[1319] Top Trumps
└ posted on Thursday, 3 March 2022, by Novil
- Caption: After all the boys have left…
- Larisa: Zoey, I believe you’re very badly informed.
- Zoey: About what?
- Larisa: Penises! And their many advantages!
- Zoey: You can’t be serious!
- Larisa: That’s why I brought a penis themed Top Trumps deck. Look! 52 of the world’s finest penises!
- Zoey: This is so pathetic I don’t even feel sexually harassed by your sexual harassment.
- Zoey: Eeep!
- Sandra: What’s up, Zoey?
- Zoey: I do kinda like that one…
- Larisa: One of us! One of us! One of us!
S&W in German/auf Deutsch
![[1319] Top Trumps](/comics/2022-03-03-1319-top-trumps.png "[1319] Top Trumps")
Okay, this is a little disturbing even from Larisa.
…where did she even GET a deck like that?
Then again, don’t answer, don’t wanna know.
@ Nikary Flare:
It’s Larisa. Just accept it. 😉
And I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but this is exactly how teenage girls behave when adults aren’t watching. (Heck! Some of them will behave this way even when adults ARE watching!)
Call me a prude, but that was in poor taste.
Even pre-teen girls sometimes behave like that on the playground. I taught sixth grade for 23 years. I know!
This is a bit much, even for a degenerate like me.
This strip should have been only 3 panels long.
It’s more than a little weird that Larisa is making fun of Zoey, a lesbian, for not finding penises attractive and is forcing her to look at pictures of penises and we’re meant to find it charming.
Hmm
Charming possibly not
But funny certainly
I LOVE Larisa succubus in training.
When she finally gets that boy she’s targeting I wanna see!
Antiyonder wrote:
Back when I was kid (imagine this in the oldest voice you can imagine) the teens that loved dirty humor the most were the top of the class who regularly went to international competitions in mathematics, informatics, physics, etc. In fact, I’ve personally seen a group of boys *and girls* compare asses during an international competition.
I hope this doesn’t fall under the “excessive swearing or insults directed at (…) the characters” clause, but…
Godfuckingdamnit, Larisa!
Someone is having a “I am Charlie” brand of humour here. Not up to everyone’s taste. For me, it’s too mainstream ( •̀ᴗ•́ )و ̑̑.
Melkior wrote:
To the first two sentences: …yeah.
As for the rest: I mean, I’ve been a teenage girl, and I certainly didn’t behave like that.
erejnion wrote:
I was the top of my class and I never liked dirty humour.
I’m not saying my example is how every teen was – of course not! – but please don’t just state that all teens are the same.
Nikary Flare wrote:
Agreed. For me that came much, much later. But I choose to blame the internet for that:-D.
A big thank you for your support of Ukraine, Novil. You’re an inspiration to say the least. <3
For those over the last little bit saying that Sandra and Woo is less optimistic, what do you expect?
At the time this series began, the great recession was ending and everything in the world was looking up.
Since then, covid-19 has been released as a plague upon the world, the war in Donbas has started, and then turned into the war of Russia, the truckers convoy, the rioting being called “peaceful protests” and the riots being called “the worst insurrection in the history of the world” both. We have had China find everyone except China cheating in the Olympics, we have had the Afghanistan military crisis and so much more. To expect this comic strip to continue to be as optimistic as it was in 2011 is foolish. While yes, it can be aggrieving to see a childhood comic turn into something that saddens and maddens you, it will unfortunately keep happening until the next “end of the happenings” whenever that may be.
Yggdrasil75 wrote:
Surprised you seem to believe that things could change for the better down the line despite suggesting that optimism during troubled times is foolish.
Wonder if Larisa will stay on her road once Zoey shows her a set of different 52 of the world’s finest.
Looks like Zoey might be a 5 on the Kinsey Scale.
@ Nikary Flare:
I still remember my very first day of school, ever, literally Kindergarten, I was standing at the end of the driveway with my mom and dad, and as soon as the bus pulled up one of the middle school girls mooned all three of us.
Pretty much set the tone for the years that followed.
…is that Top Trumps deck available anywhere?
This just feels like a good, hard trolling.
. . . Okay, if you say so, but penises are pretty weird-looking. As are vaginas, obviously, but that’s not the deck you’re looking at.
Ahh, corrupting the youth! Larisa takes any and every opportunity, expect no less.
Melkior wrote:
I once spent an entire season volunteering at a summer camp for kids 8 – 14. I had some girls flirt with me even though I was almost old enough to be their father!
Eep! classic! I liked this one myself……..the one about the heavenly butt was a little weird. …….typical teenage girls. Zoey is my favorite and wish she was in the forefront of the storylines more.
@ Skywatcher:
This is a professional hazard for male middle school teachers. I had to be very specific that if the girls wanted to give me a hug around the chest, fine, but climbing me was forbidden. Always kept the classroom door open, too.
Daniel Kelly wrote:
She’s not making fun of Zoey, she’s trying to help Zoey in her own weird way. Larisa loves penises so much, she wants to make sure that Zoey’s not just misinformed (as she says here) and hasn’t seen a penis she likes. Basically she doesn’t want Zoey to stay misinformed and miss out on something Larisa thinks of as super awesome.
If Zoey hadn’t seen any penises she liked, Larisa would likely have accepted that.
BorgLord wrote:
Agree.
Kenju wrote:
Yikes.
@ Daniel Kelly:
It’s the same joke as if a gay character forces a straight character to look at pictures of same-sex genitalia which raises humorous confusion (in the, “we find the character’s confusion humorous” sense) on the straight character, just turned the other way around. We’re to find humorous her confusion and the role reversal of the joke’s butt (usually the straight character; the gay one THIS time).
Nothing to write home about, unless you want to also ban 90% of the yaoi and yuri genres.
Reminds me of some of the interactions I’ve had with female friends of younger family members despite being older causing some real awkward situations that I had to put an end to and is why I don’t tend to be alone with girls of that age anymore and make sure I’m with an adult they see as an adult as I seam younger than I am I guess so they ask me inappropriate questions or get way to touchy with me.
For example remember when my cousin showed me all the dick pics on her phone sent to her by her female friends and asked for a picture of mine to send back to them, it was so damn awkward as she was only 13 at the time I was not gonna do that . After trying to tell her the her she shouldn’t be swapping such pics I ended up telling her dad what was on her phone but he didn’t seam to care much but I was at my grandparents place at a family get together and my other aunts and uncles overheard and blew up about it. So yep girls are like this when people they don’t consider adults are around.
@ Daniel Kelly:
Have you ever considered that sexual orientation isn’t a strict trinary between “heterosexual”, “homosexual” and “bisexual”? The Kinsey scale allows for intermediary orientations between the former two extremes and the midpoint that is the third, so Zoey could very well have been all along someone who is MAINLY homosexual but can express heterosexual attraction under VERY LIMITED circumstances (that is to say, the bar is so high for heterosexual attraction that until today, nothing had ever triggered it, so she just assumed that she’s STRICTLY homosexual).
But do they have googly eyes and mustaches?
@ DH:
I guess that’s her role as a succubus (in training).
Daniel Kelly wrote:
She isn´t being forced to anything. She openly accepts the “challenge”, since she knows who she is.
This would have been more funny if it was just 4 panels long. We don’t need to know why she was shocked.
@ Manabi:
“Larisa isn’t making fun of the lesbian, she’s just trying to convert her to heterosexuality” is maybe not an airtight defense here.
“That is so pathetic I don’t even feel sexually harassed by your sexual harassment” is a great line. Can be replaced with “I don’t feel offended by your offensive behavior” can work too.
Tue wrote:
Looks like the cards were shoved, penis side outward, in her face. That’s not really choosing to look, that’s being forced to look.
I know what kids are like, and this kind of thing happens. Dirty jokes are normal, but this looks like sexual harassment.
One of my nieces is a lesbian, and she feels harassed every time someone decides that she really would be straight if she just saw/met/dated the right guy… Doesn’t matter if it’s kids at school showing her pictures of naked men, a stranger trying to hook up (and not taking “no”), a ‘well-meaning friend’ trying to set her up, or her grandmother — it’s other people deciding they know better than her who she is, and not respecting her autonomy.
So based on my nieces school experience, this is harassment.
First three panels with Larisa brandishing the deck (maybe still in its box) with Zoey’s comment would have been funny. Third panel as drawn was harassment. Fifth panel is validating that harassment, implying that it’s OK because after the fact Zoey kinda enjoyed it.
“When its inevitable, relax and enjoy it” is not a good look.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/personal-foul/
If Zoey had taken the deck from Larissa, and looked at it of her own volition, then this would have been a funny strip, because then she would have chosen to look. But as written, no.
Normally love this comic. Harrassing a friend for her life choices, not so much.
But hey, with this strip and its overall outstanding quality it doesn’t need to please me all the time.
@ MarqFJA87:
“People can be complex and unique? Say it’s not so! That goes against all my Victorian-era values! Quick, someone fetch me a fainting couch!” ~ A third of the people here, apparently.
Okay, I’m a bit confused. So Zoey’s lack of interest in the opposite sex is due to the fact that she never had any kind of intimacy with a male representative of the human species?
Cromm wrote:
Meh, I think we could get an arc of “Zoey tries to date a guy after Larisa coerced her into it but then things go sour, makes Zoey depressed and real mad at Larisa and Larisa learns the lesson that not everything is a joke or a challenge and learns personal respect and boundaries (and not forcing people to do things they don’t want)
But then again, it’s likely just another typical Sandra and Woo joke with no real followup to the plot and maybe with no real afterthought to the gag. Of course, many people will take the joke badly (but that’s what the author wants, lol)
@ chris bartlett:
Now, now, Zoey’s preference for other girls isn’t a “life choice”. All informed folk know that. On the other hand, the possibility that Zoey rates toward the middle of the Kinsey scale is certainly apt. I once had a Lesbian correspondent who admitted that among the various kinds of Lesbian was the ‘Occasionally absent-minded’ who remembers how much fun it was to get taken over the hood of a car in her teenage years.
Nikary Flare wrote:
If you read the post I’m replying to, you’d probably figure out that what I’m actually stating is that you shouldn’t brush teens off just for having a dirty sense of humor.
OJA wrote:
Agree. That’s a good plot for a story arc!
@ Cromm:
There’s so much gag potential with Larisa trying to make up for her mistakes, lol.
erejnion wrote:
That I can get behind, I just disagree with the idea that stereotypes based on age and the like are 100% true.
So when is Larisa going to visit Iceland to see the penis museum there?
@ Antiyonder:
That is certainly correct but stereotypes are true to a degree. That’s how they get to be stereotypes. Not all Italians are loud but enough of us are . . .
@ Manabi:
@ MarqFJA87:
As if every queer doesn’t have people do this to them hundreds of times in their life because ‘helpful’ people want to fix them.
It’s very insulting, and this comic is condoning the behavior. It’s not the end of the world for one of the comics to be insulting, I’m gonna keep reading, but lets call it what it is.