Tag: Adeela

The Way Things RRRRRRRRRRR

Big ups to billytheskink for enduring the last two weeks of this “significant” arc. As Billy pointed out yesterday…

…Professor Forehead never assigned partners, he just told students to pair up themselves. He is not going to be able to assign these two new partners without breaking groups up, and if he is like most of my college professors, he is not going to care much about this melodrama.

Seriously, you’d think two adults–Wally must be pushing 40, right?–could put aside “the differences between us” and just suck it up and finish whatever nebulous assignment they’ve been paired up for and move on. Nope. But at least something is…well, not happening but starting to happen. The unlikely study partners are startled by a row of red R’s that are presumably a sound effect. An air raid siren? A snarling tiger? Roy Orbison?

(Programming note: Tuesday’s strip won’t appear until midnight eastern, so expect the dreaded placeholder post…same deal Thursday as we begin a new month)

Agreed-gious

Today’s strip is the worst thing we’ve seen in this story arc yet. It is everything wrong with every strip so far in this story arc scaled up into a Sunday strip: it is boring, nothing has really been accomplished (we all saw “talk to the professor” coming last Wednesday), Buddy doesn’t do anything, we learn nothing about either Wally or Adeela, we still don’t know what class this group project is even for. I guess it is missing a photo album corner flashback, but that is pretty much it.

Not only that, it is riddled with errors:
– There is no “mistake”. Professor Forehead never assigned partners, he just told students to pair up themselves. He is not going to be able to assign these two new partners without breaking groups up, and if he is like most of my college professors, he is not going to care much about this melodrama.
– This is not the first time these two have agreed. They agreed that they didn’t like each other’s clothes not three strips ago.
– These two also don’t have any significant history of disagreement beyond their apparent clothing-based assumptions about each other. They’ve known each other for maybe 2 hours. The debate about what table to sit at is quite literally the only disagreement we’ve seen between them.

And with that, I’m relieved to be handing this nutria dropping of a story arc off to our esteemed captain TFHackett.

Slowly they turned

Hark! A breakthrough in today’s strip! In a shocking spectacle that no one saw coming, Wally and Adeela are both going to ask Professor Forehead to assign them to different partners for this group project!

For all of the issues this story arc may have or may still find itself wading into, it’s worst crime may well be that it is unbelievably boring. I’m sorry, I don’t know what else to say.

Attired Story Arc

Adeela sums up this story arc quite nicely and concisely in today’s strip. No, this isn’t working. It’s obnoxiously pandering, laughably researched, blandly written, and glacially paced. Oh man is the pacing slothful. These two are just NOW admitting what we’ve known since last Wednesday. That might be fine if they had done something, ANYTHING, in the meantime… but they haven’t.

Cameo alert! Is that the backside of the original Stuck Funky banner Anon-O-Student in panel 2? Experts say “Sure, why not? We don’t really care.”

Friend or Photo?

I suppose today’s strip indicates that Adeela was the mother and not the child in last Sunday’s strip, which makes her fairly close to Wally in age.

No, that wasn’t obvious. Wally has been back in Westview for 9 years now. He was taken hostage in late 2007, BEFORE the time jump*, so he hasn’t patrolled an Afghan street in about two decades (heck, it is still a decade plus if you ignore the time jump). Adeela easily could have been that child and, oy… piecing together this strip’s timeline makes my head hurt. Still, I gotta say that Adeela has aged better than anyone in this strip except for maybe Cindy.

* Back in early Act III when Wally had apparently disappeared from the strip after the 10 year time jump, TB stated in a blog post (the infamous “it’s called writing…” post, in fact) that a “clue” in regards to Wally’s whereabouts appeared in the October 11, 2007 strip, in the immediate aftermath of Lisa’s death and just before the Act II to III time jump. That clue being the newspaper in the newspaper box that Les slumps past before he is pickpocketed by a couple of hipsters. It reads, muddily, “Soldiers Taken Hostage”.

Wally remained a hostage until July 2009…