Quick! The most popular and objectively successful member of the class has admitted they never felt like they fit in! Everyone must fall in line behind her and parrot her sentiments! This will prove how alienated and apart from things they all were!
This would almost be a joke. If the idea that “Les was a dork in school” hadn’t been hammered home so many times the nail is halfway to China, and they’re using a percussive drilling machine with 2000 feet of rod to reach the punchline.
Keep digging, Boys! We’ll reach that sweet black comedy! I know it!
What even does ‘In-Crowd’ mean? In my experience, you want your circle of friends to share your interests and enjoy the same things. A chess club nerd is going to be lost and bored at a football kegger. The kids I knew in high school that were miserable were either the ones that faked their way into a clique that didn’t really suit them, or the poor kids who never found a niche no matter how small.
But Funky was considered perfectly acceptable in High School. Neither the most popular, nor the least.
‘Average’ is the first bit of characterization Funky was given, and as far as I can see it held true through 20 years of high school. You’ve got to give him some credit for keeping Les as his best friend, since nothing probably dragged him down Cindy’s popularity rankings more than having human tumor Les Moore clinging to his side.
I would say that Funky should let Les speak on what it really felt like to be excluded in high school. Since if anyone has a right to speak on the topic it is him.
Wanda has been smart enough to NEVER attend a reunion following the 2008 fiasco. But really she should have known what she was in for, since Cindy showed up at her door in 2004 to for an entire week of groveling. Something I only found after my Wanda retrospective back in March.
Thank you, Cindy, for coming to my house and talking about your own feelings for five minutes and then walking away without waiting to see if I had anything I needed to get off my own chest.
Now we KNOW Batiuk is stalking this blog. He saw our intense discussion a couple weeks ago about the best guitar solos, and needed to weigh in.
And yes, Tom, “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” has an absolutely screaming guitar solo. Good call.
Name dropping quality limey rock music won’t save this strip from being carefully dissected for all the logical and continuity failings within.
Let’s go panel by panel.
Panel one, Cindy thanks Funky for letting The Reunion Committee borrow the jukebox. This implies that Cindy is back on The Reunion Committee. For the 2015 Time Pool arc, Cindy ceded up Chairman of the Committee to Les because she was moving to LA to work for BuddyBlog.
The Jukebox Awaits…
So after settling in in LA Cindy decides to join the committee again despite the long distance? Plausible I guess. Most planning for these things is done online anymore. So Cindy was on the committee for this reunion. A reunion held in the high school (gym, cafeteria, commons?) with a pizzeria jukebox as the DJ? NOT PLAUSIBLE.
RIP Mary Sue Sweetwater Blevins.
Moving on. Would they seriously transport a 250 pound classic jukebox to the high school for a bit of kitchy flair to go with their careful decorating scheme of random balloons, crepe paper, and pink frilly table cloths? When a cell phone hooked to a speaker would give you better sound and a better selection?
Logically dubious.
The jukebox has a the B-side to The Kinks 1966 best selling “Sunday Afternoon”? Plausible.
Cindy chooses the song. Plausible. Because it’s a killer jam. Yeah, it would have come out when they were in Middle School. But so what. “Sweet Child of Mine” charted when I was a fetus, and I listen to that all the time.
Plus, she just came to her 50 year reunion looking 40 years younger than her cohorts with a handsome movie star on her arm. She’s been a national news anchor, won an EMMY, and lived in New York and LA. She is literally not like anyone else there. Plausible.
Funky finds her song selection interesting. No. Not unless Funky has it in his brain that Cindy doesn’t have an appreciation for proto-punk rock. Even Cindy choosing the song as a flex isn’t implausible and Funky should know this.
Cindy confesses that, “She never felt like a part of things in High School.”
…
…
Cindy practically RAN the social circles of the high school. She was at the very apex, dictating who was in and who was out and what all the cool kids would be doing. She ranked every single person and made sure she was at the top.
Where. Is. Carrie? TOM!
Maybe she did feel disconnected from everyone else. Those who seek to dominate others rather than befriend them often do. But I don’t feel sorry for her for a second. Because unlike all the poor kids she put outside so they’d have to look in at HER, her alienation was entirely self-inflicted.
When I was in middle school, I looked up to who my mom had been in her school days. She’d been a cheerleader, and a homecoming queen, and gave the class valedictorian speech. I, on the other hand, was a chunky, geeky, midget with a propensity for uncontrollable bouts of weirdness. My mom sat me down and told me a story.
She said that when she was younger, she looked up to her older sister, who was also super popular and glamorous. She asked her sister how she got so popular. My aunt said, “Be nice to people, be nice to everyone you can. If you do that, nothing else matters, you will be popular.”
Maybe it’s because I was in a medium small school. Maybe my class was just friendly in general. But I followed my mom’s advice, and in my own weirdo, class clown way, I was popular. Maybe I didn’t get invited to the parties of other cliques, or have football players beating down my door for dates, but people weren’t unhappy to see me sitting next to them in class. I was fondly thought of by the majority of my classmates and even occasionally admired for my self-confidence to be unbearably weird.
All because I realized early on that I didn’t have to be a part of everything to be a part of things. That people didn’t really care how good I was at stuff, how pretty, how tall, as long as I was a friendly face that treated them like they had value. There were a few jerks this didn’t work on. But they were few and far between.
In honor of this week, I pulled out my senior class book. There I was, voted one of the four “Most Creative’.
After a week of Holly being cripplingly insecure, she now is trying to infect others with her self-doubt.
Cindy is a good call to try and make self-conscious. Her entire tenure as character, Cindy has been consistently portrayed as brimming with self-confidence ONLY when arbitrary ‘success’ conditions she’s built up in her mind have been met. She’s like a popularity Pharisee, as long as she’s safely within the Talmud of Flawlessness, she’s a self-righteous zealot.
But you take her ONE INCH from the straight and narrow, and she collapses. And this was worse when she was younger. When not having a date for New Year’s Eve had her hiding out at McArnolds with LES MOORE, because it broke some unwritten mental rule of hers.
And she has a history of jealousy when it comes to her romantic partners.
Do you remember when Rachel worked for DSH John? HarrietFarms remembers.
Do you remember when Rachel used to pose naked for art students?
I bet Pete remembers.
But yes. Cindy’s jealousy. Maybe not completely misplaced when it came to Funky and Rachel.
But, of course, she’s also been jealous of Masonee Jarree.
Masone handles this pretty well IMO. I don’t know what he sees in Cindy, but he’s a good fit for her.
But it is LAUGHABLE that Cindy would be jealous of the Westview Women Lumps on display today. Marianne and Rachel were both women YOUNGER than her and lauded as attractive. Cindy is still miles above anyone else female at the reunion. Even with the crippling scoliosis she’s been stricken with in panel 1.
This, this is the ultimate power FANTASY. Parading your delicious arm candy to all the dowdy hausfraus in Ohio. Beneficently allowing all the ugly old geese a moment to pose with your prize.
I mean, who could be jealous of ‘scribbles’ and ‘Jan’? Who even is Jan?
Is she some late Act I graduate I’m unfamiliar with? Why not Cindy’s old wingwoman, Carrie?
Or Les’ senior prom date, Melissa.
Because the only Act I Jan I can think of is Ladies Club, Rap Cellar, Jan. As in Jan and Marcia.
So that is my headcanon now. These two ladies posing with Masone are Marcia and Jan. They crashed the reunion in order to meet a movie star. They’re a good 8-10 years older than everyone else, but everyone is so dumpy looking no-one can tell.
Did you guys enjoy this gripping, emotional, and politically charged tale which really challenged our main characters leading to growth and change that will really shake things up going forward?
I imagine this was also Batiuk’s thought process writing this arc.
I’m starting to get kinda paranoid, guys. I’m starting to feel like Batiuk IS reading this blog. That he reads it, and then changes continuity or characters just to troll us. He saw my jokey headcanon that Roland became a conservative hardware store owner, and had to kick back against my fantasy of responsible small business success and respect for the establishment by inserting the character into a hot button political issue.
I had to fumigate and dissect a political hornets’ nest on my last shift. I’m in no mood to kick this one. I eagerly look forward to all of you in the comments respectfully discussing with each other the artistic merits of this decision and tearing Batiuk a new one. Remember the site rules.
Whatever our diverse views, we can all agree that Batiuk is mostly doing this because he lazily looked through the Overton Window and realized he could bring up a topic that would get him possible cheers from the people he loves to get cheered by and maybe even jeers from the people he gets off on hating.
Some context for your discussion. I don’t have anything concrete I’m trying to say with these. Just some stuff that’s weird to read with the new retcon in mind.
Okay, now imagine 50 years!
So, not ace?
But bikini’s irrelevant?
History and Etymology for chauvinism French chauvinisme, from Nicolas Chauvin, character noted for his excessive patriotism and devotion to Napoleon in Théodore and Hippolyte Cogniard’s play La Cocarde tricolore (1831)
Life-style? Mom?
Misogynist Transphobic Dad?
Hmmm…
I mean, no argument there…
Projection? Jealousy?
Denigrating Roller Derby reference, learned from dad?
