Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT 2101-2105 (January 16-20, 2012) - A New Hope

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Welu:
Part of the issue in here is even though the most recent strip hasn't mentioned Padma and Faye and Marten are speaking in a more general sense, we're still talking about Padma. This was just the event that triggered the conversation, not the reason for the conversation.

Faye is one of Marten's closest friends and they've seen each other through their very low points. This is another one of those low points where hopefully regardless of how we're interpreting Faye's words and Marten's response, that the characters will go on to better themselves, whatever that means.

I said something basically like this already and so have others a lot but there's nothing horrible about how Marten's living his life, he's got friends and a steady decent income and hobby he's passionate about, but he's still not happy and he's done nothing actively (not the same as actively done nothing) to change that. He can't just wait for the happy to fall on his lap, he's got to out and grab the happy!

Milesb:
But you can't have your cake and eat it...

I think Marten has a mix of positives and negatives in his life, and sure - you can always do more to increase the impact of the positives!

But I think getting rid of the negatives is often much more difficult for people, and that's Marten's issue.  

I personally believe that Marten's methods of interacting with some of his closest friends is one of his biggest negatives. Because he's generally quite meek, people project his opinion onto him when they know him well and when he deviates from that, he's wrong.

A great example of some of Marten asserting himself in a positive light would be a lot of his interactions with Hanners, helping her to be less OCD and more social, the drum kit thing, etc.

A great example of Marten being stomped on for deviating from being a door mat would be the starting scenes of the breakup with Dora (specifically the "Don't look at my porn.. you looked at my porn! I told you not to!")

Edit: I guess my point is that Marten does try and be assertive at times, and often the reaction that follows (positive or negative) is pretty much down to who he's being assertive towards. Some of his friends definitely seem to have peg holed Marten, and don't react particularly well when he fails to follow through on their expectations.

lepetitfromage:

--- Quote from: Welu on 17 Jan 2012, 07:10 ---grab the happy!

--- End quote ---

I read everything else you said (and definitely agree) but I just needed to share how much I love this phrase. haha

pwhodges:

--- Quote from: Harlequin on 17 Jan 2012, 06:56 ---A forum exists, people post their ideas, their likes and dislikes... and then these efforts are made to silence *everyone* by the people participating.
--- End quote ---

The thing is, people want their views to prevail, and on the Internet they don't get so much of the feedback that gets them to back down, either by agreeing to differ, or by accepting a modification of their views. This is a well-known phenomenon, and is the reason that forums like this have moderators to try to control things. We have worked hard here to try to remove the rudeness that was common not much more than a year ago; these days people are (mostly) reasonably polite about disagreeing - but disagree they will, and some still try to get their view over by sheer weight of posts.

There is a well-known cartoon about this, on XKCD (note the hover text):

Milesb:
I might be guilty of weight-of-posts here, though I've been trying to either post on different aspects or in response, but I think I'll cut down on it.

Perhaps making up for lurking for so long, I decided to post and I've got a bit carried away. 

:psyduck:

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