Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT: Independence Day Week (4 - 8 July, 1961-1965)
NotAwesomeAnymore:
I think the 'real' respect would be a lack of Faye's punchings, Steve's sarcastic comments, Dora's looking at his porn, Tai's nipple-grabbing, Pintsize's Pintsizing and (some have argued) Hannelore bringing his worry hat.
It's all relative though.
bhtooefr:
One thing to keep in mind, that the HBI site doesn't make clear, is that not everything is black and white. (I usually cite http://divalion.livejournal.com/163615.html when explaining "nice guy" behavior, rather than HBI.)
One can have traits of a "nice guy" who feels that being nice entitles him to various things in a relationship, which is inherently jerky behavior.
The same person can have genuinely nice traits, too. Evidence in the case of Marten: except for when he was very, very drunk, he's there for Faye, despite not being able to date her.
On that spectrum, Marten's in the gray area, not at one end or the other - most of the time, he's genuinely nice, but he has some "nice guy"ish traits that come out at times. In addition, he's now building the self-confidence to stand up for himself, which tends to help with the whole "nice guy" thing.
(Myself, I generally try to be nice - regardless of whether or not I've got a chance with someone - but at the same time, I'm a sarcastic bastard, and I'm not going to suppress that trait about myself to try to pick up chicks. And, also, I'm a firm believer in calling people out on their shit, ESPECIALLY if they're my friend.)
Tiogyr:
--- Quote from: NotAwesomeAnymore on 05 Jul 2011, 10:24 ---Tai's nipple-grabbing
--- End quote ---
Yeah, don't get me started on Tai. QC would lose nothing if she never appeared again as the character Jeph has created (cheap LOL look at that clueless lesbian that cannot interact with straight people! jokes are getting old).
Coffee_Kaioken:
It doesn't really matter sometimes what you do to earn respect, since some people tend not to have any.
cabbagehut:
The way I see Marten is that he's a genuinely nice person. Most of the time, he doesn't have a strong opinion. It's not that he's withholding or manipulative - he really doesn't care much one way or the other. That was part of what attracted Dora to him. He doesn't push people around, he's pretty honest, but yeah, he's kind of a passive person.
That's totally different from the "Nice Guy" situation, in which men pretend to be nice and to be friends with someone only in the hopes of hooking up with them later. Nice Guys like that aren't actually friends with the women in question - Marten actually is. He cares very much about Faye, in particular, but also has shown compassion and kindness to girls that he wasn't interested in romantically (Penelope, Raven, Ellen, Tai, Cosette, etc). He treats his female friends with respect, values what they think, is happy for them when they get into relationships, and while he screws up from time to time, he is overall a good friend (I think of that comic where Faye is like, "you are a true friend, flower-pits"). An actual Nice Guy wouldn't do that - there's no payback for them. To a Nice Guy, the woman in question "owes" him for the time he's invested.
Dora is not a bad person, but I think she's being a little too charitable to herself in this comic. Her beef with Marten was his passiveness, but she became incredibly angry when Marten wasn't passive. Her problems were not about him - and it's unfair to blame him for it. Marten showed repeatedly that he was willing to concede and try to be better about things when Dora expressed concern about her problems. Both he and Dora made mistakes and hurt each other, but the reason that the relationship ended was because of Dora and her response to her feelings, not because of what Marten did or didn't do.
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