When the sky lit up last week, I knew you’d come.
on July 1, 2018 at 12:01 amChapter: Supply and Demand
Characters: Jennifer Billingsworth, Sal Walters
Location: Danny's apartment
Aahh, and here we get to why this particular storyline is titled “Supply and Demand.” There’s one Danny, but two girls who are into him!
One one hand, Jesus Christ, if your dude is pining for other peeps while in a monogamous relationship, just drop the dude. It’s him, not you. Find someone better.
On the other, this is Extremely, Extremely On Brand For Billie, so I’m back and forth between “this is a terrible, terrible storyline” and “yup, this is how she does.” Is it just embarrassingly unfeminist, or is it inspiring to see a regular human, for something/someone they want, dare to go toe-to-toe with someone who was once so powerful she could raze a continent with a thought?
If only it weren’t over Danny, y’know?
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I never thought about it, but yeah, making very bad decisions for someone she loves is pretty much Billie’s bread and butter
two girls, one dope
Two Girls, A Guy, and a Power Booster Rod
👍
This just reminds me that over in Dumbing of Age, Danny’s currently ditching someone else into him so he can hang out with Sal.
BRB, I’m gonna laugh.
I’m not sure what you mean? I thought their discussed reason for not pursuing that relationship to avoid upsetting Amber.
Does Danny know that Ethan’s been having makeouts with someone?
(And would Danny back off, knowing that?)
Just that yesterday he saw Sal and took off to go talk to her, right after assuring Ethan he wouldn’t die alone.
Yeah I’m caught in the middle here too. This hole interaction is an interesting scene and kind of powerful but is the guy they’re fighting over worth all this? But on the other hand this hole scene is portrayed quite interestingly and leads to good development later on.
Also I know who Danny eventually picks but as someone who did see the one Joyce and Walky special with the alternate time lines I sometimes do wonder it would have been like if He went the other way.
Please assure me that a “hole scene” isn’t the opposite of a “sausage fest.”
🤣 Yeah, my mind went there when I read “hole interaction”. I could only think of one interaction involving a hole, and it could only be portrayed on Slipshine.
My whole body was trembling while I tried not to go into a pedantic spelling rant…
Sometimes a hole is just a hole.
— Freud from another timeline
I like that Billie’s become more badass here, but I don’t like that she’s doing it for this universe’s Danny. I think DoA Danny is a lot better at this point.
DoA-verse Danny is just a better dude. He tried to stop spending time with Amber when realizing there was feelings between her and him, and he was dating Amazi-Girl. That’s more than this Danny’s done to try to have a faithful relationship.
On the other hand, ukelele.
It’s on like Donkey Kong.
That’s actually Walky in Panel 3, Sal escaped and swapped him in as a decoy on the way out.
Putting the questionable qualities of Danny over to one side, I don’t think “fighting to retain one’s monogamous relationship” is anti-feminist. Because that would imply that all feminist relationships are either trouble free or polygamous. And judging from Shortpacked and that bit where Robin got her shit pushed in trying to save Leslie, getting punched in the face by a normal still hurts the abductees, they just hit WAY harder when they do their thing.
Maybe what Billie’s doing isn’t anti-feminist, but I can definitely see how the writing of the storyline might come off that way. Also Sal is way tougher than Robin — she can cold stop a punch from Monkey Master with one hand, which suggests that anything short of running her over with a car isn’t going to take much effort for her to survive.
I would be hesitant to label the deceitful, cowardly stuff Danny’s done as “poly.” Especially because at this point, I don’t think Billie knows what Danny said in his prison visits after they got together. She thinks Danny chose her, and Sal is just coming to try to muddy up the waters again. She doesn’t know that Danny has entered in a relationship with two people.
It’s the inspiring one, for the most part. Yeah, voice of experience sometimes says, “Dude ain’t worth it, honey, find yourself a better partner,” but another, younger voice says “Fight for love with everything you have and more.”
Part of the reason the younger voice carries the day here for me is the amount of time implicitly invested in the relationship. Since It’s Walky is a punctuated real-time series, Billie and Danny have been together for years, mostly good years from what we’ve seen, and his unresolved feelings about Sal come across more as a threat to their existing happiness than as a sign of their relationship’s inherent instability. In a way, the issue springs from a trait of Danny’s that’s normally very good in relationships: his intense loyalty. If he were just mooning around about somebody they’d met after getting together, it’d be different.
And if he were Ruth, it’d also be different. Ruth and Billie in Dumbing of Age are a frikkin’ cauldron of instability and while there’s a tiny chance they’ll help each other more than they hurt each other, I can’t say I’d be rooting for them to stay together if Ruth found someone else less likely to enable nascent alcoholism or wound her with her efforts to impress a bunch of rubes from another hall.
Of course, that Billie is younger and frankly much dumber. The worst this version shows is modest pushiness and arrogance and occasional assumption-making. And she’s less wrong about Sal than Sal wants to admit.
❤️
This is a poignant analysis but it’s been personally undercut by my reading “[Earth-2 Billie is] frankly much dumber,” scrolling back up to the strip and being reminded how skinny Billie Prime is, and finaly the two points converge in my head as the summary “Dumbingverse Billie is thicker in every sense of the word.”
Well as she noted, Billie Prime has been taking self-defense classes for months now leading up to this moment. Dumbing-Billie’s only exercise seems to be walking to class and then consuming a lot of empty calories via alcohol.
This is basically exactly what I was going to say but thank you for phrasing it way more eloquently.
“Very melodramatic, Miss Billingsworth. It would probably be more effective if I had the slightest interest in causing a scene or disrupting your life in any way.”
You know, the page title strikes me as particularly apropos considering most US towns just had their 4th of July fireworks last night.
Am I too late to make the inevitable Billie vs. Sal: Dawn of Danny joke