She acts like the press is always watching, probably the result of a lot of PR classes and experience. Subconsciously she probably doesn’t know that they aren’t always watching since growing up most of the time they were (or a therapist/government monitor).

I’ll find myself acting differently in scenarios when I know I’m being watched and judged, but I don’t think I’m always being watched despite for a lot of my childhood I was put into situations where I was. Is it odd to say I don’t think she got enough life experience as a kid? It probably links back to me calling her a former child soldier way back.

So he believes that you only need to consider positive and negative ramifications of your desires when you’re being judged by society? Oh sure, THAT’S not foreboding.

nuf said

Okay Alison, let’s do this.
1. A fresh plate of pancakes every morning guarantees you an eternally satisfied partner.
2. If you experiment with sleep schedules to find the sweet moving phase (wake up at five, go back to sleep, wake up at six, go back to sleep, do it again until twelve am) you can expand the number of pancakes arithmetically.
3. Do that while on a plane circling the globe at the rate of one time zone per hour. Unlimited pancakes.
4. Become better at it until you develop a reflex where you can fall asleep on the spot and wake up a few instants later. Infinite pancakes.
5. The fine print doesn’t say it has to be a different plate each time. How hard is it to create a robotic arm which turns the plate face down every time it feels pancakes materialize so that it’s always empty?
6. Pancakes come hot. The global energy problem is now over.
7. You can use the warmth as means to prevent pneumonia in survival situations as well as the pancakes as a genuine source of nutrients instead of giving them ice cream which would only dehydrate them you—
8. The maple syrup industry makes in majority a cheap byproduct because the real thing is expensive to do. Collapse that industry, become a global monopoly in selling real cheap maple syrup, give away all profits to charities.
(9. In-between your incessant naps, read about that guy who died trying to swim back out of a pit in ice cream with his body temperature around 1° and raise an eyebrow in incomprehension.)
10. Go into space. There is now no morning anymore. Establish a base of operation for your non-profit Maple Syrup and Energy Inc. in the international space station.

Your life is now complete.

Man knows when to stop digging, that’s a superpower all on its own.

Max’s attitude is raising some red flags for me, here. I don’t think he might be doing so intentionally, but he’s coming off kind of… douchey, for several reasons, but mainly these two in particular:

1. It seems innocuous, but the more I read it the more it sounds like he’s putting her down using the game their playing (presumably “would you rather…”). And he’s doing it in kind of a weaselly way, too, the more I examine it. His line in panel 3 seems like an honest enough invitation for her to explain why she chose her preferred option, but then he shuts her down for… what? Saying “The game is just supposed to be ‘which one do you want?’ … You play like everyone is watching you” is taking her reasons for wanting what she wanted and turning it on her to make it sound like she wanted them for the wrong reasons, even though it was a game and she seemed to be answering earnestly and was having fun with it, rather than trying to impress or acting out of self-consciousness. “This is a thing you do, you know” is something I don’t think you can claim to know about a person you’ve interacted with for a total of a few hours, but it seems he’s already trying to turn her behaviors against her and that just… eugh.

2. His “apology” sounds more like a deflection and an attempt to shift the conversation away from what he REALLY meant by his comments. Unless he plans to elucidate over said bottle of verbal smooth-over, I’m remaining suspicious of his attitude and intentions. I WANT him to be okay, but I am remaining skeptical until suitable proof is presented.

I feel like Allison’s dad.”okay, you can take her on a date, but, I swear, if you ever hurt her…”

“The wine is nicely chill. There is also Netflix.”

The game is about lighthearted selfishness, and Alison is neither.

But then look where he goes as he tries to figure her out. Not lighthearted -> everyone is watching. Unselfish -> get the right answer.

He is not a good match for her. I’m very curious whether the date will end with a physical struggle in which she accidentally hurts him. I don’t think she has a script for gracefully ending a date that’s not going well, and I’m not sure he does either.

Is her makeup still on right after an entire day? Is that a thing?

Here, have a sip of this delicious roofie-colada.

I’ve had almost this exact conversation…

Ali has always been in situations where getting the right answer and foreseeing consequences are essential. It’s hard to act like an ordinary human.

“But I’m the title character of this comic! Everyone *is* watching me!”

Everyone’s debating whether or not Max is a low key douche and I’m just over here enjoying the fact that Alison calls people “my dude.”

Yeah, teleportation or flying, I can see, because flying.

(Though I think the classic is flying vs. invisibility.)

Okay, ice cream out the nose sounds gross, but not so much since I saw that commercial that declares that all ice cream comes out from a unicorn’s arse.

I totally would. Maybe it’s because I’m French or maybe it’s so wildly different between each individual cultural education disappear into irrelevance, but going at people’s places and inviting people at mine on the first date is absolutely not something neither I nor my consenting partners found weird.

And proposing alcohol to boot.

The thing is though, that I can easily imagine Max doing all the things he’s done with someone a little less serious and the date going fantastically. There actually isn’t anything inherently wrong with any of Max’s behavior, other than the fact that it has the potential to trigger some hangups in Alison specifically.

People are allowed to rib each other a bit about how they play games. People are allowed to be very forward. People are allowed to be more interested in their preferences than in the long-term consequences of their actions. None of those are behaviors that a person should expect to get called out on as completely inappropriate, on a date, or anywhere for that matter. All of it is *well* inside the bounds of what constitutes acceptable social behavior. That’s not to say that every person is going to like being on a date with a person like that, but that’s why it’s a date and not marriage. There are plenty of people who would be perfectly fine going on a date with that kind of personality, though.

It’s not realistic to expect that attitude from everyone, becasue there’s lots selfish people in this world.

Forgive me if I don’t find that glib reply very amusing. If you mean “any measure of sexist” then fine, most people have such poorly thought out biases.
If you mean, “possessing a level of depersonalizing sexism that removes responsibility from individuals not based on intellectual & physical maturity but instead by gender expectations” then you’re effectively giggling about the idea that people suck in a normative behavioral fashion.

There’s plenty of things that I won’t do without being medicated for anxiety, whether via alcohol or prescription; I get that. But that depends on agreeing to do them when I’m competent to make that decision.

If it’s an invitation to sex that she recognizes and responds to as such, fine. But that recognition is not something you should assume about someone whom you’ve never even discussed sex with. Given the reactions in the comments, it seems that even most readers who have the benefit of time to think about this don’t immediately see it as an invitation to sex, so we can’t assume that agreement to the proposition equals tacit consent to sex for most people. And generally speaking, sex is one of those things you should have affirmative consent for, not assume tacit consent for.

More simply, I’m pretty sure “getting someone into a state where they’ll agree to sex that they wouldn’t agree to sober and they’ll regret afterwards” is pretty exactly rape.

Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug.
Your discomfort could come from anticipation of melodramatic narrative conventions. It could come from a fear that Alison is somehow in a power inequity, leaving Max somehow capable of ruining her vulnerable life philosophy by applying some sort of social leverage that causes her to forget that she is a goddamn superhero who can solve complex problems & trust people who she already knows are good folk. It could be an anticipation of very painful breaking up after poorly learning that these two are largely incompatible in viewpoint and a subconscious desire to assign blame.
It could be that you don’t like his style, his sense of humor just feels wrong to you.
It could be the way that Alison has somewhat lost her bearings around him more than once, and it feels like she’s going to lose them dramatically because of something badwrong that he does.
Any of those fit the sensation?

How the heck does that resolve the communication problem?
It’s not supposed to in and of itself, it’s supposed to be a peace offering for saying something that he recognizes was inconsiderate to say to her. He thought about her response and her non-verbal cues, and realized that he said things wrong, but cannot immediately smooth things over with the words he has in his brain. Perhaps he is needing more time, perhaps he would rather the two of them forget it happened.

he’s analyzing her as if he has the right to do it
Yo, man, I don’t know where you come from, but in my country everybody has the right to be foolish, to think incorrect things, and make ill-advised social choices. Max thought he had a solid idea of what’s going on, and learned that not only did he not have such a good grasp, but that his word choice cannot be passed off as gentle ribbing, it was something he should apologize for. His apology may appear or even be insincere, but the dude understands that what he said was hurtful to Alison. Since Max doesn’t want to hurt her in this way, he is extending an apology for his behavior.

Why are her answers a problem?
For all we know, Max never saw them as a problem, but reflexively made a unflattering remark because he’s just the kind of guy that sees irreverent criticism of others as humorous things to say to people that can dish it right back at him or otherwise defend themselves. Alison didn’t do that, and showed that she was very much emotionally invested in the idea of “get the right answer.” So Max replied after a bit of thought with an apology and an invitation to possibly smooth things over.

On the flip side, I’m thinking how are people *not* seeing red flags?
It’s hard to tell with things like this. Max has habits which are unbalancing for Alison. This could be a big deal that neither of them can adapt to, or even a sign of malice, but it could also be a benign thing that both of them adapt to after the first date. Max has firmly considered opinions on what he likes in early dates, and isn’t afraid to make casual references to passionate kissing, whereas Alison has trouble saying the word date in a way that identifies the occasion she is partaking in, hardly a matter to stop the presses over.
If you don’t like the guy, it’s easy to interpret any ambiguous thing he does as badwrong, if you’re alright with the dude, it’s easy to interpret all that ambiguous stuff as acceptable things people do when they’re trying to be themselves.

Yes. If you forget the plate, you need only launder the sheet, and have something else for breakfast for a change. With the ice cream you get more or less permanent brain freeze, I would imagine.

We’ve heard her express concern about drinking. And nothing we know about her superpower would involve faster metabolism of alcohol. So… I suppose maybe, but I don’t see much basis for this? (If anything, I’d expect her to have low tolerance, because she doesn’t drink. Of course, I think it’s likely she’ll turn him down, because she doesn’t drink.)

How do you get that idea? Alisons increased durability comes from having some kind of force field that protects her, not, you know, actually having an increased durability. Her being invulnerable to physical attacks has nothing to do with her being able to handle alcohol.

He never said that her answer is wrong. He just wanted to know why she chose how she did and then he talked about a thing he realized with her. He never critisizes what she does.

Clearly, teleportation.

1–3) I think the assumptions limit cuts both ways. “She might have theoretically had a high tolerance or immunity to alcohol” is not an acceptable excuse for deliberately getting someone drunk. Sex is not a situation where “in theory it might have been okay” is an acceptable level of consent.

4) I agree on the “drug” wording; I only made the distinction because you used the word “roofied”, which is generally more specific. But alcohol is, by this measure, the most common date-rape drug, which is why I’m worried.