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sub “Chick-Fil-A” and that’s my college experience
I mean I GUESS there might’ve been a McDonald’s in the Cave but idk, I ended up hating them ONLY bc I got in a fight with my bestie once over whether or not to have it for dinner and just quit eating there out of spite
I’m so glad Food Theory proved that Popeyes is scientifically better chicken than Chick-Fil-A. So far as I know, Popeyes has never hated me for existing.
To each their own. I can’t stand Popeyes. It’s dry and old tasting. I have never had any that tasted good. KFC was better, but the last few places I went weren’t great (in the mall) and they weren’t great. I know local places that’s really good though and those are my fried chicken of choice.
In fairness though, it’s been several years since I’ve tried it and I’ve only tried it twice or three times. So who knows, maybe it’s better now. I’ll give it another shot sometime, since everyone I know who eats it swears by it.
Kids These Days and their corporatized food courts! The idea of letting fast food franchises colonize college meal plans was anathema when I was a student, Back In My Day (90’s). Was the food any healthier? Meh. But at least we weren’t bombarded with corporate advertising every time we went to lunch.
(Lessee, shook my stick, used “Kids These Days” and “Back In My Day” – did I miss anything? Pretty sure I get a prize for properly scolding The Youngs…)
I would like to join you… but that was already changing when I was in college.
First it was Subway.
Then, in Grad School, it was Quiznos and A&W.
Finally, in more recent years, the campus building where I teach went Chik Fil A. And that was most vexing, particularly on Office Hours days where I had the unpleasant choice to eat there or to eat cold leftovers (our office microwave didn’t work).
When I went (University of Alberta), it sucked, because there weren’t any fast food places anywhere near the university area. If you lived in residence and didn’t have a car, it was a bus ride or long walk, so you were pretty much stuck with cafeteria food. Ironically, the U was offered a chance to get one of the first McDonalds franchises in the City, and they turned it down.
I don’t think you shouted about your lawn, which is a double whammy because even though I’m turning 30 next year I still won’t ever be able to afford one.
I eat healthier than I used to, but once a month or so I gotta get some Taco Bell.
Doesn’t need to be any menu item in particular, it’s not like a craving for McNuggets or fries. I just want Taco Bell, it’s basically all the same.
They should sell that stuff by weight. “Yeah, give me about a pound and a half of Taco Bell” and you just get a plastic bag filled with meat, cheese, and tortilla bits. I’m imagining it dispensed from, like, a gas pump that just ticks up the price the longer you squeeze the handle.
Taco Bell is its own thing, I guess. Like, I live in Texas, and we can get MUCH more authentic texmex easily, but some people I know crave it still from time to time. One compared it once to “sometimes, you want to eat a cartoon”, and that sums it up.
I don’t go for it, but I dislike ground beef, so that rules out a huge amount of the menu, so, yeah.
I’ve actually had grape Nehi! It was okay.
But in my experience, there really isn’t a lot of variation between brands of “grape” (or “orange”) soda. Whether store brand or part of one of the major labels (Fanta, Crush, Shasta, etc etc), most of them have similar (artificial) flavor profiles… and when that’s what I’m in the mood for, that’s what I want.
No, because TexMex is an actual cuisine that developed along the border with Mexico. Also, there is such a thing as authentic processed cheese in some cases: ask a St. Louisan about provel some time and if they’ve ever had the real stuff anywhere else.
Authentic is a weird label to apply to food in any case. Americanized foods from other cuisines are often considered inauthentic, but if that’s what people who grew up in those cuisines cooked when they came to America, how can they really be inauthentic? That’s like saying a language is not longer authentic because it picked up loan words from other languages.
Often the Americanized versions aren’t really what people from those cultures cooked for themselves, but what they changed up to appeal to Americans they cooked for in restaurants.
The French have been known to get all kinds of pissy about loanwords. English is one of the few languages that absolutely loves loanwords, they’ve been estimated to be 80% of the language.
“Authentic” is itself a loanword, having made its way to English from French, which got it from Latin, which took it from Greek.
And I wouldn’t call it a weird label to apply to food. It’s helpful to be able to distinguish a food item as not having been Americanized, because in the majority of cases the Americanization of a food is not an improvement. That’s certainly not a universal, Cajun food is after all an Americanization of French cuisine.
Taco Bell is an interesting case, in that it’s absolutely authentic American food. It has its own unique Taco Bell flavor that’s only vaguely related to any other cuisine.
As far as what people who grew up in other cuisines cook when they came to America? Chinese food is an interesting example, in that there is a distinct difference in what Chinese people tend to cook to serve to Americans and what they tend to cook for themselves to eat at home.
On the other hand, no cuisine is truly ‘authentic’ in that every cuisine has been altered by interaction with the rest of the world. Italian cuisine has only involved the tomato for about 500 years. Indian cuisine has only involved chili peppers for about the same period of time. And England’s ‘national dish’ fish and chips requires potatoes, another food that didn’t make it to Europe until about 450 years ago. It’s still happening, salmon’s use in sushi, now one of the most popular sushi fish in Japan, originated in Norway in the 1990s (there was a deliberate marketing campaign).
So ‘authentic’ isn’t completely accurate. But it’s useful shorthand for “cuisine as it exists in the country that it’s purported to be representative of rather than as it’s been altered by recent influences in another country.”
Actually, Tex-Mex is perfectly valid as a regional cuisine. It’s no different from Creole or KC Barbecue. As long as you don’t confuse it with authentic Mexican….
TexMex and Mexican are different and Taco Bell is way different, but in my completely objective opinion, the best authentic Mexican food in the world is served in Texas and the best Chineese food in the world is served in Mexico.
When I was doing a postdoc in Canada as a Southern Californian I started referring to Taco Bell as “methadone.”
As far as TexMex goes, my issue with it is the need to pour queso over everything. I just want to pick up my burrito and eat it, not have to get a plate and determine if the queso is real or plastic-ky.
Yes please. Dorothy’s one of my favorites, and one of the few things I can’t stand about her is her tendency to interact with Becky as if she sees her as a win-over challenge instead of just toxic af. At a certain point, girl, come to grips with the fact that Becky is not your friend, and even if she was, she’s a toxic and terrible friend.
At this point, despite liking her as much as I do, I just want Dorothy to take a bow and go to Yale. At least I’ll know she’s living her dream and no one there treats her like Becky does.
Yup. For me, the key moment in their relationship came when Dorothy was at the end of “Look Straight Ahead”, where Dorothy actually got a bit annoyed with Becky, and Becky realised she’d gone too far and needed to walk it back.
I think the whole reference to “it’s ok to want things,” when combined with that face in panel 3, is a subtle commentary on Walky as object of desire on Becky’s part. Her bits have layers, so to speak.
She does it even when it’s just the two of them. That’s not a bit, that’s being shitty but hoping the other person takes it as a joke so they don’t hate you. And Becky has made it clear from Day 1 that her dislike of Dorothy comes from genuine jealousy, and has done very little to dispel that initial impression. She’s been whining about what Joyce tells her vs. Dorothy even after the time skip. You’re giving Becky WAY too much credit. It’s not a bit. She dislikes her, and Dorothy keeps giving her th benefit of the doubt to the point that she’s a doormat.
I suggest that Becky is being a friend to Dorothy, and Dorothy recognizes it.
If Becky hadn’t pointed out to Dorothy that she never does anything for herself, she would have gone to lunch with her ex and his new flame and probably not particularly enjoyed herself. At no time before, during, or after that lunch would it have occurred to her that she could have just nope’d out and done something that she would prefer. Because that’s who she is.
But instead, she received some excellent life advice from Becky, which was so good that she immediately acted on it. Becky also invited her to go on a wacky adventure, which Dorothy could use more of in her life, by her own admission!
Becky is absolutely being a jerkbutt. But she’s also being a friend.
Not just the ex. The ex AND his new girlfriend whom you yourself told him he should ask out.
I think it’s “whom” in this case anyway. The awkwardness would’ve been off the charts, even the logarithmic ones.
Exactly. Maybe I phrased it poorly but it’s refreshing to see Dorothy isn’t such a saint that she’d choose to hangout with her ex and their new paramour over something more selfish.
Dorothy’s actual vice is workaholism, but it kind of feels like the webcomic doesn’t acknowledge that anymore. So now she’s just sort of boring and her only conflict is Walky.
Is Walky really a conflict? She essentially set him up with Lucy and they are still friends who apparently hangout so I find that hard to believe. Dorothy’s real conflict which won’t even be relevant for years is that she got accepted into her ivy league university and will be transferring next semester and hasn’t told anyone. But yes the workaholic aspect of her character has kind of been resolved perhaps a bit underwhelmingly. Although arguably her new conflict is kind of a result of that old one.
The conflict is that Dorothy wants Walky back but instead of acting on it she pushed him towards Lucy (who was blaring sirens and waving a neon sign declaring “take me! I’m yours!” in front of him for weeks now) so she wouldn’t get distracted from her work again.
The “resolution” was her basically cutting off all her relationships for a week to binge work. And breaking up with the guy she was in love with. You know. A healthy work-work balance.
Did others’ university meal plans work on nearby fast food places? Mine didn’t. I had to do campus dining or scrounge my own cash somehow. Maybe it’s changed recently? I just checked my alma mater and it specifies “in-campus dining” still.
If they do have on-campus Taco Bell, its a new development.
(Remember the story line where Joe was giving out donuts… When someone asked for gluten free, he offered her Taco Bell, but she had to leave campus to get it.)
We had normal campus dining places, but also a few specialty restaurants that took meal plans.
Which was actually a big problem for me, because I worked nights. During the day you could easily get sushi or salad or whatnot. At night the only places open were pizza and burritos. My Freshman Fifteen quickly became my Sophomore Shitload before I learned to cook a bit.
This discussion reminds me of when my college cafeteria suddenly got an in-house Costa (the British counterpart to Starbucks. We also have actual Starbucks, of course, because world domination).
Anyway, the peculiar interactions between the actual cafeteria and the bit that was a Costa meant that easily confused people with anxiety disorders couldn’t figure out who you were supposed to get tea — I think you had to ask the cafeteria staff for a teabag and the Costa for hot water or something ridiculous like that — which is how I discovered that, while I don’t like regular coffee, I do quite like caramel lattes.
Possibly Walky’s been cut off from major funds by his parents for daring to support Sal a little in the past few months, and therefore he can’t actually afford Taco Bell and has to use his meal plan money even for dates?
Dottie, you know you don’t have to limit yourself to 2 options, right? You can always do neither of those things.
Though one of those choices will probably lead to drama, and I think nobody attending college in Indiana can avoid its sweet call.
Cafeteria Pro-Tip: Save those reusable containers from takeout places and use them to stash meals from the days of the week the cafeteria is serving something you actually like. Wonton soup once is Potato Bacon Chowder forever. Stretch those credits kiddies.
And it makes her wholly unsympathetic. Like, I’m halfway towards retroactively declaring that she deserved all the bullshit surrounding her coming out, now that I’ve seen how obnoxious she is post-timeskip.
It feels like Becky’s been given a free pass to mistreat her friends up to this point. Joyce is her best friend no matter what, Dorothy puts up with her “enemies for Joyce’s affection” narrative, Dina rarely (if ever) questions her… There’s going to be some deserved blowback once the dam breaks.
I think we’re leading up to Joyce shattering someone’s illusions of her, if Becky and Dorothy meet up with Joe, Joyce, Liz, and Sarah. That may be the catalyst that starts the argument.
With the possible exception of Dorothy, what friends has Becky been mistreating again?
If you think that Dorothy thinks of Becky as an enemy or puts up with Becky in exchange for Joyce’s affection, you are reading a very different comic than I am.
She’s pretty curt with Joe but it’s mostly as a result of who he was and really only comes off as harsh since we know that he’s a nicer and more caring person than who he appeared to be, but not so much the cast themselves.
Otherwise there’s her deliberately embarrassing Ruth and Jennifer on the grounds of making sure they never got back together, which neither of them have indicated they wanted and if they did it certainly wouldn’t involve Becky’s opinion.
I’m trying to find the right way to word this, but here’s my interpretation: Becky thinks she’s being funny, and Dorothy thinks Becky is trying to be funny not in a “haha it was funny when you said I had no personality” way but “Becky is trying to tell jokes even if they’re rude so I won’t confront her without a speech about friendship and boundaries.”
Becky’s friends are Dina, Joyce, Walky, Dorothy, Leslie, and Robin. A bit less so, Sarah. Roz and Jenifer, much less so, and Joe and Ruth (and Lucy) acquaintances only.
I disagree with you, but you make your points well.
“If you think that Dorothy thinks of Becky as an enemy or puts up with Becky in exchange for Joyce’s affection, you are reading a very different comic than I am.”
If you think that’s what I said, you are reading very different comments than I am.
I said that’s the narrative Becky perpetuates. Becky says they’re rivals, Dorothy says they’re friends. This has been Becky’s “running joke” between them for some time now, and today she escalated it from “ha ha very funny” to “needlessly catty”.
A super pet peeve of mine is declaring homophobia/biphobia/queerphobia to be “okay” as long as the person on the receiving end is “bad enough.” If you think it’s okay to hurt someone for their identity on a conditional basis, you were never a fucking ally in the first place.
Becky’s annoying sometimes as a character, because she’s a character in a relatively realistic comic strip. Like Carla has pointed out, it is BULLSHIT that when a queer character has shitty behavior, it somehow ALWAYS gets used to justify treating them like shit.
It also really really plays off the audience’s knowledge that Dorothy got into Yale and hasn’t told anyone yet. Abandoning her friends for greener pastures is arguably selfish, but staying at Indiana to spite Becky could also be seen as selfish. All this pressure from Becky is going to push Dorothy one way or the other, but I’m not sure what it is.
Right? Both her genuinely wildly possessive ‘Joyce shall have no friends but me’ stuff and her ‘intensely mean to Dorothy for no reason’ stuff are in full evidence here. The worst Beckyness on full display like a big ol’ peacock tail.
Right?? It’s the way she makes a show out of her most unlikable characteristics in moments like this that makes it so hard for me to like her character.
Of course she hasn’t, she wants people to see her as unobjectionable (she wants to be a politician, remember?). Plus, Rebecca’s intention is messing up Dorothy’s name as a microaggression, which ain’t cool.
Or, consider, Dorothy doesn’t mind having a nickname. And don’t call some straight white girl getting called by a nickname a microaggression, that’s a massive misappropriation
It could be, even for a straight white girl. The concept applies to harassment and bullying that isn’t based in bigotry. A lot of the rest of what Becky’s doing with Dorothy fits pretty well.
I’m not sure if the nickname thing falls into that or not. Becky uses nicknames for other people, without any sign of harassment. I’m remembering “Jakes” in particular.
If Dorothy has never said anything about or given any indication she doesn’t like it, why would it bother any of us unless we had some sort of hang up about nicknames in general? Those sorts of hang ups are valid, but it’s important to recognize they don’t apply to everyone. More importantly, if Dorothy’s never said anything or given any indication she dislikes it, why should Becky stop?
This really reads like ‘I dislike nicknames, so Dorothy must dislike this one’.
I think Joyce has already been distancing a bit, so I wouldn’t be surprised. Becky doesn’t seem to have any real idea what’s going on with Joyce at any given time lately.
Becky is expressing it in an over-the-top way, but I think she is mostly serious. The plan remains to find Joyce and act possessive at her. Even if expressed in a way that’s trying to be funny, those remain the intended events. What does it matter if the seriousness is less than 100%?
Becky just… really rubs me the wrong way a lot, and this comic is particularly awful. She uses humor like a bully does – to try to smooth over the thorniest parts of her intentions and create plausible deniability if someone gets upset. Today she’s just being flat mean with the most gossamer layer of a joke on top. It’s gross.
Hah! I was just thinking this – I cannot wait for Becky to walk in on Joyce eating multivitamin gummies and talking about how Jesus is bullshit and she loves having premarital sexual relationships.
“My best friend is an atheist! Who can I turn to for comfort??? Dotty, you’re — oh, crap, you’re one too, and it’s probably your fault. I shall run in tears to my girlfriend! Oh, wait…”
*Runs away crying”
*Bumps into Leslie*
“Leslie, help! Joyce’s an atheist!”
“Guess what? SO AM I, mwahaha!!!”
*Becky screams*
“Atheists! ATHEISTS EVERYWHERE!!!”
Joyce spends the rest of the comic loudly shouting “Hey guess what? I’m an atheist!” every time Becky is within earshot.
I fucking love how every time the whitest, blondest, straightest girl in this comic makes a “:/“ face, the comments section becomes a hive of rabid animals who aren’t afraid to get straight-up hateful towards any perceived threat to her
I do think there’s an unsavory trend of people hating on Becky every time she’s a little obnoxious, but I do also think she’s not immune to being called out on stuff or that Dorothy’s status as the residential white cis/het with basically no trauma and a bunch of privilege means it’s okay for Becky to say that to her.
Dorothy’s obviously fine and it ended in a joke. But I kind of think Becky was more mean than necessary here, especially if she was actually manipulating Dorothy.
This strip which seems pretty innocent overall is actually rather polarizing upon analysis.
Yeah I really don’t get the dislike of Becky. Like you say she ain’t prefect but she reads to me as someone who doesn’t think before she speaks and is kinda irritating in the way 18 year olds are. I certainly don’t see much of any malicious intent or negligent harm in what she does.
OTOH, I was just wondering when the anti-Dorothy hate disappeared to. Time was when someone telling Dorothy to “want something selfish just once in your life” would result in a slew of comments saying “But Dorothy’s always selfish; she’s the evil career woman who cruely dumped Walky to focus on her own twisted ambitions!” And while I agree that Becky is getting dumped on a lot, I don’t miss that.
She is, and it’s not nearly as bad as it was when she got her haircut, but there’s always been a lot of hate over stuff certain female characters do that seems over the pitch other characters get for similar behaviour. It’s been commented on with Sal, Amber, Ruth, Carla, Dorothy and Becky off the top of my head.
I am pretty sure people are allowed to be irritated by how Becky is acting without caring about her sexuality. I myself am not straight and I dont care for how she treats Dorothy at all.
Pft right, because if there’s any fandom that gets overprotective of the Straights, it’s Dumbing of Age.
Obviously no one can take umbrage with Becky’s constant bullying now reaching another zenith where she tells Dorothy to her face that she has no personality without it actually being an overprotective display for a fragile straight woman.
Queer people don’t actually read Dumbing of Age, natch. If they did they’d know we’re all perfect adorably babies who bring joy and wonder and are literally incapable of human flaws.
Or, consider: Becky is straight up being mean here in an uncalled for manner and people are getting tired of her treating Dorothy like this because it has become a trend that she does this. If you are telling the person who literally came to your dead mum’s party and asked to hear more about her that they have no personality and are boring for being a kind respectful person, even though them being this way helps you, then you are an ass.
Also, Dorothy is Irish and Jewish ethnically, both groups of people that in history, have been known to be discriminated against. Dorothy outright stated to Robin before that trolls on Twitter would send her pictures of furnaces.
I think it’s more that Becky’s “loud, ‘FuN’, and obnoxious to bury your feelings” schtick is long past its sell-by date. It used to be almost charming, but she’s pushed it to the point where she’s just being passive-aggressively mean now. Today she’s all but bullying Dorothy, her roommate and one of the closer ‘friends’ in her social circle. How much farther can she push it without something blowing up in her face?
I’m queer. I don’t hate Becky because she’s picking on a poor widdle straight girl. I hate Becky because she’s consistently mean to someone who does absolutely nothing to deserve it and who continues to treat her with kindness despite her garbage behavior. I generally dislike characters who treat other people like shit for funsies, and her target being a Straight White Girl doesn’t give her a free pass to be awful. It’s not funny, or interesting, or enjoyable at all. It’s just exhausting and uncomfortable to watch.
Is it just me or is Becky like way meaner in panel 2 of this strip? There’s usually some tongue and cheek to this “rivalry” between her and Dorothy but that line kind of hit a little harder than normal.
I don’t disagree that panel 2 is over the line. I very much disagree that Becky doesn’t know, or has taken the time to know, Dorothy. They’re roommates, and Becky works at the whole “Dorothy is my arch-nemesis” schtick. She probably knows Dorothy better than she knows Joyce at this point.
Considering she doesn’t seem to know Joyce is agnostic now, but probably knows Dorothy really wants to jump Walky’s bones, Becky knowing Dorothy better than Joyce may actually be valid.
If she does know Dorothy then that makes Beckys comments even worse, shes deliberately trying to hurt Dorothy or goad her into going along with her plans
Becky: Dorothy be selfish for once! Let’s get Joyce back!
Dorothy: *Looks at Walky and wants to be selfish with him* Uh yes! Being possessive of Joyce is definitely more selfish than what I was thinking!
Yes Dotty, be aggressive! Joyce is making a fool of herself by pretending to have another personality to be liked by a girl she admires… She needs both of you to show her how much she’s faking it all. Joyce will feel sad and Sarah won’t like it. Joe will need popcorn, the show will be VERY wild!
I keep having a hard time forgetting the fact that Dorothy got accepted into Yale and still hasn’t told anyone yet….Every day that passes makes me worried that this is going to blow up hugely in her face for some reason and the dread is killing me.
I think in this case what MrSmith means is that there is a part of Becky that legitimately dislikes and/or is jealous of Dorothy for many reasons that have been explored and this is one time that animosity actually tangibly leaked out in as an aggression that was genuinely mean spirited.
Most of the time Becky dramatically overemphasizes her frenemy relationship with Dorothy, but here it’s like yeah, Becky has issues with Dotty sometimes and is also pretty manipulative as we’ve seen in the past too.
Something is building up here. Like, Liz on “edibles” hitting on Becky. And Joyce on “edibles” hitting on Dorothy. And Sarah hitting on Joe out of exasperation… no, better Sarah hitting Joe with the bat out of exasperation.
maaaaaan, every strip with becky post-chrismas break just makes me dislike her more and more. its a shame because I enjoyed her before she became the physical embodiment of petty jealousy and trying to control other peoples lives
Like it’s never been funny but it was ramping up past the timeskip and then Dorothy just defuses her with a little speech and I thought “okay that’s fine, that is how Dorothy would react and it’s way more likely Becky is just piling it on because that’s how she deals with things” but then it keeps happening and now it’s back to straight up bullying again.
I genuinely have no idea how I’m supposed to process Becky. If she’s supposed to be funny, she’s not. If it’s meant to be annoying and harmful in-universe, well there’s a lot of depth to plumb there in how Becky thinks she has to be a cool funny goofball around everyone or else they won’t love her now with someone who won’t tell her off because Dorothy is ceaselessly accommodating.
I wonder if Becky’s vision of “cool badass rebel friend” came from being that for Joyce alone. Her sexual hangups with Dina show that for all she portrays herself as a cool rebel she is still just as deluged in the culture of being a fundie, she’s still just as deep as Joyce and she’s only really broken out of it in different ways. Like, she behaves this way because she was this kind of person with Joyce and Joyce loved it, so naturally the way to get everyone else to like her is to be a cartoon character.
It feels too intentional that the only characters in the comic she’s willing to have some kind of serious conversation in a normal context are Joyce, Dina and Leslie, who she feels confident won’t stop loving her if she displays vulnerability.
That’s a good way of thinking about it, I suspect. Doesn’t make it okay, but it makes it more understandable. Makes it a character flaw with roots that she’s going to need to grow and overcome, rather than just “she’s bad”.
It’s going to take time, because this comic plays the long game and takes place in glacial time.
Nayan Martinelli – I don’t know if you saw my response to you on yesterday’s strip…but I responded to you on yesterday’s strip. Sorry for the delay…was a very tired Neko.
Panel 2 Becky is giving off some heel turn vibes. Panel 3 Becky looks like a supervillain. This may be where she realizes that this game needs to be retired. She did a lot to survive the traumas of the last year. Some of that may not be healthy going forward. Doesn’t make her a bad person but trauma isn’t alway adaptive. What one does to survive it can need to be dropped later.
Here’s kind of how I’m processing Becky at the moment: she’s convinced of, for lack of a better term, her superiority. It’s not that she thinks she’s inherently better, but she thinks that having bad shit heaped onto her has made her worldly and competent and above it all when, in actuality, she is as much of a sheltered nutbar as Joyce.
When you grow up in the circumstance Becky did of having a lot of controlling bullshit piled onto you to the point where the helplessness to enact change was a constant and overwhelming presence, two things kinda pop up.
– You’re really desperate for people to like you because you never really get the chance to express yourself.
– You start to think you’ve got other people figured out, because you yourself have experienced circumstances where you constantly have to guess and psyche out the people around you so they always respond favourably to you.
Becky constantly needs to be a loud fixture in any conversation, and when she’s not it’s so she can stand off to the side and make sarcastic commentary about how “the straights are not okay.” Trying to word this as best as I can with a little asterisk that this isn’t a condemnation of Becky, but she kind of needs to put herself out there as constantly cool, constantly likeable, and constantly funny. She needs to be someone everyone can like, and she needs to be the Cool One. The Rebel. The Jokester.
And for the most part this has worked out, because she’s been with Joyce her entire life and Joyce does actually she think Becky is the coolest and most awesome person in the universe. So does Dina, who also views Becky as smart, worldly and knowing when in reality Dina is a thousand times more put together than her. Leslie likes her too, but Leslie likes Becky because she is a formerly homeless baby gay and therefore that love for Becky is going to exist regardless of what Becky does. With these three, Becky has nothing to prove. She can be sad in front of them and they’ll still love her.
Becky also engages in this thing where because she thinks she’s funny, because every word that comes out of her mouth is supposed to be flippant and charming and badass and therefore her recipient will intimately understand that Becky means well and that she’s a cool funny badass, she has no idea how to reel it back when she’s actually being a big stupid jerkface. Becky can constantly annoy Dorothy and cut her up because Becky always knows it’s well-intentioned, she always know she’s being funny and because Dorothy never tells her to stop she assumes that means she can keep pushing because the problem doesn’t exist. Becky can publicly embarrass Ruth and Jennifer and it’s fine, because Becky has decided these two can never get back together so she can act however she pleases even though they’ve never actually indicated even for a second that they actually want to be in the same room for any amount of time anymore. Becky knows that, actually, they’re still super in love and will get back together and then kill themselves, so Becky steps up to solve this problem nobody but her thinks exists, least of all the people involved.
In summary, the slow-paced nature of a comic that runs for a decade one strip at a time where we have 24 hours to stew over a particular character’s actions in a way that other forms of media don’t really have, because if you’re reading a book and John Protagonist is being a nob on page 34 you only have to reach page 175 for him to learn a valuable lesson about camaraderie, makes Becky come off worse than she is. The reality is that she’s being a bad person here, and it’s been going on long enough that, yes, it’d be nice if someone told her to shut the fuck up for the first time since she joined the cast, but I feel sometimes when characters do bad things we’re unwilling to engage with why they act the way they do, and that if a character acts like a jerk for X amount of time without being called out we just decide the story is on their side as if this is an 80s cartoon and we need the one guy with a thought contrary to the group to be punished.
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sub “Chick-Fil-A” and that’s my college experience
I mean I GUESS there might’ve been a McDonald’s in the Cave but idk, I ended up hating them ONLY bc I got in a fight with my bestie once over whether or not to have it for dinner and just quit eating there out of spite
I’m so glad Food Theory proved that Popeyes is scientifically better chicken than Chick-Fil-A. So far as I know, Popeyes has never hated me for existing.
Popeyes is the best fast food chicken. (Sorry, Colonel.) I just wish they had more locations in my area.
KFCs chicken sandwich was actually almost as good as Popeyes. Same with JitB.
To each their own. I can’t stand Popeyes. It’s dry and old tasting. I have never had any that tasted good. KFC was better, but the last few places I went weren’t great (in the mall) and they weren’t great. I know local places that’s really good though and those are my fried chicken of choice.
In fairness though, it’s been several years since I’ve tried it and I’ve only tried it twice or three times. So who knows, maybe it’s better now. I’ll give it another shot sometime, since everyone I know who eats it swears by it.
No. Nando’s is the best fast food chicken.
Fool! Students must eat only at Galasso’s!
Agreed. Finding a Popeyes is the hardest thing about eating at Popeyes. Still, worth it if you can manage.
Meanwhile, we’ve had one here for years and thank god because our KFC is trash. Pure trash
*shakes Old Person stick*
Kids These Days and their corporatized food courts! The idea of letting fast food franchises colonize college meal plans was anathema when I was a student, Back In My Day (90’s). Was the food any healthier? Meh. But at least we weren’t bombarded with corporate advertising every time we went to lunch.
(Lessee, shook my stick, used “Kids These Days” and “Back In My Day” – did I miss anything? Pretty sure I get a prize for properly scolding The Youngs…)
you didn’t tell them about walking uphill both ways to the food court, in 3 feet of snow.
I would like to join you… but that was already changing when I was in college.
First it was Subway.
Then, in Grad School, it was Quiznos and A&W.
Finally, in more recent years, the campus building where I teach went Chik Fil A. And that was most vexing, particularly on Office Hours days where I had the unpleasant choice to eat there or to eat cold leftovers (our office microwave didn’t work).
When I went (University of Alberta), it sucked, because there weren’t any fast food places anywhere near the university area. If you lived in residence and didn’t have a car, it was a bus ride or long walk, so you were pretty much stuck with cafeteria food. Ironically, the U was offered a chance to get one of the first McDonalds franchises in the City, and they turned it down.
I don’t think you shouted about your lawn, which is a double whammy because even though I’m turning 30 next year I still won’t ever be able to afford one.
Oh, no! Does that make my lawn even more of a target?
Oh, wait. I rent, on account of I can afford to and maintenance is someone else’s problem who isn’t me.
Does it count if I wave my cane and yell “get off my patio?”
our shouty neighbour yells at people on their OWN lawns
Damnit, now I’m craving taco bell.
People crave taco bell?
I eat healthier than I used to, but once a month or so I gotta get some Taco Bell.
Doesn’t need to be any menu item in particular, it’s not like a craving for McNuggets or fries. I just want Taco Bell, it’s basically all the same.
They should sell that stuff by weight. “Yeah, give me about a pound and a half of Taco Bell” and you just get a plastic bag filled with meat, cheese, and tortilla bits. I’m imagining it dispensed from, like, a gas pump that just ticks up the price the longer you squeeze the handle.
Taco Bell is its own thing, I guess. Like, I live in Texas, and we can get MUCH more authentic texmex easily, but some people I know crave it still from time to time. One compared it once to “sometimes, you want to eat a cartoon”, and that sums it up.
I don’t go for it, but I dislike ground beef, so that rules out a huge amount of the menu, so, yeah.
Nobody thinks it is authentic TexMex. But some people do like it.
Kind of like my fondness for “orange” and “grape” soda.
Nehi?
Radar?
I’ve actually had grape Nehi! It was okay.
But in my experience, there really isn’t a lot of variation between brands of “grape” (or “orange”) soda. Whether store brand or part of one of the major labels (Fanta, Crush, Shasta, etc etc), most of them have similar (artificial) flavor profiles… and when that’s what I’m in the mood for, that’s what I want.
Peach Nehi is the only sugar soda l will consume. And it’s only once every free years. But man that stuff is amazing.
I’m just tripping over the irony of saying, “Authentic TexMex.”
Is that like authentic processed cheese?
No, because TexMex is an actual cuisine that developed along the border with Mexico. Also, there is such a thing as authentic processed cheese in some cases: ask a St. Louisan about provel some time and if they’ve ever had the real stuff anywhere else.
Authentic is a weird label to apply to food in any case. Americanized foods from other cuisines are often considered inauthentic, but if that’s what people who grew up in those cuisines cooked when they came to America, how can they really be inauthentic? That’s like saying a language is not longer authentic because it picked up loan words from other languages.
Often the Americanized versions aren’t really what people from those cultures cooked for themselves, but what they changed up to appeal to Americans they cooked for in restaurants.
The French have been known to get all kinds of pissy about loanwords. English is one of the few languages that absolutely loves loanwords, they’ve been estimated to be 80% of the language.
“Authentic” is itself a loanword, having made its way to English from French, which got it from Latin, which took it from Greek.
And I wouldn’t call it a weird label to apply to food. It’s helpful to be able to distinguish a food item as not having been Americanized, because in the majority of cases the Americanization of a food is not an improvement. That’s certainly not a universal, Cajun food is after all an Americanization of French cuisine.
Taco Bell is an interesting case, in that it’s absolutely authentic American food. It has its own unique Taco Bell flavor that’s only vaguely related to any other cuisine.
As far as what people who grew up in other cuisines cook when they came to America? Chinese food is an interesting example, in that there is a distinct difference in what Chinese people tend to cook to serve to Americans and what they tend to cook for themselves to eat at home.
On the other hand, no cuisine is truly ‘authentic’ in that every cuisine has been altered by interaction with the rest of the world. Italian cuisine has only involved the tomato for about 500 years. Indian cuisine has only involved chili peppers for about the same period of time. And England’s ‘national dish’ fish and chips requires potatoes, another food that didn’t make it to Europe until about 450 years ago. It’s still happening, salmon’s use in sushi, now one of the most popular sushi fish in Japan, originated in Norway in the 1990s (there was a deliberate marketing campaign).
So ‘authentic’ isn’t completely accurate. But it’s useful shorthand for “cuisine as it exists in the country that it’s purported to be representative of rather than as it’s been altered by recent influences in another country.”
Actually, Tex-Mex is perfectly valid as a regional cuisine. It’s no different from Creole or KC Barbecue. As long as you don’t confuse it with authentic Mexican….
TexMex and Mexican are different and Taco Bell is way different, but in my completely objective opinion, the best authentic Mexican food in the world is served in Texas and the best Chineese food in the world is served in Mexico.
We has spoken.
I remember a Chinese restaurant in Ensenada that was very good but different.
And a few other ‘regular’ restaurants with no tortillas in sight.
When I was doing a postdoc in Canada as a Southern Californian I started referring to Taco Bell as “methadone.”
As far as TexMex goes, my issue with it is the need to pour queso over everything. I just want to pick up my burrito and eat it, not have to get a plate and determine if the queso is real or plastic-ky.
My other issue is a lack of Carne Asada fries.
Hardly the worst thing people have irrational cravings for.
That does seem to be the main moral of Willis’s comics. I don’t understand it either.
I don’t consider it food.
Now I’M craving tacos, but from Jack in the Box.
MMMmmmmm. Shitty tacos. *Homer drool*
Becky being wildly over-possessive?
I’m shocked, shocked I say.
I think Dorothy might finally be starting to hit a breaking point wrt Becky’s worst qualities.
Yes please. Dorothy’s one of my favorites, and one of the few things I can’t stand about her is her tendency to interact with Becky as if she sees her as a win-over challenge instead of just toxic af. At a certain point, girl, come to grips with the fact that Becky is not your friend, and even if she was, she’s a toxic and terrible friend.
At this point, despite liking her as much as I do, I just want Dorothy to take a bow and go to Yale. At least I’ll know she’s living her dream and no one there treats her like Becky does.
Dorothy’s a Democrat, she’s required to think you can actually work with the opposition no matter how toxic it is.
Becky is doing a bit. Dorothy is aware she’s doing a bit. Most of the time, she seems unbothered by the bit.
Yup. For me, the key moment in their relationship came when Dorothy was at the end of “Look Straight Ahead”, where Dorothy actually got a bit annoyed with Becky, and Becky realised she’d gone too far and needed to walk it back.
I think the whole reference to “it’s ok to want things,” when combined with that face in panel 3, is a subtle commentary on Walky as object of desire on Becky’s part. Her bits have layers, so to speak.
Since I have seen zero evidence of Walky as an object of desire on Becky’s part, I’m going to be scratching my head on this one for awhile.
Did you mean on Dorothy’s part?
She does it even when it’s just the two of them. That’s not a bit, that’s being shitty but hoping the other person takes it as a joke so they don’t hate you. And Becky has made it clear from Day 1 that her dislike of Dorothy comes from genuine jealousy, and has done very little to dispel that initial impression. She’s been whining about what Joyce tells her vs. Dorothy even after the time skip. You’re giving Becky WAY too much credit. It’s not a bit. She dislikes her, and Dorothy keeps giving her th benefit of the doubt to the point that she’s a doormat.
I suggest that Becky is being a friend to Dorothy, and Dorothy recognizes it.
If Becky hadn’t pointed out to Dorothy that she never does anything for herself, she would have gone to lunch with her ex and his new flame and probably not particularly enjoyed herself. At no time before, during, or after that lunch would it have occurred to her that she could have just nope’d out and done something that she would prefer. Because that’s who she is.
But instead, she received some excellent life advice from Becky, which was so good that she immediately acted on it. Becky also invited her to go on a wacky adventure, which Dorothy could use more of in her life, by her own admission!
Becky is absolutely being a jerkbutt. But she’s also being a friend.
Becky is a terrible friend, if so. Advice probably shouldn’t come as a side dish to a main course of personal insult.
Yeah, that was like a quarter of Mike’s schtick (the rest just him being generally awful), and as we saw in the end, it was not a good thing.
I dunno Becky, maybe be a little apologetic about your possessiveness.
Don’t suggest it, she’ll do the opposite. Instead of going around yelling “I’m a lesbian” she’ll start loudly announcing “I’m wildly over-possessive!”
I mean, if the options are between hijinks and an awkward lunch with your ex, there’s really no choice. HIJINKS AWAY.
Walky would normally totally be down to tag along and engage in a hijink or two, but on the other hand Taco Bell.
Not just the ex. The ex AND his new girlfriend whom you yourself told him he should ask out.
I think it’s “whom” in this case anyway. The awkwardness would’ve been off the charts, even the logarithmic ones.
What?! Something that’s even too nice for Dorothy to tolerate!? It’s sad that this counts as character development for her.
It’s less the nice and more that it’s her ex and his new gf.
Exactly. Maybe I phrased it poorly but it’s refreshing to see Dorothy isn’t such a saint that she’d choose to hangout with her ex and their new paramour over something more selfish.
Lucy may consider Dorothy a threat and be upset at any attention Walky pays to her.
Dorothy’s actual vice is workaholism, but it kind of feels like the webcomic doesn’t acknowledge that anymore. So now she’s just sort of boring and her only conflict is Walky.
Is Walky really a conflict? She essentially set him up with Lucy and they are still friends who apparently hangout so I find that hard to believe. Dorothy’s real conflict which won’t even be relevant for years is that she got accepted into her ivy league university and will be transferring next semester and hasn’t told anyone. But yes the workaholic aspect of her character has kind of been resolved perhaps a bit underwhelmingly. Although arguably her new conflict is kind of a result of that old one.
The conflict is that Dorothy wants Walky back but instead of acting on it she pushed him towards Lucy (who was blaring sirens and waving a neon sign declaring “take me! I’m yours!” in front of him for weeks now) so she wouldn’t get distracted from her work again.
And yet she hasn’t stopped being distracted.
Funny, that.
(Humans are not rational, particularly when it comes to attraction and desire. DoA provides multiple examples of that.)
The “resolution” was her basically cutting off all her relationships for a week to binge work. And breaking up with the guy she was in love with. You know. A healthy work-work balance.
I’d find it pretty awkward to have a meal with an ex and the person they’re currently dating or whatever, so this doesn’t seem that odd to me.
Did others’ university meal plans work on nearby fast food places? Mine didn’t. I had to do campus dining or scrounge my own cash somehow. Maybe it’s changed recently? I just checked my alma mater and it specifies “in-campus dining” still.
Or is the Taco Bell part of campus dining?
If they do have on-campus Taco Bell, its a new development.
(Remember the story line where Joe was giving out donuts… When someone asked for gluten free, he offered her Taco Bell, but she had to leave campus to get it.)
We had normal campus dining places, but also a few specialty restaurants that took meal plans.
Which was actually a big problem for me, because I worked nights. During the day you could easily get sushi or salad or whatnot. At night the only places open were pizza and burritos. My Freshman Fifteen quickly became my Sophomore Shitload before I learned to cook a bit.
Civilian MidRats.
This discussion reminds me of when my college cafeteria suddenly got an in-house Costa (the British counterpart to Starbucks. We also have actual Starbucks, of course, because world domination).
Anyway, the peculiar interactions between the actual cafeteria and the bit that was a Costa meant that easily confused people with anxiety disorders couldn’t figure out who you were supposed to get tea — I think you had to ask the cafeteria staff for a teabag and the Costa for hot water or something ridiculous like that — which is how I discovered that, while I don’t like regular coffee, I do quite like caramel lattes.
Tea doesn’t just come from the tap in the UK?
Nope. It comes from a microwave.
Last time, they went to the Taco Bell about a mile west of Read Hall. (309 N Walnut St.)
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/04-hompk/attheborder/
Possibly Walky’s been cut off from major funds by his parents for daring to support Sal a little in the past few months, and therefore he can’t actually afford Taco Bell and has to use his meal plan money even for dates?
Y’all get meal plans?
You get meals?
Luxury!
Oh Becky.
Well played.
Dottie, you know you don’t have to limit yourself to 2 options, right? You can always do neither of those things.
Though one of those choices will probably lead to drama, and I think nobody attending college in Indiana can avoid its sweet call.
If not for the sweet call of drama, would so many of us be here?
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m 100% game for nothing but Danny and Sal being sweet at each other.
Yes, but for how many years?
You’re right we need to test this.
We’ll do a trial run of three years exclusively of strips of Danny and Sal being cute as can be,
Cafeteria Pro-Tip: Save those reusable containers from takeout places and use them to stash meals from the days of the week the cafeteria is serving something you actually like. Wonton soup once is Potato Bacon Chowder forever. Stretch those credits kiddies.
There’s no possible way Walky and Lucy didn’t do that on purpose.
Lucy might genuinely be syrupy enough to do it, but for Walky it’s totally a bit.
Good GOD Becky is insufferable whenever she gets like this.
So pretty much 80% of her time in this series
And it makes her wholly unsympathetic. Like, I’m halfway towards retroactively declaring that she deserved all the bullshit surrounding her coming out, now that I’ve seen how obnoxious she is post-timeskip.
That’s probably a bit too far, but she certainly deserves some kind of comeuppance from her behavior.
Probably in the form of pushing Joyce and maybe Dina away
It feels like Becky’s been given a free pass to mistreat her friends up to this point. Joyce is her best friend no matter what, Dorothy puts up with her “enemies for Joyce’s affection” narrative, Dina rarely (if ever) questions her… There’s going to be some deserved blowback once the dam breaks.
I think we’re leading up to Joyce shattering someone’s illusions of her, if Becky and Dorothy meet up with Joe, Joyce, Liz, and Sarah. That may be the catalyst that starts the argument.
With the possible exception of Dorothy, what friends has Becky been mistreating again?
If you think that Dorothy thinks of Becky as an enemy or puts up with Becky in exchange for Joyce’s affection, you are reading a very different comic than I am.
She’s pretty curt with Joe but it’s mostly as a result of who he was and really only comes off as harsh since we know that he’s a nicer and more caring person than who he appeared to be, but not so much the cast themselves.
Otherwise there’s her deliberately embarrassing Ruth and Jennifer on the grounds of making sure they never got back together, which neither of them have indicated they wanted and if they did it certainly wouldn’t involve Becky’s opinion.
I’m trying to find the right way to word this, but here’s my interpretation: Becky thinks she’s being funny, and Dorothy thinks Becky is trying to be funny not in a “haha it was funny when you said I had no personality” way but “Becky is trying to tell jokes even if they’re rude so I won’t confront her without a speech about friendship and boundaries.”
Becky’s friends are Dina, Joyce, Walky, Dorothy, Leslie, and Robin. A bit less so, Sarah. Roz and Jenifer, much less so, and Joe and Ruth (and Lucy) acquaintances only.
I disagree with you, but you make your points well.
“If you think that Dorothy thinks of Becky as an enemy or puts up with Becky in exchange for Joyce’s affection, you are reading a very different comic than I am.”
If you think that’s what I said, you are reading very different comments than I am.
I said that’s the narrative Becky perpetuates. Becky says they’re rivals, Dorothy says they’re friends. This has been Becky’s “running joke” between them for some time now, and today she escalated it from “ha ha very funny” to “needlessly catty”.
Please explain how this shit isn’t straight up homophobic hate. Please explain that. Jesus wept.
You can want bad things to happen to characters you don’t like without agreeing with the motivations of the person hurting them.
Saying she deserved it crosses a line for me.
Agreed.
Wow, that escalated quickly.
A super pet peeve of mine is declaring homophobia/biphobia/queerphobia to be “okay” as long as the person on the receiving end is “bad enough.” If you think it’s okay to hurt someone for their identity on a conditional basis, you were never a fucking ally in the first place.
Becky’s annoying sometimes as a character, because she’s a character in a relatively realistic comic strip. Like Carla has pointed out, it is BULLSHIT that when a queer character has shitty behavior, it somehow ALWAYS gets used to justify treating them like shit.
I dunno about that one, chief. Maybe we shouldn’t be making judgment calls about the validity of someone’s queer identity based on their personality.
Don’t ever do that.
Humanity is not conditional.
Yo that’s beyond fucked up
Every time Becky gets like this I just sigh and hope her part in the storyline is very small.
It also really really plays off the audience’s knowledge that Dorothy got into Yale and hasn’t told anyone yet. Abandoning her friends for greener pastures is arguably selfish, but staying at Indiana to spite Becky could also be seen as selfish. All this pressure from Becky is going to push Dorothy one way or the other, but I’m not sure what it is.
Right? Both her genuinely wildly possessive ‘Joyce shall have no friends but me’ stuff and her ‘intensely mean to Dorothy for no reason’ stuff are in full evidence here. The worst Beckyness on full display like a big ol’ peacock tail.
Right?? It’s the way she makes a show out of her most unlikable characteristics in moments like this that makes it so hard for me to like her character.
I want to like Becky but her behavior in strips like this one makes it difficult.
Tbh i think it’s fun
Leave Joyce alone, you guys
Dorothy takes care of Joyce (as with the glasses). Joyce is skipping class, Dorothy is going to be concerned.
Becky having a personality beyond being obsessed with Joyce challenge
[Difficulty: IMPOSSIBLE]
Stop screwing up her name, Rebecca.
Dorothy has never objected to her calling her ‘Dotty’ to my recollection.
Not everyone hates nicknames.
Of course she hasn’t, she wants people to see her as unobjectionable (she wants to be a politician, remember?). Plus, Rebecca’s intention is messing up Dorothy’s name as a microaggression, which ain’t cool.
I’m taking away the term “microaggression” from you.
You can do that?
Or, consider, Dorothy doesn’t mind having a nickname. And don’t call some straight white girl getting called by a nickname a microaggression, that’s a massive misappropriation
It could be, even for a straight white girl. The concept applies to harassment and bullying that isn’t based in bigotry. A lot of the rest of what Becky’s doing with Dorothy fits pretty well.
I’m not sure if the nickname thing falls into that or not. Becky uses nicknames for other people, without any sign of harassment. I’m remembering “Jakes” in particular.
Could be a misogynistic one, I guess, that’d still apply to Dorothy, but I can’t see any case where it would be.
If Dorothy has never said anything about or given any indication she doesn’t like it, why would it bother any of us unless we had some sort of hang up about nicknames in general? Those sorts of hang ups are valid, but it’s important to recognize they don’t apply to everyone. More importantly, if Dorothy’s never said anything or given any indication she dislikes it, why should Becky stop?
This really reads like ‘I dislike nicknames, so Dorothy must dislike this one’.
It’s kind of wild how the possibility that Becky’s not being 100 percent serious never really crosses Dorothy’s mind.
That said, yeah, I do suspect this storyline is going to start putting some distance between Joyce and Becky.
I think Joyce has already been distancing a bit, so I wouldn’t be surprised. Becky doesn’t seem to have any real idea what’s going on with Joyce at any given time lately.
I think Dorothy is well aware that Becky is almost always not 100% serious.
Becky’s expressing sincere jealousy and resentment in an exaggerated way. It’s not completely serious but it’s not completely a joke either.
Becky is expressing it in an over-the-top way, but I think she is mostly serious. The plan remains to find Joyce and act possessive at her. Even if expressed in a way that’s trying to be funny, those remain the intended events. What does it matter if the seriousness is less than 100%?
The thing is, panel 3 does not look like Becky’s joking. The fact that panel 4 is Asher levels of smugness doesn’t help.
Becky just… really rubs me the wrong way a lot, and this comic is particularly awful. She uses humor like a bully does – to try to smooth over the thorniest parts of her intentions and create plausible deniability if someone gets upset. Today she’s just being flat mean with the most gossamer layer of a joke on top. It’s gross.
becky could stand to be more apologetic
Becky: Joyce, your bestest Christian friend is here!
Joyce: SHIT YEAH, FUCK GOD, SHITTY SHIT!
Becky: :0
Hah! I was just thinking this – I cannot wait for Becky to walk in on Joyce eating multivitamin gummies and talking about how Jesus is bullshit and she loves having premarital sexual relationships.
“My best friend is an atheist! Who can I turn to for comfort??? Dotty, you’re — oh, crap, you’re one too, and it’s probably your fault. I shall run in tears to my girlfriend! Oh, wait…”
*Runs away crying”
*Bumps into Leslie*
“Leslie, help! Joyce’s an atheist!”
“Guess what? SO AM I, mwahaha!!!”
*Becky screams*
“Atheists! ATHEISTS EVERYWHERE!!!”
Joyce spends the rest of the comic loudly shouting “Hey guess what? I’m an atheist!” every time Becky is within earshot.
We are legion.
“Becky, this is wildly over-possessive.”
“Oh, so you do know me.”
I fucking love how every time the whitest, blondest, straightest girl in this comic makes a “:/“ face, the comments section becomes a hive of rabid animals who aren’t afraid to get straight-up hateful towards any perceived threat to her
I do think there’s an unsavory trend of people hating on Becky every time she’s a little obnoxious, but I do also think she’s not immune to being called out on stuff or that Dorothy’s status as the residential white cis/het with basically no trauma and a bunch of privilege means it’s okay for Becky to say that to her.
Dorothy’s obviously fine and it ended in a joke. But I kind of think Becky was more mean than necessary here, especially if she was actually manipulating Dorothy.
This strip which seems pretty innocent overall is actually rather polarizing upon analysis.
Yeah I really don’t get the dislike of Becky. Like you say she ain’t prefect but she reads to me as someone who doesn’t think before she speaks and is kinda irritating in the way 18 year olds are. I certainly don’t see much of any malicious intent or negligent harm in what she does.
Thats the thing though, its not that shes not thinking before she speaks, its that she is thinking before she speaks to Dorothy
Its deliberately mean to someone that has only ever been supportive and helpful
I just hate how annoying the “frenemies” behavior is. It was never funny and it’s been going on for years now.
They are still freshmen, so no, it hasn’t been going on for years. You’re just reading it slow.
OTOH, I was just wondering when the anti-Dorothy hate disappeared to. Time was when someone telling Dorothy to “want something selfish just once in your life” would result in a slew of comments saying “But Dorothy’s always selfish; she’s the evil career woman who cruely dumped Walky to focus on her own twisted ambitions!” And while I agree that Becky is getting dumped on a lot, I don’t miss that.
What lady’s getting weird levels of hate depends on the day. Right now it’s Becky.
It’s not weird.
She’s being a jerk.
She is, and it’s not nearly as bad as it was when she got her haircut, but there’s always been a lot of hate over stuff certain female characters do that seems over the pitch other characters get for similar behaviour. It’s been commented on with Sal, Amber, Ruth, Carla, Dorothy and Becky off the top of my head.
I am pretty sure people are allowed to be irritated by how Becky is acting without caring about her sexuality. I myself am not straight and I dont care for how she treats Dorothy at all.
Pft right, because if there’s any fandom that gets overprotective of the Straights, it’s Dumbing of Age.
Obviously no one can take umbrage with Becky’s constant bullying now reaching another zenith where she tells Dorothy to her face that she has no personality without it actually being an overprotective display for a fragile straight woman.
Queer people don’t actually read Dumbing of Age, natch. If they did they’d know we’re all perfect adorably babies who bring joy and wonder and are literally incapable of human flaws.
Or, consider: Becky is straight up being mean here in an uncalled for manner and people are getting tired of her treating Dorothy like this because it has become a trend that she does this. If you are telling the person who literally came to your dead mum’s party and asked to hear more about her that they have no personality and are boring for being a kind respectful person, even though them being this way helps you, then you are an ass.
Also, Dorothy is Irish and Jewish ethnically, both groups of people that in history, have been known to be discriminated against. Dorothy outright stated to Robin before that trolls on Twitter would send her pictures of furnaces.
I think it’s more that Becky’s “loud, ‘FuN’, and obnoxious to bury your feelings” schtick is long past its sell-by date. It used to be almost charming, but she’s pushed it to the point where she’s just being passive-aggressively mean now. Today she’s all but bullying Dorothy, her roommate and one of the closer ‘friends’ in her social circle. How much farther can she push it without something blowing up in her face?
I’m queer. I don’t hate Becky because she’s picking on a poor widdle straight girl. I hate Becky because she’s consistently mean to someone who does absolutely nothing to deserve it and who continues to treat her with kindness despite her garbage behavior. I generally dislike characters who treat other people like shit for funsies, and her target being a Straight White Girl doesn’t give her a free pass to be awful. It’s not funny, or interesting, or enjoyable at all. It’s just exhausting and uncomfortable to watch.
And noh-ooh, we leeb zee young lubbers to zair farts
So, it turns out that Dorothy has an upper limit to how much sugar she can have during lunch.
Is it just me or is Becky like way meaner in panel 2 of this strip? There’s usually some tongue and cheek to this “rivalry” between her and Dorothy but that line kind of hit a little harder than normal.
Not just you.
Its very judgemental, and arrogant, in that Becky doesn’t know, or taken the time, to get to know Dorothy yet she just knows what Dorothy should do.
Also its shitty, user behaviour on Beckys part in that shes more than willing to use Dorothy to further her own desires
I don’t disagree that panel 2 is over the line. I very much disagree that Becky doesn’t know, or has taken the time to know, Dorothy. They’re roommates, and Becky works at the whole “Dorothy is my arch-nemesis” schtick. She probably knows Dorothy better than she knows Joyce at this point.
Considering she doesn’t seem to know Joyce is agnostic now, but probably knows Dorothy really wants to jump Walky’s bones, Becky knowing Dorothy better than Joyce may actually be valid.
If she does know Dorothy then that makes Beckys comments even worse, shes deliberately trying to hurt Dorothy or goad her into going along with her plans
Tbh i like Dorothy but she’s kinda right
I think she’s right to some extent too but that doesn’t make it okay. Like you can meet and overweight person but it’s still rude to call them fat.
I mean, you can be in a morally superior demographic group than fat people, and then it *is* ok, in fact cool and insightful and funny.
Say what you will about her motives, panel three is one of the best faces I’ve seen in a while.
Becky: Dorothy be selfish for once! Let’s get Joyce back!
Dorothy: *Looks at Walky and wants to be selfish with him* Uh yes! Being possessive of Joyce is definitely more selfish than what I was thinking!
Oh, Becky knew exactly what she was doing with the “newlyweds” and “want something selfish just once” bit.
And so did Dorothy.
Yes Dotty, be aggressive! Joyce is making a fool of herself by pretending to have another personality to be liked by a girl she admires… She needs both of you to show her how much she’s faking it all. Joyce will feel sad and Sarah won’t like it. Joe will need popcorn, the show will be VERY wild!
I keep having a hard time forgetting the fact that Dorothy got accepted into Yale and still hasn’t told anyone yet….Every day that passes makes me worried that this is going to blow up hugely in her face for some reason and the dread is killing me.
Fortunately it’ll be several years (at least on our timescale) before anything about Yale needs to be revealed.
Leaving the second to last panel silent and it gets funny somehow. Ever since Joyce said that I see it all the time. And it works all the time!
Panel 2 is one of those rare moments when we see Beckys mask slip a little
Jesus Christ you talk about her like a super villain
Maybe. It’s definitely true that Becky wears a mask and that it rarely slips. I’m not sure this is an example though.
The mask is wacky unapologetic Becky. The slips are normally where we see the insecurity underneath.
We’ve been talking about Becky and hiding behind masks and false images for almost the entire time she’s been a regular.
I think in this case what MrSmith means is that there is a part of Becky that legitimately dislikes and/or is jealous of Dorothy for many reasons that have been explored and this is one time that animosity actually tangibly leaked out in as an aggression that was genuinely mean spirited.
Most of the time Becky dramatically overemphasizes her frenemy relationship with Dorothy, but here it’s like yeah, Becky has issues with Dotty sometimes and is also pretty manipulative as we’ve seen in the past too.
Yeah that’s about right
Something is building up here. Like, Liz on “edibles” hitting on Becky. And Joyce on “edibles” hitting on Dorothy. And Sarah hitting on Joe out of exasperation… no, better Sarah hitting Joe with the bat out of exasperation.
Sarah would do better hitting herself with the bat, might knock some sense into herself
As someone who never liked Becky OR Dorothy, any way this sequence ends is going to be great for me.
Gravatar checks out (can we call it Gravi? Do we?)
I call ‘em “gravs” myself.
Low blow, Bekcy
maaaaaan, every strip with becky post-chrismas break just makes me dislike her more and more. its a shame because I enjoyed her before she became the physical embodiment of petty jealousy and trying to control other peoples lives
I just want it to go somewhere.
Like it’s never been funny but it was ramping up past the timeskip and then Dorothy just defuses her with a little speech and I thought “okay that’s fine, that is how Dorothy would react and it’s way more likely Becky is just piling it on because that’s how she deals with things” but then it keeps happening and now it’s back to straight up bullying again.
I genuinely have no idea how I’m supposed to process Becky. If she’s supposed to be funny, she’s not. If it’s meant to be annoying and harmful in-universe, well there’s a lot of depth to plumb there in how Becky thinks she has to be a cool funny goofball around everyone or else they won’t love her now with someone who won’t tell her off because Dorothy is ceaselessly accommodating.
I wonder if Becky’s vision of “cool badass rebel friend” came from being that for Joyce alone. Her sexual hangups with Dina show that for all she portrays herself as a cool rebel she is still just as deluged in the culture of being a fundie, she’s still just as deep as Joyce and she’s only really broken out of it in different ways. Like, she behaves this way because she was this kind of person with Joyce and Joyce loved it, so naturally the way to get everyone else to like her is to be a cartoon character.
It feels too intentional that the only characters in the comic she’s willing to have some kind of serious conversation in a normal context are Joyce, Dina and Leslie, who she feels confident won’t stop loving her if she displays vulnerability.
What if Beckys destiny is to become the ultimate antagonist of the strip?
That’s a good way of thinking about it, I suspect. Doesn’t make it okay, but it makes it more understandable. Makes it a character flaw with roots that she’s going to need to grow and overcome, rather than just “she’s bad”.
It’s going to take time, because this comic plays the long game and takes place in glacial time.
This, exactly. Including the last part.
This is mean but at least it’s more interesting than usual.
I was starting to, well not like but tolerate Becky, and now she is putting herself firmly back in the dislike territory.
Nayan Martinelli – I don’t know if you saw my response to you on yesterday’s strip…but I responded to you on yesterday’s strip. Sorry for the delay…was a very tired Neko.
Panel 2 Becky is giving off some heel turn vibes. Panel 3 Becky looks like a supervillain. This may be where she realizes that this game needs to be retired. She did a lot to survive the traumas of the last year. Some of that may not be healthy going forward. Doesn’t make her a bad person but trauma isn’t alway adaptive. What one does to survive it can need to be dropped later.
Gotta be a Face before you can Heel Turn.
But who’s going to plummet 16 feet through the announcer’s table?
Here’s kind of how I’m processing Becky at the moment: she’s convinced of, for lack of a better term, her superiority. It’s not that she thinks she’s inherently better, but she thinks that having bad shit heaped onto her has made her worldly and competent and above it all when, in actuality, she is as much of a sheltered nutbar as Joyce.
When you grow up in the circumstance Becky did of having a lot of controlling bullshit piled onto you to the point where the helplessness to enact change was a constant and overwhelming presence, two things kinda pop up.
– You’re really desperate for people to like you because you never really get the chance to express yourself.
– You start to think you’ve got other people figured out, because you yourself have experienced circumstances where you constantly have to guess and psyche out the people around you so they always respond favourably to you.
Becky constantly needs to be a loud fixture in any conversation, and when she’s not it’s so she can stand off to the side and make sarcastic commentary about how “the straights are not okay.” Trying to word this as best as I can with a little asterisk that this isn’t a condemnation of Becky, but she kind of needs to put herself out there as constantly cool, constantly likeable, and constantly funny. She needs to be someone everyone can like, and she needs to be the Cool One. The Rebel. The Jokester.
And for the most part this has worked out, because she’s been with Joyce her entire life and Joyce does actually she think Becky is the coolest and most awesome person in the universe. So does Dina, who also views Becky as smart, worldly and knowing when in reality Dina is a thousand times more put together than her. Leslie likes her too, but Leslie likes Becky because she is a formerly homeless baby gay and therefore that love for Becky is going to exist regardless of what Becky does. With these three, Becky has nothing to prove. She can be sad in front of them and they’ll still love her.
Becky also engages in this thing where because she thinks she’s funny, because every word that comes out of her mouth is supposed to be flippant and charming and badass and therefore her recipient will intimately understand that Becky means well and that she’s a cool funny badass, she has no idea how to reel it back when she’s actually being a big stupid jerkface. Becky can constantly annoy Dorothy and cut her up because Becky always knows it’s well-intentioned, she always know she’s being funny and because Dorothy never tells her to stop she assumes that means she can keep pushing because the problem doesn’t exist. Becky can publicly embarrass Ruth and Jennifer and it’s fine, because Becky has decided these two can never get back together so she can act however she pleases even though they’ve never actually indicated even for a second that they actually want to be in the same room for any amount of time anymore. Becky knows that, actually, they’re still super in love and will get back together and then kill themselves, so Becky steps up to solve this problem nobody but her thinks exists, least of all the people involved.
In summary, the slow-paced nature of a comic that runs for a decade one strip at a time where we have 24 hours to stew over a particular character’s actions in a way that other forms of media don’t really have, because if you’re reading a book and John Protagonist is being a nob on page 34 you only have to reach page 175 for him to learn a valuable lesson about camaraderie, makes Becky come off worse than she is. The reality is that she’s being a bad person here, and it’s been going on long enough that, yes, it’d be nice if someone told her to shut the fuck up for the first time since she joined the cast, but I feel sometimes when characters do bad things we’re unwilling to engage with why they act the way they do, and that if a character acts like a jerk for X amount of time without being called out we just decide the story is on their side as if this is an 80s cartoon and we need the one guy with a thought contrary to the group to be punished.
I’ve reread DoA in large chunks at a time, and while Becky is somewhat less grating that way, the effect is starting to wear thin even that way.
“I’ll go be unapolegetically me.”
I mean, sure, but you’re still being wildly over-possessive.
You’d think writing a word under a comic where the word is would mean I’d manage to spell it correctly.