i mean she never got an explanation/told about the suicide pact but i don’t think she has bad intentions/would be trying to break up ruth and jason (tho we haven’t seen him in a while either)
Alice clearly loves to stir shit (although in a less self-aware and malicious way than Jennifer), but everyone knows about Ruth and Jen. This is clearly Alice coming down from the initial high of wanting Billie to be a good person.
I think she’s checking to make sure there aren’t any hidden red flags, along with assessing a potential romantic rival.
If we get like two more strips of Alice and Ruth, then nothing, ten bucks says the next time we see them is at the start of the next morning, waking up together.
I think officially it’s still Jennifer, she’s just so excited that Alice is talking to her again that she hasn’t wanted to correct her/doesn’t care that much about the name she’s being called when Alice is saying it/doesn’t want to accidentally scare her off again by being The Ultimate Bongo who goes by Jennifer now.
It’s purposefully unclear. I’ve been swapping occasionally. I also like that some commentators use “Billifer” that’s fun. Jennifer at least still seems mostly appropriate until she states otherwise just cause she still tagged as such.
I’ve just never stopped calling her Billie because the Jennifer thing was part of her eye-rolling attempt to reinvent herself as totally mature and above it all and I wanted to play no part in it.
I have to admit, I was more than a little confused when people in the comments treated it like it’s Preferred Pronouns and not like… The insecure change of a 19 year old cartoon.
Because that shouldn’t matter. You call people what they want to be called. Now Jennifer/Billie is a fictional character so in this context it doesn’t matter, but I won’t fault people for respecting it. Booster actually had this problem in comic where their ex roommate wouldn’t respect their name choice so they moved rooms.
It doesn’t matter because she’s fictional certainly, but some of the arguments for why commenters didn’t want to call her Jennifer hit a little too close. Even “it’s just the insecure change of a 19 year old” seems like something that could be said about a lot of trans people coming out in college.
She is Jennifer with basically most people, but did not correct Alice when she called her “Billie” and she went with it, which I think was definitely a bit of building towards what will likely be a payoff for the crisis of self she’s been having since the Ruth breakup.
well considering she went to high school i assume she knows her real name but the emphasis that ruth put on billiefers name implies that alice prolly hasn’t been calling her that
I put Big Money™ into one of the book Kickstarters a good few years ago. Probably Book 10, since that’s where my physical collection ends. It was like $200 – $300 for the Makeout Tier, any two characters of your choice, and I chose very carefully.
Or love her. I don’t know that Alice is faking anything or pretending anything, she’s seemed comparatively direct and straightforward. She might actually be WYSIWIG.
I mean, the answer is “because she’s Billie,” I feel like that should be enough lol. I don’t think there’s enough time in the comic left for someone to list every red flag Billie exhibits in any given appearance.
Regardless, Alice is kind of putting the cart a little before the horse I think lol. She stopped hating/avoiding her less than 48 hours ago.
Yeah, idk why Alice would suddenly be hopping back on the “I wanna be with Billie” train so quickly. As she herself admits Billie is still carrying a torch for Ruth and I’m not sure how receptive Billie would be to dating Alice – she was very keen to get her back as a friend, but something more than that? I dunno.
I mean I think she never got off the train, but rather for a while was convinced (correctly, one could very well argue) that she really really really SHOULD get off the train.
Yeah. Alice fell in love with Billie, realized that Billie was an unsafe partner*, and painfully distanced herself from her.
She still loves Billie, so she wants to find out if Billie is acting safe now.**
Ruth had a kinda similar trajectory, except that Ruth and Billie were unsafe for each other, what with the alcoholic suicide pact.
*prom night, Billie got dramatically drunk, drove, smashed the two of them into a tree: they could’ve died, and Billie’s actions afterwards didn’t suggest that this event was any kind of wakeup call.
**pretty sure she’s changed her name but learned nothing
The thing is, Ruth broke up with her when they were in a good place because Ruth didn’t believe it could last.
On some level she may have also been depending on Jennifer over-riding her decision, as she had promised to do, and might have in fact done if not for Radiah snagging her as part of her campaign to isolate Joyce and Sarah. (There’s too many she’s and hers in that sentence, but hopefully you can follow it okay.)
That’s the strange thing about their relationship, and why it worked so well – yes, they were both self destructive and had some serious WTFery about it, but they also pushed each other to be better and to GET better, and neither of them would be in a healthy place right now (or, potentially, be ANYplace right now) if they weren’t together. Granted, Jennifer/Billie really isn’t where she needs to be yet, but Ruth is a LOT more stable now specifically because of her relationship with Billie and the fact that Billie pushed her to be a better person. Even if it was half to spite her and get their whole angry sex thing going again.
True – but she’s also no longer trying to drink herself numb/to death, so that’s still a huge improvement over where she was. Also, she’s able to function as an effective RA, which she wasn’t really able to do before her relationship, so… Stable and much improved, but not perfect. Which is still a huge improvement over where she was at the start of the series.
It’s possible, but in Ruth’s case? It just seems to have happened, which makes me not trust it. She was an alcoholic and the next time we see her it’s fine for her to drink because she’s of age and it doesn’t interfere with her new medication?
I don’t think she’s asking ABOUT dating specifically, it think it’s more, “Hey you clearly care about her but put some distance between yourselves. I did the same thing once, but people are saying she’s changed. This isn’t lining up, is there maybe something I should know/some reason I SHOULD be keeping myself distant?”
She’s pretty openly in love with trainwrecks and drama and looooooves some hot gossip, and you’ve seen them antagonize and play with each other so far. The reason Alice cut off Billie was because she knew she couldn’t resist her.
Now we’re at the next step of that process – bargaining herself into *still* not being able to resist her.
I know this is borferline blasphemy to say this, but maybe Alice do not specifically seeks a romantic relationship with Jennifer, but sumply seeks to kbow if even just a friendship relationship with her would not turn out toxic.
I think we have enough evidence to suggest that it meant something to Jennifer (“doesn’t mean it wasn’t important”), even if she herself has contradicted that (“Sex with your best friend is no big deal”). I think Jennifer views sex as just something people do rather than anything special.
She’s specifically asking Ruth if there’s a big important reason she shouldn’t be with Jennifer. She’s definitely talking about a romantic relationship.
Toxicity in romantic relationships can also transpire in friendship ones.
And someone who has been in a romantic relationship with a person might know them better.
Here, what is relevant is that it’s Ruth who informed Alice in the first place that Jennifer was a good person. But Ruth having broken up with Jen, it make sens that Alice might perceive the Jen-Ruth break up as being at odds with what Ruth told her.
So Ruth being the one who told Alice in the first place that Jen is good, but they are also broken up while Jen still seems to have feeling for Ruth is enough of a discrepancy to investigate, for lack of better word.
Yes, it is possible in general, but I think her phrasing implies she’s asking about a reason she shouldn’t “be with” Jennifer. in the same way that Ruth had reasons not to be with her.
Microsoft Word once told me “There are no synonyms for the word breasts”. I tried telling it that my daughter (under 10 yrs old) could come up with at least 12, but it wasn’t having any!
Me too!
But what does that say about the two of us?
Simping for the most depressed, angry, bitter and cynical char in this large and drama-ridden cast…..
I think it’s a step further and that the reason she doesn’t want to have the conversation is because it’s personally embarrassing: She sees the reason for them not being together as her fault/because of her own perceived character flaws/mistakes.
i mean maybe some college students half them but other than sleeping shirtless or in lingerie i imagine pjs aren’t too common/ might be tedious for college age students to use
or the life hack/not caring enough to just permanently switch to sweatpants or those animal onesies/kigurumis even in classl ol
Where I teach now is mostly commuters, so it’s a little different. But when I was in college, we just skipped real clothes and just wore pj’s all the time
well the last arc was about the mgetting together but i’m sure well seem ore charas we haven’t seen in a while, i dont’ think anyone expected to see ken again
The Mike hallucination slowly spreads to more than just Amber. It’s left carefully ambiguous for years whether or not he knows things when speaking to one character that he could only have learned while hanging out with another (which would thereby imply he’s a real actual ghost instead of a hallucination) until the final grand reveal that Walky was right all along.
I was getting tired of them but now we switch to two characters I’m even less interested in. Monkey’s Paw. I was hoping to see Joe, or back to Walky and Jennifer.
But the nice thing here is that this isn’t just two different characters, it’s a whole different story arc.
Back to Joe would probably have been about how he’s handling Dorothy and Joyce being together, much like Walky and Jennifer was about Walky’s reaction to being dumped.
This isn’t about DoJo or about fallout from the protests.
Maybe Alice should get some of that crippling depression that makes her second guess her own happiness when things are going well and then self sabotage. Since she asked. Couldn’t hurt.
in her defense, she has spent the past 8-10 years being castigated by an aggressive, authoritarian narcissist, and scapegoated for all of the things in life that were never her fault. it’s a very reasonable complex for her to have developed.
Huh. I went to a high school play tonight with a character named “Ruth” but it was pronounced “Ruh th” but the character said it was spelled like “Ruth”. So I was thinking about Ruth, but not expecting to see her back in the comic yet.
Well, Alice, once upon a time… there two ladies who loved dumpster fire relations so much, they climbed into a bottle together and almost drowned. Then, when one tried to climb OUT of the bottle, the other set it on fire instead.
I have this weird dream of a Dumbing of Age video game in the style of River City Girls. Jennifer, Joyce, Sal, and Amber are the playable characters. Jennifer has the power up of becoming a Jedi with a working lightsaber and her most personal boss fight is against Ruth as a Sith Lord.
I don’t think she was officially one by the point I first thought of it. Dorothy was the final boss, though in the Oval Office with nukes preparing to launch. If you win, you discover she’s the Head Alien in disguise.
Yes, this is what Robin’s Cadburry Cream Egg diet will do.
She’s afraid of being happy, because she’s convinced she’s not allowed to be happy, anything that feels like happiness is not only going to end but end horribly. Ruth Was the happiest she’s ever been when she was with her and that scared the hell out of her.
Maybe I’m just weird, but when I’m dating someone or about to start dating someone and things seems to be going good, I’ve never sought out that person’s exes to ask them why they broke up. Maybe if the relationship is going badly I might consider doing that. But Alice asking Ruth this right now just seems kinda strange to me.
In normal circumstances I think I’d agree with you. But Alice has a previous incident involving a literal car accident to consider, which is likely making her very justifiably cautious about taking any big steps right now.
I wouldn’t do it now, but I certainly DID do it in college when doing so was a five-minute walk and a knock on the door of someone I already was on a first-name basis with.
Well, okay, but how many times have you started dating somebody who previously almost killed you with a car, because she was a dysfunctional alcoholic? Something tells me, uh, that’s probably a big part of Alice’s reasoning.
Jennifer usually just mirrors the energy of whoever she’s with at the time. Ruth was suicidally depressed, so she was suicidally depressed. Raidah’s a status obsessed alpha bongo, so she’s a status obsessed alpha bongo. If Jennifer hung out with Walky more she’d probably devolve into a cartoon watching slob. I’m sure Alice will be fine.
If she hung out with Walky she’d revert back to cheerleader mode and just try to bully him nonstop. For whatever reason, he sets her off nonstop just by existing. Her unexamined feelings for Sal and her partial face blindness probably don’t help.
We literally saw the reason why: Walky makes her feel like her internal focus on status and social success isn’t important, due to the fact that he’s literally never cared about it; when she was young and scared of going to school for the first time, this was comforting and supportive to her, in a way she wasn’t prepared to understand; but, as she got older, she felt more pressure to conform to her upbringing, and that same ambivalence to status which defines Walky, makes him a liability to her social goals, and an easy target to elevate her social standing in relation to his.
If she has ever seriously considered why she does this (and she probably hasn’t), her justification can easily be that Walky clearly doesn’t care about that kind of thing like she does, so she doesn’t consider herself to be substantively victimizing him; or, she sees him as making an active, deliberate choice to “be an uncool loser,” which is something she suppresses within herself, so she can easily rationalize away the behavior as victimless, since from her perspective, Walky does not care about what she is doing.
This is not fair to Walky, and definitely is something he doesn’t appreciate being on the receiving end of, but he’s also allergic to talking about his feelings and setting boundaries, so it just goes on the pile of the various ways he abandons his own wants and needs for others’.
Erm, her NOT being a status obsessed alpha bongo is rather the exception than the rule with her. I think the only reason she WASN’T a status obsessed bongo around Ruth is because she was distracted by some other rather severe issues throughout that relationship, and when it ended, she went back to being the status obsessed bongo she was at the start of the series.
…
Now I think the series needs more bongos in it. Maybe get a full geek band going with ukulele (Dan), bongos, and kazoos. Make a real mash of it.
As a trash goblin who craves mess, I vote that this ends with Billie walking in on Ruth and Alice banging while calling each other “Billie”. Bonus points if Alice still has her cheerleader uniform.
The absolute first time I heard that saying, believe it or not, was 45 years ago. High school. Classmate. Everyone assumed she was a …. oh my god, whisper, whisper, a … lesbian. She didn’t date. Guys. Of course the fact that she didn’t date other girls either was never mentioned, because, of course not, that would mean she WAS gay… err lesbian. Oh man the talk. The rumors. She was strong. She did things like the boys. Threw like one. Hit like one. How did we know? She came to the rescue of a middle-schooler and beat up some bullies.
Of course no one was an actual witness to the event… Only everyone KNEW someone who saw.
One day, part way through our junior year, in a class I shared with her, and others of course, but she was in it too, the teacher hadn’t shown up yet and it was like 10 minutes in. No one knew what was going on and no one was willing to actually go find out. For some reason we weren’t going ‘nuts’, yelling and screaming. Maybe because it was an AP class. Probably.
And then, it happened. Someone knocked on the door. This classroom had had its door replaced due to another ‘incident’ and for some reason didn’t have a window in it. Again, “knock, knock.” No one got up and no one moved. Then Tina muttered, loud enough for all of us to hear, “oh for Christ’s sake”, got up, and yelled out “ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT, HOLD YOUR TITTIES!, I’M COMING!”
That was all she wrote. everyone cracked up. We had a substitute teacher that day, no one would tell us why. Turned out our regular teacher (a man) had been having an affair with a senior girl every year for like 20 years. Finally, twentieth year of doing that and somehow keeping them all quiet, this year’s girl only goa the equivalent of an A- for a mid-term. She blew the whole thing and that was … oh my god that was a thing that still is talked about in my small hometown to this day.
But Tina, who it turned out was NOT a lesbian, and has had 4 children and multiple grand-children.
That is a fascinating and horrifying story. It reminds me a bit of my school principle’s story who was the only teacher at my private Catholic School who gave me detention for my Vampire: The Masquerade books, banned tabletop roleplaying games, and constantly thought I was a trouble maker and weirdo. I was ironically in my fundamentalist phase and would only have a spiritual revelation to be no longer an asshole (and become a Goth theist) after he left.
The principle later vanished and turned out to have been arrested for a DUI where he drove into the river (he was fine physically) but this exposed that he was in fact a fraud who had faked his credentials to get his job. He was also a gay man but even then I realized that wasn’t a reason to dislike him. No, it was the fact he hated roleplaying games and was thus evil.
Now I imagine Alice explaining her relationship while Ruth is pouring gas over her like that one scene from Airplane! where the main character bores everyone to death with his story.
Alice I do feel a compelling reason for you to not pursue a potential romantic connection with Billie is that you are clearly aware she is still hung up on her ex
Counter-argument: I think if I had cradled my highschool lover in my arms and told them I loved them for the first time as they seemingly died after we were an a car accident after they kicked the crap out of the guy who sexually assaulted me on prom night…
I think I would literally never get over that person. Like, that is a recipe for some profound emotional hang-uos
Loading ...
Ruth can get real hot, can’t she? 😛
(NG, no, get to sleep before you make any more stupid puns)
Probably good idea. Probably don’t want to start a… flame war. 😏
too late :p
pineapple pizza is good
That is such a diplomatic way to put that, Alice
……..Don’t trust Alice.
But then who are we going to go ask?
Even when she’s ten feet tall?
I dunno, go ask.
Well no, because that’s not Alice, that’s Um from Umbrage.
I’ve just had some kind of mushroom… and my mind is moving low. ~<3
Only if she’s also made of radiation.
i mean she never got an explanation/told about the suicide pact but i don’t think she has bad intentions/would be trying to break up ruth and jason (tho we haven’t seen him in a while either)
Alice clearly loves to stir shit (although in a less self-aware and malicious way than Jennifer), but everyone knows about Ruth and Jen. This is clearly Alice coming down from the initial high of wanting Billie to be a good person.
I think she still wants that, but she doesn’t want to be burned again.
I think she’s checking to make sure there aren’t any hidden red flags, along with assessing a potential romantic rival.
If we get like two more strips of Alice and Ruth, then nothing, ten bucks says the next time we see them is at the start of the next morning, waking up together.
I’m waiting to see if Jennifer trolling for recommendations comes back around to her, and from who.
The gasoline soaked clothes are in the special bag.
Damn, the hovertext beat me to it.
oh my
Okay, so Alice knows that Billie goes by Jennifer for some people at least.
Does she go by Billie or Jennifer now? I’ve been confused since Alice showed back up and she just went back to being referred to as Billie by her.
Most people still call her Jennifer but Alice never got that memo.
I think officially it’s still Jennifer, she’s just so excited that Alice is talking to her again that she hasn’t wanted to correct her/doesn’t care that much about the name she’s being called when Alice is saying it/doesn’t want to accidentally scare her off again by being The Ultimate Bongo who goes by Jennifer now.
It’s purposefully unclear. I’ve been swapping occasionally. I also like that some commentators use “Billifer” that’s fun. Jennifer at least still seems mostly appropriate until she states otherwise just cause she still tagged as such.
I’ve just never stopped calling her Billie because the Jennifer thing was part of her eye-rolling attempt to reinvent herself as totally mature and above it all and I wanted to play no part in it.
I have to admit, I was more than a little confused when people in the comments treated it like it’s Preferred Pronouns and not like… The insecure change of a 19 year old cartoon.
Because that shouldn’t matter. You call people what they want to be called. Now Jennifer/Billie is a fictional character so in this context it doesn’t matter, but I won’t fault people for respecting it. Booster actually had this problem in comic where their ex roommate wouldn’t respect their name choice so they moved rooms.
It doesn’t matter because she’s fictional certainly, but some of the arguments for why commenters didn’t want to call her Jennifer hit a little too close. Even “it’s just the insecure change of a 19 year old” seems like something that could be said about a lot of trans people coming out in college.
I love calling her Billifer, it’s very cute imo
I like to think if Billifer as an intentionally incompetent Lucifer.
She is Jennifer with basically most people, but did not correct Alice when she called her “Billie” and she went with it, which I think was definitely a bit of building towards what will likely be a payoff for the crisis of self she’s been having since the Ruth breakup.
well considering she went to high school i assume she knows her real name but the emphasis that ruth put on billiefers name implies that alice prolly hasn’t been calling her that
RUTH MY DARLING I HAVE MISSED YOU
I, too, have always enjoyed her stories.
Our queen is here
A breath of fresh air, this woman.
This comment combined with that gravatar is… Quite something.
The gravatar alone is quite something.
Someone is acting with integrity, no regrets I see. 😉
Does Willis draw these on commission?
I put Big Money™ into one of the book Kickstarters a good few years ago. Probably Book 10, since that’s where my physical collection ends. It was like $200 – $300 for the Makeout Tier, any two characters of your choice, and I chose very carefully.
excuse me, just need to go act with integrity over here
Well, now we know why Alice’s Drama Radar didn’t lock in on Dorothy and Joyce and Hank: It was swamped by its own signal.
Which does raise the question – where’s Booster during all this tasty drama?
oh my god the inevitable collision of Alice and Booster is going to be amazing.
Booster is going to hate her.
Or love her. I don’t know that Alice is faking anything or pretending anything, she’s seemed comparatively direct and straightforward. She might actually be WYSIWIG.
I mean, the answer is “because she’s Billie,” I feel like that should be enough lol. I don’t think there’s enough time in the comic left for someone to list every red flag Billie exhibits in any given appearance.
Regardless, Alice is kind of putting the cart a little before the horse I think lol. She stopped hating/avoiding her less than 48 hours ago.
Yeah, idk why Alice would suddenly be hopping back on the “I wanna be with Billie” train so quickly. As she herself admits Billie is still carrying a torch for Ruth and I’m not sure how receptive Billie would be to dating Alice – she was very keen to get her back as a friend, but something more than that? I dunno.
I mean I think she never got off the train, but rather for a while was convinced (correctly, one could very well argue) that she really really really SHOULD get off the train.
Yeah, in retrospect Alice was still always down bad. It kinda changes how ya read their first reunion strip from years ago.
Yeah. Alice fell in love with Billie, realized that Billie was an unsafe partner*, and painfully distanced herself from her.
She still loves Billie, so she wants to find out if Billie is acting safe now.**
Ruth had a kinda similar trajectory, except that Ruth and Billie were unsafe for each other, what with the alcoholic suicide pact.
*prom night, Billie got dramatically drunk, drove, smashed the two of them into a tree: they could’ve died, and Billie’s actions afterwards didn’t suggest that this event was any kind of wakeup call.
**pretty sure she’s changed her name but learned nothing
The thing is, Ruth broke up with her when they were in a good place because Ruth didn’t believe it could last.
On some level she may have also been depending on Jennifer over-riding her decision, as she had promised to do, and might have in fact done if not for Radiah snagging her as part of her campaign to isolate Joyce and Sarah. (There’s too many she’s and hers in that sentence, but hopefully you can follow it okay.)
That’s the strange thing about their relationship, and why it worked so well – yes, they were both self destructive and had some serious WTFery about it, but they also pushed each other to be better and to GET better, and neither of them would be in a healthy place right now (or, potentially, be ANYplace right now) if they weren’t together. Granted, Jennifer/Billie really isn’t where she needs to be yet, but Ruth is a LOT more stable now specifically because of her relationship with Billie and the fact that Billie pushed her to be a better person. Even if it was half to spite her and get their whole angry sex thing going again.
OTOH, Ruth has been drinking and Jennifer hasn’t.
True – but she’s also no longer trying to drink herself numb/to death, so that’s still a huge improvement over where she was. Also, she’s able to function as an effective RA, which she wasn’t really able to do before her relationship, so… Stable and much improved, but not perfect. Which is still a huge improvement over where she was at the start of the series.
It is possible to change your relationship with alcohol to something that is… well, not healthy, because it’s *alcohol,* but something reasonable.
(I know because I lived it.)
It’s possible, but in Ruth’s case? It just seems to have happened, which makes me not trust it. She was an alcoholic and the next time we see her it’s fine for her to drink because she’s of age and it doesn’t interfere with her new medication?
I don’t think she’s asking ABOUT dating specifically, it think it’s more, “Hey you clearly care about her but put some distance between yourselves. I did the same thing once, but people are saying she’s changed. This isn’t lining up, is there maybe something I should know/some reason I SHOULD be keeping myself distant?”
She’s pretty openly in love with trainwrecks and drama and looooooves some hot gossip, and you’ve seen them antagonize and play with each other so far. The reason Alice cut off Billie was because she knew she couldn’t resist her.
Now we’re at the next step of that process – bargaining herself into *still* not being able to resist her.
I know this is borferline blasphemy to say this, but maybe Alice do not specifically seeks a romantic relationship with Jennifer, but sumply seeks to kbow if even just a friendship relationship with her would not turn out toxic.
Or perhaps having sex with Jennifer meant more to Alice than it did to Jennifer.
I think we have enough evidence to suggest that it meant something to Jennifer (“doesn’t mean it wasn’t important”), even if she herself has contradicted that (“Sex with your best friend is no big deal”). I think Jennifer views sex as just something people do rather than anything special.
She’s specifically asking Ruth if there’s a big important reason she shouldn’t be with Jennifer. She’s definitely talking about a romantic relationship.
Toxicity in romantic relationships can also transpire in friendship ones.
And someone who has been in a romantic relationship with a person might know them better.
Here, what is relevant is that it’s Ruth who informed Alice in the first place that Jennifer was a good person. But Ruth having broken up with Jen, it make sens that Alice might perceive the Jen-Ruth break up as being at odds with what Ruth told her.
So Ruth being the one who told Alice in the first place that Jen is good, but they are also broken up while Jen still seems to have feeling for Ruth is enough of a discrepancy to investigate, for lack of better word.
Just as there are “friends withbenefits” there are also “friends with consequences.” 😉
Yes, it is possible in general, but I think her phrasing implies she’s asking about a reason she shouldn’t “be with” Jennifer. in the same way that Ruth had reasons not to be with her.
I don’t believe I’m gonna say: Joyce’s family situation is better than this.
Is Alice going to open Pandora’s Box? Asking it to Ruth??
i mean as far as we know, billiefers still dstopped drinking tho idk if she’s been to a therapyist since
She did tell Joyce that she sounded like her therapist two days ago, so I think she probably is still going to one.
Angry tits.
Mammary calamity
Boobs of doom!!
apoplectic areolae?
Boomba Gazoomgas
y’all need to stop i just had surgery.
Yeah, y’all are going to have Bryy in stitches.
Or out of them
Mahoromatics!!
Microsoft Word once told me “There are no synonyms for the word breasts”. I tried telling it that my daughter (under 10 yrs old) could come up with at least 12, but it wasn’t having any!
God I love Ruth. She might be my single favorite character in the comic.
Me too!
But what does that say about the two of us?
Simping for the most depressed, angry, bitter and cynical char in this large and drama-ridden cast…..
Well you see, shes awful
…Self immolation?
Not sure I follow…
(…Hi folks. *waves shyly*)
Ruth is suggesting she would rather set herself on fire than have this conversation about Jennifer.
I think it’s a step further and that the reason she doesn’t want to have the conversation is because it’s personally embarrassing: She sees the reason for them not being together as her fault/because of her own perceived character flaws/mistakes.
Ruth will have to explain, “Jennifer is messed up but I was actually worse or we were worse together.”
Alice is gonna hear about the pact and fall back into “Billie hasn’t changed” mode.
which will make billie start to spiral, thus providing even stronger evidence to the obvious
Setting herself on fire
Ah. Thanks!
Life self-examination should be preferable to suttee.
Let’s or let’s not talk about a certain pact
Why jammies
jammies for jammin’
i mean maybe some college students half them but other than sleeping shirtless or in lingerie i imagine pjs aren’t too common/ might be tedious for college age students to use
or the life hack/not caring enough to just permanently switch to sweatpants or those animal onesies/kigurumis even in classl ol
Where I teach now is mostly commuters, so it’s a little different. But when I was in college, we just skipped real clothes and just wore pj’s all the time
Also, g’mar tov to all my Jewish DOAheads. May those of you fasting have an easy fast.
Accommodations and support and affirmation to all who struggle around eating & digestion & nutrition & food security & safety…
https://www.amitzvahtoeat.org/
♡. May you be inscribed in the Book of Life
Chag semeach!
Wow, a strip that contains neither Dorothy, Joyce, or any mention of them.
It was until you bring it up smh.
It’s been 80 years..
the beckydel test
well the last arc was about the mgetting together but i’m sure well seem ore charas we haven’t seen in a while, i dont’ think anyone expected to see ken again
Chants: Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike …
The Mike hallucination slowly spreads to more than just Amber. It’s left carefully ambiguous for years whether or not he knows things when speaking to one character that he could only have learned while hanging out with another (which would thereby imply he’s a real actual ghost instead of a hallucination) until the final grand reveal that Walky was right all along.
I was getting tired of them but now we switch to two characters I’m even less interested in. Monkey’s Paw. I was hoping to see Joe, or back to Walky and Jennifer.
But the nice thing here is that this isn’t just two different characters, it’s a whole different story arc.
Back to Joe would probably have been about how he’s handling Dorothy and Joyce being together, much like Walky and Jennifer was about Walky’s reaction to being dumped.
This isn’t about DoJo or about fallout from the protests.
Yeah, as much as I’m a Joe fan I think we could do with a Doyce break to air out the comment section if nothing else.
damn you willis!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
YEEESSSS!!!!!!
Well, there’s a jump! Boing.
Ruth: …and that’s when I locked myself in the room and knocked off the doorknob before barricading the door
Alice: Because you didn’t want to start drinking again?
Ruth: Yes.
Alice: Ah.
Ruth: She’s sober now and I’m drinking again.
Jason: Hello.
Alice: Who is this?
Ruth: I mean…is slave accurate?
Wait… her tits were knocking at the door?
They’re called knockers for a reason.
I always wondered about that.
Maybe Alice should get some of that crippling depression that makes her second guess her own happiness when things are going well and then self sabotage. Since she asked. Couldn’t hurt.
I wouldn’t trust it.
“Well, she almost got you killed. Also decided to have a suicide pact with me. There’s other things but those two are extremely high on the list”
“But mostly I cared about her and things were going well so I figured she’d survive being dumped better than me inevitably dragging her down with me.”
in her defense, she has spent the past 8-10 years being castigated by an aggressive, authoritarian narcissist, and scapegoated for all of the things in life that were never her fault. it’s a very reasonable complex for her to have developed.
Huh. I went to a high school play tonight with a character named “Ruth” but it was pronounced “Ruh th” but the character said it was spelled like “Ruth”. So I was thinking about Ruth, but not expecting to see her back in the comic yet.
Ruh th ? Ruh-ro, that’s cursed
Well, Alice, once upon a time… there two ladies who loved dumpster fire relations so much, they climbed into a bottle together and almost drowned. Then, when one tried to climb OUT of the bottle, the other set it on fire instead.
Tale as old as time.
Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme…
Beast and the other beast??
Wait. Who’s supposed to be doing what here? Because unless I’m wildly misread it, that’s not at all what happened.
This conspiracy will be rooted out!
Oh dear. There are so many directions this conversations could go.
I can’t wait to see how it lands.
I have this weird dream of a Dumbing of Age video game in the style of River City Girls. Jennifer, Joyce, Sal, and Amber are the playable characters. Jennifer has the power up of becoming a Jedi with a working lightsaber and her most personal boss fight is against Ruth as a Sith Lord.
…
My brain works very funny.
Does Joyce power up by becoming an atheist?
I don’t think she was officially one by the point I first thought of it. Dorothy was the final boss, though in the Oval Office with nukes preparing to launch. If you win, you discover she’s the Head Alien in disguise.
Yes, this is what Robin’s Cadburry Cream Egg diet will do.
You gotta switch to skim milk on those or somethin’.
Wait, Ruth wrote recommendation letters for her ex? I kinda love that.
i think it was when ruth was texting alice with bilies phone
And all Alice needed before welcoming Jen back was someone saying “sure”.
I’m beginning to get the impression that, perhaps, Alice has a strong tendency towards being easily led by others.
oh so she wasnt just there to watch the burning trashfire that is billiefer, she’s actually considering it. uh oh.
She’s afraid of being happy, because she’s convinced she’s not allowed to be happy, anything that feels like happiness is not only going to end but end horribly. Ruth Was the happiest she’s ever been when she was with her and that scared the hell out of her.
And once again I remember Sally & Danny are, like
The ONE healthy couple
Don’t forget Jacob/Lucy and Sarah/Tony! They’re both recent developments but everything we’ve seen so far looks healthy.
I say they need to last at least a week in universe without toxicity before they can count as healthy
Maybe I’m just weird, but when I’m dating someone or about to start dating someone and things seems to be going good, I’ve never sought out that person’s exes to ask them why they broke up. Maybe if the relationship is going badly I might consider doing that. But Alice asking Ruth this right now just seems kinda strange to me.
I mean it’s because ruth is part of the reason she reconnected with Jennifer in the first place.
In normal circumstances I think I’d agree with you. But Alice has a previous incident involving a literal car accident to consider, which is likely making her very justifiably cautious about taking any big steps right now.
Maybe the car crash is the reason Alice talks like a fuckin’ weirdo.
If the person you are interested in is someone you were with previously and it went very badly, you’d be wise to be cautious.
I wouldn’t do it now, but I certainly DID do it in college when doing so was a five-minute walk and a knock on the door of someone I already was on a first-name basis with.
Well, okay, but how many times have you started dating somebody who previously almost killed you with a car, because she was a dysfunctional alcoholic? Something tells me, uh, that’s probably a big part of Alice’s reasoning.
She’s so goddamn hot
Ruth? Yeah
As someone who’s a fan of Billie and Ruth being a couple, I must admit I’m vibrating intensely right now
Jennifer usually just mirrors the energy of whoever she’s with at the time. Ruth was suicidally depressed, so she was suicidally depressed. Raidah’s a status obsessed alpha bongo, so she’s a status obsessed alpha bongo. If Jennifer hung out with Walky more she’d probably devolve into a cartoon watching slob. I’m sure Alice will be fine.
If she hung out with Walky she’d revert back to cheerleader mode and just try to bully him nonstop. For whatever reason, he sets her off nonstop just by existing. Her unexamined feelings for Sal and her partial face blindness probably don’t help.
Siblings.
We literally saw the reason why: Walky makes her feel like her internal focus on status and social success isn’t important, due to the fact that he’s literally never cared about it; when she was young and scared of going to school for the first time, this was comforting and supportive to her, in a way she wasn’t prepared to understand; but, as she got older, she felt more pressure to conform to her upbringing, and that same ambivalence to status which defines Walky, makes him a liability to her social goals, and an easy target to elevate her social standing in relation to his.
If she has ever seriously considered why she does this (and she probably hasn’t), her justification can easily be that Walky clearly doesn’t care about that kind of thing like she does, so she doesn’t consider herself to be substantively victimizing him; or, she sees him as making an active, deliberate choice to “be an uncool loser,” which is something she suppresses within herself, so she can easily rationalize away the behavior as victimless, since from her perspective, Walky does not care about what she is doing.
This is not fair to Walky, and definitely is something he doesn’t appreciate being on the receiving end of, but he’s also allergic to talking about his feelings and setting boundaries, so it just goes on the pile of the various ways he abandons his own wants and needs for others’.
I mean the depression predated Ruth. So did her interest in being popular — it was almost the first trait the comic established, after her alcoholism.
Erm, her NOT being a status obsessed alpha bongo is rather the exception than the rule with her. I think the only reason she WASN’T a status obsessed bongo around Ruth is because she was distracted by some other rather severe issues throughout that relationship, and when it ended, she went back to being the status obsessed bongo she was at the start of the series.
…
Now I think the series needs more bongos in it. Maybe get a full geek band going with ukulele (Dan), bongos, and kazoos. Make a real mash of it.
Alice, how are you both the smartest and dumbest of the cast.
As a trash goblin who craves mess, I vote that this ends with Billie walking in on Ruth and Alice banging while calling each other “Billie”. Bonus points if Alice still has her cheerleader uniform.
She still has it, but Ruth is the one wearing it.
I don’t want it to happen, but I like the way your mind works.
Yeah, that’s someone who want to avoid toxic relationships. Has Probably been burned too many time and now act super-cautious.
Can’t really blame her.
i was baffled at all the people who started blaming her, makes no sense to me.
Same. Alice seems to me to be behaving completely reasonably here.
Ruth suddenly has many, many regrets, and one of them is that she hasn’t been hit by a truck.
Too many regrets
Too many cigarettes
More blondes than brunettes?
Gauloises?
Interesting development .I’m not sure how I feel about it and I think Alice is not so sure either
I struggle a bit with inferring sentences, so can someone help me here?
Is she asking is this is a reason she “also maybe should have” been with Billifer or “also maybe should have” not been with her anymore.
Based on the comments it seems like the latter, but the former reads more cleanly to me.
She is asking if the reason that Ruth is no longer with Jennifer is something that would apply to her as well.
got it, thanks!
The absolute first time I heard that saying, believe it or not, was 45 years ago. High school. Classmate. Everyone assumed she was a …. oh my god, whisper, whisper, a … lesbian. She didn’t date. Guys. Of course the fact that she didn’t date other girls either was never mentioned, because, of course not, that would mean she WAS gay… err lesbian. Oh man the talk. The rumors. She was strong. She did things like the boys. Threw like one. Hit like one. How did we know? She came to the rescue of a middle-schooler and beat up some bullies.
Of course no one was an actual witness to the event… Only everyone KNEW someone who saw.
One day, part way through our junior year, in a class I shared with her, and others of course, but she was in it too, the teacher hadn’t shown up yet and it was like 10 minutes in. No one knew what was going on and no one was willing to actually go find out. For some reason we weren’t going ‘nuts’, yelling and screaming. Maybe because it was an AP class. Probably.
And then, it happened. Someone knocked on the door. This classroom had had its door replaced due to another ‘incident’ and for some reason didn’t have a window in it. Again, “knock, knock.” No one got up and no one moved. Then Tina muttered, loud enough for all of us to hear, “oh for Christ’s sake”, got up, and yelled out “ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT, HOLD YOUR TITTIES!, I’M COMING!”
That was all she wrote. everyone cracked up. We had a substitute teacher that day, no one would tell us why. Turned out our regular teacher (a man) had been having an affair with a senior girl every year for like 20 years. Finally, twentieth year of doing that and somehow keeping them all quiet, this year’s girl only goa the equivalent of an A- for a mid-term. She blew the whole thing and that was … oh my god that was a thing that still is talked about in my small hometown to this day.
But Tina, who it turned out was NOT a lesbian, and has had 4 children and multiple grand-children.
That is a fascinating and horrifying story. It reminds me a bit of my school principle’s story who was the only teacher at my private Catholic School who gave me detention for my Vampire: The Masquerade books, banned tabletop roleplaying games, and constantly thought I was a trouble maker and weirdo. I was ironically in my fundamentalist phase and would only have a spiritual revelation to be no longer an asshole (and become a Goth theist) after he left.
The principle later vanished and turned out to have been arrested for a DUI where he drove into the river (he was fine physically) but this exposed that he was in fact a fraud who had faked his credentials to get his job. He was also a gay man but even then I realized that wasn’t a reason to dislike him. No, it was the fact he hated roleplaying games and was thus evil.
I mean Principal not principle. Man, that just ruins the story.
Their, they’re, your okay. We fully understand. 🙂
(these comments and replies need an edit feature.)
Preach, comrade.
Thanks!
My diesel dungarees
My gasoline girdle
My kerosene khakis
My turpentine tights
Accelerant accoutrements?
Combustible couture.
Flammable fashion.
These are all solid gold.
What Ruth wouldn’t give for a holocaust cloak.
It’s probably a good thing that I can’t just buy one online.
Otherwise, yeah, that’s me going to the E.R. right quick-like.
If Jennifer, Alice, and Ruth formed a polycule, they would be a dark triad.
Those who would ship them could be called JARheads.
Okay, that name alone is enough to make me consider hopping on that ship.
Now I imagine Alice explaining her relationship while Ruth is pouring gas over her like that one scene from Airplane! where the main character bores everyone to death with his story.
“now do Classical Gas” XD
I literally just realized that, in this universe, Billie crashed instead of Ruth.
Alice I do feel a compelling reason for you to not pursue a potential romantic connection with Billie is that you are clearly aware she is still hung up on her ex
Counter-argument: I think if I had cradled my highschool lover in my arms and told them I loved them for the first time as they seemingly died after we were an a car accident after they kicked the crap out of the guy who sexually assaulted me on prom night…
I think I would literally never get over that person. Like, that is a recipe for some profound emotional hang-uos