Eh, Amber may have hastened things, but this has been in the works since Dorothy sat down next to Joyce in the first session of Leslie’s class, and it’s been pretty much inevitable ever since Dorothy and Joyce did laundry together. And Becky’s crush on Joyce has been doomed for way longer than that.
looks like lot everyone are losing something in this book:
– Becky is losing her religion
– Amber is losing blood
– Sarah is losing her hate
– Joyce is losing her shame
– Dorothy is losing her reservations
– Daisy is losing her job
– Joe is losing his girlfriend
– Walky is losing his metabolism
– Hank is losing his family
– Ruth is losing her ex
– Alice is losing her fear
– Jennifer is losing who she was
I think Amazi-Girl was initially somewhat Lawful Good but then came to the realization that the law can often be crap. Though one can also be “lawful” in the D&D alignment sense if one is extremely dedicated to a code of conduct that is personal rather than being based on an external legal code.
I think she always was lawful good, and this isn’t changing. She follows a very strict code of conduct, which includes things like not breaking laws (ignoring how vigilantism already breaks some). She was always a champion of the people first and foremost. Lawful doesn’t always mean explicitly follows the law of the country. It means she’s structured, she’s principled, she’s Ordered.
She also knows cops are rotten punks enforcing a corrupt and morally bankrupt system. They’re not following the laws of the country either, but rather being wielded as a cudgel by the university. They are not the right order to follow, and so she regards them as enemies in this situation.
Yeah, the whole thing is kinda born from the idea that the current law enforcement is either corrupt and/or too ineffective but you can do it better. Now whether that “better” means you will be better at enforcing the current law, or whether it means you can do what they can’t/won’t do in the current system probably varies between each vigilante. I think a true “lawful good” vigilante doesn’t exist outside of fiction where like, Golden/Silver Age Superman can be deputized by the government without having to give them his real name.
The super-hero fiction is a bit different, but far too often that “corrupt and/or too ineffective but you can do it better” part means the cops were doing enough to keep minorities (and maybe the poor in general) under control. Even street level comic books super-heroes often leaned on that, though rarely too openly.
In reality, vigilantes have rarely been anything remotely akin to good in any form, but tended to have populist support to be tougher on the “bad guys” than the cops could be, since the cops had rules and had to follow process. (Inadequate as those rules and processes might be.)
Obviously in fiction, that doesn’t have to be true, so you can have lawful good vigilantes who follow their own code. In a setting where the laws themselves are evil, even lawful heroes don’t have to strictly follow them.
the photo does a great job of distracting from the school’s decision to call in the police in the first place. I don’t see the administration agreeing to discipline Daisy whatsoever.
I especially agree regarding the “Joe losing his girlfriend” bit. Joyce didn’t give him an answer, and he mentioned he was open to Joyce being with both Dorothy and him, so we’d need to wait and see how Dorothy reacts to that.
Other things however, like Walky losing his metabolism, appear to be a given.
My brother in Christ, Joyce showed up, confessed to cheating, Joe said he was okay with an open relationship if it meant even getting a part of her heart, and then she literally ran out of the room without answering him and spent the entire day running around with Dorothy – which included introducing Dorothy to Dad as her girlfriend. That relationship is so, so dead.
To be fair, the face he made immediately after implies he is not As Cool With Polyamory as he says he is. Which makes sense with his character. As a polyamorous person not everyone has the right headspace for polyamory and Joe has too much trauma around this subject for me to believe he is legitimately 100% cool with seeing Joyce date other people while dating him, even if he logically knows that polyamory is different from cheating.
I think the least likely of these is Daisy losing her job. The University will likely be glad the paper covered the protests as a distraction instead of focusing on the institutional abuse, while to others she can note the increased engagement . Raidah’s complaints will likely fall on deaf ears.
I mean, we dunno for sure if Hank’s losing any more of his family this storyline than he’s already lost, not just yet. The dinner conversation… might go well.
idk, as of now he only knows Joyce is gay, he doesn’t know that Jocelyn has transitioned and in a lot of people’s eyes that is a way bigger thing, and he might not be able to cope. Much like Becky, everything he’s believed is kinda crumbling, and if he finds out about Jocelyn, especially so soon after his divorce and Joyce coming out, it might put him over the edge. At the very least, even if he’s accepting of her, I think he’ll end up where Becky is now.
I mean you can only take so many hits on that level before you start questioning if gods real or if they are why they are targeting you with that kinda horrible events
I really do think much of the basic human ideas of religion come more from the “why they are targeting you with that kinda horrible events” than from anything like modern notions of an all loving god.
When horrible shit keeps happening, it’s very easy to see it as aimed at you and to seek some way to turn away or propitiate the wrath.
…in hindsight, this makes sense, but man, I did not see this coming. If Becky really has lost faith… I think it might cut her even deeper than it cut Joyce.
I don’t think she has. “Suddenly atheist because bad event” isn’t that common.
I think she’s upset, and there’s a Christian idea that atheism = angry at the Christian God, so maybe these are the words she’s finding to express how she feels the victim of a cosmic unfairness.
As a teenager, I – an atheist – dated a self-described agnostic who’d lost faith and it took me years to figure out that oh no they just meant “I’m mad at God”
There’s a line from the satirical novel “Any Number Can Play”, where a cynical Frenchman finally finds love and growls, “I acknowledge His existence, but deplore his methods!”
In my opinion what happened to Joyce and what’s happening to Becky now are very different processes.
The first step for Joyce abandoning her faith was discovering that many of the people in her community were awful people doing awful things in the name of that faith. That lead her to question why she believes things that others find so strange. She concluded that her beliefs were only maintained through layered systems of control by her community, and that those beliefs stunted her growth as a person and could even harm others. So Joyce decided she didn’t want any part of that anymore.
None of this had much directly to do with the idea of a God who could allow bad things to happen to good people (specifically her).
Meanwhile Becky’s faith was rooted in the idea that God looks out for the powerless and wants everyone to do what’s right. That’s why she maintained her faith despite seeing so many people in her community act horribly, and after dumping much of the dogma she was brought up with. Her faith wasn’t about that. Compared to her belief in God’s love, dogma is unimportant, and her faith explicitly warned her about people who claim to be faithful but are actually just covering up their wickedness.
Faith in a God who looks out for his followers and helps them be better people can hold up against a lot of adversity. Until, in some cases, suddenly it can’t. I think this is where Becky is now.
A key aspect of Joyce’s realizing she didn’t hear God when she prayed is that she subtly, deep down, knew on some level that she never did. She had a sense of right and wrong and it aligned perfectly with what God told her, until she went to college.
Becky’s moral center and God’s word in her ear stood in defiance of the world around her, and her father. I don’t think we’re getting atheist Becky, I think she’s just mad at the world for taunting her.
I dislike the idea that Joyce never did. Especially since that’s never been explicit in the comic.
I’m not fond of it particularly because it’s a common apologist trope: That anyone who deconverts never was really Christian. If you really had faith, then you would have stayed.
as Yumi pointed out above — it is literally text of the comic that Joyce never actually felt God’s voice. Her entire crisis of faith was, as Booster observed, “change is easier to swallow than admitting to who we’ve been all along.” This is why she spoke to Jacob about his faith, why she needed to vent to Sarah’s sister, and why she was so mad at Becky for “not getting it.”
You can absolutely read that as her questioning whether what she thought she’d felt in the past was true, rather than an admission that she’d never actually felt it. And even if it really was the key change all along, that doesn’t mean she didn’t use to believe it was something more.
After all, it’s kind of hard to become an atheist and believe you used to actually hear God’s voice, but you just don’t anymore. What would that even mean?
It really really isn’t though. Joyce realized things didn’t add up, she let herself ask herself questions she hadn’t before. It wasn’t Bad Event flipping a switch.
Yeah, there’s definitely a common misconception that atheist = just mad at god, particularly among some types of Christians. So I suspect Becky might not be an atheist from this, though it’s always possible.
So many kind of messy things have happened over the last few weeks that it genuinely took me a minute to realize that this is in reaction to Joyce and Dorothy and not anything Hank said.
Anyways welcome to atheism Becky, we have t-shirts.
I feel more bad for Dina in this situation, tbh. Obviously there’s a LOT more than just this situation that Becky has gone through, but if she says “God isn’t real because I couldn’t have the girlfriend I wanted” in front of Dina, that’s just shooting her straight through the heart.
I wonder if Dina will feel compelled to defend Becky’s own faith to Becky’s current spiraling negative attitude, despite it going against Dina’s own personal feelings on religious faith?
Speaking as a life-long agnostic, if I were to find myself in a relationship with a devout (but not asshole, obvs) person, and they would come to me with a “you were right, god is dead” type line…
…well, my reaction would be to comfort them and ask what’s wrong.
Whether or not a god exists wouldn’t matter at that point, because they’re clearly going through some harsh shit and need some love.
I wouldn’t be affirming their statement about the nonexistence of god, or trying to support them thinking in the existence of god or anything. It just wouldn’t fucking matter at that point, because that’s not what the situation is actually about.
She might? This is bad upset and jealous disappointment, not enlightenment or a reasoned conclusion, after all. Dina knows Becky’s beliefs are core to her.
That would be interesting to see. However, personally, I do not believe Becky is seriously suggesting she no longer believes in God, but is expressing deep despair and emotional exhaustion.
I think Dina is mature enough to see that Becky is in a very bad place and anything that could be vaguely interpreted as a “told ya so”.
(Also I accidentally clicked on “report comment” so for the record, I didn’t mean it, I’m on my phone and my fat fingers just whiffed on hurting reply)
One of the reasons Becky loves Dina is not once has she, despite her dislike of religion, made fun of Becky’s faith. She recognizes it is important to her. She’ll be able to go “I cannot read faces, however… I get the feeling you are upset.”
Finally characters are becoming worse! It was predicted that the union of Joyce and Dorothy would be the match that finally burns their friend group in the precursor fires! We’re seeing the starting embers.
The games actually hold up surprisingly well if you don’t mind some slightly cringe, early 2000’s energy. I wish studios made more games like this. The 3D action platformer has kind of died.
It is also a very old joke based on the FORTRAN computer language, where if you used a variable without formally Declaring it, by default, any variable whose name begins with the letters I,J,K,L,M or N is Integer type, otherwise it is Real type. So a variable called GOD would by default be a Real, i.e. including decimal places.
(There are also Character variables and other fancy things like Double, but let’s not get into those.)
No, he hesitated. You can see it in his eyes, he wanted to unhinge his jaw like Mulch Diggums and remove the unholy fagwomen from the blighted heath in one bite.
It’s kinda interesting.
I often tell people I don’t believe in God and they usually assume there was some big traumatic event that led to me no longer being religious. But the truth is I simply stopped believing. Like Santa Clause. I didn’t have a contentious objection or moral disagreement with the doctrine. I just didn’t believe it. In the same way I stopped believing in Santa.
So I can’t quite relate or understand people who’s belief is lost through feeling a lack of fairness or hatred of what is taught. If I could believe God exists and yet children starve, Good people fall to their deaths while evil ones thrive and succeed, dying surrounded by their loved ones. That some people suffer famine and others die young from medical ailments that afflicted them through sheer coincidence. If I can accept all of that, I can’t understand why life being unfair to me in any magnitude would shake my faith whatsoever. Feels a little selfish. As if your belief only existed because you hand never suffered and you convinced yourself that any and all suffering outside of yourself was somehow deserved. If any and all suffering is part of God’s plan than yours is too. As someone who simply doesn’t believe in God from an objective sense, I cannot understand people who do or don’t believe in God for personal reasons.
Yeah, I’ve also known very few people who actually abandoned their religion due to trauma or grief. In my experience a lot of people will double down on their beliefs in that situation. Not all, of course, but it’s a common reaction.
As for the “all part of God’s plan” thing…there’s enough literature written on the Problem of Evil to keep me reading into the next millennium, but generally all the Christians I’ve known solve that problem by Not Thinking About It Too Hard. Which is just a necessary skill to survive in human society anyway, so that’s not really a diss even if it reads like one.
For sure. I tend to believe that humans are good and that putting good vibes into the universe will bring good things back to you.
Despite my lived experience that Good people often suffer and Assholes often thrive. At the end of the day you’re not kind because it brings good things to you. You’re Kind because there’s no good reason to be Unkind.
So you’re just going to ignore all the elves that Santa has imprisoned and put into forced toy-making camps all these years. Not to mention his mistreatment of reindeer that were never intended to fly. You never hear anything bad about Santa because all the news media are under his control.
Same here, I never really believed it and I stopped pretending to when I was around 16 or 17. I’ve read the bible cover to cover and none of it really resonated with me.
I think for the vast majority of religious people, religion is more like a cultural identity rather than something they actually believe. Maybe they can convince themselves to believe it because part of their culture is having faith, but when they become separated from that culture their belief becomes unstable.
Not to say I’m an atheist, in fact I’m a pope, but that’s the sort of thing you can’t bring up in normal conversation.
I feel like a lot of people use god to defend what they already believe. But they have no real claim to the religion if they don’t actually try and change to become more like what they profess.
I had a Christian friend who didn’t understand how I wasn’t a Christian when I knew so much about Christianity. Didn’t have the chutzpah to tell her that’s how a lot of former Christians are. I was only a Christian because my parents and siblings were. Eventually did my own soul searching and reading and I have my own spirituality that I came to on my own. But yeah, people always assume it was some sort of trauma or something when it was just, realizing my own individuality.
Honestly, my belief in God went down over time in general as I grew up, particularly growing up in the South where religion here is fucking crazy and basically all fundamentalists, but like Becky I was willing to believe in my own version of God. You know, a pro-evolution, pro-gay and trans rights God who really was the all loving father the fundy Christians told me he’d be.
But I’ll admit the final nail in the coffin for my belief in there being a loving God came in my senior year of college. Now, in my senior year of college, my mom got cancer. That sucked. But she survived. Fast forward to when I was a senior in college, however… and my dad started to experience some symptoms. My first thought was “oh god please, don’t let it be cancer”. And I prayed. I prayed and prayed and prayed and PRAYED as hard as I could for him to have literally anything but cancer.
And the day came.
He had the same cancer my mom had. Same exact cancer. Now, I’ll grant you that my dad did survive that bout of cancer, but I sincerely couldn’t believe in the idea of a loving, all knowing God who would condemn my parents to suffer the same kind of cancer. And the fact that my mom went on to get cancer again later, and die from it that time, well, that just solidified it. Maybe it’s a bit selfish, but I don’t know… personally seeing the suffering my parents went through with chemo, radiation, and eventually caring for someone literally dying in front of me, I just can’t believe it. My parents didn’t do anything to deserve that. And at the funeral people kept telling me “God has a plan” well you know what, it’s a shitty fucking plan if that’s the case.
My own loss of faith was the typical combination, I think — it became clear I was the only person in my Confirmation cohort or my “church council and organist/liturgy director” family who had actually READ the Bible, and that only intensified when I took some college courses on biblical translation and read some good comparisons between the gospels (both the big four and a selection of other gospels that didn’t make the Catholic cut back in the day).
Meanwhile, it wasn’t hard to notice that not a single prayer got answered in any way discernible from chance, no matter how big or small the ask. And at that point, with no evidence of anything except that Biblical tradition was an anchor lodged in quicksand, given all the issues with translation and selection…
The stupidest capstone on it all was that I had been agnostic for YEARS when I discovered that one of my old parish priests was on the Attorney General’s little list, if you catch my meaning, and a LOT of oddities about how strict the gentleman in charge of organizing and teaching the altar boys was (and how much he made it clear that priests did NOT train or otherwise specially interact with altar boys, not in HIS parish he’d been attending through more than a dozen changes of priest) snapped into focus for me.
Also, without naming names, thanks to that one grandfather of a friend of mine who more or less made it his secret life’s work to make sure no altar boys were getting sexually abused by the clergy on HIS watch. He was so strict about it across the board he may not have even known we DID have a known abuser as priest for a couple of years.
For a lot of people who deconvert over trauma in their own lives, I think that may simply bring into sharp focus what was more abstract before. It’s easy to deny or ignore things when they’re at a sufficient remove. Same kind of thing, in a way, as “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism”.
Personally, I was raised without religion so there was no real deconversion. I’ve always found it kind of fascinating intellectually, especially the early development and origins of Judaism and Christianity, but I’ve never felt any real need to believe it or participate.
I never lost my faith, it just became nuanced, and honestly a little weird and informed by things like cosmology, quantum theory, theoretical occultism and my own experiences.
I think ultimately I *never* believed. I grew up evangelical and I was always SO uncomfortable, even going back to a very young age (like, 4, 5) with how my mom and her friends would pray over me en masse. I wound up going to a Catholic school (long story) and found the Catholic church’s rigidity and standardized rituals to be more comforting, but even then I was never a true believer, despite going through confirmation, confession, learning all the prayers — I just wanted to please my mother.
I became an atheist because I realized I hated Lent, and hated the idea that my religion could dictate what I could or could not do and it never seemed to have much actual connection to what was moral, legal or even logical. So I just shrugged it all off like an oversized backpack, and had hot dogs that Friday. They tasted good.
I would be surprised if Joyce being into Dorothy and not Becky is what makes Becky become an atheist. Her faith has always seemed pretty strong even after that’s happened.
Well it was a central core part of her identity here too. But then Willis decided Joyce would be an allegory for his own young adulthood and the rest is history.
Man, I’m gonna be wondering for months what was originally written and what got changed when some of the backlog got tossed out in response to the backlash to the protest, because for me everything since about when Becky found out has been a big improvement for me over the ~four months before that.
I’m not sure how Becky thinks Dina is supposed to respond to “The person I was hopelessly in love with while I was dating you started dating someone else, which made me upset (again, while I’m dating you). Comfort me”
And now it’s revealed that Dina was actually a devout Buddhist the whole time, and that she thinks you can be reborn in Amitābha’s pure land if you chant his name 10 times.
So Joyce never actually got around to telling Becky she’s an atheist, right? I can’t quite remember. Damn though, this is probably way more brutal of a hit than that ever would have been.
I think this plus the comic where Becky says something like “Remember, you’ve only been rebelling against our parents for five whole minutes” is probably where that general vibe came from.
It’s played for a punchline and based on a misunderstanding, but she definitely does say she thinks that Joyce becoming an atheist is over-reacting.
Do we know how deep Becky was into Bible study and explaining away the apparent contradictions in it, etc? We know Joyce was really deep into that sort of stuff, but did Becky really care about that stuff, as opposed to just general faith and conforming enough not to get into trouble?
I think that, being autistic, Joyce had to rationalize everything, make it make sense. That’s why her faith was hard (barely changing) and ultimately brittle. Becky’s was based on feels, and therefore malleable and very hard to break (I don’t think it actually broke right now).
During their fight, Becky was mad Joyce didn’t get what was important (God’s love and all) and what was not (creationism against scientific facts). But Joyce had to believe everything or nothing.
Becky never cared about that stuff like Joyce did. Half her relationship with Dina is about Dina teaching her why young earth creationism is stupid and Becky being happy to learn.
At first it felt like Becky was doing a childish drama reaction; “I didn’t get a GI Joe with Kung-Fu grip. There is no God!” or in this case “… Joyce with Kung-Fu grip”. But on reflection Becky may have just adsorbed a massive triple hit.
She lost the best friend race. Dorothy is promoted to Lover and out-ranks her.
She lost the best fixer status. Hank’s humility and acceptance made her effort unneeded.
She lost ‘best’ lesbian status. Hank may have accidently caught her with a back-swing when he pronounced Dorothy an acceptable girl for his daughter to be gay with.
Not meaning to challenge your sentiment, but out of curiosity: Why did you find it beautiful that Becky kept believing that god is real? I’m trying to understand.
I imagine it’s the same thing that makes adults think that telling children about Santa Claus is actually a good thing and watching them believe and wonder something magical about the world that you’ve long lost faith in.
I think sometimes people have beliefs that bring them comfort and strengthen them as they move through the world, and it could be beautiful that they hold onto those beliefs even when life is hard on them and sad when they lose these beliefs as part of their suffering. The beliefs could be religious or non-religious– a belief in a loving god, or a belief in human goodness, or a belief one’s own value as a human being, for example.
(And then sometimes people might find “strength as they move through the world” in shitty beliefs that are harmful and at the expense of others, and the loss of those? Not so sad.)
I liked “God answers lesbian prayers.” I liked Becky holding on to her faith in defiance of her own church community wanting to cast her out.
I like the arc of Becky casting aside the prejudices and teachings of her messed up sect while still believing because it’s a nice contrast to Joyce having to give it all up in one big lump.
I imagine it’s because Joyce was, and still is, Becky’s first and strongest love. She only accepted that she and Joyce would never be together in the way that she wanted because, back when Becky confessed her feelings to Joyce (not in the best of ways, I’ll admit…), Joyce pulled the “I’m sorry, I love you but not that way. I’m straight.” card. So Becky swallowed the hurt and disappointment and accepted it as a future that just could not be… Until Joyce turns out to be head over heels for Dorothy and was even contemplating marriage/life-long commitment. So this feels like a double betrayal both by Joyce and by God for letting this all happen. And Becky’s probably also dealing with a healthy dose of self-loathing on top of it all because “the problem was me all along, wasn’t it?” and is THIS why she can’t have nice things?
Apologies if that got kinda grim. Becky’s story just hits awfully close to home for me when I was younger. 🙁
Again pointing out that Joyce never actually said that to Becky. It makes total sense that Becky interpreted it that way, but Joyce never made it explicit, and I strongly suspect that was deliberate by Willis.
Just to elaborate, I think from the very beginning, even when Joyce was still very religious and had no idea that she might not be straight, the big problem for her was not “Becky is a woman,” but “Becky is my sister.”
Fair point. I also don’t think Joyce said it in those exact words, but nonetheless, I’m very sure she did go with the “I love you but not in that way” approach. And everything else about Joyce up to that point also indicated that she had no prior interest in girls until Dorothy came along. People’s sexuality can change over time, and it’s quite possible Joyce truthfully did not feel she had attractions to women when she said it, but from Becky’s point of view, it must still feel like a betrayal or a lie on Joyce’s part.
But “I love you, just not in that way” is absolutely true for Joyce, that wasn’t a “card” to get out of anything. Familial love is just as real as romantic love.
Ah, she comes out and her crush doesn’t reciprocate AND gets kicked out of college AND her dad tries to kidnap her leading to the death of her last living relative.
Joyce comes out and gets to have her own crush reciprocate AND her whole college is fine with it AND her dad just goes “whatever, that’s fine”.
A one eye god for real.
Like with Dina’s autism, so much that Becky had to struggle and scrape and fight to have is just handed to Joyce without much effort or struggle at all. I’m not saying Joyce has done anything wrong, but it’d certainly give me a complex.
Me, completely forgetting Becky and Dina are in a relationship and Dina is literally in the room right now: “Wow, why’s Becky hitting up Amber to tell her God is fake?”
I’m an atheist and this makes me sad. I might wish that people would rely more on evidence and reason as opposed to superstition and dogma, but I really do want people that choose to believe in a religion to derive comfort, compassion, and strength from their faith, not feelings of confusion and betrayal. I’ve known some really, really good people with strong Christian faith that are motivated by their faith to be good people. The world needs more of them, however they come to be that compassionate and kind.
This! Not an atheist exactly, or even very agnostic, but this is why I tend not to discuss serious religious topics with people who have a belief system that works for them.
Also, reason, however useful a tool, never convinced anyone of something they didn’t want to believe. Empirical evidence has a chance, but unambiguous empirical evidence on the topic is in short supply. Even getting to the point that the consensus view of reality is almost completely wrong takes a lot of steps.
I would agree to the extent that people that don’t want to believe something are unlikely to be convinced by reason and evidence. (Or to be convinced that something that they want to believe is false.) But it depends on what is meant by “wanting” to believe. A person that makes a conscious effort to counter their biases can learn to set those biases aside and accept facts. At least, I like to think so. It just takes that conscious effort and self-awareness. And yet, that is in short supply.
I can understand people who say that they don’t believe in God because of the whole “How can an all-good, all-powerful deity allow THIS?” argument. I can understand people who say that there just isn’t enough evidence at all to suggest *a* deity, much less a specific deity. I can understand people who were raised to believe in it, but when they grew up, it just didn’t click anymore.
But unless this has been brewing for quite a long time, and we’ve just never seen any sign of it, I really don’t follow the logic of “I’m extremely hurt that this one thing hadn’t happened,” especially when it’s not something that God has ever shown himself to do.
Becky’s endured the suicide of her mother. Losing the college that she was accepted to. Becoming homeless. The multiple kidnapping attempts by her father. The murder by one of the members of her friend group. The murder of her father. And throughout it all, none of it seemingly affected her faith.
But she realizes that her longtime crush is attracted to the same sex, but not to her, and THAT is what makes her go “Yup, God’s not real”?
I get that she’s feeling very hurt right now. But logically, it makes no sense. Like, even if she prayed for years and years about Joyce. What, she expects that God’s just going to yoink away her free will and say, “No, you will love Becky!!!” Has God promised to match everyone with their lifelong crushes or something? Is God a genie, that he will grant your every wish if you just ask for it? Does he shoot people with heart-shaped arrows?
The answer is of course “no.” Becky’s been raised a fundie; unless she wasn’t paying attention or they believe something wildly different, she’d know that this, of all things, isn’t the breaking point. ANY of the other things in the past, I’d believe, but not this one.
Again, I get it if this is “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” and she’s been secretly harboring these feelings and shoving them down to where she can’t hear them. But that’s not what has been foreshadowed.
If you’re an adult and you actually believe – not just “I was raised to believe this and really *feel* it’s true” but actually have gone through the logic steps, reflected, had it tested like Becky has – then something like this might make you *angry* with God, but it wouldn’t make you disbelieve in God, because from that same logic and testing you’d understand that there’s nothing here that is contradictory at all. I’ve known people who were furious at God, even went so far to pray “I don’t believe in you anymore!” which is about as silly as writing and mailing a letter to Santa saying he’s not real – if you didn’t believe it, *why are you writing the letter*?
If there is someone here who read this wall of text, was in a position where your faith was more than just “I was raised this way and feel super spiritual” but was actually tested and logic’d out, but lost your faith after something very painful happened that otherwise had absolutely nothing to do with God, I would *love* to hear from you. I promise, no arguments at all, I just want to learn to understand. Was it just something that shifted, and maybe those thoughts were drifting around in your subconscious and the pain basically slapped it in you? Or did you feel like you were betrayed, or that THIS should never have happened if God was real?
The thing about folks who “become Atheist” because of a singular moment like this… it only takes one other good moment to make them believe in God again.
yeah like, and this is what I was like when I was still a believer, except the cycle of high highs and low lows making me thing God was good and God had it out for me cuz I did wrong was intensified — and accelerated.
so much so that I basically became self aware of it and realized — okay you know what chance divine intervention is impossible to discern from actual chance, trying to read God’s mind and get on his good side and shit was just making me anxious and paranoid and was already in enough physical and mental pain as it was so fuck it I’m just not gonna be religious like this this is doing nothing for me
not saying this is what all religion inevitably does to people — hardly the case, just recounting my personal experiences with this kind of thinking
I did read the text. For one everyone’s relationship to faith is pretty personal even if organized religion would insist everyone believe the same thing. So Becky’s criteria for breaking faith would inherently be unique and seemingly arbitrary looking from the outside.
That being said my analysis of Becky is that her faith was always more fluid when compared to Joyce for instance. Growing up realizing she liked girls even as scripture would label her a sinner and still believing she’d go to heaven means she was rewriting what she believed from the start. To me that means her faith was particularly self serving. Good things happen that even out the bad.
I think being bombarded with Joyce being gay, but not for her and Hank immediately accepting that in a way her father couldn’t might just have been too much emotional pain at once. It conflicts with her interpretation of her faith especially because it also hits hard on her insecurities about her own self worth.
So yeah Becky was never running on logic like Joyce. She was running on vibes and the vibes today have been real bad.
it’s not just Joyce x Dorothy in particular but being reminded so vividly of the ideal life she always wanted but could never have, with Joyce as her GF AND parents who’d accept her being gay
elephant in the room tho, Dina definitely doesn’t wanna feel like just a rebound, really really scared to see where this goes 0-0
Holy crap that makes so much sense. I never even considered that the fact that Hank finding out about Joyce being gay, and being like “OK, don’t tell your mother, let’s go get pizza” would possibly be a far, FAR bigger blow.
Also really good point on everyone’s faith being personal and that she would have had to make rationalizations before. I forget sometimes that the world doesn’t always think the same way as me – and not like “opinion-wise” but in a kinda cold, analytical sense.
Also – thank you to everyone else who responded! I probably don’t have time to respond to all this before tomorrows comic hits and this is ancient history.
I’ve never had any religious beliefs. Christian stuff was taught in school around holidays, but since my parents didn’t even bring religion up to begin with (so we could make our own decisions), I just interpreted that as comparable to fables and other stories.
So given my lack of first-hand experience, I don’t exactly have an expert opinion, but I’m under the impression that a lot of religious belief is basically Sunk Cost Fallacy. You don’t truly believe in it anymore, but you have to convince yourself that you do so that all that time actually believing (or pretending) wasn’t for nothing.
So, yeah, I think that after all that went down with their church, their families, etc., Becky didn’t actually still believe. But she had to convince herself that she did. At least partially because of how it connected her to Joyce: the one remaining link she still has to her old life. And then Joyce went atheist, and finally this whole storyline happened.
Am I forgetting something where Becky went “through the logic steps, reflected” etc? That seems more like a Joyce thing. Going through the Bible to find ways to argue that God is ok with lesbians. Becky didn’t do that. She knew God loved her. God sent a superhero to rescue her. “God answers lesbian prayers.”
When I was 20 I was SA’d, this led to my deconstruction from one year of true belief after a life of growing up open Brethren fundamentalist. It was a feeling of betrayal and being dirty and cut off – from trying so hard to be ‘sexually pure’ and struggling with and sacrificing my own desires and then an outside agent taking that all away which affected my faith in the naive version of the world I had in my head. After this I tried to keep going but felt separated and with the black and white thinking of my family’s denomination, I arrived at ‘God isn’t real’.
They really are rock-solid, I can just imagine the next panel being Dina saying “would exposure to my breasts make this situation better for you?” and Becky sadly going “yeah…”
Interested to see if this is actually a crisis of faith after one too many straws or if it’s “just” being absolutely miserable after everything and needing an extreme phrase to express it.
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Oh damn.
God is fake, and therefore cannot damn.
Hence, “oh” — a synonym for zero, or nothing — being the initializing expletive.
Well this should be fun.
No, no. Fun is if Becky finds out that Amber set this up to put Walky in play.
Somebody writing this fanfic or…?
See https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/03-me-and-who-you-say-i-was-yesterday/thumpasprunging/ and the following strip.
Also relevant, the half of the conversation we hear here. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/ice/
…well Amber DID kinda tell Dorothy how to respond to the text messages
Eh, Amber may have hastened things, but this has been in the works since Dorothy sat down next to Joyce in the first session of Leslie’s class, and it’s been pretty much inevitable ever since Dorothy and Joyce did laundry together. And Becky’s crush on Joyce has been doomed for way longer than that.
Everything is fine. Nothing is the matter.
Next panel: Dina is gone.
Panel after that: “I have returned with further medicine, to help you through this crisis.”
Final panel: Dina presenting large pot of Hormel chili and several packages of Marshmallow Peeps and M&Ms.
You put the peeps in the chilli pot and you mix it all up.
o/ You put the peeps in the chili pot and it makes it taste… baaaad. o/
Good work here, everyone.
You put the peppers in the chilli pot and and mix it all up.
What are they teaching kids nowdays?
But you have to put the limes in the coconut first.
**I got that reference .gif**
Not enough people making Chidi references. Nice work yall.
Yay I thought it was in reference to chidi, as well lol
That entire sequence was absolute gold. Chidi is a delight when he’s had his worldview utterly shattered haha
No beans, and you can’t argue much about that helping.
Next strip, Walky and Becky both recovering from overindulgence.
Mmmm….chili with beeeeeans…yessss….
(black beans is best, but kidney beenz is okay too)
And they all get As, or Fs. And there is no test, and they all failed it, and they all get As.
Ah, I remember my ‘God is fake’ moment.
Becky has lost her faith in Willis.
It does always seem ironic that the characters live in a universe that actually does have a god.
But only as long as He never catches His bus.
Damn.
Don’t trust god.
well it’s good they’re talking about it
The timing on this, right after what Dina said. Oof.
looks like lot everyone are losing something in this book:
– Becky is losing her religion
– Amber is losing blood
– Sarah is losing her hate
– Joyce is losing her shame
– Dorothy is losing her reservations
– Daisy is losing her job
– Joe is losing his girlfriend
– Walky is losing his metabolism
– Hank is losing his family
– Ruth is losing her ex
– Alice is losing her fear
– Jennifer is losing who she was
Raidah is just losing it
Amazigirl osing being Lawful Good
Amazigirl was never Lawful Good. Chaotic Good, at BEST.
I think Amazi-Girl was initially somewhat Lawful Good but then came to the realization that the law can often be crap. Though one can also be “lawful” in the D&D alignment sense if one is extremely dedicated to a code of conduct that is personal rather than being based on an external legal code.
Amazigirl lawful neutral to me – lots of emphasis on dogmatic absolute rules, very little concern for ‘good’ or ‘evil’ as she conflates Law with Good.
You’re both right; she went from Lawful Neutral to Chaotic Good.
I think she always was lawful good, and this isn’t changing. She follows a very strict code of conduct, which includes things like not breaking laws (ignoring how vigilantism already breaks some). She was always a champion of the people first and foremost. Lawful doesn’t always mean explicitly follows the law of the country. It means she’s structured, she’s principled, she’s Ordered.
She also knows cops are rotten punks enforcing a corrupt and morally bankrupt system. They’re not following the laws of the country either, but rather being wielded as a cudgel by the university. They are not the right order to follow, and so she regards them as enemies in this situation.
I feel like vigilantes are kind of inherently chaotic or at least neutral, since vigilantism is illegal?
I guess there might be a Punisher/Lone Ranger scale?
Yeah, the whole thing is kinda born from the idea that the current law enforcement is either corrupt and/or too ineffective but you can do it better. Now whether that “better” means you will be better at enforcing the current law, or whether it means you can do what they can’t/won’t do in the current system probably varies between each vigilante. I think a true “lawful good” vigilante doesn’t exist outside of fiction where like, Golden/Silver Age Superman can be deputized by the government without having to give them his real name.
The super-hero fiction is a bit different, but far too often that “corrupt and/or too ineffective but you can do it better” part means the cops were doing enough to keep minorities (and maybe the poor in general) under control. Even street level comic books super-heroes often leaned on that, though rarely too openly.
In reality, vigilantes have rarely been anything remotely akin to good in any form, but tended to have populist support to be tougher on the “bad guys” than the cops could be, since the cops had rules and had to follow process. (Inadequate as those rules and processes might be.)
Obviously in fiction, that doesn’t have to be true, so you can have lawful good vigilantes who follow their own code. In a setting where the laws themselves are evil, even lawful heroes don’t have to strictly follow them.
D&D “Lawful” doesn’t necessarily mean actual laws. It’s more synonymous with “Order”, which is the diametric opposite of “Chaos”.
But “Lawful Good”, “Lawful Neutral”, and “Lawful Evil” sound better than “Orderly Good”, etc.
am I the only one that wishes for a third axis to the alignment chart?
I have seen no evidence that Daisy is losing her job.
Raidah will probably report her.
To whom?
The editor of the newspaper!
Oh, wait…
the photo does a great job of distracting from the school’s decision to call in the police in the first place. I don’t see the administration agreeing to discipline Daisy whatsoever.
Dina is losing… her roommate?
👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽💯
nailed it XD
That’s her in the corner,
that’s her in the spotlight.
Lotta assumptions here for things that haven’t happened yet.
I especially agree regarding the “Joe losing his girlfriend” bit. Joyce didn’t give him an answer, and he mentioned he was open to Joyce being with both Dorothy and him, so we’d need to wait and see how Dorothy reacts to that.
Other things however, like Walky losing his metabolism, appear to be a given.
My brother in Christ, Joyce showed up, confessed to cheating, Joe said he was okay with an open relationship if it meant even getting a part of her heart, and then she literally ran out of the room without answering him and spent the entire day running around with Dorothy – which included introducing Dorothy to Dad as her girlfriend. That relationship is so, so dead.
To be fair, the face he made immediately after implies he is not As Cool With Polyamory as he says he is. Which makes sense with his character. As a polyamorous person not everyone has the right headspace for polyamory and Joe has too much trauma around this subject for me to believe he is legitimately 100% cool with seeing Joyce date other people while dating him, even if he logically knows that polyamory is different from cheating.
How many song titles can we get from this list? The first is a given.
I think the least likely of these is Daisy losing her job. The University will likely be glad the paper covered the protests as a distraction instead of focusing on the institutional abuse, while to others she can note the increased engagement . Raidah’s complaints will likely fall on deaf ears.
I mean, we dunno for sure if Hank’s losing any more of his family this storyline than he’s already lost, not just yet. The dinner conversation… might go well.
The way things have gone so far, it seems entirely possible that the worst place they’ll end up at is “agree to disagree.”
idk, as of now he only knows Joyce is gay, he doesn’t know that Jocelyn has transitioned and in a lot of people’s eyes that is a way bigger thing, and he might not be able to cope. Much like Becky, everything he’s believed is kinda crumbling, and if he finds out about Jocelyn, especially so soon after his divorce and Joyce coming out, it might put him over the edge. At the very least, even if he’s accepting of her, I think he’ll end up where Becky is now.
Asma is losing her patience.
good one *writing*
Oh Becky…
I mean you can only take so many hits on that level before you start questioning if gods real or if they are why they are targeting you with that kinda horrible events
The irony being that it’s nice things happening that are ruining her.
I’ve been reading a bit about the writings of Augustine of Hippo. I like his take:
The question is not so much, “Why do bad things happen?” as it is, “Why do they ever STOP happening?”
The answer is, “Who knows!?”
x-D
What led him to believe they stop?
I think he was speaking hypothetically. As in, if bad @#$% ever were to stop happening to anyone, why would it or even should it?
I really do think much of the basic human ideas of religion come more from the “why they are targeting you with that kinda horrible events” than from anything like modern notions of an all loving god.
When horrible shit keeps happening, it’s very easy to see it as aimed at you and to seek some way to turn away or propitiate the wrath.
[ Cut to Willis’s drawing room, where we see them smugly looking at a forlorn drawing of Becky on the Wacom ]
“Ain’t I a stinker?”
now there’s a deep/old cut.
…starring Kevin Sorbo as Becky MacIntyre
Here’s hoping Becky isn’t roped into teaching Philosophy 101…
becky is not having a fun day
More magic! Dina does another sympathy!
…in hindsight, this makes sense, but man, I did not see this coming. If Becky really has lost faith… I think it might cut her even deeper than it cut Joyce.
This is gonna hurt.
I don’t think she has. “Suddenly atheist because bad event” isn’t that common.
I think she’s upset, and there’s a Christian idea that atheism = angry at the Christian God, so maybe these are the words she’s finding to express how she feels the victim of a cosmic unfairness.
Yeah, I agree. I don’t see Becky going atheist permanently.
I suspect this is gonna be one of those temporary “fuck you, God!” outbursts that she’ll calm down from (then feel bad about)
As a teenager, I – an atheist – dated a self-described agnostic who’d lost faith and it took me years to figure out that oh no they just meant “I’m mad at God”
There’s a line from the satirical novel “Any Number Can Play”, where a cynical Frenchman finally finds love and growls, “I acknowledge His existence, but deplore his methods!”
I mean, that’s literally what happened to Joyce.
It wasn’t sudden, though. She spent a long time thinking about it before and after. Her faith was already starting to show cracks before Becky showed up — she was worried because she couldn’t hear God any more. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/angel/
In my opinion what happened to Joyce and what’s happening to Becky now are very different processes.
The first step for Joyce abandoning her faith was discovering that many of the people in her community were awful people doing awful things in the name of that faith. That lead her to question why she believes things that others find so strange. She concluded that her beliefs were only maintained through layered systems of control by her community, and that those beliefs stunted her growth as a person and could even harm others. So Joyce decided she didn’t want any part of that anymore.
None of this had much directly to do with the idea of a God who could allow bad things to happen to good people (specifically her).
Meanwhile Becky’s faith was rooted in the idea that God looks out for the powerless and wants everyone to do what’s right. That’s why she maintained her faith despite seeing so many people in her community act horribly, and after dumping much of the dogma she was brought up with. Her faith wasn’t about that. Compared to her belief in God’s love, dogma is unimportant, and her faith explicitly warned her about people who claim to be faithful but are actually just covering up their wickedness.
Faith in a God who looks out for his followers and helps them be better people can hold up against a lot of adversity. Until, in some cases, suddenly it can’t. I think this is where Becky is now.
A key aspect of Joyce’s realizing she didn’t hear God when she prayed is that she subtly, deep down, knew on some level that she never did. She had a sense of right and wrong and it aligned perfectly with what God told her, until she went to college.
Becky’s moral center and God’s word in her ear stood in defiance of the world around her, and her father. I don’t think we’re getting atheist Becky, I think she’s just mad at the world for taunting her.
I dislike the idea that Joyce never did. Especially since that’s never been explicit in the comic.
I’m not fond of it particularly because it’s a common apologist trope: That anyone who deconverts never was really Christian. If you really had faith, then you would have stayed.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-9-comic/03-sometimes-the-sky-was-so-far-away/notaste/
Just for a point where people are seeing that in the comic.
as Yumi pointed out above — it is literally text of the comic that Joyce never actually felt God’s voice. Her entire crisis of faith was, as Booster observed, “change is easier to swallow than admitting to who we’ve been all along.” This is why she spoke to Jacob about his faith, why she needed to vent to Sarah’s sister, and why she was so mad at Becky for “not getting it.”
“Or maybe I never did”
You can absolutely read that as her questioning whether what she thought she’d felt in the past was true, rather than an admission that she’d never actually felt it. And even if it really was the key change all along, that doesn’t mean she didn’t use to believe it was something more.
After all, it’s kind of hard to become an atheist and believe you used to actually hear God’s voice, but you just don’t anymore. What would that even mean?
I think you’re reaching for “deep down she knew on some level”.
It really really isn’t though. Joyce realized things didn’t add up, she let herself ask herself questions she hadn’t before. It wasn’t Bad Event flipping a switch.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/wiggle/
Yeah, there’s definitely a common misconception that atheist = just mad at god, particularly among some types of Christians. So I suspect Becky might not be an atheist from this, though it’s always possible.
So many kind of messy things have happened over the last few weeks that it genuinely took me a minute to realize that this is in reaction to Joyce and Dorothy and not anything Hank said.
Anyways welcome to atheism Becky, we have t-shirts.
Hank said, “If your going to chose to be gay with any girl, I guess Dorothy’s not the worse option.”
“Better than Becky,” is not what Hank said, but it’s what Becky heard in her head.
Magic isn’t real but coincidences are and I think there should be a good of THAT
A god of that?
I think you have your choice of Fortuna, Tyche or Veldrin Vance. https://www.worldanvil.com/w/manifold-sky-bcgrwurth/a/veldrin-vance2C-god-of-coincidence-article
Rough one, Becky. But there Dina is. Right there. FOREST.
For the Trees? Is that the right saying?
One assumes that Dina is the forest and Joyce and Dorothy are the trees, but the analogy seems rather strained.
Possibly: Joyce being a “girl who’s not into you” tree amongst a forest of “girls who are into you”?
I guess it was either this or standing out in the rain, yelling up at the sky.
“William, dear angel! this is thy funeral, this thy dirge!”
But the important part is, you have to shake your fist.
While wearing copper-plated armor (or armour) and shouting “All gods are bastards!”?
I feel more bad for Dina in this situation, tbh. Obviously there’s a LOT more than just this situation that Becky has gone through, but if she says “God isn’t real because I couldn’t have the girlfriend I wanted” in front of Dina, that’s just shooting her straight through the heart.
Same. I am so worried for Dina right now.
I wonder if Dina will feel compelled to defend Becky’s own faith to Becky’s current spiraling negative attitude, despite it going against Dina’s own personal feelings on religious faith?
Speaking as a life-long agnostic, if I were to find myself in a relationship with a devout (but not asshole, obvs) person, and they would come to me with a “you were right, god is dead” type line…
…well, my reaction would be to comfort them and ask what’s wrong.
Whether or not a god exists wouldn’t matter at that point, because they’re clearly going through some harsh shit and need some love.
I wouldn’t be affirming their statement about the nonexistence of god, or trying to support them thinking in the existence of god or anything. It just wouldn’t fucking matter at that point, because that’s not what the situation is actually about.
She might? This is bad upset and jealous disappointment, not enlightenment or a reasoned conclusion, after all. Dina knows Becky’s beliefs are core to her.
Not likely.
That would be interesting to see. However, personally, I do not believe Becky is seriously suggesting she no longer believes in God, but is expressing deep despair and emotional exhaustion.
Doing that would require a level of respecting other people’s beliefs that Dina simply doesn’t have.
Doing that would require a level of understanding other people’s unscientific beliefs that Dina simply doesn’t have.
The two may look similar, but they are very different.
I certainly would.
I think Dina is mature enough to see that Becky is in a very bad place and anything that could be vaguely interpreted as a “told ya so”.
(Also I accidentally clicked on “report comment” so for the record, I didn’t mean it, I’m on my phone and my fat fingers just whiffed on hurting reply)
*anything that can even vaguely be interpreted as a “told ya so” is not a good move
I’m kind of predicting that’s how it’ll go.
One of the reasons Becky loves Dina is not once has she, despite her dislike of religion, made fun of Becky’s faith. She recognizes it is important to her. She’ll be able to go “I cannot read faces, however… I get the feeling you are upset.”
Finally characters are becoming worse! It was predicted that the union of Joyce and Dorothy would be the match that finally burns their friend group in the precursor fires! We’re seeing the starting embers.
Are “precursor fires” some kind of evangelical eschatology thing? I feel some morbid curiosity.
Lol. It’s a Jak and Daxter reference!
https://youtu.be/f3LmJX3hQqY?si=lR0BubX8CErk5thr
Don’t mind me. I’m just having fun.
Always good to see the boys get brought up. Those are games I’ll still put on sometimes, just to feel them again.
Oh man, now THAT was a game series I need to revisit.
The games actually hold up surprisingly well if you don’t mind some slightly cringe, early 2000’s energy. I wish studios made more games like this. The 3D action platformer has kind of died.
In which Naruto and Pikachu get their car keys.
oh no
the consequences have arrived
(or begun to arrive anyway)
Quick! More kissing!
God is fake, but the Devil might be real.
Remind me. In the dumbing universe, which one is Willis?
Yes.
Ginny Weasley
Willis is a teenage British girl? I never would have guessed.
makes sense though
God is Real, unless Declared Integer.
This made me smile. Thank you.
However, integers are a subset of real numbers. Unless, I’m (-1)^.5ing things.
It is also a very old joke based on the FORTRAN computer language, where if you used a variable without formally Declaring it, by default, any variable whose name begins with the letters I,J,K,L,M or N is Integer type, otherwise it is Real type. So a variable called GOD would by default be a Real, i.e. including decimal places.
(There are also Character variables and other fancy things like Double, but let’s not get into those.)
But you didn’t even touch on Hollerith code.
Ow
Becky is losing her religion because Hank accepted Joyce and Dorothy without hesitation.
that too. Jeezus.
Yeah, Hank doing that is kind of the final nail in the coffin that Becky had been holding out her father wasn’t a monster.
She could blame her church beforehand.
No, Toedad had a choice and he chose poorly.
I didn’t even consider that but yeah what a blow.
No, he hesitated. You can see it in his eyes, he wanted to unhinge his jaw like Mulch Diggums and remove the unholy fagwomen from the blighted heath in one bite.
Wills Job is finished
Ding Dong! The God Is Dead
I bet she will open a forum about the death of God
but it’s a pretty Nietzsche topic.
“So long, faker!”
Willis’s Job can’t be finished. He hasn’t even been swallowed by a whale yet.
But Wills’s Job already cursed God. He has not even lost Dina yet.
She’s probably gonna regret saying that pretty quickly.
It’s kinda interesting.
I often tell people I don’t believe in God and they usually assume there was some big traumatic event that led to me no longer being religious. But the truth is I simply stopped believing. Like Santa Clause. I didn’t have a contentious objection or moral disagreement with the doctrine. I just didn’t believe it. In the same way I stopped believing in Santa.
So I can’t quite relate or understand people who’s belief is lost through feeling a lack of fairness or hatred of what is taught. If I could believe God exists and yet children starve, Good people fall to their deaths while evil ones thrive and succeed, dying surrounded by their loved ones. That some people suffer famine and others die young from medical ailments that afflicted them through sheer coincidence. If I can accept all of that, I can’t understand why life being unfair to me in any magnitude would shake my faith whatsoever. Feels a little selfish. As if your belief only existed because you hand never suffered and you convinced yourself that any and all suffering outside of yourself was somehow deserved. If any and all suffering is part of God’s plan than yours is too. As someone who simply doesn’t believe in God from an objective sense, I cannot understand people who do or don’t believe in God for personal reasons.
Yeah, I’ve also known very few people who actually abandoned their religion due to trauma or grief. In my experience a lot of people will double down on their beliefs in that situation. Not all, of course, but it’s a common reaction.
As for the “all part of God’s plan” thing…there’s enough literature written on the Problem of Evil to keep me reading into the next millennium, but generally all the Christians I’ve known solve that problem by Not Thinking About It Too Hard. Which is just a necessary skill to survive in human society anyway, so that’s not really a diss even if it reads like one.
For sure. I tend to believe that humans are good and that putting good vibes into the universe will bring good things back to you.
Despite my lived experience that Good people often suffer and Assholes often thrive. At the end of the day you’re not kind because it brings good things to you. You’re Kind because there’s no good reason to be Unkind.
So you’re just going to ignore all the elves that Santa has imprisoned and put into forced toy-making camps all these years. Not to mention his mistreatment of reindeer that were never intended to fly. You never hear anything bad about Santa because all the news media are under his control.
Skyrim taught me elves are pure evil.
Anti-fairy propoganda.
Same here, I never really believed it and I stopped pretending to when I was around 16 or 17. I’ve read the bible cover to cover and none of it really resonated with me.
I think for the vast majority of religious people, religion is more like a cultural identity rather than something they actually believe. Maybe they can convince themselves to believe it because part of their culture is having faith, but when they become separated from that culture their belief becomes unstable.
Not to say I’m an atheist, in fact I’m a pope, but that’s the sort of thing you can’t bring up in normal conversation.
I feel like a lot of people use god to defend what they already believe. But they have no real claim to the religion if they don’t actually try and change to become more like what they profess.
It’s not a sports team. It’s a commitment.
Of course you’re a pope. We’re all popes.
Kallisti!
All hail She what done it all!
All hail Discordia!
I had a Christian friend who didn’t understand how I wasn’t a Christian when I knew so much about Christianity. Didn’t have the chutzpah to tell her that’s how a lot of former Christians are. I was only a Christian because my parents and siblings were. Eventually did my own soul searching and reading and I have my own spirituality that I came to on my own. But yeah, people always assume it was some sort of trauma or something when it was just, realizing my own individuality.
Honestly, my belief in God went down over time in general as I grew up, particularly growing up in the South where religion here is fucking crazy and basically all fundamentalists, but like Becky I was willing to believe in my own version of God. You know, a pro-evolution, pro-gay and trans rights God who really was the all loving father the fundy Christians told me he’d be.
But I’ll admit the final nail in the coffin for my belief in there being a loving God came in my senior year of college. Now, in my senior year of college, my mom got cancer. That sucked. But she survived. Fast forward to when I was a senior in college, however… and my dad started to experience some symptoms. My first thought was “oh god please, don’t let it be cancer”. And I prayed. I prayed and prayed and prayed and PRAYED as hard as I could for him to have literally anything but cancer.
And the day came.
He had the same cancer my mom had. Same exact cancer. Now, I’ll grant you that my dad did survive that bout of cancer, but I sincerely couldn’t believe in the idea of a loving, all knowing God who would condemn my parents to suffer the same kind of cancer. And the fact that my mom went on to get cancer again later, and die from it that time, well, that just solidified it. Maybe it’s a bit selfish, but I don’t know… personally seeing the suffering my parents went through with chemo, radiation, and eventually caring for someone literally dying in front of me, I just can’t believe it. My parents didn’t do anything to deserve that. And at the funeral people kept telling me “God has a plan” well you know what, it’s a shitty fucking plan if that’s the case.
*correction, my mom had cancer when I was a senior in high school, mis-typed.
My own loss of faith was the typical combination, I think — it became clear I was the only person in my Confirmation cohort or my “church council and organist/liturgy director” family who had actually READ the Bible, and that only intensified when I took some college courses on biblical translation and read some good comparisons between the gospels (both the big four and a selection of other gospels that didn’t make the Catholic cut back in the day).
Meanwhile, it wasn’t hard to notice that not a single prayer got answered in any way discernible from chance, no matter how big or small the ask. And at that point, with no evidence of anything except that Biblical tradition was an anchor lodged in quicksand, given all the issues with translation and selection…
The stupidest capstone on it all was that I had been agnostic for YEARS when I discovered that one of my old parish priests was on the Attorney General’s little list, if you catch my meaning, and a LOT of oddities about how strict the gentleman in charge of organizing and teaching the altar boys was (and how much he made it clear that priests did NOT train or otherwise specially interact with altar boys, not in HIS parish he’d been attending through more than a dozen changes of priest) snapped into focus for me.
Also, without naming names, thanks to that one grandfather of a friend of mine who more or less made it his secret life’s work to make sure no altar boys were getting sexually abused by the clergy on HIS watch. He was so strict about it across the board he may not have even known we DID have a known abuser as priest for a couple of years.
For a lot of people who deconvert over trauma in their own lives, I think that may simply bring into sharp focus what was more abstract before. It’s easy to deny or ignore things when they’re at a sufficient remove. Same kind of thing, in a way, as “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism”.
Personally, I was raised without religion so there was no real deconversion. I’ve always found it kind of fascinating intellectually, especially the early development and origins of Judaism and Christianity, but I’ve never felt any real need to believe it or participate.
I never lost my faith, it just became nuanced, and honestly a little weird and informed by things like cosmology, quantum theory, theoretical occultism and my own experiences.
I think ultimately I *never* believed. I grew up evangelical and I was always SO uncomfortable, even going back to a very young age (like, 4, 5) with how my mom and her friends would pray over me en masse. I wound up going to a Catholic school (long story) and found the Catholic church’s rigidity and standardized rituals to be more comforting, but even then I was never a true believer, despite going through confirmation, confession, learning all the prayers — I just wanted to please my mother.
I became an atheist because I realized I hated Lent, and hated the idea that my religion could dictate what I could or could not do and it never seemed to have much actual connection to what was moral, legal or even logical. So I just shrugged it all off like an oversized backpack, and had hot dogs that Friday. They tasted good.
Oh sweetie. She’s been through so much, and I feel like she’s gonna push Dinah away on accident
Have you ever Lesbianed so hard that you made your friend an atheist?
It’s more likely than you’d think.
https://imgchest.com/p/bp45mdxzqy5
I’ve been in an Amber drawing Mood.
Kitchen Doc had better tools than the guy who worked on The Joker.
Also acid doesn’t leave a lot to glue back into place.
Also, thank you Yotomoe. In the spirit of never being satisfied, now I want Sal and Amber comparing scars.
In their underwear, for reasons.
I would be surprised if Joyce being into Dorothy and not Becky is what makes Becky become an atheist. Her faith has always seemed pretty strong even after that’s happened.
I tend to agree, but then I didn’t expect Joyce to become an atheist. In the Walkyverse, it was a central core part of her identity.
Well it was a central core part of her identity here too. But then Willis decided Joyce would be an allegory for his own young adulthood and the rest is history.
It’s possible she’s lashing out against her religion in a way that’s temporary, in the way that many struggle with faith in hard times.
It’s also possible that Becky sees this as God breaking the “God loves lesbians” covenant and is therefore dead to her.
Here it is. The big fallout I’ve been waiting for. This is gonna be a mess.
Man, I’m gonna be wondering for months what was originally written and what got changed when some of the backlog got tossed out in response to the backlash to the protest, because for me everything since about when Becky found out has been a big improvement for me over the ~four months before that.
I don’t think these parts with Becky were changed i think the parts wigh raidah and asma were added in.
Yeeee, not many things changed.
An added Asma update and some dialogue here and there, but the whole jist feels that it is exactly the same and how it was going to be either way.
I’m not sure how Becky thinks Dina is supposed to respond to “The person I was hopelessly in love with while I was dating you started dating someone else, which made me upset (again, while I’m dating you). Comfort me”
IMO, Becky is doing a lot more feeling than thinking right now.
And now it’s revealed that Dina was actually a devout Buddhist the whole time, and that she thinks you can be reborn in Amitābha’s pure land if you chant his name 10 times.
This while still considering the concept of a creator God to be ridiculous, of course.
You have to admit there is a great deal of internal evidence that the world was created using generative AI.
Vibe creationism, we call it in the business.
Practice bh first; listen to it here (bottom left corner).
Well this escalated quickly. I gather you’re not in the mood to hug a gentle Dina, then ? 🙁
♪That’s me in the corner♪
♪That’s me in the spotlight♪
♪Losin’ my religion♪
♪Tryin’ to keep up with you♪
♪And I don’t know if I can do it♪
♪Oh no, I’ve said too much♪
♪I haven’t said enough♪
Eventually, Dina gets her some Jesus.
Even picks up a Southern accent somehow.
This feels not real with how it happened… <.<
But it is kind of "funny", since what Joyce said ages ago for Becky:
"She'll come around. She's smart. She'll understand"
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/01-sister-christian/bethlehem/
Oof
I feel really bad for Dina right now.
But there’s nothing you can do about a crush that someone’s had since they were 5. I just hope they don’t break apart.
It’s me I’m god
Have you repented of killing off the dinosaurs so that mammals could take over?
Devil’s advocate points out that there are still birds, so the accusation is false.
So Joyce never actually got around to telling Becky she’s an atheist, right? I can’t quite remember. Damn though, this is probably way more brutal of a hit than that ever would have been.
No, she did, and Becky’s response was “you over-reacted (to getting kidnapped by the church you grew up in)”.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/01-sister-christian/too/
Amazingly, I’m seeing a distinct lack of ‘you over-reacted to getting kidnapped by the church you grew up in’.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/02-ill-leave-you-a-phantom/picked/
I think this plus the comic where Becky says something like “Remember, you’ve only been rebelling against our parents for five whole minutes” is probably where that general vibe came from.
It’s played for a punchline and based on a misunderstanding, but she definitely does say she thinks that Joyce becoming an atheist is over-reacting.
No, they talked about it. After Becky overheard a conversation between Joyce and Liz, where they kind of talked about religion in a mocking way.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/01-sister-christian/lookitme/
Good would be Becky finally dealing with her trauma.
Bad would be Becky going “Joyce doesn’t love me so God ain’t real”.
Do we know how deep Becky was into Bible study and explaining away the apparent contradictions in it, etc? We know Joyce was really deep into that sort of stuff, but did Becky really care about that stuff, as opposed to just general faith and conforming enough not to get into trouble?
She’s been very firm that the black and white text of scripture is not the important part of her faith.
I think that, being autistic, Joyce had to rationalize everything, make it make sense. That’s why her faith was hard (barely changing) and ultimately brittle. Becky’s was based on feels, and therefore malleable and very hard to break (I don’t think it actually broke right now).
During their fight, Becky was mad Joyce didn’t get what was important (God’s love and all) and what was not (creationism against scientific facts). But Joyce had to believe everything or nothing.
Becky never cared about that stuff like Joyce did. Half her relationship with Dina is about Dina teaching her why young earth creationism is stupid and Becky being happy to learn.
Oh boy
Welp, called it.
Dina’s sure having a heck of a day huh.
she stole drugs like a gansta and now her girlfriend don’t believe in god no more
just a regular ass day nothin special XD
At first it felt like Becky was doing a childish drama reaction; “I didn’t get a GI Joe with Kung-Fu grip. There is no God!” or in this case “… Joyce with Kung-Fu grip”. But on reflection Becky may have just adsorbed a massive triple hit.
She lost the best friend race. Dorothy is promoted to Lover and out-ranks her.
She lost the best fixer status. Hank’s humility and acceptance made her effort unneeded.
She lost ‘best’ lesbian status. Hank may have accidently caught her with a back-swing when he pronounced Dorothy an acceptable girl for his daughter to be gay with.
These were all very important things to her.
Dina: “You’re wrong, Becky. God is not fake.”
Becky: “Huh?”
Dina: “For I am your god.”
Becky: “Oh dang. Well, let me get to worshippin’ you!”
Paging Hozier, paging Hozier to the courtesy phone.
Beckita it’s all gonna be ok you’re gonna feel soooo much better after you get through depression and bargaining
That, or He has a very sick sense of humor. There is considerable anecdotal evidence for this hypothesis. Plus that one Depeche Mode song.
Oh no, this is what makes her lose her faith? :,(
Becky, honey, sometimes people just fall in love with someone else…
(I don’t believe in any god but I thought it was rather beautiful that Becky still did, in spite of everything.)
Not meaning to challenge your sentiment, but out of curiosity: Why did you find it beautiful that Becky kept believing that god is real? I’m trying to understand.
I imagine it’s the same thing that makes adults think that telling children about Santa Claus is actually a good thing and watching them believe and wonder something magical about the world that you’ve long lost faith in.
I think sometimes people have beliefs that bring them comfort and strengthen them as they move through the world, and it could be beautiful that they hold onto those beliefs even when life is hard on them and sad when they lose these beliefs as part of their suffering. The beliefs could be religious or non-religious– a belief in a loving god, or a belief in human goodness, or a belief one’s own value as a human being, for example.
(And then sometimes people might find “strength as they move through the world” in shitty beliefs that are harmful and at the expense of others, and the loss of those? Not so sad.)
This, yes.
I liked “God answers lesbian prayers.” I liked Becky holding on to her faith in defiance of her own church community wanting to cast her out.
I like the arc of Becky casting aside the prejudices and teachings of her messed up sect while still believing because it’s a nice contrast to Joyce having to give it all up in one big lump.
Yeah, this is what I meant.
No, not that.
Sorry, comparing belief in a god to belief in Santa Claus is an edgelord atheist teenager take. I grew out of that.
I imagine it’s because Joyce was, and still is, Becky’s first and strongest love. She only accepted that she and Joyce would never be together in the way that she wanted because, back when Becky confessed her feelings to Joyce (not in the best of ways, I’ll admit…), Joyce pulled the “I’m sorry, I love you but not that way. I’m straight.” card. So Becky swallowed the hurt and disappointment and accepted it as a future that just could not be… Until Joyce turns out to be head over heels for Dorothy and was even contemplating marriage/life-long commitment. So this feels like a double betrayal both by Joyce and by God for letting this all happen. And Becky’s probably also dealing with a healthy dose of self-loathing on top of it all because “the problem was me all along, wasn’t it?” and is THIS why she can’t have nice things?
Apologies if that got kinda grim. Becky’s story just hits awfully close to home for me when I was younger. 🙁
Again pointing out that Joyce never actually said that to Becky. It makes total sense that Becky interpreted it that way, but Joyce never made it explicit, and I strongly suspect that was deliberate by Willis.
Just to elaborate, I think from the very beginning, even when Joyce was still very religious and had no idea that she might not be straight, the big problem for her was not “Becky is a woman,” but “Becky is my sister.”
Fair point. I also don’t think Joyce said it in those exact words, but nonetheless, I’m very sure she did go with the “I love you but not in that way” approach. And everything else about Joyce up to that point also indicated that she had no prior interest in girls until Dorothy came along. People’s sexuality can change over time, and it’s quite possible Joyce truthfully did not feel she had attractions to women when she said it, but from Becky’s point of view, it must still feel like a betrayal or a lie on Joyce’s part.
But “I love you, just not in that way” is absolutely true for Joyce, that wasn’t a “card” to get out of anything. Familial love is just as real as romantic love.
This might be that ”Angry at god for not existing” flavour of atheism, as humorously defined by Terry Pratchett.
Ah, she comes out and her crush doesn’t reciprocate AND gets kicked out of college AND her dad tries to kidnap her leading to the death of her last living relative.
Joyce comes out and gets to have her own crush reciprocate AND her whole college is fine with it AND her dad just goes “whatever, that’s fine”.
A one eye god for real.
Oh…. oh. 🙁 Poor Becky.
Like with Dina’s autism, so much that Becky had to struggle and scrape and fight to have is just handed to Joyce without much effort or struggle at all. I’m not saying Joyce has done anything wrong, but it’d certainly give me a complex.
Me, completely forgetting Becky and Dina are in a relationship and Dina is literally in the room right now: “Wow, why’s Becky hitting up Amber to tell her God is fake?”
Oh dear, don’t tell Dina, you’re only proving her point here
Mmm.
I’m an atheist and this makes me sad. I might wish that people would rely more on evidence and reason as opposed to superstition and dogma, but I really do want people that choose to believe in a religion to derive comfort, compassion, and strength from their faith, not feelings of confusion and betrayal. I’ve known some really, really good people with strong Christian faith that are motivated by their faith to be good people. The world needs more of them, however they come to be that compassionate and kind.
This! Not an atheist exactly, or even very agnostic, but this is why I tend not to discuss serious religious topics with people who have a belief system that works for them.
Also, reason, however useful a tool, never convinced anyone of something they didn’t want to believe. Empirical evidence has a chance, but unambiguous empirical evidence on the topic is in short supply. Even getting to the point that the consensus view of reality is almost completely wrong takes a lot of steps.
I would agree to the extent that people that don’t want to believe something are unlikely to be convinced by reason and evidence. (Or to be convinced that something that they want to believe is false.) But it depends on what is meant by “wanting” to believe. A person that makes a conscious effort to counter their biases can learn to set those biases aside and accept facts. At least, I like to think so. It just takes that conscious effort and self-awareness. And yet, that is in short supply.
Dorothy gravatar is very appropriate here.
All that’s missing is the repeating thought bubble “Dorothy, WIFE, Dorothy, WIFE…”
That and Hank saying “who am I to judge,” just on repeat
🙁
hey I did NOT make that a fucking emoji. hate it when things turn my smilies into emojis
type
:<a>(
with an empty HTML opening and closing tag in between the characters ;)
:(
Becky’s going through her own Dark Night of the Soul. Now she has to follow her idol Rich Mullins and become Catholic.
This sort of thing, I do not understand.
I can understand people who say that they don’t believe in God because of the whole “How can an all-good, all-powerful deity allow THIS?” argument. I can understand people who say that there just isn’t enough evidence at all to suggest *a* deity, much less a specific deity. I can understand people who were raised to believe in it, but when they grew up, it just didn’t click anymore.
But unless this has been brewing for quite a long time, and we’ve just never seen any sign of it, I really don’t follow the logic of “I’m extremely hurt that this one thing hadn’t happened,” especially when it’s not something that God has ever shown himself to do.
Becky’s endured the suicide of her mother. Losing the college that she was accepted to. Becoming homeless. The multiple kidnapping attempts by her father. The murder by one of the members of her friend group. The murder of her father. And throughout it all, none of it seemingly affected her faith.
But she realizes that her longtime crush is attracted to the same sex, but not to her, and THAT is what makes her go “Yup, God’s not real”?
I get that she’s feeling very hurt right now. But logically, it makes no sense. Like, even if she prayed for years and years about Joyce. What, she expects that God’s just going to yoink away her free will and say, “No, you will love Becky!!!” Has God promised to match everyone with their lifelong crushes or something? Is God a genie, that he will grant your every wish if you just ask for it? Does he shoot people with heart-shaped arrows?
The answer is of course “no.” Becky’s been raised a fundie; unless she wasn’t paying attention or they believe something wildly different, she’d know that this, of all things, isn’t the breaking point. ANY of the other things in the past, I’d believe, but not this one.
Again, I get it if this is “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” and she’s been secretly harboring these feelings and shoving them down to where she can’t hear them. But that’s not what has been foreshadowed.
If you’re an adult and you actually believe – not just “I was raised to believe this and really *feel* it’s true” but actually have gone through the logic steps, reflected, had it tested like Becky has – then something like this might make you *angry* with God, but it wouldn’t make you disbelieve in God, because from that same logic and testing you’d understand that there’s nothing here that is contradictory at all. I’ve known people who were furious at God, even went so far to pray “I don’t believe in you anymore!” which is about as silly as writing and mailing a letter to Santa saying he’s not real – if you didn’t believe it, *why are you writing the letter*?
If there is someone here who read this wall of text, was in a position where your faith was more than just “I was raised this way and feel super spiritual” but was actually tested and logic’d out, but lost your faith after something very painful happened that otherwise had absolutely nothing to do with God, I would *love* to hear from you. I promise, no arguments at all, I just want to learn to understand. Was it just something that shifted, and maybe those thoughts were drifting around in your subconscious and the pain basically slapped it in you? Or did you feel like you were betrayed, or that THIS should never have happened if God was real?
It doesn’t make logical sense because it isn’t a response based on logical thinking, it’s based on enotions, and those are very irrational.
The thing about folks who “become Atheist” because of a singular moment like this… it only takes one other good moment to make them believe in God again.
yeah like, and this is what I was like when I was still a believer, except the cycle of high highs and low lows making me thing God was good and God had it out for me cuz I did wrong was intensified — and accelerated.
so much so that I basically became self aware of it and realized — okay you know what chance divine intervention is impossible to discern from actual chance, trying to read God’s mind and get on his good side and shit was just making me anxious and paranoid and was already in enough physical and mental pain as it was so fuck it I’m just not gonna be religious like this this is doing nothing for me
not saying this is what all religion inevitably does to people — hardly the case, just recounting my personal experiences with this kind of thinking
I did read the text. For one everyone’s relationship to faith is pretty personal even if organized religion would insist everyone believe the same thing. So Becky’s criteria for breaking faith would inherently be unique and seemingly arbitrary looking from the outside.
That being said my analysis of Becky is that her faith was always more fluid when compared to Joyce for instance. Growing up realizing she liked girls even as scripture would label her a sinner and still believing she’d go to heaven means she was rewriting what she believed from the start. To me that means her faith was particularly self serving. Good things happen that even out the bad.
I think being bombarded with Joyce being gay, but not for her and Hank immediately accepting that in a way her father couldn’t might just have been too much emotional pain at once. It conflicts with her interpretation of her faith especially because it also hits hard on her insecurities about her own self worth.
So yeah Becky was never running on logic like Joyce. She was running on vibes and the vibes today have been real bad.
this. this right here bruh.
it’s not just Joyce x Dorothy in particular but being reminded so vividly of the ideal life she always wanted but could never have, with Joyce as her GF AND parents who’d accept her being gay
elephant in the room tho, Dina definitely doesn’t wanna feel like just a rebound, really really scared to see where this goes 0-0
Holy crap that makes so much sense. I never even considered that the fact that Hank finding out about Joyce being gay, and being like “OK, don’t tell your mother, let’s go get pizza” would possibly be a far, FAR bigger blow.
Also really good point on everyone’s faith being personal and that she would have had to make rationalizations before. I forget sometimes that the world doesn’t always think the same way as me – and not like “opinion-wise” but in a kinda cold, analytical sense.
Also – thank you to everyone else who responded! I probably don’t have time to respond to all this before tomorrows comic hits and this is ancient history.
I’ve never had any religious beliefs. Christian stuff was taught in school around holidays, but since my parents didn’t even bring religion up to begin with (so we could make our own decisions), I just interpreted that as comparable to fables and other stories.
So given my lack of first-hand experience, I don’t exactly have an expert opinion, but I’m under the impression that a lot of religious belief is basically Sunk Cost Fallacy. You don’t truly believe in it anymore, but you have to convince yourself that you do so that all that time actually believing (or pretending) wasn’t for nothing.
So, yeah, I think that after all that went down with their church, their families, etc., Becky didn’t actually still believe. But she had to convince herself that she did. At least partially because of how it connected her to Joyce: the one remaining link she still has to her old life. And then Joyce went atheist, and finally this whole storyline happened.
I think this particular strip might be relevant to the point I was trying to make.
oh shit good callback
and yeah, right now we outta be preparin for some weapons grade OOF X-X
Yeah. Good call back. And Becky so “I’m never changing” about things.
Am I forgetting something where Becky went “through the logic steps, reflected” etc? That seems more like a Joyce thing. Going through the Bible to find ways to argue that God is ok with lesbians. Becky didn’t do that. She knew God loved her. God sent a superhero to rescue her. “God answers lesbian prayers.”
When I was 20 I was SA’d, this led to my deconstruction from one year of true belief after a life of growing up open Brethren fundamentalist. It was a feeling of betrayal and being dirty and cut off – from trying so hard to be ‘sexually pure’ and struggling with and sacrificing my own desires and then an outside agent taking that all away which affected my faith in the naive version of the world I had in my head. After this I tried to keep going but felt separated and with the black and white thinking of my family’s denomination, I arrived at ‘God isn’t real’.
If Dina and Becky break up over this I’m not sure if I’m gonna keep reading; this whole arc has already soured me enough on the comic sadly.
Becky and Dina are pretty bulletproof, I feel. Dina is extremely patient and understanding when Becky gets volatile, which helps them a lot.
They really are rock-solid, I can just imagine the next panel being Dina saying “would exposure to my breasts make this situation better for you?” and Becky sadly going “yeah…”
I’ve been enjoying this arc, I love the drama of it all, I’ve been rooting for Joyce and Dorothy to get together for the past nine years.
But if losing BECKY AND DINA is what happens as a result of this? Not worth it.
Now that the inevitable is happening, I’m reminded why I feel equal parts bad for Becky and mad at Becky throughout this arc.
I’m mad at her but I can’t be too mad at her because I know it’s a trauma response. I really just want her to get some therapy.
Same!
I do feel for her and I want her to get better, but she can’t put that on Joyce.
okay
something tells me I should stop putting hyperlinks in the very first comment I make,
cuz this is the THIRD TIME it’s been reported by accident too many times and caught in moderation limbo
XD
smh
If you put more than one link in a comment, it gets auto-moderated.
it was just one XD
Somewhere, Malaya points at the sky and yells “FAKEY!”
Interested to see if this is actually a crisis of faith after one too many straws or if it’s “just” being absolutely miserable after everything and needing an extreme phrase to express it.
I suspect it’s lashing out at the one thing Becky feels she *can* lash out at.
Yeah.
“…cause if he was, he woulda struck Joyce with some lightning by now.”
“Mister Twain, why is there evil in the world?”
“Well, ma’m, that is because the universe is run by God, and God is a malign thug.”
From fallible memory, but the intent is clear. Sam Clemens was described as having a “pen warm’d up in Hell.”
somebody needs to give becky a babel fish, it’ll help her accept her truth.
maybe help her sandwich making skills too
“The fake is of far greater value. In its deliberate attempt to be real, it’s more real than the real thing.”
Time for Becky to brush up on her post-modern Shinbutsu-shūgō.
Why’s by gravatar still broken, even with my tacking and cookie blockers off…I feel like I’m missing something.
oh nvm, I figured it out, lol, typo’d the email this whole time.
hm, no laugh track. entrance catchphrase needs work