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I never quite understood that. I’d think it would be domestic violence, and creepy jealousy at that, the way Joyce and Mike teamed up to beat the tar out of Joe on their first date. I never understood why there are no consequences for Joyce, even when she said, “Our fists were instruments of the Lord!” (*Barf.*) Seems like she’d be more sensitive to self-righteous religiously motivated violence, and look back on her own prior actions more critically, after what she went through with Becky’s father. But when she just looked at Joe with those big puppy-dog eyes and said (words to the effect of) “But… a girl can’t REALLY hurt a boy, can she? Not really.” (Again, too lazy/inept to look up the original strip/quote.) And all is seemingly forgiven. At most, Joe demonstrated mild irritation before going back to being smitten. It’s this whole stereotype that women can’t be abusers. “Questionable Content,” by Jeph Jacques, has a similar trope: a lady punches a guy (even to the point of bruising or serious injury) and it’s a punchline. A joke. I don’t get it.
…But it was sweet of Joe to share an anecdote about her friend, let Amber know she’s not alone (and that she’s not the only punchy/assaultive member of her peer group).
i think it’s a bit more of a “Joe was being an objectifying creep” and “Joyce was being an unreasonable religious purist” so that both of them were being gross and wrong in that situation. there’s also a lot to be said about webcomic time, because those strips were…. so long ago lol. the violence was over the top and played mostly for jokes. Both characters have had arcs of growth where they changed alongside the tone of the comic. I think it’s very fair to be critical of those original events, but Joe did need something to help knock him out of his womanisation and Joyce is learning to be less repressed herself
That is why I stopped reading QC to be honest. By the time I quit I remember Marten effectively reduced to little more than character development for everyone else.
Unfortunately Marten is even less of a character then he was before, seemly solely there to be “Claire’s boyfriend” until Jeph remembers he’s supposed to be a main character again
Martin’s been vestigial to Questionable Content ever since it stopped being a love triangle, which was pretty early on. I think the only reason he hasn’t been written out altogether is because Pintsize needs a place to stay.
I don’t see why it’s a problem. Stories need conflict and Marten is an easy-going dude who has a stable job and is in a stable healthy relationship. If he was the main character, he’d still be fairly ancillary to everyone else’s stuff, or it’d be a pretty boring comic. As it is, everyone else still has conflict and so the comic focuses on them, because they’re actually driving things forwards
I like that Marten’s moved on from the focus because it means that he’s allowed to stay the cool, chill guy that he became over time. Honestly if he wasn’t there to go “This is a thing now? Cool.” the comic’s tone would have probable gone off of one deep end or the other by now.
I still read it every day out of habit, but if you asked me to summarize the last couple years’ worth of plot I’d have nothing. Sometimes I get the feeling the comic writes itself into a corner, and gets bailed out by introducing new characters (with increasingly eccentric names and interests) to hyperfocus on for a few months. It’s more “vignettes about a small New England mill town” than an overarching plot.
In general, you could at least have an interesting conversation about it. We could consider broadly how religious attitudes towards gender roles and sex have shaped society and been shaped by it in turn and how that affects even people not raised in a religion. Like Dorothy’s concerns about how her sexual needs will be seen.
But this is Joyce and the entire main plot of the comic is about how she deals with having been messed up by her childhood in a cult. She literally says “Our fists were Instruments of the Lord.”
You’re completely right. Religion is absolutely unoriginal and quite frankly not at all pivotal to the development of the ethos of a community. Instead, religions are just a reflection or the founder’s prejudices. Therefore, no, religions are not the problem. They’re just the part that delivers the problem to the next generation as a bundle of lessons served up to corrupt the innocent! Therefore, religion itself is certainly not the problem.
FWIW, I don’t think either webcomic has used that trope in a long while.
I’m having a hard time actually figuring out what your objection is, though. The stereotype of women being physically weak, or that slapstick comedy is weird when gendered?
Like, QC never depicted Marten as shrugging off Faye’s hits. And DoA has had Amazi-girl since the beginning. So I think you have a point in there, but I can’t figure out exactly what it is.
Wasn’t there an arc in QC relatively early on where there was a female vigilante beating the shit out of womanizers and she was treated like a straight up villain?
And I remember Faye being genuinely apologetic when her shit got too much
Yes, I recall that QC arc — but the vigilante was trying to run men over on her moped (IIRC), which is significantly more dangerous than punching. But punching is not excusable.
Maybe Faye apologized once or twice, I don’t know. To me that doesn’t matter whether a person apologizes, if they are never held accountable for it and if they keep on doing it as a pattern. Like for example that time when Faye went to the hospital due to alcohol poisoning. She opens her eyes and punches Marten clean out, and that’s the whole punchline. And he doesn’t even mention it the next morning, just keeps showing sweet concern for her. I don’t like treating people as if they are entitled to hurt others just because they may have experienced oppression or violence or trauma in other contexts.
…And, Mike was right. Amazi-Girl’s hobby is problematic, too. She’s better off now, playing roller derby, where the violence is expected and consensual.
I mean there’s flavors of punching friends. My wife might punch me in the arm when I’m being a jerk but that doesn’t mean she’s beating the crap out of me.
Does everyone think that everyone is throwing Mike Tyson haymakers here?
Given the little stars of pain in QC, I got the impression that Faye hit Marten pretty hard. But sometimes people hit and hurt while they think they are just hitting lightly.
No part of that strip was a punchline, the entire moment was meant to be dramatic, I imagine she punched him because she wasn’t fully aware of what was happening at the time and Marten doesn’t bring it up because he knows that (and also his defining character flaw is he’s a bit of a doormat)
And her being quick to punch is something she gradually gets better about, honestly don’t think she’s punched anyone in rl years
Well, that’s good. I did see one a few years back where she tries to punch Marten and then stops herself, and says, “Sorry, just a reflex,” and he congratulates her on stopping. I mean, that’s progress. She has her jerkish moments, and Bubbles calls her out on them occasionally, but apparently they still love each other regardless of each any flaws, so hopefully that’s a good thing. And Bubbles really is too big and strong to be hurt easily by a physical attack.
Thanks for checking in. What bothers me is the idea that women can’t be abusers. It makes light of domestic abuse, as if it doesn’t “count” when perpetrated by women. I always took QC as treating Faye’s punching of Marten as if it were a joke somehow, or occasionally something that he “deserved” for some smart-aleck comment.
“Criticism of the Duluth Model has centered on the program’s insistence that men are perpetrators who are violent because they have been socialized in a patriarchy that condones male violence, and that women are victims who are violent only in self-defense.”
Oh great, more essentialism. “People with this phenotype are always like this, people with that phenotype are always like that.” For all the talks about broad spectrum and complex identity, it’s quite depressing how often people who should be expected to be progressive falls back to this simplistic model that wants to assign people a role (the villain or the victim) based entirely on what they look like rather than their actual story.
Thanks for clarifying. I’d agree that that’s a problem in general, though I have trouble agreeing with the comics being examples of it. But that’s probably more a case of my being relatively uneducated in this subject, and also I haven’t done the archive dives necessary to refresh myself.
It’s a double standard. Society has a lot of them and Joe has probably internalized a bit of those toxic masculinity concepts. The whole “women are the physically weaker sex and thus can’t abuse men” Not sure how that translates when said women is using another man to commit that violence by proxy though? Joe was very creepy in early DoA but taking that night literally and metaphorically on the chin was pretty impressive by early Joe standards.
Hmm, looks like I included too many links in my reply, because it’s in “awaiting moderation” limbo. (Never have I done anything in moderation…)
So rather than include all the links, I’ll just say:
My impression is that Joyce and Mike both piled on, at the end, hard enough to leave marks, and that Joyce later admitted to hitting Joe but minimized her actions by saying that she was too weak to have really hurt him:
Starting from here and then going forward until their conversation in the elevator the next day.
Yeah, but their point is – Only for women in these comics. If a male character punched one of the female characters it would not be downplayed for comedic effect. And, if it was, the comment section would be up in arms. Rightfully so.
Is it really too much to ask that we don’t laugh at guys getting abused?
Yeah. That bothers me. I don’t really know what to make of it.
Real-life punching — or even open-fist slaps across the face can have such serious consequences. They can cause long-term cumulative traumatic damage to your brain and cervical spine. I wouldn’t wish a punch on anyone, and I’d have a hard time forgiving anyone who punched someone in the face. Even in play — it’s so easy not to know your own strength and hurt someone by accident.
It’s not real life punching because they are cartoons.
QC is a series that established that Cartoon Punching is fine and causes no lasting consequence. Whether or not the audience found it funny, how that joke got played out, and how it was indulging in “it’s funny for the Feisty Female Lead to punch the Doormat Male Lead” often enough that the funny bits drained it was just some shy dude getting smacked around and everyone involved didn’t want to have it anymore, least of all the author.
DoA had these exact scenes with Billie/Ruth and Joe/Joyce, more specifically the latter. Joe gets smacked around and we think it’s funny, and then we get to their next Gender Studies class and it’s “actually this is deeply inappropriate and Joyce was motivated by a patriarchal gender standard into believing she could cause no harm” and so we stop laughing at “girls punching dudes” as a baseline for comedy. Dorothy once slapped Walky upside the head when he insulted Joyce, except that was funny because it was in a single panel and Walky had no facial expression, so it’s shaped by context.
So “punching in the face for comedy” stopped being a universally Funny thing for this series, but then it was still funny when it happened to Billie for a while. Ruth would kick the crap out of her, but Billie would be kind of shrill and annoying so there’s at least some give and take where a moody jerk gets thrown into chairs. Then Ruth slams Billie into a wall and kisses her and it’s not funny and sorta retroactively stops, and so Ruth doesn’t hit Billie again.
Meanwhile you’ve got Mary and Mary’s been slapped in the face so hard that it left an imprint of a dick. This is actually funny, except it fell kind of flat because Mary had yet established herself as a character who really deserved it, but then last year we got Dina aggressively hompking Mary when she starts being a jerk and it’s funny even though Dina is engaging in technically what is physical violence and harassment of Mary and I laugh because Mary throws wild cartoon faces. Or there was that time Amazi-Girl held her arm out and Malaya fell down and Marcie thought it was hilarious, and then a few years later it became impossible to laugh whenever she punched people because the cartoon superhero mythology Amazi-Girl had built up evaporated.
Physical slapstick is a valid form of comedy for cartoons and it’s something that gets harder in situations that seem analogous to reality, which is probably why manga gets away with it so often; characters getting smacked there turn into cartoon silly putty before reshaping back to reality. It’s something that has to be shaped by context, where establishing what’s physical slapstick and what’s Actual Violence is important for the reader, but then just because it’s a joke doesn’t always make it a funny one if a story fails to both properly contextualize them as well as run the joke into the ground.
Yeah, the level of violence that can be played for comedy is pretty variable. There’s comedies that can get away with characters getting exploded or shot in the face as a joke, even though both have extreme and often fatal consequences in real life.
Not sure why people are trying to argue with you or ignore your real experience with violence—I’m sorry. violent comedy still normalizes or downplays violence in real life. it definitely desensitizes people.
Partly I think it was “early strip weirdness”. The tone on DoA hadn’t quite settled yet and the violence in that strip would have fit better in SP!.
That said, it still did some character stuff for both Joyce and Joe and it was called back to more critically many times after. Even at the time, the “girls can’t hurt boys” thing read to me as a character trait of Joyce’s, not authorial truth. It also kept coming up throughout their early relationship, usually obliquely, eventually leading up to the “what was I, before I hurt you” bit.
Honestly my biggest problem with that sequence is that it’s our only look at Joe on a date and Joyce is so awful it makes him look good by comparison.
To be fair, Joe does call her out on it and after her saying that “girls can’t hurt boys” does she come to realise that actually, maybe that’s not right.
As someone who’s a fan of classic slapstick, when you bring a real life perspective to comedic violence it does make you think “why is there no consequences” But I mean it’s not like I mind when Nami hits Luffy, or Blooma hits Goku Or slapstick waifu hits bumbling MC #20. I dunno. I guess I can’t defend it but it’s a trope I’m pretty fond of.
I mean, complaining about web comics for not being 100% realistic like this is kinda like complaining about Taco Bell not being 100% Authentic Mexican Food, because neither are ever SUPPOSED to be that, you know?
…huh. I never realized it before now, but that was pretty much the only time Joe and Mike interacted, wasn’t it. Just did a tag search, and literally the only other scene they’re both in was when Mike snuck into the Gender Studies class to humiliate Walky.
You can also put “site:dumbingofage.com” at the end of a Google search to find old comments. (Every comment has a permalink too, but you have to rummage through the page source to find it.)
It’s kinda interesting trying random combinations of two character tags and seeing when or if they interacted with each other, or even if they ever shared the same strips together.
Doubt it. Not sure it was clear, but I was joking. This would not actually have been a good story to tell plainly. Carefully edited, maybe, but it wasn’t anyone’s good memory of Mike, not even Joyce’s.
I totally forgot about that incident, and I feel like Joe and Joyce could apologize to the each other. I doubt that will happen unless they start dating, and even then it is only a maybe.
So it’s time again to ask this, do you think Joyce and Joe will get together?
Didn’t Joyce already apologize? During Joe’s cancellation arc (it’s funny to call it that.)
I remember her acknowledging that she hurt him and i feel like she apologized but im on mobile and digging through the archive is a pain
Did an archive hike and from the looks of it, Joyce has never flat out said “sorry I hit you,” but acknowledged that what she had done had “hurt him” which then gave her the Zero-Minus ranking on his Do List when that got leaked.
Indeed, it’s not something you ever really get used to. It’s gets brought up more frequently if you spend time with others, like a group of friends, and the loss just hangs in the air.
How I would feel about if I was in his shoes is kind of like how I felt with the last president a little more than a year ago.
“I’m not wishing for him to die but if he does croak I’m just not going to feel anything for his ass, I will sing him no eulogy.” That would have been better than wishing him to be permanently left as a Is comatose vegetable or death because he got with my crush at the time.
More specifically, he said it completely foot-in-mouth and then apologized in the following strip’s first panel, whereupon an actual argument started about Mike getting immediately forgiven.
I dunno why these specific character reads keep propagating despite being at best a woeful misread of what actually happens in the comic, but I blame TV Tropes.
It bothers me too. Danny wanted a break from a toxic person. He knew this was selfish and inappropriate, and looked mortified when he blurted it out by accident. But it was such a big moment that I think it sticks in the mind of many readers, especially since Mike eventually died.
Yeah, it was a crappy thing to say at all and even more so right then and there, but damn do people seem to remember it as far worse than that. It was bad enough, leave it there.
I don’t actually think it was selfish though. Yeah, he’d been thinking about his crush on Ethan, but if you look back to Danny’s last talk with Mike (at Dina and Sarah’s birthday party) he’s pretty clearly focused on how bad Mike’s been to Ethan, not on anything Mike’s done to Danny. I read him as thinking (and then blurting out) that Ethan will be better off with Mike not around for awhile.
I suspect Amber’s laughing because she’s reminded of the fact that she’s mourning a guy who objectively was an asshole, which is just a hilarious waste of her time and energy. Joe will probably also find that funny if she explains it.
The last realization Mike had, the one that motivated him into tackling Blaine off a balcony, is the realization that what he saw as sincerely helping was actually him being the second most emotionally destructive person in Amber’s life.
Mike was a shithead edgelord who thought he had life figured out so well that he could dispense misery to make the people he cared about grow, and now he’s permanently lost the chance to ever start undoing the damage he caused.
We like our palette-swaps ’round these parts. If I ever got around to messing with that fan-game idea I had, Ruth would probably be the one with the most costumes.
its only just occurring to me that they actually do have similar neuroses. Amber thinks she’s an inch away from punching anyone and everyone, and Joe thinks he is like. radioactive or something. and will hurt people just by dint of getting close to them.
i’m pretty sure ive seen exactly this in the comments before. probably several times. but its the first time that neurons link has actually connected in my own brain
That’s actually a good thing. This is how grief is processed in the brain. You can’t be constantly dwelling on the bad memories or how it’s your fault or longing for the dead person to be back again. You need to remember the departed in a good way, a way that makes you smile and laugh and be grateful for the memories they have left you. There will no doubt still be times of sadness or regret, but they won’t be overwhelming.
I didn’t expect this to become fun. Amber is laughing and seems really amused to have discovered something she didn’t know about her dead friend. Good job Joe! He’s really a great brother.
Dunno why but to me it feels like next strip Amber will cry, like this laughing was the drop to break her dam that kept all her feelings closed off. Crying might also help her, just like laughing does.
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In the moment it was funny. In hindsight it might’ve been an assault. In Mike is dead now memory it’s back to being funny.
Oh it was definitely assault, but Mike is dead and he’s crushing hard on Joyce so there’s not much to do about it but laugh really
Joe is crushing hard that is, realized that might not have been 100% clear by the way I typed it
I think that maybe Joe’s funny story just accidentally and temporarily broke Amber. She needed an emotional release, looks like that’s it! xD
I never quite understood that. I’d think it would be domestic violence, and creepy jealousy at that, the way Joyce and Mike teamed up to beat the tar out of Joe on their first date. I never understood why there are no consequences for Joyce, even when she said, “Our fists were instruments of the Lord!” (*Barf.*) Seems like she’d be more sensitive to self-righteous religiously motivated violence, and look back on her own prior actions more critically, after what she went through with Becky’s father. But when she just looked at Joe with those big puppy-dog eyes and said (words to the effect of) “But… a girl can’t REALLY hurt a boy, can she? Not really.” (Again, too lazy/inept to look up the original strip/quote.) And all is seemingly forgiven. At most, Joe demonstrated mild irritation before going back to being smitten. It’s this whole stereotype that women can’t be abusers. “Questionable Content,” by Jeph Jacques, has a similar trope: a lady punches a guy (even to the point of bruising or serious injury) and it’s a punchline. A joke. I don’t get it.
…But it was sweet of Joe to share an anecdote about her friend, let Amber know she’s not alone (and that she’s not the only punchy/assaultive member of her peer group).
I’ll be honest, that anecdote feels more like a lead up to “So anyway, Danny is right and it’s great that he’s dead.”
i think it’s a bit more of a “Joe was being an objectifying creep” and “Joyce was being an unreasonable religious purist” so that both of them were being gross and wrong in that situation. there’s also a lot to be said about webcomic time, because those strips were…. so long ago lol. the violence was over the top and played mostly for jokes. Both characters have had arcs of growth where they changed alongside the tone of the comic. I think it’s very fair to be critical of those original events, but Joe did need something to help knock him out of his womanisation and Joyce is learning to be less repressed herself
How long ago has it been in comic book time, though? Is it still early Spring semester of freshman year?
That is why I stopped reading QC to be honest. By the time I quit I remember Marten effectively reduced to little more than character development for everyone else.
I have good news about QC then: Faye cuts that shit out, and the comic gets MUCH better. The Faye-bubbles arc alone is worth the price of admission.
That said, i think Yay is my favourite character.
Unfortunately Marten is even less of a character then he was before, seemly solely there to be “Claire’s boyfriend” until Jeph remembers he’s supposed to be a main character again
Martin’s been vestigial to Questionable Content ever since it stopped being a love triangle, which was pretty early on. I think the only reason he hasn’t been written out altogether is because Pintsize needs a place to stay.
I don’t see why it’s a problem. Stories need conflict and Marten is an easy-going dude who has a stable job and is in a stable healthy relationship. If he was the main character, he’d still be fairly ancillary to everyone else’s stuff, or it’d be a pretty boring comic. As it is, everyone else still has conflict and so the comic focuses on them, because they’re actually driving things forwards
I like that Marten’s moved on from the focus because it means that he’s allowed to stay the cool, chill guy that he became over time. Honestly if he wasn’t there to go “This is a thing now? Cool.” the comic’s tone would have probable gone off of one deep end or the other by now.
Yes, Yay! I love her so much. I love Emily, but Yay is the queen of my heart.
Oops! Love THEM so much.
I still read it every day out of habit, but if you asked me to summarize the last couple years’ worth of plot I’d have nothing. Sometimes I get the feeling the comic writes itself into a corner, and gets bailed out by introducing new characters (with increasingly eccentric names and interests) to hyperfocus on for a few months. It’s more “vignettes about a small New England mill town” than an overarching plot.
I view the plot as “exploring the AI-Human future but not an apocalypses”
The rest of the plot is just a delivery vehicle
Then even later QC gets much worse, IMO.
Agreed. I think the Faye/Bubbles arc was the last plot thread that felt planned in advance and fully executed to a satisfying conclusion.
Once the repair shop was established, the comic went back to aimless meandering.
I like a lot of the places it meanders to though, so I don’t really miss big plot arcs.
Agreed.
How was it religiously motivated violence?
It was violence caused by a desire to uphold a particular religious standard.
I feel like if you attribute the gender roles and feelings on sex purely to religion you’re being dangerously reductive.
where do y’think she learned them patriarchal gender roles and feelings on sex, bud
I mean in general you’re right
In Joyce’s case specifically though I’d absolutely attribute it solely to religion
In general, you could at least have an interesting conversation about it. We could consider broadly how religious attitudes towards gender roles and sex have shaped society and been shaped by it in turn and how that affects even people not raised in a religion. Like Dorothy’s concerns about how her sexual needs will be seen.
But this is Joyce and the entire main plot of the comic is about how she deals with having been messed up by her childhood in a cult. She literally says “Our fists were Instruments of the Lord.”
You’re completely right. Religion is absolutely unoriginal and quite frankly not at all pivotal to the development of the ethos of a community. Instead, religions are just a reflection or the founder’s prejudices. Therefore, no, religions are not the problem. They’re just the part that delivers the problem to the next generation as a bundle of lessons served up to corrupt the innocent! Therefore, religion itself is certainly not the problem.
Quote: “Our fists were instruments of the LORD!” -Joyce
FWIW, I don’t think either webcomic has used that trope in a long while.
I’m having a hard time actually figuring out what your objection is, though. The stereotype of women being physically weak, or that slapstick comedy is weird when gendered?
Like, QC never depicted Marten as shrugging off Faye’s hits. And DoA has had Amazi-girl since the beginning. So I think you have a point in there, but I can’t figure out exactly what it is.
Wasn’t there an arc in QC relatively early on where there was a female vigilante beating the shit out of womanizers and she was treated like a straight up villain?
And I remember Faye being genuinely apologetic when her shit got too much
Yes, I recall that QC arc — but the vigilante was trying to run men over on her moped (IIRC), which is significantly more dangerous than punching. But punching is not excusable.
Maybe Faye apologized once or twice, I don’t know. To me that doesn’t matter whether a person apologizes, if they are never held accountable for it and if they keep on doing it as a pattern. Like for example that time when Faye went to the hospital due to alcohol poisoning. She opens her eyes and punches Marten clean out, and that’s the whole punchline. And he doesn’t even mention it the next morning, just keeps showing sweet concern for her. I don’t like treating people as if they are entitled to hurt others just because they may have experienced oppression or violence or trauma in other contexts.
…And, Mike was right. Amazi-Girl’s hobby is problematic, too. She’s better off now, playing roller derby, where the violence is expected and consensual.
I mean there’s flavors of punching friends. My wife might punch me in the arm when I’m being a jerk but that doesn’t mean she’s beating the crap out of me.
Does everyone think that everyone is throwing Mike Tyson haymakers here?
Given the little stars of pain in QC, I got the impression that Faye hit Marten pretty hard. But sometimes people hit and hurt while they think they are just hitting lightly.
On the hospital punch
No part of that strip was a punchline, the entire moment was meant to be dramatic, I imagine she punched him because she wasn’t fully aware of what was happening at the time and Marten doesn’t bring it up because he knows that (and also his defining character flaw is he’s a bit of a doormat)
And her being quick to punch is something she gradually gets better about, honestly don’t think she’s punched anyone in rl years
Well, that’s good. I did see one a few years back where she tries to punch Marten and then stops herself, and says, “Sorry, just a reflex,” and he congratulates her on stopping. I mean, that’s progress. She has her jerkish moments, and Bubbles calls her out on them occasionally, but apparently they still love each other regardless of each any flaws, so hopefully that’s a good thing. And Bubbles really is too big and strong to be hurt easily by a physical attack.
Thanks for checking in. What bothers me is the idea that women can’t be abusers. It makes light of domestic abuse, as if it doesn’t “count” when perpetrated by women. I always took QC as treating Faye’s punching of Marten as if it were a joke somehow, or occasionally something that he “deserved” for some smart-aleck comment.
What you’re talking about is the Duluth Model of abuse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duluth_model#:~:text=Criticism%20of%20the%20Duluth%20Model,violent%20only%20in%20self%2Ddefense. I think Willis knows that women are capable of all sorts of violence, what with his “sainted mother” being the way she was.
“Criticism of the Duluth Model has centered on the program’s insistence that men are perpetrators who are violent because they have been socialized in a patriarchy that condones male violence, and that women are victims who are violent only in self-defense.”
Oh great, more essentialism. “People with this phenotype are always like this, people with that phenotype are always like that.” For all the talks about broad spectrum and complex identity, it’s quite depressing how often people who should be expected to be progressive falls back to this simplistic model that wants to assign people a role (the villain or the victim) based entirely on what they look like rather than their actual story.
Thanks for clarifying. I’d agree that that’s a problem in general, though I have trouble agreeing with the comics being examples of it. But that’s probably more a case of my being relatively uneducated in this subject, and also I haven’t done the archive dives necessary to refresh myself.
It’s a double standard. Society has a lot of them and Joe has probably internalized a bit of those toxic masculinity concepts. The whole “women are the physically weaker sex and thus can’t abuse men” Not sure how that translates when said women is using another man to commit that violence by proxy though? Joe was very creepy in early DoA but taking that night literally and metaphorically on the chin was pretty impressive by early Joe standards.
Hmm, looks like I included too many links in my reply, because it’s in “awaiting moderation” limbo. (Never have I done anything in moderation…)
So rather than include all the links, I’ll just say:
My impression is that Joyce and Mike both piled on, at the end, hard enough to leave marks, and that Joyce later admitted to hitting Joe but minimized her actions by saying that she was too weak to have really hurt him:
Starting from here and then going forward until their conversation in the elevator the next day.
For reference, here is the subsequent elevator conversation.
I was wondering why I didn’t rem,ember this, but since I apparently read it 11 years ago, I’ll forgive myself
In cartoons, it’s common for the consequences of physical violence to be downplayed for comedic effect.
Yeah, but their point is – Only for women in these comics. If a male character punched one of the female characters it would not be downplayed for comedic effect. And, if it was, the comment section would be up in arms. Rightfully so.
Is it really too much to ask that we don’t laugh at guys getting abused?
Not really. The strips where Mike punches Joe are immediately followed by ones where Billie punches Ruth in the face, and they’re dating now.
Or like they were for a while.
And besides a one-time incident isn’t “abuse” it’s just a guy getting punched in the face for being a creep, which Joe was actually doing.
Yeah… Billie and Ruth was super problematic, and presented as such.
Joyce being problematic is the point of the entire comic.
Yeah. That bothers me. I don’t really know what to make of it.
Real-life punching — or even open-fist slaps across the face can have such serious consequences. They can cause long-term cumulative traumatic damage to your brain and cervical spine. I wouldn’t wish a punch on anyone, and I’d have a hard time forgiving anyone who punched someone in the face. Even in play — it’s so easy not to know your own strength and hurt someone by accident.
… I have some history around this kind of thing. Part of why this strikes a nerve.
It’s not real life punching because they are cartoons.
QC is a series that established that Cartoon Punching is fine and causes no lasting consequence. Whether or not the audience found it funny, how that joke got played out, and how it was indulging in “it’s funny for the Feisty Female Lead to punch the Doormat Male Lead” often enough that the funny bits drained it was just some shy dude getting smacked around and everyone involved didn’t want to have it anymore, least of all the author.
DoA had these exact scenes with Billie/Ruth and Joe/Joyce, more specifically the latter. Joe gets smacked around and we think it’s funny, and then we get to their next Gender Studies class and it’s “actually this is deeply inappropriate and Joyce was motivated by a patriarchal gender standard into believing she could cause no harm” and so we stop laughing at “girls punching dudes” as a baseline for comedy. Dorothy once slapped Walky upside the head when he insulted Joyce, except that was funny because it was in a single panel and Walky had no facial expression, so it’s shaped by context.
So “punching in the face for comedy” stopped being a universally Funny thing for this series, but then it was still funny when it happened to Billie for a while. Ruth would kick the crap out of her, but Billie would be kind of shrill and annoying so there’s at least some give and take where a moody jerk gets thrown into chairs. Then Ruth slams Billie into a wall and kisses her and it’s not funny and sorta retroactively stops, and so Ruth doesn’t hit Billie again.
Meanwhile you’ve got Mary and Mary’s been slapped in the face so hard that it left an imprint of a dick. This is actually funny, except it fell kind of flat because Mary had yet established herself as a character who really deserved it, but then last year we got Dina aggressively hompking Mary when she starts being a jerk and it’s funny even though Dina is engaging in technically what is physical violence and harassment of Mary and I laugh because Mary throws wild cartoon faces. Or there was that time Amazi-Girl held her arm out and Malaya fell down and Marcie thought it was hilarious, and then a few years later it became impossible to laugh whenever she punched people because the cartoon superhero mythology Amazi-Girl had built up evaporated.
Physical slapstick is a valid form of comedy for cartoons and it’s something that gets harder in situations that seem analogous to reality, which is probably why manga gets away with it so often; characters getting smacked there turn into cartoon silly putty before reshaping back to reality. It’s something that has to be shaped by context, where establishing what’s physical slapstick and what’s Actual Violence is important for the reader, but then just because it’s a joke doesn’t always make it a funny one if a story fails to both properly contextualize them as well as run the joke into the ground.
Yeah, the level of violence that can be played for comedy is pretty variable. There’s comedies that can get away with characters getting exploded or shot in the face as a joke, even though both have extreme and often fatal consequences in real life.
Wow, cool! Thanks for the deep dive! Thumbs up.
Not sure why people are trying to argue with you or ignore your real experience with violence—I’m sorry. violent comedy still normalizes or downplays violence in real life. it definitely desensitizes people.
No one has done this.
Thank you, Roe. That’s kind of you to say.
Seriously. Why did Marten put up with Faye punching him? I’ve never struck a woman, but if she punched me, there’d be punching going on.
Because Marten’s defining character trait is he’s a bit of a doormat
Partly I think it was “early strip weirdness”. The tone on DoA hadn’t quite settled yet and the violence in that strip would have fit better in SP!.
That said, it still did some character stuff for both Joyce and Joe and it was called back to more critically many times after. Even at the time, the “girls can’t hurt boys” thing read to me as a character trait of Joyce’s, not authorial truth. It also kept coming up throughout their early relationship, usually obliquely, eventually leading up to the “what was I, before I hurt you” bit.
Honestly my biggest problem with that sequence is that it’s our only look at Joe on a date and Joyce is so awful it makes him look good by comparison.
To be fair, Joe does call her out on it and after her saying that “girls can’t hurt boys” does she come to realise that actually, maybe that’s not right.
It’s actually assault and battery.
And that night, Mike was the Energizer bunny of punching.
It’s bad but nobody was seriously hurt and there don’t seem to be any hard feelings.
OK so Ana Chronistic is sometimes away or off for a day, but she’s been absent three days now. Anybody know if she’s all good?
Last I saw, she was on the news, flying around in some sort of self-made metal warsuit. Probably a little busy with that, I’d imagine.
wow sirksome called the title-text
As someone who’s a fan of classic slapstick, when you bring a real life perspective to comedic violence it does make you think “why is there no consequences” But I mean it’s not like I mind when Nami hits Luffy, or Blooma hits Goku Or slapstick waifu hits bumbling MC #20. I dunno. I guess I can’t defend it but it’s a trope I’m pretty fond of.
Yeah me too.
I mean, complaining about web comics for not being 100% realistic like this is kinda like complaining about Taco Bell not being 100% Authentic Mexican Food, because neither are ever SUPPOSED to be that, you know?
Seeing her cheered up like that is such a happy sight 🥲
(if only I knew where she got that comfy shirt of hers)
Hopefully it’s not exclusive to a Target store in Ohio.
(seriously someone point me to her shirt it’s driving me crazy trying to search for it on Amazon)
It’s probably from Target or Kroger.
If only I knew the specific one Willis went to…
I feel the same way. It gives me hope for her future. Like sure, she has such a long way to go, but maybe she’ll actually go there.
yeah, it’d been a while I ever saw her laughing…
…huh. I never realized it before now, but that was pretty much the only time Joe and Mike interacted, wasn’t it. Just did a tag search, and literally the only other scene they’re both in was when Mike snuck into the Gender Studies class to humiliate Walky.
Is there literally any way to search for two characters at once in the archive, I’ve been trying to figure that shit out for like over a year.
You just put “Ruth+Dina” instead of “Ruth”, for example.
This works for at least three characters’ names.
You can also put “site:dumbingofage.com” at the end of a Google search to find old comments. (Every comment has a permalink too, but you have to rummage through the page source to find it.)
Thank you! That’s really helpful.
ITS BEEN THAT SIMPLE THIS WHOLE TIME????? *Man*….
It’s kinda interesting trying random combinations of two character tags and seeing when or if they interacted with each other, or even if they ever shared the same strips together.
Like how Sal and Joe didn’t have any interactions at all until she started dating Danny.
I had forgotten about that. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/03-men-are-from-beck-women-are-from-clark/three/
Going way back… I had forgotten also (Thanks for the comic link)
See, this is what you should’ve said at the funeral, Walky.
Did Walky know about it?
Doubt it. Not sure it was clear, but I was joking. This would not actually have been a good story to tell plainly. Carefully edited, maybe, but it wasn’t anyone’s good memory of Mike, not even Joyce’s.
Chang:
It’s funny cause he’s dead.
I totally forgot about that incident, and I feel like Joe and Joyce could apologize to the each other. I doubt that will happen unless they start dating, and even then it is only a maybe.
So it’s time again to ask this, do you think Joyce and Joe will get together?
Maybe, if it happens it happens and if doesn’t I know for a fact Joe will be to blame for blowing it again like all the other times.
Joe should apologize for Mike (and Joyce) beating him up? Odd take.
That said, whether they’ve formally apologized for it or not, they’ve clearly gotten past it.
Didn’t Joyce already apologize? During Joe’s cancellation arc (it’s funny to call it that.)
I remember her acknowledging that she hurt him and i feel like she apologized but im on mobile and digging through the archive is a pain
Did an archive hike and from the looks of it, Joyce has never flat out said “sorry I hit you,” but acknowledged that what she had done had “hurt him” which then gave her the Zero-Minus ranking on his Do List when that got leaked.
Yeah, there wasn’t any serious harm done so it might seem/feel funnier now that he’s gone.
Honestly, it’s surreal thinking about time you had with someone, even brief time or someone you don’t like, once they’re gone.
Indeed, it’s not something you ever really get used to. It’s gets brought up more frequently if you spend time with others, like a group of friends, and the loss just hangs in the air.
I mean Joe seems to have just a little more of a memory of him than his roomate.
*imagined conversation I assume is canon*
Dan: I mean, is it SUCH a bad thing I said I hoped he stayed in a coma forever and then he died soon after?
Joe: Yes. Dude. What the fuck?
How I would feel about if I was in his shoes is kind of like how I felt with the last president a little more than a year ago.
“I’m not wishing for him to die but if he does croak I’m just not going to feel anything for his ass, I will sing him no eulogy.” That would have been better than wishing him to be permanently left as a Is comatose vegetable or death because he got with my crush at the time.
This did not happen.
Yes, because Mike faked his death. It’ll be the ultimate prank.
Because Danny didn’t actually say he wanted mike in a coma forever, just a while longer
yeh
More specifically, he said it completely foot-in-mouth and then apologized in the following strip’s first panel, whereupon an actual argument started about Mike getting immediately forgiven.
I dunno why these specific character reads keep propagating despite being at best a woeful misread of what actually happens in the comic, but I blame TV Tropes.
It bothers me too. Danny wanted a break from a toxic person. He knew this was selfish and inappropriate, and looked mortified when he blurted it out by accident. But it was such a big moment that I think it sticks in the mind of many readers, especially since Mike eventually died.
Yeah, it was a crappy thing to say at all and even more so right then and there, but damn do people seem to remember it as far worse than that. It was bad enough, leave it there.
I don’t actually think it was selfish though. Yeah, he’d been thinking about his crush on Ethan, but if you look back to Danny’s last talk with Mike (at Dina and Sarah’s birthday party) he’s pretty clearly focused on how bad Mike’s been to Ethan, not on anything Mike’s done to Danny. I read him as thinking (and then blurting out) that Ethan will be better off with Mike not around for awhile.
I suspect Amber’s laughing because she’s reminded of the fact that she’s mourning a guy who objectively was an asshole, which is just a hilarious waste of her time and energy. Joe will probably also find that funny if she explains it.
Ethan won’t.
It isn’t a waste of time or energy, though.
She’s processing what she is feeling, and furthermore, she probably blames herself for his death.
Amber’s laughing because Joe can’t hear what ghost Mike is saying.
“Yeah, I pounded him like 60 times, but not as hard as I pounded his mom. For a nickel.”
What did happen to Joe’s mom, anyway?
I feel like if you think that Mike’s relationship to Amber was purely that of a asshole, you’ve missed a lot of what she and he were about.
The last realization Mike had, the one that motivated him into tackling Blaine off a balcony, is the realization that what he saw as sincerely helping was actually him being the second most emotionally destructive person in Amber’s life.
Mike was a shithead edgelord who thought he had life figured out so well that he could dispense misery to make the people he cared about grow, and now he’s permanently lost the chance to ever start undoing the damage he caused.
Joe is best Bro.
I like the detail of the little puffs of their breath.
I like that too. Willis had been doing really good work on visual details like this in recent years.
Got a tasty joke?
Still laughing. Not sorry.
Laughing turns into cry-laughing and an emotional breakdown in 3-2-1-…
Yeah, it was almost definitely more than 60 times. Probably not 70, though. 70 would just be excessive. But if it were just below 70…
Like sixty-eight plus one?
That sounds like a nice estimate.
Mike can punch faster than Star Platinum, so it was probably a bit more than that.
Awww, it’s so him.
Look, I’m just glad she can smile and laugh about something at this point.
Hey, just wanted to pop in and compliment your Ruth-as-Joker.
(It took me longer to figure that out than maybe it should have, which is extra embarrassing since I saw the original before the internet.)
We like our palette-swaps ’round these parts. If I ever got around to messing with that fan-game idea I had, Ruth would probably be the one with the most costumes.
its only just occurring to me that they actually do have similar neuroses. Amber thinks she’s an inch away from punching anyone and everyone, and Joe thinks he is like. radioactive or something. and will hurt people just by dint of getting close to them.
i’m pretty sure ive seen exactly this in the comments before. probably several times. but its the first time that neurons link has actually connected in my own brain
she looks half about to tears up
That’s actually a good thing.
This is how grief is processed in the brain. You can’t be constantly dwelling on the bad memories or how it’s your fault or longing for the dead person to be back again. You need to remember the departed in a good way, a way that makes you smile and laugh and be grateful for the memories they have left you. There will no doubt still be times of sadness or regret, but they won’t be overwhelming.
I didn’t expect this to become fun. Amber is laughing and seems really amused to have discovered something she didn’t know about her dead friend. Good job Joe! He’s really a great brother.
Dunno why but to me it feels like next strip Amber will cry, like this laughing was the drop to break her dam that kept all her feelings closed off. Crying might also help her, just like laughing does.
If this is the case then Joe will have already helped her more then every other character in the comic combined
Yay for Joe!
Dang, this is probably the first genuine emotion she’s felt in a while.
“It wasn’t so funny when it happened, but it’s a great story.”
“I am obligated to laugh once for each time my dead friend punched you in the face. Let me just discharge that obligation, right now.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHHAHA
Eagerly anticipating the moment where Danny and Sal have it out and Joe’s just “you should talk about your feelings and expectations with each other.”
And then every single blood cell on Danny’s face explodes at once, killing him instantly.
On his face? What, was Danny a messily-eating vampire?
God damn it.
That happens to me so often lately. Stupid stubby fingers.
I honestly keep forgetting Joyce and Joe did go on a date once.
I don’t forget. It’s a happy memory for me, too. XD
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/03-men-are-from-beck-women-are-from-clark/bliss/
Other than to drive home the comedy, why didn’t Joe just punch Mike back after the first hit?
Look how big that mutha is!
Looking back on the “Joe gets punched by Mike” arc, I somehow forgot that Joyce calls Lindsay Lohan a slut
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/03-men-are-from-beck-women-are-from-clark/pizza-2/
I thought that would be a no-no word for her, since she can’t (couldn’t)say sex. Could she say whore back then?
Well shit, I didn’t know he died. I thought he was just in a soap opra coma to return in a very special episode when the ratings dropped