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Chandra is a 12-year-old accidental time traveler with a reluctant new dad, who happens to be a member of a feared galactic crime syndicate.
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David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
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I always found that argument funny, because I’ve read up on Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, and have worked in non-euclidian geometry and discrete mathematics.
And one thing I can say for certain about math is: Nothing is certain.
Seriously, not even 1+1=2 is certain.
For example, in discrete math, it’s math for ‘things that loop’, and so the numbers loop… so like if your minimum number is 0 and your maximum number is 36, 35+3 is 1. Technically, you can set the maximum at 1 (this would be like doing the math for a blinking diode). At which point 1 + 1 = 0.
And you pull in non-euclidian geometry, there’s a lot of variations where, depending on the initial rules you set down, you can make 1 + 1 = [Pretty much whatever your heart desires.]
And if you’re the type who obsesses over “what’s real” with math, like some dirty physicist, well, there’s pretty solid evidence that spacetime itself is non-euclidan and we don’t know WHAT the base metrics for it are.
In high school they just teach on one family of math, Euclidian. In college you learn, “ha ha ha, everything you learned before now? That was a joke.”
You get fun stuff like parallel lines intersecting (non-euclidean geometry), infinities bigger than other infinities (aleph 2), dividing by zero being a normal every day thing (Calculus has entered the chat), 1+1=0 (Discrete math says hi), cups without holes (Topology coughs nervously), math that looks more like philosophy than math (Set Theory glances around nervously), philosophy that looks more like math than philosophy (Logic is feeling called out), math that is primarily used to lie (Statistics tries to hides it face), and much, much more.
But common core? That’s not a different kind of math. It’s the same math as ever. It’s just arithmetic. Only difference is that it’s teaching how to do short division instead of long division (as well as the short version of everything else). It’s a little harder to grasp at first, but once you learn it, you can do math in your head MUCH faster.
“[L]ike some dirty physicist” Hahahaha! (much LOL!)
I’m no physicist, myself, being an old English major. But I’m a big fanboy.
I’m most amused at the sight of mathematicians and physicists throwing shade at each other.
Non-euclidian just means geometry on a curved surface, of course the universe is non-euclidian, we only have a single horror writer who hated math slightly more than minorities to thank for “non-euclidian” being a word for OH GOD WHAT IS THAT THING DOING
“Hooray for new math
New-hoo-hoo math!
It won’t do you a bit of good to review math
It’s so simple
So very simple
That only a child can do it!” ~ Tom Lehrer, New Math
Oohhh. I get it. Shucks, I was using base-8 for the tens unit and base-12 for the ones unit. (’cause base-8 and base-12 average out to base-10, see?) Heck, I was doing it wrong.
No, pan isn’t on the kinsey scale, not enough axes. Complex would be closer but still not enough and the idea that anything outside the 0 to 6 is imaginary doesn’t make that any better.
Bisexuality is only 2 – 4, anything below 2 or above 4 is just “incidental” and not identifying. 0.5 means you’ve never touched or been touched intimately by someone of your gender, and you haven’t wanted to. Since Kinsey score is generally associated with fluidity, there’s always room to slide in between.
If you want to get technical, bisexuality isn’t on the Kinsey scale, either, since it’s a measurement of your sexual activity with the only two genders Kinsey was acknowledging. It’s not 0=straight, 3=bi, 6=gay. It’s 0=you’ve only had sexual encounters with “””the opposite””” gender, 6=you’ve only had sexual encounters with “the same” gender, 3 for equal amounts of both, X for no sexual encounters with anyone.
Also bi does not mean you’re only attracted to two genders and it’s not inherently transphobic, anymore than straight or gay are inherently transphobic.
Bi has meant “attraction to more than one” gender since at least the Bi Manifesto was published in 1990, and it’s always included nonbinary and trans folks. It’s fine to prefer pan as a label for oneself, and certainly it is sometimes used by folks to explicitly signal their interest in and validation of nonbinary genders, but only bi people get to define bisexuality, period.
People who study these things are now saying the range isn’t from straight on one end to gay on the other. The range is from straight or gay on one end to bi on the other. I don’t remember where I got this, and I didn’t see the rationale.
How you label the axes doesn’t really address my point, though, which is that Kinsey’s original scale was measuring homosexual versus heterosexual behavior, not measuring anybody’s identities, and didn’t take nonbinary or intersex people into account even as objects of potential sexual interest, much less as subjects whose expressed sexual interest could further throw off the simplistic scale.
I’m not saying 0-6 aren’t useful for some people, mind you. Especially as kind of a baby step to introducing the idea of fluidity and spectrums. I’m just saying that if Risky is going to argue that pan people aren’t on the scale, we have to also acknowledge that bi people aren’t really on the scale, either.
No one is, because it’s never been about your sexual orientation, only about your sexual behavior (because that’s easier to measure).
And in that sense I have no problem with it, for real.
idk the “pan isn’t on the scale because it would need more axes” claim really got to me, it only makes sense if you’ve got a very narrow definition of bi, one which bi activists have been fighting against since like… forever.
Honestly if I had to guess the rationale probably looks something like at one end we have strict preference for sex characteristics and/or gender presentation and at the far other end we have no sex characteristics or gender presentation based preferences full stop, with most people in between. It does feel intuitive to me that absent cultural stuff the monosexuality to pansexuality spectrum feels more relevant than what genders the monosexuality is pointed at.
Unrelated tangent, it’s eternally frustrating that the words we use for this stuff are based on the similarity or difference of your gender to the partner’s gender. Why does my sexuality change if I trans my gender if who I’m attracted to has not changed at all? Language is stupid.
This kinda thing is why so many of us eventually just go “fuck it I’m queer”. When your gender starts going sideways, but your attraction to everyone still feels just as gay as it ever did, the descriptive utility of them for your feelings gets increasingly questionable.
Which isn’t to say everybody ALWAYS winds up identifying as queer or that other labels are bad or less useful for everyone, etc etc. Plenty of people instead expand the definition of a given label and that’s absolutely an equally valid strategy.
It’s the same thing that gave us the pan / bi divide in the first place, really: some multisexual folks went, “I need a new word that includes the full spectrum of human gender,” and other mutlisexual people went, “I need to reclaim this word society imposed on me and redefine it so that it includes the full spectrum of human gender,” and both strategies are fine actually.
Not that I’d ever police anybody’s self identifications. But if we’re talking about definitions, then:
There is no functional difference between pansexuality and bisexuality. And I say this as someone who used to identify as pan like 18 years ago. Any differences are so minute that they might as well not exist. Because no two people experience attraction in exactly the same way. So trying to make some official sounding objective explanation of differences is ultimately meaningless.
Interesting. I always found the standard definitions– pan being “attraction regardless of gender” and bi being “attraction to two or more genders” to be… pretty understandably different. Like, I understand there are similarities, and anyone’s actual subjective experience is theirs alone to describe. It just doesn’t seem “so minute that they might as well not exist” from the definitions.
This might be useful for you. Another famous definition of bisexuality was the one offered by Robyn Ochs, aka The Mother of Pride, who described her own bisexuality as: “the potential to be attracted—romantically and/or sexually—to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.”
Some folks have definitely tried to carve out exclusive definitions so that bi means being attracted to fewer genders than pan, but mmmooooostly I’ve heard that from:
a.) crypto TERFs trying to sew discord and get bi and pan people to fight over which label is “better” (by for example making “PSA” posts where they pretend to be a trans-inclusive biphobic pan person and say stuff like “remember, only pansexuals are attracted to nonbinary people!”) (or vice-versa, where they pose as panphobic bi people, and try to argue that you can’t be attracted to nonbinary people without fetishizing them)
b.) young pan people who have been sucked in by the above arguments, or who are insecure in the validity of their own label, so they try to define bi as smaller than it is in order to make room for pan
c.) transphobic bi people who want to pretend that the bi label somehow means “attraction only to cis men and cis women, the only two genders”
Mainstream bi orgs and bi activists, meanwhile, always seem to have much broader definitions to reflect the fact that there are more than two genders and that bi is not and has never been binary.
I don’t think you’re really disagreeing? The Robyn Ochs definition at least is basically a longer version of the one Yumi gave.
And there’s nothing in Yumi’s two definitions that even implies bi applies to fewer genders than pan does.
@thejeff: If it doesn’t seem like I’m disagreeing with Yumi, then I really failed to express myself. Fair enough.
My objection is basically this:
Bi people didn’t create the term bisexual. It was created to describe non-human organisms like plants or earthworms. It was a synonym for a word I don’t even want to type because it’s also used as a slur for intersex people. That is where the “two” comes from.
There have been plenty of attempts to rehabilitate that two, to justify it, whether as “same and different” or as “two or more” — but not all bi people want the two in there. Most bi orgs reject it. Plenty of bi people consider “regardless of gender” to also describe them.
So, again I ask: standard definitions according to whom? If bi orgs and bi activists don’t get to be the source for a “standard” definition of bisexuality, who does?
(Pansexual is also a reclaimed identity, for the record. It was coined to describe hypersexual people, derogatorily! Almost all of our identity words have this type of origin. )
That depends on how big the bra is. If my girlfriend wore bras, I could probably do it. Never tried with my FWB, but probably could if I tried. They’ve both got pretty huge boobies.
He knows she’s a perfectionist in everything she does. No way she’ll be just a 0.5 or 1.0 Ultimately she’ll achieve 6.0 status, so halfway there is 3.0. But she hasn’t had time yet to get halfway to her realizations. So, yeah, 2.0 to 2.5 is a good start. Easy calculations. It’s just math.
They reek of school friends who were middle to low popular, and when puberty hit, they just hooked up. Joe was probably Danny’s social anchor, while Dottie got mean girl’ed because she was a lisa simpson.
Weirdly enough, this interaction has me wondering if Dorothy/Joyce is going to even happen, or painful heartbreaking lesson for Dorothy. Also I’m amazed this plotline is still happening and hasn’t been shuffled to come back to in 5 months.
Currently she seems pretty happy in her relationship with Joe, and while Joyce expressed interest in watching Dorothy and Walky bone I really got the sense that it was purely from an educational desire. I really don’t see Joyce, Walky or Joe, being open to any form of nonmonogamy. Even if it was parallel relationships where the girls are each hinges, I don’t see the boys or Joyce being open to the girls having a a romantic and/or sexual relationship with each other.
That said, there is definitely love between Joyce and Dorothy. I don’t know what kind exactly, and they need to explore it, but it’s there.
Different kind of rods, throwing all the damper rod into her reactor and shut her reaction down. Like what didn’t happen at Chernobyl or 3 Mile Island.
For one Joyce seems pretty happy with Joe at the moment
Plus for her to get with Dotty would require her to come to terms with liking women. Dorothy is handling that realization poorly, and it’s hard to imagine Joyce handling it much better.
Also, and I may prove myself a great fool for admitting this; although I’ve been confident Dotty is bi for years now, I’m still not quite convinced Joyce is just yet. Hard to articulate exactly why, mostly a vibe thing.
And last but certainly not least. If they did get together Becky would murder them both.
I’d argue that Dorothy x Joyce has already happened. It’s happened since they first met. They literally love each other and have said it. It’s already romantic. Whether platonic romance escalates to a physical one is really the last step. Joyce doesn’t even see a problem in getting Dorothy’s title pics. They really should just admit they’re in a poly, bi-romantic? (Is that a term?) situationship. It would be easier for everyone.
Bi-romantic is most definitely a term, the question here is, is it the right term. And poly is a relational term that does not restrict to sexual relations. Many of the first century Christian communes were poly-romantic but sexually monogamous. Some were Polyamorous with multiple sexual relationships, but evidence suggests those were uncommon, other than reports claiming early Christians were raving sex maniacs having sex indiscriminately.
Honestly, I’m kinda riding the Dorothy/Jennifer train, here.
We know that Jennifer’s kind of into it when Dorothy’s a pissy mess, and we know that Dorothy’s into girls. The two have had a lot of fun, interesting conversations with a lot of chemistry. I think it would be an interesting turn without coming out of left field.
Also I’ve been jonesing for my toxic yuris ever since Ruth dumped Jennifer, and Alice is a bit too much of a satellite character to compel me ship-wise.
That’s insane, I love it. Just possible enough to make it fun to think about, and a chance for an actually terrible relationship after a string of relatively good ones.
I’m more about Dotty and Amazigirl myself!! I love their Lois Lane/Superman dynamic! It also just interests me a lot more than Dotty’s mentorly/momfriend/newly realized romantic feelings for Joyce ever has. Plus, two blonde people dating? Horrible!
Its weird, I don’t see Joyce ever being open for poly. I know Joe would do it for Joyce, if Joyce wanted it… but I think it would break him if they did.
And I’m starting to wonder if part of the reason that Dotty can’t stand Joe because she was basically in a platonic thruple with him and Danny.
But now I’m calling she tries to tell Joyce right when Joyce and Joe are mid-bang for the first time. The trains are all on a collision course it feels like.
Joyce has been talking to Sierra and her girlfriends about poly relationships, and she suggested Sarah and Lucy do a poly relationship with Jacob. Pretty sure she’s down for a poly relationship with Dorothy and Joe.
Sure. But it’s still fair to be suspicious, narratively speaking, of Joyce learning about poly relationships and suggesting one to someone else; to be like, hm, was the only reason Willis gave us this tidbit a one-off joke, or are they going somewhere else with it?
Because this is a story, so “Joyce just happened to learn about polyamory for no reason” is less likely.
Also Joyce only suggested the poly relationship for Sarah/Lucy/Jacob so she could keep shipping Sarah and Jacob and immediately followed up by shuffling Lucy offstage for Sarah and Jacob’s wedding. It was kind of gross.
Dorothy+Mindy,
1. complimentary messes.
2. Reintroduces a minor character instead of more ouroboros.
3. Need a relationship where everyone else looks at each other thinking, “Is anyone going to say anything?” and then nobody does.
And if you round the two that might as well be a 3 and then you might as well say 5 then you’re halfway to 10 and halfway to anything might as well just be that, so congratulations Dorothy! You’re our new super lesbian!
Dorothy: “But I’m _not_ more lesbian than you, Becky! I like guys! I look at Walky’s abs with perverse sexual lust in my heart!”
Becky: “Oh, yeah? How do we know it ain’t the same with Sal? Only way to find out is throw you in bed with her!”
Dorothy: “What?”
Sal: “What?”
She’s gonna do some calculations and frame that in a full slides deck presentation. No matter she might not ever show anyone, but she’s gonna have it ready anyway.
Does it count if she -only- got together with her partner in order to reaffirm her hetero-sexuality? (Surely there’s some claus in there about that??!)
Oh that’s evil… But she ALSO got back with him because she was lacking validation and Walky has repeatedly said to her face that she can do no wrong in his eyes. That’s oine of the reasons she gave him the selfish advice when he talked to her about smexy timing Lucy.
I remember the strip after their makeup sex where it was hinted that Dorothy only got back together with him because he never took anything seriously Sleeping with him right after his rather messy breakup with Lucy doesn’t “count” as a genuine mistake
Are you misremembering? Walky asked Dorothy if she wanted to have sex, he initiated the return to them being a thing. He also asked her afterwards if this meant they were a couple again, and it was only then that she said she’d like that. It was sort of atypical in that usually, she was the more proactive one for this stuff, but I think the Lucy fiasco kind of taught Walky to stop being so passive.
You remember correctly that Walky asked Dorothy if she would like sex and they then proceeded to sex and be back together.
You are forgetting the sequence of events where she approached Walky basically telling him to ditch Lucy and get back together with her, then when he mentioned he was ‘probably’ broken up with Lucy she immediately attempted to kiss him, and then she came to his room to not-so-subtly proposition him directly: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/04-for-me-it-was-tuesday/cozytime/
It’s like 3 strips after that, in response to Dorothy’s mild meltdown, that Walky finally asks if she would like sex
Next strip better not place Walky’s room in a position relative to Danny’s that’s different than my notes or else I’ll have to add another note not to worry about it, it’s just a comic strip.
yeah—still no apology from Dorothy for what she said about bi folks. Kinda wild considering she broke down in tears earlier just for telling Jenifer a recovering alcoholic to have a drink. But reinforcing a hurtful bi stereotype? Crickets. Maybe she’ll realize later that it was offensive, but honestly, I doubt it—and I’m still pissed. Context doesn’t erase the impact, and she chose to phrase it that way.
I don’t think she’s exactly thinking clearly at the moment.
This is much more likely to be like Joyce comparing Dina to a robot once and deeply pissing her off, where recognition of the hurt caused only came later. Dorothy will likely need to reflect on it, since Danny didn’t exactly press her on it in that sense, probably since he was caught off guard by the question in the first place.
I think one of the issues with dumbing of age is the compressed timeline. When a single day of in-comic time can take months to a year to end, characters going through a doom spiral and freaking out over a few days will take years for us to go through. This whole interaction took like, a couple of minutes at most and it took us 4 days to get through it.
Look at yesterday’s comments section! People acting like a minute of Dorothy catastrophizing has made her worse than Hitler.
You need the fictional character currently having a breakdown to apologize RIGHT NOW for saying something stupid? It can wait till she’s done spiraling.
I get that when someone’s spiraling, they’re not at their best. For example I’m spiraling right now I just got doge-d, lost my job at HHS, and everything feels like it’s falling apart. So yeah, that line hit harder than it might have otherwise. Given that my work was directly with LGBTQIA+ youth, and young adults I’m a bit sensitive about this stuff right now
funnily enough, even as a bisexual person who has cheated on partners in the past (i was barely an adult, it was a while ago, still sucks but what can i do), my bisexuality had nothing to do with it!
I just don’t think she was talking about Bi Folks. I think she was talking about herself, and the phrasing came out horribly mangled because she’s spiraling, and neither her nor Danny processed it as being an actual Statement she was making that reflected even an unconscious bias.
Also she is bi, and she’s really struggling to process that.
Internalized bigotry is a thing, for sure, and it doesn’t actually suck less for the people around you (in fact it often sucks a little more), but it’s also more understandable.
Do we also need Jennifer to apologize for once saying that bisexuality only exists in porn? Because that’s a thing she said to Ruth once, and she’s never apologized for it.
Dorothy is irritated that she keeps losing her moral high ground over other people. It’s one of her flaws (because every character has them) that she has to believe she’s a Lawful Good exemplar and everyone else is less awesome at morality.
Danny and Joe both having something better than her is not RightTM.
I don’t think the “over other people” part even occurs to her. I think she thinks everyone must constantly strive for the moral high ground, and she thinks she’s good at it. So if someone effortlessly zooms by her, that’s an identity crisis similar to imposter syndrome.
I always consider myself a 1 on the Kinsey scale- I can appreciate beauty, even in males, but I never act on it, and I’ve never met a man that I had a full-on crush. I think if Dotty truly has a crush on Joyce then she’s a 1.5, provided it’s JUST Joyce, but her reaction to seeing Amber/Amazigirl lifting dumbbells could mean she has a type, so that would put her at a 2. Considering that Danny has admitted that he has a type in guys that he’s attracted to (muscular beefcake nerds) and Dorothy suggested that makes him a 2, then she and Danny are both on a level field.
Is it really Danny’s decision to make? You think he decides how lesbian she is? He decides who she’s attracted to? After Dorothy has explicitly called out exactly how much she hates essentially the exact conversation Danny is currently yelling down a public corridor at her? ‘HEY SO EXACTLY HOW LESBIAN ARE YOU? NEVER MIND, I DECIDED FOR YOU, A NUMBER FOUR TIMES HIGHER!’
After Dorothy has explicitly called out exactly how much she hates essentially the exact conversation Danny is currently yelling down a public corridor at her?
I’m getting the impression he’s like a brother to her.
It’s not Danny’s decision to make of course, but it’s not always wrong to call friends out on their bullshit denial. Especially when they came to you to ask about it, but tried not to admit it at the same time.
I am interested in the possibility that Dorothy’s bisexual awakening may make her realize she has very different feelings towards men versus women. Maybe not to the point of being aromantic with men (and just liking sex with them while having friendship) but perhaps having far deeper relationships with women than men.
I bring this up because some people speculated on whether Jennifer really can connect romantically with men. Basically, was Asher a rebound or she flat out isn’t interested in romance with men that he was so meaningless to her.
I could see it either way with Dorothy, but I honestly hope it *doesn’t* turn out that Jennifer was a lesbian all along. Just because I don’t want to see her “bisexuality isn’t real, you’re either gay or straight” to end up implicitly validated (even if it’s just in her mind). YMMV, of course
But that wasn’t really Jennifer’s thing. Her thing was bisexuality isn’t real, but even the straight women are attracted to other women sometimes. It’s still nonsense, but it’s certainly not “if you’re into women at all, you’re a lesbian”. More “All the straights are really bisexual, so we don’t need a term for that.”
Sexualities are consistent across universes, and Billie and Danny are married with two kids in the other universe.
Tangentially, I spent yesterday re-reading Dorothy’s part in the Walkyverse, and there’s some… interesting stuff in Willis’s commentary on the strips, which were drawn around 2019 I think and reposted in 2021. For instance:
Aaaaaand even though Dorothy didn’t get her Walky, I did give her the potential romantic consolation prize of, uh, the combined genetics of Walky and Joyce, a being which is SUPER INTO DOROTHY FOR SOME REASON. Read into that all you want.
I doubt that would happen.
Sexually she’s been with at least 3 guys and romantically she’s been with at least 2, one of which was for years and the other she was still caring for and at times pining for months later despite being the one to end it.
She clearly has strong romantic feelings for men.
As for having deeper romantic feelings for women, I don’t think we can claim that she has deeper romantic feelings for Joyce than she does for Walky and did for Danny (yet).
I also think we need to have her have romantic feelings for any woman besides Joyce before we start thinking she’s more romantic towards women than men.
Though she’s definitely opening up to finding women attractive besides Joyce, no other romantic feelings have been expressed verbally or nonverbally that I recall, so even her feelings for Joyce are 100x more romantic than she’s felt for Walky and Danny combined, Joyce can still be a one off.
It could also be that her feelings of romance are tied strongly to how close a friend she is with someone, and the two people she’s closest with are Walky and Joyce; no one else even comes close.
Given the onscreen interactions here, despite Danny’s Danny-ness he was able to make a pretty darn accurate guess about what Dorothy was feeling guilty about once the initial confusion passed. That feels worth noting.
Danny is being gross, deciding Dorothy’s sexuality for her. She has already stated how much it bothered her when Joe did it, why do you think it’s okay for Danny to do it? In fact, how is it not worse for Danny to yell this conversation:
Danny: HEY SO HOW BIG OF A LESBIAN ARE YOU NOW
Dorothy: TINY BIT BI, THANKS
Danny: I’M HEARING SUPER LESBIAN FOUR TIMES THAT
You know that the scale goes from 0 to six right? So a 2 IS just a bit bi here, while Dorothy is saying “Almost imperceptibly no straight”. Which he does not buy.
Huh. I seem to be the only one who thinks it’s pretty gross for Danny to decide Dorothy’s sexuality for her like this, especially since he should know how much she hated that Joe did it. I mean, he’s basically yelling down a public hallway at her, “HEY SO HOW LESBIAN ARE YOU REALLY? NEVER MIND, I’VE DECIDED ON A NUMBER FOUR TIMES HIGHER!’
Whether he’s ultimately right or not is meaningless. It’s not his call.
Except he’s not? He’s yelling a context-free number down the hallway…
I dunno, I guess I’ll withhold judgment until Dorothy gives more of an indication about how she feels right now about Danny’s reactions here so far. It’s hard to tell when she’s drowning in self-inflicted guilt over the worst possible interpretation of her actions, which isn’t Danny’s fault at all.
I don’t think it’s quite right to say he’s “deciding” her sexuality for her, so much as stating that she’s acting very much like she’s in strong denial about something or someone despite clearly coming to him specifically for bi advice. It’s less of a “I’ve decided what you are and you don’t get a say” and more a somewhat lighthearted “okay, well, I know you well enough to say you would probably overreact slightly less about this if 0.5 was the genuine answer”.
Except that Joe was doing something very different. Joe called Dorothy a lesbian to justify to himself why a woman would find him repulsive. Danny is just confronting her denial after being approached about her own bisexuality.
I was trying to remember what Joe said during their recent confrontation. Assuming I’d just forgotten something he’d said then. Didn’t even make the connection to the old Joe calling her a lesbian because she wouldn’t fuck him. That’s so completely different than this it didn’t even compute.
You are not alone. I’ve felt like Danny has been a major ass in this situation. Compare it to when they had this conversation in reverse. She offered information and support. At no point did she push him in one way or another.
Meanwhile, he’s spent all his time pushing her buttons when she’s clearly upset and interpreting everything as her coming out as a Kinsey 3 despite her uncertainty and confusion. Zero support. Zero understanding.
Yet people are somehow praising this? I get rooting for another character having a bi awakening, but people should not be cheering on someone who is being a total ass to someone he supposedly cares for when they’re in an emotionally vulnerable moment.
Dorothy broke up with Danny who was like head over heels stupid in love with her to go to Yale and then gave him the condescending hand-on-shoulder NGO talk when he came out, and now she’s a bisexual who’s not going to Yale. Danny is acting harmlessly and his behaviour is well-earned.
I don’t know you so I don’t know if you’re part of the LGBT+ group or not. I am, however, and I think a part of Danny ribbing Dorothy about her sexuality is because we tend to recognize our own. Along with what other commenters have mentioned, such as Dorothy coming to talk to Danny in a clearly anxious state, considering the last time we know they talked privately it involved a discussion on Danny’s bisexuality… I mean, if I was Danny, I too would assume she wanted to discuss orientation in some way, or perhaps advice about sex/relationships. And seeing how she just asked him “hey have you ever accidentally cheated with a same sex crush WHOOPS ANYWAYS I GOTTA GO” it’s definitely clear she’s having a sexuality panic.
Also a minor thing but he’s not calling her a lesbian, he’s suggesting she’s bi. There’s a difference.
I can’t wait to see what the next meeting between Dorothy and Joyce will be like. Very awkward or with a big laugh saying it was all a joke? I think something will change between them.
“Dear [x] my sincerest apologies for unknowingly staring for seven minutes at your hubba jubba bonky boinkers during lunch period two years ago on November 24.”
That last line about an 0.5 is really hitting my theory that Dorothy’s realization has caused a resurgence of her savior complex and self-flagellation. Despite all her talk about bisexuality and acceptance, the personal revelation has really scrambled her brain. A little bit of biphobia in there with the “oh god what did I do”
On the one hand the Kinsey scale is an outdated and reductive understanding of sexuality and how it works, on the other hand “I’m hearing a two” might be the funniest thing Danny’s said in this comic, so.
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check your hearing, Danno
it’s 27
Going outside the range of 1-6? Must be that “new math” stuff I hear about. Or maybe that “common core” stuff. (i’m always mixing this stuff up.)
you can’t take three from two two is less than three so you look at the four in the tens’ place
How could they change math?! Math is MATH!
Math is a collection of methods. Sometimes more than one method works.
Look up “Steiner Math”.
I always found that argument funny, because I’ve read up on Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, and have worked in non-euclidian geometry and discrete mathematics.
And one thing I can say for certain about math is: Nothing is certain.
Seriously, not even 1+1=2 is certain.
For example, in discrete math, it’s math for ‘things that loop’, and so the numbers loop… so like if your minimum number is 0 and your maximum number is 36, 35+3 is 1. Technically, you can set the maximum at 1 (this would be like doing the math for a blinking diode). At which point 1 + 1 = 0.
And you pull in non-euclidian geometry, there’s a lot of variations where, depending on the initial rules you set down, you can make 1 + 1 = [Pretty much whatever your heart desires.]
And if you’re the type who obsesses over “what’s real” with math, like some dirty physicist, well, there’s pretty solid evidence that spacetime itself is non-euclidan and we don’t know WHAT the base metrics for it are.
In high school they just teach on one family of math, Euclidian. In college you learn, “ha ha ha, everything you learned before now? That was a joke.”
You get fun stuff like parallel lines intersecting (non-euclidean geometry), infinities bigger than other infinities (aleph 2), dividing by zero being a normal every day thing (Calculus has entered the chat), 1+1=0 (Discrete math says hi), cups without holes (Topology coughs nervously), math that looks more like philosophy than math (Set Theory glances around nervously), philosophy that looks more like math than philosophy (Logic is feeling called out), math that is primarily used to lie (Statistics tries to hides it face), and much, much more.
But common core? That’s not a different kind of math. It’s the same math as ever. It’s just arithmetic. Only difference is that it’s teaching how to do short division instead of long division (as well as the short version of everything else). It’s a little harder to grasp at first, but once you learn it, you can do math in your head MUCH faster.
“[L]ike some dirty physicist” Hahahaha! (much LOL!)
I’m no physicist, myself, being an old English major. But I’m a big fanboy.
I’m most amused at the sight of mathematicians and physicists throwing shade at each other.
(why, yes, i do read smbc; why do you ask?)
Non-euclidian just means geometry on a curved surface, of course the universe is non-euclidian, we only have a single horror writer who hated math slightly more than minorities to thank for “non-euclidian” being a word for OH GOD WHAT IS THAT THING DOING
“Hooray for new math
New-hoo-hoo math!
It won’t do you a bit of good to review math
It’s so simple
So very simple
That only a child can do it!” ~ Tom Lehrer, New Math
IUnderstoodThatReference.jpg
Oohhh. I get it. Shucks, I was using base-8 for the tens unit and base-12 for the ones unit. (’cause base-8 and base-12 average out to base-10, see?) Heck, I was doing it wrong.
I got it
Somebody say “New Math?”
Nonono. That would suggest she’s more lesbian than Becky, and you don’t want to see what kind of rampage Becky would go on if she heard that.
Dina would not survive that rampage
Yeah, Becky’s only like 24 or 25.
Dorothy’s nowhere near that lesbian. Probably only 10 or so.
i wonder how much math she had to calculate for that tho feels like 2.7 might be a bit more honest or so or higher XD
“The panic tells me you’re at LEAST two!”
two point five
I thought bisexuality has only integers between 1 and 6. While pansexuality has all the floating numbers?
Pansexuality is on the complex plane. I’m 4.5+3i.
I think you have to break out the irrational numbers for pansexuality.
I know several pansexuals. Can confirm they’re irrational.
No need to over complicate the scale, I’d argue pansexuality is every number on the scale simultaneously.
So pansexuality is a quantum superposition of sexualities?
Pft. You’re imagining that.
0 to 6, as explained in the comic linked yesterday
No, pan isn’t on the kinsey scale, not enough axes. Complex would be closer but still not enough and the idea that anything outside the 0 to 6 is imaginary doesn’t make that any better.
Bisexuality is only 2 – 4, anything below 2 or above 4 is just “incidental” and not identifying. 0.5 means you’ve never touched or been touched intimately by someone of your gender, and you haven’t wanted to. Since Kinsey score is generally associated with fluidity, there’s always room to slide in between.
If you want to get technical, bisexuality isn’t on the Kinsey scale, either, since it’s a measurement of your sexual activity with the only two genders Kinsey was acknowledging. It’s not 0=straight, 3=bi, 6=gay. It’s 0=you’ve only had sexual encounters with “””the opposite””” gender, 6=you’ve only had sexual encounters with “the same” gender, 3 for equal amounts of both, X for no sexual encounters with anyone.
Also bi does not mean you’re only attracted to two genders and it’s not inherently transphobic, anymore than straight or gay are inherently transphobic.
Bi has meant “attraction to more than one” gender since at least the Bi Manifesto was published in 1990, and it’s always included nonbinary and trans folks. It’s fine to prefer pan as a label for oneself, and certainly it is sometimes used by folks to explicitly signal their interest in and validation of nonbinary genders, but only bi people get to define bisexuality, period.
People who study these things are now saying the range isn’t from straight on one end to gay on the other. The range is from straight or gay on one end to bi on the other. I don’t remember where I got this, and I didn’t see the rationale.
How you label the axes doesn’t really address my point, though, which is that Kinsey’s original scale was measuring homosexual versus heterosexual behavior, not measuring anybody’s identities, and didn’t take nonbinary or intersex people into account even as objects of potential sexual interest, much less as subjects whose expressed sexual interest could further throw off the simplistic scale.
I’m not saying 0-6 aren’t useful for some people, mind you. Especially as kind of a baby step to introducing the idea of fluidity and spectrums. I’m just saying that if Risky is going to argue that pan people aren’t on the scale, we have to also acknowledge that bi people aren’t really on the scale, either.
No one is, because it’s never been about your sexual orientation, only about your sexual behavior (because that’s easier to measure).
I’ve never seen the 0-6 scale as being meant to be taken too literally anyway. Not in the sense that anyone who’s a 5 is precisely-less-gay than a 6.
And in that sense I have no problem with it, for real.
idk the “pan isn’t on the scale because it would need more axes” claim really got to me, it only makes sense if you’ve got a very narrow definition of bi, one which bi activists have been fighting against since like… forever.
Honestly if I had to guess the rationale probably looks something like at one end we have strict preference for sex characteristics and/or gender presentation and at the far other end we have no sex characteristics or gender presentation based preferences full stop, with most people in between. It does feel intuitive to me that absent cultural stuff the monosexuality to pansexuality spectrum feels more relevant than what genders the monosexuality is pointed at.
Unrelated tangent, it’s eternally frustrating that the words we use for this stuff are based on the similarity or difference of your gender to the partner’s gender. Why does my sexuality change if I trans my gender if who I’m attracted to has not changed at all? Language is stupid.
This kinda thing is why so many of us eventually just go “fuck it I’m queer”. When your gender starts going sideways, but your attraction to everyone still feels just as gay as it ever did, the descriptive utility of them for your feelings gets increasingly questionable.
Which isn’t to say everybody ALWAYS winds up identifying as queer or that other labels are bad or less useful for everyone, etc etc. Plenty of people instead expand the definition of a given label and that’s absolutely an equally valid strategy.
It’s the same thing that gave us the pan / bi divide in the first place, really: some multisexual folks went, “I need a new word that includes the full spectrum of human gender,” and other mutlisexual people went, “I need to reclaim this word society imposed on me and redefine it so that it includes the full spectrum of human gender,” and both strategies are fine actually.
The pans need a lot of medieval weaponry, I guess.
I dated a pansexual once. Can confirm they need (and have) a lot of medieval weaponry.
Not that I’d ever police anybody’s self identifications. But if we’re talking about definitions, then:
There is no functional difference between pansexuality and bisexuality. And I say this as someone who used to identify as pan like 18 years ago. Any differences are so minute that they might as well not exist. Because no two people experience attraction in exactly the same way. So trying to make some official sounding objective explanation of differences is ultimately meaningless.
Interesting. I always found the standard definitions– pan being “attraction regardless of gender” and bi being “attraction to two or more genders” to be… pretty understandably different. Like, I understand there are similarities, and anyone’s actual subjective experience is theirs alone to describe. It just doesn’t seem “so minute that they might as well not exist” from the definitions.
Standard definitions according to whom?
https://queermushroomforest.weebly.com/bimanifesto.html
This might be useful for you. Another famous definition of bisexuality was the one offered by Robyn Ochs, aka The Mother of Pride, who described her own bisexuality as: “the potential to be attracted—romantically and/or sexually—to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.”
Some folks have definitely tried to carve out exclusive definitions so that bi means being attracted to fewer genders than pan, but mmmooooostly I’ve heard that from:
a.) crypto TERFs trying to sew discord and get bi and pan people to fight over which label is “better” (by for example making “PSA” posts where they pretend to be a trans-inclusive biphobic pan person and say stuff like “remember, only pansexuals are attracted to nonbinary people!”) (or vice-versa, where they pose as panphobic bi people, and try to argue that you can’t be attracted to nonbinary people without fetishizing them)
b.) young pan people who have been sucked in by the above arguments, or who are insecure in the validity of their own label, so they try to define bi as smaller than it is in order to make room for pan
c.) transphobic bi people who want to pretend that the bi label somehow means “attraction only to cis men and cis women, the only two genders”
Mainstream bi orgs and bi activists, meanwhile, always seem to have much broader definitions to reflect the fact that there are more than two genders and that bi is not and has never been binary.
I don’t think you’re really disagreeing? The Robyn Ochs definition at least is basically a longer version of the one Yumi gave.
And there’s nothing in Yumi’s two definitions that even implies bi applies to fewer genders than pan does.
@thejeff: If it doesn’t seem like I’m disagreeing with Yumi, then I really failed to express myself. Fair enough.
My objection is basically this:
Bi people didn’t create the term bisexual. It was created to describe non-human organisms like plants or earthworms. It was a synonym for a word I don’t even want to type because it’s also used as a slur for intersex people. That is where the “two” comes from.
There have been plenty of attempts to rehabilitate that two, to justify it, whether as “same and different” or as “two or more” — but not all bi people want the two in there. Most bi orgs reject it. Plenty of bi people consider “regardless of gender” to also describe them.
So, again I ask: standard definitions according to whom? If bi orgs and bi activists don’t get to be the source for a “standard” definition of bisexuality, who does?
(Pansexual is also a reclaimed identity, for the record. It was coined to describe hypersexual people, derogatorily! Almost all of our identity words have this type of origin.
)
it’s the alt text
Danny really was reveling in the schadenfreude of being more self-aware than Dorothy.
It wasn’t the right thing to do but a lot of people wouldn’t be able to engage in some light teasing.
yeah, defintiely do not send them boob pics
I’d say Danny is unlikely to send boob pics, but this whole storyline features them coming from the wrong people anyway, so who knows.
I mean there’s nothing stopping him from trying.
What about butt pics?
It’s hard to get your butt inside the bra cups.
I like your comment.
Wouldn’t that depend on the size?
Well certainly not with THAT attitude you can’t!
Anything’s a bra cup if you’re cheeky enough.
(hm, that ain’t quite right…)
just use a black sharpie to draw nipples on your buttcheeks
With Danny’s skin tone, black nipples would be slightly concerning. For like skin cancer or something. He should find a brown or pink sharpie.
That depends on how big the bra is. If my girlfriend wore bras, I could probably do it. Never tried with my FWB, but probably could if I tried. They’ve both got pretty huge boobies.
Danny’s bi-fi is strong, that’s uncannily targeted considering he doesn’t know the situation.
Gaydar
Bi-Fi
GPAce
Trans…istor…radio?
Scraping the barrel a bit.
Pan-handler
He knows she’s a perfectionist in everything she does. No way she’ll be just a 0.5 or 1.0 Ultimately she’ll achieve 6.0 status, so halfway there is 3.0. But she hasn’t had time yet to get halfway to her realizations. So, yeah, 2.0 to 2.5 is a good start. Easy calculations. It’s just math.
The decimals are kinda arbitrary though and there just because it’s a 6 major point scale. If it was a 12 point scale she would be a 1.
She’s not going to go for 6.0, she’s going to go for π.
Even if the two obviously grew apart into a poor romantic match, I imagine he’s very good at reading Dorothy specifically on certain things.
They reek of school friends who were middle to low popular, and when puberty hit, they just hooked up. Joe was probably Danny’s social anchor, while Dottie got mean girl’ed because she was a lisa simpson.
Come on… It’s at least a 2.5
You, me, the alt text, we’re pretty much in agreement.
That makes 4 of us, and when you consider one of those is Word of God…
Yeaaaah but God lies a lot. xD
Wait. Is that OLD Willisament, or NEW Willisament?
Dara is saying the alt text on this comic is Word of God.
Shut up brain, those all count as incidental.
Weirdly enough, this interaction has me wondering if Dorothy/Joyce is going to even happen, or painful heartbreaking lesson for Dorothy. Also I’m amazed this plotline is still happening and hasn’t been shuffled to come back to in 5 months.
I don’t think we’ll see Dorothy and Joyce getting together anytime soon, maybe ever.
I’m personally more curious to see how long Dotty hides this from Joyce
Why would Dorothy and Joyce not get together?
Currently she seems pretty happy in her relationship with Joe, and while Joyce expressed interest in watching Dorothy and Walky bone I really got the sense that it was purely from an educational desire. I really don’t see Joyce, Walky or Joe, being open to any form of nonmonogamy. Even if it was parallel relationships where the girls are each hinges, I don’t see the boys or Joyce being open to the girls having a a romantic and/or sexual relationship with each other.
That said, there is definitely love between Joyce and Dorothy. I don’t know what kind exactly, and they need to explore it, but it’s there.
Joyce is having to sneak up on being (actively) hetero. Romantic girl-girl feels would probably make her throw a mental rod.
Different kind of rods, throwing all the damper rod into her reactor and shut her reaction down. Like what didn’t happen at Chernobyl or 3 Mile Island.
For one Joyce seems pretty happy with Joe at the moment
Plus for her to get with Dotty would require her to come to terms with liking women. Dorothy is handling that realization poorly, and it’s hard to imagine Joyce handling it much better.
Also, and I may prove myself a great fool for admitting this; although I’ve been confident Dotty is bi for years now, I’m still not quite convinced Joyce is just yet. Hard to articulate exactly why, mostly a vibe thing.
And last but certainly not least. If they did get together Becky would murder them both.
I’d argue that Dorothy x Joyce has already happened. It’s happened since they first met. They literally love each other and have said it. It’s already romantic. Whether platonic romance escalates to a physical one is really the last step. Joyce doesn’t even see a problem in getting Dorothy’s title pics. They really should just admit they’re in a poly, bi-romantic? (Is that a term?) situationship. It would be easier for everyone.
You could argue it has already happened in the laundry room!
Bi-romantic is most definitely a term, the question here is, is it the
rightterm. And poly is a relational term that does not restrict to sexual relations. Many of the first century Christian communes were poly-romantic but sexually monogamous. Some were Polyamorous with multiple sexual relationships, but evidence suggests those were uncommon, other than reports claiming early Christians were raving sex maniacs having sex indiscriminately.Honestly, I’m kinda riding the Dorothy/Jennifer train, here.
We know that Jennifer’s kind of into it when Dorothy’s a pissy mess, and we know that Dorothy’s into girls. The two have had a lot of fun, interesting conversations with a lot of chemistry. I think it would be an interesting turn without coming out of left field.
Also I’ve been jonesing for my toxic yuris ever since Ruth dumped Jennifer, and Alice is a bit too much of a satellite character to compel me ship-wise.
*Daisy fainting*
That’s insane, I love it. Just possible enough to make it fun to think about, and a chance for an actually terrible relationship after a string of relatively good ones.
On the other hand, Dorothy has the compulsive need to fix anything and Jennifer is prickly and resistant to change.
Feels like it would be doomed before it began.
Great news! “Doomed mess of a relationship” is Jennifer’s favored terrain. It’ll work out great.
For my entertainment quota, I mean. It’ll work out terribly for their mental health.
I’m more about Dotty and Amazigirl myself!! I love their Lois Lane/Superman dynamic! It also just interests me a lot more than Dotty’s mentorly/momfriend/newly realized romantic feelings for Joyce ever has. Plus, two blonde people dating? Horrible!
Its weird, I don’t see Joyce ever being open for poly. I know Joe would do it for Joyce, if Joyce wanted it… but I think it would break him if they did.
And I’m starting to wonder if part of the reason that Dotty can’t stand Joe because she was basically in a platonic thruple with him and Danny.
But now I’m calling she tries to tell Joyce right when Joyce and Joe are mid-bang for the first time. The trains are all on a collision course it feels like.
Joyce has been talking to Sierra and her girlfriends about poly relationships, and she suggested Sarah and Lucy do a poly relationship with Jacob. Pretty sure she’s down for a poly relationship with Dorothy and Joe.
Just because you support others being in poly relationships doesn’t mean you want to have one yourself.
Sure. But it’s still fair to be suspicious, narratively speaking, of Joyce learning about poly relationships and suggesting one to someone else; to be like, hm, was the only reason Willis gave us this tidbit a one-off joke, or are they going somewhere else with it?
Because this is a story, so “Joyce just happened to learn about polyamory for no reason” is less likely.
Also Joyce only suggested the poly relationship for Sarah/Lucy/Jacob so she could keep shipping Sarah and Jacob and immediately followed up by shuffling Lucy offstage for Sarah and Jacob’s wedding. It was kind of gross.
Not really poly support, just a means to an end.
I don’t think it’s happening anytime soon, if it ever does
Dorothy+Mindy,
1. complimentary messes.
2. Reintroduces a minor character instead of more ouroboros.
3. Need a relationship where everyone else looks at each other thinking, “Is anyone going to say anything?” and then nobody does.
And if you round the two that might as well be a 3 and then you might as well say 5 then you’re halfway to 10 and halfway to anything might as well just be that, so congratulations Dorothy! You’re our new super lesbian!
Dorothy becoming even more lesbian than her would be the thing that finally makes Becky snap and demand pistols at dawn.
It’s funny that Dotty and Becks are kind of having the same angst but from opposite perspectives.
Dorothy: “But I’m _not_ more lesbian than you, Becky! I like guys! I look at Walky’s abs with perverse sexual lust in my heart!”
Becky: “Oh, yeah? How do we know it ain’t the same with Sal? Only way to find out is throw you in bed with her!”
Dorothy: “What?”
Sal: “What?”
Danny: Hey! We just talked about this!
That’s why there’s a sad, disheveled Dina leaving the building in a year! Becky Lost the duel!
0.5? Close enough to 0.8… score. *fist pump*
Despite: Obey Your Thirst (Traps)
nice avi
lol i wonder how joyce would react to the term ‘thirst trap’
thanks, dusted off this classic
Definitely a 3.
She’s gonna do some calculations and frame that in a full slides deck presentation. No matter she might not ever show anyone, but she’s gonna have it ready anyway.
(maybe might show the human sexuality class…)
There is no 3. I checked, it’s science, sorry.
No, you’re wrong. I’m a definite 3.
Does it count if she -only- got together with her partner in order to reaffirm her hetero-sexuality? (Surely there’s some claus in there about that??!)
Oh that’s evil… But she ALSO got back with him because she was lacking validation and Walky has repeatedly said to her face that she can do no wrong in his eyes. That’s oine of the reasons she gave him the selfish advice when he talked to her about smexy timing Lucy.
I remember the strip after their makeup sex where it was hinted that Dorothy only got back together with him because he never took anything seriously Sleeping with him right after his rather messy breakup with Lucy doesn’t “count” as a genuine mistake
She was saying this in reference to editing a Dexter and Monkey Master wiki, but Walky seemed to take those words as a metaphor for himself.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/04-for-me-it-was-tuesday/schema/
Are you misremembering? Walky asked Dorothy if she wanted to have sex, he initiated the return to them being a thing. He also asked her afterwards if this meant they were a couple again, and it was only then that she said she’d like that. It was sort of atypical in that usually, she was the more proactive one for this stuff, but I think the Lucy fiasco kind of taught Walky to stop being so passive.
You remember correctly that Walky asked Dorothy if she would like sex and they then proceeded to sex and be back together.
You are forgetting the sequence of events where she approached Walky basically telling him to ditch Lucy and get back together with her, then when he mentioned he was ‘probably’ broken up with Lucy she immediately attempted to kiss him, and then she came to his room to not-so-subtly proposition him directly: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/04-for-me-it-was-tuesday/cozytime/
It’s like 3 strips after that, in response to Dorothy’s mild meltdown, that Walky finally asks if she would like sex
I think she’s remembering this one
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/03-me-and-who-you-say-i-was-yesterday/gotcher/
Danny ears has a bullshit filter.
he’s got perfect pitch !
Yeah, going with Danny on this one
danny yelling down the hallway at dorothy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_9ATQFgu9o
Next strip better not place Walky’s room in a position relative to Danny’s that’s different than my notes or else I’ll have to add another note not to worry about it, it’s just a comic strip.
Little known fact is that Walky’s room actually exists in a quantum superposition of every dorm aside from Joe/Danny’s until observed
According to the Walky Exclusion Principle, it can exist in the same place as Joe and Danny’s, but has to have the opposite spin.
or some random passerby that happens to know them both and texts walky “uh ur gf is yelling at her ex about bi stuff??” lol
Probably the guy with the goatee here
yeah—still no apology from Dorothy for what she said about bi folks. Kinda wild considering she broke down in tears earlier just for telling Jenifer a recovering alcoholic to have a drink. But reinforcing a hurtful bi stereotype? Crickets. Maybe she’ll realize later that it was offensive, but honestly, I doubt it—and I’m still pissed. Context doesn’t erase the impact, and she chose to phrase it that way.
I don’t think she’s exactly thinking clearly at the moment.
This is much more likely to be like Joyce comparing Dina to a robot once and deeply pissing her off, where recognition of the hurt caused only came later. Dorothy will likely need to reflect on it, since Danny didn’t exactly press her on it in that sense, probably since he was caught off guard by the question in the first place.
Yeah you’re probably right.
I think one of the issues with dumbing of age is the compressed timeline. When a single day of in-comic time can take months to a year to end, characters going through a doom spiral and freaking out over a few days will take years for us to go through. This whole interaction took like, a couple of minutes at most and it took us 4 days to get through it.
Look at yesterday’s comments section! People acting like a minute of Dorothy catastrophizing has made her worse than Hitler.
You need the fictional character currently having a breakdown to apologize RIGHT NOW for saying something stupid? It can wait till she’s done spiraling.
I get that when someone’s spiraling, they’re not at their best. For example I’m spiraling right now I just got doge-d, lost my job at HHS, and everything feels like it’s falling apart. So yeah, that line hit harder than it might have otherwise. Given that my work was directly with LGBTQIA+ youth, and young adults I’m a bit sensitive about this stuff right now
Also, being bi myself, I’m a bit sensitive about that stereotype
funnily enough, even as a bisexual person who has cheated on partners in the past (i was barely an adult, it was a while ago, still sucks but what can i do), my bisexuality had nothing to do with it!
time for her to bump into another bi person who happened to overhear them “So bi ppl are cheaters to you, huh?”
if not bump into billiefer and send her spirilng even more
I just don’t think she was talking about Bi Folks. I think she was talking about herself, and the phrasing came out horribly mangled because she’s spiraling, and neither her nor Danny processed it as being an actual Statement she was making that reflected even an unconscious bias.
Also she is bi, and she’s really struggling to process that.
Internalized bigotry is a thing, for sure, and it doesn’t actually suck less for the people around you (in fact it often sucks a little more), but it’s also more understandable.
Do we also need Jennifer to apologize for once saying that bisexuality only exists in porn? Because that’s a thing she said to Ruth once, and she’s never apologized for it.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/borderline/
He’s helping!
Danny still clearly cares as much as he jokes and I’m glad that’s represented
Dorothy is irritated that she keeps losing her moral high ground over other people. It’s one of her flaws (because every character has them) that she has to believe she’s a Lawful Good exemplar and everyone else is less awesome at morality.
Danny and Joe both having something better than her is not RightTM.
And it’s not a good look.
I don’t think the “over other people” part even occurs to her. I think she thinks everyone must constantly strive for the moral high ground, and she thinks she’s good at it. So if someone effortlessly zooms by her, that’s an identity crisis similar to imposter syndrome.
I always consider myself a 1 on the Kinsey scale- I can appreciate beauty, even in males, but I never act on it, and I’ve never met a man that I had a full-on crush. I think if Dotty truly has a crush on Joyce then she’s a 1.5, provided it’s JUST Joyce, but her reaction to seeing Amber/Amazigirl lifting dumbbells could mean she has a type, so that would put her at a 2. Considering that Danny has admitted that he has a type in guys that he’s attracted to (muscular beefcake nerds) and Dorothy suggested that makes him a 2, then she and Danny are both on a level field.
Is it really Danny’s decision to make? You think he decides how lesbian she is? He decides who she’s attracted to? After Dorothy has explicitly called out exactly how much she hates essentially the exact conversation Danny is currently yelling down a public corridor at her? ‘HEY SO EXACTLY HOW LESBIAN ARE YOU? NEVER MIND, I DECIDED FOR YOU, A NUMBER FOUR TIMES HIGHER!’
I’m getting the impression he’s like a brother to her.
It’s not Danny’s decision to make of course, but it’s not always wrong to call friends out on their bullshit denial. Especially when they came to you to ask about it, but tried not to admit it at the same time.
I am interested in the possibility that Dorothy’s bisexual awakening may make her realize she has very different feelings towards men versus women. Maybe not to the point of being aromantic with men (and just liking sex with them while having friendship) but perhaps having far deeper relationships with women than men.
I bring this up because some people speculated on whether Jennifer really can connect romantically with men. Basically, was Asher a rebound or she flat out isn’t interested in romance with men that he was so meaningless to her.
Well said!
I could see it either way with Dorothy, but I honestly hope it *doesn’t* turn out that Jennifer was a lesbian all along. Just because I don’t want to see her “bisexuality isn’t real, you’re either gay or straight” to end up implicitly validated (even if it’s just in her mind). YMMV, of course
(Saying this as someone who thought I was bi for a long time, and I’m probably most accurately classified as, like, a Kinsey 5.9 out of 6)
But that wasn’t really Jennifer’s thing. Her thing was bisexuality isn’t real, but even the straight women are attracted to other women sometimes. It’s still nonsense, but it’s certainly not “if you’re into women at all, you’re a lesbian”. More “All the straights are really bisexual, so we don’t need a term for that.”
Sexualities are consistent across universes, and Billie and Danny are married with two kids in the other universe.
Tangentially, I spent yesterday re-reading Dorothy’s part in the Walkyverse, and there’s some… interesting stuff in Willis’s commentary on the strips, which were drawn around 2019 I think and reposted in 2021. For instance:
I had definitely considered that a bone we were being thrown in a “I see you, you’re valid, it’s not happening in the ‘mainline canon’ sense” way.
But you know. Recent developments.
I doubt that would happen.
Sexually she’s been with at least 3 guys and romantically she’s been with at least 2, one of which was for years and the other she was still caring for and at times pining for months later despite being the one to end it.
She clearly has strong romantic feelings for men.
As for having deeper romantic feelings for women, I don’t think we can claim that she has deeper romantic feelings for Joyce than she does for Walky and did for Danny (yet).
I also think we need to have her have romantic feelings for any woman besides Joyce before we start thinking she’s more romantic towards women than men.
Though she’s definitely opening up to finding women attractive besides Joyce, no other romantic feelings have been expressed verbally or nonverbally that I recall, so even her feelings for Joyce are 100x more romantic than she’s felt for Walky and Danny combined, Joyce can still be a one off.
It could also be that her feelings of romance are tied strongly to how close a friend she is with someone, and the two people she’s closest with are Walky and Joyce; no one else even comes close.
Given the onscreen interactions here, despite Danny’s Danny-ness he was able to make a pretty darn accurate guess about what Dorothy was feeling guilty about once the initial confusion passed. That feels worth noting.
He’s so right, she’s such a 2.
Danny accidentally Danning it up is always satisfying.
Danny is doing fine. Dorothy is the mess here.
Danny is being gross, deciding Dorothy’s sexuality for her. She has already stated how much it bothered her when Joe did it, why do you think it’s okay for Danny to do it? In fact, how is it not worse for Danny to yell this conversation:
Danny: HEY SO HOW BIG OF A LESBIAN ARE YOU NOW
Dorothy: TINY BIT BI, THANKS
Danny: I’M HEARING SUPER LESBIAN FOUR TIMES THAT
No.
You know that the scale goes from 0 to six right? So a 2 IS just a bit bi here, while Dorothy is saying “Almost imperceptibly no straight”. Which he does not buy.
I think “Danning it up” ha lost all meaning.
Dorothy is definitely more than 0.5, probably at least 2.
I can’t believe you completely redrew Danny so many times in the same position!
That’s one of Willis’s superpowers, they ALWAYS fully redraw what would for another artist be a lazy copy-paste panel.
Damn, Danny really is the binister of binance
Huh. I seem to be the only one who thinks it’s pretty gross for Danny to decide Dorothy’s sexuality for her like this, especially since he should know how much she hated that Joe did it. I mean, he’s basically yelling down a public hallway at her, “HEY SO HOW LESBIAN ARE YOU REALLY? NEVER MIND, I’VE DECIDED ON A NUMBER FOUR TIMES HIGHER!’
Whether he’s ultimately right or not is meaningless. It’s not his call.
Except he’s not? He’s yelling a context-free number down the hallway…
I dunno, I guess I’ll withhold judgment until Dorothy gives more of an indication about how she feels right now about Danny’s reactions here so far. It’s hard to tell when she’s drowning in self-inflicted guilt over the worst possible interpretation of her actions, which isn’t Danny’s fault at all.
I don’t think it’s quite right to say he’s “deciding” her sexuality for her, so much as stating that she’s acting very much like she’s in strong denial about something or someone despite clearly coming to him specifically for bi advice. It’s less of a “I’ve decided what you are and you don’t get a say” and more a somewhat lighthearted “okay, well, I know you well enough to say you would probably overreact slightly less about this if 0.5 was the genuine answer”.
I think this is like… the most possible uncharitable interpretation of this
It is the comments especialty!
Except that Joe was doing something very different. Joe called Dorothy a lesbian to justify to himself why a woman would find him repulsive. Danny is just confronting her denial after being approached about her own bisexuality.
Oh. Thanks.
I was trying to remember what Joe said during their recent confrontation. Assuming I’d just forgotten something he’d said then. Didn’t even make the connection to the old Joe calling her a lesbian because she wouldn’t fuck him. That’s so completely different than this it didn’t even compute.
You are not alone. I’ve felt like Danny has been a major ass in this situation. Compare it to when they had this conversation in reverse. She offered information and support. At no point did she push him in one way or another.
Meanwhile, he’s spent all his time pushing her buttons when she’s clearly upset and interpreting everything as her coming out as a Kinsey 3 despite her uncertainty and confusion. Zero support. Zero understanding.
Yet people are somehow praising this? I get rooting for another character having a bi awakening, but people should not be cheering on someone who is being a total ass to someone he supposedly cares for when they’re in an emotionally vulnerable moment.
Dorothy broke up with Danny who was like head over heels stupid in love with her to go to Yale and then gave him the condescending hand-on-shoulder NGO talk when he came out, and now she’s a bisexual who’s not going to Yale. Danny is acting harmlessly and his behaviour is well-earned.
I don’t know you so I don’t know if you’re part of the LGBT+ group or not. I am, however, and I think a part of Danny ribbing Dorothy about her sexuality is because we tend to recognize our own. Along with what other commenters have mentioned, such as Dorothy coming to talk to Danny in a clearly anxious state, considering the last time we know they talked privately it involved a discussion on Danny’s bisexuality… I mean, if I was Danny, I too would assume she wanted to discuss orientation in some way, or perhaps advice about sex/relationships. And seeing how she just asked him “hey have you ever accidentally cheated with a same sex crush WHOOPS ANYWAYS I GOTTA GO” it’s definitely clear she’s having a sexuality panic.
Also a minor thing but he’s not calling her a lesbian, he’s suggesting she’s bi. There’s a difference.
I can’t wait to see what the next meeting between Dorothy and Joyce will be like. Very awkward or with a big laugh saying it was all a joke? I think something will change between them.
Danny knows that’s the fancy version of bi.
I’m hearing a two
Dorothy may still have the potential to be a president, she’s doing everything she can to avoid her own moral compass.
I have clearly missed or forgotten something. Estimate of what…?
Estimate of where she falls on the Kinsey Scale, as reffed last strip.
Thanks, ’cause I did not grok that in the previous strip
people get so mad at characters for delivering the comedy in this comedy strip
Oh no, my phone coupled with my fat thumbs trying to scroll up meant I accidentally hit report!!! Sorry!!
I think everyone has done this 500 times
Mirth is a foreign concept to some folks.
i hate being that “go outside” guy but i really think some of these folks should take a break from commenting and go water a houseplant or something.
Someone yesterday was hella mad at Dotty for making a comment about vision when she herself wears them, it was an interesting day
Girl math!!!
You know, because it’s about girls. Girl.
Specifically the amount of girl for Dorothy, 1-6
“Hey, so long as you don’t do [exact thing she’s already done] you’re fine”
*sweating bullets of guilt* “ok, thank you goodbye”
oh good, someone else already made the joke so I don’t have to :3
Time to compose some formal apology letters, I guess.
“Dear [x] my sincerest apologies for unknowingly staring for seven minutes at your hubba jubba bonky boinkers during lunch period two years ago on November 24.”
I must now find some excuse to use the phrase “hubba jubba bonky boinkers” in some writing.
That last line about an 0.5 is really hitting my theory that Dorothy’s realization has caused a resurgence of her savior complex and self-flagellation. Despite all her talk about bisexuality and acceptance, the personal revelation has really scrambled her brain. A little bit of biphobia in there with the “oh god what did I do”
On the one hand the Kinsey scale is an outdated and reductive understanding of sexuality and how it works, on the other hand “I’m hearing a two” might be the funniest thing Danny’s said in this comic, so.
re: alt-text
Dorothy is bi confirmed ^^
I believe the .5 but not the 0 in front of it
In her defense, Billie was involved, it counts as a mitigating factor