Retrospective: Injustice League; Meg, Karen and Cyndi

[Kitsuiko]

I had the idea of doing a retrospective.

Heck, the entire point of the Injustice League take down was because Karen would do what was done to Aggie to more people. Which now that we're done seeing Cyndi who REALLY is a danger to people for what she'd do with them - kind of seems.. quaint. Karen was going to go out there and destroy the lives of more and more people until she conquered the WORLD! Somehow. The entire team up was to prevent her from harming more people like Aggie was hurt.

Did it?

I've always been on the fence. What they did to Penny was horrible and knowing that it could have shattered her confidence to become Pathetic!Penny is bad... but in many ways Meg is right. It doesn't matter. Even losing friends in high school - while rough then - isn't so bad with the recognition that you're going to most likely make entirely all new different friends in college. (And before it's brought up, I lived through it happening my Junior year - it's survivable).

What's the worse that could have happened if they didn't stop Karen in your opinions? Was it really important? Was Karen a real danger? Was Meg honestly above the game with that picture? Was Cyndi just to put perspective in what a /real/ dangerous person to society was like?

[Rhodesaw]

I think they were able to stop it because it wasn't a "real danger". It was high school girl politics, and they dealt with it as such.

I'm not quite sure how to answer the rest of your questions.

[Davidj]

I had the idea of doing a retrospective.

Heck, the entire point of the Injustice League take down was because Karen would do what was done to Aggie to more people. Which now that we're done seeing Cyndi who REALLY is a danger to people for what she'd do with them - kind of seems.. quaint. Karen was going to go out there and destroy the lives of more and more people until she conquered the WORLD! Somehow. The entire team up was to prevent her from harming more people like Aggie was hurt.

Did it?

You know, Karen did in fact set Cyndi on her path of trying to get people to destroy their selves for giggles. Cyndi was always a psychopath, but Karen taught her to be a sadistic psychopath. Endangering Michelle's health, giving Sara a reputation as a lesbian rapist, these are things that Karen brought people together to do. Karen was doing things every bit as bad as what Cyndi did. The difference is that Cyndi never felt qualms and would do them to anyone who seemed vulnerable while Karen would do them to someone who seemed to stand in the way of her ambitions. As for the qualms, Karen would outgrow them soon enough as she continued on her path.

What's the worse that could have happened if they didn't stop Karen in your opinions?

The worst? She could have become this woman:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leona_Helmsley

[Valerie]

Meg was clearly not above the game as far as the bathroom picture goes.
She was just trying (horribly) to act like she was more mature than the others-- which is a huge part of what makes someone immature.

[Alice Macher]

What Karen and "friends" did to Penny was high-school politics, yes. And from Penny's clearly thought-out, wise motivational speech to Aggie, it's clear that while Karen had hurt her, it wasn't a fraction as much as she'd hoped to do. Karen presumably wanted Penny to turn into something like Pathetic "I got...projects" Penny, or in her own frame of reference, the "Old Me" with the ugly hair, stained, schlubby clothes and fatalistic, passive attitude. Instead she ended up producing Heroic Penny.

What Karen did to Aggie was...well, she said rather nasty things when Aggie was already down, but she couldn't see Aggie crying on the sidewalk, and she had just heard what happened from Marshall's anger-distorted perspective. And Karen was herself crying as she told Aggie off, suggesting that, unlike the calculated way in which she and the IG stole the spotlight from Penny and manipulated her friends away from her one by one, Karen was speaking to Aggie out of her own pain. Maybe not a fully justified pain; I doubt that Aggie, even if she'd continued stifling herself from "true love confessions" in Marshall's presence and continued biding her time, would ever have succeeded in luring him away. But a genuine pain nonetheless, producing a response that happened, along with Marshall's majorly disproportionate and downright mean reaction, to make Aggie think she couldn't go on. And in any case Aggie, with Penny's help, was able to, as she put it, "keep moving" nonetheless.

Really, the worst thing the IG did, in terms of both intent, potential result, and actual result, was what they did to Sara and Michelle. And although Karen bore some responsibility as the leader of the IG, neither the rape video/poster campaign nor Michelle's eating disorder were her doing. (Although Karen had advised Stan to get Michelle to dump her by ordering a "diet salad with the emphasis on diet," Stan didn't take that advice, and Cyndi...well, we now know she had entirely her own, deliberately lethal motivation.) Indeed, when Helen drunkenly said what she said and Karen called an emergency IG meeting, she didn't care about Sara's lesbianism, but about Aggie possibly stealing Marshall away. It was the others, led by Meg, who said "Forget Aggie; let's ruin Sara's life so she too will abandon Penny." The upshot is that it was what they did to Sara and Michelle that had to be stopped, before they did it to others. Because had they done it to others--as indeed they (minus Meg) subsequently planned to do to Duane--there could have been far more widespread and tragic consequences than what happened to Penny or Aggie. So even if her choice of words--"That's what she'll do to the world"--may strike some as overblown, Penny was 100% absolutely positively correct that Karen and her allies had to be stopped.

As for Cyndi subsequently going on to be a worse threat...well yeah, she was, but as T said here recently, she wasn't the sort of threat Penny, Aggie, Stan and friends could've done much about. And not for lack of trying: Stan telling Cyndi off in "Out Front" only made things worse, and Penny sending the audio portion of her "blackmail" video to Carl in "Mister Smiles" did very little (it made Trisha marginally more suspicious of her daughter, but that was it). No, Cyndi was really a unique case. And that, as T said, is why ultimately her undoing had to come from someone whose actions she couldn't have predicted, because she too was disturbed in her own way, and as an indirect result of that, from Cyndi's own journal.

[maritza]

They were going after Duane after that. And who knows what else.

[Mung]

The IG was a little overblown in their minds; as it would have been at their age, in their circumstances. Cyndi was really the first time any of them had seen genuine evil, and even Cyndi was only at the beginning of her dark journey.
There's a difference between dealing with a school bully and an area drug dealer who really will kill them for crossing him. On occasion, they're the same person.

One of the guys in my brother's graduating class (one year before mine) was busted for murder less than a year after graduation. He got out in 4 years (murder 2, not murder 1 conviction), and got arrested 2 years later for offing a rival drug dealer - murder 1 conviction, life w/o parole -- "suicide" (some believe ... "assisted suicide") in prison 3 years after that. The guy's father was a well-to-do lawyer; no one could understand how he went so bad.

Such is life.

BTW - it was thought in HS that he was behind another student's disappearance in his junior year. Never did get an answer on that.

[Rhodesaw]

They were going after Duane after that. And who knows what else.

That's a good point. I think Karen even said making Duane their target was just to keep them busy. I don't think they had any specific plan at that point. Keeping them from fighting with each other was maybe just to keep the party scene away from Penny, but they didn't really seem to have a reason for targeting Duane other than he had a secret they could exploit.



How did Karen know Duane was, as she put it, a "closet Muslim" anyway?

[Alice Macher]

How did Karen know Duane was, as she put it, a "closet Muslim" anyway?

Cyndi seems to have been the first to figure it out, and she told Karen. (The strip is from "D-Day.")

[Rhodesaw]

Oh so THAT'S what she was talking about! I always wondered.


Wow, Karen's reaction is even bitchier than I thought, then.

[Alice Macher]

Yeah, she's a real piece of work, bigoted and homophobic too.

[MudFlap33]

Yeah, she's a real piece of work, bigoted and homophobic too.

I never really considered Karen homophobic. I figured the language she was using here was her way of diffusing any discomfort she has with Marshall and Aggie's friendship, and not an indication of how she feels about lesbians in general. Like a way of saying "She's gay, right? She's gay, right? I have nothing to worry about, right?" showing the insecurity that only Marshall really sees. The extremely nonchalant way she discusses the "gay girls" from her school that she invites to her parties here http://www.pennyandaggie.com/index.php?p=728 indicates to me a little more of her general attitude.

[Alice Macher]

You may be right, but there's also the fact that she was willing to go along with her cohorts' proposed smearing of Sara as a rapist preying on straight girls. Although the ultimate target was Penny, that was nothing but homophobic, and as Karen was the ringleader of the IG, she could've said "no," just as she said no to Charlotte's and Samantha's suggestions here and there. So I'm less inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt there.

[MudFlap33]

You may be right, but there's also the fact that she was willing to go along with her cohorts' proposed smearing of Sara as a rapist preying on straight girls. Although the ultimate target was Penny, that was nothing but homophobic, and as Karen was the ringleader of the IG, she could've said "no," just as she said no to Charlotte's and Samantha's suggestions here and there. So I'm less inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt there.

True, and it's a little hard to argue about Karen's intent, despite all that we're given in comic. She's certainly not a good person, but I don't know if I can assign homophobia to her as a trait because she was willing to exploit the homophobia of her cohorts and of the general public for her larger purpose. Yeah, it's homophobic action, but I don't think she's at the core a homophobic person. She might be an even worse person for being willing to go there against what may well be her "better" nature (whatever better nature she may have), but despite agreeing that she's an awful person, I can't quite stick her with that label.

[Laafje]

Yeah, I saw Karen's view of the fact that Sara's gay more as 'trait she can exploit to further bring down Penny' than as something she was actually opposed to. Still, the difference between the two doesn't really matter here since the results are just as bad.