David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 9d
Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net ⋅ 19h
David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 9d
David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 9d
Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social ⋅ 2dDavid M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 9d
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Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg @theradr.bsky.social ⋅ 22d
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Fuck off, Tall Rachel.
She’s the actual worst.
damn I don’t even wanna imagine how other Rachel feels about her.
Rachel should just change her name so other Rachel can be Rachel
You’re so right. She sucks so bad, she doesn’t deserve her own name.
Why isn’t this one “other Rachel”?
It’s an extremely obvious case of pretty privilege, tbh.
420 comments!!!! BLAZE IT!!!!
Wow really Taffy? We’ve got bullys, alcoholics, that guy who facilitated a mass kidnapping that led to people dying, sexual predators and that guy who kept a do list and Rachael is the worst? Feck off!
Sorry you feel that way.
I’ll say they’ve done an excellent job making me share their annoyance whenever Rachel appears
Well, excuse the fuck out of me for not liking the goddamn antagonist.
KtBear: I generally read ‘so and so is the worst’ as talking about the Cast (as in, people listed on the cast page). So we can trim out Ryan and the Deplorable Dad Duo, among others, from the competition.
And as others have noted, the alcoholics and the do list folks have all at least attempted to change, while Rachael remains a one note character: “I judge you, for all time, according to the worst decision you’ve ever made.”
Now, personally, i wouldn’t rank her the worst, though I find her very annoying. Booster and Roz (I almost included Mary and Raidah, but they don’t make the aforementioned Cast Page Cut, placing them formally in the Antagonist category) both aggravate me more on their appearances. But frankly, if all three of them were shoved onto a bus, with Malaya driving, I’d be quite happy.
Also, much like certain bad Charlie Chaplin impersonators I could name, them being the actual worst kinda goes without saying, I would think? (Among reasonable company.)
Or, if someone tells me that they don’t like peas and carrots, I don’t necessarily automatically assume that they’re coming down hard in favor of colonialist genocides, you know? (Unless they’re giving me some VERY particular other cues.)
Also, “so-and-so is the worst” – and even “so-and-so is the actual worst” – is often used for hyperbole. Even if Taffy is not: yeah, what Freemage said. She’s just been very judgy, and about the only role I recall her having in DoA is as this person who doesn’t care about who people are, because how could people change? As someone who is sometimes way too hard on himself (based on what other people have told me), and who knows a fair number of people whose internal monologues seem to be borderline (or actually) abusive to themselves, that kinda harshness isn’t very helpful. (And the people who might need to hear how bad they’re acting – except maybe for Joe in the past, who was already moving in the right direction – either won’t hear it if it’s posed this way, or wouldn’t hear it regardless, or will internalize the “people can’t change” narrative and will be trapped by it.)
Rachel seems to be responding to some past traumas, as best I can tell. Which likely isn’t her fault. But she’s still consistently championing a fairly toxic standard onto people who we have a sympathetic perspective on. Joe, for example, is pretty clearly trying to be a better person – regardless of his past actions, which seem to be a combination of well-intentioned, ignorant, and asshole/immature. Yeah, it’s reasonable for Rachel to personally doubt that he’s really changed, or that Ruth’s really changed. She hasn’t seen any of that. But, unless I am misunderstanding her perspective pretty dramatically, she’s taking that into a pretty toxic place, even if she herself is doing so because of her own traumas: she’s claiming that people *don’t* change and *can’t* change.
Yeah, it’s understandable that she might think that if she’s coming from a place of trauma, sure. But what we’ve seen her doing in practice is speaking aloud the internal self-hating monologues of people who are already self-flagellating, and doubting that they can change. Yeah, no one is perfect, and there’s no such thing as being so good that you’re unable to do harm – and look at what embracing self-righteousness has done to Mary. But Rachel seems stuck in this black-and-white thinking, and this belief based on her own experiences which is just not very accurate. And she’s hurting people, and being unpleasant. I personally hope she gets a bit more perspective – maybe even from Joe’s character development – but yeah, I see why people don’t like her. I myself liked her quite a bit less until I started thinking about *why* she might be like that. Now, I still find her kinda unpleasant in DoA, because of how she’s been acting, but if she can get past that, I’d be very interested to see the more nuanced perspective she might grow into.
If that’s an acceptable way to get people to improve themselves, then I have to say it’s at the same level (or worse) of Mike’s techniques. And I do recall him catching a fair amount of flak for, you know, being an asshole (albeit secretly a principled one at least part of the time, and seemingly developing his methodology as a response to his parents being threatened, at least partially as camouflage, and as a way to protect them and those who he loves).
(Hopefully, none of that comes off too harsh, or as overwhelming e.g. for being so long. Mostly, I’m just not particularly good at brevity without significant additional effort. Hopefully, it’s sufficiently clear that I mostly agree with your points (despite not being much of a Rachel fan); they just read as a bit harshly-stated. I didn’t mean it as condescending, either. And, who knows, perhaps you were intentionally overreacting back. The challenges of deciphering tone on the Internet from text are Literally The Absolute Worst (that is, kinda annoying, and sometimes hard to decipher without context).
This is why TL:DR was invented
Naw. Jennifer is the worst IMO… But that might be changing with her latest storyline and she seems to be coming back to Earth cuz I couldn’t stand her when she hung around Raidah (who is truly awful).
Billie has shown kindness to others, even during her worst segments in the story. She interacts with the other characters in a variety of ways. Rachel does neither, so I like her less.
So close, but you somehow veered away from the source of the awful. Raidah is the actual worst. She’s not only terrible, she makes other people terrible. I think I actually hate Raidah more than I do Mary. Mary is awful, but at least I can understand how and why. I just do not fathom how Raidah’s brain works.
And while Mary is the more actively hateful person, she’s so excessive about it that she mostly just pushes people away from her bullshit (mostly. There was her boyfriend at one point), unlike Raidah who, as you pointed out, drags people down toward her level.
Honestly, while strict and harsh, she has a point.
The people you hurt are not required to forgive you.
I disagree that guilt can’t change a person, but the way she’s looking at it is… it’s similar to Jimmy McGill in Better Call Saul.
It’s not a question of if the guilt is real or not. It IS real guilt.
What matters is if the change is consistent and the behaviors are not repeated.
Clearly someone, I’m assuming her dad, had a pattern of behavior, felt bad, and then continued the behavior, even after expressing guilt to her, over and over and over. So she’s jaded to sex pests and their attempts to “reform”.
She’s harsh… but I can see where she’s coming from. Plus, she’s in college. Normally, people see there can be negatives in the world or different types of good, but Rachel is an interesting case where her coming of age is about accepting some people, not all will, but some people CAN change.
Well he’s not asking for forgiveness. He’s just minding his business. She inserted herself. People are not obligated to forgive you but that doesn’t mean she isn’t being a jerk.
This right here. He’s not asking for forgiveness. All the talk of social debt and who’s owed or not owed what, but nobody seems to care that he’s not asking for a damn thing from her.
But he’s not trying to make amends either.
When someone chooses to harm another person, the two ethical courses of action are to try to repair & reverse the harm, and to pursue justice or forgiveness. Joe harmed Rachel, and he has not actually tried to repair that harm at all.
Just because Joe repaired the harm he caused Joyce doesn’t actually mean he actually did anything to help Rachel at all. In fact it sounds like he just avoided her.
He owes her, not the other way around. It’s good he’s not asking her for forgiveness. It’s bad that he’s not even trying to fix what he did. As if having a positive relationship with Joyce means the harm he did to everyone else also vanishes.
It doesn’t.
I mean, it is pretty obvious Rachel does not want Joe around, and Joe obliged by staying clear. He noticed at least that much and avoided her because she has no intention of forgiving him no matter what. She doesn’t owe him forgiveness and he hasn’t sought it out based on what seems to be her preference.
Joe doesn’t seem like the type of character to ignore Rachel if she made ANY type of indication otherwise to her wanting something from him. So far she has only shown a desire to take potshots at him whenever possible and really, Joe shouldn’t and doesn’t owe her that privilege.
I think at this point, if Rachel asked for some kind of penance, Joe would oblige her and do his best to fulfill her terms. But since she hasn’t done that, it’s Fine, Actually™ for him not to. If anything, I imagine she’d like him even less if he started deliberately coming around her to make amends she never requested.
If we absolutely have to frame this in terms of social debt (which is a disgusting mindset to me, but I’ll try it), Joe doesn’t owe Rachel any specific action in any special amount. She wants him not to be around her, he’s been avoiding spaces he sees her in, that’s him giving her what she wants. If she doesn’t want him around, being around her would be going against her wishes and prioritizing his own need to make amends, which just sucks.
The bit about his relationship with Joyce not negating the harm Joe did to everyone else is just pointless to add. Adding that little “It doesn’t.” with its own line break for emphasis implies a belief that anyone said it did, or even indicated they thought that, but nobody has, especially not the person you’re directly replying to.
When she’s made it very clear that she axiomatically will not accept attempts to make amends from anyone, that it’s actually part of her entire worldview, going out of your way to avoid contact actually is pretty much the best you can do.
Agreed. It’s annoying that she has to bring up how much she hates Joe whenever she sees him. If he can’t change, what’s the point in yelling at him?
Serious question–what sort of ‘amends’ could Joe possibly offer at this point? He did something stupid (the do list), figured out, after a bit, that it WAS stupid and harmful, and:
1: Stopped the behavior, and:
2: Offered a token apology, and donut, to show others that at least he had a better understanding of the situation, and would not repeat it. He also made it clear at the time that no one was under any obligation to forgive him, even if they took the donut.
What sort of amends can one make for a one-time action? What could possibly atone for the harm he’s done, especially since she’s made it clear nothing ever would?
Making amends is a nice concept but sometimes the best thing you can do for someone you’ve hurt is to leave them alone.
Her feelings are valid. Doesn’t mean she’s not being a turbo bongo about it.
“The people you hurt are not required to forgive you” is an absolutely true statement, full stop.
Furthermore, once you’ve hurt someone, you will always be a person who hurt someone. You can’t actually wipe the slate clean.
That being said, people are capable of growth, and change, and becoming a person who *wouldn’t have hurt* that person, if they had known then what they know now (or been the person then that they are now).
That doesn’t mean they didn’t still do whatever it is that they did, and people can choose whether or not to forgive them for it. But there’s a difference between being *a* person who made a mistake; or did something wrong; or hurt someone, and being the *same* person who…
Rachel doesn’t seem to get that. But if she did, she’s *still* not personally obligated to a) believe that Joe is actually a different person now than he was then; or b) forgive him, even if she does believe that he’s changed.
You are not incorrect! But I think the point here is that Rachel is the one who started this conversation and is using it as an excuse to dump on him. she didn’t have to engage, she could have just gone off to do her own thing. Joe already knows she doesn’t like him and why. He even pointed out that he goes out of his way not to disturb her when he sees that she’s working out.
And again, he’s neither demanding that she believe he’s changed nor demanding that she forgive him. The most he’s done so far is express that he wants to change and to acknowledge that she won’t believe he’s changed. Was even that too much for him to dare to do?
B, absolutely. A? If someone has has in fact changed and they don’t ’t see or acknowledge it because one refuses to do so, thats on them.
Sure. *We* know that Joe has, in fact, changed (or at the bare minimum, is in the process of changing). Rachel doesn’t know that; she only has Joe’s word for it. She hasn’t seen what we’ve seen and doesn’t know what we know. And given that it hasn’t really been *that* long since the events in question, I’m not sure it’s entirely unreasonable for her to be skeptical.
> Furthermore, once you’ve hurt someone, you will always be a person who hurt someone. You can’t actually wipe the slate clean.
I think that’s why Christianity is so popular; it promises to do just that.
I mean, it seems weird no one actually acknowledges the concept of atonement in the argument.
That a person can and should make amends for what actions they’ve taken.
To begin again.
I also think it’s important to make it clear what is meant by hurting someone. We talking feelings, physical harm, mental harm? What if someone is a minor when they’ve hurt someone? Are they expected to carry that burden for life for something they did when they didn’t know any better? When they were perhaps having a meltdown? I think such a viewpoint is very unforgiving and frankly, very draconian.
I still have scars on my hands from working with children who, at times, had violent outbursts. I’ve been struck, had furniture and other items thrown at me, been bitten, scratched, hair pulled, you name it I’ve experienced it. But I would NEVER say that those children will now and forever always be “people who have hurt someone”. I did my best to deescalate, and once they were calm, we went about our day as normal. Some of them apologized, most didn’t, but that doesn’t really matter. I think it’d be a lie to pretend that I’m someone who has never, at any point, ever hurt another human being. I had my own outbursts when I was a child. I’ve been flippant with my tone and hurt friends without realizing. I’ve been thoughtless and hurtful before, because I’m not perfect. I’ve done my best to apologize and make things better when I’ve fucked up. If that’s good enough for some people, yay! If it isn’t for others, oh well! I’m not going to live the rest of my life thinking I’m the scum of the earth for that. I don’t think the vast majority of people should.
I don’t think there’s a slate that really needs to be cleaned. No one is guiltless but all anyone can do is their best. And if someone IS doing their best, isn’t that commendable? Do we really think the best and most productive way of going about life is to treat any instance of ever harming another person as evidence that that person is awful and will forever be stained by it?
There’s a huge difference between acknowledging that you’re a person who has made mistakes because you’re not perfect (and nobody is) and thinking you’re the scum of the earth, to be fair. And absolutely, people doing their best is commendable.
I agree that there’s a distinction between a child who is struggling to regulate their emotions causing harm, and someone saying something thoughtless in an argument, and someone deliberately doing something to hurt somebody else. It’s a spectrum, and the things we do are “defining” to different degrees, from “virtually not at all” to “quite a bit, actually.” But they don’t go away just because we’re better people now.
Case in point: when I was a kid, I was kind of an asshole. I had some anger issues because my dad was sick, and I took it out on other people. I never seriously hurt anybody physically, but I was definitely a “bully” in a way that I’m not proud of. I don’t think what I did when I was between the ages of six and eight is particularly defining of me now, at 32, but I *did* those things, and I don’t get to pretend that I didn’t just because I’d never do something like that now.
Nobody is saying that “the best and most productive way of going about life is to treat any instance of ever harming another person as evidence that that person is awful.” Good people make mistakes. Good people even sometimes do shitty things intentionally.
But being a generally good person who does generally good things isn’t a free pass for doing something shitty. It doesn’t make them an awful person; it makes them a generally good person who did something shitty, the same as most people. We can acknowledge that we’re all imperfect people who have done shitty things without it being “carrying a burden for life” or thinking we’re “the scum of the earth” or that we will “forever be stained” by it.
So yeah, I agree with everybody who is saying some variation of “people are mostly composed of shades of gray and nobody is perfect and everybody has (probably) hurt someone at some point.” That’s what being a person is. I just think it’s important not to pretend that just because I’m not the kind of person now who would do the shitty thing I did then, that I didn’t still do that thing. That’s what I mean by always being “a person who . . .”
Everyone has hurt someone. Defining ourselves and others by “sin” should have died out with the puritans.
In 14 years this Rachel has never said a single nice thing to anyone, or about anyone.
Although she seemed normal for 30 seconds in flashback once on meeting Ruth.
She’s toxic. She’s just making baseless accusations.
She’s obviously pulled this before on Joe, which is why he admitted to avoiding her.
That isn’t what happened between them at all. He was avoiding her because he put her name on the List where he rated her like a product and then published it so people could see his esteemed opinion on her body and how fuckable it was.
She’s not upset for no reason at Joe. I agree she could have kept it to herself, but she’s not obligated to. He was a dick to her and most other women on campus. Her accusations are not baseless, they’re just lacking the extra information about Joe changing that we as the audience have.
For her, she was treated like shit and then accused of publishing the list 3 days after a rapist was found on campus, and then told he would adjust her rating downward for being a pain in the ass about this. THEN Joe apologized once and started avoiding her. It’s been a few months for her (not years like it has for us) and she’s understandably still pissed off about what he did.
She has some shitty opinions about whether people can change or not, but like everyone else on the cast she is 19/20ish so that’s not terribly surprising. I’m actually still flabbergasted that people are SO angry at her for what feels like a very normal reason to be annoyed at someone and snappy when she sees them.
The main reason people are angry at her – and I don’t know if outright angry is correct, but it’s not too important – is that *she* approached *Joe* unsolicited, decided to engage with him, and decided to begin using what I would call abusive tactics on him.
Note that all he said at first yesterday was that he chooses to avoid sharing the gym with her. She escalates by attributing it to a horribly sexist reason, and the *second* thing he says is “I do it in acknowledgment of your feelings about me”. To which she escalates again – saying he hasn’t changed (putting those words in his mouth, no less). To which he disagrees, but acknowledges that he understands her postion.
If Rachel sincerely believes change is impossible, and (as she says today) that even if it was, it doesn’t wipe away your sin, then why does she speak to him at all? After all, nothing she says will change him for the better. So the *only* possible outcome is to make him feel bad and/or to make herself feel better by making him feel bad. And that is petty vengeance. She’s not defending herself – he didn’t speak to her. She’s not defending others – he didn’t speak to anyone else, improperly or otherwise.
*That’s* why people dislike what she’s doing.
Right, I understand why people are upset. I don’t understand the level of upset that’s aimed at her, and part of that is that I personally disagree that she’s doing much wrong by being the one to start this conversation. I think people who are victims of some form of cruelty by another person have an absolute right to talk to that person and be angry while doing it.
Also, Joe was HORRIBLY SEXIST the last time she talked to him, so it’s not weird that she treated him that way.
As for her opinion on change, she’s hardly the first 19/20-something who had a stupidly rigid and unfair opinion that she’s not taking notes on.
So, again, my flabbers are fully gasted that people find this so infuriating rather than just “Oof, what a shitty opinion.”
Part of it is also that this is the only side of her we’ve ever seen, other than the Ruth flashback. Maybe if we saw her having a normal day with friends or something, it might help. But right now, she’s as one-note as Mary, and with less alterations of the beat.
Except we learned that isn’t the last time they talked.
They’ve been working out together and she drove him away with talk like this ( which may have been justified) and now she’s blaming him for not spending time with her.
No matter what he does is going to be wrong.
This is Tsundere.
It’s not that she’s not justified it’s that she has NOTHING else.
Does she have friends? Hobbies? Innerlife.
Her dialogue been become a loop of a depressed character inner condemning critic.
Do we ever see her doing or saying ANYTHING kind to anyone, ever?
Again, that is NOT what either of them said. You are making things up to be upset about. He said he’d been avoiding her, he didn’t say why. Neither of them have talked about working out together and her driving him away.
You have a good memory for what happened three months ago in comic.
But I wasnt talking about that, I was talking about yesterday and today’s comics. The words on the page.
They also tell us new facts, which you are supposed to infer and understand we as the audience have missing information .
When I said her accusations are baseless, I was stating a fact not an opinion. Rachel is justified in her dislike of Joe for all the reasons you described. But that wasn’t what she was talking about. At all. For all we know.
Justified Dislike≠ All Random Accusations being relevant and/or True.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/hnnrrrgh/
(1) We learn a new fact.
(2) They have been regularly working out together.
(3) Enough that Rachel noticed.
We are supposed to update our priors with this info.
(4) We learn that they had this conversation before and this is why Joe avoids her and no longer works out when she is there deliberately.
Lets look at the accusations: (1) Joe can’t work out around her because she is too sexy.
Notice how self flattering this is, and it’s not because of the things Rachel said to Joe implying she’d rather not see him.
(2) Look at the “Capitalized” You. She is implying shed rather not see him, so it’s obvious she said this in the past too.
(3) There is no cases of Joe avoiding women he likes because he finds them hot.
(4) It’s sus she remembers being 11 on the list and brings it up. But not how quickly he offered to downgrade her. Which you haven’t forgotten.
( I think she’s into Joe. This is her terrible ham-handed way of flirting and begging . On the old Joe this would have encouraged him)
(5) ‘You agree that you haven’t changed ‘ because Joe is giving her personal space after multiple negative conversations during workouts ??
That’s a You Hate Wallfles discourse. Nobody was talking about change. She accused him of being a bad person because she missed him and is too social awkward to phrase it anyway but an accusation of a crime.
Unless there is a missing conversation last time where Joe promised to change for her this is non sequitur.
But we have multiple conversations for years of Rachel starting the conversation about “no one can change” or “redemption is a story” when no one asked her. She clearly needs therapy about something big.
(6) She literally says “So you agree you haven’t changed”. Something he never said. You see this yourself. You know based on the words on this page this is a baseless accusation. ( Whether people can change or Joe has changed. Or whether Joe deserves her forgiveness is irrelevant. )
It’s BASELESS because she made it up. Invented it. Tried to put words in his mouth he never said.
She has her reasons.
But there is big difference between being justifiable cynical
and seeking out ppl to harass them. Or making stuff up.
I liked Rachel in Walkyverse and this one note character is a big downgrade. I no longer recognize Rachel.
Nor do I think she is a moral authority. She knew first hand Ruth was out of control and said and did nothing the first semester. Ruth is an enabler.
(7) Next baseless accusation: “it doesn’t matter if you’ve changed or not”
Unless there have multiple interim conversations where he confided this to Rachel,this is just psychological projection and false even from her viewpoint.
It DOES Matter. And it especially matters to Rachel as she keeps bringing it up. Unprompted to Multiple people.
Rachel is arguing with herself. And she is losing.
(8) “All you have is your guilt, and Guilt isn’t change.
Ditto number 7. Unless Joe told her off panel he felt guilty, she is just making stuff up, begging him, throwing spaghetti on the wall.
This isn’t the comic we’ve been reading for 15 years. Joe ,Guilty?
This seems more projection about an abusive family member or Ruth.
This isn’t going to land because it’s not accurate to the personality. Maybe he should feel guilty. Maybe Rachel should find another way to express her hornieness. Or whatever this is.
Joe has probably said 20,000 dismissive things about women and the comic hasn’t shown any sense of guilt for most of it. He expressed remorse for some, but not guilt.
I read the first two paragraphs and decided you could go fuck yourself with that condescending tone
I won’t be reading the rest. Hope it was fun to type.
Joe was literally just in there working out nominally by himself. When confronted on him not being there often, he said that he doesn’t work out when she’s here because he knows she doesn’t like him. The only words he’s said in his own defence is that he knows she doesn’t believe he can change, but he’s still trying to be the best person he can be.
She may be under absolutely no obligation to forgive him, but no one in that room is asking her to forgive or interact with him. She’s just kinda starting shit with a dude that actively doesn’t exist around her if he can avoid it.
Nearly every time Rachel shows up, she’s starting shit with another character. It’s her only trait. Fuck all this “obligation” nonsense, she’s always the one instigating a confrontation over shit that happened months or years ago.
Rachel is a consistent character.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/03-the-thing-i-was-before/redemption/
That right there is her tale. At some point she feels she let something happen and kept quiet about it until someone was hurt badly. Now she speaks up about the simple truth that change takes consistent work, not just a statement of intent.
When she’s been featured, that’s who she’s been, and almost always with Joe and Ruth. Joe, whose first interaction with her was to tell her she’s an eleven on his do list, and second interaction was to accuse her of leaking that list. And Ruth who was her freshman roommate while going through what turned her into who she was at the start of the strip. The only other person who has earned her ire is Mary.
She has a history with Ruth, too. They were roommates in their freshman year, and apparently Ruth did something unforgivable that’s still undefined.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/unredacted/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/blankslate/
And yet, when she found out Ruth was going to be her RA, she did NOT immediately go to the housing admins and demand to be moved, or even tell them why Ruth would be a bad RA. Instead, she simply remained on the wing, all the while continuing to resent Ruth to the point she walks up and starts a conversation until she can make a jab.
Well yeah, if she moved to another building she wouldn’t get to make those jabs. (And from a Doylist perspective, we’d see her even less. She’d make as many appearances as Beatrice and Nash.)
If I may? No, she does not “speak the truth that change takes consistent work”.
She states, under no uncertain terms, that “Change is impossible”.
The people you hurt are not required to forgive you, but you are required to improve your reading comprehension at some point instead of just assuming that that canned phrase applies to every sitaution.
Ironically, guilt actually can be and usually is a great motivator for change, but shame isn’t. The distinction being that guilt is when you feel bad about what you’ve done, and shame is when you feel bad about who you are. I say “ironically”, because it shows how Rachel’s actually making things much worse. Or she would be if Joe wasn’t actively choosing to disregard her and change anyway.
Wait wait wait, when did we see Rachel’s dad? Did I miss a page somewhere? Is this a patreon page?
We didn’t. But we did see a flashback to her moving in and he was conspicuously absent, which made some of us suspicious.
Plenty of innocent explanations of course, but …
I love how Joe is just minding his own and focusing on his own self improvement regardless of Rachel’s negging. Makes me respect Joe a whole lot more and view Rachel as nothing more than a stagnating 20 year old who thinks they have the whole world figured out when it’s just plain arrogance.
Booster pinned her down pretty well a couple strips back; https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/01-this-bright-millennium/sobstory/
I adore how he’s completely stonewalling her here. He’s giving her nothing and she can’t stand it.
Gray-rocking works!
“The important lessons are supposed to be humbling.” -Ruth
Honestly, with how one note Rachel is about this whole ” change doesn’t matter” thing I wonder if there is something that she is guilty about from her past she feels like she can’t or shouldn’t let go of. Would kind of give some explanation of why she is the way she is. But also entirely possible she’s just an asshole.
My best guess would be that she’s repeatedly suffered (whether severely or just socially) by people who then went on to feel bad about it, maybe even suffer consequences for it, and then seem to go on with their lives, but the harm to *her* was never undone.
As an example, a young straight couple engages in sexual activity, and the guy tells his friends. The girl is slut-shamed, and the school then goes through a lot of effort to try to educate everyone about not slut-shaming, and after all that, the guy apologizes. Maybe he even seems to sincerely do better after that. But the girl still suffered the consequence of it, and even IF people act like she was the victim, their attitude about her is permanently damaged. There’s no putting the genie back in that bottle.
There really isn’t a simple answer at all for how to manage those emotions. But I would recommend against what Rachel is doing; specifically seeking out conversations with people that trigger these feelings or memories.
Or even more so from someone who hurt her, apologized, said they’d change, then did it again.
And probably again.
Pretty standard abuser behavior.
Yeah that makes sense. I don’t really blame her though she obviously can’t help confronting Joe when she sees him. She’s probably seeking a resolution he can’t provide.
I’m actually enjoying this interaction. Joe isn’t being a doormat but he’s accepting she won’t ever stop being mad about it. And Rachel is being realistic if also obviously combative.
It became clear to me years ago that the mainstream version of “social justice” is Christianity without the redemption part. It’s just, you crossed them, so you’re a sinner and they hate you forever. And they never ask themselves how it is that they managed to make “social *justice*” Into a swear word. Well, it’s things like this
look we’re all very proud of your will to change, man, but that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to jerk off
I think the point is that jacking off wasn’t enough to handle his desires for Joyce; now we have to wait, and see if Joyce is ready anytime soon. Which might be complicated by the whole Joyce/Dorothy situation.
He also has to get stronger to be able to squeeze her harder
If he doesn’t take care of his needs before he smooshes her again she might feel something poking her; whether that’s something she wants, or not, we’ll have to wait, and see.
I’m among those who assume that she already felt it.
I would have thought that before this strip, but this implies to me that he’s trying to avoid doing so.
Yes it does. Every time you jerk off you have to start your redemption arc from scratch.
It doesn’t need to return to scratch every time someone do this. You can touch yourself without any weight on conscience.
Jelqing your way to Nirvana, as the old man said.
Joe, just stop talking. Nothing you say will make anything better for anyone.
She’s engaging him, though.
he wasn’t trying to talk. she started this whole encounter by being her default asshole self
No notes. A perfect strip.
I thought the note in the alt text was very practical advice.
Anyone have an explanation about what the Poll is asking?
Cause while I’m tempted to vote “Relationship Paladins” because I like both those words individually, I have no idea what they mean in conjunction.
It’s based on what happened a couple strips ago with Joyce and Dorothy; particularly the end panel where Joyce asked if Dorothy wanted to ‘do laundry’ and Dorothy said ‘yes’. Relationship paladins is the commenters who’s first response was being upset and scandalized by what they perceived as Joyce initiating mutual masturbation with Dorothy, thus allowing the both of them to cheat on their partners. The ‘sickos’ are the comments who are pressing their faces to the computers going “YES…! HAHAHAHA YEEEES!!!”.
I didn’t take that conversation as initiating, I think both sides are jumping the gun. Maybe we’ll find out later they are correct. Meanwhile I voted Sicko and we are winning. That exchange wasn’t enough to scandalize me.
I didn’t take it as initiating either. Also voted Sicko Mode.
It’s possible that it wasn’t. Or that one of them will back off before going through with it, even if it was.
It’s still a pretty straightforward reading of the text.
@Doopydoop: Ah. Thank you. Very clearly explained.
Welp, guess this will be another poll where I don’t vote.
It’s inspired by this comment from a few days ago.
Wow, Joyce really got Joe riled up for some pre-martial hanky panky. Also I’m disappointed Rachel doesn’t believe Joe can change, but maybe she will come around.
As she did in another universe?
This is the only comic by Willis I’ve seen.
Back in the Walkyverse (which comprises all of Willis’ works except this one, those being Roomies!, It’s Walky!, Joyce and Walky!, Shortpacked!, and It’s Pregnancy!), Joe and Rachel got together, although she got trapped in an alternate dimension for 10 years (got trapped towards the end of It’s Walky! and rescued towards the end of Shortpacked!). That was 10 *actual* years, because those comics operated on realtime instead of comic time like DoA. Joe actually wound up dating Robin for a little while in there because everyone thought Rachel was just dead.
Clearly I need to read Willis’ other works.
Also, Joe is Carla’s dad. And Carla is, well, a car. (at first. She later gets a humanoid body)
@ZombieKyrik
They’re a good read generally, although a few warnings:
The art for Roomies and early It’s Walky is so different as to be in an almost different style from what we are used to in DoA.
Since Joyce’s character development is based on Willis’s own journey, Roomies starts out as written by early DoA Joyce. The difference in morality can be jarring.
Finally, Rommies starts out kinda… aimless. It takes a while to find it’s footing and lead into It’s Walky. When it does, the plot kicks in and things are better. For me, Roomies was the hardest read for all three of the above reasons.
@ZombieKyik. – Yes, you do.
Do these kids just have full sets of workout clothes ready to go? I noticed even Sarah was looking like she was sponsored by a sports fitness magazine.
Well, if you need a real sports bra (with, like, boning), you might as well get one that’s cute, and plenty of matching sets exist where it’s not that much more expensive than just buying the bra by itself.
You can also get workout clothes at a lot of price points, so it’s not even necessarily true that any of these outfits are expensive.
Tee hee hee, boning.
Surely these aren’t rare items? Even if not Lululemon or whatever, these are things you can pick up in Walmart no?
It’s not about money it’s more a surprise that everyone is interested enough in fitness to have coordinated workout gear. Like I understand gym rats like Joe and Jacob have fitness clothes, I guess I don’t know enough about Rachel specifically. Seems she’s apparently more into physical fitness. But like in general it would be like expecting every character to have a set of knee and elbow pads just in case they plan on getting a quick skate in.
I’m going to hazard a guess that the women already need to get a sports bra anyway so why stop there.
But yeah I would imagine walky and I guess Danny just kinda wear shorts and a t shirt.
I mean i assume they got fitness clothes because they plan to go exercise semi regularly, just like they wouild get those those things if they planned to skating for time go time.
Their comments yesterday suggest she works out here pretty regularly: Enough to notice Joe hasn’t been here as much (because he’s been avoiding the place when she’s there).
Why wouldn’t they??
I’m with you. My workout clothes are random tank top and sweats IF I’M LUCKY. If I’m not I end up at the gym with a polyester sweater and sandal. Oops, better luck next time. I’ll just sit in the hot tub…(In the gendered locker rooms where we are allowed to be naked, so it doesn’t matter if I forgot my suit).
Just think how much trouble I save by avoiding gymns.
Same. I simply can’t be bothered to wear coordinating workout clothes. Or coordinated anything.
Honestly, I think Mr. Willis probably just likes having his characters in different outfits (he definitely puts in tons of work finding real life outfits to draw them in). It must be fun dressing them all up for different activities. Its like the Sims but with infinite possibilities! And sure he could just have them all in generic loose T-shirts and shorts, but were is the fun in that; the panache; the razzle-dazzle?
This is probably it. That sounds fun.
Well, nobody’s set their dinner on fire, burning down the dorm and themselves in it yet, so not quite like The Sims.
I’ve read that wearing workout clothes is very helpful, not only for the physical act of working out, but also because your brain will associate the clothes with working out, making you more able to motivate yourself to exercise, once in the workout clothes.
This. It also genuinely helps if they’re clothes you think you look nice in, so that you enjoy wearing them.
Also it’s not just workout clothes, this is also a general self-help tip for phone job interviews: get dressed up the same as you would for an in-person interview, it helps you get in the mindset.
I mean, I think I can get that. I hate working out, but the moment I wear my workout clothes I just force myself to do it.
well joe prolly had workout clothes even before college but hopefully there’d be a nearby store that’d be reasonable (idk if college has ‘gym courses’ outside of joining a full on sports team) but i imagine ppl would wear easy to move in clothes eve nif they aren’t full out ‘athletic wear’ versus athleisure/more ppl like walky prolly owning sweatpants but not working out in them lol
I don’t think either of them are thrifters, aren’t they both rich? If not, they can do what I did and get pretty nice workout gear from a thrift store, including sports bras. Sometimes never worn. I didn’t get sports bras, my partner at the time did though, and she has to be picky about those.
A lot of high schools require PE and require workout clothes for PE, so the clothes could also be their high school fits.
Anyway, I don’t think it’s weird but you are entitled to your disbelief.
Joe, Dorothy Jacob and now Rachel are all established as exercising frequently, so it’s a reasonable investment and not a particularly expensive one
I mean, this is entertainment, not a blow-by-blow of real life. People in shows are similarly outfitted in fashionable matched sets.
Yeah, Disney Channel has far fewer kids going to school in hoodies and sweatpants than I see in real life. (Nothing against hoodies and sweatpants in that– kids should be able to be comfortable.)
For the record, she’s still an 11.
I don’t rate people, but her attitude that “people don’t change” isn’t very attractive.
Joe’s ranking system didn’t take personality into account, iirc – was just about their appearance. Which was part of the problem.
It did take personality into account sometimes! Exactly one Joyce-shaped exception, if I remember correctly.
She acts like it.
“All You Have Is Guilt, and Guilt Isn’t Change”
tell that to my neighbor, Christian Guilt
Googles Christian Change.
That’s 30 pieces of silver….
fffff Joe
(this is not a complaint, he was just almost giving a dramatic monologue, and then fffff) (love you, Joe)
…I think maybe he should just go have a wank?
With his bff
Danny’s got Uke finger strength now, Joe could lose a testicle!
I thought danny would be the seme or whatever it’s called
Laundry room might be occupied.
Think that’s what he was doing in that strip where he went to take a shower right after he left Joyce?
Ok
What did he actually do thats worth this level of resentment? Make a public list of how attractive he found women? And…had consensual sex with a few people?
It’s not worth re-litigating.
IDK if anyone else will have the energy to explain this for the 800th time, but I don’t. There has been a lengthy “what did Joe even do” thread at least once per scene with him in it recently, go check the comments on his tag and you’ll find them.
It ended up getting leaked, but that was really Danny’s screw up. If I remember right, he offered donuts as a kind of initial apology. Honestly, that’s more than most people do these days. Most would just double or triple down instead of owning up to anything.
It wasn’t really Danny screw, up, it was joe for not updating the security since they were in middle school.
It was mostly Danny’s screw up. Sure, Joe had awful security, but that does not excuse leaking something private. Joe was being creepy and misogynistic, which is bad, but Danny made it worse by turning it into a public threat. That kind of thinking, blaming Joe’s bad security, is the same logic people use for victim blaming. Like saying, “If you didn’t want your nudes leaked, maybe you should have had better security.” It shifts the blame away from the person who actually violated someone’s privacy. What Danny did was dangerous, plain and simple
Danny didn’t leak his list? I don’t think it was ever revealed who did it.
I really wish I had the talent some people have for instantly finding specific comics, but going from memory, there’s one where Rachel scolds Joe for making the list. She says it exposed private details about women and put them in danger. Meanwhile, Danny is shown in a thought bubble basically admitting he never considered that. He only leaked the list because he was upset that Joe was not spending time with him.
Way ahead of you buddy, here you go!
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/treasuremap/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/skew/
I don’t think the intention is Danny thinking “oh I didn’t think of that, I fucked up the leak then”. I think going by the events of this storyline, Danny also shrugged off the list being leaked as just embarrassing for Joe, which he can survive, versus the angle Rachel presented, which made him reconsider the potential danger.
IMO it seems imploed and just seems like a Danny thing to do.
Respectfully, I don’t think that’s implied at all. I think if that was the intended conclusion, it would have been revealed by now and Danny would feel a lot worse over leaking the list.
I’m getting the impression you didn’t read the second linked strip and have a very strange opinion of Danny.
That’d be this one
Judt because you think it foes doesn’t mean it’s truth. A vague “implication” isn’t really proof of anything.
My head canon says Raidah did it.
The list’s existence wasn’t a secret (only the contents were supposed to be secure), and Joe apparently liked to share it with his friends, which would include Jacob, regardless of their actual interest in it.
In this scenario, I assume she didn’t want Joe’s behavior to rub off on Jacob, and possibly didn’t want them to be friends at all.
So she leaked the list, hoping to change Joe’s behavior and/or turn him into a social pariah, thus making him more fit to be around Jacob or making Jacob not wanting to be around him.
It’s a reach, I know, but I do want the leaker to be someone of significance and not some rando, and none of the main cast seem likely to have leaked it, nor do I think most of them even had access to it.
And other than the main cast, the only person we see Joe hang around is Jacob (I don’t consider Jacob to have been main cast then, and I’m on the fence on whether I consider him to be so now).
I share this headcanon.
Joe “leaked”, or rather published, the list. He was passing out the RSS feed to everyone who wanted it and quite a few who didn’t want it.
This, tbh. Someone made it slightly more public than it already was, that’s all, and he probably gave it to them, the same way he gave it to Rachel despite her hostile disinterest.
> but that was really Danny’s screw up.
I don’t remember. What did Danny do?
He participated in any way, which is enough for a certain brand of reader.
I think he did the coding on the website and gave it a shitty password (which Joe then started handing out like candy)
They’re assuming Danny was the one who leaked it, which is a pretty plausible theory
I don’t think it’s a plausible theory at all, especially if you read the two strips I read above. Also, Danny may get upset with Joe, but I don’t think he’d do anything like leaking his do list just because he’s upset Joe won’t hang with him. And certainly, if informed ‘hey that list being out is dangerous’, I don’t think Danny would just keep mum about it. The guy can’t keep a secret to save his life. Remember when he accidentally blurted to Ethan that he thought Mike dying wasn’t that big a deal actually? I’m expected to think he’d just keep hush hush about leaking Joe’s list?
There’s an argument against to be sure, but in terms of named characters he’s still the most likely suspect.
Most likely how, though? Because of his close proximity to Joe? Because when he heard that the women on the do list could be in danger he thought “oh this is worse than I thought” which is a reasonable reaction to the situation?
Most likely in the sense that I can’t see there ever being a definitive answer if it was someone else. Danny had the means, his behavior that chapter still makes sense if he’s the one who leaked it, and most importantly it would matter that he leaked it.
That last one is the big one. If Raidah or some other minor character did it, who cares? Danny’s the only character in the cast who makes sense to have done it where it would matter enough to Joe that he’s the one who did it enough that it would be worth revealing this far after it’s happened.
He implemented lousy security in an application he wrote back in grade-school. Do you not appreciate the horror of what he did?
The fiend.
Was generally misogynistic and objectifying, the list ended getting leaked online which besides being insulting, put s lot of women in possible danger, because he keep his shitty list under shitty security.
The shitty security really is mostly that he offered to share the password pretty regularly.
The University in the webcomic and sadly probably reality is a sick place where apparently there’s rapists lurking around looking for potential victims. So that a list of hot women is a potential target one.
God she’s such a twenty-year-old.
This. While her general mistrust of people going through self-proclaimed (or I guess in most cases actually proclaimed by someone other than self) redemption is probably trauma-related and/or otherwise come by honestly, her whole “redemption is just a story” speech was just absolutely dripping with “I just discovered philosophy/psychology/sociology a year ago, and I haven’t yet figured out that the sweeping statements I make about the nature of the universe and the human condition probably aren’t on par with the theories I’m learning.”
I feel like she was oddly impressed with “Whatever it takes for me to be different.”
It doesn’t deny her allegation, but it does recontextualize it.
yes. It was a weird route through yesterday’s “you agree with me you didn’t change”, but they’ve both made valid points today, and panel four Rachel looks like she’s going to think about what he said.
Yeah, I think she’s finally gotten beyond the “talking past each other” phase, hopefully that sticks. He was never trying to undo his past harms, he is making an effort not to repeat them. He’s accepted that he fucked up and that he’s hurt people, and now he’s trying to do better in the future.
Rachel should try changin into a less annoyin person.
Impossible. She can only have guilt about how annoying she’s been
Well, she does have to keep justifying the guilt she has for leaking his list.
Rachel is probably going to have to learn at some point that as we all get older, we all accumulate a larger history of things we’ve done that we could feel guilty of. That doesn’t make us worse dating prospects as we get older, because that’s also ignoring all the other things we get with age, like experience, wisdom, and things we’ve done that are worthy of praise.
We also get better at not getting caught and also rationalizing what we did so that we don’t have to feel guilty. It doesn’t solve the underlying problem, but we get to feel better about ourselves.
Dunno if we’re gonna unpack all her issues but other than the ruth depression arc situation, it wouldnt’ surprise me if she had a handful of other relatives well into ‘adulthood’ to where she sees firsthand the ‘not-change’ while growing up around them
Yeah, that’d be my bet too
Was Joe friends with the rapist crew that kidnapped everyone? What happened?
I don’t think anything indicated he even knew those people, let alone was friends with them.
He also didn’t seem to recognize that fool who was skating around them in the food court, so I’m going with “no”.
He doesn’t know them. Iirc he even voices his upset that he seems to be the only person who didn’t get a chance to beat the guys ass
We already know that happened it’s the way he generally acted from the start of the comic to after his list got leaked.
No, Tony was/is.
And this is one of the reasons I cannot bring myself to trust Tony.
Notably: Or Sarah’s relationship with him. I just think he’s two-faced in some way and pretending not to be to get close to her.
I don’t think there been any clues that is yhe case, he seem to strongly reject Paul attitude at least and doesn’t consider him a friend. And i can’t think of sny readon why he would want Sarah’s trust besides just liking her? I don’t like to assume malicious intentd is there no actual evidence of it.
It’s not about there being any clues, it’s just my personal viewpoint. I wasn’t asking you to share it, so it’s fine that you don’t like assuming that kind of thing.
For me, a person’s friends inform my opinion about who they are likely to be as a person. I do happily assume that people who are friends with bullies tend to at minimum be people who are fine with having bullies in their friend group.
And maybe he doesn’t know! We’ll find out, I guess, but right now I’m pretty happy thinking there’s something suspicious about him.
I think his problematic friend is probably Beef. Beef is Tony and Paul’s mutual friend. Beef’s grunting is a joke now, but I can see how him not talking a lot could mean he skates under Tony’s radar. Like maybe percentagewise, Beef says the same amount of WTF type stuff as Paul, but the absolute number is pretty low, so Tony has just let it slide the few times he’s heard. Or Beef keeps it to himself when around Tony.
An optimistic take is that Beef wasn’t skilled at handling social situations and fell into Paul’s crowd out of peer pressure, but now Tony is trying to watch out for him since they became friends/he noticed/he feels a responsibility to do so because of the team (I guess we actually don’t know if Beef plays, do we?).
*looking at the ‘interesting meter’*
We’re getting somewhere but still need more before I can say it’s not just Rachel making the same point every time she shows up
Right now we’re still I deflection city, needs more juice
I think the key is probably that in her most-recent-before-this strip with Joe, she said, “We all have to live with our mistakes.”
Not saying that needs to move the needle for anyone, just that I think it’s probably where her development is going eventually.
Until we find out otherwise, I’ve decided she includes herself in “we”, and her mistake resulted in the death of her twin sister Diane.
And Diane was even hotter and had a better personality. /joking!
Diane had experienced joy, and was thiiiiiis close to getting Rachel to feel it too, until The Incident. They were at a cabin in the mountains with some school friends, but a juvenile prank went terribly wrong and Diane found herself dangling from a cliff. Rachel tried to help her up, but she couldn’t quite reach so she grabbed a nearby stick. It looked thick and sturdy, but when she held it out and Diane went to grab on, the end of the stick crumbled in her hand and she fell. No scream, no last words, she just fell. Rachel hasn’t been able to forgive herself since, and so she lashes out at everyone around her.
So tragic…
Wait a minute, this is just the intro to Until Dawn. Goddamn it.
It happens to us all. Every time I sit down to write something, I realize I’ve just written the intro to Until Dawn again.
Little does Rachel know that Diane survived the fall, and is now living in a cabin in the woods with Mike.
That’s the stuff right there, it would definitely move the needle for me. Cause I don’t need her to turn on her beliefs, just something more interesting
<3
This one goes to 11
I think there’s a kind of sliding scale when it comes to change and forgiveness. On one end, maybe you just took an extra donut, something small and forgivable. But as you move along that scale to worse actions, there’s a point where it becomes unforgivable no matter how much someone changes. I don’t know exactly where that line is, and I don’t know where Joe falls on it. But things like genocide, mass murder, sexual assault, child abuse, torture, and other horrific acts feel like there’s no coming back. Some things are just beyond redemption.
There’s a difference between forgiveness, redemption, and being a good person. Rachel is in no way obligated to forgive Joe*. And I don’t know what would qualify as redemption for him, that’s not my concern. But he is clearly trying to be a good person, and that is a positive change to the world IMO.
*Although if she’s not going to, I have to ask why she is forcing an interaction with him.
My point is that Rachel comes across as really rigid and unwilling to forgive anyone for any mistake. Her relationship with Ruth is a good example because she holds onto every grievance. She has this self righteous attitude that gets frustrating. Being a bad roommate and having a private list leaked that revealed you as a creep should not automatically make someone unforgivable. Rachel just seems judgmental in a way that feels more about moral superiority than fairness.
I honestly hope that anyone who has done something horrific becomes a better person. That doesn’t mean that I think that I think they deserve redemption or that people that got hurt by them should forgive them (as that is a personal decision).
For an extreme hyperbolic example, if Hilter decided to quit the war halfway through and become an austere mute ascetic feeding the poor, everyone would obviously be rightfully skeptical. It wouldn’t wipe away all of the horrible things that he did, but would still be a net universal benefit than continuing what he had been doing. It is obviously best to stop something when the amount of victims are either small or there aren’t any, but that doesn’t mean you just shrug your shoulders if there are a lot of victims and keep going.
Forgiveness is a personal choice of the victim, redemption is a societal choice decided by the people you live among and becoming a better person is a choice made by the person who did the wrong, at least in my opinion.
I wondered how long it would take us to get to Hitler.
The question of when someone has gone past the point of redemption is above my pay grade.
I think way too many people conflate atonement and redemption.
Atonement is internal, it is about becoming a better person because you understand you were bad, and it includes making up for it whatever you did or whatever you were. Other people forgiving you is irrelevant for atonement.
Redemption is external, it requires the forgiveness of others, irrelevant of your attempts to be a better person.
I don’t really understand the concept of redemption outside of religious and narrative story arc contexts.
If the forgiveness of the others is required, is there a point at which it becomes their problem for holding onto a grudge?
I mean yeah, that is kinda my point. I am a lore nerd so I talk about when someone earns their “good boy” medal after being a shit person *way too often*.
My view on it is that there are 3 important things:
The first is Repentance. You realize you’ve been a bad person or done a bad thing, you acknowledge it and don’t do it again.
The second is Atonement. You try to make up for the bad thing/being a bad person.
The last is Redemption. The term is, as you said, very religiously charged but it isn’t necessarily so. It is about being granted forgiveness for what you did, for the person you’ve wronged to either recognize you’re trying to do better, or trying to make you become better by taking off the burden of external guilt.
In my view, these aren’t linear steps. While repentance is necessary to become a better person, sometimes atonement is impossible. That bridge is burned and you cannot undo it. You can only try to stop it from happening again. Redemption is, in my POV, something that can help, but not necessary.
You cannot redeem yourself, as redemption is freely given by someone else.
I just used that since that tends to be the general societal consensus of someone who was past the point of redemption (and even then, it isn’t a complete 100% consensus). It was supposed to be an extreme example to remove what could be a gray area (of how bad was their actions). I wanted to separate “working on being a good person” from “redemption” and “forgiveness”.
Who society decides in a consensus that someone is redeemed, it can really vary (even over time). An example would be WW2 scientists that got pardoned and brought into the US after the war. It might have been considered pragmatic at the time, but still gives people the moral heebie-jeebies. Actions during a war seem to be considered more acceptable for redemption, possibly due to the fog and stress of war, and trying to do what you think is best for your country when there is sometimes no good options. I have heard stories of veterans involved in the firebombings in WW2 or dealing with civilians and IEDs in Iraq or Afghanistan that do not want what they did to be glorified. I don’t know if that also means that they don’t want (or think that they should get) redemption or forgiveness. As you said, it is above my pay grade, and I wasn’t part of the group harmed in the matter. I don’t think it stops them from trying to be a better person though. That subject just hits a little closer to home (and is more controversial on how wrong their actions were) than Hitler. I guess that I can try and figure out someone else other than him to use as an extreme example next time. Didn’t realize using him would be controversial.
i think what joe is doing, while very noble and sweet and all that, is probably incredibly unhealthy for a multitude of reasons, but sure let’s all talk about how this random female character needs to be killed off instead
Agreed. She’s unpleasant and not really giving him any grace but the vitriol is a little, uh, no pun intended, overkill
I don’t think that working out your hornyness is unhealthy. He can’t be banging Joyce or masturbating 24/7 and you can’t just vent about those things to anyone. He’s just blowing off some steam as best he can however he can.
Unless you’re talking about the conversation they’re having.
“He can’t be banging Joyce or masturbating 24/7”
Well that’s just quitter talk.
i was talking more about how he seems to keep putting joyce up on this pedestal of perfection. it looks like his idea of being a better person might be tied to being “worthy” of joyce, which is just not a great foundation for a relationship to be built upon.
I’m not sure, I don’t have stats or anything, but I feel like this wild vitriol pops up every time a female character is mad at Joe (maybe mad at anyone, but it happens with Joe a lot more often for obvious reasons).
Dorothy, Sarah, & Rachel are the ones that jump to mind, but I feel like there were more. Just a vibe I get, though, from wading through seriously vicious comments now and then.
hmmm!!! curious, that!
*chanting* Rachel arc! Rachel arc! Rachel arc! Rachel arc!
I think people can change, it’s just that lots don’t. For a variety of reasons, some good, some bad.
The problem is right now it seems like her change is trying to seduce Joe. Cause she’s giving secondary signals here that make it look like she wants him to prove her right that he’s just some horndog in a way she can experience.
…She’s not doing anything to seduce Joe. What “secondary signals” are you talking about?
pheromones, obviously
If nothing else, Rachel is direct in her words and actions. If she wanted to fuck Joe, she’d say so.
Dude, what are you TALKING about? This is a wild claim.
Lotsa hit dogs hollering last night and tonight.
K
If it bothers you, maybe stop hitting them?
Or maybe be clearer about what you’re saying, because I have no clue.
The saying about hit dogs hollering carries a connotation of “Well, if you’re not guilty why are you bothered?” It’s not applicable to anything Joe has said.
I’ve seen this saying used all over the place recently and I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean.
Proverb
a hit dog will holler
(US) An offended or defensive response to a statement suggests that the statement applies to the person complaining.
It’s a worthless phrase that makes anyone who uses it look like a condescending tool.
I tend to think if someone changes and becomes a better person, that makes up for many of the bad things they may have done in the past. As long as the bad things they did in the past weren’t murder or other similar really horrible things.
We can’t change the past. We can only try to do better. If we can’t be allowed to change and grow, why even try?
I don’t know if it ever “makes up for it” except in the eyes of those people who were involved in the first place. And that…well, Rachel isn’t wrong to hold the grudge. A lot of really, really, really horrible people are good at saying exactly the right things to make it sound like they have changed, or that they were never really that bad. We know where Joe’s whole damage comes from, and that as he’s come to understand the very real harm he’s doing that he’s trying to do better and largely succeeding. But that’s a lot of stuff that Rachel has no way to know and has no obligation to look into
Past performance is no guarantee of future results but it can absolutely suggest them with decent confidence
And it’s my turn to accidentally hit the “Report” button. My apologies.
Ah yes, that’s where my favourite phrase for people who ignore you comes in:
Past behaviour is an indicator of future behaviour.
A.k.a. if your husband has ignored you the last 20 times, he will the next 20, because he doesn’t want to listen to you or make a change. It is not that he is deaf. It is that you can’t make someone change who is unwilling and resistant no matter which words you use or how you say it.
I have also literally seen someone on relationship advice in reddit legit ask how to make their girlfriend change as a person to like physical affection more and it is like, dude, you can’t. That’s not how people work. That’s an ingrained inbuilt thing.
There’s a big difference between not trusting that someone has actually changed just because they say they have and holding the grudge after it’s clear they have.
The first is often perfectly reasonable and sometimes a survival mechanism. It’s a common pattern with abusers, for example, to promise it won’t happen again.
I’m not sure Rachel sees that difference: Which isn’t to surprising with a 20 year old who’s likely seen some examples of the first.
Where would she have seen that “it’s clear [Joe] has changed” yet? It’s only been a few months, and by his admission he’s been avoiding her. She’s in the Not Trusting part right now, and the only way to get past that is interacting, sadly. Which takes an amount of trust already.
She absolutely wouldn’t have.
More of a general comment on the idea than for her specifically.
Understood, carry on~
To an extent, yeah, I agree with this.
It obviously won’t just take away the hurt caused to people and sometimes it is too late for you to truly do more good than harm personally or to really heal any of the bonds you damaged (like if you are 90 and get past bigoted views or die very shortly after the realisation).
But like, you can be friends with someone that did bad stuff before and realises it was wrong and fucked up and don’t do that stuff now.
People can be good people that have done bad things in their past (like bullying or stealing).
People can be bad people that have done good things in their past (more fitting for like say mass murderers where there’s no reasonable justification or circumstance that makes it reasonable to have done so outside of literally being completely disconnected from reality).
I wonder if Rachel has watched BoJack Horseman.
She probably unironically says “don’t talk to me if you don’t watch Succession”.
my favorite character rankings shift with every storyline and I think Joe for the first time gets to be in 1st. I’m just really pleased with his growth and decisions lately. Joyce will take his 3rd place slot for now because… well… and Sarah can retain her 2nd place ranking. My big 3 🫶
I can’t help but notice the conspicuous absence of Dina, Carla and above all Amazigirl from your list.
They aren’t on my top 3 list either.
Dina is fourth lol! Can’t fit everyone in 3 slots
I know this was said yesterday, but Rachel, what is your point? What are you trying to accomplish? “Don’t bother trying to be a better person”?
she is a whole pail of crabs
No lid needed. None will ever escape.
I wonder what constitutes “change” in her mind.
A change in attitude?
A change in actions?
A change in motivation? Well, she says he’s only motivated by guilt, and he’s not arguing with her about it, so maybe that’s not good enough in her mind?
Apparently, whatever the change needs to be, Rachel needs to hear about it or see it herself to believe it, because, otherwise, she wouldn’t be so sure he hadn’t changed.
And if someone vocalized that part to her, I’d hope she’d realize that her needing to be the one who is convinced of someone else’s change for the better before it counts as actual change is unreasonable.
Probably her position is that those are all transient things and the person simply will inevitably fall back on their previous habits.
She’s not saying “I personally have never seen someone change” she’s saying that people don’t change, as a rule.
Rachel has clearly been burned in the past and is cutting off people who she views as insincere assholes who hide behind forgiveness.
It’s throwing her Joe seems sincere about both changing as well as making amends.
As Willis has shown with Toedad and Joycemom, there’s a lot of people who think forgiveness should be given to them unlimited while they make no effort to fix themselves.
I don’t think either Ross or Carol have that attitude. They think(thought) they’re right and have done nothing that needs forgiveness.
Yeah, and look where that got them. Ross is dead and Carol’s family has dropped her like a hot brick.
Surprised I haven’t seen the Muzak guy playing Living With a Hernia
Weird Al Yankovic 1986. An excellent vintage, sir. I see you are a gentleman of high culture.
….hernia takes way t long to heal, so please don’t.
Someday Rachel’s going to have more than 2 years of actionable experience as an adult and she’s going to realize that no one is born with a perfect grasp of morality and how to function in society without accidentally hurting people, and that judging our past fuck-ups as some sort of Permanent Stain On The Soul that denies us True Salvation is actually a pretty unhelpful and self-destructive way of looking at the world.
Like, Rachel, kid, what’s going to happen when it’s you who fucks up and does tangible, irreversible harm? How are you going to grapple with that emotionally? That way lies severely damaging self-worth issues.
Cool, so first we’re moving the goalposts from “so have you changed” to “it doesn’t matter if you have”, and then we’re moving them to “you can’t because you have guilt and guilt isn’t change so nyeh”
Rachel can bite me.
Yup. Yup, yup, yup.
Not to be fair to Rachel, but she really needs an attitude adjustment.
Ahhh, Rachel is a Tralfamadorian.
Or possibly just sort of awful about what “change” means.
I’ve never read Kurt Vonnegut, so I am going to have to show my ignorance ask you to clarify exactly what you mean by Tralfamadorian here.
Also, do you recommend Vonnegut’s works? If so, which ones should I read first or, perhaps, avoid?
A Trafamadorian is one who confidently gives wrong answers to questions knowing full well they are wrong.
Unrelatedly, you should definitely read Kurt Vonnegut. Not everyone can make going to hell in a handbasket as funny as it deserves.
Guilt actually is change, Rach. It means you recognize what you did wrong.
I like this! It’s not the *completion* of change, because it isn’t actions which are different (and in this context, one hopes, implicitly *better*) than one’s previous actions. But it is part of what catalyzes the processes which result in change.
People can lean into guilt, into self-flagellation, into blaming themselves long after everyone else has forgotten what they’re even blaming themselves for, and that isn’t necessarily helpful, especially when continued past the point that it’s actually helping, the point at which the guilt is needed. But the uncomfortableness of guilt is an important part of the process.
It isn’t necessarily change. People can feel guilty about things and keep doing them. This can go on for a long time.
Consider alcoholic abusers, as a blatant example.
If I can put on my Former Addictions Counsellor hat for a moment, if an alcoholic abuser went from not feeling guilt for the things they do to feeling guilt for the things they do, even if they keep doing them, then I actually would regard that as significant change, and change that signaled they were getting closer to seeking treatment.
Of course, it’s still change that requires more change, and it certainly doesn’t signify that they’ve stopped being a bad person. And definitely, it’s not change that the victims of their abuse should feel compelled to acknowledge, because the difference hasn’t shown up for them yet.
Also, I know the situation I just outlined isn’t the exact same as the one you presented. I’m just giving in to what Hannah Gadsby called the autistic urge to spew any fact I know to anyone within ear shot.
Ok, she was definitely burned by somebody who feigned guilt
Or she was burned by someone who did feel guilt for a short time, then declared themselves changed and redeemed, and then turned around and went right back to being terrible to Rachel, but with a new sanctimonious bent.
Rachel’s conversation has so little to do with anything that’s going on it sounds like she’s going through guilt about some unspeakable evil she has done.
“What do you want from me? Do you even need me to be here?” would be an appropriate response. (Just like that other time she got some screentime, with Ruth.) I mean it’s pretty unclear to everyone what she wants from Joe. Should he admit he hasn’t changed and can’t change and should stop trying? Should he feel bad forever because there was a time when he advertised he wanted lots of promiscuous sex in a crass manner?
I started wondering if Rachel is even really there. Given her apparent intimate knowledge of everything Joe has “done,” his motivations for his new relationship and his guilt and insecurities that I doubt he’s ever talked about with anyone, this seems more like a haunting. The ghost of thumpasprung past?
“And I the grand supreme ruler of what does and doesn’t qualify as change will decide when you have done so”
-Rachel probably
Ugh go back to the messy lesbians!
Hey, give them some privacy.
Oooh is that a “maybe I’m wrong” look in panel 4?
Alright, so I was being pretty harsh, saying I wanted Rachel killed off yesterday. I can admit that. It’s a very intense thing to wish on a real person. I sincerely apologize to anyone who might have gotten the impression I’d say those things about a real human who wasn’t a sitting government official or corporate fascist, especially if you thought I might act on any of those ideas. Please don’t worry, I’m not going to harm any real-life human beings, and I’m even too lazy to write a fanfic in which Rachel gets murdered, so you won’t be seeing that on AO3.
Where should I place these knives you ordered?
Rachel’s torso.
On it boss!
Something about this is absolutely fucking frying me. I’m just picturing your avatar in a pinstripe suit with a huge case of knives just chucking them at Rachel.
That and the shiniest shoes you ever saw
I mean, she’s not really adding any value to the strip, she’s an annoying distraction.
And she’s confusing. She’s supposedly really attractive, but she’s drawn with a face that could peel wallpaper.
I think she’s adding a great deal, so maybe she’s just not a character aimed at you? I want to see her backstory so baaad.
I would also like to see her backstory, so I can see if there’s an inciting incident or if she’s just Like This™. So far, we know almost nothing about her except how she behaves every time she shows up.
Exactly. I gotta know why she behaves and feels this way about the world. What happened to her, if anything?
Wow a wild misogynistic comment, those are rare here, they are usually hidden under layers of euphemism, you here just saying it out loud, amazing.
I am unclear on how this conversation can benefit him in his resolution to be a more caring, constructive person. There are people, and not necessarily bad people, who are not helpful to a given project. Best not to spend a lot of time and energy trying to change their point of view, especially as it relates to you, and your project.
Generally, it is not helpful at all to allow someone else to tell you when you have succeeded or failed. They have their own agendas and narratives, which may not be useful to you.
And you are always going to be the villain in someone’s story.
I think that’s about where Joe’s at with Rachel. Whether she approves or not, he’s doing the work, for his own sake and for the sake of people who actually matter. Rachel doesn’t seem to be included in that latter category.
bongo. That’s all I can say. She is a bongo.
LMAO!!! IT CHANGED WHAT I WANTED TO SAY! I ABSOLUTELY ADORE THAT! HEEEHEEE!!! TESTICLES.
And yet I can say that. Harrumph…
And if you say the C-word, it changes to [SKELETON WARRIORS]
…That would actually be an improvement.
Skeleton Warriors was too awesome a cartoon and toyline to be so short-lived.
Bongo is censored specifically to stop people from throwing it at female characters they disagree with. So until Testicles becomes a slur of some kind, it’s probably safe.
Oh [SKELETON WARRIORS]!
Idk I just don’t really feel like Rachel is a particularly well-realized character. She’s frustrating in her near-total lack of actual character development. She last showed up nearly two years ago, and before that it was more than a year prior, and before that it was nearly two years prior.
Like, the fact that the sum total of her appearances over the past 5 years have consisted almost entirely of her expressing the same “you can’t change and become a better person” statement is just really tedious. If we knew, like, anything about her at all aside from this one opinion of hers, it wouldn’t be so tiresome. Sure, she has some legitimate reasons for disliking Joe, and the slow pacing of the comic has given us as readers reasons to trust his desire to change which she hasn’t seen, but if anything I think the slow pace of time in this comic makes her super rigid personality even more grating, because we’ve had so much time to learn more about her and instead she just shows up and repeats herself.
Rachel is definitely not a particularly well-realized character, just because she’s had very few appearances in general. We might find out more later on though! Just like how Tony is only now getting to be someone other than a straight man for Walky talking about their parents having sex.
Yeah, it’s kind of like saying that Leland T. Lynch wasn’t a particularly well-realized character on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
His repetitive, tedious character trait was merely announcing his full name at least once in every scene he was in, though.
I THINK THAT WE SHOULD MURDER RACHEL
Jeez man, settle down.
But we don’t even know how they want to murder her. Let’s hear Shakes out and reserve judgement.
But she’s such a [SKELETON WARRIORS]!
I’m really worried about Joe. He’s trying so hard to improve as a person, almost entirely because Joyce believes in his ability to change for the better. He’s putting so much faith in her in return.
Just for Joyce to be off talking ‘laundry’ with Dorothy while Rachel seems to be here just to insist that he’s a bad person no matter what and that somehow him trying to improve is still bad…..
i don’t think it’s looking good
I’m glad it hasn’t been easy for him, but gotdamn it ain’t been easy for him.
I’m just at all times waiting for someone to call out Rachel on her ever growing goal post of morality.
Weirdly enough for Joe here it’s understandable given the real possible danger the list could done, but say with Ruth even after knowing about her trauma, depression and suicide attempt she still boxed her into a moral binary.
And why IS she a moral authority? What has she done to prove herself as such?
Either way I miss classic Rachel.
yurusenai
urusai
konoyaro
I get the impression Rachael is an absolutist and if they’re anything like the absolutist I know they’re not worth having meaningful conversations with. It’s non-productive.
Man, Joe’s got a lot to work through. Meanwhile, Joyce is having a lovely relaxing day getting her clothes nice and clean. Dorothy’s even helping out, what a wholesome friendship they have!
I have a leg-up in all this malarky because “What Can Change The Nature Of A Man” is a riddle I’ve already seen solved previously thanks to Planescape: Torment
coincidentally that game also included an unlikable hag that wouldn’t accept anyone’s answer
seriously fuck rachel, I got nothing but XPac Heat for rachel
I don’t think it was solved in Planescape: Torment, mostly because that had didn’t have clear definitions for “man”, “change”, and “nature”. But I may be misremembering.
That makes me think of Babylon 5, that handles the adjacent subject of the nature of persons in a quite interesting way.
And I’ve recently finished the third “Children of …” book by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, which has a different take on the nature of persons, and a novel (at least to me) answer.
I heartily recommend all three to everyone who likes thinking about such things.
The closest thing in P:T to an answer was “belief,” wasn’t it?
Partial spoilers for a 25 year old computer game:
Belief, i.e. the thing that Rachel lacks. Well, either that or too much of it, in the wrong direction.
Raven Puzzle-Weaver’s response was also informative. Paraphrased.
“It’s not an answer in GENERAL, it’s an answer about YOU.”
It was always about the Nameless One figuring out the answer for himself.
Ravel. Stupid typos.
as mentioned by someone else, the trick to the riddle was that there wasn’t an answer. rather, there was not a single answer. because while the Nameless One says that belief can change the nature of a man, he and his previous incarnations prove that all manner of things can change the nature of a man; amnesia, madness, cruelty, loneliness, persecution, friendship, all the way up to the very first one, who’s regret- or at least, his fear of the consequences of his actions- led him down this mad quest for immortality to begin with
Her legit grievances aside, I fucking despise this mentality. Motherfucker, the future has so many possibilities that it’s literally unknowable. Change will happen regardless of whatever you do. So actually stop to consider if you want to be on side that contributes or the one that gets in the way.
Yeah, it’s an immature mindset. Something a 19 or 20yo might have before they experienced more of the world. Maybe an opinion formed by some trauma or abuse she received when growing up that she hasn’t had time to process because, again, she’s 19/20ish right now.
I hope we get to find out. I would really love to see her backstory.
Ok Joe was never an angel for sure. Who in the cast even is? (Joyce, Dina, Dorothy don’t count :P)
But this vitriol towards him by Rachel is really off putting.
She acts as if he raped someone, sheesh!
And in case anyone forgets, Joe has been always for the ladies and what they wanted.
He has been a creep in how he presents himself, but has never forced himself on anyone, always took account of what his partner wanted, always backed off when taking a no and was always respectful of any lady (in a sexy creepy way, but respectful).
Rachel is just toxic now.
Injuries are often toxic, lots of cells dying and falling apart, releasing all sorts of stuff that shouldn’t be outside of cells into the environment. That is why bloodflow to injured areas increases: To wash away the toxins. (It also helps with clotting).
So yes, Rachel is toxic, and the reason is injuries. Harm doesn’t disappear just because the cause is gone, it tends to linger.
Then there’s scarring, scar tissue tends to be more rigid and less adaptive in other ways as well.
These are not just biology, they’re also great metaphors for the consequences of socially harmful behaviour.
Yes, Joe was a gentleman bastard who valued consent, but he also actively shaped the social environment to view women primarily as sexual beings, which probably already was a sensitive topic for Rachel.
Communities are complicated, yo.
I’m enjoying this infodump / metaphor!!
Apparently someone has forgotten Joe’s whole character arc and why he was actually a problem.
Early Joe needed repeated threats of physical violence to back off. He was such a [SKELETON WARRIORS] that we had a hard time believing Word of Willis.
Okay, it’s me today I guess. Notably this is not a complete list, but I’ll try:
– He repeatedly accused Dorothy of being a lesbian for not wanting to date him in highschool. (Not respecting her consent)
– He joked about getting girls drunk so they’d have a threesome with him. (Consent issue again)
– He got a prostitute for Dan (at some point) without Dan’s permission. (Consent issue again)
– He put Dorothy on the “do” list seconds after she broke up with Dan, letting Dan know this was happening. (Gross misogyny and shitty friendship)
– He said Joyce needed to be “broken-in” and that he could upgrade her “From a four to a ten” by doing so. He told Sarah that he would be “fixing [Joyce]” with his penis. (Gross misogyny)
– He was shitty to Danny for not having sex because the woman in question had consented, so Danny not consenting was irrelevant and meant he didn’t respect women. (Consent issue again)
– He hit on Rachel (this Rachel right here) by announcing to her that she was an Eleven out of nowhere. Then he called out to her in another scene using the phrase “Hey, Eleven” like that was her NAME and only didn’t continue being creepy because she threatened him. (Consent issue again AND gross misogyny)
– Several times in-comic, women have been shown to be actively avoiding him for fear of him being creepy all over them. (Because of his gross misogyny)
– He accused Rachel of leaking his “do” list 3 days after a rapist was found on campus, and when she took offense to that accusation, he told her he could downgrade her from an Eleven. For standing up to him. (Gross misogyny, asshole edition!)
– He made a list, which rated women on fuckability (notably not trans women) and in some cases included where to find these women easily. He gave this list out to anyone who asked and many who didn’t. (Gross misogyny)
That isn’t a complete list of his shitty behavior, that’s an OVERVIEW. Joe said he was all about consent, he said it all the time, but that does NOT mean it was true. Joe repeatedly overstepped consent, hit one women who had made it clear they were feeling disinterested, and scolded Danny for not fucking someone when (in Danny’s view) it would have been taking advantage of a woman who had come to him for support.
Those behaviors aren’t rape, sure, but there are a lot of things that can make people feel unsafe around you. Having a man who doesn’t take “no” for an answer in all other aspects of life, and who has joked about getting women intoxicated to fuck him, is frightening to the women around him. It’s a series of red flags all marching on parade.
Even if he claims to be all about consent, he didn’t show it until he was about halfway through his redemption arc. More is required of men than just not being full-on rapists. He has definitely changed for the better, but it’s just ridiculous to act like he wasn’t a scary, awful fucking dude to be around for months.
“hit ON women” not “hit ONE women” oof
Thanks for the list! I’m hoping I’ll remember it was on a Rachel strip so I can find it to reference in the future.
It gets me when people use that Joe and Danny strip where Joe talks about how he doesn’t “you think you know better than the girl about whether she wants to have sex” as evidence of Joe respecting women and understanding consent, ignoring how the conversation on the previous strip was Danny saying he didn’t want to have sex “with any old stranger” and Joe getting angry at him for that. He’s being a shitty friend with a shitty understanding of consent.
Ahhh thanks for finding the actual strip. So not a woman coming to him for support, but still sex he didn’t want to have.
Also I’m seriously considering just making a masterdoc so I can link one thing and be done with it, but I don’t know how much effort that would save vs cost lmao.
Okay, third time’s the charm.
You could even set it so your username is a link to the document, so you’d never need to find it manually and you could just tell people to click on your name for all the evidence they need.
Ooo that’s very smart, if I do the masterdoc thing I will definitely be doing that.
Joe also made Danny a nonconsensual participant in Joe’s homemade pornography by taping the video camera to a sleeping Danny’s foot and then filming himself having graphic sex with Roz in front of Danny while Danny slept. Nonconsensual pornography production involvement of an unconscious “friend” is the worst, IMHO.
Joe deserves to consume Rachel like Saturn’s son.
Pac-man or no deal.
True, a quick “B’WIP” chomp would be over with faster and make less of a mess. Maybe she’d even become floating eyes, dart around a corner, and come back later with blue skin.
Probably the best/worst thing Joe could say right now is “I’m actually with a girl who I had previously downgraded to a zero-minus on my shitty, stupid, incredibly inaccurate ‘Do List.'”
How good/bad it is would depend on how much emphasis he put on “incredibly inaccurate” and how much of a stink-eye he gave Rachel while doing so.
I think Joe would do better to say he regrets making the list and is embarrassed by it, which he is, but that bridge is well and truly burned.
Next time on dumbing of age!
Rachel says to Joe “change is a complicated process and I both see that your changing and that I have some growing up to do”
Dorothy and Joyce say simultaneously “we both have feelings for each other and we shall talk with Joe/walky about this”
Walky joins joe and they both say at the same time “we both appreciate you both being so considerate of our feelings and we have decided you two can date each other while dating us”
Becky walks in and says “I have complicated feelings around Joyce I need to work on but it’s okay for her to be attracted to women even if I’m not one of them”
The rest of the cast walks in and waves at the audience and then smiles way too cheerfully
(The comic is now called culting of age)
… and everyone starts clapping as it’s revealed they’re all standing on a stylized globe, yelling “congratulations”.
Somewhere, Hideaki Anno smiles slightly.
Comic ends and Willis starts travel comic/blog
I cackled entirely too hard at this comment thread
How many of you saw the gorilla?
This whole interaction is starting to sound more and more like Athena and Kratos in God of War.
The first or second one?
The newer version, where he has the beard.
“I may be a monster but I’m not yours.”
Precisely. Rachel refuses to believe that Joe can change, and that he’ll always be an awful person for what he did. And while Joe’s acknowledging that what he did was indeed wrong, he’s intent on proving that he can -nay, must– become better, if not for his own sake, then for Joyces’ sake.
They mean the first or Ragnarok
I may be wrong, but I don’t think Athena appears in Ragnarok…
I thought you said Freya. My eyes are shit.
Ah, I see. I’ve only ever played the first two, so I didn’t know Athena shows up after he killed her in God of War II.
One of the fascinating things i’ve noticed is that a variant of this type of conversation happened in the comments last week during Joe’s shower. There was a very clear split between people who thought Joe was jerking it in the shower, and people who thought he was trying to calm down so he wouldn’t have an orgasm (‘happy trees…’)
The idea that Joe would want to pursue the latter course of action seemed to be completely lost on some people, based on the idea that he’s jerked off in the past, and so would be perfectly fine with jerking off now.
Now i’m not saying which of the two actions he actually took is important here, but it becomes fascinating to see people arguing about Rachel’s point of view being right or wrong here when just last week there were people in this comment section making the same type of judgements (saying that Joe wouldn’t have an issue with masturbating in that current moment, because he’s masturbated before).
When it comes to the “ethics” of masturbation in a shower, I don’t see too much issue if its a personal shower. When my younger cousin lived with me, he admitted to masturbating in the shower we shared. I was disgusted at first, but I thought about it, and figured, as long as he rinses the shower out, it’s none of my business. Joe’s shower was a communal one that’s shared with other men, so maybe that’s a bit different?
However, I also wanna point out that Billie and Ruth had sex in the shared showers during a slipshine, so… I don’t think it reflects poorly on Joe to masturbate in a shower. Though I think he was moreso just trying to calm himself down.
What’s the connection here? Joe crankin’ it in the shower, Rachel being a scumbag, they seem completely separate.
Rachel believes that Joe can’t change from being the horndog that he was.
People in the comments last week believed that Joe is absolutely definitely jerking it in the shower, because that’s the type of thing ‘Joe always does’.
Some of the people arguing this last week were quite adamant about it. It’s the usual ‘people getting stuck in the debate’ stuff, but it struck me that they weren’t flexible about it, which is similar to Rachel’s inflexibility on the issue.
It seems the scene is open to interpretation, but a lot of what people were saying seems to fall in line with Rachel’s ‘horndog’ view of Joe ‘He must definitely be crankin’ it, because that’s what Joe does’.
And just to be clear here, i’m not saying he wasn’t masturbating, or that if he was, it was a return to his old horndog ways. This was more the vibe these comments were giving off.
What? Why would Joe suddenly have an issue with masturbating?
I just want to say that although Rachel is being annoying, and instead of pestering she should ask if they should split spotting, I think she’s behaving herself otherwise. She doesn’t have perfect knowledge of Joe’s transformation, she has barely been in the same room as him the entire semester. And although it’s clear Joe isn’t welcoming this conversation, he’s certainly taking advantage of the opportunity to say his piece. So she’s justified in answering him, and she doesn’t have to be 100% rational because she’s not a robot. If he gets tired of her, he can say so or act on that feeling.
I think this is a growth opportunity for Both of them and it’s easy to interpret the things they are saying and their expressions to mean that they are both in fact growing as people. There’s a lot of that in college. A lot of people are still teenagers in the first year of college, there’s plenty of time for reaching full maturity and it won’t end before college does unless they are grad students for a decade like in other comics.
Er, counterpoint, “Walking up to a person minding their own business in the gym and starting shit” is not “behaving herself” in any context.
I don’t know that working out has ever made me LESS horny, but I applaud my man Joe for doing the science for me.
“It doesn’t matter if you’ve changed or not, you’ve still done the things you’ve done”
Is she Christian? I could have sworn the next thing to come out of her mouth would be “and only Christ’s compassion can save you”.
Rachel and Mary should become roommates, they truly deserve each other.
Nobody deserves Mary
Unless she’s Calvinist or evangelical Protestant Christians are pretty big on the whole “people can change” thing.
*if* they accept Jesus Christ into their hearts
A note that Protestant evangelicals are the ones who believe this is literal. A huge chunk of the world actually mean, “You make the choice to be better because of how Jesus says that you should be better.’
I knew a former evangelical who was genuinely stunned that it was not meant to be a magical exorcism of evil by Jesus but just trying not to be a greedy asshole.
Cheap grace is one of the three worst flavors of Christian.
(The other two are “prosperity gospel” and “everything else Calvinism comes up with”. And god help you if they crossbreed.)
But only with Jesus’s help of course.
If you’re not an evangelical Protestant, the idea only change is possible with Jesus is not an idea anyone believes. They have made it a doctrine of faith because of….well Calvinism.
Except Calvinism doesn’t believe in change and you are essentially non-free willed beings damned or saved by God. Which makes us all video game characters.
(Calvin was a real asshole who wanted to justify “good” and “bad” people regardless of actions)
Side note: those boundaries are REALLY fuzzy, in that a lot of modern “Evangelical” churches have a seriously neo-Calvinist bent if you look under the hood of their theology.
Ugh, hit the wrong button. … but a lot of them ALSO actually stick to the original “faith justification” that is a core tenet of Original Protestantism. IMHO the whole categories of “Evangelical” and “Baptist” are essentially useless at conveying what’s actually going on in a church these days.
Even in Catholicism, the change that is important is becoming Christian. Once you’re there, you can get rid of your guilt by confession and repentance.
Rachel, of all the cast you’re the one who’s changed the least. Projecting much?
…why would someone go to the gym if they don’t believe people can change
All they get is muscles, and muscles isnt fitness.
Panel 4 is Rachel looking for an angel, snide comment, or insincerity.
She’s uncomfortable he’s just…truthful.
If he’s sincerely regretful and putting in the effort, it means the person who hurt her in the past clearly wasn’t by choice and could have been.
My theory was it was Ruth and Ruth doesn’t even REMEMBER trying to get better and failing.
Rachel’s a great example of common hypocrisy in society. Hate how someone is, they try to change, doubt them and if they prove they are, beat them down by saying what they did will never change. They might as well just admit they want to live on spite or want the person dead.
You are forever defined by this one thing you find as decided by someone else.
Aka- You boink ONE goat ONE time and are forever known as Goat Boinker Steve/Steph
Rachel is not being nice, but I have no idea what kind of baggage (or should I call it “ballast”?) she is carrying, so I’m not judging her. Whatever it is, I don’t expect her next to adjust her top, and hoarsely whisper “… but you could be a twelve.” Even though that would make an ultimate test of Joe’s commitment to monogamy.
Ironically, I could almost imagine her doing something like that, to try to test Joe and prove that he hasn’t changed at all.
If she talked to Malaya she wouldn’t need to. Right after giving out donuts Malaya used Joe to ‘affirm her femininity’.
I like this panel and exchange, sometimes people are just dicks and that’s ok. Sometimes people just come to an interaction with the vibe “fuck this guy” and like, I really like that as a bit of observation. Might this play into Joe’s insecurities about being good enough for Joyce? – Probably, and like that’s a really interesting character situation and I’m all here for that. Also has Joe accidentally potentially irreparably burned a bridge? Yeah and you know what that happens too and it’s just interesting to see it so well written and makes for a really interesting comic.
Recommended reading. On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World By Danya Ruttenberg. Joe is on the path to repair and full of repentance. Does require others to forgive him but he’s doing it right.
https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/d1dcde86-c508-4a87-8b46-cd1a127748b1
Ugh. Does NOT require that others forgive him. That’s a separate matter entirely.
My kingdom for an edit button.
I don’t know, I still want to see a Rachel’s arc, because I wonder what she suffered to be like that.
Maybe she is projecting, or see Joe like a representation of men in general, and we know how men is in general, even nowadays. Or there’s something deeper in her, I sill won’t judge her.
And it was a nice take from Joe.
Sometimes I like reading what other people think about this comic I really like. And then I remember this comment section is so often an absolute pit of shit.
If I can put my psychology hat on for a second:
Change and personal growth are pretty indisputably real, and happen all the time. While it’s important to remind people that just changing doesn’t entitle them to forgiveness, Rachel’s whole “People never actually change” schtick goes beyond that, and is actively harmful. Because, while some people might use it as motivation to keep changing to spite her, the more common response, and one that’s not necessarily mutually exclusive for those who use it as motivation, is going to be to internalize it at least to some degree. And people who don’t believe they can change have a much harder time changing than people who do.
Rachel’s not some bastion of accountability, as she seems to believe. She’s an asshole who makes things worse for the people around her, and not just the people she calls out, but also their victims who she seems to care so much about. She keeps people trapped in the worst versions of themselves. But she also gives off heavy “Just got to university and discovered what ideas are” vibes, so, ironically, she can change.
She’s actually thawing out a bit with a slight “Oh dang am I preventing someone from improving themselves” expression. If Joe doesnt head out shortly she might actually feel guilt about starting shite, so Joe’s probably gonna stumble or be misinterpreted in the next comic or two and she’ll be back to normal.
I think it is important to remember this part of the equation: WE, the audience, have seen Joe’s attempts at changing, and we have seen him be largely successful. So we are getting really rooting for his redemption story to happen/keep happening. But Rachel hasn’t seen any of that. If we had been following Rachel all this time, if we knew her story and understood her better as a person… if all we knew of Joe was that he did that awful thing, then says he is trying to be better… I wonder how many people would take Rachel’s side in this. These last couple strips have been some of my favorite strips that Willis has done, tbh, and I think they do a great job of reminding me that other people are people, and many of them are worthy of the benefit of the doubt if you can give it to them. It takes effort to see their humanity sometimes, and for some, they will understandably never be willing to extend that empathy. Rachel, for example, gets a free pass to never forgive Joe’s behavior if she chooses. I don’t think less of her because, from her perspective, she hasn’t seen nearly enough from Joe to justify the olive branch. And she might never see enough. But both things can be true – Joe may never convince Rachel that he deserves forgiveness despite genuine change (both potential and actual). It just reminds me that, while some things are clearly going to be too much for me to get past, I will still try every chance I get to extend the benefit of the doubt to someone whose full story I don’t fully know.
That’s one way to read it, but I think most of us are interpreting this through the lens of her having previously given an entire speech about how people never actually change, it’s just a story we tell ourselves.
Joyce realllllly pulls, gotta be careful with that girl.
Damn he really is different. He avoided saying something risque in public because it’s not appropriate to the situation. Props, Joe.
I mostly reply to people and rarely make top-level comments, but here we go:
To the haters, who think Rachel hasn’t changed at all and direly needs to… maybe that’s why she’s popped up again? Maybe, just maybe, there’s a narrative reason we’re seeing her and Joe interact this way and it is designed to both give Rachel closure on the way he treated her before as well as give Joe space to prove his new changes aren’t temporary and paper-thin (to himself, as well as others).
Maybe she’s here to learn and grow the way characters often do in DoA, maybe she’s turned up specifically to push the plot in some way. My guess would be that she’s meant to be there when Joe finds out about Joyce’s feelings for Dorothy, as a kind of accountability to keep him from backsliding too hard into misogyny and mistreatment again. It could be anything though.
Just something to maybe keep in mind when you’re foaming at the mouth about her being kind of a pain in the ass here.
If she changes, I’ll be her loudest champion. Until then, I’ll foam with gusto.
Totally valid.
What? No, stories aren’t intentionally designed around orchestrating conflict to facilitate growth. They’re documentaries about my blorbos, and a character being mean to my blorbos is a moral failing.
Whose got Joe as a blorbo? Sound off.
wait, so what DOES rachel want from him? time travel?
I think she wants to be left alone and when she graduates, never have to deal with him again. Sometimes burned bridges can’t be repaired.
He’s been leaving her alone. If that’s what she wants, he’s been giving it to her.
If she wants to be left alone, she could always try not walking up to him and starting shit.
She noticed he was gone.
She brings up that she was an 11 on the list
She makes him wrong for avoiding her and accused him of seeing her as a distraction.
She s attracted to him. They were married in the other verse.
And her social skills are possibly as terrible as Joes were.
Rachel fascinates me. When I go through the Archives to revisit what’s happened with her in the story, she’s got a pretty clear character; even kind of an arc. But as I’m reading day to day, what I remember is “Right, she shows up to tell characters they can’t redeem themselves”.
Whole lot of “Rachel’s being unreasonable” in the comments, but Joe isn’t owed forgiveness from people he’s put in harm’s way. He can change for sure, but that doesn’t entitle him to her being cool with him. If Ryan had gotten an arc with personal growth, how many people would be saying Joyce should let bygones be bygones?
Unfortunately, I think that number of people would be higher than either of us would like, but Joe isn’t anywhere near Ryan’s level of danger and abuse so I’m hoping the number would be far lower than in the Joe-Defense camp.
Ryan drugged and raped multiple women. You can’t come back from that. No amount of not raping women anymore will un-ruin him.
Rachel’s being unreasonable because a) Joe never asked for her forgiveness, or approached her in any way, and has actually been going out of his way to give her space, and she’s the one who decided to walk up to him and tell him he’ll always be a piece of shit, and b) this isn’t just in the context of what he did to hurt her, it’s also in the context of her entire worldview being that people can’t actually change, which is bananapants and actually actively harmful.
She decided to go work out and ran into someone who, in their last interaction, accused her of endangering every woman on campus that Joe felt was bangable. It’s been at most a few months since that, she’s been very reasonable to doubt if he’s changed. Hell Joe doubts if he’s changed sometimes.
Think about what’s happened on campus in a single semester. A student was murdered, another stabbed, there was a rapist uncovered, and multiple people were kidnapped. Joe’s directions to where the hot women are couldn’t have come at a worse time, and I can’t fault anyone for being mad for more than 90 days.
Point B is definitely the more important one to me, but, while everything you’ve said is reasonable, none of it explains why she felt the need to walk up to him and start unloading.
He’s not entitled to her forgiveness, but she’s not entitled to unlimited retribution, either. And what she’s doing now is attempting to inflict psychological wounds beyond those that were inflicted upon her. What Joe did to her was serious and she’d be right if all she was doing was reminding him of the harm he caused. But to attempt to convince someone that they’re inherently irredeemable might actually be the most psychological damage you can attempt on another human being. It might be less painful than, say, inflicting a trauma, but the effects of it succeeding would have far more damage over the course of one’s lifetime, and, more importantly, not all of that damage will be inflicted on the person made to believe they can’t change.
I think you’ll find what she said to him is “It doesn’t matter if you’ve changed, you still did what you did.”
We’ve seen her speak this way about two people, Joe and Ruth. We don’t know her past with Ruth, and she doesn’t know what’s going on with Joe. From her perspective he maybe feels bad about giving a road map to the next college rapist. “Guilt isn’t change” doesn’t mean “you can’t change”, I think she just doesn’t see guilt as a motivator for genuine change. We in the audience knows he’s got more than just guilt, but she doesn’t.
There was a guy in my online community who was a serial sexual harasser, and every time he was called on it, he apologized and made a big how-do-you-do about how bad he felt, and then a month later he’d get caught doing it again. Feeling guilty, or expressing guilt, is not indicative of if someone’s changing.
When she spoke that way about Ruth, she made it clear that this was something she believed about the human condition in general, at least the first time in her “redemption is a story” speech. I think the reason “change” is in quotation marks in the first panel is because she’s outright dismissing the concept itself.
It’s also worth saying that, even in regards to Ruth, what she said to her was messed up. Possibly understandable, given whatever history may have happened between them, and whatever trauma Rachel has in her past, and certainly just being skeptical of claims that they had changed would be justified. But nevertheless, these are statements that further perpetuate harm, rather than fostering safety. This isn’t just my opinion on a web comic, this is standard practice in mental health, particularly fields like addiction treatment and criminal justice, where redemption and having harmed others are common themes. It’s normal to teach people that no one owes them forgiveness, and that part of taking accountability means accepting that, but anyone telling them they can’t change, or that they’ll always be the old version of themselves, is to be considered harmful to their recovery. If I was Joe’s counsellor (and I have been counsellor to a couple Joes), I would be advising him to avoid Rachel for his own well-being, not just hers. In fact, if she persisted, I would be advising him to file a restraining order. And that’s not saying “Oh god, she’s so horrible, she should have a restraining order against her”, it’s just something that would have to happen in order to not jeapordize his growth and healing process.
If Ruth and Joe continue becoming better people, and it looks like they probably will, it will only be because she failed to convince them and others of her arguments. She deserves some sympathy because clearly she thinks she’s helping (although she was pretty indifferent to making Billie uncomfortable despite viewing her as a victim), but she’s still doing the exact opposite.
@Vaishino
No she ran into someone who in their last interaction apologized for accusing her of releasing the list. She was immediately rude to him, then stopped to grab dumb-bells so she could keep talking to him.
It is true that Joe is not owed forgiveness, but if Rachel is not going to forgive him then she shouldn’t approach him.
On this day in this moment, Joe is being respectful and Rachel is not.
I want to make the point that “Joe isn’t owed forgiveness” and “Rachel is being unreasonable” aren’t mutually exclusive ideas. Both things can be true at the same time.
No one is “owed” forgiveness by an individual. Forgiveness can only ever be freely given. It is not an accurate statement to say that anyone MUST forgive someone else.
But can I say that someone SHOULD forgive someone else? Yes, absolutely. Because that’s not some universal absolute; that’s just one person’s opinion. And there’s a lot of extremely valid reasons, psychologically, for why it is extremely healthy to practice forgiveness and to not hold onto anger, especially when they’ve made retribution for their past mistakes.
Also, I just want to say – Rachel’s unwillingness to forgive does not, then, mean that she has carte blanche to do whatever she wants in retaliation. That’s something that actually is not decided by Rachel, but decided by the society that they live in.
To illustrate with a safer example:
Imagine, for example, the thing that Joe was guilty of was that he ate her lunch on a field trip in eighth grade.
– Does Rachel have to forgive him? No.
– Does she have to if he repays her? Two times over, ten times over? No.
– Is she being unreasonable if she never does? Perhaps. We don’t really know. It may have been a special lunch. Maybe he took the last bologna sandwich her mom ever made, you don’t know.
– Is she justified in stealing Joe’s lunch back? Maybe.
– If she steals it every day for the next month? No.
And why is she not justified? Because we, as a society, agree that the retribution for a past offense should equal roughly what was lost. We give leeway for intangible things like “suffering” and “peace of mind” but there are limits to what we think are reasonable.
If Rachel is, thirty years later, arguing in her workplace that no, Joe should not be promoted, and instead be fired, because he’s nothing but a lunch-stealing loser, then we would agree that she has gone too far. And no, Joe is not “owed” forgiveness, but he then does not deserve to be harassed in this way, because he has both paid for his crimes and changed since he was thirteen.
To bring it back here. Joe’s been respectful of Rachel and kept his distance. He has not engaged with her. She, on the other hand, is freely choosing to come here, strike up a conversation with him, interrupt what he is doing, and we only really have vague ideas of what might have transpired between them. It is very, very hard at this point to point a finger at Joe or at Rachel and say that one or the other is in the wrong.
However, I *can* say that Rachel’s statement in panel 1 is wrong. It might not matter *to her* whether Joe’s changed or not, but it absolutely matters, period.
Sure, Joe’s not owed forgiveness and Rachel doesn’t have to be cool with him. That doesn’t mean it’s okay for her walk up and start pushing his emotional buttons when he hasn’t been interacting with her at all. That’s actually pretty close to what he did to her in the first place that, in her mind, damned him irrevocably.
What did he do in the first place? I honestly don’t believe it has ever really been stated. Only vaguely alluded to. I honestly assume there has to have been something more than just walking up to her and making a pass at her.
He kept a list of all the women in the school and ranked them by hotness, which then leaked.
He made a pass at her that was gross and misogynistic and then his gross and misogynistic list of women (notably, not trans women) rated by fuckability leaked and she felt put in danger by it (which is reasonable) so she got upset and then he accused HER of leaking it.
Her dislike of him is pretty understandable imo.
And it’s worth remembering that this is basically the only consequence he’s faced for anything he did. Dorothy doesn’t like him, but that wasn’t even enough to really interfere with him and Joyce.
This is basically it. One woman who’s a jerk to him when they meet.
Didn’t almost every woman in the school very vocally hate him when the list dropped? Is there any reason to believe that, outside his group of friends, the feeling has changed?
The thing that makes her unreasonable in this situation is that she’s going out of her way to talk to him and prod him about it. If Joe is actually the irredeemable sex pest she (somewhat reasonably) believes him to be, what purpose could this possibly serve? Is she trying to goad him in to saying something that confirms her view of him? Does she just want a fight? She has every right not to forgive him, but that doesn’t make her actions reasonable.
Also, Ryan’s actions were in a whole other league to Joe’s. That comparison is not on.
They gonna fu k aren’t they
God I hope not. That would gross me out on so many levels.
I wonder how must be the demographic of the readers, here
At the moment it seems to be 61% Sickos and 39% Relationship Paladins, according to the poll.
I don’t even know what those mean.
The information is easily found with a term search. If not here, check yesterday’s strip.
Thank you!
The alt-text is perfect today
I dunno about all the Rachel hate. I’ve been on kind of a Rachelesque anti-redemption tour, recently. Past year or so. Burning bridges.
Sometimes, it’s just what you need to do. To stop pretending that something was OK when it wasn’t. Sometimes you just need to judge folks on what they have done and the effects it has had, and then shut them out of your life, and (sometimes) tell them why. Just absolutely torching any chance at reconciliation with certain people.
I dunno about others, but I see a lot of myself in Rachel. I don’t see anything wrong with any of her attitudes or statements so far. She seems like someone who tells the truth as she sees it. Personally, I feel that is sometimes necessary.
Just my opinion…
I guess her pronouncements make sense if you assume she’s not expecting any response, but people get confused cause it keeps sounding like she’s inviting conversation. Like, as mentioned above, my reaction here would be asking what she wants from me. “Let me get this off my chest and I’m not gonna bother you again” would be a reasonable answer.
Joe’s handling her babyish nagging perfectly. She’s yapping at him, and he’s only responding directly to what she says, even shutting her down to a certain degree. He’s doing everything right, in this scene.
Also, sometimes ppl need to be reminded that they’re on thin ice.
Definitely, they do. Thing is, the characters Rachel always reminds of that have basically stopped caring about her thin ice. She doesn’t matter to them anymore, but she keeps acting like they should care what she thinks of them.
Alright but I assume you’re not going out of your way to continue interacting with those people just because they happen to be nearby, after burning those bridges. That’s one of the problems with Rachel’s behavior: She doesn’t just leave the burnt bridge where it’s at, she keeps going back to the canyon and getting mad there are still people on the other side. Once she’s said her piece, she doesn’t leave it there, she just keeps making up reasons to come back and pick up right where she left off, over and over again, no matter how little the other person engages her. She just badgers people at every turn and expects them to feel bad forever.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with cutting ties with someone, leaving no room for reconciliation, if that’s what you want. But it’s childish and frankly pathetic to then take it upon yourself to essentially harass them on sight every single time they happen to exist where you can perceive them. That’s what Rachel does, it’s the only thing she does, and it only gets more pathetic every time she shows up, since the other characters have more or less stopped giving her anything back. Like, there’s a point where it’s meaningless, and she’s long since reached that.
I think I’d feel this a lot harder if it hadn’t been for her “Redemption is just a story” speech. Cutting people out is fine, refusing to forgive people is fine, but believing it’s axiomatically impossible for people to change not so much, and it also probably in practice influences most of the decisions she’s made to do the first two things.
The first rule of burning bridges is that you don’t try to cross back over to tell people on the other side that you burned the bridge and never want to see them again. And keep doing that repeatedly, just to remind them about the burnt bridge.
That’s… actually very sound advice.
Thank you.
It’s helpful.
…It’s kind of a lot to think about.
getting a little worried that we’re about to go for a spin through an insufferable character’s insufferable backstory.
its not that you’re a monster, tall rachel, it’s that you’re every bit as one-dimensional as mike was, but without the punchlines, or the decency to die.
Hey, to be fair to Mike, his non-flashback actions, especially near the end, definitely indicate that his “None are righteous” schtick was either something he outgrew, or something he just made up on the spot so Blaine would think he was unfuckwithable.
As a change of pace from the rest of the comment section: I am kind of curious how much weight those dumbbells Rachel is using are. They look like they could be 20 lb each and if they are, and she is doing this effortlessly while holding a conversation… Well let’s just put it in the conservative territory and say she could kick my ass. That’s pretty damn good.
Dhe could also kick my ass but that goes for granted with any character, ecen Danny could probably kick my ass. I am not in shape.
It is so funny to have Rachel be such an antagonistic force in Joe’s life compared to the Walkyverse version of them
Ahahaha Rachel is such a judgmental butthead. She means well in a way, but she’s SUCH a butthead. I think she’s my favorite of the cast. For as little screen time as she gets, she has a strong presence.
Damn, there’s someone out there for everyone huh.
Rachel isn’t even a particular favorite of mine but you, you get it.
Has no one noticed the red marks under his mouth? How hard has Joe been biting his lip?
Do we care what Rachel thinks? I mean, as an audience? Or is she a plot device?
I’ve read this comic consistently since it had exactly three comics. I remember when Becky wasn’t a regular character, and her showing up at school was a surprise. I remember how I felt fifteen years ago when Joyce and Joe had a terrible first date, and I wanted from the beginning for Joe to be endgame for Joyce.
I see another trajectory now, and seeing Rachel here have a moment with Joe… it gives me a lot of conflicted feelings. I get it, I do, Joyce x Dorothy was set up a ton… but I truly thought it was all joking, that Joyce was legit hetero.
…Willis, you’re a character creating savant, but I legit nearly rage quit entirely when it looked like Joyce was about to cheat on Joe before the date. I went to the beginning, reread the entire comic, and now have caught up on the past six weeks.
…I get it, but I’m not at accepting it yet. As an autistic girl raised in a cult who went queer culture at adulthood, whose special interest is LEGIT religious studies (and this was a thing before you comic so ..ya), I obviously identify a lot with Joyce.
I mean I’m glad Rachel is gonna have a nice ending, but my ship was literally coming into port when you set it on FIRE, Willis. Fifteen years, my dude. Fifteen. Years.
i understand getting upset about fictional characters, but i think you’re jumping to conclusions. we are far from the end of the comic. literally anything could happen. even if joyce cheated on joe, and they had a torrid breakup, and they both started seeing other people, and head alien showed up from another comic to take over the world, there’s nothing saying that joe and joyce couldn’t then get back together. so again, i totally get being upset and scared in this moment, but just remember that the story’s not over yet.
I miss Mike
don’t mind me, just linking this strip for no particular reason