Akane has only one way to get back home: collect the 42 keys to parallel worlds. Eri and Ben are just trying to get through the summer before university. When a magical key turns up in an old spare set, all three are forced to change their plans and fast.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Hemlock
Josceline Fenton
A witch accidentally marries a monster, and now she and her familiar has to navigate life around her monstrous husband and her even more terrifying in-laws.
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
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He dated Lucy very briefly. That’s probably the .5. He had more of a relationship with Amber, since they dated for a while before breaking up. Lucy and him survived 3½ dates or so?
Amber and Walky’s situationship started https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/fresh-3/ which was October 13, and was pretty on-and-off until Halloween when it settled firmly into off (2 and a half weeks). At no point did they define a relationship beyond fooling around and it-doesn’t-count-on-garbage-roof, and they had no formal dates.
I’d count Dorothy and Lucy as full points, Amber as half a point because they were never really “official” and he ruined things before they got to that point.
Amber&Walky are still endgame as far as I’m concerned. They had chemistry, dammit!
Depends on counting (do you count Danny as 1 for Amber even though it was AG who dated him, but they weren’t really split at the time?). But it seems like 1.5 for her, and Joyce and Lucy have had two. (Of course, one of Joyce’s was Ethan.)
I think Amber has a conversation or I guess internal conflict about this dynamic. Being resentful of things being done for one aspect of herself or belonging to one aspect of herself when the reality is it still applies to both of them.
They’re missing half the squad, though. It’s just Mandy, Grace, and Sierra. Marcie doesn’t appear to have hooked up with them, and Guns didn’t make the cut for this universe. So just two girlfriends each.
I mean, seems plausible that at least one of them could have already had at least one girlfriend under their belt before joining up with the polycule, so that number could potentially go up.
Yeah, I wouldn’t count Mike as a boyfriend. Not even that he’d object to it, just that it was never established, and I don’t think Ethan knew there were real romantic feelings there.
Waldo actually being called Wally in the UK will never not break my brain. The worst part is, there doesn’t seem to be any concrete reason for it; the American publishers seemingly just didn’t like “Wally”.
Sal: “Ah’m no longer straight. I am now seekin’ some casual girlfriends.”
Daisy, appearing out of nowhere: “I volunteer!”
Joyce, running up behind her: “Me too!”
Dorothy: “Hey!”
I think he means more that it can be yikes to go through a few relationships in a few months’ time, depending. He wasn’t terribly proud of how the Lucy relationship imploded, obviously.
Fuck “depending”. Sick to death of that word. It’s goddamn everywhere now, said about everything, like everyone’s suddenly afraid of describing a specific circumstance.
Well using the word depending is just as valid to describe any situation involving subjective opinions outside of the comic too so you getting worked up about a perfectly normal and functional word in the english language remains a weird response regardless.
Nope. Wrong. Incorrect thing said by you. I see it everywhere, constantly. You not seeing it in your own life doesn’t mean I made it up, it means we’re not the same person.
More of a fear response in that case, eh? Like “Oh fuck, yikes, I’m scared of my own rizz, this is frightening and I haven’t figured out how to handle it correctly.”
Mostly just an adolescent social immaturity. But what he’s gone through in his Fall semester has put him through some maturation. I think Alice has noticed the difference.
Walky is still reeling from the Incelerator bit from a few days back. Those words hit him harder than he let on. All three of those relationships ended with him getting dumped and i think that’s started to make him question how he treats women in general and dissect a lot of internalized beliefs. Walky is VERY good at hiding his thoughts though.
Honestly, I don’t think it’s a “how he treats women” thing, as much as a “how bad he is at relationships” thing. All three of the women he’s been with have been different situations, and he’s acted differently with each of them, so painting it with the Women Brush™ might be missing the forest for a specific tree. With Dorothy, he was brand-new to dating and didn’t know how to manage it (not helped by Dorothy unintentionally yo-yoing him a bit), with Amber it was almost purely physical with an emphasis on being unserious and not acknowledging feelings (taken way too far on Halloween), and with Lucy there was such a a disparity in expectations it’s a shock they lasted so long. Incelerator’s whole thing is that he blames women for everything that’s ever gone wrong in his life, and I think Walky as a character isn’t stupid enough to think anything that creep said was applicable to his own life.
It’s a subtle panel but he definitely picked up on more than a few things that he’s refusing to talk about with others. Walky definitely has problems with coasting and expecting life to eventually treat him well in the end. IDK someone smarter than me could probably explain it better especially when i’m currently waiting to see what the actual characters themselves have to say about the matter.
That read, to me, more like he’s worried Dorothy has come back to him because her confidence got knocked/she’s in crisis/she’s suffered some blows to her confidence. Less like he’s been treating women poorly though, of course, everyone in a relationship at that age (and any age) does some damage to the people they date just through lack of awareness or maturity.
That’s how I read it too. It plays into Walky’s poor self-image, but not how he treats women– maybe slightly aligned with something the Incelerator said, hearing about how a woman (specifically, Dorothy) wouldn’t be with him if things were going how she wanted. Which hurts, but he doesn’t want her to feel like that, like the Incelerator does.
Good way to put it. The “crawl back to him” definitely seemed like it hurt, but not in the way the Incelerator intended it or in the sense that he thought he’d been making her do that or even waiting for her to do it, but in the sense of reinforcing how close to the bottom she must be to come back to him and also hitting his self-esteem issues: she’ll only come back to me if she’s really messed up.
The break up with Dorothy at least wasn’t due to any of his own problems. That was all on her: mostly her overwork/stress. He handled that as well as anyone could be expected, even if they’d had more dating experience.
That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have plenty of self-doubt or that he doesn’t blame himself. I don’t really see how the Incelerator’s words would play into those doubts though. He’s not going to agree with them and none of the issues he does have come from treating women anything like that.
I interpret it as “He’s gone through 3 break-ups in half a year,” which is to say that his college experience has maybe potentially not been great. (You know, in addition to all the other stuff in the Yikes column.)
My first take on that didn’t read it as cumulative: “I can see Amber being 1.5 people, but howinhell does Lucy count as 2.5 people? What convoluted hidden depths have I missed??” Then the coffee kicked in, and I saw the accumulation. …But now I kind of want to see Lucy contain multitudes.
The pronunciation was always fine.
It’s just that Alice was too cool for school (school being paying attention to anyone’s name that wasn’t one of the popular kids).
I don’t even think she got as close as “Wally” the last time she saw him.
That seems most likely, although some might argue that Amber is the 1 and Lucy is the .5, because he slept with Amber and not with Lucy (at least, not in the euphemistic sense).
For the record, that’s a very dumb bullshit way of viewing it, but… I mean, Walky’s been an asshole on occasion.
He didn’t sleep with Amber. Granted, they DID grind through clothes onvr, niy they canonically didn’t go further than that. Still further than he went with Lucy, granted.
I saw it as Lucy being the 0.5, since they weren’t that close and didn’t last that long. Not so much as “they didn’t sex it up” as much as “they didn’t level it up”.
Hehe, I see we haven’t lost the “all the bisexuals are digging Walky” subplot.
I do love that Walky really does like that Billie/Jennifer’s doing well. I also could see him being more down for this relationship than Asher or Ruth, for different reasons.
Offhand, I can’t remember any other scene with Walky expressing positively about someone’s relationship. He’s doing a low-level Joyce-commending of them here.
Yeah, I am sure there is someone else he is jazzed about, but I can’t think of them. It’s more common for him to express skepticism about, like Joe with Joyce, or be outright disapproving of, like with Ruth due to power imbalance and protectiveness of Billie.
It’s probably just a phone held sideways yeah. It just looked too big to me so I thought maybe the Walkman was gaming on some new handheld. But knowing his tenuous position with his parents, him having the cash for that is unlikely.
Yeah, he will borrow the Switch of the Sanchez siblings, or go to use Amber’s, so I doubt he’s got a gaming device of his own. Ironically, his phone can probably emulate a lot of games if he looked into it.
Okay, so the trick is to count the stains. The real one has exactly 5 stains on his top, in red, brown, beige, yellow, and purple, ordered by size. You can also tell the one in panel 3 is fake because he’s facing away from the camera.
Technically, it’s a Civil War so presumably there’s a Bulmerian minority that’s getting the crap beaten out of them. It’s a stand in for RL but presumably the details aren’t 1:1
By mass, 14% of the human is bone. By Volume, around 11%.
These are averages, of course, a skinnier person would have a bigger percentage of bone, and an overweight person would have a lower percentage.
Between Walky cutting girls in half and Jacob harvesting their arms we have huge problem. Women on campus are getting dismembered and no one is talking about it!
Also my selfish hope is that the big confrontation that Alice and Jennifer face is Raidah trying to tear them apart before Alice protect Jennifer and then Jennifer embraces the name Billie and a kiss from Alice
But seriously why does the autocorrect insist so much on changing “Walky” with “Wally”? It’s like “walkie” but with a Y. You’d think that after years of typing “Walky” the algorithm would take the hint but nope.
My name is Wiman but autocorrect always changes it to Woman and I’m like; “Thanks for the thought AC but I think that’s beyond your powers.”
I’ve known multiple faculty from India who just started using anglicized names and I don’t get it because their Indian names were spelled exactly like they sound.
I enjoy the implication that in all their years of high school, Alice kept getting Walky’s name wrong and Jennifer/Billie never once corrected her/explained his name to her. And now she is just doing it fairly casually, and Alice finds it cute. I dunno, I know there are still lots of problems here, but that in itself is a nice moment I think.
Orrr maybe it’s just because Walky got a glow up and is now worthy of having a correct name. Hard to say lmao
I’m waiting for Raidah to see “Billy” and Alice in passing, and the shit to really hit the fan. Even though they’ve never met, I get the impression Alice and Raidah would really hate each other, and especially hate Billy “changing” herself for the other – Raidah disapproving of her backsliding, and Alice insulted by the fake image she tries to put on around Raidah.
Still a little lost about the squealing-tires speed of Alice’s turnaround on Billie, via an off screen talk with Ruth. I think it just made it a little hard for me to follow their dynamic.
On the other hand, I know there were people wishing Billie harm that Willis had to block, so I understand if the rapid 180 was a reaction to that! Maybe a little “you know what, Billie gets to have a GREAT day actually”.
Also, I’d wager Joyce is getting a boost to her friendship powers from her being a lesbian love sleuth, because Jennifer’s motivations here seem to be pretty damn romantic. Check her expression every time she looks at Alice. Joyce is in her element here, getting Alice to soften up.
….I’ll be dog-gonned. Our Billie/Jennifer really is like. Changing a little. I’d been half thinking ‘alright, maybe if shes around alice she kinda stabilizes into High School Billy’, but. High School Billie aint tellin that story, or stopping to sit with Walky.
Maybe shes. Actually. Really, truly. Doing…. a little better.
The longer it goes on, the more awkward it will be if Jennifer decides to stay “Jennifer.”
Why is she not correcting? Is she afraid that Alice will flake out and ditch her if she tells her she’s wanted to *really* turn over a new leaf?
Hang on a minute. Haaang on a minute.
…
Alice came back not because of Jennifer, but because of her friends. Because Joyce went to bat for her. Because Ruth helped her out. Because she looked “loved.”
“Jennifer” was a rejection of all that. “Jennifer” was leaving the friend group behind as “toxic” and instead starting up a new friendship with Raidah and Co. “Jennifer” was only interested in her old friends if they *needed* help, like Dorothy, or Joyce. Not for actually being friends.
Holy shit. “Jennifer” wasn’t the one who changed. “Jennifer” was simply a reestablishment of the status quo that she lost when leaving high school. She found the “in” crowd, the people with connections, and climbed to the top. Jennifer was the person who was petty enough to neglect her boyfriend simply so that he’d come crawling back underneath her thumb, because he dared to act like himself, instead of like a mask. The most that changed about Jennifer was her hair.
Billie was the one who changed. Billie was the one who made friends with people she’d never dream of before. Who had a close, personal, loving relationship. Who embraced the dork side of her, dressing up in Star Wars regalia. Who started getting counseling. Who was accepted for who she was, and not who she pretended to be. Not Jennifer. Billie.
OK, I know that the tags still say “Jennifer,” but she’s clearly accepting being called both at the moment, so she’s Billie for me, from here on out, unless she reestablishes her preference.
She stopped drinking as Billie. She starting using Jennifer after meeting Raidah. She hasn’t talked about why she changed the name or what it means to her. I suspect we’ll see. Possibly soon if Alice using “Billie” is a clue.
According to the flashbacks in in This Is Halloween, it seems like Raidah is the one who decided to use “Jennifer”, and ignored Billie when she tried to correct her. To me she’s always really been Billie; “Jennifer” has always just been a capitulation to Raidah’s bullshit and a rebellion after the Ruth fiasco, sort of her version of the stereotypical “chop off all your hair after a breakup” scene.
Thank you, was going to say that. Stopping drinking was a choice that she made as Billie, not as Jennifer.
Besides – this isn’t an Amber scenario. I know I refer to Jennifer and Billie as two different people, but they’re really not – they’re just two different ways she’s choosing to show herself to the world. The same exact person drank and drive and nearly killed herself, Alice, and Ruth. “Jennifer” isn’t absolved because she doesn’t drink; Jennifer doesn’t drink because of a decision and a promise she made as Billie.
Besides, if she was at a social gathering with Raidah where it was important to make connections, I’m not entirely sure that Jennifer would turn down alcohol if offered. It seems more likely that she would follow the crowd while rationalizing that the new her has tons of self-control.
Check out this later Transformers G1 scale chart I recently found in an auction. I always thought they were the same height but Blaster towers over Soundwave.
While stretch and squash has always been harder with CGI animation (especially in the 90's), leading to animation that's very stiff in SOME ways, check out how Quickstrike jerks forward a hair before jerking himself back.
Skilled animators worked on Beast Wars and it shows, despite the limitations.
M Sipher@msipher.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
I really want y'all to take this in if you haven't seen BW. The amount of expression Mainframe could get out of some *incredibly* inhuman faces, mixed with body language, is astounding even today.
“last fall I had this idea for a zine about Dilbert quitting his job and trying to learn to be happy and coming to terms with the fact that he’s trans actually” (posted 4/18/2022)
today in #9chickweedlane i learned alistair and lolly drowned
David M Willis!@damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 4d
Yesterday and today and probably also tomorrow and the next day in #9ChickweedLane I learned you can fill a whole week of strips with drawing the same two submerged heads kissing
very into these inconvenient, extremely long and pointy shoes that spread across europe in the 14th century and made everyone so horny and effeminate that the church went full on moral panic mode and a bunch of kings made them illegal!!! also everyone got bunions
2.5, what is he?
ooooh….
If he hooks up with amazagirl we can make it an even 3
Amber and him were never official, I think that’s the thing rather than a joke at Amber’s DID’s expense.
He dated Lucy very briefly. That’s probably the .5. He had more of a relationship with Amber, since they dated for a while before breaking up. Lucy and him survived 3½ dates or so?
Amber and Walky never dated, they just messed around.
Amber and Walky’s situationship started https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/fresh-3/ which was October 13, and was pretty on-and-off until Halloween when it settled firmly into off (2 and a half weeks). At no point did they define a relationship beyond fooling around and it-doesn’t-count-on-garbage-roof, and they had no formal dates.
Lucy and Walky started dating, with Walky formally asking Lucy out on a date, https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/04-hompk/romantic-2/ January 12 and broke up https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-14/02-its-the-love-i-havent-got/navigate/ January 23 (a week and a half). While they did not have sex, they definitely went on dates and repeatedly referred to one another as boyfriend and girlfriend.
Actually, it’s Dorothy, 1.5 (dated, broke up, got back together); Amber, 0.5 (FWB); Lucy, 0.5 (three dates).
Actually, Dorothy, Amber, and Lucy all count as 1, but the breakup burn with Lucy was so bad that Walky ended up owing her 0.5 afterwards.
I’m the only one who assumed Walky only counts Lucy partially because they never had sex?
More girlfriends than anyone else in the cast I think.
Wait no Danny I think has the full 3.
Depending on which girlfriend Walky is counting as a half they might be matched.
I don’t know that Walky’s counting the person as half so much as the relationship. Fully being in a relationship, with Amber or AG, would count as 1.
I assumed Lucy was the .5 due to what a clusterfuck it was from start to finish/they dated but by his own admission he wasn’t *that* into her.
I’d count Dorothy and Lucy as full points, Amber as half a point because they were never really “official” and he ruined things before they got to that point.
Amber&Walky are still endgame as far as I’m concerned. They had chemistry, dammit!
Danny was technically still dating Dorothy at the comic’s start. The breakup only happened once the two were both already in college.
Danny?
Fuck, that’s right isn’t it.
Most boyfriends is… Amber, I think? Depends if Walky counts as a .5.
Depends on counting (do you count Danny as 1 for Amber even though it was AG who dated him, but they weren’t really split at the time?). But it seems like 1.5 for her, and Joyce and Lucy have had two. (Of course, one of Joyce’s was Ethan.)
I think Amber has a conversation or I guess internal conflict about this dynamic. Being resentful of things being done for one aspect of herself or belonging to one aspect of herself when the reality is it still applies to both of them.
Amber dated Ethan too, as brief as it was.
That wasn’t during the time of the comic, though, which is the time frame I’m using.
Main cast, sure, but isn’t there a polyamorous fuckpile in the ladies hall?
They’re missing half the squad, though. It’s just Mandy, Grace, and Sierra. Marcie doesn’t appear to have hooked up with them, and Guns didn’t make the cut for this universe. So just two girlfriends each.
I mean, seems plausible that at least one of them could have already had at least one girlfriend under their belt before joining up with the polycule, so that number could potentially go up.
Ethan’s slept around a bit, before Mike’s death. That may bring his total above 3. Mike, Asher, and a whole pile o’ fuck buddies.
But Ethan’s have been unnamed flings; Mike and Asher are really the only boyfriends.
But if you’re not counting gender, then Ethan’s got everyone beat, at four. Amber, Joyce, Mike, Asher.
Ah, but Amber’s not a _college_ girlfriend. Back down to 3.
Also, Mike miiiiight object to being called a ‘boyfriend’.
The ‘friend’ part, in particular. Casual hookup, he’d be okay with.
Yeah, I wouldn’t count Mike as a boyfriend. Not even that he’d object to it, just that it was never established, and I don’t think Ethan knew there were real romantic feelings there.
from the hit webcomic ‘It’s Wally!”
it’s a Wally World after all XD
“It’s a Wally World After All” is of course the well-known attraction at the enormous Willisland theme park of the 22nd century
I love the Willis Verisimilous ride!
Free Willis!
I thought the show was “Leave It To Billie!” (“Gee, whiz, Walky!”)
I knew ‘Where’s Wally’ had to be a spinoff of something
It’s a spinoff with a surprising amount of lore for such a simple premise.
Waldo actually being called Wally in the UK will never not break my brain. The worst part is, there doesn’t seem to be any concrete reason for it; the American publishers seemingly just didn’t like “Wally”.
And I don’t like that Amazon.co.uk calls it your “basket” instead of your “cart”.
It’s because Walky is the only exception.
Take your picks! Take your picks as to who’s the ½! (I say Lucy)
Wallet stars in Two and a Half Girlfriends
Lucy feels like the charitable interpretation, yeah.
Amber since they never really dated.
Yup, they were never official.
It is amber, both Dorothy snd Lucy were officially his girlfriends while Maber was more of a casual fling kind of thing
He could also count Dorothy as a one and a half since they are dating for the second time.
I think that’d bring him to 3.5 unless he’s just not counting Amber at all.
Maber? Ow, my ears.
It’s actually a 1 and two .75s.
It’s the hair.
Though Sal wouldn’t need to muss up her hair to get 2.5 girlfriends if she wanted.
Sal: “Ah’m no longer straight. I am now seekin’ some casual girlfriends.”
Daisy, appearing out of nowhere: “I volunteer!”
Joyce, running up behind her: “Me too!”
Dorothy: “Hey!”
Marcie glaring at all of them:
Looking like sculpted caramel probably doesn’t hurt, either.
W1(D1+L1+D2) = 2.5 Gf
(i get the formula right?)
+1!
walky looking at life through 2.5 d glasses
I think Amber is willing to go from a .5 to a 1
If dating a couple of people for a little while is “yikes”, you’re a prude and a loser.
I think he means more that it can be yikes to go through a few relationships in a few months’ time, depending. He wasn’t terribly proud of how the Lucy relationship imploded, obviously.
Fuck “depending”. Sick to death of that word. It’s goddamn everywhere now, said about everything, like everyone’s suddenly afraid of describing a specific circumstance.
Or it’s because it’s a subjective opinion, so it actually does depend on the viewpoint of whoever’s judging Walky.
I’m not talking about Walky.
Well using the word depending is just as valid to describe any situation involving subjective opinions outside of the comic too so you getting worked up about a perfectly normal and functional word in the english language remains a weird response regardless.
Everyone’s obsessed with it now. Afraid to nail down anything remotely specific. Cowardice with extra steps.
Not even slightly. Every situation has nuance. Pretending otherwise isn’t bravery, it’s bull-headed idiocy.
Now you’re just making up extra shit. Have your day.
I honestly cannot tell if you are trolling otherwise this just make you look dumb.
Yeah, cuz it’s real dumb to notice something happening a lot in your life
Glad you agree!
Depending.
On what?
Further proof that Taffy is in fact a Sith Lord: despises the word “depending,” declares that it’s cowardice to deal in anything but absolutes.
What the fuck.
God forbid someone notice a trend.
You didn’t, you just msde something up to get mad about for some resson.
Nope. Wrong. Incorrect thing said by you. I see it everywhere, constantly. You not seeing it in your own life doesn’t mean I made it up, it means we’re not the same person.
And just because y8u see it “everywhere” doesn’t mean it’s actually a problem.
You’re like the least sentient person on this website.
Thanks you!
Your fanfiction is bad and you should feel bad.
Or, per a trend we all see, worse, because you have to be absolutely miserable to do this nonsense.
Eh, I think it depends
You think you’re real funny, don’t ya?
Well, I laughed, so you’re right.
Are you familiar with the Frequency Illusion?
An ngram comparison of “depending” vs some synonyms and antonyms doesn’t indicate any particular spike in usage, and actually shows “depending”s usage decreasing over the past decade.
Good. Good. Keep gaslighting Taffy as we continue or evil plan of slowly increasing the depending rate.
For reasons.
Or, you simply have no idea how this is happening and are just as surprised as everyone else.
More of a fear response in that case, eh? Like “Oh fuck, yikes, I’m scared of my own rizz, this is frightening and I haven’t figured out how to handle it correctly.”
Personally I’m not convinced that treated well and Yikes are mutually exclusive.
My impression is that Walky *was* a loser before college. Have I overlooked something in the lore?
I always figured he was more or less a non-entity up til then. Neither winning nor losing, simply existing and occasionally being perceived.
Mostly just an adolescent social immaturity. But what he’s gone through in his Fall semester has put him through some maturation. I think Alice has noticed the difference.
Walky is still reeling from the Incelerator bit from a few days back. Those words hit him harder than he let on. All three of those relationships ended with him getting dumped and i think that’s started to make him question how he treats women in general and dissect a lot of internalized beliefs. Walky is VERY good at hiding his thoughts though.
Honestly, I don’t think it’s a “how he treats women” thing, as much as a “how bad he is at relationships” thing. All three of the women he’s been with have been different situations, and he’s acted differently with each of them, so painting it with the Women Brush™ might be missing the forest for a specific tree. With Dorothy, he was brand-new to dating and didn’t know how to manage it (not helped by Dorothy unintentionally yo-yoing him a bit), with Amber it was almost purely physical with an emphasis on being unserious and not acknowledging feelings (taken way too far on Halloween), and with Lucy there was such a a disparity in expectations it’s a shock they lasted so long. Incelerator’s whole thing is that he blames women for everything that’s ever gone wrong in his life, and I think Walky as a character isn’t stupid enough to think anything that creep said was applicable to his own life.
He already kinda has though. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-15/02-the-one-where-jocelyne-returns/youllgetit/
It’s a subtle panel but he definitely picked up on more than a few things that he’s refusing to talk about with others. Walky definitely has problems with coasting and expecting life to eventually treat him well in the end. IDK someone smarter than me could probably explain it better especially when i’m currently waiting to see what the actual characters themselves have to say about the matter.
That read, to me, more like he’s worried Dorothy has come back to him because her confidence got knocked/she’s in crisis/she’s suffered some blows to her confidence. Less like he’s been treating women poorly though, of course, everyone in a relationship at that age (and any age) does some damage to the people they date just through lack of awareness or maturity.
That’s how I read it too. It plays into Walky’s poor self-image, but not how he treats women– maybe slightly aligned with something the Incelerator said, hearing about how a woman (specifically, Dorothy) wouldn’t be with him if things were going how she wanted. Which hurts, but he doesn’t want her to feel like that, like the Incelerator does.
Good way to put it. The “crawl back to him” definitely seemed like it hurt, but not in the way the Incelerator intended it or in the sense that he thought he’d been making her do that or even waiting for her to do it, but in the sense of reinforcing how close to the bottom she must be to come back to him and also hitting his self-esteem issues: she’ll only come back to me if she’s really messed up.
The break up with Dorothy at least wasn’t due to any of his own problems. That was all on her: mostly her overwork/stress. He handled that as well as anyone could be expected, even if they’d had more dating experience.
That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have plenty of self-doubt or that he doesn’t blame himself. I don’t really see how the Incelerator’s words would play into those doubts though. He’s not going to agree with them and none of the issues he does have come from treating women anything like that.
Walky thinks it might be a yikes because he feels responsible for those relationships ending and like he was a shitty boyfriend.
Not a damn thing to do with prudishness.
Is your avatar a satyr in a basketball jersey?
No, just a tank top.
Based.
And the botanimagical-cyber-arm?
Damnit, cybortanical was right there!
I believe the yikes is the .5 element.
I interpret it as “He’s gone through 3 break-ups in half a year,” which is to say that his college experience has maybe potentially not been great. (You know, in addition to all the other stuff in the Yikes column.)
Dorothy (1)
Amber-ish (1.5)
Lucy (2.5)
Now cram it.
My first take on that didn’t read it as cumulative: “I can see Amber being 1.5 people, but howinhell does Lucy count as 2.5 people? What convoluted hidden depths have I missed??” Then the coffee kicked in, and I saw the accumulation. …But now I kind of want to see Lucy contain multitudes.
Does restarting the relationship with Dorothy change the count?
damn (nice)
Billifer is… PURPOSELY…. setting next to Walky ? WHAT ? WHAT ? Is the world coming to an end ?
Of course not. A woman didn’t frown even slightly.
How do you pronounce “Walky” so that you have to mention the “k”? What wrong way will they imagine it without that?
The pronunciation was always fine.
It’s just that Alice was too cool for school (school being paying attention to anyone’s name that wasn’t one of the popular kids).
I don’t even think she got as close as “Wally” the last time she saw him.
I was wrong.
She called him Wally, last time, too.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/04-the-whiteboard-dong-bandit/wally/
Ah. Thank you.
I’m curious who walk considers the “.5” girlfriend he’s had.
Somehow I mistyped Walky as walk
It’s probably Amber since they were didn’t actually full-on date. He was official with Lucy, and Dorothy’s obviously one.
That seems most likely, although some might argue that Amber is the 1 and Lucy is the .5, because he slept with Amber and not with Lucy (at least, not in the euphemistic sense).
For the record, that’s a very dumb bullshit way of viewing it, but… I mean, Walky’s been an asshole on occasion.
Him and Amber didn’t really call it anything, and they only got as far as grinding with clothes on, so she seems like the only reasonable culprit.
He didn’t sleep with Amber. Granted, they DID grind through clothes onvr, niy they canonically didn’t go further than that. Still further than he went with Lucy, granted.
I’m pretty sure it’s because he wasn’t really with Amber, but I also thought it might be because he was dating Amber and not Amazigirl
I saw it as Lucy being the 0.5, since they weren’t that close and didn’t last that long. Not so much as “they didn’t sex it up” as much as “they didn’t level it up”.
I assume Dorothy, because they broke up and then got back together. So Lucy and Amber are both Exes, and dorothy is Half an Ex.
Hehe, I see we haven’t lost the “all the bisexuals are digging Walky” subplot.
I do love that Walky really does like that Billie/Jennifer’s doing well. I also could see him being more down for this relationship than Asher or Ruth, for different reasons.
Offhand, I can’t remember any other scene with Walky expressing positively about someone’s relationship. He’s doing a low-level Joyce-commending of them here.
Yeah, I am sure there is someone else he is jazzed about, but I can’t think of them. It’s more common for him to express skepticism about, like Joe with Joyce, or be outright disapproving of, like with Ruth due to power imbalance and protectiveness of Billie.
Those 2 columns are not mutually exclusive.
Yes.
That’s 2.5 at one time.
Oh hell yeah, it’s my favourite customer from the Papa’s Pizzeria series!
I mean, 3.5 if you count Dorothy twice…How many months has it been since the start?
Aw, actively seeking out Wally’s company… (Phone autocorrect is proving Walky’s point, so I left it.)
What’s that device Walky is holding? I would assume it’s a smartphone but it almost looks too big and he’s kind of holding it like a controller.
Probably a handheld/portable game thing.
(Which one will depend on the current state of the sliding timescale.)
Sometimes people hold their phones sideways.
It’s a knife.
Thank you for pointing this out so that I didn’t have to.
Looks like just a regular smartphone held sideways. (like for video watchin’)
It’s probably just a phone held sideways yeah. It just looked too big to me so I thought maybe the Walkman was gaming on some new handheld. But knowing his tenuous position with his parents, him having the cash for that is unlikely.
Yeah, he will borrow the Switch of the Sanchez siblings, or go to use Amber’s, so I doubt he’s got a gaming device of his own. Ironically, his phone can probably emulate a lot of games if he looked into it.
I can’t remember seeing this room before. So, Where’s Wally?
Read Eatery. Billie and Alice were headed here the whole time.
It’s weird, I’m seeing 4 of them on this page and can’t for the life of me work out which ones are the fakes!
Okay, so the trick is to count the stains. The real one has exactly 5 stains on his top, in red, brown, beige, yellow, and purple, ordered by size. You can also tell the one in panel 3 is fake because he’s facing away from the camera.
He will always be waldo for me and nothing else, everyone else is wrong.
This is correct.
Jennifer is really giving Alice the squishy eyes.
And she’s getting the right back.
Please do not be pro-Bulmeria, Alice.
Technically, it’s a Civil War so presumably there’s a Bulmerian minority that’s getting the crap beaten out of them. It’s a stand in for RL but presumably the details aren’t 1:1
“According to everyone’s autocorrect” is a great comeback that shows why Walky gets so many girls. He’s cute and confident and extremely funny.
He’s a neat guy. Could probably use some marketable skills though, like playing a musical instrument or driving a vehicle.
Standup comedy skits.
Wallky if you cut one of your girlfriends in half you’re either a serial killer or a magician, so it’s a yikes either way.
Alternatively, he could have been dating someone who was half girl, half skeleton
Horrible realization: all girls are half skeleton 0_0
What exact percentage of a girl is skeleton? It’s probably less than half, right?
By mass, 14% of the human is bone. By Volume, around 11%.
These are averages, of course, a skinnier person would have a bigger percentage of bone, and an overweight person would have a lower percentage.
Feederism is a powerful strategy in the skeleton war
Technically he’s a spree killer, since he did several at once.
Between Walky cutting girls in half and Jacob harvesting their arms we have huge problem. Women on campus are getting dismembered and no one is talking about it!
Ruth has been quite open about her femor collection.
This is nice
Also my selfish hope is that the big confrontation that Alice and Jennifer face is Raidah trying to tear them apart before Alice protect Jennifer and then Jennifer embraces the name Billie and a kiss from Alice
Maybe even Billie going “I’m not worth it Alice, I’m a terrible person” and Alice shutting those thoughts down with a big warm hug
This would be very nice
It would be
a resolution that makes sense
But seriously why does the autocorrect insist so much on changing “Walky” with “Wally”? It’s like “walkie” but with a Y. You’d think that after years of typing “Walky” the algorithm would take the hint but nope.
My name is Wiman but autocorrect always changes it to Woman and I’m like; “Thanks for the thought AC but I think that’s beyond your powers.”
I’ve known multiple faculty from India who just started using anglicized names and I don’t get it because their Indian names were spelled exactly like they sound.
Jennifer and Alice at the moment: Toxic Yuri Status – OPAL, limited drama risk but still more than it would be with status of GARNET.
Let’s see how long that lasts…
I enjoy the implication that in all their years of high school, Alice kept getting Walky’s name wrong and Jennifer/Billie never once corrected her/explained his name to her. And now she is just doing it fairly casually, and Alice finds it cute. I dunno, I know there are still lots of problems here, but that in itself is a nice moment I think.
Orrr maybe it’s just because Walky got a glow up and is now worthy of having a correct name. Hard to say lmao
So is he called Wally in the UK version of “Dumbing of Age”?
Make her girlfriend number 3.5 Walky! Mostly for the face, Billie will makes
I’m waiting for Raidah to see “Billy” and Alice in passing, and the shit to really hit the fan. Even though they’ve never met, I get the impression Alice and Raidah would really hate each other, and especially hate Billy “changing” herself for the other – Raidah disapproving of her backsliding, and Alice insulted by the fake image she tries to put on around Raidah.
Still a little lost about the squealing-tires speed of Alice’s turnaround on Billie, via an off screen talk with Ruth. I think it just made it a little hard for me to follow their dynamic.
On the other hand, I know there were people wishing Billie harm that Willis had to block, so I understand if the rapid 180 was a reaction to that! Maybe a little “you know what, Billie gets to have a GREAT day actually”.
It might be that Alice never actually got over her infatuation with Billie, so any sign of improvement is enough to let her ignore any doubts.
It’ll be interesting to see how she reacts when Jennifer does do something self-destructive in front of her again.
It wasn’t jjst the off screen talk with Ruth, it was Joyce coming in supoort of her and that she actually changed, which we saw.
Also, I’d wager Joyce is getting a boost to her friendship powers from her being a lesbian love sleuth, because Jennifer’s motivations here seem to be pretty damn romantic. Check her expression every time she looks at Alice. Joyce is in her element here, getting Alice to soften up.
And might lose another depending on current trajectory!
….I’ll be dog-gonned. Our Billie/Jennifer really is like. Changing a little. I’d been half thinking ‘alright, maybe if shes around alice she kinda stabilizes into High School Billy’, but. High School Billie aint tellin that story, or stopping to sit with Walky.
Maybe shes. Actually. Really, truly. Doing…. a little better.
It’s really nice, I so hope when she hits a speed bump it goes right, one area I hope the drama doesn’t explode too high
I may be a little bit of a relationship paladin for these two
Princesses need champions, even if they had a DUI whoopsy-doodle. Rise, Knight of Billie-Alice.
You’ve had it rough, Walky. And yeah, you’ve also been lucky.
The longer it goes on, the more awkward it will be if Jennifer decides to stay “Jennifer.”
Why is she not correcting? Is she afraid that Alice will flake out and ditch her if she tells her she’s wanted to *really* turn over a new leaf?
Hang on a minute. Haaang on a minute.
…
Alice came back not because of Jennifer, but because of her friends. Because Joyce went to bat for her. Because Ruth helped her out. Because she looked “loved.”
“Jennifer” was a rejection of all that. “Jennifer” was leaving the friend group behind as “toxic” and instead starting up a new friendship with Raidah and Co. “Jennifer” was only interested in her old friends if they *needed* help, like Dorothy, or Joyce. Not for actually being friends.
Holy shit. “Jennifer” wasn’t the one who changed. “Jennifer” was simply a reestablishment of the status quo that she lost when leaving high school. She found the “in” crowd, the people with connections, and climbed to the top. Jennifer was the person who was petty enough to neglect her boyfriend simply so that he’d come crawling back underneath her thumb, because he dared to act like himself, instead of like a mask. The most that changed about Jennifer was her hair.
Billie was the one who changed. Billie was the one who made friends with people she’d never dream of before. Who had a close, personal, loving relationship. Who embraced the dork side of her, dressing up in Star Wars regalia. Who started getting counseling. Who was accepted for who she was, and not who she pretended to be. Not Jennifer. Billie.
OK, I know that the tags still say “Jennifer,” but she’s clearly accepting being called both at the moment, so she’s Billie for me, from here on out, unless she reestablishes her preference.
Billie is an alcoholic who almost killed herself, Alice, and Ruth.
Jennifer doesn’t drink.
That alone says that Billie is dead and good riddance.
And yes, I lost multiple family members to drunk driving accidents. My brother and my cousin. I have others who have struggled with alcoholism too.
So I always am on Jennifer’s side in overcoming this.
It’s also why I overreact to Ruth’s issues since she’s back to drinking.
She stopped drinking as Billie. She starting using Jennifer after meeting Raidah. She hasn’t talked about why she changed the name or what it means to her. I suspect we’ll see. Possibly soon if Alice using “Billie” is a clue.
According to the flashbacks in in This Is Halloween, it seems like Raidah is the one who decided to use “Jennifer”, and ignored Billie when she tried to correct her. To me she’s always really been Billie; “Jennifer” has always just been a capitulation to Raidah’s bullshit and a rebellion after the Ruth fiasco, sort of her version of the stereotypical “chop off all your hair after a breakup” scene.
She still started using Jennifer and asked others to do so.
Thank you, was going to say that. Stopping drinking was a choice that she made as Billie, not as Jennifer.
Besides – this isn’t an Amber scenario. I know I refer to Jennifer and Billie as two different people, but they’re really not – they’re just two different ways she’s choosing to show herself to the world. The same exact person drank and drive and nearly killed herself, Alice, and Ruth. “Jennifer” isn’t absolved because she doesn’t drink; Jennifer doesn’t drink because of a decision and a promise she made as Billie.
Besides, if she was at a social gathering with Raidah where it was important to make connections, I’m not entirely sure that Jennifer would turn down alcohol if offered. It seems more likely that she would follow the crowd while rationalizing that the new her has tons of self-control.