Can confirm, this is extremely validating and affirming.
If you have an partner who is often seen as Too Much, and you legit love that about them, please feel free to tell them so.
Husband and I were talking yesterday. I was derailing conversation into random-giddy-giggly-nonsense with word association and bouncing and not filtering and just embracing the chaos and no filter.
He commented that it’s nice that 19 years in we still have plenty to chat about, and that it isn’t boring stilted “so, that weather” stuff ❤️
It’s nice that it’s safe for me to be a random mess of barely connected squiggly lines, or an anxious depression ball of self loathing, or geek out about maths/science, and he tells me [generally enraging] history/politics stuff (but we’re aligned politically and being ignorant is bad and I probably shouldn’t ostrich)…
I was literally just venting earlier tonight about how I worry about how intensely I feel sexual desire and my worries over it being too much that it would overwhelm a partner. I am also autistic and there may be a connection.
If somebody I was attracted to said what Joe said here, I would absolutely lose it.
My god, this! Autism’d so hard that sex became my special interest. Like, encyclopedic knowledge of kink and academic love for dissecting them and their relationship to people. The only person I’ve ever dated was luckily also a weirdo, but god am I worried about those future prospects
I’ve lost a relationship because of this, so I empathize with your anxiety. I also may or may not be autistic as well (I haven’t gone for a clinical diagnosis, but every single questionnaire I take on my own indicates it to be a strong possibility, and that’s hard for me to ignore), though I don’t know if or how it’s related.
What’s weird is that the anxiety I have about potentially being too much and overwhelming or gods forbid actually hurting someone even by accident was so strong that these days it feels like my personality did a complete 180. Before, I used to be intensely sexual with whoever my partners were. Now, it’s more like I’m completely detached and lost interest, and I approach the prospect of sexual activity even by myself as just a mechanical Thing My Body Does/Need without any sense of excitement or fulfillment.
It was like all I wanted was to feel wanted, desired, and craved and at some point, my brain became convinced it would never happen and all of a sudden, a switch was just flipped.
Can confirm, having a partner who turns your supposed flaws around into virtues DOES make the brain short-circuit. Had something like that happen recently and I was like haha, what. What the hell do I do with this. WHAT.
it would be nice to have someone be that nice/patient with you, i imagine some ppl would get dumped much sooner with someone that had like 20% of joyce’s joyce-ness
Everyone gets dumped sometimes. If you are an intense vivacious person, you’ll probably always be vivacious and intense, so it’s better to get free of partners who would try to shrink you, and find the folks who adore your vivacious intensity, instead.
Like, Joe’s not just saying this to be patient or nice, he honestly digs Joyce’s Joyce-ness. He likes her for who she is. That’s why we’re all falling all over ourselves that it’s romantic and affirming and all that. 🙂
Deadly predators… Dang, given her dad/possible family history of DV (we still don’t know what led her mother to suicide), that might be less funny than it seemed initially.
Adorkable predators who won’t attack unless provoked. I think it’s a reasonably okay adaptation. Like getting a giant cuddle monster of a dog who can scare burglars away with a single bark.
Segue into a recommendation for Laurenston’s shifter-romcom “Honey Badger” series. which started out more focused on wolves, bears, cats, etc. but none of those took off the way the badger sisters have
–Dave, … no, you do not want to KNOW how many and how diverse books are in my apartment
Look I like Joe and I like where he’s going but he was still a douche for longer than he’s been likable so any self doubt or criticism he holds to himself is still deserved. I wanna see more of this until at least next semester.
Same. Dorothy’s reservations about him were 100% deserved. He totally was skeevy. Feeling bad about his (super recent) past bahaviour is a good thing. Means he wants to change.
Ick. Joe isn’t just feeling regret for past skeeviness…he’s feeling hurt because he feels as though the woman he cares about regards him as *dangerous*. And so…he asked questions about his feelings, and the response appears to have given him better understanding. Weird! He deserves to continue feeling awful, amirite?
To say nothing of the fact that…was Joe predatory? He regrets being a fuckboy, but seriously, I’m asking, did he ever attempt to hide that from anyone, when he was one? Is there an instance in the comic-again, seriously asking-where he pressured a girl or woman into sex, even ‘just’ implicitly?
You were calling him skeevy, and the consensus for a while was that he was some kind of 80’s movie sexual predator, when at worst all his “deviancy” really amounted to was “fuck boy who only wanted casual sex, and never hid that fact.”
That was never the consensus. Even at his worst there were plenty of people defending him as an ethical horndog.
He was never quite as bad as he portrayed himself – like he proclaimed that alcohol helped with threesomes, but he never actually had a threesome.
But he wanted to fix Joyce with his penis and was willing to pretend to romantic interest he didn’t have to get there. He repeatedly hit on women over their protests and only backed off when yelled at or threatened.
He gave off every red flag of being dangerous, even if he probably wasn’t really as bad as he was pretending to be.
I never said he should keep feeling awful just that he deserves to have to check himself. That shred of doubt he has that Joyce might even consider him dangerous should be held and reflected on, because yes, Joe was that bad.
I’m a little wary on people asking if he was predatory because it implies that you must be some kind of aggressive monster to be a problem. Joe published a list ranking women based on his personal criteria of sexual attraction. I’ll end it there because really that’s enough and breaking down his long list of problematic behavior would be tiring and I personally feel unfair to his current character even if it would highlight his growth. (Also don’t really want to instigate an argument either)
Just think we shouldn’t feel too bad for him here. He dug a big hole. It should take awhile to climb out.
Only thing i want to correct in your post is that HE didn’t publish his list. it was a private thing he kept that someone stole and posted online out of spite and malice towards him (deserved? debatable, but he never meant or intended it to see the light of day) the rest of what you said though is 100% accurate.
It was stupid-secret — the kind of thing you create when you haven’t worked in information security and had to really think about it, so you bolt on something that you’ve heard about that sounds good and assume it’s now private.
(BTW that was Danny’s mistake. Joe’s was trusting that Danny knew what he was doing. Well, that and sharing such information in the first place.)
This whole argument is a bit confusing and concerning to me. Obviously it’s worse if he was sharing the list but i mean….. we all agree that Joe RATING WOMEN FOR FUCKABILITY is BAD right
Joe didn’t think his actions mattered or caused any harm, until Joyce broke down why his list triggered her (and likely other assault victims/survivors) to feel literally unsafe in the world.
(He did other deeply annoying things, too, like trying to derail every Gender Studies class to be about his sexytimes, hitting on uninterested women until they literally screamed at him to stop, etc. — everyone else looked really sick of him. But the Do List was what made Joyce feel literally unsafe, just a couple months ago.)
It’s good that Joe’s checking in that he’s not unknowingly making Joyce feel unsafe again.
The point of guilt isn’t punishment, that you should sit there feeling bad, forever, and not doing anything about it. The point of guilt is empowering a person into changing a wrong behavior. And that’s what Joe is trying to do.
@milu: It is already bad, and really, I don’t know how much pointing to past strips contradicting the “Joe was harmless” idea does, since people have apparently read this far and thought Joe was harmless. But I do think it might help for some who could be influenced by repeated comments about how his list was private to remember that it wasn’t, really, and better appreciate the harm.
And then there’s the idea that Joe was “always forthright with his intentions,” like we didn’t see how he started with Joyce and that date. And then people think you hate on Joe because you have something against casual sex…
@yumi: Yeah, it’s always frustrating. I do like Joe and his arc. It’s always weird to me when people minimize it. Like, he’s got an actual character growth arc here – let him actually start out as a problem.
Kind of makes me wish Willis had gone darker with him to start with, just to make it harder to hand-wave away.
Ohhhh, no, that (Joe being worst in the past) is a monkey’s paw wish. We’d have so many people yelling and screaming about how he shouldn’t “get” to develop as a character. -_- As though character arcs are something earned by being below a certain threshold of problematic, rather than the result of authors wanting to explore themes.
Towards the beginning of the comic everyone was a lot more one-dimensional. Joe flattered Joyce into going on a date, then made comments about “breaking her in” when she was out of earshot. When Joyce confronts him about the sex tape, clearly already upset, he says she might have slept with him if she was drunk. When Danny is upset about his girlfriend breaking up with him, Joe acts like he might sleep with her now that she is singe. As his character evolves we see him become an ethical slut who is afraid of becoming like his dad if he gets into a relationship. But even then he would still make people uncomfortable, like hitting on Rachel even after she expressed displeasure. This relationship with Joyce represents remarkable character growth, but those things are still in his past and he will need to come to terms with them before he can see himself in a positive light. I think we all want him to change, but it’s clear that he has made his own bed.
The revelation that Liz came to him and they almost boned but the instant she stopped he did as well is going to come up, isn’t it? Sarah’s going to find out.
Joyce has baked-in anxiety about being a sexual person due to her upbringing (“It’s always me”), even though her current moral guidelines don’t actually forbid it. Sarah thinks Joe is just using Joyce, but there’s a person who can confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt that Joe is safe: Liz.
Okay, except Joyce’s problem, as you say, isn’t that she doesn’t think Joe is safe, and Joe doesn’t really care what Sarah thinks, so I still don’t see why it would come up.
Sarah has shown she’s willing to crowbar the two of them apart. She’s going to keep trying to push Joe away from Joyce until something really rocks her view of him.
No, Sarah’s feelings absolutely should not matter. But until she gets put down she’s going to keep interfering with their relationship.
To follow up, Joyce is freaking about her own sexual feelings, looking a little like Becky’s fears with Dina and how Becky kept trying to mindgame herself/Dina into “losing control.” We’ve covered several times how despite the radical viewpoint shift, Joyce approaches atheism in much the same way she did faith. The facts have changed (God isn’t real) but Joyce (extremely outgoing, strong sense of justice) has not.
Now that she’s coming into her own as a sexual being she’s running into having to deal with groomed expectations of what men are like. Joe is not ever supposed to say no. Starting or stopping sex is supposed to be entirely Joyce’s wheelhouse because A Man Is Always Eager (be happy I don’t have the skills to embed the TVTropes link here), but that’s not actually the case for these two. Not that Joe will try to parent her but he’ll be able to see Joyce’s stress and hopefully address it.
Don’t get me wrong, the both of them absolutely want to bone down but Joe cares more about Joyce’s feelings than he does getting laid and his experience in this arena is going to be a huge boon to Joyce as she starts exploring it.
Joyce’s problem is that she thinks Joyce is not safe, and feels uncomfortable around her.
I don’t think it’s still anxiety about sexuality, so much as worry that she won’t control her impulses properly and manage them for best use. I suspect that intercuts from the flashback will tell us why.
And the Joe/Liz episode is just the sort of thing that will tumble out, unconsidered, in a three-cornered argument with Sarah defending Joyce and Joyce defending Joe. Which I also suspect is coming in this chapter.
I dunno…I think Joyce could probably benefit from hearing the story about Liz, since it could help remind her that intimacy isn’t a slippery slope, and she can just decide to stop at any point during the process, but I don’t think that has anything to do with JOE being safe.
And I don’t think Sarah would react the way you’re implying, either! Because Sarah isn’t especially worried about Joe being “safe” with regards to sex, i.e. that he’s going to pressure Joyce into anything she doesn’t want or whatever. What she’s REALLY showed concern about is his ability to have a monogamous relationship! Hearing the details of his extremely recent sexual encounter with someone he barely knew (who’s also Sarah’s sister) is NOT going to do ANYTHING to reassure her on that front.
I’m pretty sure it won’t cause complicated feelings that he was going to sleep with Liz a couple of days before telling Joyce his feelings… and his goal was to get over those feelings.
The only thing that would cause more of The Dumbing would be if Joyce had a similar encounter before she decided how to respond, that went further, and with someone who had even more complicated motives.
It’s coming back to Joyce taking a prat fall in her sexuality, as I remember Sara and I think Billie or Dorothy talking about. WHEN…When Joyce and Joe finally do happen in terms of intimacy, I don’t even know if Joe will be ready for the hurricane that Joyce will become.
He was doing that in public while also providing her text support through “my mother is defending my friend’s dad who pointed a gun at me” and “my parents are apparently not a homogeneous unit and I am SHOOK and don’t know how to process this. I definitely don’t trust my mother and don’t know if I can trust my dad…” and “So it turns out if I channel that horrible churning RAGE I can do useful things like punch out window frames so Becky can do things like retrieve important paperwork so maybe the RAGE is good..? But it’s also not much fun to live with”…
They might not have been their feelings directly that he was talking about, but he had clearly opened up enough to her about his experiences that she trusted him. He gave her good advice and support before he decided to double down on being a douche and shag Malaya…
Face to face emoting is harder for both of them, and Joyce has only recently admitted to having a libido but these kids have been communicating and connecting emotionally for a while.
Yeah. And I think those private convos are part of why Joyce was annoyed at Joe for presenting the horndog “I can’t change” front in public. She had evidence otherwise. Which is also evidence the rest of the cast is unaware of, as far as I can recall.
In my sleep, I’ve been known to attempt to snuggle people clear off the bed. Like, they move so they have a little room, and I cuddle closer in my sleep, so they move again, and we repeat — til there’s no more bed.
It’s a good thing that these lofts have railings.
With an ex of mine, I could snuggle him veeery gently on one side of me, or on my other side I had the Glomping Pillow. This way, if I wanted to aggressively hug, then I’d turn towards the pillow, so as not to smother the space-needing fellow off the bed / to death.
My husband can handle all the cuddles I want to give him, though. It is meant to be.
Aaw! My husband and I started off cohabiting sharing a single bed. We quickly learnt I needed to be on the wall side so he didn’t push me out of bed in his sleep… Now he just tries to lie on top of me!
I really hope this works out for these two, they’re so honest and open with eachother and they’re so willing to learn about and take the time to understand eachother. I really think this might stick, at least until they both figure out what they want out of life.
well they both know joyce has repressed hangups about sexuality and religion but it would be hilarious if we flash forward to them being married and them having a weekly sex schedule or so
I think we all kind of know it’s a very complex and messy web of shame and obedience to authority. She calls birth control “hussy pills” after all. I imagine we’ll see it in the following few strips but it’s gotta be something like “if I’m awake then I know for certain I didn’t subconsciously do any hanky-panky stuff in my sleep.”
That’s why normalcy isn’t Joyce’s middle name. She’s still undergoing deconstruction of moral sense of the self. Not Dorothy-level yet, but she’ll end up there anyway someday.
It’s still kinda upsetting that Sarah and/or Dorothy’s words seem to have stuck with Joe, and he now sees himself as some sorta monster that Joyce would be afraid to approach.
and probably thinking about liz, considering she said ‘i almost ruined myself forever’ (which is a valid feeling/you don’t have to rush to get rid of your virginity but that’s not something i’d say outloud for the other person to hear)
I don’t think it’s Sarah’s or Dorothy’s words that hit Joe, but Joyce’s. About the time the Do List was published Ryan attacked Dorothy and Amber, and that’s when Joyce shared with Joe her being attacked by Ryan.
Omg!!!!! They’re so cute!!!!! As a neurodivergent person, lowkey love how Joe loves Joyce in part because of her autism, not in spite of it. Like holy shit, they were already one of the cutest couples but this fills my heart with such butterflies!
I had this exact conversation with my ex. She never really understood why I was in love with her, why I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. She broke up with me and broke my heart. Wasted a quarter of my life pursuing that dead end. So…don’t always assume they will understand why you love and are in love with them.
That is probably exactly it, yes. Oof. Her family’s churches have a lot to answer for, and also, as always, Carol is the worst for being such a massive bongo.
I agree that there is nothing wrong with Joyce’s level of sexual desire and that she has been made to feel intense shame about it, but we’ve gotten a fair few hints that she has a pretty high libido. Her level of horniness is normal in the sense that the human species contains lots of perfectly natural and healthy variation, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be average.
It’s terrible how deep her sex-negative indoctrination goes that her desire to boink Joe feels worse than anything she suspects he’s ever done sexually………
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Joe expecting abnormal amounts of Joyce?
Abnormal amounts in this context would be something like ‘just right’ or ‘exactly enough’.
she’d have to be hopped up on painkillers again to tone down even a little bit i’d expect lol
“Closer to average baseline” amounts, or “high even by Joyce standards” amounts?
She can be less Joycey, but he prefers her either at normal Joycebox levels or sometimes even Joycier.
OH MY FUCKING GOD
If anyone let alone Joe Rosenthal said this to my neurodivergent ass I fear I would detonate
In a good or bad way?
Good, but I don’t know how I would handle it! It would mean so much that it would be overwhelming
So, “burst into tears” then?
I feel that.
Can confirm, this is extremely validating and affirming.
If you have an partner who is often seen as Too Much, and you legit love that about them, please feel free to tell them so.
Husband and I were talking yesterday. I was derailing conversation into random-giddy-giggly-nonsense with word association and bouncing and not filtering and just embracing the chaos and no filter.
He commented that it’s nice that 19 years in we still have plenty to chat about, and that it isn’t boring stilted “so, that weather” stuff ❤️
It’s nice that it’s safe for me to be a random mess of barely connected squiggly lines, or an anxious depression ball of self loathing, or geek out about maths/science, and he tells me [generally enraging] history/politics stuff (but we’re aligned politically and being ignorant is bad and I probably shouldn’t ostrich)…
I love him. Snuggled up to him is my safe place.
This is so cute and your relationship seems pretty awesome 💚
I was literally just venting earlier tonight about how I worry about how intensely I feel sexual desire and my worries over it being too much that it would overwhelm a partner. I am also autistic and there may be a connection.
If somebody I was attracted to said what Joe said here, I would absolutely lose it.
My god, this! Autism’d so hard that sex became my special interest. Like, encyclopedic knowledge of kink and academic love for dissecting them and their relationship to people. The only person I’ve ever dated was luckily also a weirdo, but god am I worried about those future prospects
I’ve lost a relationship because of this, so I empathize with your anxiety. I also may or may not be autistic as well (I haven’t gone for a clinical diagnosis, but every single questionnaire I take on my own indicates it to be a strong possibility, and that’s hard for me to ignore), though I don’t know if or how it’s related.
What’s weird is that the anxiety I have about potentially being too much and overwhelming or gods forbid actually hurting someone even by accident was so strong that these days it feels like my personality did a complete 180. Before, I used to be intensely sexual with whoever my partners were. Now, it’s more like I’m completely detached and lost interest, and I approach the prospect of sexual activity even by myself as just a mechanical Thing My Body Does/Need without any sense of excitement or fulfillment.
It was like all I wanted was to feel wanted, desired, and craved and at some point, my brain became convinced it would never happen and all of a sudden, a switch was just flipped.
…I just realized I’m oversharing. Sorry.
1000%
My ex loved my muchness and affirmed it whenever I worried I was too much. Downside is I hurt and feel anxious to the same degree.
Can confirm, having a partner who turns your supposed flaws around into virtues DOES make the brain short-circuit. Had something like that happen recently and I was like haha, what. What the hell do I do with this. WHAT.
If someone said this to me, I would feel so loved!
it would be nice to have someone be that nice/patient with you, i imagine some ppl would get dumped much sooner with someone that had like 20% of joyce’s joyce-ness
Everyone gets dumped sometimes. If you are an intense vivacious person, you’ll probably always be vivacious and intense, so it’s better to get free of partners who would try to shrink you, and find the folks who adore your vivacious intensity, instead.
Like, Joe’s not just saying this to be patient or nice, he honestly digs Joyce’s Joyce-ness. He likes her for who she is. That’s why we’re all falling all over ourselves that it’s romantic and affirming and all that. 🙂
Awe 😊
Gosh I just really like these two together…
They have very good chemistry.
Extremely Relatable
What Joyce is saying is that cuddling her is more dangerous than cuddling a rabid badger. Goals honestly.
I didn’t think of it this way but you’re right. Goals.
The risks are worth the reward(s)
You’re saying Becky has a type?
Deadly predators… Dang, given her dad/possible family history of DV (we still don’t know what led her mother to suicide), that might be less funny than it seemed initially.
Adorkable predators who won’t attack unless provoked. I think it’s a reasonably okay adaptation. Like getting a giant cuddle monster of a dog who can scare burglars away with a single bark.
Segue into a recommendation for Laurenston’s shifter-romcom “Honey Badger” series. which started out more focused on wolves, bears, cats, etc. but none of those took off the way the badger sisters have
–Dave, … no, you do not want to KNOW how many and how diverse books are in my apartment
There’s a series of rom-com novels about werebadgers?
WHY AM I ONLY FINDING OUT ABOUT THIS TODAY???
congratulations! you’re one of Today’s Ten Thousand!
–Dave, Shelley Laurenston, IIRC
Fuck, that’s cute, Joe.
Aww poor Joe, that “am I bad guy” insecurity :'(
Look I like Joe and I like where he’s going but he was still a douche for longer than he’s been likable so any self doubt or criticism he holds to himself is still deserved. I wanna see more of this until at least next semester.
Same. Dorothy’s reservations about him were 100% deserved. He totally was skeevy. Feeling bad about his (super recent) past bahaviour is a good thing. Means he wants to change.
Unclear if next semester will appear in the comic within a normal human lifespan.
it’s okay, none of us commenters appear to be nor-mal hu-mons
Ick. Joe isn’t just feeling regret for past skeeviness…he’s feeling hurt because he feels as though the woman he cares about regards him as *dangerous*. And so…he asked questions about his feelings, and the response appears to have given him better understanding. Weird! He deserves to continue feeling awful, amirite?
To say nothing of the fact that…was Joe predatory? He regrets being a fuckboy, but seriously, I’m asking, did he ever attempt to hide that from anyone, when he was one? Is there an instance in the comic-again, seriously asking-where he pressured a girl or woman into sex, even ‘just’ implicitly?
Love the ‘at least’, too.
Rakeesh, I’m not seeing where anyone in the thread said what you are implying.
You were calling him skeevy, and the consensus for a while was that he was some kind of 80’s movie sexual predator, when at worst all his “deviancy” really amounted to was “fuck boy who only wanted casual sex, and never hid that fact.”
That was never the consensus. Even at his worst there were plenty of people defending him as an ethical horndog.
He was never quite as bad as he portrayed himself – like he proclaimed that alcohol helped with threesomes, but he never actually had a threesome.
But he wanted to fix Joyce with his penis and was willing to pretend to romantic interest he didn’t have to get there. He repeatedly hit on women over their protests and only backed off when yelled at or threatened.
He gave off every red flag of being dangerous, even if he probably wasn’t really as bad as he was pretending to be.
I never said he should keep feeling awful just that he deserves to have to check himself. That shred of doubt he has that Joyce might even consider him dangerous should be held and reflected on, because yes, Joe was that bad.
I’m a little wary on people asking if he was predatory because it implies that you must be some kind of aggressive monster to be a problem. Joe published a list ranking women based on his personal criteria of sexual attraction. I’ll end it there because really that’s enough and breaking down his long list of problematic behavior would be tiring and I personally feel unfair to his current character even if it would highlight his growth. (Also don’t really want to instigate an argument either)
Just think we shouldn’t feel too bad for him here. He dug a big hole. It should take awhile to climb out.
Only thing i want to correct in your post is that HE didn’t publish his list. it was a private thing he kept that someone stole and posted online out of spite and malice towards him (deserved? debatable, but he never meant or intended it to see the light of day) the rest of what you said though is 100% accurate.
He was terrible, but he wasn’t Mark Zuckerberg terrible.
It wasn’t exactly private when he gave people access to it so readily. It wasn’t meant to be “anyone can just Google it,” but it wasn’t secret either.
It was stupid-secret — the kind of thing you create when you haven’t worked in information security and had to really think about it, so you bolt on something that you’ve heard about that sounds good and assume it’s now private.
(BTW that was Danny’s mistake. Joe’s was trusting that Danny knew what he was doing. Well, that and sharing such information in the first place.)
This whole argument is a bit confusing and concerning to me. Obviously it’s worse if he was sharing the list but i mean….. we all agree that Joe RATING WOMEN FOR FUCKABILITY is BAD right
Or at least super creepy and a massive red flag.
Actually maybe it is good that it got leaked. It exposed him.
It really wasn’t even “super-secret”. He had an RSS feed and offered the password to people regularly.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/02-everything-youve-ever-wanted/boyspizzaretreat/
Joe didn’t think his actions mattered or caused any harm, until Joyce broke down why his list triggered her (and likely other assault victims/survivors) to feel literally unsafe in the world.
(He did other deeply annoying things, too, like trying to derail every Gender Studies class to be about his sexytimes, hitting on uninterested women until they literally screamed at him to stop, etc. — everyone else looked really sick of him. But the Do List was what made Joyce feel literally unsafe, just a couple months ago.)
It’s good that Joe’s checking in that he’s not unknowingly making Joyce feel unsafe again.
The point of guilt isn’t punishment, that you should sit there feeling bad, forever, and not doing anything about it. The point of guilt is empowering a person into changing a wrong behavior. And that’s what Joe is trying to do.
@milu: It is already bad, and really, I don’t know how much pointing to past strips contradicting the “Joe was harmless” idea does, since people have apparently read this far and thought Joe was harmless. But I do think it might help for some who could be influenced by repeated comments about how his list was private to remember that it wasn’t, really, and better appreciate the harm.
And then there’s the idea that Joe was “always forthright with his intentions,” like we didn’t see how he started with Joyce and that date. And then people think you hate on Joe because you have something against casual sex…
@yumi: Yeah, it’s always frustrating. I do like Joe and his arc. It’s always weird to me when people minimize it. Like, he’s got an actual character growth arc here – let him actually start out as a problem.
Kind of makes me wish Willis had gone darker with him to start with, just to make it harder to hand-wave away.
Ohhhh, no, that (Joe being worst in the past) is a monkey’s paw wish. We’d have so many people yelling and screaming about how he shouldn’t “get” to develop as a character. -_- As though character arcs are something earned by being below a certain threshold of problematic, rather than the result of authors wanting to explore themes.
Towards the beginning of the comic everyone was a lot more one-dimensional. Joe flattered Joyce into going on a date, then made comments about “breaking her in” when she was out of earshot. When Joyce confronts him about the sex tape, clearly already upset, he says she might have slept with him if she was drunk. When Danny is upset about his girlfriend breaking up with him, Joe acts like he might sleep with her now that she is singe. As his character evolves we see him become an ethical slut who is afraid of becoming like his dad if he gets into a relationship. But even then he would still make people uncomfortable, like hitting on Rachel even after she expressed displeasure. This relationship with Joyce represents remarkable character growth, but those things are still in his past and he will need to come to terms with them before he can see himself in a positive light. I think we all want him to change, but it’s clear that he has made his own bed.
d’aww
this is why I hate that “it’s not you, it’s me” has become such a joke, BECAUSE ACTUALLY IT IS, I AM A DAMAGED HUMAN WHO DOESN’T DO THE RELATIONSHIP
also cute
also I DESPERATELY hope sarah is awake and staring at the bottom of joyce’s bunk
Nitpicking, but they’re not bunk beds. They’re loft beds. If Sarah were staring at the bottom of Joyce’s bed, she’d have to be lying on Joyce’s desk.
And now I know why we have two terms. Thank you.
The revelation that Liz came to him and they almost boned but the instant she stopped he did as well is going to come up, isn’t it? Sarah’s going to find out.
Shit’s going to get weird.
I’m … not following your logic of how that comes up from this, tbh.
Joyce has baked-in anxiety about being a sexual person due to her upbringing (“It’s always me”), even though her current moral guidelines don’t actually forbid it. Sarah thinks Joe is just using Joyce, but there’s a person who can confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt that Joe is safe: Liz.
Okay, except Joyce’s problem, as you say, isn’t that she doesn’t think Joe is safe, and Joe doesn’t really care what Sarah thinks, so I still don’t see why it would come up.
Sarah has shown she’s willing to crowbar the two of them apart. She’s going to keep trying to push Joe away from Joyce until something really rocks her view of him.
No, Sarah’s feelings absolutely should not matter. But until she gets put down she’s going to keep interfering with their relationship.
To follow up, Joyce is freaking about her own sexual feelings, looking a little like Becky’s fears with Dina and how Becky kept trying to mindgame herself/Dina into “losing control.” We’ve covered several times how despite the radical viewpoint shift, Joyce approaches atheism in much the same way she did faith. The facts have changed (God isn’t real) but Joyce (extremely outgoing, strong sense of justice) has not.
Now that she’s coming into her own as a sexual being she’s running into having to deal with groomed expectations of what men are like. Joe is not ever supposed to say no. Starting or stopping sex is supposed to be entirely Joyce’s wheelhouse because A Man Is Always Eager (be happy I don’t have the skills to embed the TVTropes link here), but that’s not actually the case for these two. Not that Joe will try to parent her but he’ll be able to see Joyce’s stress and hopefully address it.
Don’t get me wrong, the both of them absolutely want to bone down but Joe cares more about Joyce’s feelings than he does getting laid and his experience in this arena is going to be a huge boon to Joyce as she starts exploring it.
Joyce’s problem is that she thinks Joyce is not safe, and feels uncomfortable around her.
I don’t think it’s still anxiety about sexuality, so much as worry that she won’t control her impulses properly and manage them for best use. I suspect that intercuts from the flashback will tell us why.
And the Joe/Liz episode is just the sort of thing that will tumble out, unconsidered, in a three-cornered argument with Sarah defending Joyce and Joyce defending Joe. Which I also suspect is coming in this chapter.
I dunno…I think Joyce could probably benefit from hearing the story about Liz, since it could help remind her that intimacy isn’t a slippery slope, and she can just decide to stop at any point during the process, but I don’t think that has anything to do with JOE being safe.
And I don’t think Sarah would react the way you’re implying, either! Because Sarah isn’t especially worried about Joe being “safe” with regards to sex, i.e. that he’s going to pressure Joyce into anything she doesn’t want or whatever. What she’s REALLY showed concern about is his ability to have a monogamous relationship! Hearing the details of his extremely recent sexual encounter with someone he barely knew (who’s also Sarah’s sister) is NOT going to do ANYTHING to reassure her on that front.
The lesson to be learned is that Joe is a safe person with whom Joyce can explore sex but oh my goooooood the Dumbing that will be done to get there.
I’m pretty sure it won’t cause complicated feelings that he was going to sleep with Liz a couple of days before telling Joyce his feelings… and his goal was to get over those feelings.
The only thing that would cause more of The Dumbing would be if Joyce had a similar encounter before she decided how to respond, that went further, and with someone who had even more complicated motives.
The dryer was trying to break them up from the start!
Not gonna get so weird it makes Les Claypool look milquetoast, no sireebob.
It’s going to take the dumbing of the ages to get to that point.
😙😗
You can see the relief (and understanding) so clearly in panel 5.
And then panel 6 is just…
“Let’s just say I smothered a lotta cats in my sleep.”
GO BIG OR GO ….
…wait, she can’t go home anymore…
GO BIG OR GO NOT. THERE IS NO TRY.
No, Yoda’s line was “Go Biggs or go not.”
Biggs was already dead, though. I think you guys need a Hobbie.
I can see this becoming a Wedge issue.
It’s coming back to Joyce taking a prat fall in her sexuality, as I remember Sara and I think Billie or Dorothy talking about. WHEN…When Joyce and Joe finally do happen in terms of intimacy, I don’t even know if Joe will be ready for the hurricane that Joyce will become.
Yeah, a sex hurricane, maybe. She came once, and almost started dating a literal washing machine!
Joe is going to learn about the dangers of Snu-Snu
He’ll face the death by snu snu that he always wanted, and then realize that it isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
If someone had told me when this comic started that I would be this invested in Joe’s romance arc, I would have laughed in their face.
Does Joe even cuddle? Like post one-nightstand cuddle?
Was there a Joe/Roz cuddle
He too may be afraid of cuddling! Roz would definitely not be into it, didn’t she shove Joe out into the cold naked?
That was Malaya, and he still had his shirt on.
Oh god Joe and Joyce bonding over getting over their cuddle-based anxieties together might actually be too adorable for words…
I love how they talk through their issues. They have a lot of staying power, I think!
ya, after months of Joe being “feelings, gross”, it’s good to see him so comfortable, and her with him, that they actually communicate.
He was doing that in public while also providing her text support through “my mother is defending my friend’s dad who pointed a gun at me” and “my parents are apparently not a homogeneous unit and I am SHOOK and don’t know how to process this. I definitely don’t trust my mother and don’t know if I can trust my dad…” and “So it turns out if I channel that horrible churning RAGE I can do useful things like punch out window frames so Becky can do things like retrieve important paperwork so maybe the RAGE is good..? But it’s also not much fun to live with”…
They might not have been their feelings directly that he was talking about, but he had clearly opened up enough to her about his experiences that she trusted him. He gave her good advice and support before he decided to double down on being a douche and shag Malaya…
Face to face emoting is harder for both of them, and Joyce has only recently admitted to having a libido but these kids have been communicating and connecting emotionally for a while.
Yeah. And I think those private convos are part of why Joyce was annoyed at Joe for presenting the horndog “I can’t change” front in public. She had evidence otherwise. Which is also evidence the rest of the cast is unaware of, as far as I can recall.
aggressive cuddling is dangerous; kids.
always use protection.
Just imagining protective sleeves you wear over your arms.
Like the ones they use for providing medical treatment to livestock?
The ones they use to train police dogs.
Ah, the Condarm
In my sleep, I’ve been known to attempt to snuggle people clear off the bed. Like, they move so they have a little room, and I cuddle closer in my sleep, so they move again, and we repeat — til there’s no more bed.
It’s a good thing that these lofts have railings.
With an ex of mine, I could snuggle him veeery gently on one side of me, or on my other side I had the Glomping Pillow. This way, if I wanted to aggressively hug, then I’d turn towards the pillow, so as not to smother the space-needing fellow off the bed / to death.
My husband can handle all the cuddles I want to give him, though. It is meant to be.
Aaw! My husband and I started off cohabiting sharing a single bed. We quickly learnt I needed to be on the wall side so he didn’t push me out of bed in his sleep… Now he just tries to lie on top of me!
Well that’s adorable.
I wasn’t ready for feels this early in the morning.
They should break into Robin’s house and cuddle there.
I really hope this works out for these two, they’re so honest and open with eachother and they’re so willing to learn about and take the time to understand eachother. I really think this might stick, at least until they both figure out what they want out of life.
I wonder what would happen if Joe just…asked what Joyce was afraid of. Does she actually have an answer for herself yet?
well they both know joyce has repressed hangups about sexuality and religion but it would be hilarious if we flash forward to them being married and them having a weekly sex schedule or so
I think we all kind of know it’s a very complex and messy web of shame and obedience to authority. She calls birth control “hussy pills” after all. I imagine we’ll see it in the following few strips but it’s gotta be something like “if I’m awake then I know for certain I didn’t subconsciously do any hanky-panky stuff in my sleep.”
RE alt test: That thing you OVERdo?
So basically, given the opportunity, Joyce would DESTROY Joe.
That’s why normalcy isn’t Joyce’s middle name. She’s still undergoing deconstruction of moral sense of the self. Not Dorothy-level yet, but she’ll end up there anyway someday.
you’re such a tease, alt
Oh god this was my favorite movie as a child for a while??
Joe has very violently shot up to my favorite character
like, suddenly, and very hard?
–Dave, … in the morning?
Heh.
Happy.
It’s still kinda upsetting that Sarah and/or Dorothy’s words seem to have stuck with Joe, and he now sees himself as some sorta monster that Joyce would be afraid to approach.
and probably thinking about liz, considering she said ‘i almost ruined myself forever’ (which is a valid feeling/you don’t have to rush to get rid of your virginity but that’s not something i’d say outloud for the other person to hear)
Very common for people who have done bad things in their life that they regret, AKA almost every adult.
Some people double down because they can’t imagine themselves becoming a good person. Joe is going the harder route and doing splendidly.
Also, related
I don’t think it’s Sarah’s or Dorothy’s words that hit Joe, but Joyce’s. About the time the Do List was published Ryan attacked Dorothy and Amber, and that’s when Joyce shared with Joe her being attacked by Ryan.
FINALLY I can read the comic from my phone :’)
Anyway, glad that it was in this wholesome strip
CUTENESS INTENSIFIES.
You were getting the too many headings horror (thanks autocorrect! I wanted to say “error” but we’ll go with it) too?
It was letting me read the comic page on the day, but not go back if I missed one or see comics, and it was a one time view only thing…
JOE IS ONLY IN THIS FOR THE MELODRAMA FOLKS
–Dave, er, comma after melodrama
Commas are important people!
The melodrama folks are sad now.
Yeah, but they’re always sad. That’s what makes them happy.
*places back of hand to forehead and swoons backward onto fainting couch*
*offers smelling salts, a cat, and a discussion on whether in fact the rent can be paid*
”Let me go crazy on you” -Heart
Panel Four Joyce is my inner (and not so inner) spirit self.
Omg!!!!! They’re so cute!!!!! As a neurodivergent person, lowkey love how Joe loves Joyce in part because of her autism, not in spite of it. Like holy shit, they were already one of the cutest couples but this fills my heart with such butterflies!
God, they’re so cute together. I think they could mutually fix each other. (<–Foreshadowing)
OSBGVOSDBGSDHFGSD MY HEART !!!!!!!!! JOSEPH YOU SLY BASTARD
I had this exact conversation with my ex. She never really understood why I was in love with her, why I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. She broke up with me and broke my heart. Wasted a quarter of my life pursuing that dead end. So…don’t always assume they will understand why you love and are in love with them.
Joyce, honey, I think part of the problem here is that your concept of what is a “normal amount” has been horrifically skewed by your upbringing.
She THINKS she’s some insane hornymonster when in fact, her degree of horniness is entirely normal and she’s just been made to THINK she’s abnormal.
That is probably exactly it, yes. Oof. Her family’s churches have a lot to answer for, and also, as always, Carol is the worst for being such a massive bongo.
Ehhhh.
I agree that there is nothing wrong with Joyce’s level of sexual desire and that she has been made to feel intense shame about it, but we’ve gotten a fair few hints that she has a pretty high libido. Her level of horniness is normal in the sense that the human species contains lots of perfectly natural and healthy variation, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be average.
Nice rendering of a lopsided smile.
TBH, Joyce in panel 4 is a healthy level of self-awareness for a neurospicy.
It’s terrible how deep her sex-negative indoctrination goes that her desire to boink Joe feels worse than anything she suspects he’s ever done sexually………