Woo, someone asked! (a genuine woo)

“Not really necessary” was part of the idea, honestly. Becky, as we’ve seen in the past, sometimes says shitty things, whether they diminish Billie’s sexuality or they’re jerky to Dorothy for petty reasons, or they offhandedly refer to Roz as “the Mexican chick.”



The problem with writing Becky as such is finding the right level of awful. HA HA HA WHOOPS.

This is one of those super cultural things. In midwestern Indiana, Nazi allusions are given out like Halloween candy. Everyone’s a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and in the absence of knowledge and/or acknowledgement of Actual Basically Identical Things We’ve Done To People Over the Decades And Not Only In The Distant Past, invoking Nazis is the safe cartoonish way to be a friendly asshole to your fellow white person.

Essentially, Becky is saying, hey, guess what, imperialists, I’m one of THEM, you scary bastards, but in the most fucked up way possible, partly because she’s scared out of her fucking mind, and so she buries that fear in the most foul thing she can think of so others can’t find it. And since she assumes everyone around her is, as she puts it, Aryan, she hedges her bets on the hope that her snark is mostly a victimless crime.

Where that breaks down is that the strip isn’t only read by midwestern whites-only-town Hoosiers. There are readers who are the kind of Jewish folks who don’t revel in black humor, there are Germans and other European folks who were closer to what happened, etc. It’s not just a Round-The-Clock restaurant in whitest Indiana, there’s a whole world in there, thanks to the Internet.

And so you have to ask yourself, do you write that person true to their vantage point even if there are rough edges, or do you kind of soften it just to save everyone some grief. That’s a question I occasionally think I have an answer to, but kind of waffle on back and forth. Sometimes I keep characters away from each other on purpose because I don’t want them to be awful to each other in ways that make me or other people cringe. Sometimes I barrel in full speed ahead. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it’s important to do it regardless, and sometimes maybe it wasn’t so important after all. It’s not something I can write a 100% ironclad rulebook about. I’m mercurial on it. My answer will be different tomorrow.

But regardless, all that aside, I thought it was important that Becky be dialed to 11 here for narrative reasons. If you think she was a shithead, well, you’re right. And in tonight’s strip, we see Jocelyne defusing Becky’s obnoxiousness by making it obvious that she is welcome. Becky will now be toned back down from Defcon 1 to Defcon 4 or whatever. But learning not to weaponize her fear in such a way that she is liable to inadvertently hurt others is something she’s going to have to go through the motions with. Sometimes you have to learn that offensive things are offensive, and Becky (and Joyce) have been living in a bubble. Just telling them “don’t say offensive stuff” isn’t going to resolve everything suddenly.

Unfortunately, this strip goes at a handful of panels a day, so that payoff isn’t immediate.

I have to admit, one reaction that did blindside me, because I also learn things because I am often stupid like Becky, is the response of a few blonde and blue-eyed Jewish folks. Yeah, that’s gonna be pretty terrible! Great fucking job, Becky and/or me! But that’s pretty easy to address in the long run, if you are aware of the ethnic backgrounds of my main cast and some pre-existing character dynamics.