There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Beeserker
TJ Cordes
This comic is about a robot powered by bees, but it's also about the kind of people who think filling a robot with bees is a good idea, and why they're wrong.
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
The Otherknown
Lorian Merriman
Chandra is a 12-year-old accidental time traveler with a reluctant new dad, who happens to be a member of a feared galactic crime syndicate.
Countdown to Countdown
Velinxi
Iris Black is a self-proclaimed inventor with the curious ability to bring his drawings to life, and yearns to find a space where he can use his powers freely.
2 Slices
RJ Morel
After a case of mistaken identity, will awkward Daisuke find help from excitable Mamo, or will his love life be thrown completely off track?
Mac Hall
Matt Boyd
The legendary early-aughts webcomic that inspired a wave of webcomic creators.
Blindsprings
Kadi Fedoruk
Tamaura, wrested into a world 300 years in the future, must find a way to save the magic fading from her country.
Slightly Damned
Chu
Rhea Snaketail returns from the dead, befriending a Demon who falls in love with an Angel. The afterlife ain't what it used to be!
Fantomestein
Beka Duke
Desperate for companionship, Frankenstein's Monster pretends to be the Opera Ghost. A grave mistake.
Paint the Town Red
Windy, Winter Jay Kiakas
Winona runs a werewolf shelter with partner in crime, Odile in the Gothic city of Merlot. One day they take in an injured vampire, and soon unravels many of the dark secrets of Merlot.
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It can be exhausting to share space with someone who constantly needs quiet time, especially if you need a place to unpack or just chill. Dorothy would legit be a hard person to share space with.
It makes you feel bad when you see somebody trying so much harder than you are. It can make you feel really guilty, like you aren’t doing enough with your time in school. But relaxing and socializing and overdramatic relationships are important parts of college too, which Dorothy hasn’t really learned yet.
For me, seeing something be made a huge deal or something that I think would be stressful can exhaust me to look at even if the people involved are not stressed out by it.
Like, I used to get stressed out by Iron Chef because the buildup for the competition always made it sound like losing this one match was going to destroy somebody’s career and reputation.
Something about the outsized reaction is stress/anxiety inducing in a way that a reasonable response to a bigger problem isn’t. Dorothy wanting to get a head start wouldn’t bother me personally, but if she was constantly talking as if she’s two steps behind when she’s five steps ahead it would get to me.
I can’t tell if that’s a ‘oh boy I’m glad I got out of there when I could’ or a ‘I forgot how much I miss your hyper productivity, I love you and I want a million Dorothy frecklebabies’.
I feel like both are unlikely, personally. She seems more worried about Dorothy’s well-being than relieved at not having to deal with her anymore. Imo, that face she makes at the end is the face of someone who is trying *really* hard not to say something that might not be 100% tactful.
I think Dorothy has already crashed once. It was a while ago so I’m not sure I’m remembering it 100% correctly but her grades slipped, which lead to her breaking things off with Walky and going into study overdrive before realizing she maybe spread herself too thin and decided to slightly cut back on her self imposed work load. I think. Someone can correct me if I’ve gotten some or all of that wrong.
Anyway Dorothy is someone who just can’t not be doing something. I’ve known a few people like that in life. I think everyone’s at least met one workaholic.
It certainly happened but I wouldn’t call it a crash. More of a vague downwards saunter. She’s still Normal Mommish Dorothy most of the time, and I think there’s some extremely transparent performative cheerfulness when dealing with Becky’s deliberate provocations.
Some of the spreading herself less thin was also finishing all the extra credit assignments she’d taken on for herself (though not trying to tutor Walky and balance a relationship with him almost certainly did free up some time.) Resolved the immediate issues of grades and an unbalanced schedule, and I think it did let her reassess what extracurriculars she really did value, but I don’t think she’s actually hit the wall yet on the grades/burnout situation. (Doubting Walky has on his own studying problems, for that matter.)
Especially with a strip like this and last panel’s Concerned Sierra face, I wouldn’t be shocked if that arc’s still waiting to explode. Very possibly when it runs up against Becky’s jealous antagonism, since she’s hit on actual sore spots now.
I hope it does. Resolving that arc with Dorothy with “well she broke up with Walky and caught up, so she’s fine now” never sat well with me.
From either a more standard work-life balance point of view or a more specific “women who want to achieve have to forgo relationships” point of view.
There was so much Concerning Shit going on there, totally unrelated to the breakup, that if her problem IS 100% resolved by the breakup I’ll be seriously disappointed. My bet is still slow burn arc because it would shift a LOT of Dorothy’s dynamics in the short term, and some of them would probably be permanent changes.
It always bugs me when people act like Dorothy isn’t as much a messup as all the other characters when her workaholism has led her to repeatedly neglect her physical health, mental health, romantic relationships, platonic relationships, and even her ability to help others. Dorothy broke up with Walky in large part because she couldn’t stop trying to help him even when she had left herself no time to do so. Joyce has repeatedly referred to Dorothy not having much time to spend with friends. Dorothy has to be reminded to eat, and schedules every waking moment of her day. Oh, and she thinks studying hard and going to a good college will let her become president, and her dedication to her “by-the-numbers” political career has been shown to be, well, naive and even counterproductive (you are often *much* better off trying to get involved in local activism, like Roz, especially in today’s day and age).
Dorothy’s running herself into the ground. Honestly, my biggest worry with this comic is that Willis is going to be too reluctant to explicitly run a “the woman needs to stop being so ambitious” storyline to adequately acknowledge how toxic Dorothy’s current lifestyle and career goals have become for her. Because she… does. Dorothy needs to slow down and even out her goals. This isn’t healthy. Neglecting your relationships isn’t healthy, and frankly, it’s not fair to your friends.
Not that I knew someone like Dorothy once and have since developed very strong opinions on the “I think neglecting and ignoring my friends and girlfriend to focus on my career is actually a brave feminist take” attitude. Haha. Ha.
Like, Dorothy’s flaws are easy to read as positive traits if read from a capitalist framework, and I’m worried the comic isn’t going to really let her crash the way she kind of needs to to reflect the dangers of burnout in reality. “I’ll just postpone sleep” is a real thing people say and do, and it kills people in real life.
Actually you have to take people as you find them and all the main characters are perfect as they are, warts and all. Except for Mike. He was even more perfect and obviously too good for DOA.
It always bugs me when people act like Dorothy isn’t as much a messup as all the other characters…
There’s a post on Tumblr that says something along the lines of, “The adults at your school ignored your obvious mental and social problems because they caused you to be a ‘good student’ (quiet, stayed out of trouble), pretended to care when your grades dropped, and then never brought it up again.”
It was very, “I’m in this photo and I don’t like it”.
I think Dorothy’s ambitions and goals are good. It’s just that she needs to slow down a bit to take a breath. Yeah, her goal of being president is unrealistic, but she know what she wants and she knows how to work to get results. It’s easy to judge someone who would seem to functional in a setting where everyone is a mess, so her virtues could be seen as negative things by those who don’t share those virtues.
Also, I must clarify her relationship with Walky was doomed and I don’t see a future with that ship. Walky is too immature and impulsive, and he, like Joyce, glorifies Dorothy too much.
I mean, with regards to being president, Anthropic Principle I guess.
I don’t think that Walky/Dorothy was exactly a doomed ship, but it needed to survive past the baby stages so the veneer of the perfect partner wears off. If you can survive past that, then that’s one major hurdle cleared.
Except that in canon, those qualities of Walky have nothing to do with why they broke up. They broke up because she was too overworked to have time for him, despite loving him. In fact, some of Walky’s most mature and least impulsive moments were in dealing with that problem. He’d decided he was going to have to break up with her, so he’d stop being a strain on her studies. That’s not exactly immature or impulsive.
On the other hand, setting high goals and striving for them can be exactly what some people want out of life – they would genuinely be uncomfortable and less happy if they felt like they were “wasting” their time because they hadn’t scheduled it for something “more productive”. And some of them would actually crash completely if they didn’t structure themselves this way, because they just don’t handle unstructured time well, and slip more and more into missing deadlines that are actually important instead of simply self-imposed ones.
I mean, it seems exhausting and miserable to me, but some people thrive with that kind of lifestyle, and it doesn’t seem unnatural to me to see one in a college setting.
And while Dorothy isn’t exactly a social butterfly, she does have close friends and is able to manage her relationship with them once she realizes that she needs to budget time for them as well. That seems healthy enough to me.
There’s a difference between being a workaholic, and setting ambitious goals – Dorothy explicitly wants to transfer to a more prestigious university, and that requires putting in an unhealthy amount of effort. It really isn’t possible for her to have as much free time as her friends if she values that goal – and, well, it’s likely that many of these people wouldn’t be a part of her life if she does transfer, so it doesn’t make much sense to prioritize those relationships over the new ones she’ll make in the future. This isn’t her being a workaholic; it’s a realistic judgment of what she needs to do in order to accomplish a time-sensitive goal.
She’ll have plenty of time to relax once she transfers; the hard part is getting in, not the work once she’s there. If she’s still insisting on late nights and no downtime once she’s there, then she has a problem – but what we’ve seen so far is pretty much just the price of getting her foot in the door.
(Of course, there are bigger problems with her plan – namely, that the networking opportunities of a prestigious university are the only real value they have over a less expensive institution, and getting her basic credits here lock her out of many of those opportunities. But I assume that’s artistic license because her character wouldn’t be in this comic at all if she went to Princeton first.)
I think Dorothy’s on another slow burn arc, given how explicitly worrisome things were during the extra credit/breakup period. A lot of the really big character arcs – Joyce’s gradual loss of faith, Amber and AG and Sal, and Billie’s depression, all to name a few – have ended up percolating for much of the run of the strip before any kind of payoff, and we’ve seen all of them addressed in time. There’s several others that definitely went on the backburner as the Blaine arc reached its climax, but had some pretty clear plot hooks for later before the timeskip. (Case in point: Look if you see Raidah’s last line and DON’T think she’s going to be an antagonist in the near future, I don’t know what to tell you.) I think this moment with Dorothy is being set up to establish ‘no, this issue has not resolved offscreen, and it wasn’t resolved when she finished the extra credit assignments,’ especially alongside Becky’s comment about Yale actually hitting a sore spot.
All that said, while I agree with most of what you said, I will point out that Dorothy has engaged politically – she’s mentioned specifically that some of her volunteerwork’s included campaigning for Jake Manley, the guy who has Robin’s seat in the House now. We haven’t seen her do subject-specific activism, but then we haven’t seen Roz do any for quite some time, either. (She might have done some canvassing for Manley, but if so it was either non-explicit in the strip Dorothy brings up she did or AGES ago.) She doesn’t have the natural charismatic knack Roz or Becky have, no, and she’s not focusing on building connections which would be seriously helpful, but she’s not disengaged and Becky immediately went to her as the qualified person when the Robin job came up. I’ll take skill over charisma any day. She just needs to learn to balance it like she needs to balance grades vs free time, and that very few people follow a perfect, linear path in their careers. (Especially not in politics.)
I mean, winning people over’s clearly a necessary skill in itself, but since we currently have All Fascist Cult of Personality Charisma No Competence* in the White House, I may be a bit… skewed.
* Like, even if I didn’t find his policies abhorrent, he sucks at covering up his many many crimes as well.
Dorothy is generally seen as less of a mess not because she doesn’t have issues, but because her issues aren’t moral problems or as obviously self-destructive. She won’t call someone an asshole just because they hurt her feelings, she won’t drink herself into a coma, she won’t encourage bad choices. Her actual screw-ups like that are very rare.
Her messes are more self-contained and societal expected messes. If you are a student, you are expected to sleep poorly, eat poorly, have bad hygiene. Working on things overnight is expected. Studying until morning is expected. Working yourself to the bone to get to that prestigious school you want is expected. College students are expected and even encouraged to have bad self-care routines to get their work done.
Dorothy is the type of person that makes an excellent ideal well-behaved student that doesn’t trouble their teachers or staff too much… and slips right through the cracks by not being temperamental, overtly self-destructive or problematic in a way that it causes problems for *staff*.
I think it is fine for Dorothy to have grand ambitions and a lofty goal as she does. But she needs to accept that she doesn’t have to try to speedrun it and can go for it at a steady pace while looking after herself along the way.
I don’t know if that’s a
“Agatha is WAY TOO LAID BACK. I need help getting motivation.”
or a
“Thank goodness, I’m not rooming with this motivation monster anymore.”
Yeah Sierra doesn’t strike me as the type to obsess over homework and grades, so I imagine sharing a room with Dorothy was difficult in some ways. Now knowing Becky, she’ll be motivated by Dorothy and want to keep up because of her rivalry.
Now the question is, who will drive whom up the wall first? Dorothy or Becky?
I have a feeling that Agatha might be a stoner who’s not going to classes and is in the process of flunking out of school – and Sierra is unable to cope since she’s never had to pressure anyone to get their shit together.
I think part of it’s in framing of her past arcs – I didn’t worry about Dorothy’s study-orientedness until she started neglecting things like showering, sleep, and meals to finish her extra credit assignments, and that was clearly depicted as a bad thing. She hasn’t had trouble since… but since she resolved things more by finishing assignments rather than realizing ‘okay, watching cartoons so I can rest my brain for a while is something valuable, and I should build this time into my day’ (or a similar hobby-for-hobby’s-sake,) that primes us to expect she will hit that wall again eventually.
Also, speaking as a former gifted kid who has in fact burned out but isn’t anywhere NEAR the biggest crash from my high school’s advanced class programs, a lot of the people who recognize ourselves (or people we know) in Dorothy eventually burned out or graduated and had no idea what to do, or both. You can learn how to be an excellent STUDENT for the US educational system, but a lot of those skills are basically useless outside an academic environment. (For example: I am an excellent test-taker. My brother, by and large, is not. We both have a similar grasp of material we’ve both studied – say, history – and can have pretty in-depth conversations about it, but I scored way better on AP exams than he did. But he’s so much better at things like socializing that he does way better in actual environments involving other people, while I struggle with anything that’s not the specific task assigned to me, in solitude. Our test scores aren’t a sign that I’m any more knowledgeable than he is, just that I do well on standardized testing and he doesn’t.) The recognition means that we’re extrapolating from… well, being in that picture and not liking it, as someone brought up when discussing that Tumblr post about how ‘good students’’ issues get ignored because they’re seen as productive in a classroom. Those issues don’t go ignored forever, and in college is one of the prime places they start hitting a breaking point. (Walky’s the same issue from the other side of the coin with his grades – he learned effortlessly with easy material, so he never learned how to study and can’t now that he needs to. Especially since there’s an active hint he has an undiagnosed executive function disorder – Mike was wrong about a lot of things, but often because he was intentionally or not misjudging peoples’ reactions, less his own observations – and he’s now reaching a point where he can’t compensate. Very much also a Gifted Kid Burnout Mood.)
First read-through, I thought maybe Agatha snapped and her pendulum swung completely the other way to “party animal” over the skip, and that Sierra already missed Dorothy’s manic but predictable work ethic.
Not just the drama. I hadnt thought about it until this strip, but Dorothy’s studying relied /a lot/ on invisible mental and emotional labour on Sierra’s part. Sierra not complaining if she woke up at five in the morning when Dorothy swapped jogs to torch and reading in her bed. Sierra making sure Dorothy eats. Probably not managing to fall asleep as easily due to Dorothy staying up. Being a form of bodyguard to ensure Dorothy can study undisturbed (when Faz and Amber ran through the room)
Becky isnt gonna do that sort of labour for Dorothy. And that will make it very hard for Dorothy to carry on like she has done
Your comment just put this into a new perspective with the Dorothy/Becky roommate combo, and I actually am now excited to see how they work (or rather, don’t work) with each other. Cause yeah, Becky is not going to do what Sierra did, this may make some entertaining, if not cringy conversations.
Cause you are absolutely right…Sierra bent over backwards to help Dorothy and she did not need to do that crap. Agatha’s yes woman attitude will be a breath of fresh air compared to Dorothy’s ways.
We also definitely saw Sierra was actively concerned about Dorothy (encouraging Walky during the hookup just before the breakup because it meant Dorothy was actually sleeping and encouraging her REPEATEDLY to go out and do something Outside The Room and Unproductive and getting shot down made up her last four real appearances in the main comic,) but since she seems like a pretty low-conflict person, I’m not sure she would’ve actually told Dorothy, say, ‘this is unhealthy and I am concerned, get out of this room at least long enough for lunch and a walk, it’ll make you more productive anyway.’ Certainly not with the force needed to get through to her.
She clearly still likes Dorothy and enjoys her company, but I get entirely why she’s not a compatible roommate. (Becky isn’t really going to be one for Dorothy either, at least not where they stand now, but I think Becky actually CAN get through to her that neglecting self-care is detrimental to her grades, and that there’s more than one way to her goals.)
I guess it turns out that Sierra really can’t be comfortable around people who aren’t ‘laid back’ and, frankly, I can’t think of anyone who is more the opposite of that than Dorothy!
There is a new artist drawing the syndicated “Mark Trail” comic strip. If you have the ability to read the episode for Oct 30 2020 (online or in a newspaper), you are going to see Becky’s hairstyle has been co-opted for one of the Trail characters. It is unmistakable and undeniable.
The comments are disgusting, and make me ashamed to be a boomer. I keep wanting to say “Ok, Boomer” to them. What’s really obnoxious is that they complain about the older “legacy” strips as being out of touch and boring, but then when someone young with new ideas gets a chance and makes changes, they don’t like that either.
Yeah, people in the comments seem to be saying that this suggests Sierra wasn’t getting on with Dorothy’s workaholic lifestyle, so it could have been that Sierra wasn’t getting any real opportunity to chill out in her own room, but then we never really saw any sign of Sierra having issues.
On top of that, Sierra clearly still sees Dorothy as a friend (she asks if the seat is taken) so clearly nothing too bad happened. I’m guessing it was just an amicable parting of ways.
Though it almost reads as if Agatha is too laid back and Sierra has issue with that, which is also confusing.
We did see Sierra have concerns about Dorothy – she had multiple appearances where she was not-so-subtly asking Dorothy to leave the dorm and get some food, or go see a free concert, along with the one where Walky and Dorothy hooked up just before the breakup and Sierra said ‘no, we should let her sleep because she needs it.’ Combined with the apologizing for trying to keep the Faz-Amber chase quiet (out of her control,) she definitely was doing, at minimum, some worrying after Dorothy. Combined with today’s hovertext reading ‘you’re freeeeeeee,’ I think we’re definitely meant to see Sierra as stressed out by Dorothy working herself too hard.
Apart from Dorothy’s use of the word “study”, I kind of get what she’s doing. I always hated going into a new course blind, without some idea of what might be coming – especially since some professors weren’t the best at organizing their initial lessons, and you could feel out of your depth pretty quickly if you didn’t have some background.
If the syllabus is available before the first day of class, you really do need to read it.
But, the issue here is Dorothy isn’t checking if there’s anything she needs to study, which would imply potentially assigned pre-reading. Dorothy is instead looking for what to study. The surety of the statement implies she just wants to get a head start on her reading assignments. Which, given how often my professors changed those up, is all but certain to be unnecessary, extra work.
Though yeah, Sierra’s reaction is odd because it comes out of nowhere. It’s easy to believe Dorothy’s self-imposed schedule REALLY clashed with hers, but we didn’t see any evidence of that before.
I’m like super late to this but feel like I need t’say it – maybe Sierra is just worried for Dorothy’s mental well-being and might be feeling guilty about not being there to help her regulate? I remember her thankin’ Walky a while back for gettin’ Dorothy to unwind one time a while back, and tended to try and get her to take breaks here and there so she didn’t go stir-crazy. And with how Becky acts (though admittedly I’unno how well Sierra knows her), that behaviour of self-improvement over self-care to destructive levels won’t be regulated so much as encouraged.
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woo
studying
yay
=|
Studying, studying (yeah!)
Studying, studying (woo!)
So I just took an online test and found out I’m a Ravenclaw.
The test was me watching the video.
Just for my own personal amusement, I’m gonna make it headcanon that Agatha is obsessed with shoes and has a whole closet full of them.
Oh no, you can’t do that…
betch
She wears a pair on her hands to make up for the ones Sierra’s not wearing.
What’s the problem with the roommate being a workaholic? That doesn’t make you a workaholic
It’s not contagious, Sierra!
Join usssss… in alphabetising your notes and textbooks… join ussss…
“Granger’s Disease” affects thousands of students a year. Ask your doctor if Nogivvafuk is right for you.
It can be exhausting to share space with someone who constantly needs quiet time, especially if you need a place to unpack or just chill. Dorothy would legit be a hard person to share space with.
Becky has no problem. I mean, she was all set with the dividing tape.
It makes you feel bad when you see somebody trying so much harder than you are. It can make you feel really guilty, like you aren’t doing enough with your time in school. But relaxing and socializing and overdramatic relationships are important parts of college too, which Dorothy hasn’t really learned yet.
Dorothy dumped someone on her first day and then shacked up with McNuggets boy in less than two weeks.
They then broke up not even two months in.
I was in college for 7 years and I didn’t have overdramatic relationships. I just had friendships and some annoying acquaintances.
This response was for Wonderboy
Pretty sure the literal kidnapping got that out of her system
For me, seeing something be made a huge deal or something that I think would be stressful can exhaust me to look at even if the people involved are not stressed out by it.
Like, I used to get stressed out by Iron Chef because the buildup for the competition always made it sound like losing this one match was going to destroy somebody’s career and reputation.
Something about the outsized reaction is stress/anxiety inducing in a way that a reasonable response to a bigger problem isn’t. Dorothy wanting to get a head start wouldn’t bother me personally, but if she was constantly talking as if she’s two steps behind when she’s five steps ahead it would get to me.
I can’t tell if that’s a ‘oh boy I’m glad I got out of there when I could’ or a ‘I forgot how much I miss your hyper productivity, I love you and I want a million Dorothy frecklebabies’.
By the alt-text I am guessing the former.
Alt text suggests former lol, freedom!
People who are organizers generally don’t just want to organize themselves, they also want to organize anyone around them.
That was supposed to go above but I guess it applies here too sorta
Am messy at home but the organization lead at work, can confirm.
The plumber’s house has leaky pipes, the mechanic’s car has squeaky brakes.
And the cobbler’s children have no shoes.
Overrated!
Sierra knows.
I feel like both are unlikely, personally. She seems more worried about Dorothy’s well-being than relieved at not having to deal with her anymore. Imo, that face she makes at the end is the face of someone who is trying *really* hard not to say something that might not be 100% tactful.
I’m not sure exactly what Sierra’s feeling here but it’s always good to see her! Sierra is underrated!
Yes! sadly.
She’s feeling the floor, anyway.
Agatha is definitely more like Sierra’s style.
That is the face of someone who is now living a drama free college life.
Dorothy’s gonna crash one day, and it’ll make for a good story.
I think Dorothy has already crashed once. It was a while ago so I’m not sure I’m remembering it 100% correctly but her grades slipped, which lead to her breaking things off with Walky and going into study overdrive before realizing she maybe spread herself too thin and decided to slightly cut back on her self imposed work load. I think. Someone can correct me if I’ve gotten some or all of that wrong.
Anyway Dorothy is someone who just can’t not be doing something. I’ve known a few people like that in life. I think everyone’s at least met one workaholic.
It certainly happened but I wouldn’t call it a crash. More of a vague downwards saunter. She’s still Normal Mommish Dorothy most of the time, and I think there’s some extremely transparent performative cheerfulness when dealing with Becky’s deliberate provocations.
It was pretty close to a crash, at the time. She seems to have mostly recovered now.
Some of the spreading herself less thin was also finishing all the extra credit assignments she’d taken on for herself (though not trying to tutor Walky and balance a relationship with him almost certainly did free up some time.) Resolved the immediate issues of grades and an unbalanced schedule, and I think it did let her reassess what extracurriculars she really did value, but I don’t think she’s actually hit the wall yet on the grades/burnout situation. (Doubting Walky has on his own studying problems, for that matter.)
Especially with a strip like this and last panel’s Concerned Sierra face, I wouldn’t be shocked if that arc’s still waiting to explode. Very possibly when it runs up against Becky’s jealous antagonism, since she’s hit on actual sore spots now.
I hope it does. Resolving that arc with Dorothy with “well she broke up with Walky and caught up, so she’s fine now” never sat well with me.
From either a more standard work-life balance point of view or a more specific “women who want to achieve have to forgo relationships” point of view.
There was so much Concerning Shit going on there, totally unrelated to the breakup, that if her problem IS 100% resolved by the breakup I’ll be seriously disappointed. My bet is still slow burn arc because it would shift a LOT of Dorothy’s dynamics in the short term, and some of them would probably be permanent changes.
It always bugs me when people act like Dorothy isn’t as much a messup as all the other characters when her workaholism has led her to repeatedly neglect her physical health, mental health, romantic relationships, platonic relationships, and even her ability to help others. Dorothy broke up with Walky in large part because she couldn’t stop trying to help him even when she had left herself no time to do so. Joyce has repeatedly referred to Dorothy not having much time to spend with friends. Dorothy has to be reminded to eat, and schedules every waking moment of her day. Oh, and she thinks studying hard and going to a good college will let her become president, and her dedication to her “by-the-numbers” political career has been shown to be, well, naive and even counterproductive (you are often *much* better off trying to get involved in local activism, like Roz, especially in today’s day and age).
Dorothy’s running herself into the ground. Honestly, my biggest worry with this comic is that Willis is going to be too reluctant to explicitly run a “the woman needs to stop being so ambitious” storyline to adequately acknowledge how toxic Dorothy’s current lifestyle and career goals have become for her. Because she… does. Dorothy needs to slow down and even out her goals. This isn’t healthy. Neglecting your relationships isn’t healthy, and frankly, it’s not fair to your friends.
Not that I knew someone like Dorothy once and have since developed very strong opinions on the “I think neglecting and ignoring my friends and girlfriend to focus on my career is actually a brave feminist take” attitude. Haha. Ha.
Like, Dorothy’s flaws are easy to read as positive traits if read from a capitalist framework, and I’m worried the comic isn’t going to really let her crash the way she kind of needs to to reflect the dangers of burnout in reality. “I’ll just postpone sleep” is a real thing people say and do, and it kills people in real life.
Insert Boomer rant here.
Actually you have to take people as you find them and all the main characters are perfect as they are, warts and all. Except for Mike. He was even more perfect and obviously too good for DOA.
It always bugs me when people act like Dorothy isn’t as much a messup as all the other characters…
There’s a post on Tumblr that says something along the lines of, “The adults at your school ignored your obvious mental and social problems because they caused you to be a ‘good student’ (quiet, stayed out of trouble), pretended to care when your grades dropped, and then never brought it up again.”
It was very, “I’m in this photo and I don’t like it”.
I think Dorothy’s ambitions and goals are good. It’s just that she needs to slow down a bit to take a breath. Yeah, her goal of being president is unrealistic, but she know what she wants and she knows how to work to get results. It’s easy to judge someone who would seem to functional in a setting where everyone is a mess, so her virtues could be seen as negative things by those who don’t share those virtues.
Also, I must clarify her relationship with Walky was doomed and I don’t see a future with that ship. Walky is too immature and impulsive, and he, like Joyce, glorifies Dorothy too much.
I mean, with regards to being president, Anthropic Principle I guess.
I don’t think that Walky/Dorothy was exactly a doomed ship, but it needed to survive past the baby stages so the veneer of the perfect partner wears off. If you can survive past that, then that’s one major hurdle cleared.
Except that in canon, those qualities of Walky have nothing to do with why they broke up. They broke up because she was too overworked to have time for him, despite loving him. In fact, some of Walky’s most mature and least impulsive moments were in dealing with that problem. He’d decided he was going to have to break up with her, so he’d stop being a strain on her studies. That’s not exactly immature or impulsive.
On the other hand, setting high goals and striving for them can be exactly what some people want out of life – they would genuinely be uncomfortable and less happy if they felt like they were “wasting” their time because they hadn’t scheduled it for something “more productive”. And some of them would actually crash completely if they didn’t structure themselves this way, because they just don’t handle unstructured time well, and slip more and more into missing deadlines that are actually important instead of simply self-imposed ones.
I mean, it seems exhausting and miserable to me, but some people thrive with that kind of lifestyle, and it doesn’t seem unnatural to me to see one in a college setting.
And while Dorothy isn’t exactly a social butterfly, she does have close friends and is able to manage her relationship with them once she realizes that she needs to budget time for them as well. That seems healthy enough to me.
There’s a difference between being a workaholic, and setting ambitious goals – Dorothy explicitly wants to transfer to a more prestigious university, and that requires putting in an unhealthy amount of effort. It really isn’t possible for her to have as much free time as her friends if she values that goal – and, well, it’s likely that many of these people wouldn’t be a part of her life if she does transfer, so it doesn’t make much sense to prioritize those relationships over the new ones she’ll make in the future. This isn’t her being a workaholic; it’s a realistic judgment of what she needs to do in order to accomplish a time-sensitive goal.
She’ll have plenty of time to relax once she transfers; the hard part is getting in, not the work once she’s there. If she’s still insisting on late nights and no downtime once she’s there, then she has a problem – but what we’ve seen so far is pretty much just the price of getting her foot in the door.
(Of course, there are bigger problems with her plan – namely, that the networking opportunities of a prestigious university are the only real value they have over a less expensive institution, and getting her basic credits here lock her out of many of those opportunities. But I assume that’s artistic license because her character wouldn’t be in this comic at all if she went to Princeton first.)
I think Dorothy’s on another slow burn arc, given how explicitly worrisome things were during the extra credit/breakup period. A lot of the really big character arcs – Joyce’s gradual loss of faith, Amber and AG and Sal, and Billie’s depression, all to name a few – have ended up percolating for much of the run of the strip before any kind of payoff, and we’ve seen all of them addressed in time. There’s several others that definitely went on the backburner as the Blaine arc reached its climax, but had some pretty clear plot hooks for later before the timeskip. (Case in point: Look if you see Raidah’s last line and DON’T think she’s going to be an antagonist in the near future, I don’t know what to tell you.) I think this moment with Dorothy is being set up to establish ‘no, this issue has not resolved offscreen, and it wasn’t resolved when she finished the extra credit assignments,’ especially alongside Becky’s comment about Yale actually hitting a sore spot.
All that said, while I agree with most of what you said, I will point out that Dorothy has engaged politically – she’s mentioned specifically that some of her volunteerwork’s included campaigning for Jake Manley, the guy who has Robin’s seat in the House now. We haven’t seen her do subject-specific activism, but then we haven’t seen Roz do any for quite some time, either. (She might have done some canvassing for Manley, but if so it was either non-explicit in the strip Dorothy brings up she did or AGES ago.) She doesn’t have the natural charismatic knack Roz or Becky have, no, and she’s not focusing on building connections which would be seriously helpful, but she’s not disengaged and Becky immediately went to her as the qualified person when the Robin job came up. I’ll take skill over charisma any day. She just needs to learn to balance it like she needs to balance grades vs free time, and that very few people follow a perfect, linear path in their careers. (Especially not in politics.)
I’d take skill over charisma any day for most things, but not if the goal is winning political office.
I mean, winning people over’s clearly a necessary skill in itself, but since we currently have All Fascist Cult of Personality Charisma No Competence* in the White House, I may be a bit… skewed.
* Like, even if I didn’t find his policies abhorrent, he sucks at covering up his many many crimes as well.
Dorothy is generally seen as less of a mess not because she doesn’t have issues, but because her issues aren’t moral problems or as obviously self-destructive. She won’t call someone an asshole just because they hurt her feelings, she won’t drink herself into a coma, she won’t encourage bad choices. Her actual screw-ups like that are very rare.
Her messes are more self-contained and societal expected messes. If you are a student, you are expected to sleep poorly, eat poorly, have bad hygiene. Working on things overnight is expected. Studying until morning is expected. Working yourself to the bone to get to that prestigious school you want is expected. College students are expected and even encouraged to have bad self-care routines to get their work done.
Dorothy is the type of person that makes an excellent ideal well-behaved student that doesn’t trouble their teachers or staff too much… and slips right through the cracks by not being temperamental, overtly self-destructive or problematic in a way that it causes problems for *staff*.
I think it is fine for Dorothy to have grand ambitions and a lofty goal as she does. But she needs to accept that she doesn’t have to try to speedrun it and can go for it at a steady pace while looking after herself along the way.
I don’t know if that’s a
“Agatha is WAY TOO LAID BACK. I need help getting motivation.”
or a
“Thank goodness, I’m not rooming with this motivation monster anymore.”
On reading I thought it was the first but the alt text makes me think it is the second
I’m fairly certain that it the latter, Sierra does not seem enthused by the prospect of looking at homework before the semester officially begins.
I think it makes more sense this way (plus there’s the alt text), but that the last panel looks more like she’s cringing about Agatha to me
Or she’s worried about Dorothy?
Maybe it’s a bit of both?
Remember back when I thought Sierra was best girl. Those were the days.
Now I’ve got a new favorite. Can you guess who it is!?
Malaya right? I still believe in Sierra though!
Other Sierra?
Still Sierra?
Twilight Sparkle!
Agatha is dead, isn’t she?
Yeah Sierra doesn’t strike me as the type to obsess over homework and grades, so I imagine sharing a room with Dorothy was difficult in some ways. Now knowing Becky, she’ll be motivated by Dorothy and want to keep up because of her rivalry.
Now the question is, who will drive whom up the wall first? Dorothy or Becky?
They’ll meet at the ceiling.
That’s not even a nerd thing, some classes expect you to have reading done before they start
Legally Blonde warned about that. I don’t know what these kids were expecting when entering college.
Those classes suck.
Is this the first time we’ve ever seen Sierra not smiling?
OK, after checking the archives it’s not… still, it doesn’t happen a lot.
Either Dorothy is as workaholic as Sierra claims she is, or Sierra is too lazy that she is scared of seeing other people working.
You forgot? https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-7/01-glower-vacuum/rat/
Also I like her floral print hoodie!
I have a feeling that Agatha might be a stoner who’s not going to classes and is in the process of flunking out of school – and Sierra is unable to cope since she’s never had to pressure anyone to get their shit together.
Sarah: “Been there, done that.”
Can you be a stoner -and- a Mormon?
Yes.
Can you be a stoner and a “proper” Mormon? No.
See, it USED to be like Sierra’s style, but then law school rolled around, and if you’re not ahead, you’re behind
Why is everyone so aggresive about Dorothy wanting to keep up with assignments. For me finishing assignments on time meant I could play video games.
Well yeah but for her finishing assignments just means she can do more assignments.
Maybe Dorothy finds happiness in fyllfilling tasks, which would be see as abnormal by regular people like Sierra.
Regular people?
If Sierra tried to walk down the regular path to life, she got caught somewhere at the start line to fight a war against shoes.
We will cover the earth with leather!
I think part of it’s in framing of her past arcs – I didn’t worry about Dorothy’s study-orientedness until she started neglecting things like showering, sleep, and meals to finish her extra credit assignments, and that was clearly depicted as a bad thing. She hasn’t had trouble since… but since she resolved things more by finishing assignments rather than realizing ‘okay, watching cartoons so I can rest my brain for a while is something valuable, and I should build this time into my day’ (or a similar hobby-for-hobby’s-sake,) that primes us to expect she will hit that wall again eventually.
Also, speaking as a former gifted kid who has in fact burned out but isn’t anywhere NEAR the biggest crash from my high school’s advanced class programs, a lot of the people who recognize ourselves (or people we know) in Dorothy eventually burned out or graduated and had no idea what to do, or both. You can learn how to be an excellent STUDENT for the US educational system, but a lot of those skills are basically useless outside an academic environment. (For example: I am an excellent test-taker. My brother, by and large, is not. We both have a similar grasp of material we’ve both studied – say, history – and can have pretty in-depth conversations about it, but I scored way better on AP exams than he did. But he’s so much better at things like socializing that he does way better in actual environments involving other people, while I struggle with anything that’s not the specific task assigned to me, in solitude. Our test scores aren’t a sign that I’m any more knowledgeable than he is, just that I do well on standardized testing and he doesn’t.) The recognition means that we’re extrapolating from… well, being in that picture and not liking it, as someone brought up when discussing that Tumblr post about how ‘good students’’ issues get ignored because they’re seen as productive in a classroom. Those issues don’t go ignored forever, and in college is one of the prime places they start hitting a breaking point. (Walky’s the same issue from the other side of the coin with his grades – he learned effortlessly with easy material, so he never learned how to study and can’t now that he needs to. Especially since there’s an active hint he has an undiagnosed executive function disorder – Mike was wrong about a lot of things, but often because he was intentionally or not misjudging peoples’ reactions, less his own observations – and he’s now reaching a point where he can’t compensate. Very much also a Gifted Kid Burnout Mood.)
I’m all for finishing assignments on time, but not before they’ve even been assigned yet.
10 seconds conversation with Dorothy and Sierra already has PTSD.
I’m really glad she got to escape to the drama free zone
Hmm. Maybe Agatha will be too laid-back. There’s a lot to be said for the motivational value of an irritating swot.
That summarizes the relationship beween…. like two thirds of the entire cast, to be honest.
First read-through, I thought maybe Agatha snapped and her pendulum swung completely the other way to “party animal” over the skip, and that Sierra already missed Dorothy’s manic but predictable work ethic.
Your take makes a lot more sense.
But your take is a lot more entertaining.
New headcanon: agatha is doing radical keg stands as we speak
It’s a keg of Heineken 0.0 though. Can’t get TOO crazy all at once!
Not just the drama. I hadnt thought about it until this strip, but Dorothy’s studying relied /a lot/ on invisible mental and emotional labour on Sierra’s part. Sierra not complaining if she woke up at five in the morning when Dorothy swapped jogs to torch and reading in her bed. Sierra making sure Dorothy eats. Probably not managing to fall asleep as easily due to Dorothy staying up. Being a form of bodyguard to ensure Dorothy can study undisturbed (when Faz and Amber ran through the room)
Becky isnt gonna do that sort of labour for Dorothy. And that will make it very hard for Dorothy to carry on like she has done
Your comment just put this into a new perspective with the Dorothy/Becky roommate combo, and I actually am now excited to see how they work (or rather, don’t work) with each other. Cause yeah, Becky is not going to do what Sierra did, this may make some entertaining, if not cringy conversations.
Cause you are absolutely right…Sierra bent over backwards to help Dorothy and she did not need to do that crap. Agatha’s yes woman attitude will be a breath of fresh air compared to Dorothy’s ways.
We also definitely saw Sierra was actively concerned about Dorothy (encouraging Walky during the hookup just before the breakup because it meant Dorothy was actually sleeping and encouraging her REPEATEDLY to go out and do something Outside The Room and Unproductive and getting shot down made up her last four real appearances in the main comic,) but since she seems like a pretty low-conflict person, I’m not sure she would’ve actually told Dorothy, say, ‘this is unhealthy and I am concerned, get out of this room at least long enough for lunch and a walk, it’ll make you more productive anyway.’ Certainly not with the force needed to get through to her.
She clearly still likes Dorothy and enjoys her company, but I get entirely why she’s not a compatible roommate. (Becky isn’t really going to be one for Dorothy either, at least not where they stand now, but I think Becky actually CAN get through to her that neglecting self-care is detrimental to her grades, and that there’s more than one way to her goals.)
I wonder if Dorothy’s grade in Intro to Logic (?) bounced back from that C+ or whatever it was.
Oh, no!
That’s a big fuckin mood, Sierra my gravatar. That’s a big fuckin’ mood.
I guess it turns out that Sierra really can’t be comfortable around people who aren’t ‘laid back’ and, frankly, I can’t think of anyone who is more the opposite of that than Dorothy!
When I noticed Dina was tagged, I had to go back and look for her in the strip.
I spotted her hiding behind the chair immediately. Perception check: SUCCESS!
Is this the first time we’ve seen her in Concealed Observer mode?
someone’s feel the stress of midterms
Or, rather, felt Dorothy’s stress of midterms and it kind of ruined her own mental and emotional balance. That’s how I see this strip, anyway.
Brief sidetrack for a moment…
There is a new artist drawing the syndicated “Mark Trail” comic strip. If you have the ability to read the episode for Oct 30 2020 (online or in a newspaper), you are going to see Becky’s hairstyle has been co-opted for one of the Trail characters. It is unmistakable and undeniable.
See you in court, Mark.
Just don’t read the comments. They’re filled with so many triggered Boomers you’d think the strip was an AOC tweet.
The comments are disgusting, and make me ashamed to be a boomer. I keep wanting to say “Ok, Boomer” to them. What’s really obnoxious is that they complain about the older “legacy” strips as being out of touch and boring, but then when someone young with new ideas gets a chance and makes changes, they don’t like that either.
…Just because two things are vaguely similar doesn’t mean one was stolen from the other. That hairstyle exists in real life, willis didn’t invent it.
Something tells me they were being a little sarcastic, but that’s not for me to decide :v
The new Mark Trail himself reminds me a bit of Ranger Gord from Red Green, with a dash of Patrick Warburton’s expression as The Tick. Good stuff.
I will never understand workaholics
And i think that’s a good thing
I kinda don’t understand her reaction. Is Dorothy’s studying affecting her sleep?
Yeah, people in the comments seem to be saying that this suggests Sierra wasn’t getting on with Dorothy’s workaholic lifestyle, so it could have been that Sierra wasn’t getting any real opportunity to chill out in her own room, but then we never really saw any sign of Sierra having issues.
On top of that, Sierra clearly still sees Dorothy as a friend (she asks if the seat is taken) so clearly nothing too bad happened. I’m guessing it was just an amicable parting of ways.
Though it almost reads as if Agatha is too laid back and Sierra has issue with that, which is also confusing.
I guess we’ll find out.
We did see Sierra have concerns about Dorothy – she had multiple appearances where she was not-so-subtly asking Dorothy to leave the dorm and get some food, or go see a free concert, along with the one where Walky and Dorothy hooked up just before the breakup and Sierra said ‘no, we should let her sleep because she needs it.’ Combined with the apologizing for trying to keep the Faz-Amber chase quiet (out of her control,) she definitely was doing, at minimum, some worrying after Dorothy. Combined with today’s hovertext reading ‘you’re freeeeeeee,’ I think we’re definitely meant to see Sierra as stressed out by Dorothy working herself too hard.
Dorothy’s certainly got her seating arrangement game in order.
I’m always getting a giggle out of how these group of friends predict each other’s behaviour.
That’s the most stress anyone has ever seen on Sierra
Apart from Dorothy’s use of the word “study”, I kind of get what she’s doing. I always hated going into a new course blind, without some idea of what might be coming – especially since some professors weren’t the best at organizing their initial lessons, and you could feel out of your depth pretty quickly if you didn’t have some background.
You read the first page in each chapter when you got your new textbooks, didn’t you?
Sometimes I’m worried for Dorothy. Actually, most of the times…
Nonsense, can’t you see how many three ring binders she has?
Actually, no.
If the syllabus is available before the first day of class, you really do need to read it.
But, the issue here is Dorothy isn’t checking if there’s anything she needs to study, which would imply potentially assigned pre-reading. Dorothy is instead looking for what to study. The surety of the statement implies she just wants to get a head start on her reading assignments. Which, given how often my professors changed those up, is all but certain to be unnecessary, extra work.
Though yeah, Sierra’s reaction is odd because it comes out of nowhere. It’s easy to believe Dorothy’s self-imposed schedule REALLY clashed with hers, but we didn’t see any evidence of that before.
Oh no. Sierra, baby, who hurt you? D:
Dorothy.
Lies and slander. Dorothy never did anything wrong.
Then why’s she holding a deadly weapon?
Phones don’t kill people. Social media kill people.
So you’re telling us, Dorothy took the *whole* break off of school? WTF? That’s like three weeks *wasted*! GASP!
I see those joycon controllers on the coffee table, who brought a switch?
You know… I’m getting the impression that Sierra doesn’t think that Agatha being laid back is so great…
I’m like super late to this but feel like I need t’say it – maybe Sierra is just worried for Dorothy’s mental well-being and might be feeling guilty about not being there to help her regulate? I remember her thankin’ Walky a while back for gettin’ Dorothy to unwind one time a while back, and tended to try and get her to take breaks here and there so she didn’t go stir-crazy. And with how Becky acts (though admittedly I’unno how well Sierra knows her), that behaviour of self-improvement over self-care to destructive levels won’t be regulated so much as encouraged.
That’s my guess, anyway.
I have loved Sierra since she was Tootsi.