Check Displeased

Kent Parson is a ghost. Or: Kent Parson is a trace of what could have been. Or: Kent Parson is innumerable iterations of collective memory. Or: Kent Parson was invented, then reinvented, by each new generation of Check, Please! fans. Or: Kent Parson has anime eyes and is two steps away from a magical girl transformation sequence and, by the way, is overwhelmed by Jack's big butt??? Sekrit and Tomato get to the bottom (or the behind, if you will) of the question: WHO OR WHAT IS KENT PARSON?  

P.S. Check out the Kent Parson Collective Memory Project and send in your own oral history! 

Read along with us: Parse - I Blog | Parse - II Blog | Parse - III Blog

This is the most infamous strip in the entire comic. How do you summarize that? Bye bye Kenny, it's awful hard to bear! GUESS WE'LL ALWAYS CARE.

Read along with us: 2.9 Parse - Part III | Blog

Also, Tomato is offering to write fucking machine PWP fic for listeners who contribute time and volunteering to the Georgia Senate runoff elections -- or should we say "fun-off"? It is when Bitty has a fucking machine.

Kent Parson...how do we begin to explain Kent Parson? Kent Parson is flawless. He has a Calder, a Cup, and a silver Lexus. I hear his hands are insured for $10,000. I hear he does Canadian Tire commercials...in Canada. His favorite movie is The Mighty Ducks. One time he met a blonde pop idol on a plane, and she told him he was pretty. One time he punched me in the face...and it was awesome.

Okay, so maybe we also talk about why and how people read this character differently, his structural importance within the text, and foot jobs.

Read along with us: 2.8 Parse - Part II | Blog

Hey, U.S. listeners! Please vote.

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This is the first of three strips that everyone wants to talk about. And why wouldn't they? We get to meet Kent Parson, the character generating so much hooplah. Sekrit and Tomato talk about how the final panels here tell readers to pay attention, speculate on how the narrative being set up here may not have been resolved in the comic, and contemplate the role of Bitty's vlog in shaping the (un)reliable narration. Also, speaking of Bitty? He has a Confederate flag up in his bedroom.

Read along with us: 2.7 Parse - Part I | Blog

Jack and Bitty––Outstanding Twitter(pated) Piemaking. That's what OTP stands for, right? Tomato and Sekrit unpack Dr. Alice Atley's slightly dubious pedagogical strategy before trying to figure out whether Jack talking about himself to Bitty's rapt silence counts as flirting yet. Meanwhile, there's a hung jury as to whether puffing flour into someone's face is an effective romantic technique. Does Bitty have a parasocial relationship with his YouTube subscribers? Does this comic have anything to say about internet notoriety? Do these dummies really get 40% of their final grade from making a pie? Well, how do I sign up for that? 

Read along with us: 2.6 WGSS120 / HIST376: Women, Food, & American Culture | Blog

In 2.5 we meet Georgia Martin, assistant general manager for the Providence Falconers, a fake hockey team Ngozi made up for Jack to play on. How do we know that? It says so in the blog post. Also in this blog post: a discussion of "hooplah," and the characters who aren't in the comic yet that generate it. What does an NHL GM do, and what would it mean for a woman of color to be in the front office? How do NHL contracts work? What do we expect George is going to do for this story? And isn't it kind of dick to like, purposely run into your crush? It is, right? ... Right???

Read along with us: 2.5 Providence Falconers | Blog

This one's a doozy, and I don't say that just because Bitty's wearing jean cutoffs––it's Hazeapalooza, formerly known as Hazestock, a time-honored SMH tradition in which frogs and Zimmermanns are, and I quote from Massachusetts General Law, Part IV, Title I, Chapter 269, Section 17, subjected to "brutal treatment or forced physical activity which is likely to adversely affect the physical health or safety of any such student or other person, or which subjects such student or other person to extreme mental stress, including extended deprivation of sleep or rest or extended isolation." Seriously, we get into a pretty intense discussion of hazing, abuse in hockey and the major juniors, and Check, Please!'s relationship to the toxicity of sports culture. Then we take a left turn into fetishizing Jack's body? So, you know, the usual? Plus: as Dex foreshadows, the cowlick cometh––and the author (and her habit of deleting blog posts and Tweets) taketh away. 

Read along with us: 2.4 Hazeapalooza | Blog

HEY GUYS, we're hosting a Mighty Ducks viewing party on Saturday, October 3 to raise money for Democrats and other left-leaning causes, especially for the US general election in November. Want to join? E-mail proof of your $10+ contribution to sekritomg@gmail.com! More details here, hope you can make it!

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Samwell Men's Hockey has three rookies, or "frogs," which is a colloquialism for "freshmen," because it's their first year on the team, and language is constantly evolving. Already things are strained between them, and Bitty is asked to mediate. In this hot mess of an episode, Sekrit and Tomato get into how the differences between Dex and Nursey are framed in both the comic and the fandom, and the politics of OMGCP writ large: Is Andover so different from Samwell, actually? Even if Bitty isn't a Republican, why wouldn't knowing Dex is one bother him? Plus we debut a fantastic new segment, "Rating How Gay What Bitty Looks Like Is," the main takeaway of which is that Chowder's hair is unforgivable.

Read along with us: 2.3 Meet the Frogs | Blog

HEY GUYS, we're hosting a Mighty Ducks viewing party on Saturday, October 3 to raise money for Democrats and other left-leaning causes, especially for the US general election in November. Want to join? E-mail proof of your $10+ contribution to sekritomg@gmail.com! More details here, hope you can make it!

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There was so little to say about Celly that Tomato and Sekrit decided it was a better use of time to answer some of the asks that had fallen to the bottom of their inbox. We talk about NCAA hockey, university sports culture in the US, and the road to the NHL; the punishing conformity of hockey culture and its relationship to white supremacy; Sekrit's elusive Patater recs; Bitty's family and homophobic bullying; and whether Jack's play style is influenced by his daddy issues - well, what isn't influenced by his daddy issues is what I want to know?

Read along with us: HS 5: Celly | No Blog

HEY GUYS, we're hosting a Mighty Ducks viewing party on Saturday, October 3 to raise money for Democrats and other left-leaning causes, especially for the US general election in November. Want to join? E-mail proof of your $10+ contribution to sekritomg@gmail.com! More details here, hope you can make it!

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Kewpie-eyed naif Eric Bittle faints on the ice again, and might lose his place on the roster if he can't figure it out. Tomato and Sekrit break down the visual parallels in this update to strips both past and future, and dig into the blog post. Is Bitty's posture in the first two panels a stirring contrast to the last two, or does he just need an osteopathic surgeon? How about a sports therapist? What do these coaches even do, anyway? If this update completely bums you out, don't worry -- it doesn't matter even a little. The blog post said so!

Read along with us: 2.2 Square One | Blog