It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Secret Agent Man.
You know I mentioned Zed's weird thing with the twins, but this reminds you that Sam has the same weird thing, partially because she's just Muir imagining his ideal woman, who is essentially him, but in an exceedingly attractive woman's body. (Sam is supposed to be that, even if Muir's skills aren't always up to drawing that.) And partially because these are porn characters pretending they're not, so we get eternal porn scenario setups even when they're wildly inappropriate.
Yeah, I’ve long noticed that, too, and it’s funny we’ve never discussed it before —— Sam’s behavior with her daughters is arguably even more bizarre. The Zed dynamic falls within pretty familiar patterns of paternalistic/chauvinistic ick, but Sam is a mother who weaponizes not only her body but her daughters’ as well, while every moment engaging in unearned snark about How Men Are and how there’s Deeper Meaning to the ways in, and purposes for which, they flaunt it.
ReplyDeleteLike giant billboards and floats.
But Zed is still a totally normal father for getting in a bloody fistfight with his daughter’s suitor in order to test his mettle, or whatever.
On top of which Sam frequently almost seems to be flirting with them.
DeleteAs you note, even with all the leering, Zed's easy to slot into a traditional reactionary fantasy. Sam is a weird mashup of porn vixen and tradwife, where Muir has essentially trained himself not to see the contradiction here.
I find that a lot of the conservative movement in America, especially when combined with fundamentalist religion, is all about trying not to notice the contradictions.
DeleteOf course. Just Muir's particular contradictions are fairly glaring.
DeleteHmm. I hadn’t been interpreting Sam’s weird dynamic with the twins as flirting, though honestly that wouldn’t be TOO much weirder than how it appears, anyway. It definitely is an…unusual mother-daughter dynamic, at any rate.
DeleteShe is constantly complimenting their bodies, finding excuses to hang out with them naked...
DeleteAgain, the thing with Sam is she's mostly a porn character at this point.
And what a crazy journey it’s been to there.
DeleteShe used to be a believable professional, just as Zed used to be a believable laid-back schlub.
Occasional lip service is still given to her engineering pedigree, but it might as well have been retconned away at this point.
Again, I wouldn't oversell it. She'd have stints of being a believable professional, alongside stints of 'How does she keep a job?', like most of the cast.
DeleteAs I've said before, she's always been Muir's dream girl, it's just the dream's gotten slimier.
FWIW, my impression has mostly been that she's pimping out the girls. I'm sure this is a huge turn on for Muir, but I think she is the "real Murican" mother teaching her girls that their one and most important purpose in life is to be a sexual object for men. And she demonstrates this for them. And now I'm off to take a cleansing shower after having to think through that again.
DeleteYeah, that’s pretty spot-on; pimping them out and basically modeling for them that their purpose is exactly that — which would already be super ick enough without the quality that makes it even worse, which that trademark Muir insider-joke “uh huh” smugness about everything.
DeleteIt’s the same thing that makes my skin crawl about the strip generally — everyone is always unflappably smug, because no matter what happens in the world, it all somehow fits exactly into their narrative. So they’re never surprised, never thrown for a loop, never confused, never anything but “Uh huh. Yep. Thaaaat’s right.”
Oh, that is certainly what generally comes to mind, and the unvarnished version of what Muir is aiming for. What I'm talking about is a sort of subtext that exists because A) Sam isn't a real woman, she's Muir imagining his ideal woman and that's increasingly just a version of himself, so she winds up holding his attitudes even when they're wildly inappropriate and B) the parts of Sam that aren't 'Muir in drag' are 'porn character', which only furthers the uncomfortable feeling in how she treats the twins.
DeleteAnd yeah, the smug is a big part of the strip.