[0821] The Divine Comedy, Page 19
└ posted on Thursday, 15 September 2016, by Novil
- Larisa: Anything planned for Saturday, Sandy?
- Sandra: Sorta. I want to go to the mall.
- Larisa: Cool. Mind if I tag along?
- Sandra: Nope.
- Sandra: First, I want to go to the superstore to buy–
- Larisa: … ten bags of charcoal to make a giant bonfire with flames so tall it’ll be visible even in the neighboring town?!
- Sandra: –No– a new drinking bottle for my bike. And after that, I want to go to the multiplex and–
- Larisa: … sneak into Rob Zombie’s new horror movie which is so scary and full of sex, drugs and electronic dance music that it received an NC-17 rating?
- Sandra: –No– reserve tickets for the premiere of Moana. And finally, I want to go to the clothing store to buy–
- Larisa: … lingerie which is so sexy that Cloud’s eyes will pop out when I command you to take off your clothes during a game of “Truth or Dare”?!
- Sandra: –YES! Let’s do just that!!
- Larisa: Oh, Sandra! You have no idea how much fun it is to corrupt the innocent!
![[0821] The Divine Comedy, Page 19](/comics/2016-09-15-0821-the-divine-comedy-page-19.png "[0821] The Divine Comedy, Page 19")
Actually, they’re more like 16 by now – if they’re aging “in real time” (which they seem to)
Wasn’t Larissa’s age given at one point during the sexting arc? IIRC she’s 14 or 15 now.
To be honest, corruption of the innocent does have a certain appeal to it.
I wholly recommend it to any and everyone.
Pylgrim wrote:
Yes I was thirteen, and sorry to burst your bubble (no sarcasm intended), but I barely thought about sex and never talked about it (even though I hit puberty at nine years old), the same of my friends. Sex wasn’t an issue with us; it was confined to spanking the proverbial monkey in the privacy of our homes. Hell,none of us had boy/girlfriends, nor did we care to have any. We were focused on having fun playing sports and video games, and skateboarding, along with the occasional fist fight. We weren’t awkward kids either; we were outgoing, confident, filled with bravado, and if I may say so, good looking (seriously we were a handsome crowd). We weren’t repressed either, sex just wasn’t an issue with us. Hell, when I was fourteen I had full permission from my mother to have sex, with the condition that if I get a girl pregnant that I take care of the child, and even then sex wasn’t an issue in my mind. Maybe it was due to the fact that my mother always taught me (along with a complete sexual education, and I mean complete!) to “Never think with my dick” and that “Hormones are no f***ing excuse” which I took to heart and maybe that just rubbed off (heh) on my friends, or maybe we were just too damn concerned with enjoying our very short childhood (yes we were aware of the brevity of childhood, another thing my mother crammed into my skull form an early age).
Also I will never stop protesting and feeling more than a bit creeped out by a f***ing thirteen year old being turned into a sex demon, as well as that dress where you can see the groin line!
Cloud, you are a lucky guy!
Given the increased amount of innuendo lately, can we get an update how old the characters are supposed to be currently? I wanna determine how uncomfortable this should make me.
@ Mudsaur:
Could not agree more, and Larisa is going to get an A* on her homework. And you know, I’m pretty sure Cloud doesn’t want his head to be separated from his shoulders….
Isn’t it redundant to tag both “Larisa” and “setting things on fire”
Oh dear, so many people thinking not talking/thinking about something makes it not happening at all. What is creeping ME out about this is that those people are not one-year-olds who can be excused for thinking they turn invisible when they close their eyes. Those people complaining here might actually be parents themselves.
Don’t you people realize what will happen, when you refuse to think that your twelve or thirteen year old children may be (or soon become) sexually active? Deliberate ignorance like that leads to your children being educated on that topic by other children – quite possibly through practice (with considerably less theory).
Do you need proof that it’s not unnormal for twelve or thirteen year old children to become sexually active? That proof is called puberty and is visible enough if you care to look.
When nature tells your children that they are ready for sex, you would be stupid to just ignore it and hope it will go away. Eventually they will do it with someone. And if you failed to educate them (and when I say “educate”, I don’t mean merely telling them not to do it), you will be solely responsible for all consequences.
By the way, as far as I can tell they are about 13 or 14 years old by now.
My approach to the comic is to treat it as an interesting set of stories. I am creeped out by those who sexualise the characters. However, how the characters are portrayed seems about right for their age. Around that age some people want to explore things and some don’t.
It’s wonderful how well people can explain their desires to see underage people partaking sexual activities for our viewing pleasure…
“Oh, there is nothing wrong with it.” which sure, there isn’t.
“It’s completely normal and some kids at that age are just more sexually active.” they sure are, granted in S&W everyone regardless of age or species seem to be sexually active… Which is something I think real life doesn’t follow suit. At least I didn’t end up in any 13 year old sex parties or ever heard of it talked. Then again, I’ve never been seen in S&W either…
“It should be talked about more.” quite true. Between the parents and their kids. I don’t think it’s interenetcomic’s job to educate our kids and the way S&W goes around showing child-sexuality, I’d keep my kids away from this thing and tell them about birds and bees a liiiiiittle better…
So all in all, my opinion? Internet is for porn and the way it’s handled here is careering towards what we can already see from Rule 34, so… If you want to see children have sexual adventures, I’m not one to judge, but please stay home with your hobbies and don’t ever go near real children.
Thank you. ^_^
LET IT BE SO!
@ Velgar:
I doubt S&W will ever cross that line.
Chiggerwood wrote:
Well, I *do* remember some girls asking me to use my modem internet connection to shop for lingerie ^^ And of course, once in a while, one of them teased or flirted a bit, but it was just that – trying how far you can go, nothing serious. The excuse in Larisas case is of course her condition. In Sandras case, we havn’t actually seen anything similar.
…the mall probably does stock lingerie in their size now, huh? It’s easy to forget sometimes that these guys are growing up.
I had to say something, some people seem to have completely forgotten how it felt to be 13… As much as you guys are trying to neglect it: Novil is portraying very healthy and natural adolescent girls. For me at 12/13/14 there was close to no other theme than sex (and i am a boy, girls are always a few steps further). When puberty is at it’s best, you want to talk as much as you can about these new feelings. What you “all-grown-ups” seem to miss, is the fact, that the actions you take at that age are still heavily influenced by glowing red heads, whispers, a lot of giggles and trying and failing. With 12/13 our main games at every party where truth and dare and midnight skinny dipping. We tried smoking and alcohol… you want to be as grown up as you can, even though you are still a child. And exactly that feeling is portrayed with this comic, it’s not perverse but extremely classy and realistic.
Whaaaaaaaat
Wow, that is scarier than it should be. 0_0
@ Cervisia:
nope, larissa is aiming for extra credit 😉
@ MidoriLuna:
No, this is planet Earth. The comic is not created by, read by, or commented on solely by people from one country, ya know.@ MidoriLuna:
Chiggerwood wrote:
She has likely about 15 more years alive… and even so in 2 extra years she would be fair game on most of the planet.
Christ, how old are these kids? all this underage implications is making me a little uncomfortable.
@ Persia:
-_-
The comic takes place in the US. The joke being that the US is fairly puritanical while culturally sex is used to sell everything. So of course the comment section explodes with the idea that these two shouldn’t have any naughty thoughts until they’re well into their twenties, but in reality they’ve probably been exposed to this sort of thing all their lives.
Haha! This made me laugh out loud! xD
I thought Moana would be the best part about this comic. Then I saw their plans for Cloud…
Arthur wrote:
rough guess now is something between 13 and 15. Time is not exactly going on in linear scale with this commics. but people DO age in this commics.
And well,
http://www.sandraandwoo.com/2014/08/07/0605-teenage-pregnancy/
solves the issue quite well
Arthur wrote:
Why? Teenage girls talking to each other about teasing their long-term boyfriends is anything but unusual – at least here on planet Earth.
Might be useful to note that, while the comic takes place in the USA, Novil is German – and in Germany people are rather more open about sex. I’m German and I learned about the basics of sex in primary school (as in, when I was younger than 10). Was a bit awkward, naturally, but the teacher handled it pretty well and everyone in the class knew about the changes that come with puberty, sex, pregnancy and condoms some time before things got serious.
At any rate, even children are already curious about sex (and I doubt they are less so in more prudish countries, just less openly so). In my class in primary school here was one popular joke that revolved around sechs (six) and Sex being pronounced the same (a boy leaving out “sechs” when counting and being told to practice “sechs” – he ends up sleeping with his sister… <.<) and a game that involved two people clapping hands in a particular way while saying a rhyme out loud – the last bit of which involved a married couple in bed, the woman laughing so hard that her belly explodes, a baby walks out and bites the man in the explicetives…) .
Children pick up that adults are rather interested in sex, and make jokes about the forbidden… and when puberty hits they start thinking more explicative thoughts, in a more personal way. I was more of a child even with 14, and thus comparatively innocent, but I still noticed that sex was becoming to seem attractive. And I had a friend who, at the age of 13, had a boyfriend and was taking the pill…
Children mature at different paces, and don't necessarily let adults know how much they already know… Just because you don't recall any teenager acting that way doesn't mean that none act like that. It's just that either you never met them or never noticed.
I haven’t read all the comments, so perhaps someone has expressed this already, but:
The funny thing is this is not abnormal for Larissa, so Sandra has no reason to suspect anything is up.
About this pair of gorls being innocent …:
http://www.sandraandwoo.com/2009/11/02/0108-moms-in-black/
… and Devil being involved:
http://www.sandraandwoo.com/2009/06/25/0071-how-not-to-deal-with-the-devil/
Conclusion: Novil has been planning this arc for years!
How old are these kids now anyway? I know that they were 12 back when the comic started but I honestly have no idea now.
Do we honestly have to wheel this same dead horse out every time the comic mentions certain themes that it has shown in the past and likely will in the future? These things have all been said before on both sides. At this point, it isn’t a surprise anymore, so I submit the radical notion that one is not required to continue reading a story that makes them uncomfortable.
Do they even make lingerie in sizes for 13 year olds?
Man, the comments on these… Novi, at this point you need to make this kind of strip to chase these people away. Have a whole strip with a cow, talking about its hopes and dreams, how it plans on raising proud family. Make sure we know it’s a living thing. Then THROW IT INTO A GRINDER. Meanwhile, in the background, Landon, Sandra, Cloud and Larissa are having an orgy. No joke, the people who are complaining that these kids are over sexualised are, aside from horribly ignorant, at this point annoying. The cow bit is in regards to the strip a while back where the squirrel was eating animals and some tot angry that you’d make their kids go vegan. This was less than a year after the series where Cloud got an erection (with his PENIS, people! Gasp!) and the girls teased him by showing him Sandra’s ass. You don’t need to do any actual nudity (I’m an anime fan, so I’m not going to care much) but just for one strip go WILD, just to flip these people off, man.
I see larisa is familiar with the door-in-the-face technique
I’m glad we realise that we we’re all around different people growing up.
Some of us were interested in sex! Some not so much!
So let’s talk about how Woo will save the day!
Pubescent girls acknowledging and responding to there hormones, oh the horror. Seriously people its not even remotely unusual for a girl to get her first period at age 11. As in her body is developed enough to carry a child and has the hormone drive to seek out sexual intimacy. If that disturbs you, then its you that needs to mature. Or you know ya can continue to treat developing girls like there something wrong with them because they have’t hit whatever arbitrary age bracket you deem appropriate.
@ Chiggerwood:
Your 13 year old self is not the rule or an expectation it was ‘you’. I got my period a few months before age 11 and was writing sexual fan fiction at age 12 involving bondage, rape, you name it. Everyone develops at a different rates and sex is going to be more or less of a factor to you depending on what you were interested in. Saying you find it creepy to have a 13 year old making a deal to be a sex focused demon because you were not the kind of 13 year old to find that offer enticing is fine, but don’t act like you were the norm and all 13 year old are like that because i’ll tell you I was a Larissa at that age and I would have taken this deal.
roguebfl wrote:
Does that make it better?
@ MidoriLuna:
And a satellite called The Neighbouring Town?
@ kitenkaiba:
There still are a couple problems with this. One is that it takes a few years after someone first becomes fertile before they hit their peak, before that they’re less able and complications are more likely. A much more obvious one is that even while improved nutrition (and also exposure to chemicals that induce early puberty) speed up sexual maturity, in advanced societies, long years of education are more necessary than ever to make responsible adults with the financial security to form long-lasting relationships, so that they can raise children in stable environments, and give them the best hopes for the future. In the middle ages, the likely age for marriage and puberty came around the same time for most people. Since then, the former’s moved back five to ten years, while the latter’s moved forward five years. The size of that gap is a real problem.
It’s useful for children between these ages to practice having relationships, but if they go too far it can destroy their lives, so it’s still helpful to keep it in check. And in some cases, environmental factors can induce puberty years early in ways that are neither healthy nor natural. While it’s not helpful to blame anyone after the fact, it’s not something that should be welcomed, either. We don’t have good ways to stop early puberty if it’s genetic in origin, but if it’s due to exposure to estrogen-like compounds leeching from plastic or the like, it’s better to mitigate it than to just shrug it off.
These two characters aren’t that young, though. A human society where 13 years old is an age of innocence is hard to imagine.
@ Chiggerwood:
I’m sorry, but what do normal actions like buying lingerie in early puberty have to do with sexualisation?
Honestly…especially at the age of discovering new kinds of feelings about oneself, the other sex (or the same, or anyone/thing else for that matter), it is completely alright for Sandra and Larisa to talk like that and to want to play truth-or-dare with striptease. Heck, I even played it like that as I was ten years young with neighbouring kids. I have the feeling that people often forget what it’s like to be twelve or thirteen and to encounter things like buying sexy underwear for the first time (because here Sandra seems to not own that – and as I was that age in the early 2000s it was already common to buy lingerie sets and lace bras etc. as soon as one as a female started to develop female proportions). In fact, this is, besides the bonfire, a pretty ‘normal’ teenage conversation. They are not even talking about possible sexual acts, or buying condoms or anything like that, so how is this sexualisation?
(on a side note, Larisa as a succubus can be considered sexualisation – especially keeping a Lolita-concept in mind)
…Today I learned that the Sandra and Woo community would much rather argue about whether or not the comic is sexualizing the characters, rather than just appreciating the coming for what it is.
No offense meant to anyone, but don’t you think if you don’t like things Sandra and Woo is doing, you could just, y’know…Not read Sandra and Woo? Arguing about something online is pointless, and so far I have seen no positive discussion in the comments of this specific comic. Just people going at it about whether or not these characters are being sexualized.
@ nicktyrong:
Of course there is lingerie for 13-year-olds, mainly because you do not need to be a certain age to buy one. It depends on the sizes, not on the age of the possible wearer.
On a side note, it also depends on their notion of lingerie: do they mean things like corsages or more like bras with a little (or more) lace on not simply in one colour cotton-bra. Because I’d say something as a lace corsage would probably be a bit too expensive for Sandra, so they are probably talking about ‘nicer’ underwear than the more comfortable and practically-oriented ones they might be used to.
@ Tjikicew: Wild guess, but I’m certain that you’re already corrupted enough the devil doesn’t need to send a Succubus.
@ Diamond655:
I get what you mean, but everyone is entitled to discuss what they think about the comic in their own way, unless it of course violates the comment posting rules or is deemed by the moderator to be unfitting.
Some of us might like to discuss such issues – the main characters in this comic are teenagers, so it is bound to happen that their teenage-ness will come into focus on one point or another, especially if someone strongly disagrees with something they think is displayed by the comic (aka sexualisation of young females). And in turn it is bound to happen that other people respond to that if they disagree with anything they said or asked. As long as no one starts with the insults this is a rather civilised discussion/conversation/provision of statements to the topic.
I personally don’t think arguing about anything over the internet is pointless per se. It’s an exchange of opinions, simple as that.
But again, I get what you mean, so might I ask, what do you think about this specific comic? (because you said no one discusses it but you yourself did not add your opinion on it)
I, for one, realised just how much the characters changed over the years in appearance and was completely aghast that I somehow forgot how they looked like in the beginning. But I like how they look now, the development of the drawing style in general.
In this comic strip per se: Larisas expression (as well as her text) in this one are just great, because she is so enthusiastic while Sandra is just following through with what she wants to say without any kind of surprise about the interruptions from Larisa.
Actualy, I rather think SandIa has a good idea about how much fun it is to corrupt the innocent- Cloud, in this case.
My ability to resist a rant at this point is impossible. I apologize in advance.
Words must be said about the curse of Rob Zombie and the disaster that his entire film catalogue comprises.
His “visionary” “House of 1000 Corpses” is nothing more than a jumped-up Texas Chainsaw Knockoff that contains almost as much stock footage as original. It is a mouth-breathing disaster and actually makes Craven look SUBTLE by comparison.
His interpretation of “Halloween” turned one of the greatest movie franchise characters ever known from a nightmarish silent juggernaut powered by arcane energies in unknown quantities into a white trash child abuse case. It is a categorical insult to one of the greatest names in horror, John Carpenter, whose boots Rob Zombie is not worthy to lick.
His “Lords of Salem” was incomprehensible garbage created as nothing more than a vehicle for his no-talent hack of a wife.
The only thing he did that was any good was something he didn’t even appear in: “The Haunted World of El Superbeasto,” a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek affair that was sufficiently over-the-top to be both funny and action packed.
In short, Rob Zombie is proof even a broken clock can be right twice a day as long as it stays in animation.
CoMa wrote:
My personal opinion is that nothing sexualizing has appeared on-screen, and sure as heck won’t. I’m not really too concerned, and myself just focus on the story being formed. As for the argument…I get it, but two pages? Really?
Besides that, you guys didn’t discuss anything else. At all. Very few commenters have said much apart from that argument. I don’t really need the argument to end, but can we please discuss something else about this comic now? Please? Like, uh, where the story’s going so far? Or the fact that Sandra seemingly avoided her fate on her own if she really isn’t going to the robot thing on Saturday?
@ Steve:
Lol! Finally something interesting in the discussion! 😀
Rob Zob really has been disappointing lately. His version of Halloween is completely unwatchable.