then myself.
I’mma’ gonna’ let myself out now.
Okay, I understand your feelings here more clearly now, David. Earlier comments you’d made about this sequence confused me, because you seemed to be calling it rape when it didn’t quite qualify.
That said, this part feels very real to me, and it deals with a difficult but important issue I’ve rarely seen. I find it skillful and not remotely problematic. Ruth clearly consented to have sex, but she clearly expected an entirely different experience than what she got. Everything about Ryan indicates that he doesn’t really care about Ruth beyond getting what he wants. It therefore stands to reason that his approach to sex was not particularly concerned with her pleasure, may have even been rough and hurtful. She gave consent without knowing what she was consenting to, because she didn’t know Ryan.
Calling it rape risks labeling any unsatisfying fumblefingers a “rapist,” but calling it merely “consensual” means Ryan can continue to get away with his manipulative, abusive behavior. What’s worse, Ryan seems fully aware of this. Even if it weren’t Ruth’s word against his, he’s done nothing actionable. He’s the kind of monster who understands the rules of human society and won’t be called out for years, not until his ego and the need for bigger thrills overwhelm his prudence.
Ruth’s experience had to differ from Danny’s substantially, or the comparison between them would have been obvious and forced. I reject the idea that when you have a single male character and a single female character experience pancakes in different ways, you are therefore saying “all men experience pancakes like this, but all WOMEN experience them like THIS.” If you resent this story because you were thinking that way at the time, fine, but it doesn’t come through in your work. Billie and Joyce got their illusions shattered too, without any Ryans in their lives. If Mary ever met a Ryan, he’d probably only reinforce her illusions.
(Spoilers follow)
Now, I’m not as thrilled with the rest of the story, in retrospect. What happens with Ryan, with Walky, and with Ruth’s father would certainly batter anybody emotionally, but the idea that all three of them happened on the same day, even in a story titled “One Day,” is taking things a little too far. (The “one bad day” in The Killing Joke employed one cruel coincidence– Joe’s family dying right before the heist that was supposed to ensure their future– but two in such a short time feels contrived.) Ruth’s later initial reaction to seeing Ryan seems off in light of this scene. And Ruth’s later use of the word “humbling” seems a bit mild.
But I’d say you can relax your creator’s guilt about this scene a little bit. It’s not like you made it a motif.
I think the other thing is that what seems to be a few days later (I just braved the old website: the exact wording is “Days pass”, and we don’t know how long it is but it seems to be less than a week. Also, the narration seems to be from her diary, almost certainly written after the rest of her day from hell, which might affect things?), it looks like he’s either cheating on her or going to break up and start dating Nameless New Girl. Which is at best seriously jerkish, and at worst suggests he only wanted to date her so that he could have sex with her and/or pressured her into doing so, which would put this right on that line between meaningful consent and not.
The Killing Joke also has him take a dunk in a vat of acid at the end of that one bad day because he’s forced to go through with the crime, but agreed. This is a bit much for circumstances that aren’t possibly made up and all.
*cough*Aziz*cough*
I completely agree that we should nuke it from orbit if Willis doesn’t feel comfortable with it, although I feel the need to add that I felt exactly like Ruth after my first time. Okay, I do come from a Joyce-like background of terrifying Christians, which made it so hard to admit to myself that I was gay. That kind of settles why it felt so wrong for me to have sex with a guy just to prove to myself that I could act straight if I wanted to.
I don’t want to push the drama here; I just mean to say, it is very possible to feel like this after a first time, and although it is sad to depict such a dramatic/conservative view of sex (which is overdone in pretty much any teen series), it still refers to some realities. It echoes with my own experiences and I dare say I’m not the only one.
So, yeah. The strip didn’t have to show Ruth having second thoughts about having sex, but at least it is well-done. Props for that.
I’m guessing she was expecting something that she didn’t get, maybe a stronger connection to him than she had before. Instead she left Billie alone to have her first time with her boyfriend but something didn’t feel right, or at least wasn’t what she was expecting. I don’t think you have to have a strong or fanatical religious background for that to happen. You only get one first time and if something didn’t feel right there will be regret.
As a female reader, while this might not be THE WORST OF ALL RAPE ORIGINS or anything, I’m glad you look at this with disdain. It gives me hope for writers, because like you said, you could gain the same uneasiness and whatnot from kissing and this kinda puts females in the unfortunate light of “SEX? FEEL GOOD? NOT UNTIL MARRIAGE!” I mean, she clearly liked him a lot, so this would make sense, I mean, she might regret it, but not on this drama level until afterwards, or so I would think.
So thanks for hating this. Really. It means a lot to me.
Well, it’s like pretending to be able to fly a plane, and you take off with someone, and get into a thunderstorm and things go all ugly and you don’t see anything and set the thing down again just flying by instruments. Except that you don’t know what they mean.
And you’re not sure whether you landed at a safe place. Or landed at all. Or this is actually hell keeping you in the dark.
Why did you pretend to be able to handle that thing? Perhaps you’re fucked, but you have no idea how far.
See guys, I told you she wasn’t raped. She just acts like she was, because of reasons.
As for why she feels so wrong, maybe because she left Billie alone, unsupervised and she knows that was the wrong thing to do?
Yeah, that was my thought too. She feels like she gave into her hormones rather than being rational and responsible, which is what she was priding herself on like two pages ago. Her wording is pretty weird though if that’s the case… I think Willis was trying to portray a “oh, shit, sex” kinda thing, but it’s possible the wording just made it seem awkward.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that she built it all up in her head as the ultimate expression of love, when really, it’s JUST sex. So she probably rushed into a relationship with a dude who didn’t really care about her, or someone she didn’t care for, and ends up regretting it. I actually kind of like this, since it implies a darker story involving the boyfriend. Granted, it would work a bit better with some foreshadowing, but hey.
Plus, it could all be a flashback and she’s traumatized more by the fact that she was busy having sex when she was supposed to be watching kids, and she’s remembering it as a darker experience as a coping mechanism. Either way, it needs breathing room.
I have to admit I always took her reaction here to get hinting at Ruth being closer to a Kinsey six. I.E. that she had not considered the possibility and so assumed she was straight hence why it didn’t feel right. I think this was reinforced for me by the inclusion of the lines “He says he loves me. I say I love him”. Rather than simply imply possible disbelief in just his love for her she uses the same language concerning her feelings. I took this freekout to be a result of what she though were her sexual foundations coming out from under her. But well, I can’t tell you how your brain was working, well I can but I doubt I would be right, I can only tell you how I took it.
I do find this strip, and Willis’s reaction, fascinating. Firstly, because no matter how much Willis may disdain the content, the execution is excellent. I mean, yes, panel 2 Ruth may look like a golem, but panel 3 is really quite excellent, not matter what the reasons behind it might be.
The other fascinating thing is how easy it would be to make this sequence make sense, in that it’s not unreasonable for Ruth to feel horrible right now, for all sorts of reason.
For instance, this is Ryan, so we can assume that the experience wasn’t all that great.
Plus, this might be the first time that Ruth has had to consider that she might not be entirely straight, and she might be horrified and confused over whether she’s feeling this because it’s a fact or because the experience that she hoped/experienced.
Plus, Ruth the über-responsible-adult girl left her babysitting charges alone to go and have sex. And though she’s not yet aware of the consequences, if the experience isn’t that great, guilt for that could be bleeding into her psyche.
And then there’s the ‘This shouldn’t be wrong’ line. She’s quite right. But on the other hand she just slept with Ryan (ick) while in a position of responsibility (oops), and so it… kind of is.
Of course, Willis didn’t go for any of these. Which is a pity, because there’s so much potential in the details, and so very little in the execution.
Well, when you’re young, and of an alternate sexuality (as we’re aware Ruth is…) you go through a lot of things figuring that out. Sometimes you need to have that disappointing, WRONG sex with guys before you figure out you like the ladies. And I do know this from experience. So while it might have been a bit… over done, her reaction isn’t THAT extreme. She knows that something wasn’t right, but not what she missed.
That was my first guess at what was going on in this scene too. Poor Ruth!
Wait… what? What happened? Is he dead? Why is he dead?
It would make for a much better story if Ruth killed him rather than slept with him…but would kinda screw up the rest of Roomies!
Pretty much what I saw after staring at this page for a while. Either that or she now knows she’s really not into penises and the ramifications thereof scare her, especially since she was feeling so high and mighty ‘since she was five’.
Gotta give it to Rabid Rabbit up there. His thoughts were reflective of a lot of mine.
Overall it seems to me that Ryan coerced her using “Love” as a bludgeon. Which just makes the whole thing skeezier to me if he was doing stuff she was uncomfortable with, or was just plain rough and I don’t think that’s what you want for a first time. *I* was nervous as hell for mine. I full-body vibrated from adrenaline for like 10 minutes. And I had the benefit of having discussed, and in my mind at least, committed to marriage with my partner. I might just be lacking context but something implies to me that maybe these two weren’t THAT committed into the relationship yet, plus all the juggling a burgeoning alternate sexuality. (unless this caused it which seems a bit extreme in the long term)
Reading it, I sort of assumed it was something Ryan… did? Just. No matter what words came out of their mouth. I can’t imagine Ryan being anything but selfish, and rough when it came to the actual deed.
i am not reading ANY of the other comments bc that will end up being triggering but as someone who has been sexually assaulted by multiple people, ruths reaction is definitely on par with someone who changed their mind and wasnt comfortable enough with their partner to speak up (which considering how ryan acts towards ruth- completely understandable and likely)
even if it was intended to be the whole “o noe im a good christian girl i cant have sex until marriage” thing, it easily has roots in sexual assault AND is a more accurate portrayal of it than a lot of rape storylines- it doesnt always click right away when someone has abused you; it can take time for you to accept it and your feelings do start off as very confused and you do blame yourself for what happened, even if it isnt your fault.