Bad link. But anyway,
Giz says she favours "Larose" here.
brasca wrote:Some children appear to be smart at first and quite possibly Amber is intelligent in areas we do not know or is absent minded, but can be exceptionally smart when she puts her mind to it. We have seen such evidence with DiDi.
DiDi is written so weirdly I now think of her as almost a
savant type. But Amber actually displays a working degree of street smarts at times; I wouldn't actually call her unintelligent. She just lacks structured academic intelligence, to the extent that Ruby apparently makes her feel stupid at times, and she can't deduce the meaning of a word like "sororicide" and doesn't bother to ask before changing the subject.
Actually, to be honest, Amber may have been depicted with declining intelligence over her history in the comics. The sneaky hard-nosed blonde who scammed Gary and Nathan has turned into a bit of a fluffy bimbo.
brasca wrote:Maybe Zii is a terrible dancer.
Look at that strip again. She says
"No!" when DiDi suggests "dancing", but also "Not funny" when DiDi suggests working in a massage parlour. It's obvious to me that Zii has standards, and regards sex work as way beneath them.
brasca wrote:There is probably more to Amber's motivation than just that, but it remains to be seen and it does not have to be tragic. Some people become sex workers despite having stable home lives and career alternatives.
Call me old-fashioned, but I just can't see it as anything other than a bad choice. Given that Amber felt unable to tell her parents what she did for a living, and also felt unable to give her best friend from school a call until an emergency arose, it's clear that she has at best an ambiguous view of the subject.
brasca wrote:And how would they know that Amber was engaged in self-destructive behavior? If she dropped out of school and ran away from home that would be a clear sign, but we do not know much of what happened between her sexual awakening and her porn career. As far as they knew she was had frequent sleepovers with little Suzie. What is suspicious about that ?
The point is not that they didn't know; it's that Amber went that way, without giving any visible signs. The failure isn't failing to spot the behaviour, it's raising a daughter prone to such behaviour in the first place.
brasca wrote:Perhaps the pictures progressed from showing a little leg to showing things that Menage a 3 cannot get away with currently.
Uh, you really are stretching there. Ruby was cripplingly embarrassed by the recollection of that action, and we saw exactly what was embarrassing her; we got a memory flashback, and all she was doing was showing some leg. If she'd done something more extreme, we'd have seen something more extreme - with scenery or speech bubble censorship if necessary.
Using an incident which has never been shown, and which exists only in your imagination, as evidence for your ideas about Ruby's personality, is ... not terribly convincing.
brasca wrote:You certainly are setting a high bar.
No, my bar is set at "raising kids who are not prone to self-destructive or neurotic behaviour, or who can at least talk to you if their life goes difficult or bad on them". That's my working minimum for "didn't screw up as parents", and the Laroses failed it, twice. Maybe there's a third Larose kid who's sane and well-balanced; who knows? But the evidence we have available doesn't make them look good.
brasca wrote:Maybe Amber's grades slipped in her last years of high school and the LaRoses did not want to repeat the same mistakes so when they saw Ruby engrossed in her studies they chose not to question it. Ruby is tight lipped about sex, but she might have had a heart to heart discussion about her low opinion of other people her age and given what a lot of parents see and hear about other children her age doing they were pleased that their Ruby was not like those kids.
That sounds to me like "Our daughter has no friends! Great! That means she has no bad influences!" If I thought that was how things had gone, I'd
really call the Laroses f***wits.
brasca wrote:So they should not trust their daughter when she says she is fine and that she is working? Should they have hired a private investigator to verify this?
Asking "How's your new job going?" is something you can do to casual friends, let alone family. Okay, maybe Ruby answered that with a carefully constructed and consistent lie - in which case, yes, her parents get a pass, but Amber looks even more screwed up.
brasca wrote:Spidrift wrote:Anyway, my pet theory (with no great evidence) remains that they praised each of the girls to the other, leaving both with minor inferiority complexes.
Perhaps. Some parents have their failings and your theory might be true.
That one is actually a very commonplace, standard error, and it's not even limited to parents. Some teachers and work supervisors regularly make much the same mistake.
brasca wrote:Perhaps they should have waited for confirmation, but Amber seems to have the problem with communicating regularly and if the last thing the LaRoses heard from Amber was how great her career was going they could reasonably conclude that there was a place Ruby could stay.
They could conclude that Amber had a place, but sending Ruby there without even confirming by 'phone that Amber had enough space was extremely rude, at the very least. Heck, they didn't even know that Amber would be
at home when Ruby arrived. For all they knew, she could have been away visiting friends or something. This is comedy, of course, but it's not comedy that makes Mrs Larose look at all good.