#big ethel energy is GROSS

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this just in on "three voices you absolutely should NOT listen to especially when it comes to romance and relationships"

literally all of these comics are dumpster fires (*tho I will say Down to Earth is the lesser of the three) and i'm genuinely concerned for the people who are being raised on some of this shit 🤢 can we please just be over this garbage collectively as a society already, jfc

[itsactuallyunlocked]

ND culprit (written) tier list

@an-american-teen-against-crime made a ranking of all the culprits based on presentation and level of iconicness, and I had some of my own thoughts, so I decided to make a written tier list. Lotta spoilers below the cut!

Mitch/"det Beech": Mitch gets an F for not even being in the game. Detective Beech/Uncle Steve does win more points from me for being genuinely threatening at the end of the game (and honestly I didn't expect a new culprit in the remaster so he got me by surprise). B for him. Together they get C tier.

Dwayne: absolutely iconic. Absurd. Psycho. Comes back for another round later in the series. S tier.

Louis: I don't like him. The plan is weird and maybe a bit too realistic for my liking. Generally forgettable, D tier.

Lisa: also a little forgettable, but she gets props for explaining her motives and actions for the whole game. Kicks Nancy's ass and leaves her to die. B tier.

Joseph: scary in the quiet way. It's very unsettling that he's helping you but he's also holding a teen hostage in a condemned building. B tier.

Taylor: kind of pathetic, right? He makes himself sick by eating rank cookies. Locking Nancy in the monolith was very scary but nothing saves your rep when you have to run to the toilet mid-conversation. F tier.

Emily: she's quite threatening! Her plan is calculated, she makes several attempts to kill Nancy, and her final plan is to savagely beat Nance to death. Not quite iconic enough for S but a solid A tier.

Elliot: a real asshole, this one. I've had co-workers like him. The villainy is pretty good though. B tier.

Andy: I always got creepy... incel vibes?? from him. I don't like him. This is my list and he's going in C tier for being generally gross but not cunning.

Shorty: I am HAUNTED by "...here's Shorty." He seems nice, but in the way where he'd stab you in the back. And that's exactly how he is, so it's good characterization. A tier.

Jane: a literal child. She's lashing out because she's hurt and Ethel is an awful influence on her. Great twist because she's 10, bad villain because she's 10. C tier.

Marion: not bad. It's a good reveal, and a decent plot. B tier.

Lori: I love this game but damn Lori is a bad culprit. She doesn't even decide to be a villain until the very end. F tier.

Minette: I like her crazy bitch energy. It's fun that for most of the game she's discount Miranda Priestly, then at the end you find out she's actually a villain. B tier.

Mike/Pua: hard to say. The plot of the game gets a lil incomprehensible, but I'd say they're decent. C tier.

Yanni: he got that thicc ass. Okay besides that, he came up with that story about his grandmother being eaten by wolves??? Fantastic. A tier.

Renee: kind seeming with a dash of threatening. Love her wild convictions. S tier.

Helena: solid villain. Girl is in. charge. Also she knows to get out while the getting's good. B tier.

Okay, if Fiona was actually a villain who was scheming and trying to hurt ppl, she would be S tier. She's not though. No bad intentions, D tier for villainy.

Okay so. I might've made a case for this one, but it's pretty majorly racist, so it's an automatic F tier.

Corine: she's real mean! Great villain for a high school setting. A tier.

Scott: I literally don't remember him. F tier.

Rentaro: I liked him :( but he's a terrible boyfriend. The plotting and execution are really good though, it's just the motivations that don't make sense. B tier for the horrifying yurei robot.

Anja: oh yeah she's golden baby. S tier. Until we meet again girlfriend!!

Brenda: she's a big bitch. Her and Toni are megabitches. Plot is okay, not great. C tier.

Abdullah: huge energy, but what did he really do? That's kinda Abdullah in a nutshell though. C tier.

Victor: they just wanted a twist villain. He's decently menacing for the five minutes he's around. Killed a guy. Still D tier.

Clara: the backstory is phenomenal. I like her constantly standing around brooding. S tier.

Ewan: kind of boring but he did presumably have a lot going on in the background. An actual terrorist. Still C tier.

Kiri: I don't get what her deal was. F tier.

Xenia/Thanos: yeah they're S tier.

Soren: I honestly don't remember him that well. He was threatening at the end there. C tier.

I remember NONE of the characters from this game, I don't remember the culprit, and I don't think they really mattered. FFF tier.

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Can you give us your thoughts on Big Ethel Energy? I haven’t seen anything glaringly wrong with it tbh, but I might not be educated on the topics the comic brings up.

TBF I haven't read it as extensively as LO (though that's a loaded comparison because I definitely put WAY more into analyzing LO than most webtoons LMAO) but my biggest issue with BEE is just like... the main cast (primarily made up of women) are so manipulative and toxic all the time. A lot of the comic's narrative feels very preachy while not actually practicing that empathy, very similarly to LO in which characters will just yeet out Therapy Speak or whatever have you and then use it to justify their shitty actions, rather than actually learn from them/correct them/etc.

One big example I can think of that alerted me to its issues (as many others) was the scene where Betty tears into her boss (Seth):

And he totally has a point, he acknowledges that he made a misstep but I don't think the irony of her calling him a "judgmental jerk" has been lost here because she's literally basing her judgments of him off instant reactions (and hoo boy, do a lot of the characters in this comic do that, but we'll get into that shortly).

But then there's complete tonal whiplash where they go upstairs to the roof where he reveals that he's changed his decision about working with Veronica (thus correcting the misstep that Betty was calling him out on) and Betty is just SO overjoyed by this that she-

Like, this is her boss, for starters, who she's kissing (without his consent or even any signalling that he wanted to kiss her in that moment) literally MOMENTS after she called him a "judgmental jerk". And then when he rejects her because there would be a power imbalance in their relationship that he's not comfortable with (which is a VERY reasonable boundary to set), she just ?? Goes right back to being mad at him and the story paints it as if he's at fault ??

Like they actually had the opportunity to showcase a story in which a power imbalance in the workplace ISN'T romanticized (like it is in so many webtoons like LO and Let's Play) and instead it made the boss out to be the bad guy for rejecting the advances of a female lead. And so many of the female characters in the story are like this, it's like they're trying so hard to be "strong independent women" but then they just come across as manipulative and mean all the time. Like sorry, but you can't just use "progressive language" like "mansplaining" to make your characters seem smart, Betty is being a huge asshole here over something SHE caused. It's very "woman good, man bad" with no nuance or consideration for the actions of either party.

And of course, they follow it up with Betty actually realizing she wasn't in the right, only for Veronica to come in and be like "nah you're allowed to hate who you hate" even though that kind of advice totally isn't constructive here when Seth was being completely reasonable. So Betty is literally just flip-flopping between actually caring about Seth and his boundaries to hating on him for having them at all.

Like, this is so miserable to read. Don't get me wrong, Veronica is traditionally a very "fuck you, I do what I want" character, but it just feels so gross when we know what Betty did was wrong and Betty ought to know this as well because she's usually the more reasonable foil to Veronica. It's not like it's empowering either of them the same way it would if they were fighting over Archie (as they traditionally do in Archie comics) and then mutually decided he wasn't worth destroying their friendship over, this is Betty's boss who she kept changing her opinion about based on whether or not he sided with her. It's flimsy. And they never really address Betty's behavior here going forward or use this as an opportunity for growth (at least from what I read following this, mind you I haven't kept up on the comic in a while).

To talk about the main character, Ethel, there's actually another weird scene that comes after the Betty/Veronica exchange, this is after she's started seeing Moose (though they don't have an official relationship yet) and is going over to his house for the first time.

Like, these two aren't even officially dating yet and she's already nitpicking things about him and taking his choices personally. It feels very unnecessary and vapid - and if you're someone who's read Archie comics before, it feels very out of character for someone like Ethel, who's traditionally a very sweet (albeit hopeless romantic) girl, here she just feels mean all the time.

And the comic as a whole just has a lot of these passive aggressive scenes. The internal monologuing of Ethel is insufferable because it's often just her constantly judging people or jumping to extreme conclusions. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for characters who aren't morally good, but I don't want to read a story that lives in the head of an asshole LOL

All that said, I haven't kept up on anything from BEE in a while, from what I've scrolled through of newer episodes at a glance it seems to have dialed back on some of that passive aggressiveness, but I'm gonna have to do a re-read of it at some point with the newer episodes included to form a stronger opinion. So take what I say here with grains of salt.

I just don't think it's necessarily a good example of a "strong romance series". Everything feels so petty all of the time and when it does try to act informed or mature, it's completely undercut by characters who can't practice what they preach. A lot of comics on the platform tend to stress "women supporting women" but then really it turns into "women hating men" and it's just like...?? Is that really the point of the message we're trying to get across here?

Add in the extremely stiff dialogue and text dumping and cheap art, and this just doesn't feel like something that would be made for a series like Archie of all things. The Archie franchise has really been suffering from lame melodrama and unlikeable characters as of late, I know there's only so much one can do to re-adapt a series that was from the 1940's, but it feels like it's often misinterpreting the point of the more modernized messages they're trying to preach rather than giving us an actual story with characters who learn and develop along the way. It comes across more as the Archie franchise looking for shortcuts to connect with "today's audience" by using cheap buzzwords rather than put any actual effort into the writing.

IDK, it's just a very mediocre comic with very mediocre attempts at seeming "progressive" and it feels so disingenuous. The characters never feel like they have any real integrity or development, especially with how some of them flip-flop on a dime based on whatever the creators want the audience to feel.

It's just a big ball of 'meh'.