Honestly, if I knew someone like this in real life, I'd treat him/her like a child in terms of consent. I just can't consider someone that spineless as being at an age of consent even if he/she is legally an adult! Anything we did would feel sort of ... rapey.
Simply put, as far as I am concerned, anyone incapable of saying "no" also cannot really be considered capable of saying "yes." And that makes all of the Gary stuff very squicky to me.
You're actually right. Any one on here who thinks otherwise is trying to wash it away. If a girl is drunk and a guy tries to have sex with her and she's unable to say "no" due to her state of intoxication, it's still rape. It's the same with Gary, but instead of booze it's some faulty personality trait.
You just contradicted yourself. Those two scenarios are completely different.
Gary is completely sober, so he can in fact give consent and he has.
Now I don't know what I find funnier: the comic or the messages people post on this forum.
As for the current scene in the comic I'm thinking we are going to be left hanging and the comic will snap to the Didi wrestling sub-plot for the next several weeks.
The really hilarious thing is, Giz and Dave have made a point of both showing and saying that Gary's relationship with Peggy is totally, 100% consensual, he knows what he's doing, he can enjoy being pegged, and Peggy sometimes does other, totally clearly pleasurable things to and for him. He just finds some of the things he does with her a little weird and exhausting, is all.
But some readers are so determined to see Gary as a tragic victim (rather than a comedy idiot) that they can only respond by defining Gary as mentally incapable. Sheesh. Projected paranoia?
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Spidrift "Brevior vita est quam pro futumentibus negotium agendo."
-- Motto of Hogshead Publishing of fond memory, and wise words to set your Foes List by. Avatar misappropriated from the wonderful XKCD.
Gee, I wonder how the "poor Gary" people will react when Peggin' Peggy fits a Tremendous Trevor, or an Immense Ivan, or an Enormass tool on her harness...
Wow, that's a lot of forum angst over me just commenting that I find the idea of Gary-sex squicky because I can't see him as capable of consent!
I'm not calling Peggy a rapist, guys. She's a character in the story, not an omniscient viewer who has the full picture. But yes, Gary comes off to me as mentally disabled in some way ... and maybe that isn't intended, but when multiple people "misinterpret" a particular character more than any other character, is the fault necessarily with the people doing the "misinterpreting"?
So far as I can see, most people here don't perceive Gary as mentally incompetent. (Feel free to run a poll and prove me wrong - go on, do it.) It seems to me to be just a peculiar minority who persist in reading a very standard comedy character type, clearly flagged as such by the writers, as somehow pathologically tragic. And no, writers aren't responsible for weird minority misreadings of their work - else every good writer in the world, from Shakespeare on down, would have the same fatal flaw.
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Spidrift "Brevior vita est quam pro futumentibus negotium agendo."
-- Motto of Hogshead Publishing of fond memory, and wise words to set your Foes List by. Avatar misappropriated from the wonderful XKCD.
Spidrift wrote:Gary is a comedy character. Such characters are continually being bounced into stuff that they don't want, due to social ineptitude or excessive politeness. Admittedly, Gary dials this up to 11, but honestly, if he's incapable of giving consent, so are Bertie Wooster and Rincewind and Baldrick and Andy Dwyer and Malvolio.
Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die, you know?
Rincewind at least can refuse to do stuff. It's only one more reason for him to run for the hills.
But the Lady gets him anyway. Remember how he didn't volunteer for the space mission?
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Spidrift "Brevior vita est quam pro futumentibus negotium agendo."
-- Motto of Hogshead Publishing of fond memory, and wise words to set your Foes List by. Avatar misappropriated from the wonderful XKCD.
That was all Rincewind. He chose to go before she could get him - or Fate, who I would suspect in equal measure to the Lady of rigging events to put Rincewind in a life threatning situation, had they been paying attention to him instead of the Silver Horde.
I got the impression the Lady and Fate already mostly left him alone ever since he got back from Fourecks and received his position as Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography. His life got a lot calmer, give or take a few spikes of unpleasantness like the aforementioned space mission. Rather like he got put on the reserve bench; not knocked off the board as such, but kept in reserve for special occasions.
KittyHat wrote:Wow, that's a lot of forum angst over me just commenting that I find the idea of Gary-sex squicky because I can't see him as capable of consent!
