I kinda waffled on whether or not to put this here because it’s kinda more serious subject matter than I typically involve in this comic and I know “funny video game webcomic takes on serious issues” is always at risk of coming across as really corny and undermining what it’s trying to discuss, but I figure it’s worth laying out exactly what kinda history these two had.

I mean, I feel like it was more or less implied, but hey, there it is if you had any doubts.

That said, not trying to portray Rock as a paragon of good decision making here. This isn’t supposed to be an advice book for how to handle abusive breakups by any means, it comes from a place of personal experience with messy relationship ends and mental illness, the grey area when you can’t cut something cleanly but you need to set hard limits and figure out what amount of interaction (if any) is safe after a period of time for the parties to work on themselves. They’re two people who ended up damaged by similar shit, at various stages of working through it, stuck in each other’s orbit by necessity of circumstance beyond their control, figuring out how they can safely interact and get closure from each other.

And I mean honestly, speaking from the experience of someone with friendships and other such relationships break down over issues like this with no happy ending or closure, it can be cathartic to have a little fictional fantasy situation where two people I can guarantee are going to be civil with each other can talk this shit out.

(Mostly I just wanna explicitly stress I’m not trying to convince anyone to keep in contact with someone dangerous for them to be around here)