Sees like a dangerous sport – not least because it gives an excuse to put Derby Pie out into the world year round and not just on Derby Day. Who puts nuts in pie, anyway? Kentuckians are weird.
Eh, it’s likely more difficult for homosexual students, tho’. The potential dating pool is smaller, and since many gay kids realize their orientation when they fall for someone of the same sex, that means that a lot of them are already off the market. And of course, given that this is freakin’ Indiana, there’s still a non-zero chance of a genuinely hostile reaction if you try fishing without making sure the person is going to be interested in your bait.
Sal: “That’s my point. Danny and I’ve been on way more than three dates. We’re just doing what we feel is right without limiting ourselves to some arbitrary clock. We can fuck if we want or not fuck if we want – we’re free to do whatever.”
**NOTE: I am not even attempting to do Sal’s accent**
Yes, exactly. Sal and Danny are taking things at their natural pace. There aren’t arbitrary milestones or rules. Sal was crude, sure, but her advice to Lucy was sound and healthy.
Does Malaya have ANY redeeming qualities? I’ve never seen Malaya be even a basically decent person. Mike was an asshole, but he was their asshole you know? Every single time I’ve seen Malaya he’s (?) looking down on others and talking shit about them.
She’s honest or at least has no filter what so ever. She’s great self-confidence though largely in areas where it is misplaced. She has been helpful before, I think, though only by sheer accident.
She has a lizard, that’s pretty cool.
Also, Marcie seemed to like her, though I don’t recall why.
Shortpacked!-universe Malaya mainly defined herself by hating everything around her. Personally I don’t find this endearing or honest or anything — in a real-life person, I wouldn’t even call it a personality. Willis has a real soft spot for jerks, though!
Only time its worked is when she’s being a jerk to Mary and that doesn’t haven’t nearly enough to balance out all the time she’s judgmental and condensending to non a-holes.
i mean i assume she got along with marcie well enough on their one on one hangouts/group stuff if she was able to develop a crush on her, unless marcie is some masochist that has like ‘step on me’ energy
personally i like malaya because theyre funny! i don’t need a character to be a “good person,” necessarily, just to bring something fun to whatever scene they’re in.
Mike was WAY worse than Malaya ever was. In fact, that’s the entire point of Malaya, and Carla, and to an extent Becky, and probably more characters that I’m forgetting: men get to be curmudgeonly jerks or snarky assholes or what have you in fiction and be considered lovable scamps for it, but any other gender doing the same is liable to get panned by the audience.
Except Becky and Carla both have considerably stronger fan-bases than Malaya. Not saying you’re wrong about Mike getting the white guy pass–hell, even he acknowledged it. But I am saying that including Malaya in with those other characters ignores the lack of an upside to her personality.
I enjoy Mary as a character, even as I root for her comeuppance–arguably, BECAUSE of her periodic comeuppances. But for me, Malaya’s sole redeeming quality is Fuckface. If Malaya suddenly joined Lyman in Jon’s basement, but Fuckface stuck around and just was hanging in the background periodically, I’d enjoy the strip more overall.
I think part of the problem is Malayas holier-than-thou attitude, one of the reasons I found her interactions with Mary entertaining aside from Mary comeuppance is she just trolled Mary because she and Carla decided to, Malaya wasn’t trying to dress her actions up as being rightoues. No ‘your so fake I just have to call you out’ bs.
I don’t think the fact Carla’s mission to find a way to irritate everyone she comes in contact with includes doing it with a smile on her face really qualifies as more of an “upside” than Malaya’s approach.
Oh, wait, I guess she occasionally uses her parents’ ridiculous wealth to influence things. That’s certainly useful, but again, not sure it counts as a personality “upside.”
The smiling isn’t really the upside to Carla. It’s that we regularly see her help people out, while pretending she’s a jerk who would never do anything nice for someone else.
Patching up Amber’s head wound. Joyce’s jug shoes. The whole thing with cookies and checking on Ruth.
She’s obnoxious and if people don’t like her for that reason, that’s cool. It’s what she’s aiming at. But don’t miss what lies underneath that cover.
Malaya is abrasive, and she could stand to be kinder to people. She’s far from my favorite character.
Redeeming qualities:
• They genuinely loves their pet iguana, and will let others handle him.
• They are mean to Sal, and unfair to her, but they are often also spot on, and that can be entertaining for the audience, and also helps with Sal’s growth.
• I don’t know why they are so mean to Lucy, but they are not usually mean to Joyce. They’re mostly only mean to Sal and Lucy.
• They did learn ASL for Marcie’s sake.
• They genuinely enjoy roller-derby.
• They’ve never been a bigot, like Mary, or physically abusive, like Ruth. They don’t scheme against others like Mike did. Mike literally had long cons going to break people up or humiliate them.
In fact if we look at it Malaya comes of worse than she is because she’s not as prominently featured as others in the cast. We mostly see her from other characters’ perspective, usually Sal, and they can’t stand each other.
Ironically, we know quite early on why Malaya doesn’t get along with Sal, and we can guess why she doesn’t get along with Lucy: she doesn’t like fakey people. Okay, Malaya can be fakey sometimes too, but that’s besides the point. Sal could probably get Malaya on her side if she had a sincere talk with her about her insecurities. Lucy could probably earn Malaya’s respect if she got mad or acknowledged Malaya’s behavior hurt her. So far, Sal’s reactions to Malaya’s prodding just confirms to them that Sal is just acting cool and is just annoyed Malaya sees through her facade. Lucy, on the other hand, is such a people pleaser, she’s unfailingly kind and smiling no matter what Malaya says, and they would interpret that behavior as fakey.
Of course, neither Sal nor Lucy owe Malaya anything. She ought to offer them some grace. Nobody is “fakey” for the love of the game. We’re all just trying yo figure ourselves out, especially in college.
I think their meanness to Sal is more a confrontational style of being social. Turn the dial down, definitely, but it reminds me of bros insulting each other. I think that part of their personality is male coded, as the kids say, which might be why some people might give Mike a pass for being much much worse, and a character they perceive as female doesn’t.
Another redeeming quality:
They are ready to throw down against an aggressor. Of the entire cast, I think they’re the most likely to punch a nazi. Others might work themselves up to it, or wait until night to put on a jumpsuit to track them until they broke a literal law. If Malaya sees some dapper Nazi talking to a tv camera, dressing up their genocide talk in veiled slogan, they cross the street just to sock them in the jaw on camera.
decent person? nah, being convinced you’re the only authentic motherfucker out there is pretty self-centred and being a dick about it is definitely bad
decent character? sure, the antics are very entertaining
I like Malaya’s iguana. Malaya, not so much. I might start to like Malaya, or at least fine her less annoying, if she didn’t assume Sal is being fake for no reason whatsoever.
To be fair Sal never said anything about whether or not she wanted to fuck, just that Lucy shouldn’t be pestering people for double dates if all she really wants is sex.
This. Though it seems like now that the idea has been spoken aloud, she has to admit that she does indeed wanna fuck, and why’d Lucy have to go & open that can of worms? (Or should that be worm?)
I do think that Lucy viewing sex as this rigid thing with rules that have to be followed to the letter (and I’m not talking about, like, basic consent stuff) is a good sign she’s not yet mature enough to be having it. I don’t expect her and Walky’s first time to go well.
It’s one thing to have these rigid rules you hold yourself to, that’s perfectly fine – you made some kind of judgement and came to a decision, presumably while your head was cool and able to think clearly, and now you stick to it even though you have lust burning throughout your body and mind.
Not entirely unlike how we “train” for various emergencies, like the safety demonstration you get anytime you set foot on a commercial airliner. You try to “pre-decide” as much as possible, so come the chaos of an actual emergency, you just go by the pre-determined script, rather than trying to figure it out as you go while your hair is, perhaps literally, on fire.
The thing about Lucy that annoys me is that she’s clearly made a bunch of rules for herself, but now that the rubber hits the gravel, rather than sticking to it, she’s trying to find loopholes and pathetically coming up with these elaborate lies, really only told to herself, to dodge or bypass them.
I really don’t think we as humans should be judging when someone is “mature enough for sex”, literally the problem both with lucy and assuming a required maturity level for sex, is ovengineering and idealising the notion of sex. There were 14 year olds in my 8th grade class doing it already, I’ve met people in their 40s that had still never done it and believed there were weird customs one needed to adhere to in order to engage in it, in fact it is the having sex that, in my experience, helps to dispel weird notions about prerequisites for having sex.
the only mature prerequisites required are using adequate protection and observing clear and enthusiastic consent between participants.
lol interesting to see ‘puritans’ in this context because ‘third date’ would be way too soon for me even at that age lol. Unless we were literally friends for years and did lots of platonic one on one hangouts beforehand but i’m more demi leaning i suppose
Well, “puritan” and words roughly to that effect gets thrown around a lot.
The rules for sex I’ve made for myself is to
a) Never be intoxicated for my “first time” (or even first couple of times) with someone.
b) To never let any one or any circumstance cheapen what sex means to me, to keep it something “special” I only share with someone I truly care about and for. (I’d have said “truly love”, but people can get really weird about the l-word – see the subplot of the lunch Lucy & Walky had with Lucy’s brother – and when/how/what it means to say it.)
c) To try to be honest with myself about if I, and my partner, are really ready, and roughly in agreement about what it means/don’t mean to have it.
d) To never go ahead if I think there’s any reason to believe it’s something I or the other person could come to regret. And here I mean things like ex-sex, or if someone is in a vulnerable state and our relationship isn’t already at a place where sex is regular part.
e) Sex is only “available” from me as part of a committed monogamous romantic relationship. If you have an issue with living up to any part of that, be it the commitment, the monogamy, the romance, or the relationship, then sex is, for now, off the table. And I apply the same standard to myself.
I mean, Sal has a good point: putting an arbitrary number-of-dates on a sexual relationship makes a good bit of it artificial, as you either try to minutely define what a date is in order to reach your arbitrary number or try to render things not dates so they don’t have to count because you’re not ready.
Sal and Danny haven’t had sex not because Sal is waiting to clear some imaginary bar like ‘three dates’ but because one or both of them – I suspect Sal – isn’t actually ready yet. Danny seems to be Sal’s first real romantic/intimate relationship, where previous relationships have been more sexual and/or shallow. Like Joe, almost: she’s had partners, not relationships. This is new, it’s important to her, she’s moving slowly as a result.
And that’s WAY different from Lucy trying to clear some arbitrary ‘now I’m not a slut’ bar, but I don’t think Sal can articulate that, or if she can she’s not likely be willing to be that kind of vulnerable in front of Lucy and Malaya.
Ehhh everything people do is artificial. Words are artificial, clothes are artificial. “Dates” are a constructed pageantry. I say, let people assign meanings, values and milestones in their lives however they want, it becomes a problem when they turn it into casting judgement on *others* for how *they* value things.
Lucy decided to arbitrate 3 “dates” because it means something to her. As far as I can tell, all it did was increase the tension/anticipation factor.
Words and clothing are artificial, yes, because artificial means “human made”. What anonymsly said was that it was arbitrary, which means something different.
They mentioned both artificiality and arbitration (as did I 😉 ), but sure we can apply similar principles. Much of human culture and interaction comes down to some sort of arbitration. That could include deciding when and under what conditions you wish to start having sex with someone. I don’t deny for second that “3 dates” is an arbitration, I’m just saying there’s nothing wrong with assigning personal meaning to it.
She’s not assigning personal meaning to it, though, she’s assigning someone else’s personal meaning to it.
If she’d decided that three dates was her personal metric for whether she’s interested enough in the guy for sex, that would be wholly different -at least to my mind – than what she is doing, which is assigning a rigid timeline to an organic personal thing (artificial, in the sense of not her natural inclination or actual desire) according to social rules handed down from who knows where for who knows why (arbitrary, in the sense of ‘because someone said so, no other reason’).
More detail on Sal’s tattoo, a C note, assuming treble cleff. The lines under the staff seem to go all the way around, not just under the spider. I think they look kind of like roots maybe.
I’m seeing an F, too. Interestingly, the stems are inverted, which could imply that they’re meant to be part of two different voices/melodies, potentially symbolizing a harmonious bond with another person, or her own internal complexity – or it could just be that the artist doesn’t know that particular convention of music notation.
This is a bit painful to read, Lucy really wants more female friends but her over eagernes to leap to best friend sharing status in one bound just leads to resentment.
joyce would make a decent friend tbh but given her disdain of walky, maybe not in this particular case. she seems to get along decently enough with becky but i don’t think she cares about ‘straight ppl sex’ lol
I think Joyce has softened on Walky, like I wanna say the last time they interacted much, Walky converted her on ditching her pants and relaxing a bit, so maybe there’s a detente. I feel like the bigger issue would be Lucy’s faith than anything else.
When we saw Lucy and Becky talking it sounded to me like trying to re-convert Joyce. I think religion stands to be a major sticking point between them if that ever came out (and as much as both of them want things to work between them, I think would be a permanent fracture between Joyce and Becky too.)
I may have taken it too literally though? I don’t recall the exact phrasing of it.
I mean, Becky is dating Dina, who’s also an atheist. And she’s best friends with Dorothy, who is atheist.
But the difference there was that Dina wasn’t super judgy about it because although Becky has faith, she doesn’t let it undermine her scientific curiosity or ability to understand logical arguments. Joyce was going through her “religion is for idiots” phase of atheist awakening, so she had a hard time with Becky.
Joyce is friends with Walky. Joyce was friends with Walky before she was friends with Dorothy. She just had conflicting feelings about them dating. She was jealous of, at a bare minimum, the time Dorothy spent with Walky. And she had opinions about what Dorothy did with her sex life. Walky is still her friend though.
Snrrk. Sal is such a fucking dork sometimes, and I love it.
I wouldn’t actually be surprised if Danny is her first actual boyfriend, like the whole boyfriend experience. She’s obviously had sex before, we’ve seen that, and she’s maybe gone on dates prior to him, but it wasn’t quite like this, and this intimacy is a whole-new experience. Sal and Joe kind of have a lot in common in that regard.
I love how unshakable Lucy is, too, like that last panel, she is endeared and the deflection bounces right off of her like a forcefield.
I do think this could be a lot of fun, roller derby is something I’d been wanting to see more of.
Additionally, goddamn, is Sal reminding me of Walky here. You can really see their relation when they’re frazzled. Both lose their cool in somewhat comparable ways. Makes me wonder a bit which parent they take after in that regard.
I have no doubt that Danny is her first boyfriend.
And we’ve seen Linda lose her cool, but I don’t think we’ve seen Charles lose his cool. So I suspect they both get it from Linda. But Walky probably gets a lot of his passive aggressive deflection skills from Charles.
They weren’t. Sal was thirteen when they robbed the stores and then she got sent to juvie afterwards. And Sal said ‘they both grew up to be pure sex’, which suggests they never really got together/found each other attractive before.
Like maaaaybe they did like, grade school dating, but I don’t think that really counts.
I think I remember Sal explicitly telling Danny that she’s never been someone’s girlfriend before (too tired to find the exact comic – it’s in the scene where Danny tells his parents about her over the phone.)
That strip had both danny and joe in it (or rather, the first one did). You can click on the “sal” tag under the comic, then manually edit it to include more character tags with “+” signs, to bring up comics where all of those characters appear together, so like this:
I’m pretty sure the secret of writing is that *every* character is an author avatar!
…maybe with the exception of characters like Toedad and Blaine. Those are 50% the worst people on TV, 25% parental trauma, and only 25% bits of an author they don’t like about themself.
Literally just fuck if you feel like fucking. Everyone makes it so goddamn complicated, with all their stupid little rules and contingencies and paranoid circular thinking. As long as it’s fine with everyone involved and nobody’s getting hurt, why’s it gotta be such a big deal?
I guess it matters what the rules are for. If you made them up yourself because it describes the situations where you wanna doink, or at least crosses off some neuroses for you, rules are fine.
if they stipulate when you are allowed to doink, or obligate you to doink whether or not you wanna, then we definitely have a problem.
Mostly because sex – for better or for worse – is actually extremely complicated and varied, in many physical, social, and/or cultural ways, so it change or even hurt people’s feelings to an absolutely incredible degree, so I think it actually would kinda make sense to have lots of little rules and etiquette and contingencies, if only to make sure there’s no accidental miscommunications or bad vibes for anyone involved!
…I mean, obviously I’m not saying that all of the weird-ass rules and ideas people have built up around sex are good, I’m just saying it’s actually a surprisingly complex issue so just doing away with all the rules & stuff is probably not a good idea for everybody.
Side note: I’ll admit that I’m coming at this from an entirely asexual perspective, so if people want to discount me here I guess that’s fair, but honestly I think it just puts me in an even better position to judge how wild and varied peoples’ feelings are about sex.
@Mturtle7 Totally insightful. (Though I’m demi-, so maybe I’m also coming from a similar perspective.) Communication and consent and understanding what those mean are so important. Even if it’s not dumb arbitrary rules like 3 dates or whatever.
I was talking more about the really stupid ones, like “If you leave it in and your friend jumps on the bed, it doesn’t count” or “Only after the third date, once you’ve confirmed they’ve got the same star sign as you, and they have to wear a red-and-white striped top hat over their eyes so they can’t see you during”.
Like, I understand the baseline value of simple rules like “Make sure I actually told you that you could fuck me before you start fucking me”, those make sense and I’m not confused about them. It’s the deeply ingrained and weirdly specific ones that creep me out.
Agreed. The only requirements for having sex is that both partners are informed, consenting (I would also say of age, but let’s face it, teenage sex has always been a thing and WILL always be a thing) and that neither partner are comfortable and are not pressured to continue. Consent can always be revoked at any time if the situation stops being comfortable, and both partners need to respect that.
Y’know what, what am I saying? Of course we can’t assume that, because I’ve personally had several Gen-X women (usually mom’s friends) say the wildest shit with me in earshot. Shit like “Oh, consent’s not that big a deal. Me and [husband] fuck every night for the last 10 years, even when I’d rather not” (not a direct quote), where you have to wonder if a person can even be retrieved from that scenario, after that long.
Hey what if we did literally anything to fix the broken sex culture in this country?
As I think you imply in the other post, “willing” goes along with “consenting, but “wants to” doesn’t necessarily. You can be willing to do something, even if you don’t really want to. For many reasons, not all of them bad.
But if Lucy wants the relationship to feel more serious before she is ready, that’s also fine. Granted the strict adherence to “dates” is a bit artificial but that aspect is probably played up for humor.
But that’s pretty clearly not what’s going on with Lucy. Lucy wants to have sex now, but feels the need to put up the “I’m a Christian woman” reluctance and delay for the requisite 3 dates. Now she’s trying to speedrun those dates so they can get it on while still following the rule she made up.
Roller derby at midnight? Is that a common thing? If so, it probably evolved that way because of availability of the skating rink. Aren’t those hours impractical for college students? Okay, I guess not, except for people like Dorothy or Hermione.
I don’t think it’s her positivity itself that gets on people’s nerves but her brand of being helpful can come across as putting herself in a position of authority in situations where she has less experience then the person she’s trying to help and as demonstrated with Sal that can be grating.
I don’t know if I’d call it smugness, but she doesn’t seem to have a middle gear between insecure and overconfident. https://www.dumbingofage.com/leader/
What Lucy says today in panel 5 sounds like what someone would say in jest, to either rib Sal or self-deprecate. But she’s saying it in earnest, which is weird, because what Sal was trying to say with “if you want to fuck, then fuck” was “leave me out of your sex calculations”, not “who I have sex with is your business”.
And over-familiar. Yesterday she just brought up Malaya’s underwear and today, when Sal met her halfway on the double-date suggestion, she decided to inform Sal she was part of her formula to fuck her brother.
YES definitely overfamiliar. Tell Malaya she looks great, don’t mention her undergarments. Don’t ask people about their sex lives unless you know you’re that kind of friends.
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The enemy of my enemy is still a hipster
This strip was hilarious.
“The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy, no more, no less.”
-Maxim 29
Dumbing of Age Book 13: Goddammit, Malaya
That’s every book though.
#GDM
Pretty sure that title has already been used
🤣🤣🤣 👏👏
Roller Derby?!?!? HELL YEAH!!!! 🤩🤩🤩
Sees like a dangerous sport – not least because it gives an excuse to put Derby Pie out into the world year round and not just on Derby Day. Who puts nuts in pie, anyway? Kentuckians are weird.
Hi NG,
Today I passed a field of mustard flowers. I remembered how you told me to go lie down in one, and I smiled. 🙂
Awe how sweet! 😊
Or should I say, spicy and savory? 😆
Like a big warm, tingly, sunny yellow blanket! ☺️
Simply salubrious!
alternatively:
Dumbing of Age Book 13: If You Wanna Fuck, Just Fuckin’ Fuck
this comment brought to you by Daisy, who really wants to fuckin’ fuck
lol i feel sorry for daisy if she’s frustrated but at that point it can’t be that hard to find a one night stand
*gestures at arc that happened on-screen*
Eh, it’s likely more difficult for homosexual students, tho’. The potential dating pool is smaller, and since many gay kids realize their orientation when they fall for someone of the same sex, that means that a lot of them are already off the market. And of course, given that this is freakin’ Indiana, there’s still a non-zero chance of a genuinely hostile reaction if you try fishing without making sure the person is going to be interested in your bait.
Except that there are dating apps specifically for those kind of connections. If Daisy was real and not a gag she’d have no trouble.
At least that only happens in Indiana.
Someone introduce Daisy to Alice, we know she’s only allowed to get wins if it makes Jennifer look bad
Consider: “Dumbing of Age PONOGRAPHIQUE Vol1: If You Wanna Fuck, Just Fuckin’ Fuck”
Sal: “That’s my point. Danny and I’ve been on way more than three dates. We’re just doing what we feel is right without limiting ourselves to some arbitrary clock. We can fuck if we want or not fuck if we want – we’re free to do whatever.”
**NOTE: I am not even attempting to do Sal’s accent**
These days she just sounds like Benoit Blanc to me
Sign me the hell up for Sal the famous private eye who chews up and spits out rich entitled A-holes.
I’ll watch that.
Sallock Holmes and her companion, Dr. (of IT) Danny Wilcoxson.
Or: Sal: I’m not discussing the details of my love life with you. You little twerp.
Yes, exactly. Sal and Danny are taking things at their natural pace. There aren’t arbitrary milestones or rules. Sal was crude, sure, but her advice to Lucy was sound and healthy.
See discussion of why Joyce and Joe are not sprinting to find a deserted room….
Yeah, I’m not sure how Lucy got her conclusion from what Sal said. It’s almost the exact opposite.
Does Malaya have ANY redeeming qualities? I’ve never seen Malaya be even a basically decent person. Mike was an asshole, but he was their asshole you know? Every single time I’ve seen Malaya he’s (?) looking down on others and talking shit about them.
She hates fakey poseurs like Sal.
Ugh.
So fake.
She’s honest or at least has no filter what so ever. She’s great self-confidence though largely in areas where it is misplaced. She has been helpful before, I think, though only by sheer accident.
She has a lizard, that’s pretty cool.
Also, Marcie seemed to like her, though I don’t recall why.
Heavily implied Marcie likes Malaya because of the similarities with Sal, her first crush.
Malaya is not honest.
e.g. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/05-as-long-as-its-free/steal/
An overly-honest person will sometimes come off as an asshole because of it. But sometimes an asshole is just an asshole.
Shortpacked!-universe Malaya mainly defined herself by hating everything around her. Personally I don’t find this endearing or honest or anything — in a real-life person, I wouldn’t even call it a personality. Willis has a real soft spot for jerks, though!
Glass Onion: “It’s a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth.”
Good point.
“So round, so firm, so fully packed.” That may be why.
Malaya’s pronouns are she/they/whatever.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/01-this-bright-millennium/pronouns/
Not sure that’s a ‘redeeming’ quality for her. It’s a neutral fact of their preferences, which says nothing about whatever as a person.
It’s a response to MisterJinKC using “he(?)” to refer to Malaya
Only time its worked is when she’s being a jerk to Mary and that doesn’t haven’t nearly enough to balance out all the time she’s judgmental and condensending to non a-holes.
i mean i assume she got along with marcie well enough on their one on one hangouts/group stuff if she was able to develop a crush on her, unless marcie is some masochist that has like ‘step on me’ energy
personally i like malaya because theyre funny! i don’t need a character to be a “good person,” necessarily, just to bring something fun to whatever scene they’re in.
YEAH! 😀 I love Malaya!
Mike was WAY worse than Malaya ever was. In fact, that’s the entire point of Malaya, and Carla, and to an extent Becky, and probably more characters that I’m forgetting: men get to be curmudgeonly jerks or snarky assholes or what have you in fiction and be considered lovable scamps for it, but any other gender doing the same is liable to get panned by the audience.
Except Becky and Carla both have considerably stronger fan-bases than Malaya. Not saying you’re wrong about Mike getting the white guy pass–hell, even he acknowledged it. But I am saying that including Malaya in with those other characters ignores the lack of an upside to her personality.
I enjoy Mary as a character, even as I root for her comeuppance–arguably, BECAUSE of her periodic comeuppances. But for me, Malaya’s sole redeeming quality is Fuckface. If Malaya suddenly joined Lyman in Jon’s basement, but Fuckface stuck around and just was hanging in the background periodically, I’d enjoy the strip more overall.
Becky and Carla are also white, and there’s an Extra Leeway afforded to people/characters for reasons other than gender.
I think part of the problem is Malayas holier-than-thou attitude, one of the reasons I found her interactions with Mary entertaining aside from Mary comeuppance is she just trolled Mary because she and Carla decided to, Malaya wasn’t trying to dress her actions up as being rightoues. No ‘your so fake I just have to call you out’ bs.
Carla’s near-entire shtick is telling everyone how much better she is than them.
I don’t think the fact Carla’s mission to find a way to irritate everyone she comes in contact with includes doing it with a smile on her face really qualifies as more of an “upside” than Malaya’s approach.
Oh, wait, I guess she occasionally uses her parents’ ridiculous wealth to influence things. That’s certainly useful, but again, not sure it counts as a personality “upside.”
The smiling isn’t really the upside to Carla. It’s that we regularly see her help people out, while pretending she’s a jerk who would never do anything nice for someone else.
Patching up Amber’s head wound. Joyce’s jug shoes. The whole thing with cookies and checking on Ruth.
She’s obnoxious and if people don’t like her for that reason, that’s cool. It’s what she’s aiming at. But don’t miss what lies underneath that cover.
Has iguana.
Taught herself ASL so she could talk to Marcie.
Malaya is abrasive, and she could stand to be kinder to people. She’s far from my favorite character.
Redeeming qualities:
• They genuinely loves their pet iguana, and will let others handle him.
• They are mean to Sal, and unfair to her, but they are often also spot on, and that can be entertaining for the audience, and also helps with Sal’s growth.
• I don’t know why they are so mean to Lucy, but they are not usually mean to Joyce. They’re mostly only mean to Sal and Lucy.
• They did learn ASL for Marcie’s sake.
• They genuinely enjoy roller-derby.
• They’ve never been a bigot, like Mary, or physically abusive, like Ruth. They don’t scheme against others like Mike did. Mike literally had long cons going to break people up or humiliate them.
In fact if we look at it Malaya comes of worse than she is because she’s not as prominently featured as others in the cast. We mostly see her from other characters’ perspective, usually Sal, and they can’t stand each other.
Ironically, we know quite early on why Malaya doesn’t get along with Sal, and we can guess why she doesn’t get along with Lucy: she doesn’t like fakey people. Okay, Malaya can be fakey sometimes too, but that’s besides the point. Sal could probably get Malaya on her side if she had a sincere talk with her about her insecurities. Lucy could probably earn Malaya’s respect if she got mad or acknowledged Malaya’s behavior hurt her. So far, Sal’s reactions to Malaya’s prodding just confirms to them that Sal is just acting cool and is just annoyed Malaya sees through her facade. Lucy, on the other hand, is such a people pleaser, she’s unfailingly kind and smiling no matter what Malaya says, and they would interpret that behavior as fakey.
Of course, neither Sal nor Lucy owe Malaya anything. She ought to offer them some grace. Nobody is “fakey” for the love of the game. We’re all just trying yo figure ourselves out, especially in college.
I think their meanness to Sal is more a confrontational style of being social. Turn the dial down, definitely, but it reminds me of bros insulting each other. I think that part of their personality is male coded, as the kids say, which might be why some people might give Mike a pass for being much much worse, and a character they perceive as female doesn’t.
Another redeeming quality:
They are ready to throw down against an aggressor. Of the entire cast, I think they’re the most likely to punch a nazi. Others might work themselves up to it, or wait until night to put on a jumpsuit to track them until they broke a literal law. If Malaya sees some dapper Nazi talking to a tv camera, dressing up their genocide talk in veiled slogan, they cross the street just to sock them in the jaw on camera.
And a non-hypothetical situation, when half the main cast was abducted, Malaya came with Sal at the prospect of getting to fight assholes.
decent person? nah, being convinced you’re the only authentic motherfucker out there is pretty self-centred and being a dick about it is definitely bad
decent character? sure, the antics are very entertaining
I like Malaya’s iguana. Malaya, not so much. I might start to like Malaya, or at least fine her less annoying, if she didn’t assume Sal is being fake for no reason whatsoever.
How do any of you like Mike… I can’t understand it. I’ve never seen Shortpacked or Roomies, is that why?
Sounds like Danny is gonna get a surprise this evening.
that being the next slipshine, or some kinda two stories/couples split between the next one would be interesting
That would make me get a shipshine subcription.
At last, an opposing force to unite them all.
One jerk to rule them all, One jerk to find them…
Sal: If you wanna fuck just fuck.
Lucy: So does that mean you and Danny…
Sal: Ah never said anything about taking my own advice.
To be fair Sal never said anything about whether or not she wanted to fuck, just that Lucy shouldn’t be pestering people for double dates if all she really wants is sex.
This. Though it seems like now that the idea has been spoken aloud, she has to admit that she does indeed wanna fuck, and why’d Lucy have to go & open that can of worms? (Or should that be worm?)
Nope, too late, you are friends now.
So the arc is gonna end with whatever drama happens at the roller derby.
Got it.
Gotta make sure Amber’s present, after all.
and you were doing so well, Sal.
I do think that Lucy viewing sex as this rigid thing with rules that have to be followed to the letter (and I’m not talking about, like, basic consent stuff) is a good sign she’s not yet mature enough to be having it. I don’t expect her and Walky’s first time to go well.
It’s one thing to have these rigid rules you hold yourself to, that’s perfectly fine – you made some kind of judgement and came to a decision, presumably while your head was cool and able to think clearly, and now you stick to it even though you have lust burning throughout your body and mind.
Not entirely unlike how we “train” for various emergencies, like the safety demonstration you get anytime you set foot on a commercial airliner. You try to “pre-decide” as much as possible, so come the chaos of an actual emergency, you just go by the pre-determined script, rather than trying to figure it out as you go while your hair is, perhaps literally, on fire.
The thing about Lucy that annoys me is that she’s clearly made a bunch of rules for herself, but now that the rubber hits the gravel, rather than sticking to it, she’s trying to find loopholes and pathetically coming up with these elaborate lies, really only told to herself, to dodge or bypass them.
I really don’t think we as humans should be judging when someone is “mature enough for sex”, literally the problem both with lucy and assuming a required maturity level for sex, is ovengineering and idealising the notion of sex. There were 14 year olds in my 8th grade class doing it already, I’ve met people in their 40s that had still never done it and believed there were weird customs one needed to adhere to in order to engage in it, in fact it is the having sex that, in my experience, helps to dispel weird notions about prerequisites for having sex.
the only mature prerequisites required are using adequate protection and observing clear and enthusiastic consent between participants.
lol interesting to see ‘puritans’ in this context because ‘third date’ would be way too soon for me even at that age lol. Unless we were literally friends for years and did lots of platonic one on one hangouts beforehand but i’m more demi leaning i suppose
My college boyfriend and I waited a YEAR, and that was a good choice for us. I’m glad when everyone gets to go at their own pace.
Interesting historical trivia: way back in the day, when Puritans ruled Massachusetts, 60% of Puritan women were pregnant when they got married.
That would be surprising. Source?
Long forgotten. Some volume of history or sociology.
Also, not so surprising. Teenagers gonna fuck. Especially ones with little or no sex education.
Here’s an audio discussion that goes into Puritan sexuality in some depth:
https://digpodcast.org/2017/09/10/puritans-sex/
Interesting. Thanks!
Well, “puritan” and words roughly to that effect gets thrown around a lot.
The rules for sex I’ve made for myself is to
a) Never be intoxicated for my “first time” (or even first couple of times) with someone.
b) To never let any one or any circumstance cheapen what sex means to me, to keep it something “special” I only share with someone I truly care about and for. (I’d have said “truly love”, but people can get really weird about the l-word – see the subplot of the lunch Lucy & Walky had with Lucy’s brother – and when/how/what it means to say it.)
c) To try to be honest with myself about if I, and my partner, are really ready, and roughly in agreement about what it means/don’t mean to have it.
d) To never go ahead if I think there’s any reason to believe it’s something I or the other person could come to regret. And here I mean things like ex-sex, or if someone is in a vulnerable state and our relationship isn’t already at a place where sex is regular part.
e) Sex is only “available” from me as part of a committed monogamous romantic relationship. If you have an issue with living up to any part of that, be it the commitment, the monogamy, the romance, or the relationship, then sex is, for now, off the table. And I apply the same standard to myself.
I mean, Sal has a good point: putting an arbitrary number-of-dates on a sexual relationship makes a good bit of it artificial, as you either try to minutely define what a date is in order to reach your arbitrary number or try to render things not dates so they don’t have to count because you’re not ready.
Sal and Danny haven’t had sex not because Sal is waiting to clear some imaginary bar like ‘three dates’ but because one or both of them – I suspect Sal – isn’t actually ready yet. Danny seems to be Sal’s first real romantic/intimate relationship, where previous relationships have been more sexual and/or shallow. Like Joe, almost: she’s had partners, not relationships. This is new, it’s important to her, she’s moving slowly as a result.
And that’s WAY different from Lucy trying to clear some arbitrary ‘now I’m not a slut’ bar, but I don’t think Sal can articulate that, or if she can she’s not likely be willing to be that kind of vulnerable in front of Lucy and Malaya.
i assume the ‘third’ came from some famous movie/tv/series popular culture
Lucy is looking for more than a hookup even if she seemed more eager than Walky though
Ehhh everything people do is artificial. Words are artificial, clothes are artificial. “Dates” are a constructed pageantry. I say, let people assign meanings, values and milestones in their lives however they want, it becomes a problem when they turn it into casting judgement on *others* for how *they* value things.
Lucy decided to arbitrate 3 “dates” because it means something to her. As far as I can tell, all it did was increase the tension/anticipation factor.
Words and clothing are artificial, yes, because artificial means “human made”. What anonymsly said was that it was arbitrary, which means something different.
Anon, I hear it was in the sermon on the mountain.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/04-hompk/chill/
Right there in between abortions and capital gains taxes.
They mentioned both artificiality and arbitration (as did I 😉 ), but sure we can apply similar principles. Much of human culture and interaction comes down to some sort of arbitration. That could include deciding when and under what conditions you wish to start having sex with someone. I don’t deny for second that “3 dates” is an arbitration, I’m just saying there’s nothing wrong with assigning personal meaning to it.
She’s not assigning personal meaning to it, though, she’s assigning someone else’s personal meaning to it.
If she’d decided that three dates was her personal metric for whether she’s interested enough in the guy for sex, that would be wholly different -at least to my mind – than what she is doing, which is assigning a rigid timeline to an organic personal thing (artificial, in the sense of not her natural inclination or actual desire) according to social rules handed down from who knows where for who knows why (arbitrary, in the sense of ‘because someone said so, no other reason’).
More detail on Sal’s tattoo, a C note, assuming treble cleff. The lines under the staff seem to go all the way around, not just under the spider. I think they look kind of like roots maybe.
I’m seeing an F, too. Interestingly, the stems are inverted, which could imply that they’re meant to be part of two different voices/melodies, potentially symbolizing a harmonious bond with another person, or her own internal complexity – or it could just be that the artist doesn’t know that particular convention of music notation.
If we figure out the significance of the notes, something magnificent and/or terrible will happen.
Theres an F too (Assuming treble clef without alterations)
Ah oops!
This is a bit painful to read, Lucy really wants more female friends but her over eagernes to leap to best friend sharing status in one bound just leads to resentment.
joyce would make a decent friend tbh but given her disdain of walky, maybe not in this particular case. she seems to get along decently enough with becky but i don’t think she cares about ‘straight ppl sex’ lol
I think Joyce has softened on Walky, like I wanna say the last time they interacted much, Walky converted her on ditching her pants and relaxing a bit, so maybe there’s a detente. I feel like the bigger issue would be Lucy’s faith than anything else.
When we saw Lucy and Becky talking it sounded to me like trying to re-convert Joyce. I think religion stands to be a major sticking point between them if that ever came out (and as much as both of them want things to work between them, I think would be a permanent fracture between Joyce and Becky too.)
I may have taken it too literally though? I don’t recall the exact phrasing of it.
I mean, Becky is dating Dina, who’s also an atheist. And she’s best friends with Dorothy, who is atheist.
But the difference there was that Dina wasn’t super judgy about it because although Becky has faith, she doesn’t let it undermine her scientific curiosity or ability to understand logical arguments. Joyce was going through her “religion is for idiots” phase of atheist awakening, so she had a hard time with Becky.
Between Joyce and Becky, only one of them actively tried to change the other’s stance on religion, and it wasn’t Joyce.
Joyce is friends with Walky. Joyce was friends with Walky before she was friends with Dorothy. She just had conflicting feelings about them dating. She was jealous of, at a bare minimum, the time Dorothy spent with Walky. And she had
opinionsabout what Dorothy did with her sex life. Walky is still her friend though.Anyways, Carla is friends with Lucy.
Her ‘understandingness’ can also come across as pity/coddling, so I think she really needs to know her audience.
Snrrk. Sal is such a fucking dork sometimes, and I love it.
I wouldn’t actually be surprised if Danny is her first actual boyfriend, like the whole boyfriend experience. She’s obviously had sex before, we’ve seen that, and she’s maybe gone on dates prior to him, but it wasn’t quite like this, and this intimacy is a whole-new experience. Sal and Joe kind of have a lot in common in that regard.
I love how unshakable Lucy is, too, like that last panel, she is endeared and the deflection bounces right off of her like a forcefield.
I do think this could be a lot of fun, roller derby is something I’d been wanting to see more of.
Additionally, goddamn, is Sal reminding me of Walky here. You can really see their relation when they’re frazzled. Both lose their cool in somewhat comparable ways. Makes me wonder a bit which parent they take after in that regard.
I have no doubt that Danny is her first boyfriend.
And we’ve seen Linda lose her cool, but I don’t think we’ve seen Charles lose his cool. So I suspect they both get it from Linda. But Walky probably gets a lot of his passive aggressive deflection skills from Charles.
Wasn’t she with Asher back in the day?
They weren’t. Sal was thirteen when they robbed the stores and then she got sent to juvie afterwards. And Sal said ‘they both grew up to be pure sex’, which suggests they never really got together/found each other attractive before.
Like maaaaybe they did like, grade school dating, but I don’t think that really counts.
I think I remember Sal explicitly telling Danny that she’s never been someone’s girlfriend before (too tired to find the exact comic – it’s in the scene where Danny tells his parents about her over the phone.)
That strip had both danny and joe in it (or rather, the first one did). You can click on the “sal” tag under the comic, then manually edit it to include more character tags with “+” signs, to bring up comics where all of those characters appear together, so like this:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/tag/sal+danny+joe/
Also, you can cut out everything but the last word of the url, and it will autolink to that comic.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/semestersgoingfine/
(It’s the next comic after that one where Sal says that she’s been a one-night-stand, a fuckbuddy, a shameful secret, a reason for faculty dismissal…)
Nobody besides “the golden couple” has made past first base, I can feel it.
Goddamnit Malaya, misery NEEDS company!
So, drunken Walky/Danny hookup to set everything properly on fire everywhere?
I feel like it needs Ethan and Booster for a proper bit of arson, but my standards might be too high.
Worse things can happen.
I doubt it.
I think there is a secret rule: No Author Avatars allowed to fuck. (see: Danny Billy ship destruction) .
they can date: Ethan x Joyce
Ship tease/ Queerbait : Danny xEthan ,
But never slipshine.
^ should say Danny x Ethan ship destruction
Is Billie an author avatar too?
Danny has featured in two (2) Slipshines.
I’m pretty sure the secret of writing is that *every* character is an author avatar!
…maybe with the exception of characters like Toedad and Blaine. Those are 50% the worst people on TV, 25% parental trauma, and only 25% bits of an author they don’t like about themself.
Just Fuckin’ Fuck: a Dumbing of Age Pornographique
Malaya: I only give you shit when you’re being fakey.
Also Malaya: You’re now allowed to genuinely dislike Lucy because I disliked her first.
Sorry Sal, that’s what you get for going up against an AAAAAALPHA SWEEEETIE!
Also, the last panel of Malayaness made me laugh so hard.
I hear it was in the sermon on the mountain.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/04-hompk/chill/
Damn it, how did this get down here. Now I got to post this where it was supposed to go.
She’s a saint. We all hate saints.
Case in point Mother Theresa.
Literally just fuck if you feel like fucking. Everyone makes it so goddamn complicated, with all their stupid little rules and contingencies and paranoid circular thinking. As long as it’s fine with everyone involved and nobody’s getting hurt, why’s it gotta be such a big deal?
Because! That’s why.
Good enough for me.
I guess it matters what the rules are for. If you made them up yourself because it describes the situations where you wanna doink, or at least crosses off some neuroses for you, rules are fine.
if they stipulate when you are allowed to doink, or obligate you to doink whether or not you wanna, then we definitely have a problem.
Mostly because sex – for better or for worse – is actually extremely complicated and varied, in many physical, social, and/or cultural ways, so it change or even hurt people’s feelings to an absolutely incredible degree, so I think it actually would kinda make sense to have lots of little rules and etiquette and contingencies, if only to make sure there’s no accidental miscommunications or bad vibes for anyone involved!
…I mean, obviously I’m not saying that all of the weird-ass rules and ideas people have built up around sex are good, I’m just saying it’s actually a surprisingly complex issue so just doing away with all the rules & stuff is probably not a good idea for everybody.
Side note: I’ll admit that I’m coming at this from an entirely asexual perspective, so if people want to discount me here I guess that’s fair, but honestly I think it just puts me in an even better position to judge how wild and varied peoples’ feelings are about sex.
@Mturtle7 Totally insightful. (Though I’m demi-, so maybe I’m also coming from a similar perspective.) Communication and consent and understanding what those mean are so important. Even if it’s not dumb arbitrary rules like 3 dates or whatever.
I was talking more about the really stupid ones, like “If you leave it in and your friend jumps on the bed, it doesn’t count” or “Only after the third date, once you’ve confirmed they’ve got the same star sign as you, and they have to wear a red-and-white striped top hat over their eyes so they can’t see you during”.
Like, I understand the baseline value of simple rules like “Make sure I actually told you that you could fuck me before you start fucking me”, those make sense and I’m not confused about them. It’s the deeply ingrained and weirdly specific ones that creep me out.
The “third date” one isn’t quite so dumb, since it’s really just supposed to be a proxy for making sure there’s at least some sustained interest.
Do as ye will, and it harm none
Sal and Lucy are both right.
Agreed. The only requirements for having sex is that both partners are informed, consenting (I would also say of age, but let’s face it, teenage sex has always been a thing and WILL always be a thing) and that neither partner are comfortable and are not pressured to continue. Consent can always be revoked at any time if the situation stops being comfortable, and both partners need to respect that.
Of age or of a similar age. Age requirements are, or should be, about stopping older predators, not about punishing teens.
Concent is a tragically low bar. “everyone involved want to do it” is much better.
Can we not assume “willing” is part of “consenting”? If you’re not willing, it’s coercion at best.
Y’know what, what am I saying? Of course we can’t assume that, because I’ve personally had several Gen-X women (usually mom’s friends) say the wildest shit with me in earshot. Shit like “Oh, consent’s not that big a deal. Me and [husband] fuck every night for the last 10 years, even when I’d rather not” (not a direct quote), where you have to wonder if a person can even be retrieved from that scenario, after that long.
Hey what if we did literally anything to fix the broken sex culture in this country?
As I think you imply in the other post, “willing” goes along with “consenting, but “wants to” doesn’t necessarily. You can be willing to do something, even if you don’t really want to. For many reasons, not all of them bad.
But if Lucy wants the relationship to feel more serious before she is ready, that’s also fine. Granted the strict adherence to “dates” is a bit artificial but that aspect is probably played up for humor.
But that’s pretty clearly not what’s going on with Lucy. Lucy wants to have sex now, but feels the need to put up the “I’m a Christian woman” reluctance and delay for the requisite 3 dates. Now she’s trying to speedrun those dates so they can get it on while still following the rule she made up.
Of all the things that brings the last panel over the top, Malaya’s implication that Sal does something cool is the most ridiculous. Good jokes!
Roller derby at midnight? Is that a common thing? If so, it probably evolved that way because of availability of the skating rink. Aren’t those hours impractical for college students? Okay, I guess not, except for people like Dorothy or Hermione.
Now I wanna know what Sal and Danny did in the “music” room. Time to archive dive to see what I missed.
I hate Lucy too right now. Sal, don’t listen to her. Your relationship is none of Lucy’s business.
Lucy’s face in the last panel is so peak it unlocked memories of the sweet girl trope that I haven’t thought of in years. Lucy I love you please DM me
I am surprised that Sal and Danny haven’t had sex yet.
Maybe they are having trouble trying to find a grappling hook
I think Sal is somewhat in a similar situation as Joe. Actual romance is kind of new for her.
I think they’ve just been enjoying the romance/courtship aspect of the relationship so much that sex hasn’t been a priority.
I met one of my partners at an orgy. It’s obviously not the path everyone should take, but it works for us!
Lucy is an excellent foil to the “cool” characters, I must say.
Just thinking about the Valentines Day chapter that’s going to happen in like 7 years.
We’ll probably get another timeskip a la Halloween and slowly retrace our steps via flashback to figure out how everything fell apart.
forgot about the flashbacks, add two more years for the Hanukkah flashback.
Am I the only one feels a certain smugness in Lucy every time she opens her mouth?
It might be her subtle air of comfort in her own body, combined with her generally positive attitude. People reflexively dislike happy people.
I don’t think it’s her positivity itself that gets on people’s nerves but her brand of being helpful can come across as putting herself in a position of authority in situations where she has less experience then the person she’s trying to help and as demonstrated with Sal that can be grating.
I don’t know if I’d call it smugness, but she doesn’t seem to have a middle gear between insecure and overconfident. https://www.dumbingofage.com/leader/
What Lucy says today in panel 5 sounds like what someone would say in jest, to either rib Sal or self-deprecate. But she’s saying it in earnest, which is weird, because what Sal was trying to say with “if you want to fuck, then fuck” was “leave me out of your sex calculations”, not “who I have sex with is your business”.
And over-familiar. Yesterday she just brought up Malaya’s underwear and today, when Sal met her halfway on the double-date suggestion, she decided to inform Sal she was part of her formula to fuck her brother.
YES definitely overfamiliar. Tell Malaya she looks great, don’t mention her undergarments. Don’t ask people about their sex lives unless you know you’re that kind of friends.
i love lucy
Upcoming slipshine: Sal does a sex.
This seems way out of character for Sal, it’d seem more like Sal to say none of your business or we’ll do it when we’re ready or something
i would normally agree but this seems to be her reaction when she’s attempting to stifle down genuine emotion lmao
Why is Lucy like 85% of the time right
Dumbing of Age Book 13: “How is your sex life?”
“I hated Malaya before it was cool.”
Said nobody ever.
Dumbing of Age Book 13: The I Hate Lucy Show