Participation Trophy

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Participation Trophy
Chapter126 of 127 (list of chapters)
PublishedJune 27, 2025 (2025-06-27)
Page count20
Major charactersSue, Amaya, Jessica, Madison, David, James, Paulo, Rachel
Minor charactersMatt, Jordan, Daisy
LocationsRoseville High School
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Jessica’s apology tour finally wins Rachel back, but all the praise being heaped on her play leaves Sue quietly falling apart over her own. It takes her whole friend group, one silent schemer, and the worst apology on record to put her back together.

Synopsis

Jessica arrives at lunch ready to grovel, plying Rachel with her favorite slushie, photocopied class notes, and a pulled-out chair.[1] Rachel jokes that she could get used to this, but it’s the plain apology that melts her: “You’re my best friend.”[2] Just like that, the two are BFFs again. David then swoops in to defend the play as authentic art and flatter Rachel that her character was key to the plot, to Madison’s disbelief.[3]

At a nearby table, Sue watches David shower Jessica with praise. She insists to Amaya that she’s perfectly fine, but keeps watching until she is openly furious.[4] Out in the hallway on her crutches, she rants about what a buffoon David is before admitting why she is upset. He trashed her own play and made her feel like a moron, and afterward nobody ever brought it up except to tease her.[5] In tears, she admits her play “was more about forcing Mike and Lucy together than it was about an actually compelling story”. Then Jessica’s voice cuts in from a nearby locker. Amaya led her there on purpose.[6]

Madison rushes to reassure her. “Your play didn’t suck!” she insists. “Your actors sucked!” Madison argues that Mike and Lucy were too in love to play convincing siblings, then bluntly mentions Lucy’s suicide attempt.[7] Madison then reminds Sue that the news about Lucy reached their whole class the day after the play, when everyone was dealing with a classmate almost dying. Sue softens and feels guilty for treating her own problems as more important.[8] Jessica, who produced the play, adds that Sue is good at what she does, and Sue leaves feeling loads better.[9]

In the hallway, Sue and Amaya run into Paulo, David and James. David announces that he’s there to apologize on a little birdie’s orders.[10] James guilelessly asks if he means the mute girl, and the cover story falls apart on the spot. David gets out the world’s worst apology, “Anyway I’m sorry I thought your play sucked, Sue!”, and flees from two furious glares.[11]

James stays behind to cheer Sue up, and makes everything so much worse. His pep talk keeps derailing into gushing about how cool and smart and talented David is.[12] When Sue snaps that David probably stole his movie takes off the internet just to impress him, James lights up with hearts floating around his head.[13] Paulo tells James to make his move fast, because Sue clearly wants David for herself. He and Sue are mid-screaming-match when James innocently asks, “So wait, it’s you guys who have crushes on each other?”[14] Paulo laughs himself to literal tears and walks off, leaving Sue shrieking after him.[15]

Character dynamics

Madison remembers the play: Mike and Lucy in costume hold hands, Lucy singing with empty eyes while Mike blushes at her.
Madison makes her case that the actors, not the script, were the problem.
  • Jessica and Rachel: Jessica and Rachel are best friends, but Rachel objected to how Jessica portrayed her in the play. Their fight at the end of Method Acting left Rachel refusing to forgive her.[16] Rachel happily milks the groveling, but it’s the sincere apology rather than the slushie that wins her back.[2] She also happily accepts David’s praise for her character as key to the plot.[3]
  • Sue and David: Longtime hecklers of each other, with Sue’s play as the sore spot. Paulo once relayed that even David said it sucked,[17] and Sue brings up that criticism again while complaining about David here. David finally apologizes here, about as gracelessly as possible, and by chapter’s end Paulo and James have publicly recast the whole feud as a crush, which Sue denies at the top of her lungs.[11][14]
  • Sue and Amaya: Veronica’s commentary notes the two have known each other for pretty much all of Sue’s life.[18] Without a single line of dialogue, Amaya steers Sue into Jessica’s earshot and orders David to apologize. Sue thanks her, then warns her never to do it again.[6][9]
  • James and David: James’s admiration for his track teammate has been visibly starry-eyed since Date Night,[19] and here it tips into an open crush. The mere suggestion that David might be trying to impress him sends hearts floating around his head, and Paulo urges him to make his move.[13][14]
  • Sue and Jessica: Sue watches Jessica receive David’s praise, then tells Amaya that nobody talked about her own play afterward except to tease her. Jessica worked backstage on that production.[20] It’s Jessica’s word as her old producer that finally gets through: “You’re good at what you do, Sue.”[9]

Trivia & observations

Paulo throws his head back with a hand to his face, roaring with laughter as tears stream down his cheeks.
James’s question is the funniest thing Paulo has ever heard.
  • Veronica redesigned Rachel’s star outfit for this chapter. She created it back in Back and Forth, always hated its white-top, black-dress, yellow-star color scheme, and took the opportunity to warm up the colors and give Rachel bike shorts.[1]
  • Veronica’s commentary says the chapter “is coming from my own personal experiences, as an excitable chocolate lab”, casting herself as the David of the situation.[3]
  • Per Veronica, Madison is “the queen” of foot-in-mouth syndrome: “Her condition is TERMINAL.”[7]
  • Madison’s familiarity with “the playwright’s self-loathing” has off-panel backstory. Veronica’s commentary says she spent many nights talking Jessica through an imposter-syndrome freakout over her own play.[8]
  • Amaya doesn’t speak a single line in the chapter despite being on panel for more than half of it, and James’s “the mute girl” is the first time anyone in the comic has mentioned her muteness out loud.[10] David, for the record, refers to her with they/them pronouns.[11]
  • Veronica’s commentary under the crush-teasing page jokes, “And people thought Mucy was tsunderecore.”[14]

Related chapters

  • Method Acting: Jessica’s tell-all play and the cafeteria blow-up over it both happen there. Rachel’s complaint about her “one-note slut” portrayal explains why Jessica is apologizing to her here. Matt’s complaints about Morris also carry into the lunchtime reconciliation, while Sue’s claim that her own play was a bigger disaster becomes the subject of her hallway breakdown.[16][21]
  • Curtain Call: Sue’s own play, in which Mike and Lucy were cast as long-separated siblings while Jessica worked backstage.[22][20] It’s the production Sue finally grieves over in this chapter’s hallway scene.
  • Breaking Up: In the first homeroom after Sue’s play, Miss Amalu announces that Lucy will no longer be attending the school.[23] That announcement is what Madison is talking about when she explains why nobody ever discussed the play.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Chapter 126: Participation Trophy, page 1
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Chapter 126: Participation Trophy, page 2
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Chapter 126: Participation Trophy, page 3
  4. ↑ Chapter 126: Participation Trophy, page 8
  5. ↑ Chapter 126: Participation Trophy, page 10
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Chapter 126: Participation Trophy, page 11
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Chapter 126: Participation Trophy, page 12
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Chapter 126: Participation Trophy, page 13
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Chapter 126: Participation Trophy, page 14
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Chapter 126: Participation Trophy, page 15
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Chapter 126: Participation Trophy, page 16
  12. ↑ Chapter 126: Participation Trophy, page 17
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Chapter 126: Participation Trophy, page 18
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 14.3 Chapter 126: Participation Trophy, page 19
  15. ↑ Chapter 126: Participation Trophy, page 20
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Chapter 121: Method Acting, page 23
  17. ↑ Chapter 79: Critical Hit, page 19
  18. ↑ Chapter 126: Participation Trophy, page 9
  19. ↑ Chapter 118: Date Night, page 18
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Chapter 74: Curtain Call, page 21
  21. ↑ Chapter 121: Method Acting, page 24
  22. ↑ Chapter 74: Curtain Call, page 15
  23. ↑ Chapter 75: Breaking Up, page 5
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