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themacnut wrote:Quite frankly though, by this point I think Amber's broken that rule so many times with Ruby that nothing less than several sessions with a therapist or something like that can work out the problems between them. Which of course is not Amber's style, and Ruby won't be comfortable talking about her problems and feelings in front of a stranger either. Heck, she doesn't even want to talk about them with her sister.

Oh, I think if you told Amber that a lot of proper famous actresses are in therapy, she'd sign up with Cool Bald Guy like a shot. And Ruby may be introverted, but she's also a nerdy rationalist; if she accepted that she had an emotional problem, she'd treat psychotherapy like going to the dentist - an unfortunate, painful necessity.

I'm not saying that we're terribly likely to see either of them going, though. Therapy in this setting, is usually for big, comedy problems with big, clear symptoms (psychotic fugue states, hallucinations, radical anorgasmia). Mundane routine unhappiness and bollixed-up family interactions are too much like hard work to show being fixed that way.

And anyway, I've said before that Ruby would only really need one session. ("Yes, you have a libido. It's up to you what you do with it. And yes, your sister is an inconsiderate idiot. That's up to her to fix. Next patient.") Amber, on the other hand, would need to be coached through things like telling her parents about her porn career, which are more likely to get dealt with the comedy way.

Putting them in therapy together might be constructive, but that'd just be another of those big talky scenes that this comic doesn't do.

This is now my favorite SDB strip!

Really, Ruby? Two eighteen-year-olds lock themselves away to "play mommy and daddy," and it takes you this long to figure it out?

Keep in mind, from what we've been shown Ruby actively avoids thinking about sex and has since about age fourteen. It may, from sheer habit, be one of the last possible explanations she considers in most situations and wouldn't have occurred to her at all at that age. Particularly as the idea of female homosexuality is even further outside her mental models.

More like 16-17 year olds. More importantly, Ruby was only 10-11 herself at the time, conventional (and priggish) in a way that only a 10-year-old can be, and probably trying to hero-worship her big sister a bit. And it's not like big sisters never lock little sisters out of their rooms for more innocent reasons; sex didn't have to be involved.

And then yeah, from age 14 onwards, Ruby had a mental block on the whole subject of sex. She was all too aware that Amber had a sex life after that, but apparently not that she was bi. From her point of view, Amber doing heterosexual stuff after she left home was bad enough.

And it looks like Ruby simply hasn't thought about this specific subject for many years. There's no particular reason why she should; it was just something that happened when she was a kid. And it seems from panel 2 that it was a mildly painful topic already; her big sister locked her out of friendship for no reason she could understand. Discovering why now brings all the pain back, adds a large dose of embarrassment, and puts a cherry on the top.

Isn't that Jesry and Angel in the bg, moving away? And Dillon is too busy to spy on them.

It does indeed appear to be Jerzy and Angel there. But the question for me would be, if Ruby gets upset for more than a moment by this latest revelation - and she might, she looks like she's taking it quite hard - whether Dillon is prepared to drop that current idiot game and try to talk her through it.

Stray thought on this; one of these days, somebody is going to have to give Ruby a full "It Gets Better" speech. ("There are other people out there like you. The people around you at the moment - the idiots who don't even try to understand you, the parents who think they understand you but don't - they aren't the whole world. You'll meet those people like yourself eventually, and feel at home with them. You'll probably want to sleep with one of them, but don't feel rushed. Just hang in there and you'll be okay.")

Now, of course, if Dillon gave that speech - right now, even - it could still be combined with yet another embarrassing misunderstanding, to make this a proper Ruby scene; probably Amber coming in a catching part of it. ("Oh, that sketchy guy is gay! Why didn't you just say?")

mmm they have not put key words yet