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Calling it now Billie is a bisexual homoromantic female, or maybe pansexual, but definitely loves women. And as long as that leads her to healthy relationships I’m there for her
I don’t know about homoromantic. She was in a relationship with Asher. Yes, it was dysfunctional, but so was her relationship with Ruth. I’m think she’s just bi/pan on all fronts.
… actually, I think Carla had it right. She’s attracted to BAD IDEAS.
Alice seems to be the big exception based on what we’ve seen. Maybe. We don’t know that much about Alice yet, but so far she seems like the least bad idea of the relationships we’ve seen Jennifer have.
I wouldn’t go that far.
From what I can tell from the hints: They were officially just friends, but Alice was at least massively crushing on Jennifer, while Jennifer would have sex with her, but avoided any romantic commitment beyond friends. And brought her along to parties where she was looking for boys to drunkenly fuck and expecting Alice to do the same.
At least with Ruth, despite all the problems, she acknowledged it as a relationship.
(I actually researched this, because that’s the kind of dork I am, but most free online dictionaries don’t do origins, and the local library is closed, so all I’ve got is that Longman and Cambridge both call it “old fashioned”.
If Google ngrams is to be believed, the first usage of “look a fright” was late 1700s. I’m skeptical, because Google Books search is thoroughly enshittified — despite putting a date range of 1790-1850, I get results from whenever the hell, including the 21st century. I see no “sort by date” possible. Feh.
Archive.org works much better at narrowing down timeframes, although the date in the metadata doesn’t always match what is printed in the book (there’s some that say “1731”, but they’re collections from a magazine that started publishing then and the actual story the words appear in has a date of 1871 ).
The earliest book that I can find that does match — that is, the book itself has 1799 as the publication date on the title page — is:
He Deceives Himself: A Domestic Tale (In Three Volumes). By Marianne Chambers, (1799), Vol 1
In 1799, the long s was still used in printing, so the text is “—I am ſure I look a fright !”
One possible antedate of the phrase was published in 1814. It’s a review of a book that contains discussion of historical persons and events. According to the review, Anne Oldfield’s last words were “One would not look a fright after one’s death”. Anne Oldfield died in 1730.
However, I am not confident without primary documents.
It would appear that Alexander Pope versified her last words:
Odious! in woollen! ‘twould a saint provoke,
Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke;
No, let a charming chintz and Brussels lace
Wrap my cold limbs and shade my lifeless face:
One would not, sure, be frightful when one’s dead,
And—Betty—give this cheek a little red.
Which strikes me as improbable as something she would literally say, but I note that “fright” is in there. FWIW
It means that she hasn’t yet explicitly said to Alice that she’s Jennifer now. Or, alternatively, she hasn’t yet said that she had been going by Jennifer, but she’s good with being Billie again.
Like the fact that Alice has been talking to Ruth and knows that Jennifer sought refuge in Ruth’s room and that “Billie” is loved. But will it occur to her to ask who she is loved by?
I hope Alice will explain why she started texting, but even if she doesn’t, Jennifer should notice that Ruth helped. NOTHING about this situation screams “Jennifer has pull,” and I think she’s self-aware enough to notice that.
I’d like to think Jennifer will recognize that others helped, but a laugh track plays in my head when I try to think of her as self-aware.
(I do think she’ll recognize that others helped make this possible somewhat, but also if someone went, “This actually worked out because you’re so magnetic,” she’d go, “Yeah, yeah, it was all me!”)
I think she’s happy to be Billie for Alice – Billie was never a bad person to Alice, never a problem until the end. Other people calling her Billie at college reminds her of falling apart, fucking up, alcohol-fueled suicide pact, etc. ‘Billie’ is someone to be escaped most of the time, while ‘Jennifer’ doesn’t have to shoulder all of that.
Alice calling her Billie (and smiling!) probably feels amazing, because ‘Billie’ was a goddamn hero to Alice, truly the alpha bongo problem solver, until she wasn’t anything. From Alice, ‘Billie’ means forgiveness as well as a host of other positive and strong feelings and memories.
I suspect that Jennifer is fine with being Billie for Alice specifically, even if she still prefers the ‘cleaner’ Jennifer from everyone else.
To quote Alice from her first appearance: “You’re poison. A drama hurricane who ruins everything she touches. I let you drag me down with you for years, but I finally saw the real you and got out before it was too late.”
I think Jennifer was a problem for Alice all along, Alice was just too infatuated to see it until the aftermath of the crash was a step too far.
She was also the goddamn hero and the alpha bongo problem solver, which is why Alice thought she loved her.
I never got one of those. I wanted one, but after they came out with the PS4+ very shortly after I got a PS4, and I didn’t want to get screwed over again. Figured I would save the money and focus on schooling. I don’t regret that decision. Wait, should I?
We say “People are the gender they say they are,” and that’s a good saying that communicates good ideas. Of course, though, no short saying can capture every detail and technicality, and I think the little details are causing the miscommunication.
Strictly speaking, trans people are trans because they “feel and know” that they are. The “who they say they are” matters because it’s generally appropriate to trust people know themselves and are not misinformed or lying.
In other words, the “who you say you are” part isn’t strictly the important part for whether someone is trans; it’s the “who you know and feel that you are”. If someone is trolling badly and says they’re [fake troll gender], that doesn’t make it so, as we know – they’re just lying.
To me, Tenzhi is saying that Billie did not know who she was, said things wrong about that as a result, and this wrong statement did not change her.
Ado can I hire you to explain my views on gender to other people for me?Because you’ve just expressed a bunch of things aligned with what I believe in a much more diplomatic way than I have ever been able to, whereas when I try to say this stuff people accuse me of being a dishonest alt-right troll.
Yeah I can definitely relate to your incomplete satisfaction with the community here. Aside from this stuff being very hard to express and conceptualize, making some degree of patience and understanding and mercy great, I think the community is overly focused on some surface-level ideas about gender. To some extent I think that’s inevitable and understandable – the community skews young and has a lot of understandable reasons to be defensive – but things can always be better.
I’m still stuck on “OK. This means enough to people to risk being murdered or disowned. Gender, as a thing that exists outside of both biology and socialisation, is clearly A Thing, and I am definitely not going to argue with this. I will defend people’s rights on this. (Seriously: if on one side you have people screaming about who gets to use what bathroom, and on the other side you have people too terrified to use the bathroom, it’s a bit of a no-brainer which is the “correct” side to take.) But what is it, fundamentally, then? (And does not knowing make me agendered or very comfortably cis-gendered? Like, I’ve given birth to and breastfed three babies. I wouldn’t say *comfortably, what with the pregnancy and breastfeeding Raynaud’s, the cumulative 27 months of morning sickness, having my ribcage stretched out by my first (she was cramped for a while… My first sight of her was 4 stretched out, long limbs… She’s taller than me at 10.5), and the “oof”-inducing movements… Also, being bit (and my middle one scrabbled and twiddled and scratched… Silicone teething beads around my neck to divert her fingers were amazing!). But other than getting touched out sometimes, and cracking up a bit after 10 weeks with probably less than 100 hours of cumulative sleep, it was basically physical discomfort…)
There’s not actually a clean distinction here. A lot of people have this experience and what they take away from it is that they are cis. A lot of people have that experience and take away that they’re agender. The buckets aren’t actually describing the experiences people are having so much as they are describing the ways that people interpret their experiences and want to be perceived and interface with the world. If you’re happier contextualizing that experience one way than another, that’s probably the way you should contextualize it and the identity you should build.
Lots of people (vast majority, I’d say) don’t really know what gender is or have a ready and accurate way to describe it. It’s a complex topic. Not knowing doesn’t make one agender or cisgender (there’s not the “-ed” there) or transgender.
Yeah, I’ve been consistently uncomfortable with how a lot of the fanbase treats Jennifer regarding basic things like her name. Obviously it’s not the same thing as deadnaming a trans person, but even so, insisting on referring to a character with a name that they’ve repeatedly said makes them uncomfortable? (at the time; we’ll see how she feels about it re: Alice in the future) Still shitty.
As a trans person, I still take away the message of: “a lot of people don’t like her, so they view referring to her by the name she wants as a ‘privilege’ they don’t owe her.” Once people view that as okay, in any circumstance, I can’t help but wonder how conditional their professed allyship really is.
Unless she explicitly says she’s okay with being referred to as Billie again, we should respect Jennifer’s wishes regarding her name. inb4 “She’s a fictional character”–yes, obviously, but real people go through this every day. It’s annoying to get deadnamed every day irl, only to go home and see many “progressive” people in the comments thinking it’s okay to not show basic human decency about people’s names.
The thing about Jennifer/Billie is that I’ve never been convinced that “Jennifer” is the name she actually wants to be called by. Because it seems to have originated not with her deciding that she was going to be “Jennifer” henceforth, but with Raidah telling her that her name is “Jennifer” now, in the same way that she (like Linda!) insists on calling Walky “David”.
That’s very possible and it might tie into why she eventually changes back, if she does.
But she’s still asking to be called Jennifer now. (Even if she’s not willing to push back against Alice calling her Billie right when she’s starting to connect with her again.)
I think it’s moreso that the name change symbolizes a rejection of her authentic self, and bullying of people similar to her who aren’t ashamed to be themselves. The old nickname is tainted by NERDS, and she is totally NOT a nerd who enjoys media featuring Kit Fisto. She’s trying way too hard to impress some imaginary movie villain in-crowd that shoves nerds in lockers. If she simply liked her given name and felt like she’d missed out on it as a kid, the comments section probably would have just gone “oh,” and moved on. Any other motivation than… this.
But … it was Billie who was like that. Bilie denied she was into Kit Fisto. Billie followed up every reference to Star Wars with “it’s not a nerd thing”. Billie arrived in college thinking she was still the head chearleader, somehow.
Jennifer likes chatting to Raidah about her Star Wars fandom, and is completely unaware that Raidah is judging her for it.
I like the idea that Raidah’s bitter grumbling about Star Wars means that Jennifer is openly and unreservedly nerding out about it now?
That wasn’t how I read that strip, though. Jennifer had before defended Star Wars as “mainstream, you can’t really be a nerd about [it]”. So she might well be excitedly infodumping (or just talking enough about it to annoy Raidah) while still maintaining that she’s not a nerd.
While again, this isn’t nearly the same thing as deadnaming a trans person, deciding for someone else that it’s “a rejection of her authentic self” has uncomfortable resonance.
That’s a little bit beyond “who you say you are.” And given that unless I missed something Billie wasn’t identifying as a different gender under that name, it kinda seems like you’re just trying to open up a can of worms when I wasn’t even planning on going fishing.
I’m not a very social person and even I have managed to be known by different monikers to different people (yes, in person) – first name, first initial, middle name, Von Benzer, Reverend. Now, if I told any of those people that I was going by Bob now, even if they could consistently manage to call me Bob most, if not all, of them would almost certainly think of me how they knew me for so long.
Sal said in this very comic that Billie is not trans or has any sort of DID going on, she’s just rebranding. That’s been reinforced by the comic’s depiction of Billie. C’mon man.
She’s not trans or DID, but I think the basic question of “Who you say you are cannot in itself change who you are or have been to others” carries over. It doesn’t have the same weight of prejudice in her case of course, but refusing to accept her name preference unless one agrees with her changes can make people think your acceptance of their own more serious changes might also be contingent.
I think part of the issue is that some readers are treating the name change as if it’s even more significant than it is. Sure, this is fiction and on some level there’s meaning behind the name change, but it’s not that Billie and Jennifer are two completely different people and one of them is her real authentic better self. They’re both her and while she’s certainly changed over the course of the comic, not more so than plenty of other characters without name changes.
Jennifer herself has never given it that kind of weight, even at the beginning of this semester when she was better at holding up the pretense that she had it all together.
It’s literally just a cutening of her surname. Like technically she has been a Billingsworth this whole time, yeah. I don’t really understand your point, and you’re coming across as vaguely transphobic in a comments section that’s moderated against transphobia, so it’s a matter of propriety not to say such things.
Yeah this scene has just kind of infuriated me with Ruth talking about how much she cares and how she’ll never give up on JB. Ruth unilaterally and traumatically nuked their relationship under the pretense of being “healthy” and has now at some point offstage decided to regret that decision for some flavor of raisins and is fronting like she’s some kind of loyal friend who believes in JB when her entire shtick back then was *herself* being adamant that neither of them could change and stop being toxic and self-destructive and that’s why their relationship, the best and most stable thing either of them had going in their lives, had to be destroyed for the greater good. I really don’t trust a damn thing Ruth says or even any emotion she expresses.
Maybe more fundamentally, though, this is a pretty callous treatment. Ruth is a girl that’s coming to terms with her self-abuse and need for vulnerability for maybe the first time other, and she started this with a relationship that brought her enormous joy and enormous struggling at the same time.
She’s inconsistent and prone to fucking up because she’s a human thrown into staggeringly hard circumstances to navigate which are bending the fabric of her existence.
There’s plenty of reasons to not like and not trust her. Like, yeah, she doesn’t have her house in order. But there’s a lack of clarity on why she’s making the mistakes she does, and that’s leading to a pretty cruel point of view where she’s some kind of devious master manipulator that’s “fronting” genuine care.
This comment juxtaposed with one of my others maybe exposes my easier ability to suggest patience than practice it. Idk. I like Ruth, but people with different experiences with me could definitely be more sensitive to her volatility and inconsistency.
The comic you link is Ruth declaring her regret of that decision, but the part where she decides to regret it, and her reasoning for doing so, is not something I can recall seeing in any strip of the comic. In that linked comic Ruth has already decided she wants to be back with Jennifer again, but she doesn’t offer any explanation or justification for her behavior and her reversal of position, which is especially egregious considering even if Jennifer was willing to accept her back, Jennifer would have no way of trusting that Ruth wouldn’t just repeat her past actions of changing her mind about their very serious commitments to each other and then secretly planning a sudden, public and dramatic unilateral cutting off of their relationship. Ruth wasn’t willing to do the work to ethically disentangle their intense codependent relationship back then, and she seems no more willing now to actually acknowledge what she did and her thoughts and feelings that led to it in order to try to build healthy boundaries and a foundation for trust. Jennifer has always been the one who has been trying to change and make the best of her situation while still treasuring the parts of herself she can hold on to; she’s just been excruciatingly bad at it in almost every way due to internalizing so much toxic self image over the course of her life. Ruth is the one who has always fought any change or improvement tooth and nail, kicking and screaming, probably because she associates change with the death of her parents and being forced to leave Canada, and so her entire concept of “good and healthy” is synonymous with “status quo”.
I mean, Ruth didn’t want to break up with Jennifer, so you could argue her regret was immediate?
She just thought that her own self-destructive tendencies were going to inevitably swing back into the forefront, and she dumped Jennifer in an effort to save Jennifer from that backswing, because she was terrified that she might one day be again in such a dark place that she was okay with both of them dying.
Ruth’s self destructive tendencies did swing back into the forefront- she decided to fulfill her own self-fulfilling prophecy that she would become self destructive again, by going ahead and being self-destructive. She was a coward, and she took the coward’s way out. It was easier to be self destructive in the present than to go on fearing that she would be self destructive in the future, and Ruth told herself the lie that it was okay to do it because it was for Billie’s own good and Ruth was hurting herself more than hurting Billie, which was literally willfully engaging in the very self destruction she claimed to be trying to avoid. The only part of it that looks to Ruth’s credit in my eyes is that after the time skip Ruth said that “we lost Billie”, which seemed to be an acknowledgement that Jennifer had been truly harmed by what she did, she had utterly failed at her objective, and it wasn’t just some temporary unpleasantness that had to be stoically toughed out to reach the “healthy” future which all that self destruction was supposed to facilitate.
I simply can’t disagree more with what you say. For one, I cannot accept the idea that breaking up with Billie was cowardly, not for Ruth. I’m not even convinced she would have managed if her plan for the evening were not ruined… (with on top of it Dorothy reminding her while trying to dissuade her).
It was highly misguided, little doubt about that knowing she’s been fine since then. (So much for “breaking up so she could be self-destructive again” i think read some time)
I also think the break up was more self-sabotage than self-destruction, as i think this strip is supposed to imply by comparing with Dorothy. She self-sabotaged fearing Billie’s “codependency” and her self-destruction could (not would) lead to catastrophe.
I mention the “codependency” because I find the references she made to dying by Ruth’s hands hard to ignore. Even if it happened only twice in the storyline, it felt the stripes put weight on it in both cases, as to show Ruth’s (non-verbalized) discomfort.
No one says you have to like Ruth, and I’m not going to try to argue with you about whether or not breaking up with Jennifer was “cowardice”.
All I said was, she already regretted breaking up with Jennifer before it happened. So we didn’t really need to be shown her turning around on that, because she was never facing any other metaphorical direction.
I can respect and have patience for Ruth as a person trying to improve herself under the poor circumstances of her life. I can’t have that for her relationship with Jennifer. Her history of drinking and abuse all seem like excuses to me for a toxic relationship she initiated through physical and emotional abuse and assault. That’s before they even really started dating.
Ruth always dictated the terms of their relationship. Pushing Billie in public because they can’t be seen as a couple. Billie having to rescue her because she was in a drunken, depression spiral. Criticizing Billie for sneaking drinks when they tried to quit, only to go back to drinking when she found a balsnce of meds that worked. Breaking up with Billie on her whims and just expecting Billie to come back. Billie choosing to hang with her through all of that to finally get to a decent and stable place and Ruth ends it anyway. Billie never had a fair amount of agency in their relationship. At least not the way I read it.
And I don’t want to undercut Billie’s own choices on their past as a couple. She could’ve walked away anytime, but I think Ruth took advantage of the fact she wouldn’t. Even at it was over admitting she still expected Billie to chase her again and hypocritically wanting to be angry about it.
I like Ruth as Jennifer’s friend but I can’t trust her as Jennifer’s partner or girlfriend.
Or maybe it’s not that big a deal. Re-reading all her recent strips at once and Alice doesn’t seem very upset emotionally. She’s was likely willing to reconnect with Jen but was wary of her and looking for confirmation she had changed. That whole “You never change.” line likely had more impact than she intended considering she was texting and trying to track Jen down.
And also erasure of all the monosyllables Alice replied with when they stumbled into each other before That Lunch With Joyce. Like, literally their last interaction had been
1- Also Accidental
2- Ending with Alice’s stony-faced “you’ll never change”.
I feel like Joyce’s words dug deep into Alice’s empathy and she realised that just because she hadn’t seen Billie’s transformation and growth doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It’s so sweet 🥹
With the discussion Ruth and Billifer just had (well, before her nap), I’m starting to think maybe it did, under the surface and pretense.
Or maybe she got a really good epiphany and may at least be able to finally rethink things.
Honestly I think it did. Jennifer pushing away Asher on purpose cause she got bored with him and he reminded her too much of her past self was deeply shitty of her, but I think the last arc or two is trying to point out that despite Jennifer’s myriad of shaky confidence and bad decision making, she is trying to improve and grow and all her failures are landing home.
She can’t have Ruth anymore, sure, but she still relies on her as a friend who’s seen her at her worst, and Joyce (who is her friend) vouches for her. Billie would never be caught dead being vulnerable to anyone because she would — as we just saw — puff herself up, talk big, and storm off pretending she doesn’t need anything.
I really do love watching Jennifer make bad decisions and suffer but keep in mind after Ruth was hospitalized she responded with anger and lashing out. Crying about her shame and regret and what she can’t have is kinda a step up for her!
He went from having one personality to having a different personality because he ended his nicotine dependency which lead to arguments and a communication break down. The moment they broke up was immediately after he horribly insulted her.
You cannot possibly actually believe this. Jennifer was actively belittling and insulting his choices because they reminded her of Walky, then when he changed them she said he was trying too hard. He then tried to ask about being her boyfriend and she more or less told him she wasn’t interested.
Alice is not too cool for Jennifer, she cut ties because Billie was self-destructive and dangerous but she still cares about her. Like she wants Billie in her life, she just thought she couldn’t have that without putting herself in danger
Not necessarily. I think she kind of WANTED to give Billie/Jennifer a chance, but she was hesitant, given what happened before. This was MUCH less hostile than their initial meeting up again in college, so… I think she just kind of needed a nudge towards being justified in giving her a shot.
Okay, so from the sound of it, the underlying issue on Alice’s part mostly may have been how Jennifer went about the AFTERMATH of the crash instead of the incident itself. Specifically her tendency to refuse vulnerability in order to take care of others.
What seemed to set Alice off before Joyce intervened was Jennifer’s signature “alpha bongo who needs nothing from anyone” routine. She’s very much the type to put on a poker face and pretend everything’s fine instead of letting people support her, which really only changed when she and Ruth began to bond over sharing her biggest issue at the time.
Alice clearly cared about her a lot, and the prom flashback really emphasizes that Jennifer very much did live up to her “get shit done” brand. But she was never able to reciprocate that, even after they were both involved in the wreck and Jennifer was most heavily affected by it.
Through Joyce’s account of the ways she’s since changed, and through seeing her actually turn to others for support, even going out of her WAY to do so, Alice essentially got the sign she needed that she was finally giving people the chance to be there for her, which is all she seemingly wanted all along.
To be fair, the underlying issue was very likely updated in the decade since Alice’s first appearance, since that seemed to paint it as Alice being upset about the crash in general. Which, with how much has occurred narratively since then, is an understandable retcon with the complete lack of emphasis on the fallout with Alice until now, so it doesn’t really change much overall.
I think the flashback at the beginning of the arc was meant to emphasize that
1) Billie took care of everyone else’s problems, at the expense of her own life
2) Billie has surrounded herself with fake friends
So I think it makes sense that the conclusion Billie had to come to was to stop trying to isolate herself with fake friends, and learn to rely on real friends who care about her when she’s hurt.
And for character development, this is reinforcing to Billie that it’s good for her to emotionally rely on people who love her, like Joyce and Ruth, instead of hanging with fake friends for status
I hope that first part isn’t the only takeaway there, since there’s been good evidence in the past that while Jennifer was an alpha bongo who took care of the problems of her flock of cheerleaders, her own problems helped them get into that trouble in the first place. Especially Alice, who at least thought she was in love with Jennifer.
Correct. She’s still going to make horrible decisions for herself, but she’s also in your corner the hardest anyone can be. She just needs to learn to let her guard down for others, which Alice noted she never did.
And then Ruth opened her door to her, let her cry, told Alice where to find her, and she sees her as a total red-eyed mess. Thus confirming that she’s letting people close.
The plot line kind of wrote itself into a dead end and was dragging so everyone was given an out to move on to other stuff/having Alice in the comic more often.
I think it’s only really a surprisingly quick turnaround if you don’t remember the look on Alice’s face when she originally (on-panel) told Jennifer to stay away from her.
She was brimming over with tears then, and between that and now, I think it’s fairly clear that Alice was always only putting up a tough front because she thought she had to, for her own protection. Upon having any evidence that Jennifer has really changed and has really become someone safe to be around — she’s happy and relieved.
But seriously it’s nice to see these characters actually genuinely happy once in a while. Though this probably means Dorothy is about to fuck things up with Joyce big time.
Have people actually been denying that Alice still clearly has a lot of feelings for and about Billie?
The general thing I’ve seen is doubt about whether it’s a good idea for them to reconnect, and the jury’s still out on that. I’m rooting for them to make it work, but this isn’t stable yet and I don’t know if it’s gonna get stable
Among a thousand other things that are less obvious and more nuanced, they can’t get stable until Jennifer accepts that she is not fucking straight, even if that makes her unpopular. She’s gradually pursued men less and less, over the run of the strip. She’s literally supposed to be dating a guy right now, and she BARELY could muster up the scantest shred of giving a fuck about him boning a suicidal twink for, like, weeks or months, now.
Like this isn’t a strong criticism of her directly, per se; however, it is PLAINLY obvious that Jennifer and her circle are going to get hurt again, possibly badly, if she can’t even pay some lip service to the fact that the women she is trying to befriend, all rightfully see her as a romantic interest.
Something about how they’re walking away, tells me Alice isn’t exactly in the “besties” or “roommates” phase of her life, here…
I mean, Jennifer and Dan are happily married in the Walkyverse (or Willis-1) so it’s probable that Jennifer is in fact bisexual. It’s just she has no strong feelings about Asher.
Although Jennifer overcorrecting and decides she’s on the other end of a binary gay/straight divide instead of in the middle of a spectrum would be a pretty plausible thing to happen
The fact she keeps talking about Alice and being her “friend” may be a problem as it seems clearly that Jennifer wants to get back with her as a romantic partner. But she’s not using those words.
I think we got word of god years ago from a bi day of visibility post or some such, featuring several bi characters. (Her, Danny, Mike at a minimum if memory serves.)
It was Jennifer and Ruth with Danny between them, looking passably like an ally. Willis hadn’t yet revealed that Danny was also bi, and was winking at us all.
(This also long-predated Willis’s reveal that Mike had feelings for Ethan, and I think they would’ve hesitated to put Mike in a Bi Visibility Day celebration post anyway, since 90% of readers were still describing Mike’s sexuality using edgelord phrasing that Willis probably regretted (“he’s whatever you don’t want him to be”).)
It was Billie (she was never “Jennifer” in the Walkyverse, and the character designs are the Roomies! versions) with her girlfriend on one arm and her boyfriend (later husband) on the other, saying, “All eyes on me!”
And, yeah, we didn’t know at the time that all three of them were bi. Danny’s presence seemed like it was just illustrating Billie’s bi-llieness.
(I’m now imagining a DoA version of it, with Dorothy in the middle, Joyce on one arm and Walky on the other… and the later, “No, actually, it’s all three of them,” reveal.)
Ahh thanks, I figured the post was on the dead bird site and didn’t check. I might have gotten vibes about Danny at the time and simply accepted the post as confirmation for team bi, not knowing the Willisverse callback John Campbell pointed out below.
How has she “pursued men less and less, over the run of the strip”?
She spent most of the first semester dating a woman and showing almost no signs of interest in men. She showed up after the timeskip dating a man, though we didn’t really see a lot of them together until just before they broke up. (And yes, they’re not actually dating anymore and haven’t been since before Asher and Ethan first boned.)
The comic has definitely focused more on her relationships with women, but there’s been no gradual shift away from men.
i’ve read this comic long enough to warn you that you should genuinely have no hope on this one. we got another decade or two of strips before we even get close to that, I think.
Yeah, like I won’t rule it out completely or anything, ’cause I have actually known people very much like that. But that’s the darkest hole you could possibly jump down into off of one sentence!
I think that in the moment it was a reassurance that helped with the jab that raidah sent her way as opposed to a full scale judgement of character. While I agree that it’s uncharitable way to interpret that statement… I had the same initial reaction before thinking about it further. I think the root comment is a valuable discussion point.
Yeah to me there are some weird vibes. And like to have Alice in juxtaposition with Ruth here makes it feel even weirder to me.
Like the fact that Alice did such a complete 180 from “you’ll never change” (which felt intentionally cruel) to ‘i just want to make sure you’re loved <3’ based only on the opinions of complete strangers over a couple hours.
and then there’s Ruth, who believes in Jennifer. Who isn’t going to give up on her. It kind of makes Alice’s back and forth nature more evident.
I think she’s allowed to be back and forth about re-initiating contact with Jennifer considering they were in a situationship situation that ended with a car crash that injured Alice and could have killed her. God forbid a girl be unsure what to think of her former lover after all of that.
This is only about “make sure you’re loved” or even her relationships with others in the sense that Alice thinks the Jennifer she knew in high school wouldn’t have been capable of that. This is evidence that she’s changed, not whatever else is being read into it. What Alice asked Joyce at the end of the last scene was “Has she learned to love somebody? Like for real?”
Like 3 different seemingly upstanding people independently vetted her in a way that proved her wrong about Jennifer changing. The initial statement was likely hyperbolic, furthermore. When people say stuff like that, they want to be proven wrong.
I love these two dorks, I hope the live long and happy lives together. And Billifer, Cimbalta did wonders for me and my depression, ask your doctor about it.
Who am I kidding this is a DYW comic, nobody lives happy and stays in the comic.
Joyce might be fantasizing about if Jennifer is Billie again. There’s a lot uncanny in this particular strip. For a few days, I’m going to be suspicious it’s Joyce imagining this or Jennifer dreaming/imagining it based off of lunch with Joyce.
Yeah, I had to look carefully at the whole thing, for any possible signs of anecdotey, dreamy, flashbacky sorts of “it’s-not-really-happening”. Can’t see any, though!
This is, what, the second or third time folks who don’t like where a storyline is going have started wondering if it was a dream?
Willis has literally never faked us out in this way. The closest incidents were Danny’s two panel fantasy of kissing Ethan and the first appearance of Amber’s head-Mike, who was immediately and consistently drawn without shadows, after we knew something bad had happened to him.
We aren’t gonna get whole strips of fantasy with no indicators.
give it a rest. I said this strip was uncanny and you decide I “don’t like where a storyline is going”. Stop making up shit about other people, please.
Like I said, suspicious for a few days. It’s the next day now, and it’s not Joyce imagining it. I do not expect a dream reveal after a scene break either. It doesn’t make this strip not uncanny.
I’ve been trying to figure out what group of friends Carla fits into since she just kind of floats around the periphery by herself. I think it’s actually Ruth and Jennifer. They have the most history and even share Leslie’s class which is where other main relationships were established.
I think she’s probably closer with Sal and her derby team, but also I do think it’s deliberate that Carla kind of keeps herself at a distance where all her friendships are easily divestable
Okay, I wasn’t expecting Ruth to have actually invited Alice over. I thought we would have to deal with some petty three- or even four-way snarking for a bit until Ruth decided it’d be okay to let JB have this.
Taking the initiative to be kind kinda surprises and impresses me. Good job, Ruth.
Either they turned them off or set the timeout to like 1 hour or something.
(on an entirely different note, i hope jocelyn did _not_ take her phone with her to the protest. or if she did, it’s info-locked and not biometric-locked.)
It’s entirely possible, also, that they did the stupid thing of (1) telling their current partner the passcode, and (2) not changing it after breaking up.
“you sought refuge and people took care of you, you look loved” who the heck talks like that? it sounds like a line someone would say in a 1940’s movie, not something a young adult would say in 2025. maybe it was previously established that Alice a “m’lady” affectation…
When you don’t know the correct “normal” words, because it is something you haven’t ever said before, people tend to fall back on the fictional contexts in which they’ve read or heard such words. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the current social context is such that saying stuff like “you look loved” are not things most people normally say to each other. So maybe she fell back on the period fiction she enjoys so much (I assume).
Might be movies, novels, or some other common media experience that Alice and Jennifer have both discussed in-depth. They might very well have some intimate dialect between them from the previous year(s).
I mean Alice did give up on Jennifer. That was a pretty significant thing that happened. Like I understand where you’re coming from but she very much did give up on her
Maybe I’m weird but I don’t really understand this like for soft-serve ice cream. If the ice cream is too soft it melts too fast, and then you’re stuck with disgusting ice cream soup.
I am crossing my fingers that they run into Raidah, because I think with Alice standing beside her, accepting her, Jennifer may have the strength to tell Raidah to go fuck herself.
“And by the way? My name is Billie” would be an especially awesome way of saying goodbye forever to Raidah’s awful clique.
Honestly I have no idea how much of the protest I expect us to see. It kind of depends on whether Willis’s reaction to Politics of 2024 was “I’m gonna make this part of my art” or “I’m gonna make art that helps me escape this”.
We could easily get, for example:
– Amazi-Girl has a tussle with police
– Jocelyne gets arrested (though not too badly mistreated bc she’s white), Hank and Carol both show up to react and or bail her out
– Cameos or more from other politically active students who are also at the protest, like Roz or Jacob (whose brother, the one he super duper looks up to, is a civil rights lawyer)
– Dorothy finds her calling in grass roots organizing? It might be a little early for something like that, but it’s a very legitimate avenue to future non-corrupt political machinations
With the way Alice started off being so distant and wary compared to what we saw in the flashback, I think there was probably more to the aftermath of the crash that caused her to pull away this big. I wouldn’t be surprised if the clash came from Alice being scared about Billie getting so badly hurt and Billie doubling down on insisting she’s fine and just being angry at everyone for giving her DUI tangible social consequences, and Alice eventually realizing that she couldn’t keep trying to care about someone who wouldn’t actually let herself be vulnerable and cared about.
Especially given that it seems like the proof Alice needed of her having actually changed was that she has friends now who will not only hang out with her and stand up for her, but friends that she’ll run to when she’s upset and recognizes that she needs to be taken care of too.
I definitely think Alice was trying to protect herself from an “inevitable” sense of rejection if she tried to care about her again only to get held at arms’ length. I’d say it’s even possible that past Billie intentionally tried to be strong for both of them without realizing it was pushing Alice away and making her feel lost and unwelcome.
(Reading into things a bit, sure, but I do feel like it’s text-supported theorizing. :P)
Ruth saved the day. I’m enjoying this new dynamic as BFF between her and Jennifer. Now let’s see if Alice will become Jennifer’s next girlfriend or no.
Honestly did not expect Alice to give her another shot, nor did I expect the “does she accept love” conversation to link directly into Ruth supporting her when she’s low. Jennifer will still show up to wreck it but I’m happy to see we’re getting Alice added to the cast as more than just a reminder of Jennifer’s incompetence and failures.
She (and Jocelyne) have been promoted to the cast page, and Willis originally said she was in some building or other when asked before, obviously, deciding to move her to Forest.
Alice is better than Bad Rachel because takes in new information and uses it to shape her perception of a person. And she’s hot hot hotter than the sun on the 4th of July.
I remember not feeling sure about Alice before, but I like her now. Partially because of the strip here but partially because I’ve let go of past judgements before I’d read it. Honestly, I already liked her, I just wasn’t totally sure about her yet.
…I… Felt like there might be somewhat of an unsettling vibe to me to this interaction as someone who is friends with people who are sociopaths, but now that I think about it, they would still experience what Jennifer/Billie is experiencing right now, since they’re still caring people with social connections who just happen to not experience empathy. So nevermind.
I’ve gone from being a hater to not being a hater. Without forcing it, since I didn’t hate myself either way. Yay!
(For those unfamiliar with me, I consciously choose to be blatantly biased in favor of Jennifer, specifically because she’s the only major character in the story with a similar skin tone or a similar build as mine.)
I’m going to be honest though, my personality is a lot closer to Joyce, despite a hilariously different upbringing. Of course, I genuinely don’t care what other people think of me. Sal is probably the character who I’m like in that regard. People get annoying about it when they find out that I don’t actually care, but it weeds out emotional abusers so it’s worth it. I’d recommend it.
…though actually saying that instead of demonstrating that is more of a Jennifer trait. Hrm. Eh, that’s fine, I actually like Jennifer for her personality so it’s a self esteem boost either way.
At the very least, IF Jennifer felt like she had to hide her nerdy interests from Alice in high school, I bet Alice is actually totally fine with nerdy stuff, and it was just Jennifer assuming that all the other popular pretty teenagers were also [performatively] anti-nerd.
You’re a textbook tsundere, really. Often grumpy and clumsy when it comes to expressing affection. A little cartoonish and over the top about it sometimes, occasionally with slightly more serious consequences.
That was always going to rub some people the wrong way, which is natural. I myself get prickly about different tropes — belligerent sexual tension, for example. Especially if it’s the m/f type where the woman has been insisting for 90% of the narrative that she has no interest in the man, but then suddenly he makes some big gesture and she completely changes her mind.
For a long time, I was particularly twitchy about characters who say mean things to their friends. I had a “friend” who was mean to me in exactly that way and for a long time, fictional portrayals of actual friends who used that kind of “meanness” to tease each other made me uncomfortable.
We all bring out own things to fiction. Sometimes that means seeing the early signs of something before anyone else and getting to be right when the big reveal finally happens; sometimes it means that what seemed like super obvious and unarguable implication to us wasn’t intended at all, and we’re caught flat-footed, stumbling when the narrative doesn’t go the way we expect.
The very early days of Ruth and Jennifer’s relationship were rough. Kind of the emotional equivalent of a head-on collision that the two drivers then trauma-bonded over, I think. And I do understand why a lot of readers would have been uncomfortable with that: especially the pre-courtship part, where Ruth — a depressed alcoholic child of abuse, who probably hadn’t known love since her parents died and who didn’t even know what she was feeling for Jennifer until she found herself trying to kiss her — unarguably treated Jennifer very poorly while struggling to figure out and accept what she was feeling.
Honestly, part of me thinks that contingent of vocal folks might be a big part of why Willis had them break up; that Willis might have felt like the readership was never going to be able to accept this couple as it was, and that Ruth/Jennifer needed to be destroyed and remade before it could actually be read as healthy.
But of course that presupposes that they’re going to get back together, and we definitely don’t know yet whether that’s the plan…
Still. Nice to see them both smiling here.
NOTE: I’m opening myself up to discussion here obviously but I would request that we leave the s-word out of it. If it’s gotta come up — and it’s fair to mention it, because it was a big part of why Ruth ended things after all — even just talking about it as self-harm or self-destructive tendencies is a lot easier for me personally to read in a dozen comments back and forth. Thank you!
Should maybe stress that I’m not trying to ask anyone to avoid the word elsewhere, just being self-aware that I’m not gonna respond to comments if they mention it a bunch.
Also not feeling like disclosing my why, so I’m not gonna. Respect it or don’t, it’s up to you.
Just wanna say I really enjoy your comments in general! And in particular, you’ve hit here on a super interesting point — Readers don’t do character analysis unbiased. We can’t, I’d argue, because just like you bring yourself along in a trip, the lenses we look at fiction with can be trained and tempered with a ton of tools, but also they hinge on our emotional engagement: We make ourselves vulnerable for the story.
Thank you for sharing your experience ♥ And yeah, heartfully agreeing: It IS nice to see these two smiling.
I’ve always been a fan of relationships where two people come together to uplift each other and support each other’s growth. Have been ever since Beauty and the Beast. And while like you said, early Ruth and Billie were really rough to root for, I will say I eventually came around to them. They’re both flawed individuals, dealing with their own issues and breaking out of certain awful cycles, and for a time I think they actually were very good for each other. It’s a shame they broke up, but I’m rooting for them to, if nothing else, still be friends.
I feel like the old scanlation term ‘hotcold woman’ suits her a bit more. Although recent panels of her interaction with Jennifer have been ‘dere’, Ruth’s demeanor has always been more of an intensity thing. She’s always either aloof and cold or packing all the heat possible. At least in the present she seems to be rather frank and straightforward about her feelings, where as a tsundere archetypal tends to have difficulty with that and is almost compulsively indirect until forced. I think this is largely due to her growing up some. But I also think that it’s impossible to talk about any of her behavior towards others without reminding that a lot of her negativity is more so to make herself look worse in comparison and how deep her disdain for herself is tends to reflect how intense the hot or cold reactions tend to be.
I was gonna say “enough”, but most of them were so bad orz
Anyway, I’m not familiar with that term. Google seems to think you are referring to kuudere?
Mostly I was thinking of the early, um, violence, which is definitely more of a tsun reaction to having a crush. But kuu probably works well for Ruth after that first initial period of calling Jennifer names and that one memorable body slam.
(Again: cartoonish, slightly more realistic consequences.)
Anyway, fully agree that Ruth was actively trying to be a bad RA for a lot of the early days because she wanted to be fired, and she was very much crushed when her grandfather pulled strings. Similarly, Ruth ended things with Jennifer the way she did because she wanted Jennifer to hate her. She undoubtedly thought that would make things easier for Jennifer, and in a way she wasn’t completely wrong there, though I think obviously if Raidah hadn’t swooped in…
(For readers who aren’t familiar: tsuntsun = standoffish, prickly, grumpy or angry; kuukuu = distant, cool, indifferent; deredere = mooning over, lovestruck. Combinations like tsundere and kuudere describe a character who’s one way on the outside and the other way on the inside, with varying degrees of transparency. Someone with a very thick outer shell might be called a tsuntsundere.
Japan definitely isn’t alone in loving this trope, though in western fiction we tend to call it “asshole with a heart of gold”, and while tsundere characters are more often teen girls, AWAHOG are more often middle-aged men.)
While I am happy for Billie, she still needs to do a lot of work on herself top deserve a peaceful walk into the sunset. Hopefully having Alice around will help her be better in and out.
This kind of thing is why I roll my eyes at people who think it’s some kind of huge deal about “don’t you dare call me by such-and-such name.” Like, obviously context is important. That’s all.
But there’s a whole little cottage industry to shame anyone using a name regardless of context. (Side note, with Jennifer / Billy specifically, I think I’d be less annoyed if she’d accept the perfectly good (and arguably better) name “Jenny” instead of insisting on the full blown, hoity-toity “Jennifer.”
Like, if you’re annoyed by people calling you “Dave” or “Jenny” when you prefer “David” or “Jennifer”… fine. If you think that’s somehow a disrespectful insult, guess what, some people have *real* problems.
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whatever, just don’t call her late for drinks
Calling it now Billie is a bisexual homoromantic female, or maybe pansexual, but definitely loves women. And as long as that leads her to healthy relationships I’m there for her
I don’t know about homoromantic. She was in a relationship with Asher. Yes, it was dysfunctional, but so was her relationship with Ruth. I’m think she’s just bi/pan on all fronts.
… actually, I think Carla had it right. She’s attracted to BAD IDEAS.
And based on my own history of atteaction to bad relationships, Ms. Billingsworth is also a bad idea.
She was so close to learning something and self-awareness. sigh Getting an out here isn’t going to do her any favours, I fear.
Alice seems to be the big exception based on what we’ve seen. Maybe. We don’t know that much about Alice yet, but so far she seems like the least bad idea of the relationships we’ve seen Jennifer have.
I wouldn’t go that far.
From what I can tell from the hints: They were officially just friends, but Alice was at least massively crushing on Jennifer, while Jennifer would have sex with her, but avoided any romantic commitment beyond friends. And brought her along to parties where she was looking for boys to drunkenly fuck and expecting Alice to do the same.
At least with Ruth, despite all the problems, she acknowledged it as a relationship.
Based on what we actually know so far, I would. Not based on hints. But that’s fine, you don’t have to come along.
Based on what we actually know, they were best friends and Alice had a crush on Billie.
We don’t know they had sex or even kissed.
A fright? When and where did she learn to talk like a middle ages wench
Dated an english major for a bit.
And I’ll have you know looking a fright is the bees knees..
“Sought refuge.” It doesn’t matter how hot they are. Those two are dorks.
I bet they like Stars War.
Alice definitely knows about the Kit Fisto thing
Imagine being the kind of loser that would devote themselves to never learning about Kit Fisto?
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/04-dont-stop-billie-ving/pretended/
I bet that person is really sad and lonely and has no friends. Couldn’t be me.
As a Caribbean person I take kit fistos fine ass as an apology for jar jar binks. Not an adequate apology, but one nonetheless
You can Kit Fisto your BFF maybe once and it’s not gay.
Actually rendered “the war of the stars” in French and “war of the stars” in German.
And the the movie’s stars all got along together. People should have demanded their money back.
Being dorks makes them hotter
Her father is English and rich.
yeah this
it’d be really funny if he was related to jason actually
After too many Clone Wars rewatches, she starts sounding like Obi-Wan.
Math class, where she earned the burning.
I think it’s a view of the more goofy Billie underneath who she tries to keep suppressed. Seeing Alice jolted it out of her for a moment.
i’d have said Victorian lady, but yeah.
(I actually researched this, because that’s the kind of dork I am, but most free online dictionaries don’t do origins, and the local library is closed, so all I’ve got is that Longman and Cambridge both call it “old fashioned”.
If Google ngrams is to be believed, the first usage of “look a fright” was late 1700s. I’m skeptical, because Google Books search is thoroughly enshittified — despite putting a date range of 1790-1850, I get results from whenever the hell, including the 21st century. I see no “sort by date” possible. Feh.
Archive.org works much better at narrowing down timeframes, although the date in the metadata doesn’t always match what is printed in the book (there’s some that say “1731”, but they’re collections from a magazine that started publishing then and the actual story the words appear in has a date of 1871 ).
The earliest book that I can find that does match — that is, the book itself has 1799 as the publication date on the title page — is:
He Deceives Himself: A Domestic Tale (In Three Volumes). By Marianne Chambers, (1799), Vol 1
In 1799, the long s was still used in printing, so the text is “—I am ſure I look a fright !”
One possible antedate of the phrase was published in 1814. It’s a review of a book that contains discussion of historical persons and events. According to the review, Anne Oldfield’s last words were “One would not look a fright after one’s death”. Anne Oldfield died in 1730.
However, I am not confident without primary documents.
It would appear that Alexander Pope versified her last words:
Odious! in woollen! ‘twould a saint provoke,
Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke;
No, let a charming chintz and Brussels lace
Wrap my cold limbs and shade my lifeless face:
One would not, sure, be frightful when one’s dead,
And—Betty—give this cheek a little red.
Which strikes me as improbable as something she would literally say, but I note that “fright” is in there. FWIW
Jason sleeps in that room sometimes. His dialectical Bri’ishness permeates the room. Influencing the words of the unwary.
She DOES have that hidden nerdy side that she’s not so adept at keeping hidden.
What do the tags say? What do they say?! Still Jennifer! What does it mean?!
The tags need to suss it out too.
Billinifer
-worth
According to Google, “White Wave” or “Fair One”.
That Ruth can’t see them.
Willis sometimes keep the tags un-updated, and goes in and retroactively fixes them.
It means that she hasn’t yet explicitly said to Alice that she’s Jennifer now. Or, alternatively, she hasn’t yet said that she had been going by Jennifer, but she’s good with being Billie again.
Really rooting for this to turn out well, but there’s so many pitfalls that Jennifer could step into here
Like the fact that Alice has been talking to Ruth and knows that Jennifer sought refuge in Ruth’s room and that “Billie” is loved. But will it occur to her to ask who she is loved by?
No. Nor to learn.
….woah ?
Heartwarming as fuck.
…Damn, Joyce is good.
Joyce does in fact pull
But Jennifer doesn’t know Joyce said anything and so she’ll conclude that this was due to her innate charm.
I hope Alice will explain why she started texting, but even if she doesn’t, Jennifer should notice that Ruth helped. NOTHING about this situation screams “Jennifer has pull,” and I think she’s self-aware enough to notice that.
Jennifer. Aware.
Hm.
I’d like to think Jennifer will recognize that others helped, but a laugh track plays in my head when I try to think of her as self-aware.
(I do think she’ll recognize that others helped make this possible somewhat, but also if someone went, “This actually worked out because you’re so magnetic,” she’d go, “Yeah, yeah, it was all me!”)
Joyce pulls so hard she pulls for other people
Aww, Biwwie has fwiends!
Wait, Alice can be nice. Neat!
So can Billie! Er, Jennifer! Um, Fright-Woman. (her new super identity)
Fright-woman is good.
I’d buy The Adventures of Ruth and Fright-Woman if comic racks in convenience stores were still a thing
And of course if comics were still a quarter and not whatever they’re charging now.
Thank Willis that electrons are still cheap.
Eh, about $8-10 each issue. Can get higher. (For the typical monthly issue format)
methinks she may be Billie once more.
That’s not what the tags say.
I think she’s happy to be Billie for Alice – Billie was never a bad person to Alice, never a problem until the end. Other people calling her Billie at college reminds her of falling apart, fucking up, alcohol-fueled suicide pact, etc. ‘Billie’ is someone to be escaped most of the time, while ‘Jennifer’ doesn’t have to shoulder all of that.
Alice calling her Billie (and smiling!) probably feels amazing, because ‘Billie’ was a goddamn hero to Alice, truly the alpha bongo problem solver, until she wasn’t anything. From Alice, ‘Billie’ means forgiveness as well as a host of other positive and strong feelings and memories.
I suspect that Jennifer is fine with being Billie for Alice specifically, even if she still prefers the ‘cleaner’ Jennifer from everyone else.
“Billie was never a bad person to Alice, never a problem until the end.”
Eh, maybe? Like, we don’t have enough evidence for that, but we do have implications of evidence.
To quote Alice from her first appearance: “You’re poison. A drama hurricane who ruins everything she touches. I let you drag me down with you for years, but I finally saw the real you and got out before it was too late.”
I think Jennifer was a problem for Alice all along, Alice was just too infatuated to see it until the aftermath of the crash was a step too far.
She was also the goddamn hero and the alpha bongo problem solver, which is why Alice thought she loved her.
to be fair she can be all of those at once
easiest way to acquire problems to solve is to cause them
BillieJ’s P5 expression – goofily happy. Authentic joy. Hoping for more.
I never got one of those. I wanted one, but after they came out with the PS4+ very shortly after I got a PS4, and I didn’t want to get screwed over again. Figured I would save the money and focus on schooling. I don’t regret that decision. Wait, should I?
She was never *not* Billie. Who you say you are cannot in itself change who you are or have been to others. Embrace the multiplicity of you.
Many, many trans people would disagree with you.
I think there’s a miscommunication here.
We say “People are the gender they say they are,” and that’s a good saying that communicates good ideas. Of course, though, no short saying can capture every detail and technicality, and I think the little details are causing the miscommunication.
Strictly speaking, trans people are trans because they “feel and know” that they are. The “who they say they are” matters because it’s generally appropriate to trust people know themselves and are not misinformed or lying.
In other words, the “who you say you are” part isn’t strictly the important part for whether someone is trans; it’s the “who you know and feel that you are”. If someone is trolling badly and says they’re [fake troll gender], that doesn’t make it so, as we know – they’re just lying.
To me, Tenzhi is saying that Billie did not know who she was, said things wrong about that as a result, and this wrong statement did not change her.
– trans person btw
Ado can I hire you to explain my views on gender to other people for me?Because you’ve just expressed a bunch of things aligned with what I believe in a much more diplomatic way than I have ever been able to, whereas when I try to say this stuff people accuse me of being a dishonest alt-right troll.
Yeah I can definitely relate to your incomplete satisfaction with the community here. Aside from this stuff being very hard to express and conceptualize, making some degree of patience and understanding and mercy great, I think the community is overly focused on some surface-level ideas about gender. To some extent I think that’s inevitable and understandable – the community skews young and has a lot of understandable reasons to be defensive – but things can always be better.
I’m still stuck on “OK. This means enough to people to risk being murdered or disowned. Gender, as a thing that exists outside of both biology and socialisation, is clearly A Thing, and I am definitely not going to argue with this. I will defend people’s rights on this. (Seriously: if on one side you have people screaming about who gets to use what bathroom, and on the other side you have people too terrified to use the bathroom, it’s a bit of a no-brainer which is the “correct” side to take.) But what is it, fundamentally, then? (And does not knowing make me agendered or very comfortably cis-gendered? Like, I’ve given birth to and breastfed three babies. I wouldn’t say *comfortably, what with the pregnancy and breastfeeding Raynaud’s, the cumulative 27 months of morning sickness, having my ribcage stretched out by my first (she was cramped for a while… My first sight of her was 4 stretched out, long limbs… She’s taller than me at 10.5), and the “oof”-inducing movements… Also, being bit (and my middle one scrabbled and twiddled and scratched…
Silicone teething beads around my neck to divert her fingers were amazing!). But other than getting touched out sometimes, and cracking up a bit after 10 weeks with probably less than 100 hours of cumulative sleep, it was basically physical discomfort…)
Have you always taken for granted that you’re at some level the same kind of person as the girls and not as the boys?
Or has that always felt like a thing people say about you but you can’t actually empathize with?
There’s not actually a clean distinction here. A lot of people have this experience and what they take away from it is that they are cis. A lot of people have that experience and take away that they’re agender. The buckets aren’t actually describing the experiences people are having so much as they are describing the ways that people interpret their experiences and want to be perceived and interface with the world. If you’re happier contextualizing that experience one way than another, that’s probably the way you should contextualize it and the identity you should build.
Lots of people (vast majority, I’d say) don’t really know what gender is or have a ready and accurate way to describe it. It’s a complex topic. Not knowing doesn’t make one agender or cisgender (there’s not the “-ed” there) or transgender.
I like people who make room for nuance. Props to you.
I am also trans and I don’t need you to tell me how I’m supposed to feel about that comment or my identity.
Yeah, I’ve been consistently uncomfortable with how a lot of the fanbase treats Jennifer regarding basic things like her name. Obviously it’s not the same thing as deadnaming a trans person, but even so, insisting on referring to a character with a name that they’ve repeatedly said makes them uncomfortable? (at the time; we’ll see how she feels about it re: Alice in the future) Still shitty.
As a trans person, I still take away the message of: “a lot of people don’t like her, so they view referring to her by the name she wants as a ‘privilege’ they don’t owe her.” Once people view that as okay, in any circumstance, I can’t help but wonder how conditional their professed allyship really is.
Unless she explicitly says she’s okay with being referred to as Billie again, we should respect Jennifer’s wishes regarding her name. inb4 “She’s a fictional character”–yes, obviously, but real people go through this every day. It’s annoying to get deadnamed every day irl, only to go home and see many “progressive” people in the comments thinking it’s okay to not show basic human decency about people’s names.
The thing about Jennifer/Billie is that I’ve never been convinced that “Jennifer” is the name she actually wants to be called by. Because it seems to have originated not with her deciding that she was going to be “Jennifer” henceforth, but with Raidah telling her that her name is “Jennifer” now, in the same way that she (like Linda!) insists on calling Walky “David”.
…I think you’re right.
That’s very possible and it might tie into why she eventually changes back, if she does.
But she’s still asking to be called Jennifer now. (Even if she’s not willing to push back against Alice calling her Billie right when she’s starting to connect with her again.)
I think it’s moreso that the name change symbolizes a rejection of her authentic self, and bullying of people similar to her who aren’t ashamed to be themselves. The old nickname is tainted by NERDS, and she is totally NOT a nerd who enjoys media featuring Kit Fisto. She’s trying way too hard to impress some imaginary movie villain in-crowd that shoves nerds in lockers. If she simply liked her given name and felt like she’d missed out on it as a kid, the comments section probably would have just gone “oh,” and moved on. Any other motivation than… this.
(I’m enby and nobody reads pronouns on forms ever though, so you have my sympathies with the frustration.)
But … it was Billie who was like that. Bilie denied she was into Kit Fisto. Billie followed up every reference to Star Wars with “it’s not a nerd thing”. Billie arrived in college thinking she was still the head chearleader, somehow.
Jennifer likes chatting to Raidah about her Star Wars fandom, and is completely unaware that Raidah is judging her for it.
I like the idea that Raidah’s bitter grumbling about Star Wars means that Jennifer is openly and unreservedly nerding out about it now?
That wasn’t how I read that strip, though. Jennifer had before defended Star Wars as “mainstream, you can’t really be a nerd about [it]”. So she might well be excitedly infodumping (or just talking enough about it to annoy Raidah) while still maintaining that she’s not a nerd.
While again, this isn’t nearly the same thing as deadnaming a trans person, deciding for someone else that it’s “a rejection of her authentic self” has uncomfortable resonance.
That’s a little bit beyond “who you say you are.” And given that unless I missed something Billie wasn’t identifying as a different gender under that name, it kinda seems like you’re just trying to open up a can of worms when I wasn’t even planning on going fishing.
I’m not a very social person and even I have managed to be known by different monikers to different people (yes, in person) – first name, first initial, middle name, Von Benzer, Reverend. Now, if I told any of those people that I was going by Bob now, even if they could consistently manage to call me Bob most, if not all, of them would almost certainly think of me how they knew me for so long.
Sal said in this very comic that Billie is not trans or has any sort of DID going on, she’s just rebranding. That’s been reinforced by the comic’s depiction of Billie. C’mon man.
She’s not trans or DID, but I think the basic question of “Who you say you are cannot in itself change who you are or have been to others” carries over. It doesn’t have the same weight of prejudice in her case of course, but refusing to accept her name preference unless one agrees with her changes can make people think your acceptance of their own more serious changes might also be contingent.
Not a man.
I think part of the issue is that some readers are treating the name change as if it’s even more significant than it is. Sure, this is fiction and on some level there’s meaning behind the name change, but it’s not that Billie and Jennifer are two completely different people and one of them is her real authentic better self. They’re both her and while she’s certainly changed over the course of the comic, not more so than plenty of other characters without name changes.
Jennifer herself has never given it that kind of weight, even at the beginning of this semester when she was better at holding up the pretense that she had it all together.
It’s literally just a cutening of her surname. Like technically she has been a Billingsworth this whole time, yeah. I don’t really understand your point, and you’re coming across as vaguely transphobic in a comments section that’s moderated against transphobia, so it’s a matter of propriety not to say such things.
And everyone lived happily ever after…
…Until the next time Jennifer opened her mouth.
This, I think.
YUP.
The worst case scenario here is Jennifer becomes an asshole the second she gets what she wants.
Valuable bit of education in college: knowing when to shut up.
Maybe….
Jennifer/Billie being happy is all I can ask for on my birthday comic wise
Happy birthday!
I hope it lasts for a long while.
(the billifer-happy…up to you how long to keep your bday)
Ok yeah happy ending but Billie and Ruth have some stuff to sort out still I reckon
Yeah this scene has just kind of infuriated me with Ruth talking about how much she cares and how she’ll never give up on JB. Ruth unilaterally and traumatically nuked their relationship under the pretense of being “healthy” and has now at some point offstage decided to regret that decision for some flavor of raisins and is fronting like she’s some kind of loyal friend who believes in JB when her entire shtick back then was *herself* being adamant that neither of them could change and stop being toxic and self-destructive and that’s why their relationship, the best and most stable thing either of them had going in their lives, had to be destroyed for the greater good. I really don’t trust a damn thing Ruth says or even any emotion she expresses.
There’s some incomplete ideas here.
Ruth’s regret was on-screen, not off-screen. Below is the most direct example that came to mind, but there were other subtler indicators. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/02-the-one-where-jocelyne-returns/bloodinthewater/
Maybe more fundamentally, though, this is a pretty callous treatment. Ruth is a girl that’s coming to terms with her self-abuse and need for vulnerability for maybe the first time other, and she started this with a relationship that brought her enormous joy and enormous struggling at the same time.
She’s inconsistent and prone to fucking up because she’s a human thrown into staggeringly hard circumstances to navigate which are bending the fabric of her existence.
There’s plenty of reasons to not like and not trust her. Like, yeah, she doesn’t have her house in order. But there’s a lack of clarity on why she’s making the mistakes she does, and that’s leading to a pretty cruel point of view where she’s some kind of devious master manipulator that’s “fronting” genuine care.
This comment juxtaposed with one of my others maybe exposes my easier ability to suggest patience than practice it. Idk. I like Ruth, but people with different experiences with me could definitely be more sensitive to her volatility and inconsistency.
The comic you link is Ruth declaring her regret of that decision, but the part where she decides to regret it, and her reasoning for doing so, is not something I can recall seeing in any strip of the comic. In that linked comic Ruth has already decided she wants to be back with Jennifer again, but she doesn’t offer any explanation or justification for her behavior and her reversal of position, which is especially egregious considering even if Jennifer was willing to accept her back, Jennifer would have no way of trusting that Ruth wouldn’t just repeat her past actions of changing her mind about their very serious commitments to each other and then secretly planning a sudden, public and dramatic unilateral cutting off of their relationship. Ruth wasn’t willing to do the work to ethically disentangle their intense codependent relationship back then, and she seems no more willing now to actually acknowledge what she did and her thoughts and feelings that led to it in order to try to build healthy boundaries and a foundation for trust. Jennifer has always been the one who has been trying to change and make the best of her situation while still treasuring the parts of herself she can hold on to; she’s just been excruciatingly bad at it in almost every way due to internalizing so much toxic self image over the course of her life. Ruth is the one who has always fought any change or improvement tooth and nail, kicking and screaming, probably because she associates change with the death of her parents and being forced to leave Canada, and so her entire concept of “good and healthy” is synonymous with “status quo”.
I mean, Ruth didn’t want to break up with Jennifer, so you could argue her regret was immediate?
She just thought that her own self-destructive tendencies were going to inevitably swing back into the forefront, and she dumped Jennifer in an effort to save Jennifer from that backswing, because she was terrified that she might one day be again in such a dark place that she was okay with both of them dying.
Ruth’s self destructive tendencies did swing back into the forefront- she decided to fulfill her own self-fulfilling prophecy that she would become self destructive again, by going ahead and being self-destructive. She was a coward, and she took the coward’s way out. It was easier to be self destructive in the present than to go on fearing that she would be self destructive in the future, and Ruth told herself the lie that it was okay to do it because it was for Billie’s own good and Ruth was hurting herself more than hurting Billie, which was literally willfully engaging in the very self destruction she claimed to be trying to avoid. The only part of it that looks to Ruth’s credit in my eyes is that after the time skip Ruth said that “we lost Billie”, which seemed to be an acknowledgement that Jennifer had been truly harmed by what she did, she had utterly failed at her objective, and it wasn’t just some temporary unpleasantness that had to be stoically toughed out to reach the “healthy” future which all that self destruction was supposed to facilitate.
I simply can’t disagree more with what you say. For one, I cannot accept the idea that breaking up with Billie was cowardly, not for Ruth. I’m not even convinced she would have managed if her plan for the evening were not ruined… (with on top of it Dorothy reminding her while trying to dissuade her).
It was highly misguided, little doubt about that knowing she’s been fine since then. (So much for “breaking up so she could be self-destructive again” i think read some time)
I also think the break up was more self-sabotage than self-destruction, as i think this strip is supposed to imply by comparing with Dorothy. She self-sabotaged fearing Billie’s “codependency” and her self-destruction could (not would) lead to catastrophe.
I mention the “codependency” because I find the references she made to dying by Ruth’s hands hard to ignore. Even if it happened only twice in the storyline, it felt the stripes put weight on it in both cases, as to show Ruth’s (non-verbalized) discomfort.
No one says you have to like Ruth, and I’m not going to try to argue with you about whether or not breaking up with Jennifer was “cowardice”.
All I said was, she already regretted breaking up with Jennifer before it happened. So we didn’t really need to be shown her turning around on that, because she was never facing any other metaphorical direction.
I can respect and have patience for Ruth as a person trying to improve herself under the poor circumstances of her life. I can’t have that for her relationship with Jennifer. Her history of drinking and abuse all seem like excuses to me for a toxic relationship she initiated through physical and emotional abuse and assault. That’s before they even really started dating.
Ruth always dictated the terms of their relationship. Pushing Billie in public because they can’t be seen as a couple. Billie having to rescue her because she was in a drunken, depression spiral. Criticizing Billie for sneaking drinks when they tried to quit, only to go back to drinking when she found a balsnce of meds that worked. Breaking up with Billie on her whims and just expecting Billie to come back. Billie choosing to hang with her through all of that to finally get to a decent and stable place and Ruth ends it anyway. Billie never had a fair amount of agency in their relationship. At least not the way I read it.
And I don’t want to undercut Billie’s own choices on their past as a couple. She could’ve walked away anytime, but I think Ruth took advantage of the fact she wouldn’t. Even at it was over admitting she still expected Billie to chase her again and hypocritically wanting to be angry about it.
I like Ruth as Jennifer’s friend but I can’t trust her as Jennifer’s partner or girlfriend.
This is an incredibly uncharitable take on Ruth that I can’t understand. It’s adding a lot that isn’t in the text.
Thank you. You’re saying it with greater patience and grace that I could.
I tried to say more but it just kept coming back to this. Maybe I’ll start my own thread.
Oh I could cry for real. She looks so happy.
What the hell just happened? This seems like a weirdly fast turnaround on Alice’s part.
She could be, based on what we’ve seen, an incredibly hopeless romantic.
She could even be similarly volatile to Billie, and we just haven’t seen evidence of that yet, because we mostly have gotten Billie’s perspective.
Or maybe it’s not that big a deal. Re-reading all her recent strips at once and Alice doesn’t seem very upset emotionally. She’s was likely willing to reconnect with Jen but was wary of her and looking for confirmation she had changed. That whole “You never change.” line likely had more impact than she intended considering she was texting and trying to track Jen down.
…. This is “Should’ve gotten the clue when I didn’t text you all summer” and “you’re poison, you’re a drama hurricane” erasure.
And also erasure of all the monosyllables Alice replied with when they stumbled into each other before That Lunch With Joyce. Like, literally their last interaction had been
1- Also Accidental
2- Ending with Alice’s stony-faced “you’ll never change”.
That was like 6 months ago in the comic.
Yep, so it’s sore but not as fresh. As demonstrated on gheir interactions of this day, before Joyce intervened.
I feel like Joyce’s words dug deep into Alice’s empathy and she realised that just because she hadn’t seen Billie’s transformation and growth doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It’s so sweet 🥹
But did it?
With the discussion Ruth and Billifer just had (well, before her nap), I’m starting to think maybe it did, under the surface and pretense.
Or maybe she got a really good epiphany and may at least be able to finally rethink things.
Honestly I think it did. Jennifer pushing away Asher on purpose cause she got bored with him and he reminded her too much of her past self was deeply shitty of her, but I think the last arc or two is trying to point out that despite Jennifer’s myriad of shaky confidence and bad decision making, she is trying to improve and grow and all her failures are landing home.
She can’t have Ruth anymore, sure, but she still relies on her as a friend who’s seen her at her worst, and Joyce (who is her friend) vouches for her. Billie would never be caught dead being vulnerable to anyone because she would — as we just saw — puff herself up, talk big, and storm off pretending she doesn’t need anything.
I really do love watching Jennifer make bad decisions and suffer but keep in mind after Ruth was hospitalized she responded with anger and lashing out. Crying about her shame and regret and what she can’t have is kinda a step up for her!
He went from having one personality to having a different personality because he ended his nicotine dependency which lead to arguments and a communication break down. The moment they broke up was immediately after he horribly insulted her.
You cannot possibly actually believe this. Jennifer was actively belittling and insulting his choices because they reminded her of Walky, then when he changed them she said he was trying too hard. He then tried to ask about being her boyfriend and she more or less told him she wasn’t interested.
Alice is not too cool for Jennifer, she cut ties because Billie was self-destructive and dangerous but she still cares about her. Like she wants Billie in her life, she just thought she couldn’t have that without putting herself in danger
We’ll see if she gets proven right about that
Not necessarily. I think she kind of WANTED to give Billie/Jennifer a chance, but she was hesitant, given what happened before. This was MUCH less hostile than their initial meeting up again in college, so… I think she just kind of needed a nudge towards being justified in giving her a shot.
Okay, so from the sound of it, the underlying issue on Alice’s part mostly may have been how Jennifer went about the AFTERMATH of the crash instead of the incident itself. Specifically her tendency to refuse vulnerability in order to take care of others.
What seemed to set Alice off before Joyce intervened was Jennifer’s signature “alpha bongo who needs nothing from anyone” routine. She’s very much the type to put on a poker face and pretend everything’s fine instead of letting people support her, which really only changed when she and Ruth began to bond over sharing her biggest issue at the time.
Alice clearly cared about her a lot, and the prom flashback really emphasizes that Jennifer very much did live up to her “get shit done” brand. But she was never able to reciprocate that, even after they were both involved in the wreck and Jennifer was most heavily affected by it.
Through Joyce’s account of the ways she’s since changed, and through seeing her actually turn to others for support, even going out of her WAY to do so, Alice essentially got the sign she needed that she was finally giving people the chance to be there for her, which is all she seemingly wanted all along.
To be fair, the underlying issue was very likely updated in the decade since Alice’s first appearance, since that seemed to paint it as Alice being upset about the crash in general. Which, with how much has occurred narratively since then, is an understandable retcon with the complete lack of emphasis on the fallout with Alice until now, so it doesn’t really change much overall.
I think the flashback at the beginning of the arc was meant to emphasize that
1) Billie took care of everyone else’s problems, at the expense of her own life
2) Billie has surrounded herself with fake friends
So I think it makes sense that the conclusion Billie had to come to was to stop trying to isolate herself with fake friends, and learn to rely on real friends who care about her when she’s hurt.
And for character development, this is reinforcing to Billie that it’s good for her to emotionally rely on people who love her, like Joyce and Ruth, instead of hanging with fake friends for status
I hope that first part isn’t the only takeaway there, since there’s been good evidence in the past that while Jennifer was an alpha bongo who took care of the problems of her flock of cheerleaders, her own problems helped them get into that trouble in the first place. Especially Alice, who at least thought she was in love with Jennifer.
In that first scene with Alice linked below we focus on the car wreck, but Alice also says “I let you drag me down with you for years”.
Correct. She’s still going to make horrible decisions for herself, but she’s also in your corner the hardest anyone can be. She just needs to learn to let her guard down for others, which Alice noted she never did.
And then Ruth opened her door to her, let her cry, told Alice where to find her, and she sees her as a total red-eyed mess. Thus confirming that she’s letting people close.
The plot line kind of wrote itself into a dead end and was dragging so everyone was given an out to move on to other stuff/having Alice in the comic more often.
Yeah I’m very surprised that Alice changed her mind on Jennifer so fast. Feels like we missed a bunch of stuff that happened off-panel or something.
We did. We missed her whole text conversation with Ruth.
We also missed what Alice said to Jennifer before leaving the dining hall!
Yeah, I expected more of a “meet me in the middle” response from her. Open-minded, but guarded.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/dramahurricane/
I think it’s only really a surprisingly quick turnaround if you don’t remember the look on Alice’s face when she originally (on-panel) told Jennifer to stay away from her.
She was brimming over with tears then, and between that and now, I think it’s fairly clear that Alice was always only putting up a tough front because she thought she had to, for her own protection. Upon having any evidence that Jennifer has really changed and has really become someone safe to be around — she’s happy and relieved.
And both Joyce and Ruth helped Alice to learn how Billie/Jennifer has been changing the last six months.
Yep.
Awe. Jennifer’s expression in the second to last panel is jsut yhe cutest and dorkiest she ever looked ^^
*plays “Why Can’t We Be Friends” by War on hacked muzak*
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OHmmjnEdtx8&t=1s&pp=2AEBkAIB
Is… is this Smarting of Age?
But seriously it’s nice to see these characters actually genuinely happy once in a while. Though this probably means Dorothy is about to fuck things up with Joyce big time.
Hey, maybe things are about to go really badly at the protest instead
I really fucking hope not. Distinctly possible though.
*Geordi finger guns*
Holy shit Joyce really IS the best wing woman! She got Alice to text Billifer!
And Ruth got the assist.
Alice weirdly sounding like a catholic priest in that one middle panel.
Yeah, the wording is awkward and I can’t imagine a college kid talking like that in real life
Back in my day we all talked like that and it was uphill both ways.
It has very strong “we’re adults now!” vibes for me.
I dunno that I was a typical teenager, but I think trying to sound older than you are is very typical.
I, too, would like some soft serve.
Fans: Alice will never accept Jennifer back. Is permanently traumatized. Wants nothing to do with her and as soon as Jennifer accepts…
Alice: I’M SO GLAD YOU’VE CHANGED!
Fans: …
That screeching sound you are hearing is the comment section hitting the Jennifer hate train’s brakes.
Not fully, methinks. I’m seeing some ‘anticipation’ of Jennifer Jenning up the situation.
Have people actually been denying that Alice still clearly has a lot of feelings for and about Billie?
The general thing I’ve seen is doubt about whether it’s a good idea for them to reconnect, and the jury’s still out on that. I’m rooting for them to make it work, but this isn’t stable yet and I don’t know if it’s gonna get stable
Among a thousand other things that are less obvious and more nuanced, they can’t get stable until Jennifer accepts that she is not fucking straight, even if that makes her unpopular. She’s gradually pursued men less and less, over the run of the strip. She’s literally supposed to be dating a guy right now, and she BARELY could muster up the scantest shred of giving a fuck about him boning a suicidal twink for, like, weeks or months, now.
Like this isn’t a strong criticism of her directly, per se; however, it is PLAINLY obvious that Jennifer and her circle are going to get hurt again, possibly badly, if she can’t even pay some lip service to the fact that the women she is trying to befriend, all rightfully see her as a romantic interest.
Something about how they’re walking away, tells me Alice isn’t exactly in the “besties” or “roommates” phase of her life, here…
Oh yeah, “what sort of relationship is this?” is the first hurdle they’re gonna have to clear
I mean, Jennifer and Dan are happily married in the Walkyverse (or Willis-1) so it’s probable that Jennifer is in fact bisexual. It’s just she has no strong feelings about Asher.
Considering where Jennifer’s been at with regards to her queerness I think they’re talking about being openly Bi.
Although Jennifer overcorrecting and decides she’s on the other end of a binary gay/straight divide instead of in the middle of a spectrum would be a pretty plausible thing to happen
Fair enough.
The fact she keeps talking about Alice and being her “friend” may be a problem as it seems clearly that Jennifer wants to get back with her as a romantic partner. But she’s not using those words.
I don’t know that it is clear. I kinda think it could go either way at this point with Jen
I think we got word of god years ago from a bi day of visibility post or some such, featuring several bi characters. (Her, Danny, Mike at a minimum if memory serves.)
It was Jennifer and Ruth with Danny between them, looking passably like an ally. Willis hadn’t yet revealed that Danny was also bi, and was winking at us all.
(This also long-predated Willis’s reveal that Mike had feelings for Ethan, and I think they would’ve hesitated to put Mike in a Bi Visibility Day celebration post anyway, since 90% of readers were still describing Mike’s sexuality using edgelord phrasing that Willis probably regretted (“he’s whatever you don’t want him to be”).)
It was Billie (she was never “Jennifer” in the Walkyverse, and the character designs are the Roomies! versions) with her girlfriend on one arm and her boyfriend (later husband) on the other, saying, “All eyes on me!”
And, yeah, we didn’t know at the time that all three of them were bi. Danny’s presence seemed like it was just illustrating Billie’s bi-llieness.
(I’m now imagining a DoA version of it, with Dorothy in the middle, Joyce on one arm and Walky on the other… and the later, “No, actually, it’s all three of them,” reveal.)
Ahh thanks, I figured the post was on the dead bird site and didn’t check. I might have gotten vibes about Danny at the time and simply accepted the post as confirmation for team bi, not knowing the Willisverse callback John Campbell pointed out below.
How has she “pursued men less and less, over the run of the strip”?
She spent most of the first semester dating a woman and showing almost no signs of interest in men. She showed up after the timeskip dating a man, though we didn’t really see a lot of them together until just before they broke up. (And yes, they’re not actually dating anymore and haven’t been since before Asher and Ethan first boned.)
The comic has definitely focused more on her relationships with women, but there’s been no gradual shift away from men.
If there’s one thing I know about Dumbing of Age fans, it’s that they all speak with a unified voice like that.
Yes. One voice. One brain cell. Join us. ONE OF US…..
AAAAA <3 This is so sweet!!!
PLEASE let this be her ACTUAL road to recovery
i’ve read this comic long enough to warn you that you should genuinely have no hope on this one. we got another decade or two of strips before we even get close to that, I think.
Appropriate Roz face is appropriate.
Absolutely not, I want the comic to keep going and I like Jennifer as the car wreck.
You could say Alice is… The Only Exception… in calling Jennifer as Billie.
Not hamburgers, not chicken sandwiches. …Soft serve ice cream.
:O
i love being valued only for my relations to other people.
idk, alice seems not worth it tbh
I think that’s the least charitable interpretation of her statement here you could make
Yeah, like I won’t rule it out completely or anything, ’cause I have actually known people very much like that. But that’s the darkest hole you could possibly jump down into off of one sentence!
I’m sure you’re familiar with Murphy’s law,
“If it can be interpreted in an absurdly uncharitable way, it will be!”
Alice is secretly a serial killer and has clearly changed her opinion on Billie because she has decided to make her her next target
How’s that?
Much better, but for real effectiveness you should our group that learns from the words of Taffy.
I think that in the moment it was a reassurance that helped with the jab that raidah sent her way as opposed to a full scale judgement of character. While I agree that it’s uncharitable way to interpret that statement… I had the same initial reaction before thinking about it further. I think the root comment is a valuable discussion point.
Yeah, I totally get it and stuff, but Geez Megan that’s Dark as hell
give it a shot
Yeah to me there are some weird vibes. And like to have Alice in juxtaposition with Ruth here makes it feel even weirder to me.
Like the fact that Alice did such a complete 180 from “you’ll never change” (which felt intentionally cruel) to ‘i just want to make sure you’re loved <3’ based only on the opinions of complete strangers over a couple hours.
and then there’s Ruth, who believes in Jennifer. Who isn’t going to give up on her. It kind of makes Alice’s back and forth nature more evident.
I think she’s allowed to be back and forth about re-initiating contact with Jennifer considering they were in a situationship situation that ended with a car crash that injured Alice and could have killed her. God forbid a girl be unsure what to think of her former lover after all of that.
Yeah, I don’t read it like that at all.
This is only about “make sure you’re loved” or even her relationships with others in the sense that Alice thinks the Jennifer she knew in high school wouldn’t have been capable of that. This is evidence that she’s changed, not whatever else is being read into it.
What Alice asked Joyce at the end of the last scene was “Has she learned to love somebody? Like for real?”
Like 3 different seemingly upstanding people independently vetted her in a way that proved her wrong about Jennifer changing. The initial statement was likely hyperbolic, furthermore. When people say stuff like that, they want to be proven wrong.
This is the first time I’ve liked Billie
I love these two dorks, I hope the live long and happy lives together. And Billifer, Cimbalta did wonders for me and my depression, ask your doctor about it.
Who am I kidding this is a DYW comic, nobody lives happy and stays in the comic.
I thought this was gonna turn into a dream sequence until the last panel. Good for them, good for them
My immediate thought was, yeah, Joyce is fantasizing to Joe about how well the Alice/Jennifer reunion will go.
Including the callback to soft serve ice cream.
Joyce might be fantasizing about if Jennifer is Billie again. There’s a lot uncanny in this particular strip. For a few days, I’m going to be suspicious it’s Joyce imagining this or Jennifer dreaming/imagining it based off of lunch with Joyce.
We’re always visibly cued when something isn’t Actually Happening so I’d bet on it being real.
That and “it was just a dream” is reaaaaally difficult to pull off without cheapening the thing you’re trying to make your readers care about.
Yeah, I had to look carefully at the whole thing, for any possible signs of anecdotey, dreamy, flashbacky sorts of “it’s-not-really-happening”. Can’t see any, though!
This is, what, the second or third time folks who don’t like where a storyline is going have started wondering if it was a dream?
Willis has literally never faked us out in this way. The closest incidents were Danny’s two panel fantasy of kissing Ethan and the first appearance of Amber’s head-Mike, who was immediately and consistently drawn without shadows, after we knew something bad had happened to him.
We aren’t gonna get whole strips of fantasy with no indicators.
I mean, no one’s even on a giant horse!
give it a rest. I said this strip was uncanny and you decide I “don’t like where a storyline is going”. Stop making up shit about other people, please.
They’ve done a full strip in secret dream-mode before.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/itsme/
Like I said, suspicious for a few days. It’s the next day now, and it’s not Joyce imagining it. I do not expect a dream reveal after a scene break either. It doesn’t make this strip not uncanny.
And I am pleasantly surprised by how well this went! I’m happy for Jennifer and Alice.
Is Horse going to show up?
Who is Horse?
Horse.
Squirrel.
I’ve been trying to figure out what group of friends Carla fits into since she just kind of floats around the periphery by herself. I think it’s actually Ruth and Jennifer. They have the most history and even share Leslie’s class which is where other main relationships were established.
Honestly that’d be interesting. I’d be down.
Carla is the main friend, all others are on her periphery.
She told me she was the main character of the comic and that everyone else play supporting roles.
What a coincidence! She told me the same! And we can totally believe her because she’s cool and smart!
I think she’s probably closer with Sal and her derby team, but also I do think it’s deliberate that Carla kind of keeps herself at a distance where all her friendships are easily divestable
The disappearance of the Carla+Lucy friendship fits this.
Not the good engine, but a good “end of section of chapter” for Billie
*ending. I’ve been doing game programming all day
So! When IS that DoA light novel game / romance rpg coming out?
Goddammit I’ve been meaning to get back into DoA game devving SO BAD, but been busy with code commissions to stay afloat after tax season T_T
I am envious. It’s a profession I want to get into, but exactly now seems bad timing.
Okay, I wasn’t expecting Ruth to have actually invited Alice over. I thought we would have to deal with some petty three- or even four-way snarking for a bit until Ruth decided it’d be okay to let JB have this.
Taking the initiative to be kind kinda surprises and impresses me. Good job, Ruth.
Carla, according to the tags, not yet.
i think this is the first time since the start of this webcomic that i have had any hope of billie/jennifer becoming a likeable character
Sorry but I’m fully “I love messes” right now. I fucking *love* current Ethan and Jennifer.
*gives Ruth a big hug* That was sweet of her. And no femurs were harmed!
This is so cheesy lol, I can’t take it!!!
But where’s the kisses? I was promised kisses!!!!*
*I was not promised kisses
Don’t these kids have passcodes on their phones or what.
Either they turned them off or set the timeout to like 1 hour or something.
(on an entirely different note, i hope jocelyn did _not_ take her phone with her to the protest. or if she did, it’s info-locked and not biometric-locked.)
It’s entirely possible, also, that they did the stupid thing of (1) telling their current partner the passcode, and (2) not changing it after breaking up.
Again, that’s stupid, but also, *webcomic title*.
“you sought refuge and people took care of you, you look loved” who the heck talks like that? it sounds like a line someone would say in a 1940’s movie, not something a young adult would say in 2025. maybe it was previously established that Alice a “m’lady” affectation…
When you don’t know the correct “normal” words, because it is something you haven’t ever said before, people tend to fall back on the fictional contexts in which they’ve read or heard such words. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the current social context is such that saying stuff like “you look loved” are not things most people normally say to each other. So maybe she fell back on the period fiction she enjoys so much (I assume).
Might be movies, novels, or some other common media experience that Alice and Jennifer have both discussed in-depth. They might very well have some intimate dialect between them from the previous year(s).
Yeah, I’m going to go with Alice being the exact opposite cringe of Jennifer.
Avatar roulette
Carla helping out someone selflessly? Carla wanting follow-up deets?
Jim to the Camera: What is going on?!
It makes sense that Carla would not want to screw up and call people by names they’ve rejected.
This is so sweet and hopeful and I know Ruth wants this for Billifer, but…oh, ouch for Ruth
.
lol this worked out easier than i expected
Everything until the last panel made me think this was going to be a dream sequence
Did Alice send messages right after last encounter with Jennifer and Joyce?
. This is wholesome.
Omg, Alice never gave up Jennifer
Do
not
mess
this
chance,
Jennifer!
I mean Alice did give up on Jennifer. That was a pretty significant thing that happened. Like I understand where you’re coming from but she very much did give up on her
This is nice, I like this alternate universe I just found myself in
In this universe Danny is an elf
An elven bard!
What? Danny has always been an elf. Didn’t you notice way back on parents visitation day that both his parents were elves?
This is so good
Yes for Billie or Jennifer or whatever her name is
please please let this last mr comic man
Have you met Mr. Willis? Don’t you know how things go around here?
Keeping my eye peeled for those tags
Better go back to Billie soon
She is Risen!!!
too soon? <.<
Just 1 day
Maybe I’m weird but I don’t really understand this like for soft-serve ice cream. If the ice cream is too soft it melts too fast, and then you’re stuck with disgusting ice cream soup.
Cus most people like milkshakes
I’m not sure what there is to understand about that: People like different things.
The writer’s barely disguised
fetishfood preferences.Huh. That’s an entirely surprising lack of drama. Where are the explosions?
{{meanwhile, in Dorothys head…}}
I am crossing my fingers that they run into Raidah, because I think with Alice standing beside her, accepting her, Jennifer may have the strength to tell Raidah to go fuck herself.
“And by the way? My name is Billie” would be an especially awesome way of saying goodbye forever to Raidah’s awful clique.
I never realized how much I wanted this until you said it!
If we’re gonna go back to calling her Billie, there’s no better way to do it than by having her reject the very person who re-named her Jennifer :3
I 10000% feel like we’re about to hit a test of Jennifer’s maturity. The protest has ripe potential to be a crossroads for many plot threads.
Oh that’s another idea…
Honestly I have no idea how much of the protest I expect us to see. It kind of depends on whether Willis’s reaction to Politics of 2024 was “I’m gonna make this part of my art” or “I’m gonna make art that helps me escape this”.
We could easily get, for example:
– Amazi-Girl has a tussle with police
– Jocelyne gets arrested (though not too badly mistreated bc she’s white), Hank and Carol both show up to react and or bail her out
– Cameos or more from other politically active students who are also at the protest, like Roz or Jacob (whose brother, the one he super duper looks up to, is a civil rights lawyer)
– Dorothy finds her calling in grass roots organizing? It might be a little early for something like that, but it’s a very legitimate avenue to future non-corrupt political machinations
Seconding this, but I actually want Billie to straight-up ignore Raidah in favor of Alice. Something tells me that that would piss her off more.
“So, uh, why did you find me?”
“Well, your friend Joyce insisted that you had changed and… I wanted that to be true.”
Beautifully said
….. god damn that’s poetic.
This exactly.
How are Alice’s walls coming down so quickly? Because she’s choosing to lower them.
It’s not that easy for older folks who have spent longer with walls up, but Alice and Jennifer are still very young.
I do hope this works, and that it sets Jennifer/Billie on a path of actual self-acceptance and love.
Ruth is such a sweetheart for just quietly helping out with this. (Also Joyce, of course.)
hope this works out*
is what I meant to type, I think.
With the way Alice started off being so distant and wary compared to what we saw in the flashback, I think there was probably more to the aftermath of the crash that caused her to pull away this big. I wouldn’t be surprised if the clash came from Alice being scared about Billie getting so badly hurt and Billie doubling down on insisting she’s fine and just being angry at everyone for giving her DUI tangible social consequences, and Alice eventually realizing that she couldn’t keep trying to care about someone who wouldn’t actually let herself be vulnerable and cared about.
Especially given that it seems like the proof Alice needed of her having actually changed was that she has friends now who will not only hang out with her and stand up for her, but friends that she’ll run to when she’s upset and recognizes that she needs to be taken care of too.
I definitely think Alice was trying to protect herself from an “inevitable” sense of rejection if she tried to care about her again only to get held at arms’ length. I’d say it’s even possible that past Billie intentionally tried to be strong for both of them without realizing it was pushing Alice away and making her feel lost and unwelcome.
(Reading into things a bit, sure, but I do feel like it’s text-supported theorizing. :P)
Surprised that Carla cares enough to ask – good for her!
Other than the last panel I’d half expect this to turn out to be a depression-nap dream.
:”Don’t look at me. I’m a fright. Is my book lighting straight?
“In a manner of speaking…””
(Autocorrect? How many times has my phone seen me type “boob”?)
Only your phone would know.
Only apple knows.
Or google.
Or, possibly, both.
That explains the Boob McNutt Collection ads.
Whoa! This is “Spanish Inquisition” levels of not-expecting!
Ruth saved the day. I’m enjoying this new dynamic as BFF between her and Jennifer. Now let’s see if Alice will become Jennifer’s next girlfriend or no.
Ruth _and_ Joyce, both wing-girling for Jennifer/Billie.
Did I miss something or are we supposed to be suspicious here?
Like Alice is about to pull some bs.
No.
No, so knock it off.
I feel like this is gonna be a test to see which group Jennifer goes with.
Honestly did not expect Alice to give her another shot, nor did I expect the “does she accept love” conversation to link directly into Ruth supporting her when she’s low. Jennifer will still show up to wreck it but I’m happy to see we’re getting Alice added to the cast as more than just a reminder of Jennifer’s incompetence and failures.
And Alice was never seen or referred to again.
Not really, but by the time she returns the readers have to be reminded of who she is.
Nah, it’ll be fine. She’ll be back in the comic before Mike will.
She (and Jocelyne) have been promoted to the cast page, and Willis originally said she was in some building or other when asked before, obviously, deciding to move her to Forest.
Alice definitely isn’t going anywhere.
very good. I couldn’t be bothered to actually look at the cast page.
god panel 5 is beautiful
Alice is better than Bad Rachel because takes in new information and uses it to shape her perception of a person. And she’s hot hot hotter than the sun on the 4th of July.
Damn y-
Wait no, this is good.
Aww, that’s nice! Billifer and Alice reconnecting, I love it.
Don’t mind me, I’m just bracing myself for when the other shoe drops…
I remember not feeling sure about Alice before, but I like her now. Partially because of the strip here but partially because I’ve let go of past judgements before I’d read it. Honestly, I already liked her, I just wasn’t totally sure about her yet.
…I… Felt like there might be somewhat of an unsettling vibe to me to this interaction as someone who is friends with people who are sociopaths, but now that I think about it, they would still experience what Jennifer/Billie is experiencing right now, since they’re still caring people with social connections who just happen to not experience empathy. So nevermind.
I’ve gone from being a hater to not being a hater. Without forcing it, since I didn’t hate myself either way. Yay!
(For those unfamiliar with me, I consciously choose to be blatantly biased in favor of Jennifer, specifically because she’s the only major character in the story with a similar skin tone or a similar build as mine.)
I’m going to be honest though, my personality is a lot closer to Joyce, despite a hilariously different upbringing. Of course, I genuinely don’t care what other people think of me. Sal is probably the character who I’m like in that regard. People get annoying about it when they find out that I don’t actually care, but it weeds out emotional abusers so it’s worth it. I’d recommend it.
…though actually saying that instead of demonstrating that is more of a Jennifer trait. Hrm. Eh, that’s fine, I actually like Jennifer for her personality so it’s a self esteem boost either way.
Prediction: Alice is gonna want to talk Geek Shit.
I hope so!
“So, you getting the Star Wars Black Kit Fisto?”
“…yes.”
Fingers crossed!
At the very least, IF Jennifer felt like she had to hide her nerdy interests from Alice in high school, I bet Alice is actually totally fine with nerdy stuff, and it was just Jennifer assuming that all the other popular pretty teenagers were also [performatively] anti-nerd.
What a happy ending to the ark. If it is the ending. will there be one more twist? Is Jason hiding under the bed?
This resolved so simple and cleanly that I’m inclined to believe Billie/Jennifer’s dreaming right now.
Oh, Ruth.
You’re a textbook tsundere, really. Often grumpy and clumsy when it comes to expressing affection. A little cartoonish and over the top about it sometimes, occasionally with slightly more serious consequences.
That was always going to rub some people the wrong way, which is natural. I myself get prickly about different tropes — belligerent sexual tension, for example. Especially if it’s the m/f type where the woman has been insisting for 90% of the narrative that she has no interest in the man, but then suddenly he makes some big gesture and she completely changes her mind.
For a long time, I was particularly twitchy about characters who say mean things to their friends. I had a “friend” who was mean to me in exactly that way and for a long time, fictional portrayals of actual friends who used that kind of “meanness” to tease each other made me uncomfortable.
We all bring out own things to fiction. Sometimes that means seeing the early signs of something before anyone else and getting to be right when the big reveal finally happens; sometimes it means that what seemed like super obvious and unarguable implication to us wasn’t intended at all, and we’re caught flat-footed, stumbling when the narrative doesn’t go the way we expect.
The very early days of Ruth and Jennifer’s relationship were rough. Kind of the emotional equivalent of a head-on collision that the two drivers then trauma-bonded over, I think. And I do understand why a lot of readers would have been uncomfortable with that: especially the pre-courtship part, where Ruth — a depressed alcoholic child of abuse, who probably hadn’t known love since her parents died and who didn’t even know what she was feeling for Jennifer until she found herself trying to kiss her — unarguably treated Jennifer very poorly while struggling to figure out and accept what she was feeling.
Honestly, part of me thinks that contingent of vocal folks might be a big part of why Willis had them break up; that Willis might have felt like the readership was never going to be able to accept this couple as it was, and that Ruth/Jennifer needed to be destroyed and remade before it could actually be read as healthy.
But of course that presupposes that they’re going to get back together, and we definitely don’t know yet whether that’s the plan…
Still. Nice to see them both smiling here.
NOTE: I’m opening myself up to discussion here obviously but I would request that we leave the s-word out of it. If it’s gotta come up — and it’s fair to mention it, because it was a big part of why Ruth ended things after all — even just talking about it as self-harm or self-destructive tendencies is a lot easier for me personally to read in a dozen comments back and forth. Thank you!
Should maybe stress that I’m not trying to ask anyone to avoid the word elsewhere, just being self-aware that I’m not gonna respond to comments if they mention it a bunch.
Also not feeling like disclosing my why, so I’m not gonna. Respect it or don’t, it’s up to you.
Hey, Li!
Just wanna say I really enjoy your comments in general! And in particular, you’ve hit here on a super interesting point — Readers don’t do character analysis unbiased. We can’t, I’d argue, because just like you bring yourself along in a trip, the lenses we look at fiction with can be trained and tempered with a ton of tools, but also they hinge on our emotional engagement: We make ourselves vulnerable for the story.
Thank you for sharing your experience ♥ And yeah, heartfully agreeing: It IS nice to see these two smiling.
Different stories resonate with different people. The corollary is also true: different stories punch different people in the gut and steal our lunch money, heh.
I’ve always been a fan of relationships where two people come together to uplift each other and support each other’s growth. Have been ever since Beauty and the Beast. And while like you said, early Ruth and Billie were really rough to root for, I will say I eventually came around to them. They’re both flawed individuals, dealing with their own issues and breaking out of certain awful cycles, and for a time I think they actually were very good for each other. It’s a shame they broke up, but I’m rooting for them to, if nothing else, still be friends.
This for sure.
I wouldn’t at all be upset if they got back together but more than anything I’d like to see them be friends again.
I feel like the old scanlation term ‘hotcold woman’ suits her a bit more. Although recent panels of her interaction with Jennifer have been ‘dere’, Ruth’s demeanor has always been more of an intensity thing. She’s always either aloof and cold or packing all the heat possible. At least in the present she seems to be rather frank and straightforward about her feelings, where as a tsundere archetypal tends to have difficulty with that and is almost compulsively indirect until forced. I think this is largely due to her growing up some. But I also think that it’s impossible to talk about any of her behavior towards others without reminding that a lot of her negativity is more so to make herself look worse in comparison and how deep her disdain for herself is tends to reflect how intense the hot or cold reactions tend to be.
I clearly haven’t read a lot of scanslations.
I was gonna say “enough”, but most of them were so bad orz
Anyway, I’m not familiar with that term. Google seems to think you are referring to kuudere?
Mostly I was thinking of the early, um, violence, which is definitely more of a tsun reaction to having a crush. But kuu probably works well for Ruth after that first initial period of calling Jennifer names and that one memorable body slam.
(Again: cartoonish, slightly more realistic consequences.)
Anyway, fully agree that Ruth was actively trying to be a bad RA for a lot of the early days because she wanted to be fired, and she was very much crushed when her grandfather pulled strings. Similarly, Ruth ended things with Jennifer the way she did because she wanted Jennifer to hate her. She undoubtedly thought that would make things easier for Jennifer, and in a way she wasn’t completely wrong there, though I think obviously if Raidah hadn’t swooped in…
(For readers who aren’t familiar: tsuntsun = standoffish, prickly, grumpy or angry; kuukuu = distant, cool, indifferent; deredere = mooning over, lovestruck. Combinations like tsundere and kuudere describe a character who’s one way on the outside and the other way on the inside, with varying degrees of transparency. Someone with a very thick outer shell might be called a tsuntsundere.
Japan definitely isn’t alone in loving this trope, though in western fiction we tend to call it “asshole with a heart of gold”, and while tsundere characters are more often teen girls, AWAHOG are more often middle-aged men.)
While I am happy for Billie, she still needs to do a lot of work on herself top deserve a peaceful walk into the sunset. Hopefully having Alice around will help her be better in and out.
Look some people call her Jennifer. Some people call her Billie.
….
….
Some people call her the space cowgirl. Some people call her the gangstress of love.
This kind of thing is why I roll my eyes at people who think it’s some kind of huge deal about “don’t you dare call me by such-and-such name.” Like, obviously context is important. That’s all.
But there’s a whole little cottage industry to shame anyone using a name regardless of context. (Side note, with Jennifer / Billy specifically, I think I’d be less annoyed if she’d accept the perfectly good (and arguably better) name “Jenny” instead of insisting on the full blown, hoity-toity “Jennifer.”
Like, if you’re annoyed by people calling you “Dave” or “Jenny” when you prefer “David” or “Jennifer”… fine. If you think that’s somehow a disrespectful insult, guess what, some people have *real* problems.