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Joe Chouinard @joechoui.bsky.social ⋅ 8m
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mccloud
Leslie death flags incoming!
What do you mean, she’ll be right back and everything will be okay! She just gotta wear this red shirt, in and out, perfect heist — And she’ll confess to the love of her life right after, too!
This is her last day on the job as a beat cop before retirement, incidentally…
And it’ll all be over by Christmas, anyways.
Once she catches this one last perp, she can finally retire and sail around the world on the Live-4-Ever.
You know, it’d be funny to have a character that flies every single death flag and then… just doesn’t die. Like ever. Somehow they overloaded the system and walked away with immortality.
Soon as this job is done she’s gonna buy that farm
“I swear ta God Arth- er, Becky. One more job and we retire to Tahiti!”
I believe you’re thinking of the Walkyverse. No one dies in the Dumbiverse but Mike (and I’m pretty sure he’s in Witness Protection)
Blaine? Toedad? All the chickens in Walky’s nugs?
No, see – those two are nobodies, so they get to die.
Like the chickens in Walky’s nuggets, they were created to die.
NOOO! :O
re: alt text, she’s ALWAYS been, and not even this is her final form >:3
NEW STORYLINE? IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY? YO?
oh wait I think it’s a mistake LOL
Nope.
…Chuck Testa…
I am not familiar with this meme.
Taigan isn’t beating the meme illiteracy allegations
Me neither. I am very confused
i would’ve expected her to absorb memes from amber before becky tho i imagine their tastes would vary lol
If a person has a trait that is obvious to everyone, one could say “They are never beating the (has that trait) allegations. This is to say, even if you tried to tell people you don’t (have that trait), no one would believe you. Pleading not guilty to (having that trait) would be indefensible in court. It doesn’t have to be, but its especially effective if the (trait) is something mildly embarrassing or that someone wouldn’t want to have thought about them, in a “methinks the lady doth protest too much” kinda way.
Its hard to summon a better example, but if you had a friend who kept mentioning “Jason” or talking about texting “Jason” or seeing “Jason” around places, you could say “Never beating the Jason stalker allegations”
Upvoted. Thank you.
Ruth is never beating the Jason stalker allegations
I worry Ruth is just beating Jason instead
“Do I no longer give you ‘the lady boner’?”
I wonder what’s going on with Becky anyway. I never expected someone so outwardly confident in her identity to be so shaken by the idea of fluidity.
Her stable life got shaken up by an abrupt mon suicide, maybe??
And an abrupt kidnapping by her dad. Then an abrupt kidnapping of her girlfriend and friends by someone elses’s dad who abruptly beat her dad to death with a hammer.
Reminder: ask Willis to do backstory series on Becky’s mom’s self unliving. Patreon will do
It’s because of how hard she had to fight to be a lesbian. Her dad chased her with a gun over it and kidnapped her.
Also, her being a lesbian is THE certainty in her life, which has been extremely tragic and tumoltuous, and her identity is something she can hold onto and be confident in.
Yeah I feel like why the idea of a central pillar of your identity shifting away is upsetting to Becky in specific is pretty obvious?
Also, the idea that she doesn’t HAVE to be something.
Becky said she’d rather die than be straight or lose her identity as a lesbian. Which then caused her a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) when she realized that she’d unwittingly endorsed suicide (which claimed her mom) and then realized she’d made her sexuality worth dying over (which endorsed her dad). Which, honestly, is totally unfair to herself and a whole different kettle of fish when it’s **your** identity over something imposed on you but is her trying to just cling to something certain in a very chaotic time.
That was during the Night of the Drunken Whatever with Dina supplying the stolen booze right?
I believe so, yeah.
She literally says it out loud to the audience in this very strip. I was about to comment about how it felt a recurring example of how I think “character loudly announces the subtext as a gag ” never works well in DoA.
I just find it curious that fluidity is specifically the trigger for her anxiety and not the several other reasons kind commenters have mentioned in this thread.
Because “if its fluid” she could have “waited out the gay” and her dad would be alive. If her mom knew she could have “Waited out the gay” And not killed herself.
That her entire life got upended and it’s *not* a certainty that it was destroyed for a *real* reason? that’s terrifying.
She thinks she just “Dad at the ending of The Mist”ed her entire life.
Would her dad being alive be good?
Yes, because then he could die again.
If being gay isn’t a fixed thing then reducing it down to being a choice isn’t illogical (and the IDEA of having to type that had me wincing like I was tasting curdled milk) and then her dad and their old church aren’t exactly wrong, per se, either… And then that means she’s a terrible evil daughter who got her father killed through her waywardness and should have been beaten more and was probably somehow responsible for her mother’s death too… In her own head, at least
It’s fixed. It’s the understanding of it that’s not fixed.
Largely, this is because of cultural oppression.
Imagine, if you will, that society told you were told since a child that “Brunette is the only valid color of hair. Being a ginger is evil”.
To counter this, your parents told you that you ‘had a medical condition of the scalp’ that required a ‘special shampoo’. Unbeknowst to you, the shampoo has dye in it. As you get up in years, you have excruciating scalp itch as a persistant problem so much so that your scratching causes your face to be perpetually have a trickle of blood, so you see the doctor and they tell you that the shampoo is giving you itchy scalp, so you switch. Within a a couple nights, the itching is gone, your scalp begins healing, and you don’t have blood everywhere anymore.
However, slowly, the dye starts to wash out instead of being refreshed each time you shower.
You realize, “Huh, I’m not as brunette as a thought… I thought I was jet black, but it’s more of an auburn…” then, as time goes on, more of the dye that was forced on you washed out, and it’s like, “oh no… I”m actually a red head! I’m a ginger!” You begin freaking out, and whether you try to hide it or try to start fighting for ginger rights becomes a big question. But that scalp itch was so painful, you can’t really go back. Fight for your rights, it is.
But little do you know, not all the dye is washed out yet. A few more months go by, and your hair continues to lighten… strawberry red, then full on blonde.
You’re now confronted by a new experience… you experienced being ginger, you fought for being ginger, but… you’re actually blonde. Society understands Blondes even less than being Ginger… your identity was stripped away again.
You COULD choose to go back to harming yourself by dying your hair.
You CHOSE to stop dying your hair.
You COULD choose to try a red hair dye and try to force yourself to be blonde.
But in reality, you don’t have a choice, you ARE blonde, it’s just a matter of choosing to hide it or not.
It’s really the same way for coming out as LGBTQIA+.
Society forces a lot of norms and patterns that are harmful to you if you’re LGBTQIA+, and it takes a lot of time for the old norms to fall away, revealing the nuance underneath, and sometimes more bad habits need to fade few times before revealing the full picture.
For example, if you have a trans man, forced by his family to be a perfect princess. He rips up the dresses, and insists on being like the boys. His parents eventually relent after racking up $2000 in destroyed clothes, and eventually “let” him be a tomboy, a habit his family still tries to break with limited success. He feels better than he has before. When he gets to college, he may first think he’s a lesbian. Girls are hot and like him back. He starts playing into the butch lesbian stereotypes; he chops wood, wears flannel, and burps after drinking a beer. These things scratch an itch, but but they’re not what he needs. He gets irritable, yells at his girlfriends when they grab his boobs, and due to his slowly mounting internal trauma… he realized the beers and flannel aren’t enough to solve the problem just ease it a bit, the ‘itch’ is still there, bleeding out. Then, he learns what a trans man is… it’s like a breath of fresh air, it fits and everything screams in him, “this is the direction”. He get’s on Testosterone, and the mental bleeding itch goes away almost instantly. He’s getting stronger, faster, and a mental fog he’s been fighting is lifted. He starts growing facial hair. However, the lesbians start giving him a disgusted look. He’s the epitome of a lumberjack at this point. They were his community for awhile, but that’s not who he is. He’s a straight trans man, and starts dating straight women (both cis and trans) instead.
Him being a trans man was never a choice, it was there from the beginning. If it had been presented as a possible outcome as a small child, he would have taken it in a heartbeat. But the pressures by society had to be peeled away, layer by layer. The only choices he had was whether to keep hiding in pain, or to be himself.
It’s even more fun when you lose most of your support structure by realizing you’re gay, and have to form a new support structure around that identity…
Then realize you weren’t just gay, but bisexual, and having your second support structure act exactly like the first one because biphobia is a cancer in the Community.
Not that I”m talking from experience or anything.. hahahahaaa…a a…
But that’s different, I think.
That is a common experience. Especially for trans people, but also for lesbians and gay men. Repression of their true nature, even to themselves due to social pressure to cis-heteronormativity.
We’re talking here about the opposite possibility. About someone like Becky who’s had to fight to be able to live as a lesbian worried that’ll change. That she could actually start to like boys. Prompted by Jocelyne telling her she’s starting to like girls.
I don’t think that’s the thought process. Becky likes who she’s become, she’s staked out an identity she’s comfortable with and a live she likes living, and the fear comes from the idea that she could lose that too.
I think there’s the less, “I could be straight” than, “What if Dina becomes straight?” too.
Especially since Dina said “I am uncertain if gender expression matters to me” to Joyce back when they started dating.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/item/
Or what if Joyce “becomes” bi and still doesn’t want Becky…
Much of Becky’s outward confidence is a brittle shell over deep insecurity.
That describes about half the characters here and it’s amazing how often commenters accept the mask.
We like to give them the benefit of the doubt. Or dumb. The benefit of the dumb.
A lot of her outward confidence is a mask. Becky’s had a lot of upheavals in her life in a very short amount of time. Her mom died last spring, so coming up on a year anniversary of that passing, and then you have Becky trying to go to Christian college, only to be pulled out by her dad, a stint as a homeless teen, her dad died, and although she’s starting to get back to some stability now as she’s going back to college, I imagine the future has to be terrifying for her to think about. Nevertheless the idea that she could become ‘not a lesbian’ in the future.
True. See also: “I’m fun, I’m loud, and I’m not this…stupid mess, okay? Who wants to hang around someone who’s rejected, homeless, and a bummer? Nobody thats who. Folks can sniff that on ya from miles away.” – Becky 2015
wait only a year?
that means that the shooting happened, what, a few weeks into college? wow, Toedad didn’t waste any time at all trying to ruin his daughter’s life, did he?
About a month in yeah.
Yeah before I made my comment I double checked for myself because I wasn’t sure when Becky’s mom died. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/05-as-long-as-its-free/spring/ For some reason I always assumed she had died, like, a year or two prior to the beginning of the school year but nope! They just passed her mom’s first late birthday, so it’s still kinda fresh. I’ll admit my first year without my mom was mainly spent in, like, a bit of a depressive haze. Becky seems better outwardly, but only because she’s had so much shit go down and only because she’s putting up a front.
She’s outwardly secure because inside she’s a mess.
She lost everything she ever cared about by being true to herself. In her head, her dad died because she stayed true to herself. Her friends were kidnapped and Mike *died* because of her.
Leslie then put it into her head (Completely unintended, but that’s where she took the lesson) that her mom might have been queer, and that’s why she offed herself.
And now, Leslie is talking about how your sexual orientation can change. The thing that utterly imploded her life maybe *isn’t* set in stone.
What if it really was “just a phase” And everyone suffered and her dad died for nothing?
that’s what running though her head right now. She’s wrong, of course. but that guilt isn’t going anywhere for a long while. especially since she’s not seeing any kind of therapist, as far as I can tell.
Becky is still incredibly brainwashed by her religion and trauma. She still thinks that everything is her fault (she’s getting much better at it, i.e. “it was just me being stupid”) and, until proven otherwise, still thinks becoming an atheist is a sin.
Poor girl has gone through it. Remember in the last year (in comic), her mother has died to suicide. Which Becky was lied to about, and only found out about later. She left high school and went to college, got kicked out of college, and became homeless. Her abusive, violent father kidnapped her, and threatened her friends with a rifle. Then came back, was accessory to a murder, kidnapped her friends and friends’ friends, and was himself murdered, all on account of getting her back into the cult she was born into. The man who murdered her father kidnapped her best friend and engaged in a high speed chase across town. All this while she was under the stresses of sabotaging a congressional campaign. Not to mention that she was rejected by Joyce romantically, which she had built up in her head over years. This is more trauma than most people get in a life time.
This all happened while she’s still a teenager, still going through the same life changes every teen goes through as they leave high school and move on to their adult lives. She’s 19 years old. Still technically homeless. A college kid with all the stress that entails. And she grew up abused in a cult, with a hyper controlling psychopath of a father who saw her as a piece of property and raised her to be such. She still adheres at least in part to the tenants of that cult, which are damaging at best.
All she really has is her identity, which she literally lost her entire life over. Her family is gone, the cult family she was raised in took the side of her abusive father and treated her as a pariah at best, her home she grew up in is foreclosed by now. Even her best friend’s changed; abandoning the same cult and rejecting it entirely, viciously. While Joyce’s family is also breaking apart under a divorce. A family she saw as her own second, slightly saner family.
The thought that her identity could shift is terrifying because to her traumatized self, that’s all she really has left. And if she “loses” her lesbianism? Why is her father dead? What value was losing her family, home and everything she knew growing up and nearly all her friends for something that might change down the line?
Yep, all of this ^. Having been in a less dramatic but similar place to Becky in the past being willing to get to ‘maybe this isn’t as set in stone as I thought’ is a challenging step to take that took me way more years to even consider. While my answer is fundamentally that my identity as a queer person is what I thought it was, the thing Becky will take time to understand is she lost all that not for her queerness but the humanright to question identity in the first place.
I should add that I’m not saying she lost her family/cult/etc because SHE did something. She lost it because her family and cult were bigots. But fundamentally from a personal narrative she did lose them and her identity as ‘counter to all of their bigotry’ is still playing a big part in that narrative.
I don’t think *Becky* was lied to about it – I think in the part of the story where they break into her home to find paperwork, there’s some flashback scenes that seem to indicate Becky found her mom after (looked like she took a load of pills). *Joyce* however was lied to about what happened – was told she had cancer.
Wait Becky found her mom on the bed when she passed. Joyce was the one lied to about it
Good thing Becky isn’t meta-aware otherwise her brain might break at the idea of a sliding timescale.
I actually made that a plot point in my superhero books.
The protagonist deals with cosmic entities who have been keeping time from moving on for almost a century so it can continue watching superhero fights.
Dang. When the Greek Chorus is actively interfering with the dramatics…that’s an Everyman or Our Town I’d like to see.
Heh, just last night I saw a story whose narrator was one of the characters. Everybody can see and talk with him, but he keeps saying, “I’m the narrator, I’m not supposed to get involved.” Then he involves himself to make the ending happen.
Neat! What’s the title?
This is where Always Sunny would bring up a “Leslie Gets Fired” title card.
I mean if robin is still working on campus it’d take a lot for leslie to get fired at this point
She just started the beginning of this semester. Robin would have to do something like Blain and ToeDad to get fired that quickly. She’s only been working maybe 3 weeks at this point.
It would probably be Robin’s fault somehow
how was this one not titled shouldna taughtcha howta
Language is so much fun!
Dumbing Of Age Book 15: Shouldna Taughtcha Howta Meme
“Why would the idea of fluid sexuality concern me? It’s not like my entire life imploded and my father died because I realized I’m gay! And the idea that I could change back and none of this needed to happen isn’t a black hole of terror and shame about my choices!”
“That’s not how this works Becky.”
“ISN’T IT?!”
(Bear in mind **I** know none of this happened because of her, but she’s rocking every kind of guilt, and a few new ones, so you know she’s still harboring FEELINGS about everything that happened.)
Yep, I think you’re spot on here.
Yup.
Becky’s never really dealt with WHY her dad was evil, or that he just WAS.
+1!
Don’t make promises to college kids like that.
Half of them move across the state, a quarter across the country, and 10% across the globe.
And I can back all of those stats up, so long as you never ask for the sources.
TO be FAIR its Leslie, her whole character arch was basically “be a lesbian mother” in shortpacked! So now she can be one for an adopted lesbian!
The numbers track mostly, way I see it. My original college crew of 11 are now 4 still in-town, 5 outta town but in-state, and 2 outta country.
What is Becky freaking out over?
Is it the idea that Dina might not consider herself a girl anymore and that Becky will no longer be a lesbian?
Or is she scared of anything new because of all the trauma?
I assumed that she was worried that dina wasn’t a lesbian and was going to leave her
I think it’s mostly the idea that Becky herself could change. The idea that the identity she’s fought tooth and nail to build for herself and she finally feels comfortable with might just stop working for her at some point
It can also just be both as sexuality being fixed is fundamental to a LOT of things she believes in from Dina being in to her to Joyce not being into her.
Yeah, I’m agreeing. Becky seems a bit scared she could change in some fundamental-identity sort of way.
Por qué no los dos?
“A fatherless girl thinks all things are possible, and nothing is safe.” – Mary Gordon
“And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down.” C.S. Lewis
Her life is/was all over the place, especially in recent memory. The only thing that Becky (thinks she) has that’s stable is her sexual identity. It’s the foundation of the rest of her identity, her person. To learn that (for some) this is not stable is freaking her out
That makes sense, and I can’t blame her, but I hope time, and Dina can help her have an identity that isn’t just “Joyce’s Lesbian Best Friend.”
I mean what’d you expect? This is literally the first time in her life she’s ever been able to actually HAVE an identity of her own, hence cults’ well known tendencies to engage in Personality Control 0-0
Becky’s afraid that her choices got her dad killed.
The whole ‘never ever dies’ part might also remind people that Becky’s mom’s suicide is also a really big point of her, and she really beat herself up after Jennifer’s lesbian suicide pact reveal when she found out.
been touchy for a long time
“static characters? Becky, this is DoA”
Dead or Alive? I don’t remember this comic featuring a Sexy Volleyball Island.
That’s the secret Patreon.
Teacher, is this memes??
Dina what’s your socials I want to follow you for more epic memery
Dina as well as a few other cast members actually had their own Twitter accounts IRRC,
but I’m surprised they still haven’t canonically moved unto Bluesky
No no I can’t IMAGINE what kind of traumatic experiences Becky might have had involving violent change, or an amount of experience she’s had with having to fight for her sexual identity that might make the idea of those feelings changing really uncomfortable.
which. like. i’ll be real: i think is p normal around this age with this kinda circumstance. if you’re just fresh off of agonizing and repressing and fighting and losing things for this incredibly important part of yourself, you might not be in the best place to then like. Internalize the idea of those feelings changing.
it can feel like being told it WILL happen to YOU or YOUR GIRLFRIEND bc you have a lot of feelings about the idea. Instead of a neutral fact of life.
das all. Becky remains da best shes also still like. not even 20 yet.
Dude. Dina was ALWAYS unstoppable.
you can’t put the meme genie back into the meme bottle.
lol i need to see a page/strip of her starting with the ‘babe wake up’ meme
Dina is the BEST at memes, Becky.
+1!
i love Dina so much
“I’ll always be here for you, no matter what happens.”
Okay, what if I stab you to death, then salt and burn your corpse so you can’t haunt me? What then, smartypants?
Jokes on you, now I’m smoked, salted, and preserved like a country ham. Impervious to the ravages of time and decay.
let’s see how impervious they are to sliced bread, cheddar slices and mustard in my midnight snack :9
Double jokes on you. Like the giving tree, I have given you the gift of my whole self. The love and care I felt for you will now be a part of you for the rest of your life, no matter what happens.
I mean the body’s cells and atoms are continuously replaced just about every day, so that’s a solid maybe.
But hey, no denying that was one tasty sammich, so thank you anyway :9
The Sammich of Theseus?
I feel like brutally murdering someone is a great way to have their metaphorical spectre haunting you for the rest of your life, even if you manage to avoid getting haunted by their actual spectre.
Incidentally in my experience salting and burning the body doesn’t do shit to prevent them from haunting you, it just makes the ghost angrier
In this thread, Thag Simmons has admitted to digging up graves and defiling corpses on at least one occasion. This is almost certainly a felony, which Thag is 100% definitely guilty of IRL and will do again if given the chance.
It’s only a felony in 27 states.
Where are you getting the digging up graves part. That sounds wildly inefficient
I was wondering about the digging up part as well. The context was clearly after brutally murdering someone. Something that is a felony in all 50 states unless self defense was involved, or in Texas, if your lawyer can unofficially convince a jury that they needed murdering.
I’m honestly kind of insulted. If you’re taking preventative measures when the body’s already in the ground you’re already too late.
Like any good lawyer, I took creative liberties to make you look worse.
Always a good idea to punch up the language a bit.
Those are the sort of liberties that get your case thrown out of court.
Not if I salt and burn the judge as well.
Well, I would respect the audacity if nothing else.
I am concerned about your interpretation of “hung jury”.
Tell it to the judge, jerky-maker.
How wide is your experience? And should we worry?
My lawyer has encouraged me to not answer this question
Re: Exorcisms of the Restless dead
I think you have to bind the spirit first before salting and destroying the body. Otherwise, it just moves to other fetters.
They’re separate processes really, they prevent different sorts of undead. The burning’s actually pretty good at stopping the body from getting up again, but that’s pretty rare to begin with and it’s not going to prevent the spirit from manifesting as an incorporeal phantasm. It’s also liable to really piss the spirit off, which is generally a bad play
I was mostly thinking of the jealousy in response to a possible JoycexDorothy kiss of chaos 2K25 but the aspect of Joyce changing being what freaks Becky out the most is narratively juicy
Dina’s saying what we’re all thinking
Mere seconds later, the Dean walked into the classroom and fired Leslie on the spot.
Well, that’s what she gets for sleeping with students.
“No, I don’t know why I’m doing this, I just felt a sudden compulsion.”
This would be a great thing for Leslie to say if she wasn’t in a narrative sensitive to the dramatic tempting of fate.
I wonder if Becky is more afraid of the people around her changing, or the possibility of herself changing in the future.
I think it’s explicitly the latter, iirc Becky has expressed once before that the thought of the possibility of someday not being a lesbian anymore literally made her want to die.
It’s too late now, Becky.
On the contrary, dear Becky; Dina’s meme-ing is perfection!
Starting to wonder if Becky might be questioning her gender identity and it’s freaking her out.
Jocelyne showing up and talking about her sexuality changing kinda makes me think she’s not.
Don’t put your hands on students, Leslie. It’s called the Nosferatu rule for a reason.
I mean, it’s not but I assume it’s there to prevent vampire teachers from going for the throat.
Jokes aside, its a bit strange seeing becky so weird about gender fluidity, especially in regard to Dina, who i dont recall even really expressing much interestin identifying as anything other than female with she/her pronouns (but my memory can be shoddy)
Like I know “Being a lesbian” is her whole thing in-universe and what she built how she portrays herself to literally everyone, but even if Dina were to be more gender fluid.. Becky is still a lesbian, if that is how she still wants to identify.
Sexual fluidity is more her worry. She’s not worried Dina will no longer be a girl – she’s worried that their (especially her own) sexuality will change.
Since the comic made her a primary character her entire ethos has been “I am a lesbian” and now there’s things introduced that have shaken that grounding.
What? Dina is evolving!
Dun dunn dun dunn dun dunn dun DUNNNNNN dun dunn dun dunn dun dunn dun DUNNNNN
Congratulations! Dina evolved into MEMELORD!
Dina has learned Meme IRL!
Poor Becky doesn’t realize it’s not about her that sexual fluidity is being explored.
It’s about Dorothy.