Damn, what is that fallacy called? I’m sure there must be a name for it, I’ve seen it before. That sort of idea that “you’re angry, so your argument is invalid.”
To be fair, he also is using logical fallacies in his argument, specifically there’s Argument ad hominem, argument from (personal) incredulity, and appeal to the stone. If I knew how to link I would, so here’s the gist:
Ad Hominem – Evading Joyce’s point with subtle attacks about her anger
(Personal) Incredulity – I don’t believe it could happen therefore it’s false/unjustified.
Appeal to the Stone – Dismissing a claim as absurd without proof of its absurdity.
Absolutely. His argument (well, he’s not really making an argument, but the thing he’s doing that resembles an argument) is ridiculously, blatantly fallacious, and Joyce’s family really needs to get themselves schoolfed on some Aristotle.
No, he’s making an argument. He is 100% trying to convince Joyce of something. He provided the comment about anger as a way to try and counter her statement.
It’s extremely fallacious arguing, but it’s still arguing.
Oh wait the one in this strip is the Moral High Ground fallacy, through the medium of Tone Policing, John is attempting to make himself look good to win the argument.
I’ve found that being right is no good if you can’t get people to stick around and listen to you. I think Joyce is totally in the right here, and I’m on her side– but sadly, the world isn’t an idyllic place where the people in the right always get to be heard.
I agree Inkblot. That’s a lesson that took me years to learn. Controlling your (very appropriate) anger is extremely difficult, but it can be necessary if you want certain people on your side.
I’m lucky to have a dad that discussed difficult subjects that we often disagreed about openly, calmly. He would frequently say (and still does) “okay, you’re getting really upset about this. Let’s change the subject and come back to it another time” which can be enraging, but the thing is, he doesn’t use it to shut me down. He actually has no qualms about discussing the same subject again when we’re both feeling more level-headed.
When I was Joyce’s age and younger, I frequently got angry with Dad because he thought my gay friends were bad influences. Or that it was fine to be gay, but not fine to “act on those urges and feelings.” I’d get so angry that I’d end up screaming and fighting the urge to throw anything within reach.
As we discussed this more and more, though, I got better at controlling my temper, expressing my own views and at least appearing calm and level-headed. By the time I was 20, I’d convinced dad that being gay was not a sin (and that even if it is, that’s between that person, their god, and no one else.). By the time I was 25 I’d convinced him that allowing straight people to get “married” and same-sex couples to have “civil unions” was tantamount to modern-day segregation (in that “separate but equal is inherently unequal”).
When I was about 27 or 28, discussions between us had convinced him that same-sex couples deserved completely equal marriage rights and all that went with it, and he advocated for it within our very Conservative family and celebrated with me last year when the ruling was made.
It can be very useful to be able to control that anger and express yourself calmly.
All that said, I don’t think this is the time for that lesson for Joyce. She needs her family to stop shutting her down and actually listen to her. She’s feeling traumatized and going through a grieving process to deal with that trauma and the loss of who she was. And that’s being combined with her anger over Ross’ actions, her mother’s behavior toward Becky, and her family’s treatment of Dorothy, Becky and Joyce’s new life overall. She needs a safe place and safe people to express that anger with and to help her cope.
While actually running away from the whole issue, which didn’t register with him much at all in lieu of Joyce’s inconvenient, embarrassing display of emotion.
A lot of people wouldn’t have the strength/patience to manage what was essentially a near-decade campaign that completely changed someone’s opinion on homosexuality. I fully understand people who can’t face that, but I’m hella impressed that you did. Well done!
Thank you, Liam. I’m very proud of my dad. When most people in his generation narrow their views as they age, he broadened his. He a compasionate person that truly wants equality for everyone. I just couldn’t bring myself to write him off as a lost cause. So I kept talking to him about it, eventually learning to speak calmly rather than blowing up like I wanted to. Like I really, really wanted to.
Joyce’s dad reminds me of my dad, honestly. We’d have a big discussion and maybe get a little mad at each other. Then two days, a week, a month later he’d tell me “you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said about x. And, I see your point. I think you’re absolutely right.”
It’s a good feeling to hear that. I definitely identified with her in her conversation with her dad on the way home.
@Annie What Joyce wants and needs, she may never be able to get. In my experience, extend across those I know and have encountered, people would rather abandon their family altogether, in favor of maintaining their pride and prejudice. I mean, the sins, not the book.
The book also, maybe, people are pretty silly in their priorities. 😛
Anyway, as Willis’s handling of Becky’s dad shows, he’s not hesitant to adhere to real world predictability in such matters, so this may turn out to create a schism in Joyce’s family- much like it does for a great many people in real life.
Given that your interpretation of Joyce’s dad seems spot on, he’s likely to be the one who ends up getting caught in the middle of it all- he doesn’t seem the sort who’d abandon Joyce, or even Jocelyn. He seems to have too much affection and dutifulness toward his children to give up on them altogether, or to outright hate them for something like that [even if his response may be rather less than positive at first].
Desires to support both sides and to keep the family held together over holding on to pettyness and hate..
This could get rather the ugly situation for him. :/
Anyway, kudos to your dad. Giving up something like that is like confronting a deep addiction. It takes dedication, a willingess to confront your flaws, and a desire to improve yourself for those you care about.
Also, if I am remembering tumblr posts properly, given Willis’ own life, and that Joyce’s journey is somewhat reflective of Willis’… I believe you are correct in your suspicion that a schism in the family is coming somewhere down the road.
This is more than tone policing. It’s emotional invalidation. John isn’t just telling Joyce to “calm down”. He’s telling he she has no right to be angry in the first place.
I’m frankly surprised the guy didn’t use the phrase “female hysteria”… though he clearly demonstrated that he was thinking in such a blindly illogical direction about Joyce’s bearing and demeanor in this conversation.
It’s folks like him who give disciplined conflict avoidance a bad name. And by “folks like him”, I suppose I mean bigots.
I wonder where he’ll be when the intolerance of intolerance catches up with him?
I think it has more to do with a flaky attempt to deny strong emotophobia than committing to any kind of bigotry.
Ross spoke like a ye olden days Puritan Preacher to cover up being a selfish, unsuccessful, glorified man-baby still trying to emulate the ‘cool kids’ who used to torture him for falling shorter of the ‘All-American’ ideal than average due to a low IQ and being a runt (none of that is confirmable, but he sure painted that kind of picture, damn…) at the expense of his adult life and everyone else in it.
John’s pretenses of maturity here serve to downplay what looked to me, since they arrived at the restaurant, as a man suffering from disruptive levels emotophobia and in complete denial about it.
I thought gaslighting was changing things about the physical area the victim is in to slowly erode the victim’s sanity, not just blatantly ignoring parts of events to minimize the emotional response as “extreme”
You don’t have to actually change the physical world. However you convince the target that their perception was wrong qualifies. Having people who should know better back your version of events and not the targets would work, for example.
I guess it’s a bit of a stretch here, but trying to twist the target’s understanding of what happened, so that Toedad really wasn’t doing anything that bad is at least along the same lines.
“If you are angry/emotional, then your argument is invalid.”
There is no correlation between those two clauses. It’s ad hominem, a fallacy of irrelevance, attacking the credibility of the person instead of the credibility of their argument.
It’s based on something that is relevant though. The idea that, “If you are angry/emotional, then your ability to act logically is impaired.” I’d say that that is likely to be true, but assuming that it /must/ be true is also a fallacy, an appeal to probability.
There is that “whoever loses their temper first, loses the argument” homily. Which we all know is BS, especially when dealing with the ideology indoctrinated.
Indeed. It’s a hallmark of identity politics in the modern age that stretches from the playground to the media, and it really needs to pack its bags and leave. It has overstayed its welcome and needs to leave before it takes up permanent residence in the US and in global culture at large.
He’s victim-blaming, yet at the same time he has no logical defense for his position. Instead he goes on the offensive, using emotional blackmail and character attacks in an attempt to shut Joyce down. This is pretty much what Carol did to her.
He may only have a skewed version of the story to work from, but even if Joyce were calm enough to be worth listening to (in his mind), he probably wouldn’t be receptive to the truth.
So much for the ‘Brown siblings get more indoctrinated the younger they are’ theory.
A few (cerebral) Christians have extremely patronizing attitudes towards other Christians who do “un-Christian” things with intent – in other words, who embrace “heresy”.
In this case, John seriously doubts the rightness of Joyce’s actions; but Joyce insists on her rightness unapologetically. Furthermore, she expresses anger. Open expression of anger has quite limited legitimate usages according to many varieties of Christianity; outside of that, it might even be regarded as sinful.
His calmness seems to be a display of contempt. I’ve experienced similar myself.
Didn’t seem all that concerned with Joyce’s actions or why she would feel the desire to do or think such things. Came off like he was more bothered by all the scary intemperance that came with it, like that was a greater concern.
Seriously, Joyce almost *threatened* him a panel or two back, and he was bothered enough by how he noticed she sounded angry when she said it to *treat that part like it was the only thing wrong about the threat*.
Doubtful he gave so much thought on whether or not Joyce was being Unchristian in her actions once he saw that there was anger behind it.
I get that you’re not exactly defending him, but it’s worth pointing out that being calm does not make a person correct, morally or factually.
Is Joyce presenting the best form of her position? Not really, no, but in her defense, this is the first time she’s ever been confronted with a situation where she clearly sees where right and wrong lie and her family does not unanimously agree with her. To add to that, she is trying to deal with the very difficult realization that at least some of the things she was taught to believe as absolute, literally god-given truth, are also wrong (and also slowly coming to wonder how much else of her bedrock principles are in the same boat and she just hasn’t seen them yet). Dealing with all of that, on top of the very real trauma she has so recently endured, and her fear for her friend, and it’s hardly surprising she’s having trouble keeping her emotions in check.
The fact that her older brother fails to see any of that, if anything, makes him more wrong still for expecting her to NOT be angry. His lack of empathy, inability to recognize the threat she endured as real, and attempt to police her demeanor are all part and parcel of that. He’s not more credible because he’s calm – he’s just being a dick and hiding behind condescension.
Going home and talking to mom, who will now have back up on the whole “Joyce needs to come home from college because it’s making her less holy” thing, instead of “my daughter/my sister just went through something horrible and traumatic and needs a safe space” that Joyce’s dad seams to understand.
Anybody else hoping for a divorce where her dad still supports her at college?
They probably will separate someday, but it’s unlikely we’ll see it in DoA unless it’s the world’s fastest divorce outside Hollywood. (Freshman year has about 20 real-world years left in it at the comic’s current pace.)
If ‘the Jordan situation’ cracked their marriage, Joyce is a wedge making that crack wider. She’s exposing an irreconcilable difference in how Hank and Carol want to treat their children.
you know I kind of liked John at first cause he seemed so stable… now fuck him, fuck his wife who married this asshole and fuck his beliefs. Joyce has a right to be angry and trying to down grade her feelings makes him an ass. I am extra sensitive to this because I had a neighbor who was my age, race, and gender murders 3 doors down form me once and I know how scary it is to have your mortality brought into focus. SHE IS ALLOWED TO BE ANGRY!!!!
to be fair to the heretofore unseen Christi, they’re newlyweds–who knows if she got to see this side of him before marrying him (countless victims of domestic abuse will (or SHOULD) attest to their abusers hiding their asshole sides very well)
But she is likely indoctrinated to the same beliefs as him. Raised in a similar way. My money is on his wife believing that John is in the right here. That Joyce shouldn’t be so angry and unreasonable because she has nothing to be angry and unreasonable about. Also that women should strive to always be happy and content with their lives and not stress out the men in their lives by yelling at them, nagging, etc. Because it’s only men who deal with the really stressful, difficult things in life.
(Also, fuck that mentality. I was raised with it to a degree. I’ve dealt with depression and anxiety since I was young and those “lessons” made it SO much worse.)
Oddly (or not), finding out that he was a missionary was a first red flag for me. He makes a living out of trying to force his religion and faith onto other people and treating third world countries as if they need to be saved from themselves instead of supporting them to help themselves?
Missionary work is based on colonisation and racism, and even if it’s well intentioned, it does strike as something only people who think they have a moral high ground would do.
(Do pardon if what I’m writing is confusing and so. English is my fourth language and I normally don’t talk about these subjects in it)
We have missionaries right here in the U.S. The Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses go door to door trying to convert people. So not all missionary work is based on colonialism and racism. That said, if he’s an overseas missionary (which it sounds like he is) then he’s probably part of that tradition.
That’s not missionary work; the Jehovah’s Witnesses are just proselytizing and evangelical behavior. But you’re right that there have been missionaries in the U.S.—out west, for the Native American Indians—and they most certainly were racist and colonizing, just as Nymphie says.
Also, settler colonization is an ongoing process, not a single event. The Christians in the US who evangelize are absolutely connected to racism and colonization.
When I was a kid, I didn’t not understand missionary work or evangelism at all. I was always told that a person that’s never heard the word of God, if he dies, especially if he is a child, he will likely enter heaven. Because it’s not his fault that the Word has not reached him.
But I also knew that if someone came to me and said “I believe in this other god. You must believe in him too or you will be doomed after you die” I’d immediately dismiss them and their religion.
So, I figured that by evangelizing and doing missionary work people were dooming more of the people they encountered, who may have had a free ticket to heaven before.
I grew up around many large missions left over from when the Spanish conquistadors came here. I was always in awe of the architecture, art work (painted ceilings, rose windows, relief sculptures. Beautiful stuff!), and the historical significance (when you grow up in the shadow of the Alamo, it’s inevitable), but they also made me sad because they represented how many people I thought the missionaries doomed to hell by telling them to turn away from the gods they were raised to believe in and follow the Abrahamic god.
(To be clear, I’m an atheist now, but grew up in a mostly evangelical Christian family and considered myself a Christian until adulthood.)
Strictly speaking, we shouldn’t diss his wife sight unseen. He might’ve hidden his more assholeish tendencies from her, or she might’ve come from a family that was equally or more horrible so she doesn’t realize she should have better standards. Give her a chance to call him an asshat and seek divorce before criticizing her.
I wanted to dismiss her just based off her name. You know “aww gawd. Her name is Christi. We know what kind of family she comes from.”
That was for about two seconds before I thumped myself in the head because my given name is very similar. In fact my childhood nickname was the same as hers. Just spelled differently. I just forgot because I really HATE using that name.
“You other kids all suck and won’t play baseball the way *I* want to play baseball so I’m taking my bat and my ball and I’m going home! Now you can’t play without me. Nyeah. 😛 “
… this is pretty much what I do. Am I extremely angry at everything? CLEAN AGGRESSIVELY. Slam trash in that trash can! Scrub with the fury of a thousand suns! Let the lid of the washing machine slam closed instead of lowering it quietly!
Yeah, but walking away when his little sister tells him she feared for her life is incredibly shitty. He does know Ross had a rifle pointed at her, right?
Yeah, I’m wondering why everybody is saying John’s the ‘favourite’. The closest that anyone in the story has come to saying that is Hank saying he ‘turned out ok’. That’s not ‘favourite’, that’s ‘liked’.
Well, if past in-comic comments are any indication, Jordan’s pretty much actively attempted to escape his more religious parents after ‘they squeezed too hard’. If I remember correctly, he’s also the one in Afghanistan.
But I agree; Jordan’s probably gonna be pretty relaxed and cool.
All we know from the in-universe conversation is that Jordan is the ‘black sheep’, probably a rebellion because of being pushed too hard by his parents (Hank seems much more trustworthy than Carol), and however that manifested, it kept him from attending Family Day.
We don’t know if their parents disowned him, if he split, if his rebellion landed him in jail, or what.
Eeeeh. I’ve met some people that I would categorize as absolutely worthless, dispicable human beings. I don’t know that John actually qualifies, but I disagree with the “no one is garbage” sentiment.
The word we were all looking for is ‘prickmuffin’. We didn’t know we needed that word until we found it, and then we knew it’s what we always wanted, all along.
He’s dismissive of someone else’s legitimate concerns. He doesn’t treat Joyce’s pain or trauma as being serious or valid and that sort of response from someone that you think you can trust can actually contribute to PTSD. My family never took my sexual abuse seriously, and that might have led to self destructive behaviors and self perception on my part.
If not emotional abuse, it is at least emotional neglect.
Just wait until nighttime, douse the house in gasoline and burn them all Joyce. You can write some crazy message about escaping the sinfull world, it’ll all fit.
I completely agree. My favorite for most likely scenario is he had a period of cognitive dissonance similar to what Joyce is having now, what they’ve been taught through religion isn’t matching real life, and got excommunicated from the family because of it, but Carol told Jocelyne and Joyce (possibly John) that it was all him. Possibly with some kind of threat to leave his siblings out of it or face some kind of consequence.
It honestly does, when you just want to smash something but everything within reach is either too expensive to replace or belongs to someone who hasn’t wronged you in any way.
But I’m happy for the times I’ve had the feel of concern for property. When that feel wasn’t strong enough, I had to replace my broken phone :/ That sucks a lot more than not being able to smash things when you want to.
One time in college my pals and I went into the basement of our dorm with a huge pile of empty soda cans, and a baseball bat, and just smashed the hell out of them. It cost nothing, and was very satisfying, I recommend it.
Yeah! I recently demo-ed an old wooden deck for a job. Being able to attack something with a crowbar is pretty great! And all the more great because I could do it for work/fun, and not because I felt like I was going to explode if I didn’t break something.
Some high school seniors near me had a fundraising with an old car and a baseball bat. Three swings for I think it was either a buck or five bucks.
I had to change a flat right beside them; they let me take a couple swings for free after out of sympathy. Sadly, the windows were already all smashed out but it was still fun.
I think they did pretty good out of it, too. Pretty ingenious way to raise money, heh. They were outside a local strip mall, so a high-traffic area.
I know! Poor girl. I’m willing to bet that this feels a lot more personal for her than it does for anyone else in the family, except Joyce. Also “come along, I’ll take you home”. What a prickmuffin.
Didn’t Joyce just drive over there herself? I don’t see why she couldn’t stay and talk things out, which is something Joyce definitely needs from her family right now
Eh, she could stop John on the way out and suggest that she might be able to calm Joyce down if she stays. That doesn’t involve taking sides, and it lets her hang around to show support and comfort.
Luckily, Jocelyne appears in quite a few upcoming preview panels with Joyce and Becky, so there’s a good chance she’ll find a way out leaving tomorrow or the next day.
Same. Poor Jocelyne, she just wants no fighting. -.-
And also probably a name and gender presentation that make her feel comfortable and herself, but she’ll totally settle for no fighting.
Jocelyne’s in a terrible spot. She WANTS to stay and help Becky and help Joyce andshow her support and get everything out on the table… But if she does that, she’s revealing to John that she’s more okay with what Joyce just said than she’s supposed to be, and is going to have to explain herself, either now or later, and can she do that without saying something she can’t take back?
On the other hand, if she goes with John, he’s going to expect her to commiserate with him about what Joyce just did and what she’s becoming and so forth, and can Jocelyne make it through such a conversation without breaking cover and again saying something she can’t take back?
They also knew how to make poetry interesting and that a lawyer scares off ghosts. Plus, remarkably good regarding women’s rights (reasonable divorce laws, allowed to work in most non-combat jobs). I’d say remarkably good for their times, but since we’re discussing this below a comic about fundies, my head would explode from sheer incorrectness if I did that.
Actually, Norse women were also allowed ‘combat jobs’. A lot of the more recent finds of warrior burial sites are for women. A paper about 2 years back suggested that a lot of the older finds strongly under-reported the amount of women involved in combat because it was often assumed that anyone buried with a sword was a man, whereas recent findings show that this assumption does not at all hold true.
Perhaps unsurprising given the valkyerie thing in the mythos and all that, but you know.
PS: I’d cite you the source but I forgot the name of the authors < . <
There indeed was a lot of underreporting of women in graves with weapons, and misidentifying them as male, but unfortunately that doesn’t translate into proof women were warriors. These people were in mostly peaceful colonists and we don’t know if the people buried with weapons actually fought with them.
We don’t yet know whether Norse women fought or not, in truth. What needs to be done is an osteoarchaeological analysis of the bones of armed women they found, to see if any of them actually have the kinds of healed wounds associated with warriors. Then we’ll be sure.
In the meantime, there’s no literary evidence outside of (fictional) sagas, but further east we do have the Byzantine historian Johannes Skylitzes, who describes female warriors among the (related) Kievan Rus.
This is a fantastic thread. I’ve had Vikings on the mind a lot lately (I do a Norse persona for a couple historical reenactment societies); I’m in Nova Scotia and we have the only confirmed Norse settlement in the New World right next door in Newfoundland, in L’anse aux Meadows (which we visited in 2014; it was really cool). But! Recently I discovered that they may have found another Norse camp in Baffin island (the site was discovered in 2012 but the lead scientist was fired for being too “bossy” and “outspoken” [which I can’t help but think may not have been an issue if she wasn’t a woman; but it was the Harper government so it may be political politics rather than gender politics involved here; he fired a lot of scientists for saying stuff he didn’t want them to, mostly about the environment], and she wasn’t given access to her research and materials, unusually); and they’ve just found what appears to be a THIRD settlement just across the water from me, somewhere in southwest Newfoundland! (L’anse aux Meadows is on the northeastern tip). They’re going to start digging this summer. And maybe this find will help restart the Baffin Island exploration!
As a scandinavian, I’m pretty fond of Vikings too 🙂 Disclaimer though – A LOT of what we think we know about vikings are national romantic drivel made up during the 19th century, OR deviated from not-really contemporary sources who mostly got it wrong in hilarious ways.
(my favorit is ibn Fadlan, a historian from Baghdad who spent a lot of his time with the Rus people being horrified by their complete lack of basic hygiene).
Yeah, she does a good job helping as good as she can, but this is exactly the sort of situation she dreaded back at family day. Getting caught in a confrontation and saying one thing too many…
Anxiety freeze mode: Not a fun thing at all. Especially when you know full well and with good reason that leaving it is likely to end in your life and safety being jeopardized.
I really wish she wasn’t so scared, because I think if she went ahead and said, “Wait a minute, bro, I’m not done here yet – Hey, Joyce, mind if I catch a ride home with you?” she’d actually be pretty likely to get away with it. Jocelyne has so many things to be terrified of, but I don’t think any of those threats are immediately imminent.
Or maybe it’s just because that’s gonna be a really terrifyingly silent car ride with John if she doesn’t split now.
Wait, I actually want to expand on this so somebody can tell me if I’m full of bullshit. These are the reasons I think Jocelyne staying with Joyce is a viable option that is unlikely to cause further conflict or out her.
1) As much as Jocelyne is not male, John perceives her as male, so all the way he casually employs misogyny to invalidate Joyce would not be employed on Jocelyne.
2) Beyond the more general invisibility of Jocelyne trans-ness, Josh and the rest of the Browns are eager to perceive things in a way that’s favourable and unchallenging to them. They’ve already had enough trouble with Joyce and her vocal rejection of values they take for granted, they’ll be unlikely to search out more trouble. So long as Jocelyne appears conforming and doesn’t go out of her way to rock the boat, they are likely to take what’s presented to them at face value.
3) In accordance with the above, so long as Jocelyne is calm and vague and practices a little finesse, she can easily spin this in a way that gives John the impression that she has the patience and tolerance to weather Joyce’s “unreasonableness”, and maybe even the ability to nudge Joyce back on the “right track”, and gives Joyce the impression that she rightfully prioritises Joyce and Becky’s safety over casual bigotry – something that will placate both parties. It’s not exactly the most noble of courses, but I think it’s safe enough.
In contrast, being in a car alone with John, where he’s likely to rant about how wrong Joyce is and don’t-you-agree?, is a dangerous situation. It’s reactive instead of proactive, and puts Jocelyne’s personal opinions under fire – such that she must agree enthusiastically with hateful rhetoric, or end up under scrutiny herself.
This is what my sense of preservation tells me, but I may be full of it, what do you guys think?
I could only find one good reason for Joycelyn to stay with Snidely
Whipjohn, the Douchinator .
Jocelyn is needed with John to be Joyce’s advoate, when they both go from here to spy on her to Joyces mom.
I think Snuidsely basically confessed in the next-last-panel this lunch date was a ruse , and john was there to get evidence for mom to justify her already made decsion ( which we already know ) to pull Joyce from college.
The Douchinator is threatening Joyce, confessing, and retroactively blaming Joyce for his prior and future betrayals . Its victim-blaming on top of victim-blaming on top of Victim-blaming.
I think you have solid points, but Jocelyne is frozen in fear. She just saw exactly how conditional is their family’s support, “I don’t like what my little sister has become” and walking out. Too scared to strategize, gotta shrink.
You just know there’s someone making a vine of this with the title ‘Crazy bongo loses it.’ Then again, it is a religious town so they might title it B-Word.
I was halfway wondering if the last couple of days were some elaborate test, and that he was finally going to say something like, “Thank goodness; I’m glad to see that you’re reacting appropriately when pressed.” I guess not.
Yeah, that’s my point. How the Brown parents feel about their children doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about the actual child; only about how good they are at putting on a persona, be it true or false, that their parents like.
Oh no. Here we go~ Another person thinking that because Joyce is changing that it’s a bad thing. I understand it’s shocking for them, but for Joyce she’s dealing with a lot at once. :/ oh boy.
Change is the great constant of the universe! But those fools thing they can control it with a few prayers and a meaningless Bible… They’re delusional and Joyce is the one who is being reasonable.
It’s pretty meaningful to all of the Browns and Becky. It’s just they’re just hiding behind its words without analysis or even really caring about them. “Whatever we believe is in it.” Which Joyce pointed out in her Biblical scholar phase.
That’s because Willis has admitted giving kids their oppiste gendered parents eyes and same gender’s hair. Joss having blue eyes was foreshadowing no one picked up on.
Yeah, it’s pretty rare in this comic for a father figure to come out anywhere near ‘the range of a decent human being.’ At this rate, Mr. Keener will turn out to be a professional kitten mauler or something.
Oh, OF COURSE that’s his full name. (Though, if your proposal goes through, no more nickname for me. I’d rather be pretentious that associated with this wanker.)
Isn’t John its own name, not short for anything? A Jonathan would use “Jon” as the diminutive. Generally.
More specifically here, there is a John in the Bible, but I can recall no Jonathans.
(Do there be a Joyce?)
God i hate people like that. I appreciate the value of calm discourse as the next guy, but the idea that a person’s become irrational because they’re expressing emotions is ridiculous.
And if you aren’t a member of the group being discussed, along any vector. Any commonality with any part of the subject group renders your opinion irrelevant due to “bias.”
Scientists have actually seen that people with damaged emotions. (Which typically occurs through brain damage) are actually worse at making logical decisions. Emotions are an integral part of the decision-making process because they help us know how much we should value things.
For example they ran the experiment by putting both the emotionless and controls through a chess game. The emotionless subjects made horrible decisions in choosing which pieces were worth sacrificing. Even when they knew a numerical value for each piece, it was still difficult for them to not give up pieces for comparatively smaller gains.
Turns out that you can’t just tell someone to value something, even as a chess player, if they don’t have an emotion to associate with them. We don’t want to sacrifice our Rook for a Knight because we attach a feeling of loss, anxiety and frustration towards losing a more valuable piece. Without those emotions we just see a set of carved pieces and are told how they move, but we don’t know why we should really care about winning or losing pieces and the game.
This …actually resonates a lot for me, oddly enough. I could never get the hang of chess, mostly because I was too reticent to sacrifice any of my pieces. (Which I guess is actually the opposite of this study? Welp.)
Well, that went a lot better than I thought it would. Well done Joyce, now help Jocelyne help Becky. Then listen and talk to Jocelyne and Becky, they can probably help you too. There is some big trauma you aren’t mentioning.
There is certainly conflict there, hopefully John will get an earful from his sibling on the way home. Only reason I can see for Jocelyn not staying to hang with Joyce and Becky.
I want that to happen but I don’t think Jocelyne is as strong as Joyce and she probably just wants this to all blow over as quickly as possible so she can get back to her life asap
Yeah, I agree. We really need to see more of Jocelyne.
Problem is, I do not think Joyce is the best equipped personto help Becky. Jocelyne might be, John probably is, if he “approved” which I guess is a metaphor for something distasteful.
So who can hel Becky? Dina? She doesn’t like or trust Dorothy. Sarah would need convincing. Someone suggested Leslie yesterday, for Joyce. She might be the ideal person to help both Joyce and Becky.
I don’t think it’s so much that Jocelyne is not as strong as Joyce, so much as she has spent a lot more time living in fear than Joyce.
By which I mean: Most adult-transitioned trans folk I know tell me they started seriously thinking about transitioning a good decade or more before they actually did it. Jocelyne has been living in terror of her ‘secret’ being discovered for at least that long, possibly longer (using me as an example on the bi and autistic fronts since I can’t really separate each from the other: I knew there was something different about me in a way society hated looooong before I had the language to express it or the knowledge to be able to put my finger on it. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t feel alienated, and I think I was seven? Maybe eight? Anyway, I was in early third grade and I was young for the grade when I realized consciously there was something fundamentally very different between me and my age-peers. I didn’t learn that bisexuality even was a thing until my late teens, and I didn’t learn I was autistic until my mid 20s, but looong before then, I was living in terror that people would wake up and realize what I was and hate me for it. I would not be surprised if this was Jocelyne’s experience, too, only with gender instead of sexual orientation and neurodevelopmental disability).
For Joyce, the kind of terror she’s felt in the past few months is a new and overwhelming experience. For Jocelyne, it’s Tuesday.
But terror chips away and wears at you, and the longer you live with it and bow to it, the harder it is to be brave. And consider also that Jocelyne genuinely has more to lose. Straight/cis allies are rarely murdered for being allies. Corrective rape and murder for Jocelyne and Becky, on the other hand, is an ever-present worry. Joyce is scared of losing her family and the things she’s built her life towards, and that’s valid and understandable. Jocelyne and Becky have all that to lose, plus their bodily autonomy, their safety, and their lives. I am not at all surprised that Joyce is the one standing up and doing the angry bellowing while Jocelyne and Becky both have different forms of freeze response.
I don’t think Jocelyne is about to tell anyone off. She does not like conflict, and fears it because it directly threatens her closet and her safety. I think she will hide within herself as much as she possibly can on the ride home, look out the window, try not to cry. That’s what I would do.
I think Joyce needs to get herself help first before trying to help others. She’s been through sever traumatic experiences and has yet to unload all of the emotions that have spawned from them.
She isn’t using Becky’s problems. She’s using -her- problems. They were both threatened at gunpoint. She thought she was going to die, then she thought her best friend was gone forever, then she almost watched somebody else die because she asked them to intervene. Then, after all of that, she got to experience the super awesome pleasure of finding out that her family, who she trusted unconditionally, not only was not entirely on her side, but is partially made up of people who are kinda on -Ross’s- side.
She’s a bundle of raw nerves right now, and is rapidly starting to feel like she has no allies at home.
Becky’s loss of her previous life comes off as someone who escaped from a prison. She was living a repressed lie of a life that she seems to be overjoyed to be free of. She has a lot of logistical problems, but she’s emotionally equipped to tackle them. Joyce, on the other hand, has had her worldview destroyed and her safety net yanked out from under her. Her unshakable faith in the authority figures in her life has been rocked to the core, and her mom is looking more and more like a Toedad waiting to happen than would have even seemed conceivable to her before.
yes, she is using Becky as the conduit for her problems. Joyce does not get upset over and still relies on her family supporting her. She is using their attitude to Becky to vent her anger, rather than channel her energies into helping her much more needing of support friend. Joyce is not even opening up about her real traumas, both of which inspire PTSD in a lot of survivors.
Joyce needs help and she is using Becky’s situation to deflect that need.
Yes, she needs help, as does Becky. But she’s not going to get it here. She’s not going to get it from her family. She has to get through this weekend and away from them.
So what should she be doing right here and now? Other than being calm and reasonable like John wants her to be.
Joyce’s problem in the short term is that, unlike Becky and Jocelyne, because her childhood was relatively trauma free she lacks the skills to cope with a horribly dysfunctional family now that she’s in conflict with them. She can’t bottle up her anger, because she’s never needed to. She doesn’t have the emotional armor, so every betrayal hurts.
Mind you, that comes at the price of deep long term damage that’ll take years of therapy to process, but it gets you through the immediate situation.
But forget the long term plans, what good does Joyce not getting angry do Becky now? What good does Joyce not defending Becky or her own actions do? It wasn’t going to be possible to have that discussion with John without basically admitting he was right and that she shouldn’t have punched Ross and … I don’t even know where to go with that.
In some ways, the best most practical thing she could do is knuckle under, pretend to be the good little girl they know, walking the fine line of not quite giving up on Becky, just to get through the weekend without more conflict so she can be sure to get back to school. Which is a very real threat right now.
But that’s not Joyce. That’s never been Joyce. Even before the PTSD and her current anger issues, she’s always been an open book. She’s always had a fierce sense of justice – sometimes misdirected, but she’s never been able to be quiet when she recognizes something wrong. She’s not just using Becky as an excuse to vent. She really is passionate about defending Becky.
Also, Becky is NOT emotionally equipped to handle her problems. She is NOT handling her problems. She is terrified and alone, pay more attention to those cutaways of her face.
If everyone admitted they had problems and got professional help, there would be no help because all of the the psychiatrists would have cashed in and moved to the Bahamas by now.
On the upside, dude’s not real so you can’t punch him in the face or drop a bus on him from orbit. But you can REALLY want to. Like HOLY DANG do I super want to be the one to drop a bus on him from orbit.
Which is fine because I’m not doing it and it’s not as if I view that as a valid reaction to real world problems, but for ones involving fictional people over whom I have no control, this impossible variety of violence is pretty fine because it’s impossible.
Amusing. I brought that subject up with a co-worker who was turning 65 in a few days. “Well, we could have your parade around the office and we’ll spank you, just like in elementary school.” He was amused by the offer, but declined.
Joyce should point out that she totally stole the parental units’ SUV, so Jon’s not the only one who can give Jos a ride home or possibly someplace sane.
Unfortunately, not returning it means getting the police after her. My sister was threatened with grand theft auto when all she did was drive around the parking lot and down a block or two.
Granted, my parents aren’t bongos, so they didn’t let that happen. The cop threatened it, as she was driving with her permit but without an adult present.
We don’t know how long the drive is, or if Jocelyne left any personal belongings in John’s car, or if she can even process that quickly in the middle of a stressful situation.
I know that feeling Joyce has. It’s the same feeling that is keeping me from being the only one out of my siblings to not smash a hole in a wall. And the feeling of wanting to comes up a lot lately.
There’s still time, and I hope like FUCK she keys that assholes car. He is a douche-nozzle toolbag dipshit who really needs to be punched in his big, stupid, passive aggressive face.
Joyce’s criticism is so accurate and jarring that I suspect John is acting like this because it’s easier to criticize HOW Joyce is arguing than actually considering her argument (which he would need to do to counter it). It’s too painful and true that he’s just deflecting so he doesn’t have to think on it too much.
The thing is, he’s taking Jocelyn home. Which means that Joss can say the same things that Joyce just yelled during the ride home. And since Joss will be speaking reasonably, John might actually listen to what was said, as opposed to how it was said the first time.
The problem is that Joss will get the credit and not Joyce.
Assuming Joss says anything. Her heart’s clearly in the right place, but she seems very conflict-averse. It might depend on how she reads John’s attitude in the car. And even then, he ignore her and could come back with “Oh, don’t you start too.”
Jocelyne’s stepping into a live minefield if she speaks up, unfortunately. Appearing to support Joyce and Becky too strongly, especially when it means siding against the “good” family line, is a very real threat to her own safety.
She’s probably going to be up all night drafting the pefect argument in her head, wishing she’d spoken up, fantasizing about a world in which that would have ended well.
Honestly, I’m actually mad at Jocylene right now. Joyce and Becky need more support than a quiet “I’m on your side, really, I’m just not going to say or do anything where someone might see!”
John is a shit person who I would literally cry no tears if he was 1) real and 2) died horribly but that’s what I expect from this family so
Yeah, she’s clearly in Survival Mode. Once you’ve been in that state for long enough it’s hard to leave, especially since the kind of pressure that keeps you in Survival Mode for long enough means that leaving it for one thing could lead to the rest exploding out after it.
Yeah. I disagree with what she is doing, but completely understand it as well.
My family is very Christian. Not dangerously so like the Browns are depicted, but enough that it would be a huge pile of drama if parts of it knew that I was bi.
And I don’t bother to tell them. I don’t actively hide it, I just don’t talk to family that much, and no one has ever asked.
But at the same time, every time I’ve heard one of my family members say something bigoted, I’ve stood up to it and said that that was NOT OK, and that I am NOT cool with that kind of talk or thought.
See, that’s the thing. I’m not asking Jocelyne to say that she’d prefer to be called by her real name and tell John that if he has a problem with LGBT people he has a problem with her. I know that won’t end well.
I am asking her to show support for her sister and her nearly-kidnapped best friend. And if that entails a certain amount of risk, well, Joyce risked a run at someone she knew was carrying a hunting rifle for Becky. I’d like to think that Joss can risk a heated argument for Joyce.
It is unfortunate that she didn’t/doesn’t speak up, but hating someone for being too afraid to do the right thing is not the proper response. Joyce taking on huge risks is nice of her, but not a reason to demand similar (if lesser) sacrifices from others as well.
(Also, you are mistaken if you think speaking up would risk just one heated argument. This is about a fundamental breach between Joyce and the family’s views. If Jocelyne openly takes a side here, she actually risks alienating herself from the rest of the family.)
I realize that she’s financially dependent on her family because lol freelance writer. But fuck them. Seriously, fuck them. They deserve the most agonizing pain.
Carol and John suck, yeah, but it’s REALLY, really hard to sever ties with even one family member. Even if you know that they are objectively Bad For Your Wellbeing, even if you AREN’T in a position where you’re dependent on them, cutting people out of your life that you have been brought up to love unconditionally and who society repeatedly and insistently tells you you should love unconditionally and if you don’t even if they have made it clear they aren’t good for you and won’t accept you, well, are you sure that isn’t something YOU’RE doing wrong?
That shit is HARD. Jocelyne’s not financially ready for that yet, and she’s probably not emotionally ready for it either. I’m certain Joyce isn’t at that stage yet, either, and that before she goes back to college there’s going to have to be SOME kind of reconciliation move on her part that’s going to hurt like hell but keep her in college and in the family for a bit longer.
Depends on how you define ‘act on those fantasies’. I never watched my Mom die due to a self-inflicted cooking accident, then check her pulse to make sure it had stopped before calling 911 in fake tears – oh, thinking about that little scenario kept me from killing myself through high school – but I did tell her that what she did and was doing to other people was unacceptable, had her storm off in tears saying ‘You’re not my son!’ (well, yeah, duh, that’s pretty accurate), and was homeless for a while, sleeping on the couch of my old common room in college.
It’s not just financial dependence here. If she comes out in the heat of an argument, there’s a good chance she’d be in physical danger. Disowning/loss of financial support would probably be her best case scenario.
Remember how the reason Becky ran away was because Ross was going to put her in reparative therapy? Now remember how Carol literally sided with Ross? How do you think she’d react if she found out one of her ‘favourite sons’ was actually a daughter? (Hint: badly. Very badly.)
Now thinking about that, can you be sure that you would speak up in Joss’s position? I know I can’t.
Jocelyne’s already in a tight spot with the whole trans thing. Remember what she said to Ethan back at freshman family weekend? She’s worried about familial confrontation because she doesn’t want to say something she can’t take back, such as accidentally coming out to a family she knows will disown her.
She’s got her own safety as an LGBTQ+ person to look out for as well, and it’s unfair to expect-slash-demand her to put that on the line, especially when John and Carol have both proven t be close-minded, bigoted assholes.
I know she has her own safety to look out for. Trust me, I am acutely aware of what it’s like being a trans person with a bigoted mother who occasionally talks about how it would be sweet if LGBTQ people died. But I fought against her when she’d say something like that, and I think it’s real shitty of Jocelyne to hang her sister and her best friend out to dry like that.
Jocelyne’s parents don’t deserve her love. Both of them. Now, sure, Jocelyne can be dependent on them. But let’s not pretend that they’ve done anything to earn the slightest iota of care.
Agreed. I can see Hank potentially learning to be a not-shitty human being one day, but probably not until AFTER he realizes he’s become estranged from three out of four children because he wasn’t willing to accept them as they are and goes “You know, the common factor here is me and maybe I should consider changing that.” Until that point, Jocelyne owes them jackshit.
Unfortunately, it’s really hard to realize that point. (Trust me, my mom and her half-siblings STILL have some really complicated emotions about a man they pretty much all agree they are better off without and want nowhere near their children. Emotional abuse can be really hard to shake.)
And even then, Jocelyne will still owe him jackshit and the onus will be totally on Hank proving he CAN be a not-shitty human being and even then Joss is not required to forgive him for the damage done. Forgot to add that.
John is Jocelyne’s ride — although Joyce and Beckie have a car at their disposal, so it’s not that crucial a deal; he could always hook a ride with them. So it’s probably more along the lines of what ozaline is saying. Considering what she’s still hiding, Jocelyne knows better than to rock the boat any further.
I’m a little disappointed in Joss, but I also completely understand her, here. She’s deeply closeted, and I suspect highly conflict-averse even without that. Standing up to John would risk ‘saying something [she] can’t take back’ as she put it when she was talking to Ethan at Family Day.
Yeah, there’s a time and a place, and this aint it. It’s like when all the people in the comments were hoping Joss would come out as trans in this scene. Like, it’d be nice for Joyce and Becky to see the truth! But with John right there and Joyce still being kind of an unknown, Jocelyn has no real reason to out herself when it could be more harmful than helpful. For the same reason, she’s hesitant about fighting John on this. Were she not having to hide this part of herself, defending her sister would be more plausible.
The thing of it is, Joss is in a really difficult place. Being too overtly supportive could risk her safety, or at the very least her continued relationship with her parents. I don’t blame her for hesitating.
She may also simply have absolutely no idea how to go about it. I was painfully, PAINFULLY shy and meek as a kid, and as dearly as I would have loved to have stood up for my hypothetical sister Joyce in such a situation, I honestly wouldn’t have known how to do it. It’s all very well to say she should do it, but knowing how to speak up (and finding not just the courage, but the ability to do so–I couldn’t even speak up to say I hadn’t gotten a handout that had been passed around) can be another kettle of fish entirely.
I simply was never taught how to stand up for myself. All I was taught was how to sit down and shut up. :/ Jocelyn may be in a similar position, even without the added issue of her own safety if she does.
We can tell from one of the Patreon strips that she’s had some level of awareness that’s she’s a girl since before Joyce was born, though she probably couldn’t put it into words until years later. In a family and culture that is so focused on gender conformation and proper gender roles. She already has a lifetime of practice and reinforcement of hiding and repressing everything and avoiding conflict, deflecting suspicion. That’s really hard to overcome. Courage or not. You’ve got to overcome decades of survival instinct.
She hasn’t come across as particularly shy or meek. She gave her token of support to Becky earlier and also tried to both deflect John and give more practical support, but that kinda backfired.
Mostly I think she’s afraid if she gets into the argument, she’ll let her repressed anger out and let something out she won’t be able to take back. She said as much to Ethan back when she first showed up.
Oh, so kind of like Jocelyne needed support from her family her entire life and got misgendered and told she was wrong/sinful instead? That kind of support?
The idea that Jocelyne is wrong for not being able to instantly argue for LGBT rights after a lifetime of suppressing it for her own safety is just so awful I don’t even have words for it.
Living in a small town in Indiana, I can confirm that you really do need a car, as public transportation basically doesn’t exist, sidewalks are not a given (and some people will get really angry and threatening if you walk on their lawn, whereas drivers will come close to clipping you if you’re on the side of the road), and there is a desperate lack of crosswalks. Oh, and once every few years you get to hear about a motorist running down a cyclist and leaving them for dead.
I mean, ‘one property/house one care’ has been necessary or incredibly life-improving everywhere I’ve lived. Canada and the US are pretty spread out, especially in more rural communities.
I have no problem with “one property/family, one car” … maybe even two. But “one family, four licensed drivers, four cars plus an RV” is a little bit much in my book. And that doesn’t even take into account my “up with bicycles, down with (most) cars” mindset.
Depends how many of them are working. And what schedules/public transport is like.
In the immediate case, Jocelyne lives alone and lacks a car most likely because she’s trying to survive as a freelance writer – ie she’s broke.
Not living at home for obvious reasons.
Hopefully she’s in a large enough town that she’s got access to basic necessities in walking distance.
When I still lived at home, there were six licensed drivers in my house. My dad, my stepmother, myself, and my three siblings. Therefore, we had six cars. There is no public transportation in my hometown.
1 and 2. My dad and stepmother had jobs separately. They got off work at different times. My dad’s job required him to be able to drive anywhere in town at any time. He was also on call, which meant at any point in time he could have to leave and wouldn’t know when he would be back.
3. My brother’s job was mostly graveyard shifts in the next town.
4. My sister was in college in a town half an hour away.
5. I was in high school and had a job. No one’s schedule would allow them to leave work to give me a ride. I was also chauffeur to my stepbrothers.
6. My younger sister, as part of the custody arrangement, spent half her time with my dad and half her time with my mom(who lived an hour away). She needed a vehicle to travel that distance, as everyone else had jobs and commitments that prevented a daily two hour round trip, as she was in school.
I agree with both of you, when I grew up we needed 3 cars and were aided by having a 4th, and it’s still like it at that house (a van (driven by everyone, needed by mom for biking and dad for transporting parts for work, a car because my mom works elsewhere, my brother’s car because he too works elsewhere, and my dad’s truck which was unlicensed most of the year, but needed for camping and occasionally for moving stuff for his work, and was the second car before we had the car and brother car). I never drove and moved to a city with moderate transit and so on as soon as I was 18, or we easily could have had a fifth for me to drive to uni.
They actually also had/have excess cars (two collectables (one pre-marriage and one built by my dad) and my brother bought two cars for bringing to a drifting course), which I agree is excessive but whatever, it’s rural, they have the space to have them, it’s a hobby, and mostly I don’t care that much.
My husband and I have two, although I still don’t drive. A car, for commuting and daily driving, and a truck (usually unlicensed now that we have a car) for 4x4ing and more importantly moving furniture, tools, and other large/heavy stuff, which seems to happen a lot for us?
I’m not really sure you get how hard any alternate transit is for some people/places. All but one of the places I’ve lived have required a car to get to work/school (too far to bike, shoddy or zero public transit), and as soon as one person is on a different schedule or working in a different direction, that’s another car.
Talking about Josh/Jocelyne is something I would like to do more of. Which means seeing more of them. I dislike using the gender neutral pronouns though. It would be nice if we could learn more about their transition and where they see themselves within it. I dislike making assumptions with things I don’t actually understand.
So yeah, open up Jocelyne, it will make the non transperson feel more comfotable
I’m pretty sure the score is jut that Jocelyn is a girl and uses she/her. Unfortunately, no one knows because bigotry so everyone still defaults to he/him.
I can’t say I blame Jocelyne for not opening up. Her sister demonstrates that she’s upset about her family minimizing an awful thing that happened to her and her best friend, and her older brother walks away rather than concede that he might even be a little bit in the wrong. I think her fears of a permanent rift with her family seem pretty damn well founded.
Also I think Jocelyne uses female pronouns exclusively. (Or would if she were given the freedom to be herself. Obviously this isn’t said in the comic but I think Willis might have said this somewhere?)
I believe Word of God is that Jocelyne is a transwoman, Joyce’s sister. She identifies as a Jocelyne Brown in her writing online, and, if her preferences were known to others in her life, would like to use she/her/hers.
also Jocelyn is definitely closeted, at least to her family, and is probably straight (ie, she likes men) judging by her flirtation with Ethan and her line of “I’m not actually gay”, though she could be bi or something else.
I appreciate that you’re trying to be sensitive here, but degendering her when she’s explicitly word of god confirmed to be a woman is kind of rude in itself.
Not really, depends who you ask, most days. I already said I avoid using pronouns when referring to Jocelyne for just that reason. It isn’t the fictional character I am worried about offending, it is getting into discussions like this on the internet.
The thing is that an unwillingness to respect the gender of someone in a comic tends to speak largely of one’s ability to respect the gender and pronouns in real life.
Regardless of that, it’s weird and pointless other than for invalidating gender- I doubt you casually call Joe or Danny she, nor Joyce or Dorothy he.
It isn’t something you do to avoid offense, it’s something that is a basic part of treating people decently and referring to them accurately.
So, yeah, it is definitely inappropriate to degender her when you know how to correctly gender her, especially with it repeatedly confirmed in comics.
Like Shiro, I get that it’s an attempt at being neutral and sensitive, but since you outright disagreed with that, I really think you need to hear more.
If this is rampant with spelling errors, my apologies. Phone before bed is not the best typing platform
Yes, it can be polite to avoid pronouns when you don’t know them about a character or person, but when the person’s preferred pronouns and name are known and you side with neutral pronouns, it can feel like those preferred pronouns or names are considered fake or worthless.
It’s like if someone mistook a friend for a different person. Say, a friend named Hank that they mistook for their friend John. So Hank says, hey, actually, I’m Hank. And so the person continues referring to them as John or said Hank/John or the like. Hank would feel actively dismissed. Because they were being ignored.
As such, it’s typically seen as at least a sign of unsafety that makes a trans person less willing to put themselves out there and offer education, because they don’t trust they’ll be fully heard.
And please don’t let this serve as discouragement from asking and please let me know if you have any specific questions regarding trans people, pronouns, or other stuff like that.
Actually, your source of Jocelyne being, “word of God, a woman” would be hugely appreciated. I only read the comic, if Willis has said this elsewhere it would make me very happy indeed.
joss is a trans lady, so the default is she/her. using they for a binary trans person can actually be very hurtful, and when done while knowing their gender, is considered misgendering. (of course, there are some binary trans people who accept other pronouns, but i think they’re in the minority.) 🙂
I read something new every day on pronouns and gender identity. Last article I read said that there was a movement to avoid gender identity in pronouns altogether. As a result. I avoid pronouns altogether, when no preference has been addressed.
Younare right though, all the women I know prefer she/her, regardless of [see, I have no idea how to finish that sentence].
See, I was similarly in Jocelyn’s position. I’m a trans woman who grew up with a very religious family, and the past 3 years living with them suuuucked because I knew I was trans and I knew coming out as a whole would be bad, baaaad- and Jocelyn basically has… well, probably a worse situation than I do. Anyway, so I had to deal with them constantly referring to me by my legal name and what gender is on my birth certificate. But, as you can see, I go by Amber. I haven’t started transitioning yet (but I did get scheduled for HRT recently, finally!) but my girlfriend, roommates, and friends all call me Amber. At my job interview the other day, I told the manager and MIT that they could call me Amber. Transitioning doesn’t really define gender identity. It didn’t matter 3 years ago when I wasn’t anywhere close to getting on HRT- I wanted people to use she/her pronouns for me. I’m not on HRT, and yet the receptionist at the doctor’s office asked me what my preferred name is. Getting on HRT doesn’t magically transform your thought process over time, it’s just a means of changing your body to suit your identity. It’s not like, “Okay, now that the estrogen is pumping through me, now I’m a girl!” What really matters is what *I* know and am confident in what my identity is. And in the case of Jocelyn, we know via Word of Willis that Jocelyn identifies by that name and as female, and that’s all you really need to know for her.
I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m condescending or anything- I’ve been where you are. It can be a somewhat tricky topic but it does feel like people tend to think it’s more complicated than it actually is.
Thank you for sharing! It can be somewhat intimidating for cis-folks to ask about trans* issues, because we know we’re probably going to screw something up while learning, and we legit don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. I sure appreciate here on the comments, lots of transpeople are very generous with their diverse experiences.
I likewise didn’t pick up on the fact that she was trans when I first was binging the comic. But I didn’t need to know about the Word of God on the subject to find out. Everyone in the comments has been referring to her as female. People say you can’t call her Josh(ua). It’s been pretty clear that she’s a trans women for quite a while.
In this sort of thing, that will get you quite far. Pay attention to what other people who do know about these sorts say. You learn a lot more about how to interact with in real life than you would by reading books and stuff.
1. Who reads the comments? There are people like you here.
2. Go be condescending somewhere else.
3. No one questioned Jocelyn being trans. Duh. Read the comments.
Woah, Skizz, I think you read trlkly’s comment a lot differently than I did… Obviously I’m not inside either of your brains, but from here their suggestion didn’t seem condescending, it seemed like trlkly was trying to give you a tool for guessing from context in order to answer your question about which pronouns to use for Jocelyne.
Yeah. I specifically had to rewrite that comment three times because I was trying not to come off as condescending or overly critical. That’s why I specifically explained it in terms of what I did, and how I figured it out.
I’m honestly not sure how I could have given you the information without it coming across as condescending. Would you mind giving some advice?
We have Jocelyne’s word that ‘Josh’ is the favourite, though we know from the overheard convo between Hank and Carol that they consider John to have turned out the right way as well. We know that the younger siblings are all quite a bit younger than John; I think Jocelyne (second oldest) was still a pretty little kid when baby-of-the-family Joyce came along, while John’s something like 15 years older than Joyce. John’s sufficiently older that he may not factor into her estimations of ‘favourite sibling’. But I dunno.
Is that where you kick him in the butt, and then you kick him again?
I mean, I don’t really want to unleash the deluge of violence against characters, because it makes some commenters very uncomfortable, but surely just kicking him the butt is okay.
Welp, toss that Brown sibling into the shitpile, then. I didn’t exactly have high hopes for him (and if I was it was more for Joyce’s sake than anything; girl needs some more emotional support from her family than just Hank’s “yeah Ross was a dick”), but damn, that’s just. Damn.
“I WAS SCARED FOR MY LIFE AND THE LIFE OF MY BEST FRIEND OF COURSE I’M UPSET.” “Ugh, be reasonable</i.."
Fuckin' A. I have never wanted to kick a fictional character in his fictional dick more.
I feel you, Joyce. I’d want to throw furniture around too.
Oh and hey John. It’s me again. You don’t get to decide that because your sister is extremely angry and bitter, she has changed in a wrong way and needs to be, what’s that word, “recentered”? No. Nope. Nooooope.
Becky loudly makes a Hitler joke. Fandom reaction: “Becky is loud in the restaurant and makes a public accusation of bigotry. Becky is bad. No like Becky.”
Joyce even more loudly, and entirely seriously, makes a public accusation of bigotry. Fandom reaction? “Go Joyce! Joyce is awesome!”
Also important to take into account what the audience knew then vs what we know now, had we known John was awful when Becky made the hitler joke the reaction likely would have been different
Nah. Because Jocelyne, who, as a translady, would be on the Nazi kill list, was also included in that Nazi joke. And Becky had no way to know that, but, hey, that’s why you don’t go around loudly implying people are Nazis for no good reason.
Joyce, on the other hand, is just calling bigotry bigotry.
Except making a Hitler joke isn’t exactly a public accusation of bigotry, but rather being pretty insensitive. Joyce literally just said that her family are bigots.
This. Becky made an inappropriate joke because she was uncomfortable. Joyce called her brother a bigot because he refuses to see why Ross pointing a gun at Joyce and Becky was wrong. It’s a tad different.
Becky went home to the family that had been kinder to her than her own family. Already severely shaken, and yet maintaining her chipper attitude through the whole thing. And Joyce’s mother quite intentionally tried to shame Becky, both in private and at the dinner table.
We saw Becky’s reaction there. Wit. Sarcasm. Deflection. That’s what she was doing with the Nazi joke.
I’d be shocked if she wasn’t every bit as angry as Joyce. But Joyce still believes in her family. She still believes in all of it. Every betrayal, by her mother, and now by John, is devastating to her, because IT’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THAT WAY. So her anger is shocked. Raw. Honest.
Becky knows better. She knows fundamentalists like Carol and John are scum, and even Hank is struggling not to judge. She doesn’t expect John to be any different than he is. So she’s sarcastic. She’s witty. It allows her to keep smiling through the anger. To keep being cheerful through the anger.
Since coming out as a lesbian, Becky’s barely exhibited any sadness or anger at all… except in private, quiet moments when no one is watching. She’s internalizing and repressing all of it.
She must be screaming inside.
So when she makes a Nazi joke at John’s expense (and it is John’s expense, Jocelyn gets in on it), that’s her version of BECAUSE I AM.
I had this talk a million times in the comments under the joke and the strip after, so I won’t rehash everything that was said there here, but I will acknowledge what you’re dying so you don’t think I’m ignoring you.
You gave reasons as to why Becky said what she said, and those are valid and probably correct! They’re not excuses. Loudly mentioning nazis in a public place as an act of defiance is not really ok. So, no, not go Becky. Go in a different direction Becky. Away from lines that make patrons and readers alike uncomfortable.
Ah yes. Telling the wronged that, above all, they should be polite. A theme I hear often, generally directed at any form of protest, no matter how benign.
Wouldn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. It would be even better if she slipped quietly back into the closet, where her presence wouldn’t disturb anyone at all. That way her father might not have become so “uncomfortable” that he hunted her with a shotgun. That way the Browns would not have been so “uncomfortable” that they were forced to reveal their bigotry.
That way the readers would not have been so “uncomfortable” that they might be reminded Jews weren’t the only ones killed during the Holocaust. Homosexuals didn’t fare well either. That way the readers would not have been so “uncomfortable” that they might have to deal with their own thoughts and feelings toward a young lesbian whose life has been blasted out from under her.
By all means, let not the suffering of the oppressed be so apparent and raw as to make us UNCOMFORTABLE.
Why can’t she be more like Jocelyn, who would never make anyone UNCOMFORTABLE. As she slinks behind John, clearly torn up inside, but unable to act for fear of making someone UNCOMFORTABLE.
Not a dig at Jocelyn, by the way. She’s got every reason to fear making her bigoted family UNCOMFORTABLE. But rather, a dig at people who think Becky should be as concerned with the comfort of bigots as Jocelyn is forced to be.
This came as a surprise, but let’s back up the truck a little bit. I’m sorry if what i said upset you, I really am, but i don’t think we’re in entire disagreement here. I dont condone what John is doing, nor do i think Becky needs to be polite while dealing with people like John. I don’t.
I’m all for Becky being assertive and aggressive in order to feel better and to fight off people like john, whether he becomes uncomfortable or not. Go for it! Joyce is doing it here and you won’t find me telling her that her reaction isn’t warranted. If becky was having the same reaction, I’d be rooting for her just the same (despite me not liking her as a character as much, it’s a gutsy move worthy of respect either way).
I understand that you view Becky’s joke as somewhat of an equivalent, it being a cut that isn’t as loud as Joyce’s, but maybe one that would be just as unsettling. That’s where we disagree. I think it was used for Becky to cope, a joke like she often makes in order to calm herself and ease some of her internal tension. Trouble is, this joke is offensive to some.
There were real people in these comments talking about how the joke didn’t sift well with them, some of them jewish, some of them blonde/blue-eyed, feeling somewhat betrayed that a character they liked would crack a joke about something that’s still tender. Then, when people jumped down their throats, telling them that they were wrong to be offended, I commented on their side, citing that a character’s right to crack jokes about genocidal maniacs does not outweigh real people’s comfort reading what should be something that provides escapism.
Willis himself said in this blog post http://itswalky.tumblr.com/post/141942653372/willis-youre-usually-so-good-about-things-was that what Becky did wasn’t meant to be morally-righteous. It was a nazi joke, through and through. She had reasons to make it, because she obviously doesn’t agree with what they did! That doesn’t necessarily make it ok for her to do it.
I’m sorry if my comment upset you, the last thing I want to do is fight more people here about Becky, to the point where I’ve been trying my best to comment in a more constructive way in order to be a more positive member of the community.
I’m not here to fight about Becky, or whether it’s ok for only jewish people to make these jokes, or if anyone who was targeted is allowed to, or any of that. I didn’t like it, many other readers didn’t like it, we weren’t meant to like it.
I hope this long response better illustrates where I’m coming from so we can come to a resolution.
i kind of appreciate the point, but i think a significant factor is that becky made a nazi joke. like, that was definitely the thing that upset me and at least a few others
Well, that’s because Joyce’s accusation is completely valid. John has downplayed what she and Becky went through and basically said that Becky being homeless was her own fault for being gay. He’s telling Joyce to calm down because he doesn’t want to hear what she has to say, when what she has to say is a valid expression of anger. He and Joyce’s parents (well, her mom, at least) seem to be on Becky’s dad’s side and have little sympathy for Becky, blaming her for being gay.
Also, while Becky’s joke was insensitive, it was a joke. It may not have been a good joke, but it’s not really comparable to Joyce rightfully expressing her pain and anger and being shut down.
Becky didn’t make any accusation of bigotry. She made a joke that was in quite poor taste. I love Becky, but it would have been nice if she hadn’t said it.
It would also be nice if Joyce would calm down, wouldn’t it?
Except it wouldn’t. Because Joyce’s anger is justified. And Becky’s anger, repressed and displaying itself through her wit and sarcasm, is likewise justified.
Nobody said Becky needs to be calm and docile, merely that it’s possible to be rightfully angry and still hurt people in undeserved ways with expressions of that anger.
Though now that you put it that way, that stereotype does exist for a reason. Light skinned, blue-eyed guy being a bigot? Sounds like Becky’s description was more accurate than she realized.
If you think noting bigotry is an accusation, you’re likely not overburdened with real problems.
Hint: Being “accused” of bigotry will never, even in error, affect you half as much as actually experiencing bigotry. Never. No, not even then.
It is quite literally a fake worry and I’m perpetually annoyed by those who pretend otherwise, because I’ve had the life shattering hell of bigotry both personal and societal, ripping away my family, tearing apart a long running relationship, costing me work, sanity, and nearly driving me to the streets.
Someone who thinks it “costs” them to not be a tone-policing asshole or be called out on their shit or have to avoid using slurs to refer to people is someone who doesn’t know what the fuck they are talking about.
And Joyce. I’m saying they BOTH deserve fandom support, rather than almost everyone bashing Becky because she doesn’t act like, as Carla would say, “That Perfect Girl.”
As people have said before about the members of the Brown family, it’s the eyes, and John doesn’t have the big blue soulful eyes, so I was just sort of waiting for this.
Doesn’t stop me from being pissed off, because I’ve been the Joyce here before. Haven’t we all been in Joyce’s place here before?
It’s actually not that. The eyes thing is actually due to Willis’s character design method. Basically, everyone in the comic has the hair color of their same sex parent and the eye color of their opposite sex parent. Jocelyne’s hair and eye color are a subtle cue about her being transgender, while John’s hair and eye color mean absolutely nothing.
Oh, THAT’S what people are doing when they say I’m too upset and need to calm down, causing me to get more upset and eventually unable to form a coherent argument as my emotions lead to a mental overload
I would argue that pointing out someone’s anger and inviting them to calm down is in fact perfectly okay… so long as it’s not used to silence them. Honestly, arguing with an angry person is unpleasant for everyone involved, and anger can in fact prevent one from thinking rationally. That said, while anger makes a person more likely to use invalid arguments, it does not in itself make arguments invalid. Using a person’s anger as an excuse to dismiss their arguments (as John clearly does here) is wrong. Simply inviting someone to calm down a little is not.
I’ve never seen ‘calm down’ actually calm somebody down.
Better choices, depending on the person, include: “I hear you,” “That sounds super frustrating,” “Yes, that is important, justasec though, shouting scares me” and, best of all, repeating back what they said verbatim. That last one always feels like it’s going to be totally weird and lengthy, but then it isn’t, it’s super helpful to proving to the person that they are heard. Pro-tip!
Yeah, just anything that opens up to a discussion. Something that says “I understand you’re angry but let us discuss this anger in a calm fashion” without saying all that.
Saying “Calm down” has maybe Never worked. In the history of conversation. Something like “I hear you, it IS terrible… but you don’t have to yell. I’m sitting right here,” often WILL work.
But really, you’re saying the exact same thing with a different tone. In both cases, you’re inviting the person to calm down, only in the second option you’re trying to do it in a way the person’s more likely to respond to. Basically, you’re changing the way you’re phrasing your thoughts because you’re expecting the other person to tone police you.
No. You aren’t. Calm down is a command. It is not an invitation. And it contains absolutely no claim of understanding. It shows no compassion.
And that’s not what tone policing is. Tone policing is saying “because you are angry, you are wrong.” The only way you can tone police yourself is if you got some serious self-hatred going on. I’m pretty sure Amber does it to herself all the time.
And it is such a common one if you argue with men, honestly. Can’t tell you how many times I have absolutely calmly replied to utter shit with a point by point shut down (one nontheless less vehement or long as their thing) and been told ‘Calm down!’ often followed by an implication that I would see they were right if I weren’t so emotional (because nigh-robotic = emotional).
It’s also worth noting that one of those refers to emotions (“what you are feeling is wrong, please stop”) whereas the other refers to actions (“the way you are expressing your emotions is making me uncomfortable, please find another way”). One is infinitely more actionable than the other.
The correct response is not “you need to control your anger”, the correct response is “I realize that I did something wrong by provoking your anger and would like to take it back and correct it.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll buy a cup of lemonade if you buy a box of my delicious Girl Scout cookies. Do we have a deal?”
“Are they made from real Girl Scouts?
Jesus fucking Christ John you are an asshole to the ninth degree, not to mention one of the worst older brothers in existence. I dearly hope the other Brown siblings aren’t as much of a dismissive asshole as you.
Anyone else get the feeling the plan was for John and “Josh” to get Joyce alone so she could hear from her siblings how toedad was doing the right thing? Between Joyce caring more about Becky than her fundie upbringing and Jocelyne not being anything like her parents and brother think, this was probably the only possible outcome of this meeting.
Did Carol even know this was happening? Joyce stole the family car.
…okay, granted, they were awake at the time and cars aren’t exactly quiet, but still. You would think that if they were aware they would’ve called her themselves.
I think what Nemirthel is suggesting is that Carol decided that Joyce is already upset at her mom and has already shown she’s willing to stand up to her parents, so she’s not listening to ‘reason’ because her emotions are in the way.
So instead of trying to confront Joyce again she asked if John and Jocelyne could talk to her because she figured then Joyce wouldn’t be as defensive. Plus, John tried to get Joyce to come without Becky (to which Joyce responded that Becky is family), again because Becky being around must be interfering and turning her against the family.
(Carol did know, John asked if their parents had told Joyce about meeting him and Jocelyne for lunch).
Oh, and Joyce was screening her phone for calls from her mom, so Carol wouldn’t have been wrong if she decided Joyce would be more likely to listen to siblings instead.
Of course it was. It was also part of the plan to soft sell Joyce on their mother’s plan to get her to drop out of that awful secular college that’s turning her away from Jesus. They were there to give her the swindle and make it look like it was her decision in the end. They’d even pray over it together.
Two things fret me at this point – 1) Jocelyne looks actively sick about this whole situation, there’s going to be a major issue around her – probably soon; and 2) Now that Carol’s “Plan A” has failed, what horrible tactic is she going to try as a backup?
Yeah, and now I’m really worried that since John has said the same thing, that he’ll verify to his mother that “yes, she does need to leave that school it’s *changed* her” and with that extra confirmation Carol will go ahead with removing her from school. I really feel like we’re going to see Joyce fighting to stay at IU coming up soon, which sounds absolutely terrifying. 🙁
I think the original intent was just catching up with their sister without their parents around. Behaving differently around different social combinations is a thing, right? It can’t just be me. I mean, my base personality doesn’t change or anything, but some topics are taboo with my dad/stepmom that aren’t with my mom (I would say “and vice versa” but she and I can talk about almost anything lol), so I tend to bite my tongue more when it comes to them.
Annnyway, getting back to the comic, I was going to suggest that they wanted to see how the last few weeks/months had treated Joyce, but clearly john isn’t interested in his baby sister having learned that there are things in the world that anger her and that it’s OK to express that anger.
I’m really hoping joss shoots her a quick text offering to listen with an open heart, so she knows at least one of her sibs aren’t close-minded.
I’ve had it ringing in my head, every time he’s jerkier, the car conversation. ‘We’re foing for lunch. Mom told you about that, right?’ (on mobile, can’t get the page, but that’s at least 80% correct.)
Joyce has every right to be angry and upset but she also needs to talk about her anger unfortunately the people who are supposed to be there for her, her family, are too absorbed in themselves to care. Her mother is a self righteous witch, her father is too timid to speak up and voice his opinions, John is too ignorant and self absorbed in his life to really listen to what Joyce is saying and Jocelyne, bless her soul because I know she wants do right by Joyce, but she’s doesn’t want to draw attention to herself so she doesn’t speak up for her sister. It’s sad when you can’t rely on your family.
He’s literally the worst! Like, indefensible! Everyone in the comments who want to “wait and see” STOP. It’s clear at this point that he knows he’s wrong but just doesn’t give a shit. I never thought I’d see him walk out, as if HE should be offended when his sister a lost died. The worst part is that every time I want to write it off as, “Nah, Willis is playing this guy up for Drama, people aren’t this unreasonable.” one of you will come along and explain how something similar happened to you. And I can’t decide if that’s more saddening or infuriating.
Seriously, many of us who were saying this a while ago could /feel it coming/ because we have had to learn to detect this to Survive.
The fact that a good half of the comments were “I don’t wanna judge too quickly, maybe it’s a misunderstanding” (in an arc titled “when god closes the door”)….. y’all maybe see how we felt a little like Joyce here, a little “you’re being too harsh and extreme and unreasonable”?
Joyce should have hit him where it hurt. She should have called him a Fake Christian for turning his back on his family. There are a lot of things she could have said, but in the heat of the moment, I am not surprised she didn’t.
What would be the point? Pouring oil on the fire has never accomplished anything. If all you can do is insult someone, no matter how much they deserve it, you’re better off just walking away.
Yes and no. For someone stubborn that wouldn’t do anything. But when Joyce called out her parents for their mistreatment of Dorothy, citing that Jesus wouldn’t have wanted/supported mistreating others, Joyce’s dad reconsidered his stance. It doesn’t have to be petty if what you’re saying is accurate.
But that’s not what Just Me was suggesting. They were suggesting that Joyce should have called him a Fake Christian not in an attempt to invite him to reconsider his stance, but because it would “hit him where it hurt.” That would serve absolutely no purpose. If she started acting that way… well, that would make John entirely justified in walking away here.
Honestly, considering Joyce said she thought she was going to die, and John’s reaction was to walk away dismissing her, I don’t think she could have said anything to actually get his attention. He’s in a mode where he thinks of her as a hysterical woman and that nothing she has to say is valid.
Is anyone else really hoping the person she was texting is Ruth, so John can lose femurs? I mean, it is a long shot, with Ruth being Ruth, and having Billie and Mary issues, but come on.
Given what we’ve seen when we cut away to Ruth and Carla it seems unlikely Ruth is doing anything but lying in bed with the curtains closed and something over her eyes.
Here’s hoping Josh dies horribly in the next panel. Come on Davis, you can do it! Just tweak the next few upcoming strips! You know how satisfying it would be for everyone!
Yeaaahhh…I was really trying to have your back John…I actually legitimately was but nope. You had to piss it away. Oh well there’ll be more lost causes to try and fight.
Yeah, but you’re not a fundamentalist douchebag who’s invested in minimizing what happened to her and enforcing the ‘proper’ behaviour of a ‘good, godly woman’.
You know… I’m wondering if at some point in all this, Joyce is going to let it slip to her family about the sexual assault attempt. She purposefully didn’t tell them because she knew they’d take her out of college.
But at some point in all this, it may all be blowing up, and it will end up coming out.
That would be a mistake because her family would just assume that Joyces “outbursts” are all to do with that incident and nothing to do with her Mom and brother being completely hypocritical bigots
Yeah, because obviously she seduced him and is just lying about the rest. Theb she ASSAULTED him! So people wouldn’t find out! (/sarcasm, noted because holy shit there are some awful, though temporary, commenters sometimes)
All of this. A family that victim blames her about nearly being murdered will definitely not hesitate to victim blame her for nearly being raped. Especially since all of society is only too happy to help on the victim-blaming for that.
It’s not hard to imagine how their response would begin. “What were you doing going to a party? You know unwholesome things happen at parties.” If Joyce is lucky they won’t pull out the really big guns of victim blaming, like asking what she was wearing, or what she might have done to “lead him on.”
I’ve seen people argue that a woman in jeans and a t-shirt was dressed in a way that was “asking for it”, and flat out mean it. They’d probably argue the turtleneck must have been too tight without breaking their victim-blaming stride.
Shouting always makes people look guilty. I still happily remember when I got my brother grounded by calmly lieing while he shouted the truth… I’m probably a horrible person.
I’d say John is confirmed as a total pig, but pigs are cute and intelligent animals that actually make for good companions.
There’s no excuse for his behavior. The suggestion that he just doesn’t know what really happen doesn’t fly now, because if he actually gave a damn and was just misinformed, then he’d care about the emotional state she’s in instead of stomping off because she’s not acting pleasant.
I think the stomping off is more of an excuse. Joyce just dropped three facts: almost died, Becky kidnapped, family making excuses for it. They are indisputable. With John siding with the excuse-makers, the ONLY rebuttal he has is to criticize how Joyce is arguing rather than the argument itself, because regardless of the excuses, it’s pretty hard to argue facts. And they are hard facts to swallow. So he objects to her emotions and uses it as his out so he doesn’t have to think about it too carefully.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Similar to how Walky was in denial and dismissing Sal’s argument over their mom’s racism and favoritism, I think the only way John will face those facts is if he were witnessing it firsthand.
Also, Panel 2 is where Joyce gets it for real, what we’ve talked about before, the whole “your life is worth less than my sense of self-righteousness” axis of hell that all of this follows nearly all of the time.
You want to know what’s a good example of a bad brother? Walking out on your younger sister when she’s finally unloading and opening up about being stressed out and deciding not to talk it out with her when you have the given opportunity. Just taking her out of school and not bringing it up again won’t solve shit especially since the problem that’s stressing her out didn’t come from school but from her own freaking family.
Ohhhh, this fucking argument makes me see red. You can be calm about it because you have no skin in the game, you colossal jerkwad, you can afford to be all sanctimonious and “calm down”. And yeah, I am very well acquainted with the “I want to throw something but that would be actually violent and I’m better than that” response.
Poor Jocelyne, too. I can’t imagine how knotted up she must be over this one. I hope she gets screentime to talk it out soon.
See also, why I flat-out refuse to discuss issues of bigotry with philosophers and philosophy majors. Nice of you to navel gaze about the philosophical theory of the ethics of protest (that always seems to rest on the conclusion that people bucking the status quo are wrong), jackass, but down here in the real world this stuff that is happening actually hurts my friends and family who have neither the time nor the emotional resources to devote to reading a 20,000 word essay about your navel gazing as you do that philosophy thing of “The more words I throw at it and the more arcane and dehumanizing language I use, the more right I am and if you can’t see it, it’s because you don’t understand Philosophy, not because I don’t understand the issues at play because not having all the facts is apparently irrelevant in philosophy.”
(I have had almost that exact argument used on me by more than one actual philosophy professors, so don’t “no true philosopher” about it to me. Self-identified philosophers are jackasses who are more concerned with feeling comfortable and correct in their ivory tower than actually understanding what’s going on. John would be great at that)
Don’t feel too sad. He most certainly would’ve been a homophobic ass if he’d been allowed to. You just didn’t count on Joyce stopping him before that happened.
I see a lot of people call him a prick muffin and after a 3 day bender of watching Bojack Horseman i can only relate it to a pet name for a daughter or a euphemism for vagina.
John is a little bit right. Joyce has a lot to be upset about, and she is justified in those feelings and justified in wanting to express them. But there isn’t much point in making a public scene like that. Nor will vitriol sway any opinions. One must make the effort to be diplomatic if they want to debate something honestly.
No. John isn’t trying to debate. He’s not engaging in good faith, and he has no interest in a discussion. He just wanted to speak down to Becky and he started condescending and tone-policing when Joyce called him out on it.
Nonsense. I mean, sure, Joyce maintains that Becky is quote-unquote “human” and that she quote-unquote “deserves to live”, but have we truly debated that in the civil emotionless regard of our robot overlords?
Who is to say what is right or wrong, who did or did not have a gun pointed at her face and fired and who is or isn’t being an incredible victim-blaming tone-policing pile of scum.
After all, debating people’s humanity and dismissing their lived experiences has never led to bad ends reinforcing bigotry and creating endless bad laws that leads to increased harassment and physical harm, right?
Bob save us from Debate Club escapees who think “everything is a debate” and that one’s life experiences can be dismissed if they aren’t “diplomatic” enough.
Yes however he is doing it the wrong way. Demanding instead of asking, and being unwilling to hear her out. He doesn’t want to hear from this broken Joyce he wants to hear from his perfect baby sister. And for that he is in the wrong. Rather than shun her anger he should be accepting of it but he should also be asking why and trying to find a solution to her anger, which is a symptom of her fear that all her beliefs she once held dear are wrong. This is not the way to deal with this situation from John or Joyce. Though in Joyce’s defense I find her reactions quite justifiable.
Someone goes through that, almost dies, realizes they have been complicit in hate alll their lives and that their own family is more concerned with preservation of the bigoted positions than even considering reality, the onus is NOT on them to adhere to some nebulous idea of respectable and civil debate.
Joyce is hurt. John willfully hurt her more. She reacted. The blame falls entirely on John for being hurtful, not on Joyce for defending herself against him.
I don’t care what your belief system is, if someone points a gun at your sibling and you are not AT LEAST AS MAD, IF NOT MORE MAD ABOUT IT TGAB THEY ARE, you are fucked up.
Okay, throw everything I said yesterday out the window, John is an ass. Though I understand his concern he is expressing it in the completely worst way. Instead of trying to command her to settle down he could’ve politely asked her to calm down and discuss all the reasons shes so angry. While the events of the last few weeks have been the final blows to Joyce’s view of her family and worldview. Lets not forget the memories of the assault at the beginning of the semester, as well as her families reaction to Dorothy as well during parent weekend. The problem is nobody else in her family eally knows everything that has happened to her this semester. I was hoping John was just inadvertently being as ass but I hate this holier than thou attitude he’s displaying. I may be a believer myself but I realize that acting like some perfect human who has everything figured out is the wrong way to go, because I’m not and I don’t and i fuck up all the time. We all fuck up sometimes, that’s what makes us human. But
He does not have any concern about Joyce the person to begin with, so there’s nothing there to understand. He’s only concerned with how the family should be Perfect in the Eyes of God. It’s not about humans, all about the religion. He’s pretty much the same as Toedad in that regards.
If he had any concern about Joyce whatsoever, he would -not- f.ex. though of Joyce punching Toedad as more extreme than Toedad’s actions to begin with.
I find it really hard to not relate to John right now. I mean, his position is wrong, but his reaction is exactly what I do. I can’t do aggressive conflict, I can’t do yelling. Whenever I got mad at home, I would lose. So whenever I get in a disagreement, I always end up staying really calm and isolating myself emotionally. If John came from a household where getting angry only made them punish you worse for being wrong as opposed to making people listen to your point, getting up and leaving is a natural reaction.
John isn’t leaving because he can’t handle noisy conflict. He’s leaving because he has literally no other way to preserve his superiority in the face of Joyce’s indisputable truth than by deflecting attention to her tone and condescending to her because of it.
Exactly. John would’ve left even if Joyce had just explained her position calmly and rationally. He is not leaving because of Joyces tone, but because he refuses to tolerate her not sharing his worldview anymore.
“Sure, your best friend was kidnapped and you almost died, but you’re RAISING YOUR VOICE IN A PUBLIC PLACE YOUNG LADY AND THAT’S JUST INEXCUSABLE! I will now take my leave and bid you good day!”
“Josh” is irritatingly spineless. All things considered, that should probably have been expected. But it it only became irritating with firsthand experience.
I’m hoping Joss thinks of that. Whether sje says she’s staying with Joyce or just ‘no, been a while since I was here, I wanna walk around town. I’ll get myself home later.’
(I also don’t think she’s spineless. She already tried to diffuse the situation a couple times. Self preservation matters, not to mention that John is giving her a taste of what will happen if she comes out)
I wouldn’t call her spineless considering that she’s a victim in this too and not just a bystander? She has essentially everything to lose from her family as well.
I… really, really want to just skip to the part where everyone either figures out they’re being utter dicks and fixes it, or gets cast aside by those who do figure it out. But… reading this is also really, really painful. Hitting way close to home… I’m not really sure I can keep reading without it basically just being a daily update to my depression…
You are definitely not alone in this. Lots of people are here in doses that they have chosen carefully for themselves, like weekly or monthly when they want an update that might hit them so hard in the feels.
If you ever prefer to take a break, now or in the future, for your own happiness, it’s cool and we’ll still be here when you get back. <3
It’s an unfortunate part of our world that people tend to equate being emotional to being unreasonable.
I’m sure no one has really told this to you in your life, so I guess I’ll say this: it’s okay to feel like crap sometimes. Hell, if your life sucks enough, it’s okay to feel like crap a lot. Being sad, or angry, or afraid, are all perfectly reasonable things to feel under the right circumstances. Anyone who tries to delegitimize your feelings, who tries to tell you to calm down without trying to understand why you’re feeling the way you feel, isn’t interested in helping you deal with your problems; instead, they just want you to stop making their life more inconvenient.
That being said, it’s okay if the comic is hitting a bit too close to home. Davis is exceptionally skilled at hitting people right in the feels, and if you’re already in a vulnerable emotional state, this sort of thing might not help. Then again, I personally find it helps to know there’s someone out there who’s dealt with the same shit I have, so different strokes for different folks, I suppose.
Damn it. Can’t win all of them over. Putting the Browns along a spectrum for acceptance, from Joss to Carol, with Hank in the middle, I was hoping for between Joss and Hank, not within throwing distance of Carol.
Every day (in universe), Joyce grows. But she’s a main character. But the Browns? Exist to challenge and contrast her. In the end, she’ll be a better person for this.
Drama tag? Prepulled. Looking to feel good? Go somewhere else. Looking to feel, and gain insight to not only the human condition, but yourself? Pull up a chair. I do not damn you, Willis. I thank you, for putting a piece of yourself into this comic. This comic lives because of your soul, and the growth and pains you have felt and fought your life.
I keep forgetting their last name, so when I see it, I think of the Cleveland Browns. As far as acceptance goes, I think they get points for dumping Johnny Manziel and giving Robert Griffin another chance.
And there it is … that predictable reaction I’ve been waiting to see for the last two panels. Any response other than Joyce knuckling down and quietly returning to the fold was going to be an unacceptable response for John.
He had no intention of actually talking to Joyce from the moment she told him that Becky would also be present. This entire meeting has confirmed for him that Joyce needs an intervention before she’s completely lost to Satan’s Lies(tm). Their mother will be so pleased to learn that her judgement was righteous, and now she can justify her own extreme steps to “save” Joyce.
What is John’s deal? I mean WTF? He seems to act like this is over someone getting dumped or something petty, what joyce and becky went through was not petty it was a big crazy wtf situation that is affecting everyone but Joyce’s family, they act like its nothing!
Yes but you see all that drama could have been avoided if Joyce had done the reasonable Christian thing and turned Becky over to her father. [/sarcasm]
His culture works with one hard and fast rule of morality. Those within are good. That which contradicts the party line is evil.
If he’s to accept that someone, motivated from his culture’s party line, could do evil, he’d have to doubt that single hard and fast rule of tribal goodness. Just getting Joyce to do that has months in the comic.
“You guys are being assholes and acting as if what happened to my friend and I mean nothing.”
“I’m not taking part in this conversation, good bye sis.”
He pretty much proved her point by just DROPPING the discussion and WALKING AWAY. Yet again, he is disregarding what happened to her. And of course we’ve got some good old fashioned ‘I don’t like what you’re becoming, that college is changing you’. I don’t doubt that John is sincerely ‘worried’ about Joyce. But he’s being an asshole. A biiiiiig asshole.
To be fair, they usually do. But John is not being either of those things. And if he is going to claim that this is Becky’s own fault for being a lesbian, based on the evidence of a book he genuinely believes was created from divine magic, he can’t really claim the intellectual high ground.
Also, you can be logical and still not be a condescending douchebag to someone you know is going through emotional trauma, and in all likelihood PTSD.
Damn. Another one of my few hopes regarding the rest of Joyce’s family crushed. Also, another jerk character that looks eerily like a family member. With the same name this time too…
I like how “college” changed her for the worse and not tramatic ordeal caused by a person from her home town. Too much diversity is bad because someone may shoot you to “recenter” you.
Yeah, at this point ToeDad is basically going… “um, remember me? Looks like a toe, Gun to the face? Give me some credit here.”
John: “You were only a symptom of a deeper change that had to do with going to college.”
Carol: “You poor man, one must understand what you have been going through.”
John’s probably heard many a tale of a good Christian (the kind that he would recognize as a Christian, anyway) going off to College only to come back having doubted the obvious truth of things like the literal 6 day Creation and even considering that Christianity, itself, might not be the truest of the true (assuming they even acknowledge that there’s a difference).
He likely also knows that trauma, like someone pointing a gun at you, is *supposed* to bring someone closer to God, like how that liberal blogger in God’s Not Dead converted when she found out she had cancer.
Therefore, obviously, the problem is College, not any kind of trauma. That’s not according to script at all.
Hes an insincere weasel, dont give him any credit.
He was sent here to spy on Joyce, gain her confidence and use it against her.
John is moms spy and she wants reasons to pull Joyce out of college.
John has screwed up and telegraphed this fact. He is just more victim-blaming.
And he is threatening Joyce, and then saying your negative reaction justifies why I set this lunch up to betray You.
Patriarchy! For when you absolutely MUST ignore a woman’s opinion over night!
But don’t take it from us, listen to our endorsements:
John from La Porte: Patriarchy allowed me to dismiss my sister’s experiences of nearly being murdered from a member of our church while still pretending to be the good guy. Thanks, Patriarchy!
Yes, Patriarchy for all your “being an ass” needs. Now in new victim-blaming favor!
John taking his ball and going home
not ordering from the children’s menu = CONFIRMED
You’re psychic!
Hmm after john is gone she could still order from the children’s menu
John is not God, no matter what he seems to think.
So God would still witness her ordering from the children’s menu.
I am worrying that they can’t order anything because they don’t have any money with them. Becky doesn’t, would Joyce?
They might as well order something any way. It won’t matter after the police come to arrest them for stealing her parents car.
and because he’s calm, it show’s that he:
a) is a good person
b) is right in this exchange
c) doesn’t care as much as joyce about all this stuff
…d) is jocelyne’s ride home
Damn, what is that fallacy called? I’m sure there must be a name for it, I’ve seen it before. That sort of idea that “you’re angry, so your argument is invalid.”
Tone policing?
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of. It’s not a fallacy, per se, but it’s some bullshit.
To be fair, he also is using logical fallacies in his argument, specifically there’s Argument ad hominem, argument from (personal) incredulity, and appeal to the stone. If I knew how to link I would, so here’s the gist:
Ad Hominem – Evading Joyce’s point with subtle attacks about her anger
(Personal) Incredulity – I don’t believe it could happen therefore it’s false/unjustified.
Appeal to the Stone – Dismissing a claim as absurd without proof of its absurdity.
Absolutely. His argument (well, he’s not really making an argument, but the thing he’s doing that resembles an argument) is ridiculously, blatantly fallacious, and Joyce’s family really needs to get themselves schoolfed on some Aristotle.
As if they would ever, he was a “filthy pagan”
No, he’s making an argument. He is 100% trying to convince Joyce of something. He provided the comment about anger as a way to try and counter her statement.
It’s extremely fallacious arguing, but it’s still arguing.
Oh wait the one in this strip is the Moral High Ground fallacy, through the medium of Tone Policing, John is attempting to make himself look good to win the argument.
I’ve found that being right is no good if you can’t get people to stick around and listen to you. I think Joyce is totally in the right here, and I’m on her side– but sadly, the world isn’t an idyllic place where the people in the right always get to be heard.
I agree Inkblot. That’s a lesson that took me years to learn. Controlling your (very appropriate) anger is extremely difficult, but it can be necessary if you want certain people on your side.
I’m lucky to have a dad that discussed difficult subjects that we often disagreed about openly, calmly. He would frequently say (and still does) “okay, you’re getting really upset about this. Let’s change the subject and come back to it another time” which can be enraging, but the thing is, he doesn’t use it to shut me down. He actually has no qualms about discussing the same subject again when we’re both feeling more level-headed.
When I was Joyce’s age and younger, I frequently got angry with Dad because he thought my gay friends were bad influences. Or that it was fine to be gay, but not fine to “act on those urges and feelings.” I’d get so angry that I’d end up screaming and fighting the urge to throw anything within reach.
As we discussed this more and more, though, I got better at controlling my temper, expressing my own views and at least appearing calm and level-headed. By the time I was 20, I’d convinced dad that being gay was not a sin (and that even if it is, that’s between that person, their god, and no one else.). By the time I was 25 I’d convinced him that allowing straight people to get “married” and same-sex couples to have “civil unions” was tantamount to modern-day segregation (in that “separate but equal is inherently unequal”).
When I was about 27 or 28, discussions between us had convinced him that same-sex couples deserved completely equal marriage rights and all that went with it, and he advocated for it within our very Conservative family and celebrated with me last year when the ruling was made.
It can be very useful to be able to control that anger and express yourself calmly.
All that said, I don’t think this is the time for that lesson for Joyce. She needs her family to stop shutting her down and actually listen to her. She’s feeling traumatized and going through a grieving process to deal with that trauma and the loss of who she was. And that’s being combined with her anger over Ross’ actions, her mother’s behavior toward Becky, and her family’s treatment of Dorothy, Becky and Joyce’s new life overall. She needs a safe place and safe people to express that anger with and to help her cope.
While actually running away from the whole issue, which didn’t register with him much at all in lieu of Joyce’s inconvenient, embarrassing display of emotion.
@Annie
A lot of people wouldn’t have the strength/patience to manage what was essentially a near-decade campaign that completely changed someone’s opinion on homosexuality. I fully understand people who can’t face that, but I’m hella impressed that you did. Well done!
Thank you, Liam. I’m very proud of my dad. When most people in his generation narrow their views as they age, he broadened his. He a compasionate person that truly wants equality for everyone. I just couldn’t bring myself to write him off as a lost cause. So I kept talking to him about it, eventually learning to speak calmly rather than blowing up like I wanted to. Like I really, really wanted to.
Joyce’s dad reminds me of my dad, honestly. We’d have a big discussion and maybe get a little mad at each other. Then two days, a week, a month later he’d tell me “you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said about x. And, I see your point. I think you’re absolutely right.”
It’s a good feeling to hear that. I definitely identified with her in her conversation with her dad on the way home.
@Annie What Joyce wants and needs, she may never be able to get. In my experience, extend across those I know and have encountered, people would rather abandon their family altogether, in favor of maintaining their pride and prejudice. I mean, the sins, not the book.
The book also, maybe, people are pretty silly in their priorities. 😛
Anyway, as Willis’s handling of Becky’s dad shows, he’s not hesitant to adhere to real world predictability in such matters, so this may turn out to create a schism in Joyce’s family- much like it does for a great many people in real life.
Given that your interpretation of Joyce’s dad seems spot on, he’s likely to be the one who ends up getting caught in the middle of it all- he doesn’t seem the sort who’d abandon Joyce, or even Jocelyn. He seems to have too much affection and dutifulness toward his children to give up on them altogether, or to outright hate them for something like that [even if his response may be rather less than positive at first].
Desires to support both sides and to keep the family held together over holding on to pettyness and hate..
This could get rather the ugly situation for him. :/
Anyway, kudos to your dad. Giving up something like that is like confronting a deep addiction. It takes dedication, a willingess to confront your flaws, and a desire to improve yourself for those you care about.
Big hug next time you see him, okay? 🙂
Also, if I am remembering tumblr posts properly, given Willis’ own life, and that Joyce’s journey is somewhat reflective of Willis’… I believe you are correct in your suspicion that a schism in the family is coming somewhere down the road.
This is more than tone policing. It’s emotional invalidation. John isn’t just telling Joyce to “calm down”. He’s telling he she has no right to be angry in the first place.
What better way to rationalize possible denial about neurosis with dealing with people…
I’m frankly surprised the guy didn’t use the phrase “female hysteria”… though he clearly demonstrated that he was thinking in such a blindly illogical direction about Joyce’s bearing and demeanor in this conversation.
It’s folks like him who give disciplined conflict avoidance a bad name. And by “folks like him”, I suppose I mean bigots.
I wonder where he’ll be when the intolerance of intolerance catches up with him?
^ this
“gdi joyce your uterus started flying around again”
I think it has more to do with a flaky attempt to deny strong emotophobia than committing to any kind of bigotry.
Ross spoke like a ye olden days Puritan Preacher to cover up being a selfish, unsuccessful, glorified man-baby still trying to emulate the ‘cool kids’ who used to torture him for falling shorter of the ‘All-American’ ideal than average due to a low IQ and being a runt (none of that is confirmable, but he sure painted that kind of picture, damn…) at the expense of his adult life and everyone else in it.
John’s pretenses of maturity here serve to downplay what looked to me, since they arrived at the restaurant, as a man suffering from disruptive levels emotophobia and in complete denial about it.
I prefer the term gaslighting.
Also appropriate. Although, John’s execution a such an act of manipulation is pathetically poor.
It’s gaslighting (“Don’t you think that was an extreme reaction”) plus tone policing plus a whole ton of condescension.
I thought gaslighting was changing things about the physical area the victim is in to slowly erode the victim’s sanity, not just blatantly ignoring parts of events to minimize the emotional response as “extreme”
You don’t have to actually change the physical world. However you convince the target that their perception was wrong qualifies. Having people who should know better back your version of events and not the targets would work, for example.
I guess it’s a bit of a stretch here, but trying to twist the target’s understanding of what happened, so that Toedad really wasn’t doing anything that bad is at least along the same lines.
“If you are angry/emotional, then your argument is invalid.”
There is no correlation between those two clauses. It’s ad hominem, a fallacy of irrelevance, attacking the credibility of the person instead of the credibility of their argument.
It’s based on something that is relevant though. The idea that, “If you are angry/emotional, then your ability to act logically is impaired.” I’d say that that is likely to be true, but assuming that it /must/ be true is also a fallacy, an appeal to probability.
Oops, too late! Kudos to Harvey Janus!
There is that “whoever loses their temper first, loses the argument” homily. Which we all know is BS, especially when dealing with the ideology indoctrinated.
Indeed. It’s a hallmark of identity politics in the modern age that stretches from the playground to the media, and it really needs to pack its bags and leave. It has overstayed its welcome and needs to leave before it takes up permanent residence in the US and in global culture at large.
I think it’s an Ad Hominem Argument cause he’s essentially saying her argument is invalid due to her character (or anger in this case).
He’s victim-blaming, yet at the same time he has no logical defense for his position. Instead he goes on the offensive, using emotional blackmail and character attacks in an attempt to shut Joyce down. This is pretty much what Carol did to her.
He may only have a skewed version of the story to work from, but even if Joyce were calm enough to be worth listening to (in his mind), he probably wouldn’t be receptive to the truth.
So much for the ‘Brown siblings get more indoctrinated the younger they are’ theory.
Wasn’t that theory out the window when Jordan was mentioned as being “Too Jordan” to go to Freshman Family Weekend?
And victim-blaming is one form of Argument Ad Hominem (Attacking the person not the argument)
I believe the term you’re looking for is Argumentum ad Umadbroium.
hah! that went way over my head. i actually googled it before i noticed what you did with ‘umadbro’
e) doesn’t fully understand the situation.
f) you see kay
…sorry
Tell him he may.
You don’t have to shout when you’re mouthing the words of the hegemony, to the tune of the dominant ideology. #lipsync
A few (cerebral) Christians have extremely patronizing attitudes towards other Christians who do “un-Christian” things with intent – in other words, who embrace “heresy”.
In this case, John seriously doubts the rightness of Joyce’s actions; but Joyce insists on her rightness unapologetically. Furthermore, she expresses anger. Open expression of anger has quite limited legitimate usages according to many varieties of Christianity; outside of that, it might even be regarded as sinful.
His calmness seems to be a display of contempt. I’ve experienced similar myself.
Didn’t seem all that concerned with Joyce’s actions or why she would feel the desire to do or think such things. Came off like he was more bothered by all the scary intemperance that came with it, like that was a greater concern.
Seriously, Joyce almost *threatened* him a panel or two back, and he was bothered enough by how he noticed she sounded angry when she said it to *treat that part like it was the only thing wrong about the threat*.
Doubtful he gave so much thought on whether or not Joyce was being Unchristian in her actions once he saw that there was anger behind it.
I get that you’re not exactly defending him, but it’s worth pointing out that being calm does not make a person correct, morally or factually.
Is Joyce presenting the best form of her position? Not really, no, but in her defense, this is the first time she’s ever been confronted with a situation where she clearly sees where right and wrong lie and her family does not unanimously agree with her. To add to that, she is trying to deal with the very difficult realization that at least some of the things she was taught to believe as absolute, literally god-given truth, are also wrong (and also slowly coming to wonder how much else of her bedrock principles are in the same boat and she just hasn’t seen them yet). Dealing with all of that, on top of the very real trauma she has so recently endured, and her fear for her friend, and it’s hardly surprising she’s having trouble keeping her emotions in check.
The fact that her older brother fails to see any of that, if anything, makes him more wrong still for expecting her to NOT be angry. His lack of empathy, inability to recognize the threat she endured as real, and attempt to police her demeanor are all part and parcel of that. He’s not more credible because he’s calm – he’s just being a dick and hiding behind condescension.
I don’t know why, but I read all his lines in Frank Grimes’ voice…
Huh. That makes sense.
Right?
Who is Frank Grimes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer's_Enemy
Going home and talking to mom, who will now have back up on the whole “Joyce needs to come home from college because it’s making her less holy” thing, instead of “my daughter/my sister just went through something horrible and traumatic and needs a safe space” that Joyce’s dad seams to understand.
Anybody else hoping for a divorce where her dad still supports her at college?
They probably will separate someday, but it’s unlikely we’ll see it in DoA unless it’s the world’s fastest divorce outside Hollywood. (Freshman year has about 20 real-world years left in it at the comic’s current pace.)
If ‘the Jordan situation’ cracked their marriage, Joyce is a wedge making that crack wider. She’s exposing an irreconcilable difference in how Hank and Carol want to treat their children.
you know I kind of liked John at first cause he seemed so stable… now fuck him, fuck his wife who married this asshole and fuck his beliefs. Joyce has a right to be angry and trying to down grade her feelings makes him an ass. I am extra sensitive to this because I had a neighbor who was my age, race, and gender murders 3 doors down form me once and I know how scary it is to have your mortality brought into focus. SHE IS ALLOWED TO BE ANGRY!!!!
to be fair to the heretofore unseen Christi, they’re newlyweds–who knows if she got to see this side of him before marrying him (countless victims of domestic abuse will (or SHOULD) attest to their abusers hiding their asshole sides very well)
and by “newlyweds” I mean w/in the last year-ish
also we just heard about it, and even Joyce hasn’t met her yet
Chances are no one else in the family has….Probably how John likes it. Christi may feel the same way too.
But she is likely indoctrinated to the same beliefs as him. Raised in a similar way. My money is on his wife believing that John is in the right here. That Joyce shouldn’t be so angry and unreasonable because she has nothing to be angry and unreasonable about. Also that women should strive to always be happy and content with their lives and not stress out the men in their lives by yelling at them, nagging, etc. Because it’s only men who deal with the really stressful, difficult things in life.
(Also, fuck that mentality. I was raised with it to a degree. I’ve dealt with depression and anxiety since I was young and those “lessons” made it SO much worse.)
Oddly (or not), finding out that he was a missionary was a first red flag for me. He makes a living out of trying to force his religion and faith onto other people and treating third world countries as if they need to be saved from themselves instead of supporting them to help themselves?
Missionary work is based on colonisation and racism, and even if it’s well intentioned, it does strike as something only people who think they have a moral high ground would do.
(Do pardon if what I’m writing is confusing and so. English is my fourth language and I normally don’t talk about these subjects in it)
We have missionaries right here in the U.S. The Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses go door to door trying to convert people. So not all missionary work is based on colonialism and racism. That said, if he’s an overseas missionary (which it sounds like he is) then he’s probably part of that tradition.
That’s not missionary work; the Jehovah’s Witnesses are just proselytizing and evangelical behavior. But you’re right that there have been missionaries in the U.S.—out west, for the Native American Indians—and they most certainly were racist and colonizing, just as Nymphie says.
You want to talk about colonization and missionaries, you haven’t even touched the subject until you discuss the Jesuits.
Also, settler colonization is an ongoing process, not a single event. The Christians in the US who evangelize are absolutely connected to racism and colonization.
I mean he’s a missionary in INDIA. Sounds pretty Colonial to me.
Not confusing at all!
When I was a kid, I didn’t not understand missionary work or evangelism at all. I was always told that a person that’s never heard the word of God, if he dies, especially if he is a child, he will likely enter heaven. Because it’s not his fault that the Word has not reached him.
But I also knew that if someone came to me and said “I believe in this other god. You must believe in him too or you will be doomed after you die” I’d immediately dismiss them and their religion.
So, I figured that by evangelizing and doing missionary work people were dooming more of the people they encountered, who may have had a free ticket to heaven before.
I grew up around many large missions left over from when the Spanish conquistadors came here. I was always in awe of the architecture, art work (painted ceilings, rose windows, relief sculptures. Beautiful stuff!), and the historical significance (when you grow up in the shadow of the Alamo, it’s inevitable), but they also made me sad because they represented how many people I thought the missionaries doomed to hell by telling them to turn away from the gods they were raised to believe in and follow the Abrahamic god.
(To be clear, I’m an atheist now, but grew up in a mostly evangelical Christian family and considered myself a Christian until adulthood.)
Just thought it was worth mentioning, I know people who can’t make points nearly that clearly in English, and they don’t speak ANY other language.
It’s also a convenient excuse to move as far away from his family as possible while working at a gratifying job with no chance of failure. That too.
Strictly speaking, we shouldn’t diss his wife sight unseen. He might’ve hidden his more assholeish tendencies from her, or she might’ve come from a family that was equally or more horrible so she doesn’t realize she should have better standards. Give her a chance to call him an asshat and seek divorce before criticizing her.
I wanted to dismiss her just based off her name. You know “aww gawd. Her name is Christi. We know what kind of family she comes from.”
That was for about two seconds before I thumped myself in the head because my given name is very similar. In fact my childhood nickname was the same as hers. Just spelled differently. I just forgot because I really HATE using that name.
His “ball”? Is this like a unibrow? Or a cyclops? Do cyclopes have unibrows in general? They have only one eyeball but what about other balls?
“You other kids all suck and won’t play baseball the way *I* want to play baseball so I’m taking my bat and my ball and I’m going home! Now you can’t play without me. Nyeah. 😛 “
nah, I’m pretty sure he only has one gonad. too
One of my best friends has only one gonad and he greatly resents being associated with a homophobic butt-opening.
look, not all one-armed men are associated with killing Richard Kimble’s wife
anyway the one gonad could easily be post-this-entire-forum-kicking-him-in-the-unmentionables
joyce has gone Yang!
Like I said yesterday!
Doom Reigns.
Well shit, nevermind then.
Thanks for the Latverian weather update.
JOYCE SMASH
Joyce would make an excellent Hulk.
“JOYCE WANT SMASH, BUT TOO CONSCIENTIOUS A CITIZEN!”
haha ‘JOYCE MAD BECAUSE RELIGIOUS UPBRINGING CONFLICT WITH BELIEF IN INNATE GOODNESS OF HUMANITY’
“JOYCE ONLY PAWN, IN GAME OF LIFE.”
Dorothy: “Joyce, how do you deal with your insensitive relatives? Don’t they make you angry?”
Joyce: “That’s my secret, Dotty. I’m always angry.”
At this rate that line’s going to join the Bison quote in the filter….
Which Bison line?
‘For me, it was the second day of the week, the one named for the Norse God Tyr, although using a different variant of it.’
It was discussed (amongs all the other words that are filtered) in this thread.
(see comment from Orion Fury, 1:07 am).
Fun times.
He’s really more of a rook…
Like.
Throw trash nobody cares about that.
I could actually see her going around furiously picking up trash from empty tables and slamming it into the garbage can.
The serving staff appreciate it so much they cut her in on tips and ask if she’d like to pick up a few shifts.
… this is pretty much what I do. Am I extremely angry at everything? CLEAN AGGRESSIVELY. Slam trash in that trash can! Scrub with the fury of a thousand suns! Let the lid of the washing machine slam closed instead of lowering it quietly!
She graciously gives the job offer to Becky.
She would but John just left.
#rekt
But Mary and Roz are back at the collage.
I’m sure Roz has a wonderful collage of genitalia, but I sort of doubt that Mary wants to hang around it for very long.
Hey now, hey now! That’s somebody else’s treasure, right there! 😛
Nah, only one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I’ve never met him, and it’s statistically unlikely that he’s in the restaurant.
*plays some Bob Marley & The Wailers from the jukebox*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybmPHD7FPcQ <- Simmer Down
Not 7 “Whats new Pussycat” in a row?
We’d have to follow up with “It’s not Unusual” to enable the full effect.
When it comes to Tom Jones I’m on strike like Thunderball.
Well, I guess it’s safe to say John’s shit.
Yeah, he’s a total prickmuffin.
A Sodomuffin?
Are you kidding? John is probably the sort of person who calls people ‘sodomites’ and means it.
total cockwaffle
total douchecake
total assdonut
total jerkpie
ballcroissant
dickcannoli
schlubbienenstich
http://48bfc51361a55a01a028-17b283ac00835b5ced4db83c898330a1.r33.cf1.rackcdn.com/1645453_bf454b58_m.jpeg <- Now I'll never see the billboards that have THIS on them the same way again.
Asstard!
Fuckwhistle
Douchecanoe
Aren’t assdonuts already a thing?
I am partial to “douchenozzle” myself.
Douchecanoe
Shitweasel
cockwomble
Shitbiscuit
Crapbasket
Bileclog.
This one has my vote
I was really hoping he’d be an ok guy, too :<
Ditto. What a goshdarn disappointment.
Yes, there was a lot of that going around here. Me too. Not so much any more.
Yeah, he doesn’t seem *actively* evil… he’s just an insensitive, narrow-minded tool.
Yeah, but walking away when his little sister tells him she feared for her life is incredibly shitty. He does know Ross had a rifle pointed at her, right?
On the bright side, if this is what the Browns’ golden boy is like, then Jordan must be, like, the chillest dude who ever lived.
Didn’t Joss say she was the favorite?
Yeah, I suppose so.
Yeah, I’m wondering why everybody is saying John’s the ‘favourite’. The closest that anyone in the story has come to saying that is Hank saying he ‘turned out ok’. That’s not ‘favourite’, that’s ‘liked’.
Well, if past in-comic comments are any indication, Jordan’s pretty much actively attempted to escape his more religious parents after ‘they squeezed too hard’. If I remember correctly, he’s also the one in Afghanistan.
But I agree; Jordan’s probably gonna be pretty relaxed and cool.
We have no idea where Jordan is. You must be thinking of Danny’s brother.
Crap, yeah.
Sorry folks, I done goofed.
All we know from the in-universe conversation is that Jordan is the ‘black sheep’, probably a rebellion because of being pushed too hard by his parents (Hank seems much more trustworthy than Carol), and however that manifested, it kept him from attending Family Day.
We don’t know if their parents disowned him, if he split, if his rebellion landed him in jail, or what.
My personal theory is that he’s concerted to a church that’s too prejudiced and intolerant for the Browns to accept.
Either that or he’s making his living as a webcomic creator and Internet Pornlord. This is supposed to based on Willis’s family, right?
That would be “converted”, of course.
Wankstain
John is a garbage person CONFIRMED.
No one is a garbage person. He is simply a person who has made a mistake.
A garbage mistake?
A huuuuge garbage mistake. As well as having a garbage mental framework that he really ought to take a look at.
Eeeeh. I’ve met some people that I would categorize as absolutely worthless, dispicable human beings. I don’t know that John actually qualifies, but I disagree with the “no one is garbage” sentiment.
What John’s doing isn’t exactly impossible for anyone else, but ‘a mistake’ is seriously underestimating the number of errors he is making rn.
Well, John’s… I can’t put a finger on it, but I strongly, strongly dislike him and he makes me very uncomfortable.
The word you’re looking for is ‘prickmuffin.’
The word we were all looking for is ‘prickmuffin’. We didn’t know we needed that word until we found it, and then we knew it’s what we always wanted, all along.
It’s the Batman of words!
I am vengeance. I am the night. I am… PRICKMUFFIN.
I’m not sure what it means, actually. Under the right circumstances…
Sometimes, when a loves baked good very very much, there is s special hug
That is supposed to say:
‘sometimes when A MAN …
loves a baked good very very much, there is a special hug
….
Huzzah!
He’s dismissive of someone else’s legitimate concerns. He doesn’t treat Joyce’s pain or trauma as being serious or valid and that sort of response from someone that you think you can trust can actually contribute to PTSD. My family never took my sexual abuse seriously, and that might have led to self destructive behaviors and self perception on my part.
If not emotional abuse, it is at least emotional neglect.
Just wait until nighttime, douse the house in gasoline and burn them all Joyce. You can write some crazy message about escaping the sinfull world, it’ll all fit.
What? No, that’s horrible! What if the fire spreads to the homes of non-asshole neighbors?
Or Becky’s father’s house! Her social security card will be destroyed!
Now, now… Evil begets more evil.
Still fun, though.
So, I’m guessing the as-yet-unseen fourth sibling will be bringing some extra wrinkles to this little family drama…
I completely agree. My favorite for most likely scenario is he had a period of cognitive dissonance similar to what Joyce is having now, what they’ve been taught through religion isn’t matching real life, and got excommunicated from the family because of it, but Carol told Jocelyne and Joyce (possibly John) that it was all him. Possibly with some kind of threat to leave his siblings out of it or face some kind of consequence.
Ooooh noooo this feel is the worst feel
So frustrating auugghh
The feel of having concern for other people’s property? Yeah! That sucks!
:p
It honestly does, when you just want to smash something but everything within reach is either too expensive to replace or belongs to someone who hasn’t wronged you in any way.
Been there.
But I’m happy for the times I’ve had the feel of concern for property. When that feel wasn’t strong enough, I had to replace my broken phone :/ That sucks a lot more than not being able to smash things when you want to.
One time in college my pals and I went into the basement of our dorm with a huge pile of empty soda cans, and a baseball bat, and just smashed the hell out of them. It cost nothing, and was very satisfying, I recommend it.
Yeah! I recently demo-ed an old wooden deck for a job. Being able to attack something with a crowbar is pretty great! And all the more great because I could do it for work/fun, and not because I felt like I was going to explode if I didn’t break something.
Nice!
Some high school seniors near me had a fundraising with an old car and a baseball bat. Three swings for I think it was either a buck or five bucks.
I had to change a flat right beside them; they let me take a couple swings for free after out of sympathy. Sadly, the windows were already all smashed out but it was still fun.
I think they did pretty good out of it, too. Pretty ingenious way to raise money, heh. They were outside a local strip mall, so a high-traffic area.
That is a terrific idea. I bet they made so many dollars.
Well now you’re just tempting fate.
it really is it huuuuuuuuurts aaaack
Yikes. And yay!
Yaykes!
I know it’s not the main point of the strip, but I can’t focus on anything other than how scared Jocelyne looks.
THIS.
I know! Poor girl. I’m willing to bet that this feels a lot more personal for her than it does for anyone else in the family, except Joyce. Also “come along, I’ll take you home”. What a prickmuffin.
I really really wanna see Jocelyne stick around, somehow. But she seems a little freaked out to be standing up to John right now…
The curse of being reliant on other people for transportation.
Didn’t Joyce just drive over there herself? I don’t see why she couldn’t stay and talk things out, which is something Joyce definitely needs from her family right now
She’s the peacemaker. ‘Taking sides’ with Joyce and not listening to John would only get her involved in their drama.
Eh, she could stop John on the way out and suggest that she might be able to calm Joyce down if she stays. That doesn’t involve taking sides, and it lets her hang around to show support and comfort.
Joyce doesn’t own her own car, she took her parents’ car, she’s going to have to give it back fairly soon.
Luckily, Jocelyne appears in quite a few upcoming preview panels with Joyce and Becky, so there’s a good chance she’ll find a way out leaving tomorrow or the next day.
*a way out of leaving
TYPOS
HAHA YESSSS
I got that too.
Yeah, that really got my attention too. 🙁
Same. Poor Jocelyne, she just wants no fighting. -.-
And also probably a name and gender presentation that make her feel comfortable and herself, but she’ll totally settle for no fighting.
And some quality time with her cool little sis and her friend would be good too.
And some cookies, and time to write. Cookies for Jocelyne every day. And a funny cat. Yay, I like this plan.
I think she already has one.
Excellent.
Jocelyne’s in a terrible spot. She WANTS to stay and help Becky and help Joyce andshow her support and get everything out on the table… But if she does that, she’s revealing to John that she’s more okay with what Joyce just said than she’s supposed to be, and is going to have to explain herself, either now or later, and can she do that without saying something she can’t take back?
On the other hand, if she goes with John, he’s going to expect her to commiserate with him about what Joyce just did and what she’s becoming and so forth, and can Jocelyne make it through such a conversation without breaking cover and again saying something she can’t take back?
Lose/lose.
She’s not even allowed to break into tears from this lose-lose situation (which is what I would do in her position), ’cause men don’t cry.
Screw that rule. The Vikings had it right; if you’re afraid to show your tears you’re a coward.
A lot of us are cowards.
They also had cool fiery funerals. Let’s all be Vikings today.
What the historic source of that?
They also knew how to make poetry interesting and that a lawyer scares off ghosts. Plus, remarkably good regarding women’s rights (reasonable divorce laws, allowed to work in most non-combat jobs). I’d say remarkably good for their times, but since we’re discussing this below a comic about fundies, my head would explode from sheer incorrectness if I did that.
Actually, Norse women were also allowed ‘combat jobs’. A lot of the more recent finds of warrior burial sites are for women. A paper about 2 years back suggested that a lot of the older finds strongly under-reported the amount of women involved in combat because it was often assumed that anyone buried with a sword was a man, whereas recent findings show that this assumption does not at all hold true.
Perhaps unsurprising given the valkyerie thing in the mythos and all that, but you know.
PS: I’d cite you the source but I forgot the name of the authors < . <
Was it this one? http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0254.2011.00323.x/abstract
There indeed was a lot of underreporting of women in graves with weapons, and misidentifying them as male, but unfortunately that doesn’t translate into proof women were warriors. These people were in mostly peaceful colonists and we don’t know if the people buried with weapons actually fought with them.
We don’t yet know whether Norse women fought or not, in truth. What needs to be done is an osteoarchaeological analysis of the bones of armed women they found, to see if any of them actually have the kinds of healed wounds associated with warriors. Then we’ll be sure.
In the meantime, there’s no literary evidence outside of (fictional) sagas, but further east we do have the Byzantine historian Johannes Skylitzes, who describes female warriors among the (related) Kievan Rus.
This is a fantastic thread. I’ve had Vikings on the mind a lot lately (I do a Norse persona for a couple historical reenactment societies); I’m in Nova Scotia and we have the only confirmed Norse settlement in the New World right next door in Newfoundland, in L’anse aux Meadows (which we visited in 2014; it was really cool). But! Recently I discovered that they may have found another Norse camp in Baffin island (the site was discovered in 2012 but the lead scientist was fired for being too “bossy” and “outspoken” [which I can’t help but think may not have been an issue if she wasn’t a woman; but it was the Harper government so it may be political politics rather than gender politics involved here; he fired a lot of scientists for saying stuff he didn’t want them to, mostly about the environment], and she wasn’t given access to her research and materials, unusually); and they’ve just found what appears to be a THIRD settlement just across the water from me, somewhere in southwest Newfoundland! (L’anse aux Meadows is on the northeastern tip). They’re going to start digging this summer. And maybe this find will help restart the Baffin Island exploration!
SO excited about Vikings right now! 😀 Eeee!
As a scandinavian, I’m pretty fond of Vikings too 🙂 Disclaimer though – A LOT of what we think we know about vikings are national romantic drivel made up during the 19th century, OR deviated from not-really contemporary sources who mostly got it wrong in hilarious ways.
(my favorit is ibn Fadlan, a historian from Baghdad who spent a lot of his time with the Rus people being horrified by their complete lack of basic hygiene).
Speaking of, this just came by in my feed.
http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/new-evidence-viking-colonization-north-america
I frickin’ love Vikings, and I love everyone on this thread, too, for talking about them.
Now we need someone to draw DOA characters as Vikings.
Also if she doesn’t leave she loses her ride home.
Yeah, she does a good job helping as good as she can, but this is exactly the sort of situation she dreaded back at family day. Getting caught in a confrontation and saying one thing too many…
Anxiety freeze mode: Not a fun thing at all. Especially when you know full well and with good reason that leaving it is likely to end in your life and safety being jeopardized.
I really wish she wasn’t so scared, because I think if she went ahead and said, “Wait a minute, bro, I’m not done here yet – Hey, Joyce, mind if I catch a ride home with you?” she’d actually be pretty likely to get away with it. Jocelyne has so many things to be terrified of, but I don’t think any of those threats are immediately imminent.
Or maybe it’s just because that’s gonna be a really terrifyingly silent car ride with John if she doesn’t split now.
Wait, I actually want to expand on this so somebody can tell me if I’m full of bullshit. These are the reasons I think Jocelyne staying with Joyce is a viable option that is unlikely to cause further conflict or out her.
1) As much as Jocelyne is not male, John perceives her as male, so all the way he casually employs misogyny to invalidate Joyce would not be employed on Jocelyne.
2) Beyond the more general invisibility of Jocelyne trans-ness, Josh and the rest of the Browns are eager to perceive things in a way that’s favourable and unchallenging to them. They’ve already had enough trouble with Joyce and her vocal rejection of values they take for granted, they’ll be unlikely to search out more trouble. So long as Jocelyne appears conforming and doesn’t go out of her way to rock the boat, they are likely to take what’s presented to them at face value.
3) In accordance with the above, so long as Jocelyne is calm and vague and practices a little finesse, she can easily spin this in a way that gives John the impression that she has the patience and tolerance to weather Joyce’s “unreasonableness”, and maybe even the ability to nudge Joyce back on the “right track”, and gives Joyce the impression that she rightfully prioritises Joyce and Becky’s safety over casual bigotry – something that will placate both parties. It’s not exactly the most noble of courses, but I think it’s safe enough.
In contrast, being in a car alone with John, where he’s likely to rant about how wrong Joyce is and don’t-you-agree?, is a dangerous situation. It’s reactive instead of proactive, and puts Jocelyne’s personal opinions under fire – such that she must agree enthusiastically with hateful rhetoric, or end up under scrutiny herself.
This is what my sense of preservation tells me, but I may be full of it, what do you guys think?
Yes I think you are right.
I could only find one good reason for Joycelyn to stay with Snidely
Whipjohn, the Douchinator .
Jocelyn is needed with John to be Joyce’s advoate, when they both go from here to spy on her to Joyces mom.
I think Snuidsely basically confessed in the next-last-panel this lunch date was a ruse , and john was there to get evidence for mom to justify her already made decsion ( which we already know ) to pull Joyce from college.
The Douchinator is threatening Joyce, confessing, and retroactively blaming Joyce for his prior and future betrayals . Its victim-blaming on top of victim-blaming on top of Victim-blaming.
I think you have solid points, but Jocelyne is frozen in fear. She just saw exactly how conditional is their family’s support, “I don’t like what my little sister has become” and walking out. Too scared to strategize, gotta shrink.
You just know there’s someone making a vine of this with the title ‘Crazy bongo loses it.’ Then again, it is a religious town so they might title it B-Word.
Actually, that would be an interesting twist but incorporating it into the plot seems kinda unnecessary.
Oh.
Oh, okay then.
I was really hoping John would be, y’know, cool or something, but I guess not.
I was halfway wondering if the last couple of days were some elaborate test, and that he was finally going to say something like, “Thank goodness; I’m glad to see that you’re reacting appropriately when pressed.” I guess not.
I doubt any child their parents are proud of is going to be worth talking to.
They’re proud of Jocelyne.
I was hoping, and kind of suspecting for Walkyverse reasons, that Jon would be a similar case.
Only because they know nothing about her, so they’re not really.
Yeah, that’s my point. How the Brown parents feel about their children doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about the actual child; only about how good they are at putting on a persona, be it true or false, that their parents like.
They’re proud of “Joshua”. Who doesn’t exist.
Oh no. Here we go~ Another person thinking that because Joyce is changing that it’s a bad thing. I understand it’s shocking for them, but for Joyce she’s dealing with a lot at once. :/ oh boy.
Change is the great constant of the universe! But those fools thing they can control it with a few prayers and a meaningless Bible… They’re delusional and Joyce is the one who is being reasonable.
It’s pretty meaningful to all of the Browns and Becky. It’s just they’re just hiding behind its words without analysis or even really caring about them. “Whatever we believe is in it.” Which Joyce pointed out in her Biblical scholar phase.
Respect for other people’s property is what separates us from the animals.
Naw, I’m pretty sure it’s hats. Animals are terrible at hats.
They know what territory is, though.
Good point. Maybe Joyce will pee across the doorstep of the Round The Clock to mark it as hers. Or maybe that’s more of a Becky thing.
Hats are what separates us from the Free-to-Plays.
Do not start a TF2 flame war, please.
Haha.
Oh.
Okay.
Wow.
So much for “wait and see”.
John is, like, right at Carol’s level now.
He’s pretty clearly his mother’s son, that’s for sure.
I mean, they do have the same eyes, unlike Joyce/Hank/Jocelyn
That’s because Willis has admitted giving kids their oppiste gendered parents eyes and same gender’s hair. Joss having blue eyes was foreshadowing no one picked up on.
He’s the only child Carol speaks of favorably. That should have been the first clue.
Prick. And a muffin.
John has destroyed the last shreds of my “assume new DoA characters are good until proven otherwise” faith :<
Not really. He just wasted no time in proving that, at least in this instance, he is more to be loathed than loved.
Wow, the track record on that has got to be… I mean, if that were a gambling strategy, Willis would have your house by now.
Did you start that after Hank turned out “just inside the range of decent human being.”
Well, even that was more than we expected, so we got way too optimistic.
Yeah, it’s pretty rare in this comic for a father figure to come out anywhere near ‘the range of a decent human being.’ At this rate, Mr. Keener will turn out to be a professional kitten mauler or something.
I don’t know if he’s there yet, he’s being a huge jerk but it’s in a subtler, less aggressive way than Carol.
Hey, Crumplepunch! It’s been a while! We’ve missed you!
Yessss, give in to your anger!
I want to start a petition to make Jonathan Brown stop putting an ‘h’ in his nickname.
I’ll sign it.
Oh, OF COURSE that’s his full name. (Though, if your proposal goes through, no more nickname for me. I’d rather be pretentious that associated with this wanker.)
Isn’t John its own name, not short for anything? A Jonathan would use “Jon” as the diminutive. Generally.
More specifically here, there is a John in the Bible, but I can recall no Jonathans.
(Do there be a Joyce?)
God i hate people like that. I appreciate the value of calm discourse as the next guy, but the idea that a person’s become irrational because they’re expressing emotions is ridiculous.
Your point is only valid if you detach all sympathy and empathy.
Which is preposterous, because Christians love to get hysterical about people doing anything to offend their precious little ideals.
So glad someone else sees it.
I don’t feel alone anymore.
And if you aren’t a member of the group being discussed, along any vector. Any commonality with any part of the subject group renders your opinion irrelevant due to “bias.”
“But isn’t your opposition of my position already a sign of YOUR bias?”
And then the MRA calls you a bongo.
You have just described every parent of every teenager ever.
Exactly. Reason and emotion are not opposites. Her anger, frustration, and fear are central to the freaking topic!
Scientists have actually seen that people with damaged emotions. (Which typically occurs through brain damage) are actually worse at making logical decisions. Emotions are an integral part of the decision-making process because they help us know how much we should value things.
For example they ran the experiment by putting both the emotionless and controls through a chess game. The emotionless subjects made horrible decisions in choosing which pieces were worth sacrificing. Even when they knew a numerical value for each piece, it was still difficult for them to not give up pieces for comparatively smaller gains.
Turns out that you can’t just tell someone to value something, even as a chess player, if they don’t have an emotion to associate with them. We don’t want to sacrifice our Rook for a Knight because we attach a feeling of loss, anxiety and frustration towards losing a more valuable piece. Without those emotions we just see a set of carved pieces and are told how they move, but we don’t know why we should really care about winning or losing pieces and the game.
Those people are almost incapable of making decisions at all, if I recall correctly.
This …actually resonates a lot for me, oddly enough. I could never get the hang of chess, mostly because I was too reticent to sacrifice any of my pieces. (Which I guess is actually the opposite of this study? Welp.)
Well, that went a lot better than I thought it would. Well done Joyce, now help Jocelyne help Becky. Then listen and talk to Jocelyne and Becky, they can probably help you too. There is some big trauma you aren’t mentioning.
By the looks of the last panel I’d suggest the Jocelyne might be the one needing help
There is certainly conflict there, hopefully John will get an earful from his sibling on the way home. Only reason I can see for Jocelyn not staying to hang with Joyce and Becky.
I want that to happen but I don’t think Jocelyne is as strong as Joyce and she probably just wants this to all blow over as quickly as possible so she can get back to her life asap
Yeah, I agree. We really need to see more of Jocelyne.
Problem is, I do not think Joyce is the best equipped personto help Becky. Jocelyne might be, John probably is, if he “approved” which I guess is a metaphor for something distasteful.
So who can hel Becky? Dina? She doesn’t like or trust Dorothy. Sarah would need convincing. Someone suggested Leslie yesterday, for Joyce. She might be the ideal person to help both Joyce and Becky.
Pretty much the only person in comic who even comes close to being equipped to help Becky is Leslie.
I don’t think it’s so much that Jocelyne is not as strong as Joyce, so much as she has spent a lot more time living in fear than Joyce.
By which I mean: Most adult-transitioned trans folk I know tell me they started seriously thinking about transitioning a good decade or more before they actually did it. Jocelyne has been living in terror of her ‘secret’ being discovered for at least that long, possibly longer (using me as an example on the bi and autistic fronts since I can’t really separate each from the other: I knew there was something different about me in a way society hated looooong before I had the language to express it or the knowledge to be able to put my finger on it. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t feel alienated, and I think I was seven? Maybe eight? Anyway, I was in early third grade and I was young for the grade when I realized consciously there was something fundamentally very different between me and my age-peers. I didn’t learn that bisexuality even was a thing until my late teens, and I didn’t learn I was autistic until my mid 20s, but looong before then, I was living in terror that people would wake up and realize what I was and hate me for it. I would not be surprised if this was Jocelyne’s experience, too, only with gender instead of sexual orientation and neurodevelopmental disability).
For Joyce, the kind of terror she’s felt in the past few months is a new and overwhelming experience. For Jocelyne, it’s Tuesday.
But terror chips away and wears at you, and the longer you live with it and bow to it, the harder it is to be brave. And consider also that Jocelyne genuinely has more to lose. Straight/cis allies are rarely murdered for being allies. Corrective rape and murder for Jocelyne and Becky, on the other hand, is an ever-present worry. Joyce is scared of losing her family and the things she’s built her life towards, and that’s valid and understandable. Jocelyne and Becky have all that to lose, plus their bodily autonomy, their safety, and their lives. I am not at all surprised that Joyce is the one standing up and doing the angry bellowing while Jocelyne and Becky both have different forms of freeze response.
I don’t think Jocelyne is about to tell anyone off. She does not like conflict, and fears it because it directly threatens her closet and her safety. I think she will hide within herself as much as she possibly can on the ride home, look out the window, try not to cry. That’s what I would do.
Yeah, you are right Jocelyne has enough burdens to carry already.
I think Joyce needs to get herself help first before trying to help others. She’s been through sever traumatic experiences and has yet to unload all of the emotions that have spawned from them.
Jouce certainly needs help, using Becky’s problems as a conduit for venting her (justifiable) anger isn’t helping anyone.
Certainly not, however it is a start towrmards something better I hope.
She isn’t using Becky’s problems. She’s using -her- problems. They were both threatened at gunpoint. She thought she was going to die, then she thought her best friend was gone forever, then she almost watched somebody else die because she asked them to intervene. Then, after all of that, she got to experience the super awesome pleasure of finding out that her family, who she trusted unconditionally, not only was not entirely on her side, but is partially made up of people who are kinda on -Ross’s- side.
She’s a bundle of raw nerves right now, and is rapidly starting to feel like she has no allies at home.
Becky’s loss of her previous life comes off as someone who escaped from a prison. She was living a repressed lie of a life that she seems to be overjoyed to be free of. She has a lot of logistical problems, but she’s emotionally equipped to tackle them. Joyce, on the other hand, has had her worldview destroyed and her safety net yanked out from under her. Her unshakable faith in the authority figures in her life has been rocked to the core, and her mom is looking more and more like a Toedad waiting to happen than would have even seemed conceivable to her before.
yes, she is using Becky as the conduit for her problems. Joyce does not get upset over and still relies on her family supporting her. She is using their attitude to Becky to vent her anger, rather than channel her energies into helping her much more needing of support friend. Joyce is not even opening up about her real traumas, both of which inspire PTSD in a lot of survivors.
Joyce needs help and she is using Becky’s situation to deflect that need.
Yes, she needs help, as does Becky. But she’s not going to get it here. She’s not going to get it from her family. She has to get through this weekend and away from them.
So what should she be doing right here and now? Other than being calm and reasonable like John wants her to be.
Joyce’s problem in the short term is that, unlike Becky and Jocelyne, because her childhood was relatively trauma free she lacks the skills to cope with a horribly dysfunctional family now that she’s in conflict with them. She can’t bottle up her anger, because she’s never needed to. She doesn’t have the emotional armor, so every betrayal hurts.
Mind you, that comes at the price of deep long term damage that’ll take years of therapy to process, but it gets you through the immediate situation.
But forget the long term plans, what good does Joyce not getting angry do Becky now? What good does Joyce not defending Becky or her own actions do? It wasn’t going to be possible to have that discussion with John without basically admitting he was right and that she shouldn’t have punched Ross and … I don’t even know where to go with that.
In some ways, the best most practical thing she could do is knuckle under, pretend to be the good little girl they know, walking the fine line of not quite giving up on Becky, just to get through the weekend without more conflict so she can be sure to get back to school. Which is a very real threat right now.
But that’s not Joyce. That’s never been Joyce. Even before the PTSD and her current anger issues, she’s always been an open book. She’s always had a fierce sense of justice – sometimes misdirected, but she’s never been able to be quiet when she recognizes something wrong. She’s not just using Becky as an excuse to vent. She really is passionate about defending Becky.
Also, Becky is NOT emotionally equipped to handle her problems. She is NOT handling her problems. She is terrified and alone, pay more attention to those cutaways of her face.
TL:DR
Everybody’s fucked up in some way.
Some psychiatrist is about to make bank.
If everyone admitted they had problems and got professional help, there would be no help because all of the the psychiatrists would have cashed in and moved to the Bahamas by now.
Throw John into his car!
Throw his car into John!
In Soviet Russia car throws you into John or throws John into you.
Really wanna punch John in the face.
John is jerk but violence is not the answer.
…say that to Joyce.
She’s being angry, not violent. That’s part of her point.
true. But I’m just waiting for one of her family members to push her over the line.
Yes it is.
On the upside, dude’s not real so you can’t punch him in the face or drop a bus on him from orbit. But you can REALLY want to. Like HOLY DANG do I super want to be the one to drop a bus on him from orbit.
Which is fine because I’m not doing it and it’s not as if I view that as a valid reaction to real world problems, but for ones involving fictional people over whom I have no control, this impossible variety of violence is pretty fine because it’s impossible.
http://i.imgur.com/5sNE01G.png
Happy Birthday.
May do more if there’s demand but keep in mind I’m a degenerate.
Demand. Just remember “e before i except after Y”.
There’s demand!
Amusing. I brought that subject up with a co-worker who was turning 65 in a few days. “Well, we could have your parade around the office and we’ll spank you, just like in elementary school.” He was amused by the offer, but declined.
http://i.imgur.com/By4b15y.png
Oh… um…. I’ll be in my bunk
That’s one serious case of Butts Disease.
Bump for more?
John makes me angry too.
John would make a good troper.
I can picture him arguing that Mary’s Unintentionally Sympathetic, yeah.
I mean, more the fact that TV Tropes’ forum conduct policy has “politeness trumps not being a jerkwad” coded in, but yeah, also that.
Jocelyne: “Er, he’s my ride. Soooo… bye?”
Joyce should point out that she totally stole the parental units’ SUV, so Jon’s not the only one who can give Jos a ride home or possibly someplace sane.
“Stole” is such a … judgemental word. She ‘borrowed’ it.
“Borrowed” implies that she’s going to return it, and the way things are going that looks increasingly unlikely.
“Commandeered”? “Deputized“?
Unfortunately, not returning it means getting the police after her. My sister was threatened with grand theft auto when all she did was drive around the parking lot and down a block or two.
Granted, my parents aren’t bongos, so they didn’t let that happen. The cop threatened it, as she was driving with her permit but without an adult present.
We don’t know how long the drive is, or if Jocelyne left any personal belongings in John’s car, or if she can even process that quickly in the middle of a stressful situation.
Oh yeah. There’s that flashback to good fundamentalist passive-aggression. Mmmnn, sweet, sweet tone policing and victim blaming.
Whelp. That pretty much settles it. Joyce flat out spelled it out for him, and he dismissed it.
John is, now, and definitively (barring MAJOR apologies and redemption) a complete Douche.
JOCELYNE STAY!!!
Please!
Sit! Good girl. 😛
Go easy on her. Coming out to your bigoted family is not an easy step, and she is not ready.
I know that feeling Joyce has. It’s the same feeling that is keeping me from being the only one out of my siblings to not smash a hole in a wall. And the feeling of wanting to comes up a lot lately.
Yeah, I’ve been in Joyce’s place. Kudos to Joyce for not keying his car.
There’s still time, and I hope like FUCK she keys that assholes car. He is a douche-nozzle toolbag dipshit who really needs to be punched in his big, stupid, passive aggressive face.
Yeah… John can go screw himself.
If I were a cartoon I would buy Joyce and Becky lunch, then would take Becky to the Social Security Office.
But first I would let out all the air of John’s tires.
I’ll run the distraction!
Joyce’s criticism is so accurate and jarring that I suspect John is acting like this because it’s easier to criticize HOW Joyce is arguing than actually considering her argument (which he would need to do to counter it). It’s too painful and true that he’s just deflecting so he doesn’t have to think on it too much.
Really, it’s anything – anything – to disqualify an opposing opinion.
The thing is, he’s taking Jocelyn home. Which means that Joss can say the same things that Joyce just yelled during the ride home. And since Joss will be speaking reasonably, John might actually listen to what was said, as opposed to how it was said the first time.
The problem is that Joss will get the credit and not Joyce.
Assuming Joss says anything. Her heart’s clearly in the right place, but she seems very conflict-averse. It might depend on how she reads John’s attitude in the car. And even then, he ignore her and could come back with “Oh, don’t you start too.”
Jocelyne’s stepping into a live minefield if she speaks up, unfortunately. Appearing to support Joyce and Becky too strongly, especially when it means siding against the “good” family line, is a very real threat to her own safety.
She’s probably going to be up all night drafting the pefect argument in her head, wishing she’d spoken up, fantasizing about a world in which that would have ended well.
Or even more likely, writing about it on her blog.
Which Ethan may be reading. He might be able to mobilize the troops and organize a rescue roadtrip…
She DID ask Becky for a coming-out high-five in front of John, so she’s not totally averse to challenging the Brown standard. Fingers crossed.
I wouldn’t be surprised that is the case, guy has the luxury of denial and facing things that are actually wrong and need fixing isn’t easy.
Honestly, I’m actually mad at Jocylene right now. Joyce and Becky need more support than a quiet “I’m on your side, really, I’m just not going to say or do anything where someone might see!”
John is a shit person who I would literally cry no tears if he was 1) real and 2) died horribly but that’s what I expect from this family so
To be fair when you’re closeted taking a progressive stance around your bigoted family is kinda terrifying in and of itself.
Not saying it wouldn’t be better for her to weigh in, but I do understand why she’s scared too.
Yeah, she’s clearly in Survival Mode. Once you’ve been in that state for long enough it’s hard to leave, especially since the kind of pressure that keeps you in Survival Mode for long enough means that leaving it for one thing could lead to the rest exploding out after it.
Yeah. I disagree with what she is doing, but completely understand it as well.
My family is very Christian. Not dangerously so like the Browns are depicted, but enough that it would be a huge pile of drama if parts of it knew that I was bi.
And I don’t bother to tell them. I don’t actively hide it, I just don’t talk to family that much, and no one has ever asked.
But at the same time, every time I’ve heard one of my family members say something bigoted, I’ve stood up to it and said that that was NOT OK, and that I am NOT cool with that kind of talk or thought.
See, that’s the thing. I’m not asking Jocelyne to say that she’d prefer to be called by her real name and tell John that if he has a problem with LGBT people he has a problem with her. I know that won’t end well.
I am asking her to show support for her sister and her nearly-kidnapped best friend. And if that entails a certain amount of risk, well, Joyce risked a run at someone she knew was carrying a hunting rifle for Becky. I’d like to think that Joss can risk a heated argument for Joyce.
It is unfortunate that she didn’t/doesn’t speak up, but hating someone for being too afraid to do the right thing is not the proper response. Joyce taking on huge risks is nice of her, but not a reason to demand similar (if lesser) sacrifices from others as well.
(Also, you are mistaken if you think speaking up would risk just one heated argument. This is about a fundamental breach between Joyce and the family’s views. If Jocelyne openly takes a side here, she actually risks alienating herself from the rest of the family.)
I’m hoping theres other issues at play for Jocelyne because otherwise yeah she just her sister who obviously needs support
Jocelyne is a closeted trans woman. As far as the rest of the family is concerned, her name’s Joshua.
As she pointed out when we last saw her, if she starts arguing with her family, she might say some things she can’t take back.
I realize that she’s financially dependent on her family because lol freelance writer. But fuck them. Seriously, fuck them. They deserve the most agonizing pain.
Carol and John suck, yeah, but it’s REALLY, really hard to sever ties with even one family member. Even if you know that they are objectively Bad For Your Wellbeing, even if you AREN’T in a position where you’re dependent on them, cutting people out of your life that you have been brought up to love unconditionally and who society repeatedly and insistently tells you you should love unconditionally and if you don’t even if they have made it clear they aren’t good for you and won’t accept you, well, are you sure that isn’t something YOU’RE doing wrong?
That shit is HARD. Jocelyne’s not financially ready for that yet, and she’s probably not emotionally ready for it either. I’m certain Joyce isn’t at that stage yet, either, and that before she goes back to college there’s going to have to be SOME kind of reconciliation move on her part that’s going to hurt like hell but keep her in college and in the family for a bit longer.
I dunno about it being hard. I remember elaborately fantasizing about it all through high school and college. But I guess I’m an odd case.
But did you do it? Did you act on those fantasies? And if so, how long did it take you to get up the nerve to?
That’s the hard part.
Depends on how you define ‘act on those fantasies’. I never watched my Mom die due to a self-inflicted cooking accident, then check her pulse to make sure it had stopped before calling 911 in fake tears – oh, thinking about that little scenario kept me from killing myself through high school – but I did tell her that what she did and was doing to other people was unacceptable, had her storm off in tears saying ‘You’re not my son!’ (well, yeah, duh, that’s pretty accurate), and was homeless for a while, sleeping on the couch of my old common room in college.
It’s not just financial dependence here. If she comes out in the heat of an argument, there’s a good chance she’d be in physical danger. Disowning/loss of financial support would probably be her best case scenario.
Remember how the reason Becky ran away was because Ross was going to put her in reparative therapy? Now remember how Carol literally sided with Ross? How do you think she’d react if she found out one of her ‘favourite sons’ was actually a daughter? (Hint: badly. Very badly.)
Now thinking about that, can you be sure that you would speak up in Joss’s position? I know I can’t.
Jocelyne’s already in a tight spot with the whole trans thing. Remember what she said to Ethan back at freshman family weekend? She’s worried about familial confrontation because she doesn’t want to say something she can’t take back, such as accidentally coming out to a family she knows will disown her.
She’s got her own safety as an LGBTQ+ person to look out for as well, and it’s unfair to expect-slash-demand her to put that on the line, especially when John and Carol have both proven t be close-minded, bigoted assholes.
I know she has her own safety to look out for. Trust me, I am acutely aware of what it’s like being a trans person with a bigoted mother who occasionally talks about how it would be sweet if LGBTQ people died. But I fought against her when she’d say something like that, and I think it’s real shitty of Jocelyne to hang her sister and her best friend out to dry like that.
If you know exactly what it’s like, then it’s even worse that you are apparently incapable of empathy in the situation.
Check your privilege of being able to tell your mom off without being kicked out of the house.
I did tell her off. I was. It was fucking worth it.
Then you didn’t do it every time she said something, now did you?
So because things worked out for you, the high rates of murder, suicide, and homelessness among trans youth suddenly don’t matter?
Well that depends doesn’t it, whs’s more important to Jocelyne…her parents or her sister
But yeah tough call for her
Jocelyne’s parents don’t deserve her love. Both of them. Now, sure, Jocelyne can be dependent on them. But let’s not pretend that they’ve done anything to earn the slightest iota of care.
Agreed. I can see Hank potentially learning to be a not-shitty human being one day, but probably not until AFTER he realizes he’s become estranged from three out of four children because he wasn’t willing to accept them as they are and goes “You know, the common factor here is me and maybe I should consider changing that.” Until that point, Jocelyne owes them jackshit.
Unfortunately, it’s really hard to realize that point. (Trust me, my mom and her half-siblings STILL have some really complicated emotions about a man they pretty much all agree they are better off without and want nowhere near their children. Emotional abuse can be really hard to shake.)
And even then, Jocelyne will still owe him jackshit and the onus will be totally on Hank proving he CAN be a not-shitty human being and even then Joss is not required to forgive him for the damage done. Forgot to add that.
John is Jocelyne’s ride — although Joyce and Beckie have a car at their disposal, so it’s not that crucial a deal; he could always hook a ride with them. So it’s probably more along the lines of what ozaline is saying. Considering what she’s still hiding, Jocelyne knows better than to rock the boat any further.
I’m a little disappointed in Joss, but I also completely understand her, here. She’s deeply closeted, and I suspect highly conflict-averse even without that. Standing up to John would risk ‘saying something [she] can’t take back’ as she put it when she was talking to Ethan at Family Day.
I still have a lot of trouble facing conflict and I blasted out of my closet like a rocket almost 20 years ago.
Time travelling Becky, is that you?
Yeah, there’s a time and a place, and this aint it. It’s like when all the people in the comments were hoping Joss would come out as trans in this scene. Like, it’d be nice for Joyce and Becky to see the truth! But with John right there and Joyce still being kind of an unknown, Jocelyn has no real reason to out herself when it could be more harmful than helpful. For the same reason, she’s hesitant about fighting John on this. Were she not having to hide this part of herself, defending her sister would be more plausible.
The thing of it is, Joss is in a really difficult place. Being too overtly supportive could risk her safety, or at the very least her continued relationship with her parents. I don’t blame her for hesitating.
She may also simply have absolutely no idea how to go about it. I was painfully, PAINFULLY shy and meek as a kid, and as dearly as I would have loved to have stood up for my hypothetical sister Joyce in such a situation, I honestly wouldn’t have known how to do it. It’s all very well to say she should do it, but knowing how to speak up (and finding not just the courage, but the ability to do so–I couldn’t even speak up to say I hadn’t gotten a handout that had been passed around) can be another kettle of fish entirely.
I simply was never taught how to stand up for myself. All I was taught was how to sit down and shut up. :/ Jocelyn may be in a similar position, even without the added issue of her own safety if she does.
We can tell from one of the Patreon strips that she’s had some level of awareness that’s she’s a girl since before Joyce was born, though she probably couldn’t put it into words until years later. In a family and culture that is so focused on gender conformation and proper gender roles. She already has a lifetime of practice and reinforcement of hiding and repressing everything and avoiding conflict, deflecting suspicion. That’s really hard to overcome. Courage or not. You’ve got to overcome decades of survival instinct.
She hasn’t come across as particularly shy or meek. She gave her token of support to Becky earlier and also tried to both deflect John and give more practical support, but that kinda backfired.
Mostly I think she’s afraid if she gets into the argument, she’ll let her repressed anger out and let something out she won’t be able to take back. She said as much to Ethan back when she first showed up.
Joyce and Becky need more support
Oh, so kind of like Jocelyne needed support from her family her entire life and got misgendered and told she was wrong/sinful instead? That kind of support?
The idea that Jocelyne is wrong for not being able to instantly argue for LGBT rights after a lifetime of suppressing it for her own safety is just so awful I don’t even have words for it.
Interesting that Jocelyne needs John to take her home. No car of her own?
Or at least they rode there together today.
Ah, the typical American “one person, one car” mindset.
Given where they live it’s just about a given that Jocelyne needs a vehicle of some sort.
Living in a small town in Indiana, I can confirm that you really do need a car, as public transportation basically doesn’t exist, sidewalks are not a given (and some people will get really angry and threatening if you walk on their lawn, whereas drivers will come close to clipping you if you’re on the side of the road), and there is a desperate lack of crosswalks. Oh, and once every few years you get to hear about a motorist running down a cyclist and leaving them for dead.
I mean, ‘one property/house one care’ has been necessary or incredibly life-improving everywhere I’ve lived. Canada and the US are pretty spread out, especially in more rural communities.
I have no problem with “one property/family, one car” … maybe even two. But “one family, four licensed drivers, four cars plus an RV” is a little bit much in my book. And that doesn’t even take into account my “up with bicycles, down with (most) cars” mindset.
Depends how many of them are working. And what schedules/public transport is like.
In the immediate case, Jocelyne lives alone and lacks a car most likely because she’s trying to survive as a freelance writer – ie she’s broke.
Not living at home for obvious reasons.
Hopefully she’s in a large enough town that she’s got access to basic necessities in walking distance.
Okay, but…
When I still lived at home, there were six licensed drivers in my house. My dad, my stepmother, myself, and my three siblings. Therefore, we had six cars. There is no public transportation in my hometown.
1 and 2. My dad and stepmother had jobs separately. They got off work at different times. My dad’s job required him to be able to drive anywhere in town at any time. He was also on call, which meant at any point in time he could have to leave and wouldn’t know when he would be back.
3. My brother’s job was mostly graveyard shifts in the next town.
4. My sister was in college in a town half an hour away.
5. I was in high school and had a job. No one’s schedule would allow them to leave work to give me a ride. I was also chauffeur to my stepbrothers.
6. My younger sister, as part of the custody arrangement, spent half her time with my dad and half her time with my mom(who lived an hour away). She needed a vehicle to travel that distance, as everyone else had jobs and commitments that prevented a daily two hour round trip, as she was in school.
I agree with both of you, when I grew up we needed 3 cars and were aided by having a 4th, and it’s still like it at that house (a van (driven by everyone, needed by mom for biking and dad for transporting parts for work, a car because my mom works elsewhere, my brother’s car because he too works elsewhere, and my dad’s truck which was unlicensed most of the year, but needed for camping and occasionally for moving stuff for his work, and was the second car before we had the car and brother car). I never drove and moved to a city with moderate transit and so on as soon as I was 18, or we easily could have had a fifth for me to drive to uni.
They actually also had/have excess cars (two collectables (one pre-marriage and one built by my dad) and my brother bought two cars for bringing to a drifting course), which I agree is excessive but whatever, it’s rural, they have the space to have them, it’s a hobby, and mostly I don’t care that much.
My husband and I have two, although I still don’t drive. A car, for commuting and daily driving, and a truck (usually unlicensed now that we have a car) for 4x4ing and more importantly moving furniture, tools, and other large/heavy stuff, which seems to happen a lot for us?
I’m not really sure you get how hard any alternate transit is for some people/places. All but one of the places I’ve lived have required a car to get to work/school (too far to bike, shoddy or zero public transit), and as soon as one person is on a different schedule or working in a different direction, that’s another car.
Jocelyn has stated (in the Freshman Family Weekend strips) that she is a writer, and therefore makes no real money.
Yup today is the day I punch a cartoon.
Only today?
There’s one of the Blaine strips I avoid looking at because it triggers my fight reflex. (I don’t really have an “or flight”.)
Fortunately, Amber punched his face in for me.
What a piece of shit.
Talking about Josh/Jocelyne is something I would like to do more of. Which means seeing more of them. I dislike using the gender neutral pronouns though. It would be nice if we could learn more about their transition and where they see themselves within it. I dislike making assumptions with things I don’t actually understand.
So yeah, open up Jocelyne, it will make the non transperson feel more comfotable
I’m pretty sure the score is jut that Jocelyn is a girl and uses she/her. Unfortunately, no one knows because bigotry so everyone still defaults to he/him.
So far all we know is a URL, unfortunately. Jocelyne is a terrific character and One I would like to see more of.
I can’t say I blame Jocelyne for not opening up. Her sister demonstrates that she’s upset about her family minimizing an awful thing that happened to her and her best friend, and her older brother walks away rather than concede that he might even be a little bit in the wrong. I think her fears of a permanent rift with her family seem pretty damn well founded.
Also I think Jocelyne uses female pronouns exclusively. (Or would if she were given the freedom to be herself. Obviously this isn’t said in the comic but I think Willis might have said this somewhere?)
I believe Word of God is that Jocelyne is a transwoman, Joyce’s sister. She identifies as a Jocelyne Brown in her writing online, and, if her preferences were known to others in her life, would like to use she/her/hers.
also Jocelyn is definitely closeted, at least to her family, and is probably straight (ie, she likes men) judging by her flirtation with Ethan and her line of “I’m not actually gay”, though she could be bi or something else.
Also your PS was funny.
I am missing the reference to “Word of God” where is it from? I could use some enlightening here. Inonly read the comic.
It just means “from the writer/creator directly”. Willis said it at some point.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/writer/
The URL in question.
And the URL leads to, this comic? is @damnyouwillis trying to tell us something?
That’s the one.
Skizz, a text search for “David M Willis” will lead you to a comment where he wrote: “Jocelyn identifies as female”.
I appreciate that you’re trying to be sensitive here, but degendering her when she’s explicitly word of god confirmed to be a woman is kind of rude in itself.
Not really, depends who you ask, most days. I already said I avoid using pronouns when referring to Jocelyne for just that reason. It isn’t the fictional character I am worried about offending, it is getting into discussions like this on the internet.
The thing is that an unwillingness to respect the gender of someone in a comic tends to speak largely of one’s ability to respect the gender and pronouns in real life.
Regardless of that, it’s weird and pointless other than for invalidating gender- I doubt you casually call Joe or Danny she, nor Joyce or Dorothy he.
It isn’t something you do to avoid offense, it’s something that is a basic part of treating people decently and referring to them accurately.
So, yeah, it is definitely inappropriate to degender her when you know how to correctly gender her, especially with it repeatedly confirmed in comics.
Like Shiro, I get that it’s an attempt at being neutral and sensitive, but since you outright disagreed with that, I really think you need to hear more.
If this is rampant with spelling errors, my apologies. Phone before bed is not the best typing platform
Yes, it can be polite to avoid pronouns when you don’t know them about a character or person, but when the person’s preferred pronouns and name are known and you side with neutral pronouns, it can feel like those preferred pronouns or names are considered fake or worthless.
It’s like if someone mistook a friend for a different person. Say, a friend named Hank that they mistook for their friend John. So Hank says, hey, actually, I’m Hank. And so the person continues referring to them as John or said Hank/John or the like. Hank would feel actively dismissed. Because they were being ignored.
As such, it’s typically seen as at least a sign of unsafety that makes a trans person less willing to put themselves out there and offer education, because they don’t trust they’ll be fully heard.
That all being said, to Skizz, I offer these resources, now in comic form:
http://www.robot-hugs.com/mispats/
http://chaoslife.findchaos.com/agender-agenda
http://www.roostertailscomic.com/comic/queer-101-third-edition/
http://rain.thecomicseries.com/comics/801/
http://robothugscomic.tumblr.com/post/97107162945/new-comic-pronouns-right-super-weird-little
And please don’t let this serve as discouragement from asking and please let me know if you have any specific questions regarding trans people, pronouns, or other stuff like that.
Actually, your source of Jocelyne being, “word of God, a woman” would be hugely appreciated. I only read the comic, if Willis has said this elsewhere it would make me very happy indeed.
This conversation was already had on the post where she came out to Ethan. You’ll have to scroll a bit, I can only link the top level comment.
David M Willis
October 14, 2013 at 1:48 am
Jocelyne identifies as female.
Is the source I was looking for.
Here, Willis referring to Jocelyne as her: http://itswalky.tumblr.com/post/138285376757/jocelyne-won-this-months-patreon-bonus-strip
Even better, plus, knowing there are Jocelyne bonus strips has just gained Mssr Willis another Patreon supporter. Many points for you and thank you.
joss is a trans lady, so the default is she/her. using they for a binary trans person can actually be very hurtful, and when done while knowing their gender, is considered misgendering. (of course, there are some binary trans people who accept other pronouns, but i think they’re in the minority.) 🙂
I read something new every day on pronouns and gender identity. Last article I read said that there was a movement to avoid gender identity in pronouns altogether. As a result. I avoid pronouns altogether, when no preference has been addressed.
Younare right though, all the women I know prefer she/her, regardless of [see, I have no idea how to finish that sentence].
Ooh, ooh, I can do this!
See, I was similarly in Jocelyn’s position. I’m a trans woman who grew up with a very religious family, and the past 3 years living with them suuuucked because I knew I was trans and I knew coming out as a whole would be bad, baaaad- and Jocelyn basically has… well, probably a worse situation than I do. Anyway, so I had to deal with them constantly referring to me by my legal name and what gender is on my birth certificate. But, as you can see, I go by Amber. I haven’t started transitioning yet (but I did get scheduled for HRT recently, finally!) but my girlfriend, roommates, and friends all call me Amber. At my job interview the other day, I told the manager and MIT that they could call me Amber. Transitioning doesn’t really define gender identity. It didn’t matter 3 years ago when I wasn’t anywhere close to getting on HRT- I wanted people to use she/her pronouns for me. I’m not on HRT, and yet the receptionist at the doctor’s office asked me what my preferred name is. Getting on HRT doesn’t magically transform your thought process over time, it’s just a means of changing your body to suit your identity. It’s not like, “Okay, now that the estrogen is pumping through me, now I’m a girl!” What really matters is what *I* know and am confident in what my identity is. And in the case of Jocelyn, we know via Word of Willis that Jocelyn identifies by that name and as female, and that’s all you really need to know for her.
I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m condescending or anything- I’ve been where you are. It can be a somewhat tricky topic but it does feel like people tend to think it’s more complicated than it actually is.
Not condescending at all, thank you for sharing and enlightening me.
Just to be clear, I was not referring to physical transitioning and I had no idea of the meta of David Willis’ statements.
Which probably means I misused the word “transitioning,” I know. Sorry.
Thank you for sharing! It can be somewhat intimidating for cis-folks to ask about trans* issues, because we know we’re probably going to screw something up while learning, and we legit don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. I sure appreciate here on the comments, lots of transpeople are very generous with their diverse experiences.
And also, Yay! for the HRT.
I likewise didn’t pick up on the fact that she was trans when I first was binging the comic. But I didn’t need to know about the Word of God on the subject to find out. Everyone in the comments has been referring to her as female. People say you can’t call her Josh(ua). It’s been pretty clear that she’s a trans women for quite a while.
In this sort of thing, that will get you quite far. Pay attention to what other people who do know about these sorts say. You learn a lot more about how to interact with in real life than you would by reading books and stuff.
1. Who reads the comments? There are people like you here.
2. Go be condescending somewhere else.
3. No one questioned Jocelyn being trans. Duh. Read the comments.
Well, it WAS a pleasant, adult conversation. I’ll sign off until tomorrow’s strip.
Woah, Skizz, I think you read trlkly’s comment a lot differently than I did… Obviously I’m not inside either of your brains, but from here their suggestion didn’t seem condescending, it seemed like trlkly was trying to give you a tool for guessing from context in order to answer your question about which pronouns to use for Jocelyne.
Yeah. I specifically had to rewrite that comment three times because I was trying not to come off as condescending or overly critical. That’s why I specifically explained it in terms of what I did, and how I figured it out.
I’m honestly not sure how I could have given you the information without it coming across as condescending. Would you mind giving some advice?
First off,Someone made this from yesterday. This will be updated sometime soon.
Dumbing of Triangle (Now click on the day): DAY 19
So this was a nice date guys, see u l8r
I like how you made John all smoky after the joyce-beam.
Amazi-Girl is always prepared for anything!
You know… Today, maybe just today, I’ll skip this one.
I’m really surprised John isn’t his parents’ favorite. He seems right up their fuckin’ alley.
(Also, no, Jocelyne, please don’t go with him, nooooo)
We have Jocelyne’s word that ‘Josh’ is the favourite, though we know from the overheard convo between Hank and Carol that they consider John to have turned out the right way as well. We know that the younger siblings are all quite a bit younger than John; I think Jocelyne (second oldest) was still a pretty little kid when baby-of-the-family Joyce came along, while John’s something like 15 years older than Joyce. John’s sufficiently older that he may not factor into her estimations of ‘favourite sibling’. But I dunno.
Maybe even they can pick up on the fact that John is an unempathetic douche, while “Joshua” is sweet and shy and actively kind.
Recentered = Reorogrammed. “I don’t like what you’ve become” = http://i.imgur.com/XL1voxh.jpg
Dagnabbit. That should be “reprogrammed”.
“Rebooted”.
C’mere, Jonathan; I’ll reboot you. No charge.
Is that where you kick him in the butt, and then you kick him again?
I mean, I don’t really want to unleash the deluge of violence against characters, because it makes some commenters very uncomfortable, but surely just kicking him the butt is okay.
Ah.
Welp, toss that Brown sibling into the shitpile, then. I didn’t exactly have high hopes for him (and if I was it was more for Joyce’s sake than anything; girl needs some more emotional support from her family than just Hank’s “yeah Ross was a dick”), but damn, that’s just. Damn.
“I WAS SCARED FOR MY LIFE AND THE LIFE OF MY BEST FRIEND OF COURSE I’M UPSET.” “Ugh, be reasonable</i.."
Fuckin' A. I have never wanted to kick a fictional character in his fictional dick more.
“Junk, junk, bill, junk, postcard from my sister. When did I get a sister?”
I feel you, Joyce. I’d want to throw furniture around too.
Oh and hey John. It’s me again. You don’t get to decide that because your sister is extremely angry and bitter, she has changed in a wrong way and needs to be, what’s that word, “recentered”? No. Nope. Nooooope.
Becky loudly makes a Hitler joke. Fandom reaction: “Becky is loud in the restaurant and makes a public accusation of bigotry. Becky is bad. No like Becky.”
Joyce even more loudly, and entirely seriously, makes a public accusation of bigotry. Fandom reaction? “Go Joyce! Joyce is awesome!”
Hmmmmmmm.
Different situations: Based on looks vs. based on actions.
Also important to take into account what the audience knew then vs what we know now, had we known John was awful when Becky made the hitler joke the reaction likely would have been different
Nah. Because Jocelyne, who, as a translady, would be on the Nazi kill list, was also included in that Nazi joke. And Becky had no way to know that, but, hey, that’s why you don’t go around loudly implying people are Nazis for no good reason.
Joyce, on the other hand, is just calling bigotry bigotry.
Except making a Hitler joke isn’t exactly a public accusation of bigotry, but rather being pretty insensitive. Joyce literally just said that her family are bigots.
This. Becky made an inappropriate joke because she was uncomfortable. Joyce called her brother a bigot because he refuses to see why Ross pointing a gun at Joyce and Becky was wrong. It’s a tad different.
Here’s how I see it.
Becky went home to the family that had been kinder to her than her own family. Already severely shaken, and yet maintaining her chipper attitude through the whole thing. And Joyce’s mother quite intentionally tried to shame Becky, both in private and at the dinner table.
We saw Becky’s reaction there. Wit. Sarcasm. Deflection. That’s what she was doing with the Nazi joke.
I’d be shocked if she wasn’t every bit as angry as Joyce. But Joyce still believes in her family. She still believes in all of it. Every betrayal, by her mother, and now by John, is devastating to her, because IT’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THAT WAY. So her anger is shocked. Raw. Honest.
Becky knows better. She knows fundamentalists like Carol and John are scum, and even Hank is struggling not to judge. She doesn’t expect John to be any different than he is. So she’s sarcastic. She’s witty. It allows her to keep smiling through the anger. To keep being cheerful through the anger.
Since coming out as a lesbian, Becky’s barely exhibited any sadness or anger at all… except in private, quiet moments when no one is watching. She’s internalizing and repressing all of it.
She must be screaming inside.
So when she makes a Nazi joke at John’s expense (and it is John’s expense, Jocelyn gets in on it), that’s her version of BECAUSE I AM.
GO. BECKY.
I had this talk a million times in the comments under the joke and the strip after, so I won’t rehash everything that was said there here, but I will acknowledge what you’re dying so you don’t think I’m ignoring you.
You gave reasons as to why Becky said what she said, and those are valid and probably correct! They’re not excuses. Loudly mentioning nazis in a public place as an act of defiance is not really ok. So, no, not go Becky. Go in a different direction Becky. Away from lines that make patrons and readers alike uncomfortable.
Ah yes. Telling the wronged that, above all, they should be polite. A theme I hear often, generally directed at any form of protest, no matter how benign.
Wouldn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. It would be even better if she slipped quietly back into the closet, where her presence wouldn’t disturb anyone at all. That way her father might not have become so “uncomfortable” that he hunted her with a shotgun. That way the Browns would not have been so “uncomfortable” that they were forced to reveal their bigotry.
That way the readers would not have been so “uncomfortable” that they might be reminded Jews weren’t the only ones killed during the Holocaust. Homosexuals didn’t fare well either. That way the readers would not have been so “uncomfortable” that they might have to deal with their own thoughts and feelings toward a young lesbian whose life has been blasted out from under her.
By all means, let not the suffering of the oppressed be so apparent and raw as to make us UNCOMFORTABLE.
Why can’t she be more like Jocelyn, who would never make anyone UNCOMFORTABLE. As she slinks behind John, clearly torn up inside, but unable to act for fear of making someone UNCOMFORTABLE.
Not a dig at Jocelyn, by the way. She’s got every reason to fear making her bigoted family UNCOMFORTABLE. But rather, a dig at people who think Becky should be as concerned with the comfort of bigots as Jocelyn is forced to be.
This came as a surprise, but let’s back up the truck a little bit. I’m sorry if what i said upset you, I really am, but i don’t think we’re in entire disagreement here. I dont condone what John is doing, nor do i think Becky needs to be polite while dealing with people like John. I don’t.
I’m all for Becky being assertive and aggressive in order to feel better and to fight off people like john, whether he becomes uncomfortable or not. Go for it! Joyce is doing it here and you won’t find me telling her that her reaction isn’t warranted. If becky was having the same reaction, I’d be rooting for her just the same (despite me not liking her as a character as much, it’s a gutsy move worthy of respect either way).
I understand that you view Becky’s joke as somewhat of an equivalent, it being a cut that isn’t as loud as Joyce’s, but maybe one that would be just as unsettling. That’s where we disagree. I think it was used for Becky to cope, a joke like she often makes in order to calm herself and ease some of her internal tension. Trouble is, this joke is offensive to some.
There were real people in these comments talking about how the joke didn’t sift well with them, some of them jewish, some of them blonde/blue-eyed, feeling somewhat betrayed that a character they liked would crack a joke about something that’s still tender. Then, when people jumped down their throats, telling them that they were wrong to be offended, I commented on their side, citing that a character’s right to crack jokes about genocidal maniacs does not outweigh real people’s comfort reading what should be something that provides escapism.
Willis himself said in this blog post http://itswalky.tumblr.com/post/141942653372/willis-youre-usually-so-good-about-things-was that what Becky did wasn’t meant to be morally-righteous. It was a nazi joke, through and through. She had reasons to make it, because she obviously doesn’t agree with what they did! That doesn’t necessarily make it ok for her to do it.
I’m sorry if my comment upset you, the last thing I want to do is fight more people here about Becky, to the point where I’ve been trying my best to comment in a more constructive way in order to be a more positive member of the community.
I’m not here to fight about Becky, or whether it’s ok for only jewish people to make these jokes, or if anyone who was targeted is allowed to, or any of that. I didn’t like it, many other readers didn’t like it, we weren’t meant to like it.
I hope this long response better illustrates where I’m coming from so we can come to a resolution.
Sigh. Not a shotgun. Don’t make me do this again…
Thank you. Thank you so much. You get it.
i kind of appreciate the point, but i think a significant factor is that becky made a nazi joke. like, that was definitely the thing that upset me and at least a few others
Well, that’s because Joyce’s accusation is completely valid. John has downplayed what she and Becky went through and basically said that Becky being homeless was her own fault for being gay. He’s telling Joyce to calm down because he doesn’t want to hear what she has to say, when what she has to say is a valid expression of anger. He and Joyce’s parents (well, her mom, at least) seem to be on Becky’s dad’s side and have little sympathy for Becky, blaming her for being gay.
Also, while Becky’s joke was insensitive, it was a joke. It may not have been a good joke, but it’s not really comparable to Joyce rightfully expressing her pain and anger and being shut down.
Becky didn’t make any accusation of bigotry. She made a joke that was in quite poor taste. I love Becky, but it would have been nice if she hadn’t said it.
It would also be nice if Joyce would calm down, wouldn’t it?
Except it wouldn’t. Because Joyce’s anger is justified. And Becky’s anger, repressed and displaying itself through her wit and sarcasm, is likewise justified.
It would be nice if Becky had made a different joke. I’m all for jokes, and I’m all for Becky. It just wasn’t a good joke.
Nobody said Becky needs to be calm and docile, merely that it’s possible to be rightfully angry and still hurt people in undeserved ways with expressions of that anger.
Equating people with Nazis based on physical appearance isn’t the same at all as calling people out on the bigotry they’re displaying.
Though now that you put it that way, that stereotype does exist for a reason. Light skinned, blue-eyed guy being a bigot? Sounds like Becky’s description was more accurate than she realized.
If you think noting bigotry is an accusation, you’re likely not overburdened with real problems.
Hint: Being “accused” of bigotry will never, even in error, affect you half as much as actually experiencing bigotry. Never. No, not even then.
It is quite literally a fake worry and I’m perpetually annoyed by those who pretend otherwise, because I’ve had the life shattering hell of bigotry both personal and societal, ripping away my family, tearing apart a long running relationship, costing me work, sanity, and nearly driving me to the streets.
Someone who thinks it “costs” them to not be a tone-policing asshole or be called out on their shit or have to avoid using slurs to refer to people is someone who doesn’t know what the fuck they are talking about.
For the record, my comment was in SUPPORT of Becky.
And Joyce. I’m saying they BOTH deserve fandom support, rather than almost everyone bashing Becky because she doesn’t act like, as Carla would say, “That Perfect Girl.”
Oh, my mistake, I completely misread that.
Also, reposting for context: Willis’ reply on tumblr when asked about the Nazi joke.
The problem with the Hitler joke was NOT the public accusation of bigotry. It was the part where it used Hitler to make jokes.
As people have said before about the members of the Brown family, it’s the eyes, and John doesn’t have the big blue soulful eyes, so I was just sort of waiting for this.
Doesn’t stop me from being pissed off, because I’ve been the Joyce here before. Haven’t we all been in Joyce’s place here before?
It’s actually not that. The eyes thing is actually due to Willis’s character design method. Basically, everyone in the comic has the hair color of their same sex parent and the eye color of their opposite sex parent. Jocelyne’s hair and eye color are a subtle cue about her being transgender, while John’s hair and eye color mean absolutely nothing.
All the time. It’s why I dislike having long conversations with my dad.
He is horrible! Seriously. Just can’t even.
God damn tone policing.
http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/12/tone-policing-and-privilege/
Oh, THAT’S what people are doing when they say I’m too upset and need to calm down, causing me to get more upset and eventually unable to form a coherent argument as my emotions lead to a mental overload
Glad to know there’s a term for it
I would argue that pointing out someone’s anger and inviting them to calm down is in fact perfectly okay… so long as it’s not used to silence them. Honestly, arguing with an angry person is unpleasant for everyone involved, and anger can in fact prevent one from thinking rationally. That said, while anger makes a person more likely to use invalid arguments, it does not in itself make arguments invalid. Using a person’s anger as an excuse to dismiss their arguments (as John clearly does here) is wrong. Simply inviting someone to calm down a little is not.
This ⬆
I agree. Instead of demanding she calm down and invitation to discuss the anger would have been more appropriate.
But dammit John you had to fuck it up by being an ass.
I’ve never seen ‘calm down’ actually calm somebody down.
Better choices, depending on the person, include: “I hear you,” “That sounds super frustrating,” “Yes, that is important, justasec though, shouting scares me” and, best of all, repeating back what they said verbatim. That last one always feels like it’s going to be totally weird and lengthy, but then it isn’t, it’s super helpful to proving to the person that they are heard. Pro-tip!
Yeah, just anything that opens up to a discussion. Something that says “I understand you’re angry but let us discuss this anger in a calm fashion” without saying all that.
Saying “Calm down” has maybe Never worked. In the history of conversation. Something like “I hear you, it IS terrible… but you don’t have to yell. I’m sitting right here,” often WILL work.
But really, you’re saying the exact same thing with a different tone. In both cases, you’re inviting the person to calm down, only in the second option you’re trying to do it in a way the person’s more likely to respond to. Basically, you’re changing the way you’re phrasing your thoughts because you’re expecting the other person to tone police you.
No. You aren’t. Calm down is a command. It is not an invitation. And it contains absolutely no claim of understanding. It shows no compassion.
And that’s not what tone policing is. Tone policing is saying “because you are angry, you are wrong.” The only way you can tone police yourself is if you got some serious self-hatred going on. I’m pretty sure Amber does it to herself all the time.
And it is such a common one if you argue with men, honestly. Can’t tell you how many times I have absolutely calmly replied to utter shit with a point by point shut down (one nontheless less vehement or long as their thing) and been told ‘Calm down!’ often followed by an implication that I would see they were right if I weren’t so emotional (because nigh-robotic = emotional).
This.
Same arguments made in the same tone, before and after revealing I was a woman get vastly different responses on that exact axis.
“Calm down” is the eternal signal of a douchebag who has well and truly bought the scam that “men are logical and women are emotional”.
I’m am so sorry, that is awful. 🙁
It’s also worth noting that one of those refers to emotions (“what you are feeling is wrong, please stop”) whereas the other refers to actions (“the way you are expressing your emotions is making me uncomfortable, please find another way”). One is infinitely more actionable than the other.
The correct response is not “you need to control your anger”, the correct response is “I realize that I did something wrong by provoking your anger and would like to take it back and correct it.”
A K A
“I’m sorry!”
Woman at the next table over: “I’ll have what she’s having.”
“There’s three women at the table, which one?”
“The small angry one.”
“Children nuggets it is.”
… They serve children nuggets?
Cannibalism is way worse than yelling, John, and you support them. Tsk, tsk, tsk.
“Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll buy a cup of lemonade if you buy a box of my delicious Girl Scout cookies. Do we have a deal?”
“Are they made from real Girl Scouts?
CHILDREN nuggets? Oh my goodness…
Jesus fucking Christ John you are an asshole to the ninth degree, not to mention one of the worst older brothers in existence. I dearly hope the other Brown siblings aren’t as much of a dismissive asshole as you.
Is that shading on Jonathan’s face supposed to be a 5 o’clock shadow?
Nah, the tinted visor of his Stormtrooper of God helmet covers the top half of his face, so he gets weird tan lines.
Anyone else get the feeling the plan was for John and “Josh” to get Joyce alone so she could hear from her siblings how toedad was doing the right thing? Between Joyce caring more about Becky than her fundie upbringing and Jocelyne not being anything like her parents and brother think, this was probably the only possible outcome of this meeting.
Aw man, now I’m imagining Ms. Brown as a little Christian housewife Emperor Palpatine.
Did Carol even know this was happening? Joyce stole the family car.
…okay, granted, they were awake at the time and cars aren’t exactly quiet, but still. You would think that if they were aware they would’ve called her themselves.
I think what Nemirthel is suggesting is that Carol decided that Joyce is already upset at her mom and has already shown she’s willing to stand up to her parents, so she’s not listening to ‘reason’ because her emotions are in the way.
So instead of trying to confront Joyce again she asked if John and Jocelyne could talk to her because she figured then Joyce wouldn’t be as defensive. Plus, John tried to get Joyce to come without Becky (to which Joyce responded that Becky is family), again because Becky being around must be interfering and turning her against the family.
(Carol did know, John asked if their parents had told Joyce about meeting him and Jocelyne for lunch).
Oh, and Joyce was screening her phone for calls from her mom, so Carol wouldn’t have been wrong if she decided Joyce would be more likely to listen to siblings instead.
Of course it was. It was also part of the plan to soft sell Joyce on their mother’s plan to get her to drop out of that awful secular college that’s turning her away from Jesus. They were there to give her the swindle and make it look like it was her decision in the end. They’d even pray over it together.
Two things fret me at this point – 1) Jocelyne looks actively sick about this whole situation, there’s going to be a major issue around her – probably soon; and 2) Now that Carol’s “Plan A” has failed, what horrible tactic is she going to try as a backup?
No subterfuge, just straight out removing her from College or if Joyce doesn’t play ball then stopping paying the bills
That’d be my guess, she seems like an ends justifies the means type
Yeah, and now I’m really worried that since John has said the same thing, that he’ll verify to his mother that “yes, she does need to leave that school it’s *changed* her” and with that extra confirmation Carol will go ahead with removing her from school. I really feel like we’re going to see Joyce fighting to stay at IU coming up soon, which sounds absolutely terrifying. 🙁
I think the original intent was just catching up with their sister without their parents around. Behaving differently around different social combinations is a thing, right? It can’t just be me. I mean, my base personality doesn’t change or anything, but some topics are taboo with my dad/stepmom that aren’t with my mom (I would say “and vice versa” but she and I can talk about almost anything lol), so I tend to bite my tongue more when it comes to them.
Annnyway, getting back to the comic, I was going to suggest that they wanted to see how the last few weeks/months had treated Joyce, but clearly john isn’t interested in his baby sister having learned that there are things in the world that anger her and that it’s OK to express that anger.
I’m really hoping joss shoots her a quick text offering to listen with an open heart, so she knows at least one of her sibs aren’t close-minded.
I’ve had it ringing in my head, every time he’s jerkier, the car conversation. ‘We’re foing for lunch. Mom told you about that, right?’ (on mobile, can’t get the page, but that’s at least 80% correct.)
Yep.
And that’s why coming along with Joyce was an awesome supportive selfless decision of Becky
If I had a eollar for everytime that feeling hit me, I’d have enough money to pay for all the stuff that got broken when I threw it.
Joyce has every right to be angry and upset but she also needs to talk about her anger unfortunately the people who are supposed to be there for her, her family, are too absorbed in themselves to care. Her mother is a self righteous witch, her father is too timid to speak up and voice his opinions, John is too ignorant and self absorbed in his life to really listen to what Joyce is saying and Jocelyne, bless her soul because I know she wants do right by Joyce, but she’s doesn’t want to draw attention to herself so she doesn’t speak up for her sister. It’s sad when you can’t rely on your family.
Not sure how differently Joyce herself would have reacted, though, if she hadn’t actually been through all this herself.
This is true. It just makes me angry that family can be the ones to hurt you. Everyone has a different experience but it still sucks for Joyce.
Screw you, John!
Why throw things when you can use a Toedad punching bag instead?
He’s literally the worst! Like, indefensible! Everyone in the comments who want to “wait and see” STOP. It’s clear at this point that he knows he’s wrong but just doesn’t give a shit. I never thought I’d see him walk out, as if HE should be offended when his sister a lost died. The worst part is that every time I want to write it off as, “Nah, Willis is playing this guy up for Drama, people aren’t this unreasonable.” one of you will come along and explain how something similar happened to you. And I can’t decide if that’s more saddening or infuriating.
*hug* Thank you for this.
*hugs back*
Seriously, many of us who were saying this a while ago could /feel it coming/ because we have had to learn to detect this to Survive.
The fact that a good half of the comments were “I don’t wanna judge too quickly, maybe it’s a misunderstanding” (in an arc titled “when god closes the door”)….. y’all maybe see how we felt a little like Joyce here, a little “you’re being too harsh and extreme and unreasonable”?
hugs, man. >:(
Spoiler: Under this very comment, people are still defending John as if he’s not ok with Sister-murder
Joyce should have hit him where it hurt. She should have called him a Fake Christian for turning his back on his family. There are a lot of things she could have said, but in the heat of the moment, I am not surprised she didn’t.
What would be the point? Pouring oil on the fire has never accomplished anything. If all you can do is insult someone, no matter how much they deserve it, you’re better off just walking away.
Yes and no. For someone stubborn that wouldn’t do anything. But when Joyce called out her parents for their mistreatment of Dorothy, citing that Jesus wouldn’t have wanted/supported mistreating others, Joyce’s dad reconsidered his stance. It doesn’t have to be petty if what you’re saying is accurate.
But that’s not what Just Me was suggesting. They were suggesting that Joyce should have called him a Fake Christian not in an attempt to invite him to reconsider his stance, but because it would “hit him where it hurt.” That would serve absolutely no purpose. If she started acting that way… well, that would make John entirely justified in walking away here.
Maybe to get his attention? Stop him from leaving and force him to talk to her? Long shot, but it does work sometimes.
Honestly, considering Joyce said she thought she was going to die, and John’s reaction was to walk away dismissing her, I don’t think she could have said anything to actually get his attention. He’s in a mode where he thinks of her as a hysterical woman and that nothing she has to say is valid.
Yeahhh, you’re not wrong.
Is anyone else really hoping the person she was texting is Ruth, so John can lose femurs? I mean, it is a long shot, with Ruth being Ruth, and having Billie and Mary issues, but come on.
Given what we’ve seen when we cut away to Ruth and Carla it seems unlikely Ruth is doing anything but lying in bed with the curtains closed and something over her eyes.
And eating racism cookies.
John is officially a douch!
Goddammit, John. I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt, but you’re just a dick.
… yeah. I don’t think Jocelyn even wants to go with that assbutt. She knows she can’t say a single thing now.
And now I’m fucking angry too. Goddamnit Willis.
Here’s hoping Josh dies horribly in the next panel. Come on Davis, you can do it! Just tweak the next few upcoming strips! You know how satisfying it would be for everyone!
God, I hope not. Josh is Jocelyne’s… what’s the word? Official name?
Birth name.
Birth name? Presently-legal name?
Yeah, not sure. Would it be assigned name? We use assigned gender, so.
I believe people have been referring to Joshua as her dead name.
I actually wasn’t sure if that applied until she came out. Though I guess she is essentially out to us (through Ethan).
Phil, did you mean Jon? Or are you just bating the commenters?
(psst! you mean John, right?)
I’m not sure who Davis is, either, unless they’ve confused this with Garfield.
hissss
Yeaaahhh…I was really trying to have your back John…I actually legitimately was but nope. You had to piss it away. Oh well there’ll be more lost causes to try and fight.
She seems pretty reasonable to me, considering what she and her best friend went through.
Yeah, but you’re not a fundamentalist douchebag who’s invested in minimizing what happened to her and enforcing the ‘proper’ behaviour of a ‘good, godly woman’.
You know… I’m wondering if at some point in all this, Joyce is going to let it slip to her family about the sexual assault attempt. She purposefully didn’t tell them because she knew they’d take her out of college.
But at some point in all this, it may all be blowing up, and it will end up coming out.
That would be a mistake because her family would just assume that Joyces “outbursts” are all to do with that incident and nothing to do with her Mom and brother being completely hypocritical bigots
and then they’d take her out of college
They might even put the blame of that situation on joyce some how
“So you went to a *party*? Where there was *alcohol*? And un-Christian men?”
(and the CHRISTIAN man who assaulted her, but that is an irrelevant detail)
Yeah, because obviously she seduced him and is just lying about the rest. Theb she ASSAULTED him! So people wouldn’t find out! (/sarcasm, noted because holy shit there are some awful, though temporary, commenters sometimes)
All of this. A family that victim blames her about nearly being murdered will definitely not hesitate to victim blame her for nearly being raped. Especially since all of society is only too happy to help on the victim-blaming for that.
It’s not hard to imagine how their response would begin. “What were you doing going to a party? You know unwholesome things happen at parties.” If Joyce is lucky they won’t pull out the really big guns of victim blaming, like asking what she was wearing, or what she might have done to “lead him on.”
‘What were you wearing’ is disgusting garbage but I have to adnit that I giggled at the thought of her saying ‘a turtleneck.’
I’ve seen people argue that a woman in jeans and a t-shirt was dressed in a way that was “asking for it”, and flat out mean it. They’d probably argue the turtleneck must have been too tight without breaking their victim-blaming stride.
“You turned down the affections of a boy who invited you to play board games? Where have I gone wrong in showing you what’s right?”
“…and, a pastor’s son at that! Such a nice boy!”
Shouting always makes people look guilty. I still happily remember when I got my brother grounded by calmly lieing while he shouted the truth… I’m probably a horrible person.
Damn it, John.
Exactly.
All my my hope for him yesterday has gone straight out the window…
I’d say John is confirmed as a total pig, but pigs are cute and intelligent animals that actually make for good companions.
There’s no excuse for his behavior. The suggestion that he just doesn’t know what really happen doesn’t fly now, because if he actually gave a damn and was just misinformed, then he’d care about the emotional state she’s in instead of stomping off because she’s not acting pleasant.
I think the stomping off is more of an excuse. Joyce just dropped three facts: almost died, Becky kidnapped, family making excuses for it. They are indisputable. With John siding with the excuse-makers, the ONLY rebuttal he has is to criticize how Joyce is arguing rather than the argument itself, because regardless of the excuses, it’s pretty hard to argue facts. And they are hard facts to swallow. So he objects to her emotions and uses it as his out so he doesn’t have to think about it too carefully.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Similar to how Walky was in denial and dismissing Sal’s argument over their mom’s racism and favoritism, I think the only way John will face those facts is if he were witnessing it firsthand.
Pigs also happily eat people. I think it fits. >_>
Also, Panel 2 is where Joyce gets it for real, what we’ve talked about before, the whole “your life is worth less than my sense of self-righteousness” axis of hell that all of this follows nearly all of the time.
You want to know what’s a good example of a bad brother? Walking out on your younger sister when she’s finally unloading and opening up about being stressed out and deciding not to talk it out with her when you have the given opportunity. Just taking her out of school and not bringing it up again won’t solve shit especially since the problem that’s stressing her out didn’t come from school but from her own freaking family.
Way to be sympathetic, John. Christi is one lucky lady.
Since we’ve yet to see her, she may consider herself to be lucky.
Ohhhh, this fucking argument makes me see red. You can be calm about it because you have no skin in the game, you colossal jerkwad, you can afford to be all sanctimonious and “calm down”. And yeah, I am very well acquainted with the “I want to throw something but that would be actually violent and I’m better than that” response.
Poor Jocelyne, too. I can’t imagine how knotted up she must be over this one. I hope she gets screentime to talk it out soon.
All of this.
It’s easy to be “calm” and “reasonable” if you literally do not care about the humanity of the participants and have nothing to lose either way.
It’s a convenient philosophy for shit weasels who don’t want to honestly engage their own privilege or the active harm their ideologies cause people.
See also, why I flat-out refuse to discuss issues of bigotry with philosophers and philosophy majors. Nice of you to navel gaze about the philosophical theory of the ethics of protest (that always seems to rest on the conclusion that people bucking the status quo are wrong), jackass, but down here in the real world this stuff that is happening actually hurts my friends and family who have neither the time nor the emotional resources to devote to reading a 20,000 word essay about your navel gazing as you do that philosophy thing of “The more words I throw at it and the more arcane and dehumanizing language I use, the more right I am and if you can’t see it, it’s because you don’t understand Philosophy, not because I don’t understand the issues at play because not having all the facts is apparently irrelevant in philosophy.”
(I have had almost that exact argument used on me by more than one actual philosophy professors, so don’t “no true philosopher” about it to me. Self-identified philosophers are jackasses who are more concerned with feeling comfortable and correct in their ivory tower than actually understanding what’s going on. John would be great at that)
I can so identify with this.
I actually got a bit of a rep back in college for my refusal to treat devil’s advocacy of the status quo as a neutral stance.
But yeah, if one’s philosophical model can’t withstand the harsh reality of people’s actual lives, it wasn’t a good model to begin with.
I originally thought he was being a homophobic ass, but no, sexist ass it is.
Eh. little of both.
No need to be limiting, he can be both.
http://www.reactiongifs.com/good-2/
Don’t feel too sad. He most certainly would’ve been a homophobic ass if he’d been allowed to. You just didn’t count on Joyce stopping him before that happened.
Remember two days ago when we thought he was gay or in an interfaith marriage or something?
I mean maybe that’s still the case, but sheesh. You sure brought yourself down, John.
“Anger is an appropriate response to injustice.”
Here’s a testimony for you Brown family:https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wKcHMJlE7OM
If this comment section has likes I would like this several times.
*had, apologies.
I see a lot of people call him a prick muffin and after a 3 day bender of watching Bojack Horseman i can only relate it to a pet name for a daughter or a euphemism for vagina.
John is a little bit right. Joyce has a lot to be upset about, and she is justified in those feelings and justified in wanting to express them. But there isn’t much point in making a public scene like that. Nor will vitriol sway any opinions. One must make the effort to be diplomatic if they want to debate something honestly.
No. John isn’t trying to debate. He’s not engaging in good faith, and he has no interest in a discussion. He just wanted to speak down to Becky and he started condescending and tone-policing when Joyce called him out on it.
And how is she supposed to get to work through her anger, and make a reasoned, diplomatic appeal, when her own family won’t listen and help her heal?
…but this isn’t a debate. The things Joyce are saying are objectively true and not up for discussion.
*Joyce IS saying
gfdi me
Nonsense. I mean, sure, Joyce maintains that Becky is quote-unquote “human” and that she quote-unquote “deserves to live”, but have we truly debated that in the civil emotionless regard of our robot overlords?
Who is to say what is right or wrong, who did or did not have a gun pointed at her face and fired and who is or isn’t being an incredible victim-blaming tone-policing pile of scum.
After all, debating people’s humanity and dismissing their lived experiences has never led to bad ends reinforcing bigotry and creating endless bad laws that leads to increased harassment and physical harm, right?
Bob save us from Debate Club escapees who think “everything is a debate” and that one’s life experiences can be dismissed if they aren’t “diplomatic” enough.
Yes however he is doing it the wrong way. Demanding instead of asking, and being unwilling to hear her out. He doesn’t want to hear from this broken Joyce he wants to hear from his perfect baby sister. And for that he is in the wrong. Rather than shun her anger he should be accepting of it but he should also be asking why and trying to find a solution to her anger, which is a symptom of her fear that all her beliefs she once held dear are wrong. This is not the way to deal with this situation from John or Joyce. Though in Joyce’s defense I find her reactions quite justifiable.
Someone goes through that, almost dies, realizes they have been complicit in hate alll their lives and that their own family is more concerned with preservation of the bigoted positions than even considering reality, the onus is NOT on them to adhere to some nebulous idea of respectable and civil debate.
Screw that.
Joyce is hurt. John willfully hurt her more. She reacted. The blame falls entirely on John for being hurtful, not on Joyce for defending herself against him.
When you intentionally provoke someone just so you can further upset and control them, you’re not the good guy, even if they’re the louder one.
John as a real life Internet Troll, confimed. ” Why are you reacting to my offensive, patronizing bullshit so strongly? U mad, sis?”
Would anyone still like to argue that John isn’t an asshole? I offer that now is the time to say so.
John’s a perfectly nice guy. The shape-shifting alien that took his place after the mission trip is a big jerk
That would be an amazing plot twist. All the mean characters in DoA aren’t human, they’re evil shape-shifting aliens.
Sorry we let that Faceless get away. We’ve been hunting it for weeks.
Judging by this comment section, more than one person. Incredible.
Victim-blaming. Victim-blaming never changes. (/Ron Perlman Voice)
way to not be emotionally supportive, john.
I don’t care what your belief system is, if someone points a gun at your sibling and you are not AT LEAST AS MAD, IF NOT MORE MAD ABOUT IT TGAB THEY ARE, you are fucked up.
or, you know more mad at the person with the gun than the person with the gun in the face… but that’s victim blaming for you.
Well, I mean theoretically, if, say, your sibling were breaking into someone’s house, and the owner caught them and pointed a gun at them…
yeah this highly hypothetical situation is as relevant to the situation at hand as Australian weather facts
I wonder if something like this is the reason John’s wife is “away overseas”.
Okay, throw everything I said yesterday out the window, John is an ass. Though I understand his concern he is expressing it in the completely worst way. Instead of trying to command her to settle down he could’ve politely asked her to calm down and discuss all the reasons shes so angry. While the events of the last few weeks have been the final blows to Joyce’s view of her family and worldview. Lets not forget the memories of the assault at the beginning of the semester, as well as her families reaction to Dorothy as well during parent weekend. The problem is nobody else in her family eally knows everything that has happened to her this semester. I was hoping John was just inadvertently being as ass but I hate this holier than thou attitude he’s displaying. I may be a believer myself but I realize that acting like some perfect human who has everything figured out is the wrong way to go, because I’m not and I don’t and i fuck up all the time. We all fuck up sometimes, that’s what makes us human. But
He does not have any concern about Joyce the person to begin with, so there’s nothing there to understand. He’s only concerned with how the family should be Perfect in the Eyes of God. It’s not about humans, all about the religion. He’s pretty much the same as Toedad in that regards.
If he had any concern about Joyce whatsoever, he would -not- f.ex. though of Joyce punching Toedad as more extreme than Toedad’s actions to begin with.
I find it really hard to not relate to John right now. I mean, his position is wrong, but his reaction is exactly what I do. I can’t do aggressive conflict, I can’t do yelling. Whenever I got mad at home, I would lose. So whenever I get in a disagreement, I always end up staying really calm and isolating myself emotionally. If John came from a household where getting angry only made them punish you worse for being wrong as opposed to making people listen to your point, getting up and leaving is a natural reaction.
John isn’t leaving because he can’t handle noisy conflict. He’s leaving because he has literally no other way to preserve his superiority in the face of Joyce’s indisputable truth than by deflecting attention to her tone and condescending to her because of it.
Exactly. John would’ve left even if Joyce had just explained her position calmly and rationally. He is not leaving because of Joyces tone, but because he refuses to tolerate her not sharing his worldview anymore.
The correct response in this situation is “I’m sorry!” and waiting for Joyce to yell herself out.
You either aren’t reading the tone here well or are an asshole.
“Sure, your best friend was kidnapped and you almost died, but you’re RAISING YOUR VOICE IN A PUBLIC PLACE YOUNG LADY AND THAT’S JUST INEXCUSABLE! I will now take my leave and bid you good day!”
“Josh” is irritatingly spineless. All things considered, that should probably have been expected. But it it only became irritating with firsthand experience.
She rode here with John and may not have a ride home if she pisses him off.
Joyce does have a car.
I’m hoping Joss thinks of that. Whether sje says she’s staying with Joyce or just ‘no, been a while since I was here, I wanna walk around town. I’ll get myself home later.’
(I also don’t think she’s spineless. She already tried to diffuse the situation a couple times. Self preservation matters, not to mention that John is giving her a taste of what will happen if she comes out)
I wouldn’t call her spineless considering that she’s a victim in this too and not just a bystander? She has essentially everything to lose from her family as well.
I… really, really want to just skip to the part where everyone either figures out they’re being utter dicks and fixes it, or gets cast aside by those who do figure it out. But… reading this is also really, really painful. Hitting way close to home… I’m not really sure I can keep reading without it basically just being a daily update to my depression…
No one will blame you for taking a break. 🙂
You are definitely not alone in this. Lots of people are here in doses that they have chosen carefully for themselves, like weekly or monthly when they want an update that might hit them so hard in the feels.
If you ever prefer to take a break, now or in the future, for your own happiness, it’s cool and we’ll still be here when you get back. <3
It’s an unfortunate part of our world that people tend to equate being emotional to being unreasonable.
I’m sure no one has really told this to you in your life, so I guess I’ll say this: it’s okay to feel like crap sometimes. Hell, if your life sucks enough, it’s okay to feel like crap a lot. Being sad, or angry, or afraid, are all perfectly reasonable things to feel under the right circumstances. Anyone who tries to delegitimize your feelings, who tries to tell you to calm down without trying to understand why you’re feeling the way you feel, isn’t interested in helping you deal with your problems; instead, they just want you to stop making their life more inconvenient.
That being said, it’s okay if the comic is hitting a bit too close to home. Davis is exceptionally skilled at hitting people right in the feels, and if you’re already in a vulnerable emotional state, this sort of thing might not help. Then again, I personally find it helps to know there’s someone out there who’s dealt with the same shit I have, so different strokes for different folks, I suppose.
Thank you guys
Damn it. Can’t win all of them over. Putting the Browns along a spectrum for acceptance, from Joss to Carol, with Hank in the middle, I was hoping for between Joss and Hank, not within throwing distance of Carol.
Every day (in universe), Joyce grows. But she’s a main character. But the Browns? Exist to challenge and contrast her. In the end, she’ll be a better person for this.
Drama tag? Prepulled. Looking to feel good? Go somewhere else. Looking to feel, and gain insight to not only the human condition, but yourself? Pull up a chair. I do not damn you, Willis. I thank you, for putting a piece of yourself into this comic. This comic lives because of your soul, and the growth and pains you have felt and fought your life.
I keep forgetting their last name, so when I see it, I think of the Cleveland Browns. As far as acceptance goes, I think they get points for dumping Johnny Manziel and giving Robert Griffin another chance.
And there it is … that predictable reaction I’ve been waiting to see for the last two panels. Any response other than Joyce knuckling down and quietly returning to the fold was going to be an unacceptable response for John.
He had no intention of actually talking to Joyce from the moment she told him that Becky would also be present. This entire meeting has confirmed for him that Joyce needs an intervention before she’s completely lost to Satan’s Lies(tm). Their mother will be so pleased to learn that her judgement was righteous, and now she can justify her own extreme steps to “save” Joyce.
What is John’s deal? I mean WTF? He seems to act like this is over someone getting dumped or something petty, what joyce and becky went through was not petty it was a big crazy wtf situation that is affecting everyone but Joyce’s family, they act like its nothing!
Yes but you see all that drama could have been avoided if Joyce had done the reasonable Christian thing and turned Becky over to her father. [/sarcasm]
Yeah, but try to get him to acknowledge that.
His culture works with one hard and fast rule of morality. Those within are good. That which contradicts the party line is evil.
If he’s to accept that someone, motivated from his culture’s party line, could do evil, he’d have to doubt that single hard and fast rule of tribal goodness. Just getting Joyce to do that has months in the comic.
Yeah, I think I’ll take back my defending of John. He ain’t trying to be reasonable, he’s being kind of a dick.
You gave him the benefit of doubt, he used it in a…. less than stellar way.
“You guys are being assholes and acting as if what happened to my friend and I mean nothing.”
“I’m not taking part in this conversation, good bye sis.”
He pretty much proved her point by just DROPPING the discussion and WALKING AWAY. Yet again, he is disregarding what happened to her. And of course we’ve got some good old fashioned ‘I don’t like what you’re becoming, that college is changing you’. I don’t doubt that John is sincerely ‘worried’ about Joyce. But he’s being an asshole. A biiiiiig asshole.
See also: every person that says someone needs to be “more logical” or “more rational”.
To be fair, they usually do. But John is not being either of those things. And if he is going to claim that this is Becky’s own fault for being a lesbian, based on the evidence of a book he genuinely believes was created from divine magic, he can’t really claim the intellectual high ground.
Also, you can be logical and still not be a condescending douchebag to someone you know is going through emotional trauma, and in all likelihood PTSD.
Damn. Another one of my few hopes regarding the rest of Joyce’s family crushed. Also, another jerk character that looks eerily like a family member. With the same name this time too…
My father was Wiccan, not Christian, but hoo boy am I flashing back to his condescending patriarchal bullshit with John.
Reminds me of that one comic ( http://i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/578/682/575.jpg ) where an “SJW” is “being unreasonable” towards Adolf Hitler, who is clearly the more rational of the two.
This is my new favorite auto-correct.
SJW!
SJWSJWSJW
Social Justice Warrior
Ess Jay Double-Yu
SJW
(in that last one, the “W” stands for wizard)
That autocorrect is bongo-ing!
I like how “college” changed her for the worse and not tramatic ordeal caused by a person from her home town. Too much diversity is bad because someone may shoot you to “recenter” you.
Yeah, at this point ToeDad is basically going… “um, remember me? Looks like a toe, Gun to the face? Give me some credit here.”
John: “You were only a symptom of a deeper change that had to do with going to college.”
Carol: “You poor man, one must understand what you have been going through.”
John’s probably heard many a tale of a good Christian (the kind that he would recognize as a Christian, anyway) going off to College only to come back having doubted the obvious truth of things like the literal 6 day Creation and even considering that Christianity, itself, might not be the truest of the true (assuming they even acknowledge that there’s a difference).
He likely also knows that trauma, like someone pointing a gun at you, is *supposed* to bring someone closer to God, like how that liberal blogger in God’s Not Dead converted when she found out she had cancer.
Therefore, obviously, the problem is College, not any kind of trauma. That’s not according to script at all.
Hes an insincere weasel, dont give him any credit.
He was sent here to spy on Joyce, gain her confidence and use it against her.
John is moms spy and she wants reasons to pull Joyce out of college.
John has screwed up and telegraphed this fact. He is just more victim-blaming.
And he is threatening Joyce, and then saying your negative reaction justifies why I set this lunch up to betray You.
Okay, wow.
Even after yesterday’s strip I was open to the possibility that he might still be a surprise not so bad guy after all. But this? …wow.
Wow, that encounter dripped with patriarchy . . .
patriarchy – making everything worse since forever. Now with extra John.
Patriarchy! For when you absolutely MUST ignore a woman’s opinion over night!
But don’t take it from us, listen to our endorsements:
John from La Porte: Patriarchy allowed me to dismiss my sister’s experiences of nearly being murdered from a member of our church while still pretending to be the good guy. Thanks, Patriarchy!
Yes, Patriarchy for all your “being an ass” needs. Now in new victim-blaming favor!
None of that had anything to do with that…