as a front desk receptionist would be surprised if predecessor was like “we tried to but college policy doesn’t allow us too” and she’s not as bold as ruth to suplex anyone lol
She’s at the same stage of coming to terms with her sexuality that Becky was at when she couldn’t go three sentences without loudly announcing “I’m a lesbian!”.
Next stage is fucking on top of a dinosaur, but it may have to wait, I get the feeling Dina isn’t in the mood.
y’all think this is the most annoying she can get? just wait until she’s finished coming out as a lesbian, and remembers that she needs to come out as bisexual, next
my only pet peeve is that calling what Daisy did “”journalism”” seems… a little too generous if you ask me
for Daisy to make birthday balloons the highlight of a story about a funeral was a shitty move, but so was bringing balloons to that funeral in the first place
It makes me wonder if the strip where pointed out they shouldn’t do this was from before the new strips with Asma were inserted, and originally they listened to her.
Hmmm. Being born ‘white’ is not something you can control. Being brought up ‘white’ isn’t, either. Getting to late teens and starting to think about is seems to me to be about the first time you get to exercise your own control. Joyce seems to be doing that.
Heck, nearly in my 70s and still finding things to re-assess.
I have never been this ignorantly white. I HAVE been this ignorantly cismale, but fortunately I had that beaten out of me (pretty nicely, all things considered) by my own dorm’s lesbians who instructed me pretty clearly on how not to be a dumbass about participating in my first Take Back The Night rally.
I think I was very much Dorothy at 18 in a lot of ways, and she woke up to the problems of liberalism a lot earlier than I did.
I mean, I’be never done this specific thing, but I also didn’t go to protests in college and I grew up in a very white part of the country, so in my case I think it’s less “knew better” than “was never in this position”.
I feel like she’s been this way for an extremely long time, just she’s getting more aggressive about it.
It may go hand-in-hand with Ruth’s prediction that she would one day stumble into an orgasm and end up screwing half the town. Joyce’s barriers smashed alla sudden and she has a LOT of reorienting to do.
Oh wait, just remembered her “I’m a jackass atheist now” phase. yeah this is how Joyce is til she actually matures, rather than mistaking grabbing at new things or whatever it is for maturity.
I’ll bang on the drum forever that Joyce’s entire good-girl persona was an obsessive fear of sin. Joyce’s entire moral compass was the Sin Alarm, and she has deprogrammed the Sin Alarm completely. She has absolutely zero idea how to operate in a moral paradigm that isn’t externally prescribed by a deity, under threat of eternal omni-violence.
She had to deliberately learn to not have a complete internal shutdown over the prospect of ever doing anything morally wrong, and as a result, she’s convinced herself that there aren’t actually any meaningful, worldly consequences; very easily, in fact, because she was rarely ever scared of those, she was scared of the Sin Alarm.
So, she fixed one problem with herself…and exposed half a dozen new problems, because her being severely over-developed in one particular coping mechanism, was masking a shitload of her genuine gaps in what we seculars consider to be basic social skills and moral reasoning.
Recovering from toxic shit in one’s head, often does follow that pattern. You make yourself worse, long before you actually make yourself better.
I just hate cuz one of the best strips of the entire run has Joyce addressing this fact. Doesn’t mean she’s perfect at circumventing it but man it was a level of introspection on her programming that I just…feel like is going to the wayside now. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/freeing/
The next strip after, Dorothy correctly identifies that Joyce fucked up specifically because she had been completely suppressing her libido for seven or eight solid years, and was led astray by inconceivable levels of horniness.
So I guess Joyce had one orgasm, and as it turns out, that was her Factory Reset button. She used to care about the consequences of her actions, now she only cares about doinking as often as humanly possible. Why ever have introspection, if introspection won’t lead to more yummy good brain chemicals?
also now im just sad because there’s a ton of real cute strips after that point, lol
actually, tacky reply to myself to acknowledge that, perhaps, it’s fair to consider whether her current sex fugue is, in fact, escapist behavior to avoid all of the actual hard work that comes with said introspection.
I wish Joyce had remembered that moment of introspection, but she seems to have completely forgotten about it since she started to realize her feelings for Dorothy.
When people complain that all this is super in character for Joyce and not an example of her backsliding, it is this strip I’m wishing she’d followed the trajectory of instead.
Right? Going back to that strip reminds me of when I loved Joyce. She was flawed, she made mistakes, sometimes really big mistakes, but she was trying. She was actively trying to be better and was responsive to people calling her out on her behavior.
I get that people can screw up multiple times before a lesson really sinks in, even if they realize after each time that it was a mistake, but in the narrative it really seems to undermine her growth.
I suspect Joyce will have a crashout later, but that remains to be seen. IMO this is one of her biggest personal flaws. She’ll feel ashamed of hurting people after the fact, but she easily gets carried away while in the moment and goes too far, particularly if she has ‘encouragement’ from a friend (Sarah -> Jacob, Liz -> dirtbag atheist, Dorothy -> now).
I think this is likely just her brand of neurospicy, i.e. she doesn’t have good intuition about when she should restrain herself to be polite, so she’d been using religious rules as a crutch. Or, in the absence of that, a friend to moor herself to.
Ooh. That’s a good one! It’s nice to see Joyce is taking steps now to explore herself in a world without her previous foundations holding her. Tho I don’t see much contradiction here on this page since Asma can’t be hurt here if she doesn’t know Joyce’s personal relationships she is testing or even friends in the first place
Came here to find this and discuss the “without God you can’t be a moral person” fundie concept.
This seems to be Joyce’s paradigm right now. We’re all losing patience with her (or have been without patience for a while), but admittedly she’s spiralling because of the pile up of everything all nearly at once and needs to find her feet.
But her whole world has crashed. There’s of course the big traumas of attempted rape and Toedad, but also on a smaller scale her parents divorcing, realizing her older brother is a terrible person, leaving her church, finding out she’s a sexual being – that was a big one for her, finding out she’s by, having to navigate feelings for two people at once when her whole life she’s been taught “you meet one person and love them forever the end”, being the instrument of her BFF’s hurt, hurting Joe whom she loves, starting probably for the first time in her life to think about politics instead of just repeating Chick-fil-A talking points, and of course all that while trying to get an education instead of a husband, her whole future and worldview completely upended.
And she’s 17 (?) and out of her parents’ house for the first time. It’s just a lot.
So it’s rather realistic she’d react by following her hormones for a while. If she wasn’t we’d be complaining about her Mary Sue-ness.
Her question to Dorothy yesterday re: guilt assuaging is promising.
Now I’m waiting for her to find out about morality-without-a-deity. Turns out we’re not all being horrible all the time!
This is where I always stand with these kids in this strip. Yes, they’re absolute train-wrecks. But most people cannot handle the incredible excess of trauma that all of them have had, both before coming to college and since enrolling, gracefully. Like, I’d wager less than 1% of this comment thread has been through two kidnappings in their life. Let alone two in the span of a year, or less.
These characters are unrealistically hare-brained, even for college kids; but ffs, in real life they’d all be in inpatient care. Just…expect less of them, people. It’s an entire cast of broken-ass individuals, primed for further trauma, being driven at each other like bumper cars. Willis loves putting all his characters through the absolute ringer in the most over-the-top dramatic stakes possible, and I’ve never met anybody going through life events the way this cast does, who stayed at their absolute lifetime best composure and behavior through traumas that destabilizing.
Meh. I see nothing inappropriate about a kiss during a highly emotional situation. There’s a lot these two have done wrong, but this is the exact wrong thing for them to be berated about.
I feel like I shouldn’t have to tell people “don’t swap spit with teargas on your lips, you fucking dentheads”. I feel like thats just a reasonable thing people should feel internally.
Yeah, I take umbrage with the overall idea that “kissing at a protest is selfish, because you should expect to end up being made the Main Character of Life,” because that’s gonna be unrealistic at 99% of protests. I don’t take umbrage with the premise that “making out while armed fascists are attacking, is definitely going to get somebody hurt.” The former can be false while the latter is true.
Especially since this protest was supposed to be an encampment, with people living there for days or weeks. There definitely would have been more than kissing going on if all had gone according to plan.
I doubt very seriously that’s where Willis is going with Asma for several reasons:
– She also appears to be queer
– This is the ~start~ of her arc, not the end
– Willis put in more Asma to have actual Muslim rep and I doubt they did that just to make her a different kind of 2D cardboard cut-out of a person
Maybe but from a narrative perspective there is some ground to be had about deconstructing Christian fundie vs Muslim fundie. Like Joyce going on her whole “I was religious but I got better” arc and getting praise for it and trying to push that secular is better idea onto a Muslim character and not getting why that is different.
It’s a little hard to parse, but remember her demeanor when Raidah and Alice were talking to her? That exchange wasn’t perfect evidence of being fine with girlkissing, but it suggests this is about situational discretion, not a “don’t shove it down my throat”. Asma definitely has a ton of experience with having to police one’s own emotional responses in public for one’s own safetly.
Also homophobes aren’t known for quips like the “receptive third propositionee” line. Also also she emphasized that middle word in a way that makes me think she is not unattracted to womenses.
I think it’s worth noting here that Asma doesn’t actually have to be homophobic as such to still hold herself and people who chose to talk at her to not engage in or make excuses for inappropriate PDA…
Oh god no wait… please don’t let Joyce mistakenly think Asma is homophobic. I don’t think that will happen, but they’re potentially miscommunicating in a way where it could, and she could easily assume that her own upbringing maps to other (presumably) religious people.
I categorically deny that the public display of affection is inappropriate. I’ve certainly always enjoyed being around people that felt free to express their affection for each other. It’s a positive thing not a negative one.
I mean you can cross over a line and I’m not saying get hot and heavy in the street, and maybe formal occasions call for decorum generally, but I tend to think that it’s the people that can’t tolerate people kissing, holding hands or hugging that are the problem. Seriously.
How about making out while people are getting teargassed or shot? Would you consider that inappropriate?
Or maybe going and making someone talk to you while they’re on the clock and you’re carrying around the dirty sheets just after you finished having sex, just so you can deliver an insincere apology that would only make you feel better?
I don’t consider my own discomforts to be anyone else’s problem on principle, and I can’t say with certainty whether KM finds it inappropriate, but the societal perception of it as inappropriate, And Asma’s perception in particular, is the main point here, rather than whether it actually IS a problem.
Also Asma is surely fed up with these two enough that she’s less able to let things go right now, especially with Joyce arguably seeming aggressive about it with zero provocation, in the middle of what was supposed to be an apology of some kind. Joyce doesn’t have Becky’s charisma or tragic backstory, she can’t pull off punctuating other people’s sentences with I’M GAY
Annnnd that’s when I remember how patronizing Joyce was to Raidah about religion. “I would NOT like to apologize for kissing her” might be Joyce expressing her upbringing in the form of unconscious yet intrusive assumptions about Asma.
It should be clear that it’s not about what I personally think, but what I, a person who is somewhat familiar with various expressions of Islamic values from liberal to conservative, think Asma thinks based on what we have seen of Asma to date and the words she had chosen to use.
I think people in the comments are being super weird about this. Like, yes, someone complaining about ‘inappropriate PDA’ does raise questions of what kind of PDA they consider inappropriate, but those questions are more or less already answered by the “hope it wasn’t intentionally center stage for the cameras at the protest” part.
People in this comment section have a habit of being extremely quick to read homophobic intent into the words of women of color. Happened with Sarah, happened with Raidah, now it’s happening with Asma.
FWIW, I don’t think Asma’s being homophobic (though I could see Joyce leaping to that conclusion based on wording and their limited exposure to one another). I do think she might be a bit envious. “Be discrete.” “Avoid the temptation to act on your desires.” “Don’t kiss in public places.” That reads to me like the rules someone who is very, very worried about her own position would follow.
We know Asma at least appreciates attractive ladies (Alice). And while it’s possible she’s from a more liberal sect of Islam that’s accepting of homosexuality (American Muslims are about tied with Protestant Christians in terms of being just over majority-support for same-sex rights, with a sizeable minority opposed), it’s also very likely at least some in her family and social circles would be condemnatory. So she’s had to learn these rules, and is perhaps a bit resentful that Joyce and Dorothy can be so casual and open about it.
I had to reread this strip like 5 times to parse it and I still don’t understand why this conversation flowed this way at all. What the heck is Asma talking about? Also Joyce and Dorothy’s overwhelming affection for each other has not yet become cute for me.
I also just don’t…feel like Panel 2 is phrased well. Like it doesn’t feel like it flows naturally from the previous statement?
It’s Asma’s meaning very obtuse? I think it’s very clear what she means. Though it’s probably against the worldview of most people here, since it’s essentially “if you being in situation X will lead to you sinning, don’t put yourself in situation X to begin with”
I should rephrase. I understand what she “means”. I don’t know WHY she’s saying it or why she’s saying it the way she’s saying it. It’s phrased so awkwardly and feels so disproportionate with the rest of the conversation that it makes me want to go back through the comic and see if Asma is meant to be ESL.
Ok someone helped me parse it better. I think she’s saying
“I HOPE you weren’t in the middle of the protest doing something so out of place. surely the newspaper photographer just happened to catch you”
I really really struggled reading it correctly.
I think in that panel, Asma is implying that she hopes they weren’t doing that, like, “Let’s do a performative gay kiss to own the conservatives!” that people do at protests sometimes? Especially because this one was entirely unrelated to gay rights.
Or maybe she’s hoping they weren’t just using a protest against genocide that resulted in police violence as a romantic date spot?
Asma was there when Joyce and Dorothy needed Amazi-Girl to smack a can of tear gas away from them and probably heard them getting told off for forcing Amazi-Girl to make detours when she was trying to make an exit for people that were trapped.
So even without the article she could assume the two of them considered kissing more important than the protest.
This!! Thank you!! This is a much better summation of how I feel about this strip. It’s just… I don’t get it? And then on like the 3rd reread it seemed like Asma is speaking For the Critics and Joyce is speaking For Willis.
W: I will not apologize for Doythy.
C: Yeah I hope the whole protest backdrop was like, an oversight or something.
W: I mean what was I supposed to do, NOT have my OTP kiss?
C: Yes.
W: But the setting was so emotionally charged! It was perfect!
C: Right so maybe change that so they’re not narratively co-opting this thing that has very real parallels to real life.
W: But this is the ship I’ve secretly wanted all along and I really like how impactful and dynamic this moment is for THEM!
C: Yeah so I think we’ve found the problem.
Willis has in fact specifically said the protest backdrop was an oversight, caused by them holding back the kiss while showing it to a sensitivity reader, so…
Like. Sometimes characters say things that do not in fact directly reflect the author’s feelings, especially when those characters are being rather dramatically lampshaded as being wrong and shortsighted.
I know Dorothy was one of your least favourites but has Joyce slid past her? Feels like this storyline has been way harsher on Joyce’s image than Dorothy’s.
I think I probably still like Dorothy less. Joyce is obnoxious but she doesn’t have Dorothy’s level of know-it-all, self righteousness going for her. This whole apology business is a prime example.
There’s been quite a bit of dotty idling off to the side t-posting with a blank stare like a broken npc place while Joyce gets righteous at people about why she just had to kiss her crush then and there
Asma’s point is that white people at protests shouldn’t do anything potentially photogenic lest a horny newspaper editor make that the picture on a student newspaper instead of making the story about the genocide itself which is totally a thing that would’ve happened had Joyce/Dorothy not kissed.
And it makes sense for Asma to make this argument, because she’s mad this happened and Dorothy/Joyce are thus Bad by proxy and also semi-unintentionally antagonizing her over it. And Asma’s argument is a way of addressing the meta criticism of how DoA itself used the Gaza protests as background set dressing, so it’s in conversation with the audience in an interesting way.
But also when you zoom out from the specifics of this situation Asma’s argument is kind of insane, lol. Especially in the current news cycle where some random dude wore an inflatable frog costume to an anti-ICE protest to be funny, which is much sillier than kissing someone, and it’s turned into a bit of a resistance icon and a symbol of the anti-ICE protests.
Except the frog costume thing is entirely different. It was a deliberate protest tactic to make police violence against protestors seem even more out of place. Beating up on masked black bloc types can look justified, but beating up dancing frogs?
I have autism and poor impulse control (in general, but also like, some impulse-control related disorders), and “what am I supposed to do, control my impulses?” always drives me crazy. Yes! If it is inappropriate or unsafe (which that moment was!), you don’t do the thing!
I don’t actually blame Joyce much in the moment the kiss happened- it wasn’t planned, she hadn’t considered the idea of it being news that overshadowed the protest itself and I don’t think she could have expected that, etc. It’s the way she’s talking about it, when she already acknowledged on the stairs that this is supposed to be something good for Asma and not for their egos, that is driving me nuts.
I thought talking to Asma was Dorothy’s idea.
So for Joyce to go talk to Joe right this moment would mean she’d first have to think of him, then suggest going against Dorothy’s idea, and possibly explaining why she would want to talk to Joe instead of Asma.
There’s no way all 3 things would pop into Joyce’s head at this moment, especially since she’s still riding the high of being in a relationship with Dorothy as well as just having sex with Dorothy.
Also,
I’m connecting Asma’s assertion about temptation to the previous Asma-involved conversation in which Raidah(?) asserted that Joyce is a serial cheater.
And as Asma’s the front-desk worker in their dorm, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s seen Joyce and Joe together.
Long story short, I don’t think Asma’s being a scold about PDAs or about LGBTQ+ folks, I think that (in addition to her annoyance at these two being the faces of the protest) Asma’s a relationship paladin.
Agreed. Not just because of that previous conversation, but also because if Willis’ solution to the lack of Muslim characters in the comic was to give Asma more prominence by making her a bigot… That kinda just makes it worse? So I’m choosing to believe the less offensive option until proven wrong.
I really don’t think it makes her a bigot to snap at Joyce that if she can’t help herself then she should remove herself from the temptation when Joyce goaded her into a response (Asma did not at any point insist on the conversation, the conversation was forced on her). I do think it reveals something about how Asma does approach temptations in general – if you disagree with me that this is also related to her religion that’s fine. I could be wrong too, but I think if we accept that Asma is a whole complete Muslim person and not just someone with a label of Muslim, it’s fair to take note of how her words track with a worldview based on avoiding the temptations of the material world and staying true to scripture
It’s a good point to highlight that Asma’s choice of words and attitude during this interaction, probably have a ton to do with the fact that this interaction was forced on her, in a setting where she can’t ignore or refuse it. Getting Joyce to “so I can’t just do the thing I secretly wanted to do,” as quickly and tersely as possible, is actually really apt, since from Asma’s perspective, the white women really should have resisted the temptation of starting this conversation.
The temptation part can be religious framing without being homophobic.
This starts with the context of the kiss, not with it being a queer kiss. And the temptation part doesn’t come up until Joyce says it was impossible not to.
What in any of Asma’s appearances, one of which involved her checking out and showing visible attraction to another woman freely and without hesitation or shame, even remotely signals to someone that she would be homophobic
I don’t think she’s the least bit homophobic. I do suspect she’s envious of the fact that some lesbians seem to be able to parade their sexuality around without being condemned for it. As an American Muslim, odds are her elder family members, at least, are traditionalists about the subject, meaning they have some degree of homophobia in their thought processes. So “Stay discrete” and “Avoid Temptation” to me read like rules she’s had to follow most of her life to avoid ostracism, at the least.
I don’t even feel personally all that bothered, just objectively and in the comic. Joyce is being so fucking annoying right now dear God. Literally all she had to do was say nothing. Dotty had this. The conversation could’ve ended after the cringe cop energy apology and they could have walked away. But Joyce had to be annoying and say she wasn’t apologizing for the kiss, completely unprompted. Like girl……. lovingly, shut up, god
Always nice when I’m reminded some people care more about the two white cartoon characters smootching than the feelings of brown people that exist in real life
Joyce is just boring as hell now. She has no character besides jumping Dorothy’s bones. Even in her apology she is immediately derailed by her desire to not even hypothetically be off Dorothy’s dick. There’s not been one thing since this storyline has began that made her do anything but constantly reaffirm how much she just wants Dorothy.
When will she be allowed to have any of her other personality traits back? That’s my biggest gripe here now, cheating has been talked to death but Joyce has just been like a broken record for so long.
I think a possible explanation (which doesn’t make it any more repetitive or annoying for anybody) is that Joyce has very little frame of reference for doing anything passionate, sans zealotry. Her main role model to copy “being a lesbian” behavior from, is Becky. So, that’s part of her core concept of “how lesbians act,” and Joyce absolutely gets through social situations by mirroring the behavior of people she sees as more authoritative or confident.
Furthermore, Joyce probably hasn’t actually finished unpacking the perspective that homosexual relations are wrong; she fully believes they are 100% right, now, because she can’t accept nuance anywhere in her moral fiber. So, she’s even more all-in on being Lesbian Zealot Proselytizer Joyce Brown, because at her gut instinct, she expects the amount of push-back for her current relationship, that she personally would have given that same relationship, two years ago.
She’s basically treating “being a homosexual” no differently than she used to treat “being a good Christian woman.” This is the only way she knows how to express an identity concept. And, she’s deeply afraid that her and Dorothy will get push-back, or have their relationship questioned, even though that’s not reflective of reality. Honestly, we’re risking several different future strips, of Joyce getting a constructive criticism about how her relationship is going, and immediately knee-jerk reacting as if the person doing the criticizing is some kind of homophobe for criticizing her.
There’s also just the fact that, she knows there’s a bunch of shit that her and Dorothy getting together have directly put into motion, that actually begs their responses, vis a vis social responsibility to other people in their lives; but, from those peoples’ perspectives, right or wrong, they all have been wronged; due to her completely rigid sense of internal ethics, Joyce cannot readily distinguish that aspects of her relationship have caused problems, from “my entire relationship is bad, because things are bad or good, and there’s un-good, here.”
She needs the constant reassurance that “kissing Dorothy was not just okay, but the morally correct thing to do, and also fate, and also the climax in the narrative of my entire life” for herself, because she’s in a very stressful situation outside this relationship, and she absolutely needs the reassurance that nothing she did here could possibly have been wrong in any way, because it involved her attaining true love with her future spouse, which is the singular life goal she was raised with, that she willfully hasn’t actually finished unpacking, because she’s scared she’ll find out that love can be a morally grey area; after all, if love is morally grey, that means her and Dorothy may not be bulletproof, and thus, may not be true love, and thus, may have possibly in some ways not been completely perfect, or maybe even some type of mistake.
Joyce is outwardly boring right now, but it’s because internally, she’s like a nine year old trying to drive an adult life with no lessons or manual. Her prior existing paradigm for how to behave on a moment to moment basis is completely gone, and she’s trying to learn ten plus years of social and moral skills in the space of a few weeks, story time. She used to be a Good Little Jesus Robot, and now she’s free; but, as it turns out, freedom has way more responsibilities and consequences, because unlike scripture, secular life demands nuance and compromise, which are arguably the two skillsets where Joyce is the most deficient.
Much more. Becky had sexuality euphoria but discretion and empathy. Joyce is hyperfocused on herself, which just… does not feel like where her character growth was taking her.
Obnoxious? Joyce is more. Becky was worse when she first came out though, cuz she kept talking about how horny for Joyce she was even though Joyce was extremely uncomfortable with it (and joked that she thought Joyce being uncomfortable was part of what made her attractive). Joyce is being incredibly obnoxious and irritating and callous, but at least she’s not sexually harassing anyone.
This is a Joyce Drum I don’t personally bang on about, but it’s an extremely truthful drum. She can’t be considered a reliable narrator or a trustworthy actor where romantic things are concerned, because she actually feels obligated to perform/express the maximum conceivable amount of love for whoever she’s with, at all times.
She may have given up religion, but she hasn’t unpacked her own implicit belief that her spouse must be the sum total purpose of her human life. She hasn’t really been confronted about the idea, yet, that her way of talking about love and her way of loving, are incredibly incredibly over the top and beyond the pale.
See also her rewriting of history to make it so that in her mind she was always deeply in romantic love with Dorothy and always secretly wanted to kiss her, because it makes a better love story, when the reality is that as with most people she fell in love with Dorothy gradually and didn’t actually realize that’s what she felt until at most two days ago.
It’s consistent, but it definitely makes it feel like she learned nothing from her debacle with Jacob, even though it seemed to pretty deeply effect her pre-timeskip.
Joyce’s first obvious character trait ever since Roomies is how obsessive she is over romantic relationships. Finding a husband was her primary motivation for attending college, she employed assault to police her date’s behaviour, and the Jacob romance plot was a trashfire of tactless selfishness. I think the comic has developed to be more grounded and realistic now with more three dimensional side characters, so her bongoness stands out way more.
And if thatis what they are, then Willis is doing a good job of actualising them? I mean, as being what they are, as opposed to what lots of people seem to want them to be?
But is it that they don’t want them to be realistic, don’t want them to be teenage, don’t want them to be white, or don’t want them to be Christian atheists (or Jewish atheists in Dorothy’s case)?
Joyce being an utter dipfuck is perfectly in character, especially when it comes to romance. She’s stupid as shit and has terminal romcom brain. And she’s absolutely way too white to recognize how much she’s centering herself in this very important thing that has nothing to do with her. We’ve seen her act like this before, most of this storyline is very in character for her I’d say. It’s just. Annoying.
yup. all of her *least* appealing character traits/flaws are getting shown off in this storyline, which is really bad when she’s supposed to be a character (and part of a relationship) we like and/or sympathize with.
Nope, still works. Earnestly calling Asma homophobic is still clownshoes behavior. Nobody better do it if they don’t want stuffed into a tiny car with a dozen other clowns.
not because of the sentiment. i just want to make a joke where i melodramatically protest the idea of being crammed in the clown car, to the point that it’s implied i’m horny for the clowns. but if i do that, at least one person will misconstrue it as me throwing down chips on the “asma is a homophobe” table, and i’m not willing to wear that letter
As a clown, I’m devastated to hear our shoes and our cars being mocked. Don’t you know clowns are VERY pro-LGBTC (the C is for clowns, it’s gonna catch on any day now)??
lmfao being a prude is something shitty men made up when women wouldn’t fuck them. The only thing problematic is your insistence that a woman with opinions about “appropriateness” and “temptation” is a prude because her opinions don’t align with yours. Get real.
She was offended that two randos she’s barely spoken to didn’t know her name, even though she also didn’t know their names. Somehow she knew they were the main characters.
Eh, she hands out mail/packages for their dorm and probably has other front desk duties. They’ve almost definitely had quite a few interactions with her off-screen, it is pretty rude they don’t know her name.
She doesn’t work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. She’s the face of the front desk because it’s a comic so a consistent character is depicted in that role, not because she’s there literally all of the time.
I fully comprehend the impulse towards course correction in the wake of some of the criticism of the protect arc, but this just kind of leaves me cold. It does not feel meaningful to me to suddenly center Asma, who for the entire lifetime of this strip has not been much more than a running joke about the inability of the entire cast to remember her name. I can’t imagine that the framework of the story is going to suddenly alter radically to make her a central character of the cast, so it’s hitting me a bit odd to have these interactions with her in the fringes of the active plot, completely auxiliary to the main story. I don’t know that I’m enjoying seeing this one-note joke character inorganically propped up to be a spokesperson for Muslim people.
It has absolutely nothing to do with Joyrothy, really. Even if they had misbehaved somehow, I can’t imagine they’d be terribly self-aware about it. The panel where they went right on making out after their big moment felt like a much more natural reaction to me than the self-conscious reaction that was grafted on after the backlash. But even in a world where they had misbehaved AND were painfully conscious of having done so, why would it even be a thought in their head to apologize to Asma? They don’t know her. They are hardly acquaintances. It only makes sense as a thing to do in a world where Asma has been propped up as a representative of Muslim people.
And to be clear – I don’t actually think Joyrothy really did anything wrong at the protest. Were I present, I don’t think the sight of two white girls making out in my periphery would even make the cut for short-term memory. God knows I’ve seen weirder shit and worse behavior at protests in the past. It is really more of a problem how the comic itself built up and framed the event. Maybe the second panel is trying to be a little self-aware about it; if it is, it’s kind of ringing hollow to me.
I really think the protest was a serious misstep and that the subject matter was biting off a lot more than this dramady slice-of-life comic was prepared to chew. If it had been left off-camera, vague, and up to the imagination, I think the tone of the comic might not strike me as so dissonant. There are protests on university campuses all the time, after all. But the parallels drawn towards the Palestinian genocide brought up some serious moral questions with which this cast of characters is just not equipped to contend. Now the question hangs over every single cast member: are they aware of what is going on? Are they shutting out information about an ongoing genocide by choice, or by happenstance? I don’t think characters like Walky or Ethan are designed to fall under this kind of scrutiny, but here they have found themselves.
Dorothy being the imperfect collegiate liberal who means well but is fundamentally self-centered works for her character, but what about Joyce? She came to that protest looking for her sister and stayed out of concern for Dorothy, but certainly she isn’t impervious to the circumstances under which it developed. Is she indifferent? Oblivious? So much buzz has been written about Jocelyne mustering up genuine feeling for Joe’s plight, but forget giving half a fiddling fuck about her younger sister’s love life – would she not care deeply about informing Joyce about the world events that led her to the campus to protest in the first place? This is all of course complicated by it being the on-ramp into what appears to be the main relationship of the comic, which is a heavier weight to bear than an arc about infidelity by far.
It’s just a hell of a place to have written oneself into and I cannot say that I have any idea what I’d do with it. I don’t envy you.
My guess is they’re apologising to Asma as a distraction from having to talk to Becky. It’s a middle ground from “let’s be irresponsible and not think about the impact of our actions” and “oh jeez we have to talk to our roommate/best friend who’s devastated right now”.
It’s weird to suggest they should talk to Becky. They already did, she is devastated, seeing them hurts her, there is genuinely nothing they can say that wouldn’t twist the knife. Becky needs help, but not from them.
Unless these particular strips are an exception, I ‘m pretty sure Willis wrote these strips months ago and none of this is “course correction in the wake of some of the criticism.”
I imagine there’s SOME direction he’s going with this since Joyce is being deliberately written to be obnoxious here. It’s not like she’s being painted in a flattering light.
So I don’t think these strips are a ‘look, support my ship!’ insertion.
He did deliberately point out that, with his year-long buffer, that he had no excuse to modify the existing backlog of strips, such that more material with his Muslim characters could be inserted without having to wait a full year or more.
Maybe that’s why the script for this strip is so awkward? He tried to insert it too soon to get it reading crisp, and created a rush job for himself?
We have never, not once, received any information on the actual group facing genocide in Bulmeria. That they are probably Arab and predominantly Muslim is mostly extrapolation readers have made from the real-world events being fictionalized and the reactions of characters like Asma and Raidah.
There’s a casual dehumanization at play there, where the victims of genocide are reduced to a faceless, formless entity, a mere plot contrivance. We don’t know their history, we don’t know their culture, we don’t even know their name.
I had the feeling that Willis wanted an issue which would both be able to reference the Gaza protests at Indiana University AND be vague-enough to stand in as a place holder such that his comic would stay relevant long into the future (after all this isn’t the first or last time a protest in the US would wind up like this, right?),
and without necessarily meaning to do so, made a plot which marginalized this really serious racial issue as a background decoration without necessarily meaning to do so
like, I GET the desire to make the comic more relevant to the intended audience, but given the highly decompressed storytelling the strip is known for
it’s not exactly like it can be South Park or something XD
in the end Willis tried to do too much and juggle too many plates at once, and is trying his best to course correct within the constraints of the buffer and in-comic time
maybe it could have been landed better, had the journey to the Jorothy endgame taken as long as willis had originally intended; however, the obvious truth is, that endgame was always a Hindenburg waiting to happen
I really wish the protest storyline had never happened, and unfortunately these insert strips only make it worse for me, not better :/ More Asma is good, but the content could have been. Literally anything else.
it’s supposed to be a place-holder for US protests in general, because I think the main intention was to show how US authority react to student protesters, such that it would stay relevant that way long into the future
but at the same time Willis also wanted to hint at Gaza just enough so as to reference the IRL Indiana University protests about it in particular
in the end it was all fudged up and wound up being insensitive to this issue affecting us without meaning to be
I guess sometimes authors don’t fully realize there’s holes until they’re crossed this way, in Willis’s best attempts to course correct, at least now he knows for next time
Can you imagine if we got enough information on Bulmeria for the comments section to start forming opinions about whatever is happening there?? We’d have to have a SECOND containment thread.
There are already people who come out of the woodwork anytime the conversation turns to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people in the context of the Bulmerian situation so I’m not sure there’d be much of a difference
It also undercuts the story in a more direct Cinema-Sins-y kind of way: If Joyce hadn’t kissed Dorothy, what would the front page of the paper been? It would’ve been “College Cops Tear Gas Students”, which also has nothing to do with Bulmeria, because as far as we’ve seen the protest didn’t actually do…anything. It was like 20 dudes holding signs.
How would knowing anything about about the situation in Bulmeria improve the story? What’s relevant to the narrative is that there is a protest in the Indiana University campus because the University has financial ties to organizations supplying arms to the conflict, but the details of that conflict don’t actually matter because the story remains the same regardless of what they are.
So it gives you bad vibes, I suppose that’s fair. I’ve liked this whole arc a lot and thought it was beautifully done. The details of what is happening in Bulmeria just aren’t important to me because it’s backdrop. It seems to me that for a lot of people some subjects are so serious they shouldn’t be used it as a backdrop, such that if you bring it up you have to center it. It most often comes up in the context of sexual violence, so using rape is a side detail is seen as very tasteless, but it makes sense it would apply to genocide as well. Personally, I’m of the opinion that any and all subjects are backgroundable, but obviously it’s a matter of taste.
I regret using the phrasing, “I suppose that’s fair”, as this is not something that warrants grudging acquiescence. It is ENTIRELY fair to get bad vibes from how this serious and sensitive matter is being handled, even if I don’t share the sentiment.
Well, it affects how Asma’s tied into it, for example. The Gaza parallels imply that it’s Muslims genocided, probably by non-Muslims (if not necessarily by Jews). Willis explicitly deciding that he needs to give Muslim characters more prominence in response pretty much confirms that.
Like fuck, would it be the hardest thing in the world to have a tv on in the background say something like “the X people, a predominantly muslim minority group living in the Y region of Bulmeria,”
Literally just add three or four words to one piece of dialogue. “We’re protesting the genocide in bulmeria *against the X people*”. There, done. Fixed. Jesus, Superman did it and they even basically had the same fake country name for the genociders
This puts a lot of what I’ve been feeling about the new strips into words better than I could’ve. Hanging in-universe lampshades about the mishandled protest storyline is just iterating upon the initial blunder, not undoing it. I like the idea of Asma becoming a character and Raidah gaining more nuance in a void but in practice their new screentime has been not as characters at all but as stand-ins for the criticism. I have not given up hope that they actually will be incorporated into future storylines in more organic and less tokenizing ways that aren’t all about the protest fallout. But for now these strips feel like the same genre of anxious and self-defeating apology as Joyce and Dorothy are performing in universe.
Just to expand since you linked the bluesky post, for anyone wondering whether these strips are originally planned or not, you can see in the following posts that Willis admitted that initially, Asma’s next reappearance after the protest was in a strip he was drawing at that point, one with Carla in it. So, clearly every strip with Asma in it from after escaping the protest (yes, including the strip where Asma sat at her desk alone and decompressed from the protest) is part of Willis’ effort to include Asma more and fix his mistakes.
Wow, in retrospect, that’s kind of crazy. Seeing her at the protest and then having no idea what happened to her for months is wild. I think a lot of people probably would’ve assumed she got arrested or something.
I gotta be honest. I don’t like the idea of only including more of them due to your desire for representation, or worse, guilt over cultural insensitivity. Representation isn’t bad but also every character doesn’t need to be a major character with storylines and arcs. It’s not like I’m chomping at the bit to know more about rose and Ken and sayid and Arnold and other Rachel are doing. If we get more of them that’s great. But if they’re not a priority or fun for Willis to write then I’d rather they just stay in the capacity they currently are.
Otherwise you just get dropped out of the narrative like those two women Leslie dated who haven’t been seen in 6 years.
It’s understandable, but the logic they’re using is sort of the thing that got them here in the first place. Willis has this expectation that their comic should represent the entire spectrum of human experience, and that’s very noble, but it’s something that even big budget TV and film struggle at. The difference is that we judge that stuff more harshly because they have the resources to bring in people with the proper backgrounds to make sure representations are authentic and not token attempt. Willis is just one person, sure you could hire sensitivity readers, but in the end people don’t have that kind of expectation towards independent creators doing it on their own. The best stuff in DoA, imo, has always been Joyce’s religious upbringing because that’s the stuff Willis actually lived through and the emotions are the most authentic. I’m not saying they’re terrible at everything else, but tackling Israel/Palestine clearly was not something they were equipped for. Poorly done representation is often worse than no representation at all.
Going off of the first part of what you said, I’m epileptic but I’m not gonna assume Willis is anti epileptic just cause an epileptic character has never appeared in the comic.
This is a stellar post, but I do think I have an answer for one tiny detail. I suspect I know why Jocelyn has absolutely zero priority for trying to educate Joyce about the Bulmerian Genocide, or about proper practical protesting skills: Jocelyn still sees Joyce as a child, basically.
Why the hell would Jocelyn want to get her little sister involved in the movement she wants to productively help? Joyce is way, way too immature, and furthermore, Jocelyn knows Joyce well enough to know that Joyce does nothing in moderation, or with half her heart; in Jocelyn’s head, radicalizing 19 year old Joyce, is probably a real risk factor for 20 year old Joyce being in jail, or somewhere even worse. Jocelyn is capable of being a smart, pragmatic, effective irritant to the system; Joyce will get herself put in the hospital by riot cops, or, hell, she might just embarrass and de-legitimize the movement, by doing a dumb-but-well-meaning-and-passionate thing, at any given moment.
There’s no point in radicalizing people who aren’t useful to the struggle. Jocelyn is mature and intelligent enough to recognize this. And, selfishly, she probably cares a whole lot more about her little sisters’ safety, than she does her own.
Yeah this is kinda the big problem with this, Willis is obviously using the two as a way to be self-critical, but it doesn’t really makes sense for them to feel this bad in the context of the comic. They kissed in moment of high stress and then got photographed and put on the front page (of a college newspaper not even a real paper) which they had no control over. The real problem is the storyline itself and how it’s presented to the reader. Willis used a made up country because they didn’t want to date the comic, but it ended up just making the whole thing come off in real poor taste. And because it has to be as non-specific as possible it can’t get into the real issues of Israel/Palestine, like the lunch with Joyce’s Dad being done offscreen so we don’t have to show the characters actually debating it. It just creates this weird dissonance where it’s obvious WHAT the protest really is, but comic doesn’t want to acknowledge it so things don’t really make sense in-context. Why does what character like Asma and Raidah think matter above characters of any other ethnicity? If it’s because they’re Muslim isn’t it really strange that hasn’t come up once in any conversation with them? Or at all when it comes to the protest?
“Why does what character like Asma and Raidah think matter above characters of any other ethnicity?”
With the current framing of the story, I BELIEVE the reason they (Joyce and Dorothy) care about what Asma thinks is because she was someone present at the protest who they saw and interacted with. There weren’t a lot of other named students there who they know (I may be wrong here, didn’t double check), so to assuage their guilt over the kiss they’re going to the person they know who was involved in the protest who they haven’t already spoken with.
As for Raidah, she’s pissed that the paper frontpaged two white girls kissing when the protest was about/for a situation that is obviously more impactful to people of a specific minority status. In her criticisms she isn’t outright upset for her own sake, but for the sake of the protest and for Daisy assisting Doythy in “hijacking” said protest. She’s full of righteous fury.
Why do we care about what she specifically thinks? Outside of the story, because Willis wants to give his Muslim characters more screentime given the obvious real-world parallels to this storyline and his lack of including them in the comic thus far. So within the story, because she’s someone who would be upset and outspoken enough about this to complain.
No, it wasn’t! Willis wrote and inserted new strips to include Asma (& to an extend Raidah) more in the fallout of the protest storyline & they did that after taking criticism about it. There’s a link to a bsky thread by Willis floating around here somewhere where they talk about that, if you’re interested in learning any context.
It’s a course correction. I understand that you want to pretend people are making things up, but these comments are based in an admitted reality. I encourage you to give it a peek!
Asma probably understands very well the concept of resisting earthly temptations, seeing as she appears to be observant. Desires are a test to be resisted.
Well, this is AN opinion, but not necessarily THE opinion. People think differently. Not a criticism of Asma or KM for having and expressing an opinion, everyone is entitled to one. But. Bigotry arises from the assumption that one’s own opinion is correct and others’ opinions are wrong. Acceptance of that is key. (In my personal opinion).
I actually think it’s okay to accept that one’s opinion can be tenuous or spurious, a holding pattern, until one can come across more solid information to change or form that opinion. Even if, or rather, especially if, said opinion is not on any topic that the person holding it is passionate about expanding their understanding.
If you have an opinion that you aren’t sure doesn’t suck, you can still have that opinion! Just keep in mind, you shouldn’t be too attached to the opinions in your mind, which you have previously vetted to be tenuous or spurious. Like anything more tangible in life, it’s okay to have an imperfect opinion, as long as you’re willing to upgrade or change it as necessary, when you get access to more related information or resources.
You seem to think my opinion is that desires are a test to be resisted. It is not. But I understand Asma is not merely a default liberal white person cosplaying as a hijabi and in a reply to a person who opened with “inshallah” articulated my presumption that she probably has a worldview that would be consistent with what she is saying and her presumed presentation as a hijabi Muslim.
Keep in mind, *this* is probably like all of the personal information she knows about Joyce, other than her mail-ordering habits. It’s no wonder she thinks Joyce is impulsive with these kinds of things.
Dorothy, at least, is contrite in her own manner, though not really for the right reasons. Joyce, as has become her modus operandi, can’t help but get carried away about kissing Dorothy.
Dorothy actually started this off fairly well. Then Joyce took it off the rails.
To be fair, it was probably going there anyway, but damn.
And I just realized that Joyce here doesn’t actually contradict what she was saying a couple days ago. Her insistence on not apologizing for the kiss can follow directly from her question about whether Asma wants an apology.
Also don’t show up to tell people specifically you’re not Sorry for something. Unless your goal is to be an asshole.
(More of a general piece of advice than a reference to anything in this strip)
okay genuinely for anybody reading the comments every day and having a bad time: i am giving you permission to not do that. you simply do not have to.
there is no rule saying anybody has to read the comic every day either. you are allowed to just catch up when youre in the mood.
i will not be reading any hypothetical replies i work nights. stay golden doaheads
Asma was done with this conversation before it even started. Joyce, Dorothy please just let her read her book in peace, Its the best thing for all parties involved.
I mean yeah? Jocelyn (the person they were supposedly there for) was leaving, told them to leave, and that it was all breaking down, but they just stuck around for reasons and made it their time to make out instead of going literally anywhere else. They could have gone like, 5 feet away from the protest zone. But they didn’t because ~drama~
Right so that’s my confusion with this line. She’s NOT saying “I hope you were doing this outside of the protest zone” or “I wish you had just done it outside of the protest zone”. She’s saying “I know you were doing this within the protest zone, I just hope it was somewhere out of the way”. Which doesn’t make sense to me given the “protest zone” was quickly falling apart and there were cops and tear gas everywhere. Given the situation, where would “out of the way, off in a corner” even be??
I *think* she’s saying she hoped it wouldn’t get much attention and distract from the matter of the protest. And then she saw it on the front page of the paper
It took me a while to parse but I think shes saying “I hope you to were kissing off to the side for personal reasons and just by chance a photographer caught you in an intimate moment and blew up.
Like if they were just sharing a kiss as they were leaving and that’s when the chaos started rather than kissing in front of every thing to like…make a statement.
Be nice to know how Joe or Walky or Becky or Dina are doing but I suppose we’ll just get comic after comic of Joyce and Dorothy apprantly being cute until we all agree they are, in fact, the cutest couple the world has ever seen
Don’t you understand? They’re the main characters .
That means the story of everyone else is totally irrelevant and are only allowed 2 pages maximum before more joyrothy continue to confess their undying love for each other
Oh that’s actually really easy to fix! When you first open the comic, read the comic all the way through, and then just hit the lil ‘x’ in the top right of the screen! The way Willis has it set up, you actually have to click a whole unique button to open the comics on the current-day page and if you just don’t do that, it’ll be like the comments aren’t there at all!
If you can’t figure that out, lmk! I’ll do a deeper dive explanation with screenshots <3
Yeah this plotline’s not for me either, but I feel better and less negative commenting on Joyce not following her own advice than I would going into detail on that.
No, no. This is the Internet. You are required to complain bitterly each day about how unpleasing you find the comic we come back here every day to read. Feeling negative is just the price we pay.
Dorothy I can see giving pause… but Joyce? Her inner romantic has taken over and she just wants to make out/have sex with her new girlfriend every waking moment, and anyone who tells her to chill is obviously a super-conservative bigot just like the ones in her former church. Full hedonism is the way to go now, or at least until the winter semester ends and Joyce can have a spring wedding with Dorothy. (Don’t tell me she hasn’t thought of marrying Dotty ASAP. I’m expecting Joyce to full-on propose on Valentine’s Day.)
Uh, your name is a lie, though? You’re not dead. So like, why should anyone trust anything you say, if you’re effectively introducing yourself as something you’re not?
Pretty sure Asma is not aware that was their first kiss, so Panel 2 would probably be about her assumption they were kissing before the protest and in her opinion either A) need to do less of that pretty intense PDA because it’s weird, or B) need to be more careful about the PDA because safety. It does not read like religious judgment!
We can also be pretty certain that Asma does NOT feel comfortable telling white women in public that she has a religious objection to their behavior between themselves. Don’t attribute Fundie shit to her without more evidence, especially with her (AFAIK?) entire previous lack of judgment on The Gay Stuff, even when talking with and listening to Raidah and Alice. “Congrats to them”, “I’ve… heard good reviews”, “receptive third propositionee”… these don’t have homophobe vibes.
Tbh I don’t think it’s out of character for Asma to be positive about other couples and crack jokes about the pleasures of kissing – but when people start talking at her about how they just couldn’t help themselves – switch to a more aggressive “you aren’t supposed to give in to temptations” stance like she did here.
I think I may have accidentally implied that being anti-PDA and having a religious objection were connected, but I meant that those two things could be conflated. I’m with you here.
Let me put it this way. Religion enters the picture not on the topic of girls kissing. It enters the picture in terms of how Asma as a woman of faith thinks one should approach avoiding temptations when riled up by Joyce’s “it was impossible for me not to”. Asma woulds have said the same thing if it was a hetero kiss or cutting class. It’s not about if she’s homophobic or not at all.
I mean. She works in a college dorm. And saying “I just couldn’t help myself” sexually is, if it’s not consensually agreed upon dirty talk, just kinda nasty and maybe reflective of Joyce’s fundie “men just lose control around temptation” upbringing. Except she’s gay so she’s inserting herself in that role.
I just realized that it fully tracks that Asma would not think that that is their first kiss; she just recently heard the (false) narrative that Joyce and Dorothy have been fucking for days, and that Joyce sleeps around heavily. That makes it completely understandable that she assumes them making out at the protest was even stupider and more self-absorbed than it actually was. Or, that she assumed that the two women who reeked of sex two feet in front of her, were there to proposition her.
Asma is right to say all of this stuff and also I absolutely avoid talking to people in service work positions outside of immediately relevant stuff that I need them to do because I’m terrified of being an inconvenience
Don’t back down, Joyce! Stick it to this woman who’s essentially a hostage audience behind her work desk, who was minding her damn business before you randomly started a confrontation about the least important thing that’s ever happened!
Keep going, Asma. Joyce won’t listen, but maybe someone else will. If we’re lucky, you’ll eventually get to be in a story arc that isn’t just an apology for being tone deaf about Palestine. Maybe you’ll even get a backstory! That would be neat.
is this scene also a more recent insert? I don’t see any reason it couldn’t have been written alongside the rest of the buffer.
IIRC (admittedly I don’t recall correctly as often as I’d like) the change to add strips focusing on her soon after the protest was because as written it would have taken a really long time to get back to her, not than it wouldn’t.
Willis commented a while back that “I’m sorry, Asma will get more screen time a year from now” was a pretty weak response to the problem of their Muslim characters being so minor. Not that I think this strip by itself would be much of an improvement on Asma’s screen time, but the comment did imply that she hadn’t shown up again after the protest previously.
Yeah, basically any time between now and a year from the protest storyline, all Asma appearances will have been added in. In an effort to actually flesh out and explore one (or more, I have hopes it’ll be more!!) of the Muslim characters.
I hope Asma’s criticism doesn’t get veered off into “giving into temptation is bad territory” just because Joyce brought up not be able to resist kissing Dorothy
I think I reserve watching for like animated medium, but I think reading is definitely still enough on its own. I am indeed watching this slow train wreck, got my popcorn and everything
Oh god, as other commenter’s point out, this might be more of a misunderstanding that Joyce is a serial affair collector 😭 Oh gods, could this non-apology get any more funny worse.
Replying to myself again to elaborate: This is not me thinking Asma thinks “giving into temptation” = bad, but my worry that the writing will depict her as such in the next strip. Therefore muddling a prospective reader’s view of her, but I think that’s already happening now :/
I get the idea that them kissing at a protest wouldn’t be an inherently wrong thing to do; however, try reading Miroku’s sentence more like “What am I supposed to do? Not make out with someone in a cloud of tear gas, while armed police are storming my position and taking people to jail?” I think that’s the more particular reason that Asma is accusing the girls of being really, really foolish and reckless.
Depends on the protest. Where I used to live, makeouts during a protest were expected and cheered, and people being against two girls kissing were jeered and not welcome.
I think reducing this to “makeouts at a protest are bad” isn’t a good approach. It’s not what Asma says. You’re right that it doesn’t match protest culture (at least from what I’ve seen).
Yeah I don’t think it should have to be said but here we are.
I think if you’re protesting for say, gay marriage then yes making out with your girlfriend is totally okay and will be met kindly. Not so much the protest of people being actively wiped out, think you should be able to reign it in unless you only care about yourself.
Asma can actually be as mean as she wants right now, because she is at work and thus is unable to escape this conversation, and ambushing service employees to unload personal baggage on them is a much more mundane and recognizable wrong than most of the other things Joyce and Dorothy have done in the last two days. With other stuff, there’s at least some nuances, but this is just weird, tone-deaf, socially-malignant behavior, and Joyce and Dorothy are too passionate not to let themselves be temporarily, conveniently blind to that.
Wait a sec. Is Asma going to teach Joyce that discipline, self-control, and delayed gratification are actually valuable skills to have, and isn’t automatically horrible and disgusting because her past church twisted those concepts to control her to be in one specific image?
……. pfffffffff *snork* haaahh…. yeah… no.
Better chance that the result of this conversation will have Asma removing her hijab, grabbing a pair of scissors, and converting it into some sort of string bikini.
Okay. So, 1st off. Between Asma making a belated pass at Alice this morning and just now making a crack about being invited to a threesome… Her problem is not with Joyce and Dorothy being in a relationship with each other.
Here is how its gone down.
Yesterday, Asma joins a protest that is important enough to her that she knowingly risks her job, freedom, and possibly life to join (she calmly states that fences are being put up for the purpose of arresting all the attendees and points out where at least one sniper is overlooking them all).
Then two white girls with “cop energy” show up, refer to her by her job, express ignorance on what is going on with the protest, and ask after another protester.
I.E. They are rude tourists at best and snitches at worst.
Asma escapes the fallout and has a quiet freakout about everything.
The next morning Asma learns that while she was running for her life, those two girls were using the violence as a photogenic backdrop for a make-out session.
She learns this because said make-out session is frontpage news — as opposed to the University attempting to entrap and arrest the protesters using clubs, teargas, and the threat of deadly gunfire.
Next said two girls, in pajamas, with dirty laundry, and probably reeking of sex come up to her all smiles just to tell her.
“Hey how are ya? Sorry ’bout our vibes yesterday. Just wanted to let you know we aren’t sorry about the make-out session.”
Asma is like, “yeah… I wouldn’t normally care, but then the news made it the most important thing that happened yesterday.”
Then Joyce gets offended at the concept that there are times and places where she should exercise restraint and self-control instead of doing whatever she wants where-ever she is.
thank you, perfectly put, this is not a post i was willing to put in the effort to make, but I think this is what a lot of us feel about how Asma has reacted so far.
The first panel covers a lot of ground, both visually and verbally, so we are set up to look at the the 3 pairs of following panels. These are simply ‘talking heads’ panels, but it is worth ignoring the spoken words and reading the facial expressions here. The changes drawn are quite striking. Asma is thoughtful about a complex situation and all its implications, then moves to answering a direct question directly, so her focus narrows, then irritated, as her focus narrows even more. Joyce’s journey is quite different.
Art thread anyone? v
I like how you can notice by the last panel, as Joyce is getting indignant, she’s fully taken her arm off of Dorothy’s shoulder and straightened them down with tension. (Uh oh, I wonder what she’s gonna say next!)
I definitely feel Asma rolling her eyes on panel 2, even if it’s just a still in time.
Oh interesting. I didn’t read that as an eye roll, I read it as looking away while she considered the fact that it wasn’t D&J’s fault that the picture was taken and put on the front page, even if she thinks them at fault for doing it (as to why she would think that, I don’t think that is as yet clear.
But nice that interpretations differ and can be discussed.
That’s the most cop thing you can do in a protest besides being in the ranks of the stormtroopers that are about to escalate the violence. They literally infiltrate activist movements the same way they do with organized crime. Guess what for?
I mean, they were there precisely to warn someone that she had been spotted on social media by her father. Trying to do that is the opposite of being a cop.
Joyce has made growth, in the fact that she now acknowledges that protests are not evil liberal agendas, but real action taken against injustice.
But growth isn’t a checkbox, and learning the real risks that protest entails, respecting that ‘white knight activism’ doesn’t serve the needs of marginalized people, and having the maturity to accept that criticism with humility and self-reflection, all these things take time and intentional effort. This isn’t to justify Joyce, but just to acknowledge that she has a long road, a lot of baggage to let go of, and is an impulsive freshman. Goodness knows I was a real shitknocker when I was a freshman.
If two unaffiliated girls showed up to a protest about my chosen peoples being subjected to genocide, said genocide using weapons that my school was apparently investing in, welcome girls. If the reaction to the protest is at the level of police state casual attempted murder including at least one of those girls taking a grenade to the face, and their response was to defy the encroaching hate with an expression of love, mazel tov.
It was a protest about a war but the target of the protest was the school. All students of the school should be there in support of the protest and in opposition to the school’s odious investments.
The comic hasn’t explicitly said so, but context heavily imply it. And Willis’s outside comments, while again not explicitly saying so again imply it, since he’s talked about adding more appearances by Muslim characters due to problems with this arc.
I think it’s important for people to remember the protest had nothing to do with them and they weren’t even going to go if not for Jocelyn, who explicitly told them to leave because she was leaving too. Instead they stayed to make out because dramatic tension I guess.
Yeah, they stayed to have an overwrought, melodramatic moment where they invented new stakes to fight against even though they had pretty much no reason to stick around. And then they made out during that stupid moment where the only danger was the kind they deliberately put themselves in.
You’re right. Dotty stayed to throw a lil tantrum about being gay for her friend and Joyce came back to make out with teargas flavored spit
Seriously, pretty and romantic sure but that must’ve been the nastiest kiss known to man. Making out is already kinda gross by virtue of saliva and tongues and breath smell, but add teargas and snot into it??? Ew
It’s true. It’s actually way WORSE in context because Dorothy reentered the settlement against the wishes of the organizers and everyone in order to make a point to herself that she could stand up for what’s right despite her not giving a shit about Bulmeria. She willingly put herself and others in danger because she was feeling bad about her morals and politics. She made everything about her.
I mean Joyce could’ve just. Not brought it up. She literally started this stupid argument by saying something stupid. Kinda like she and dotty chose to stick around in the middle of the no-longer-a-protest for no reason other than to be melodramatic lil dipshits, and put themselves in danger bc yeah fuckers you were told multiple times to run while you still could
Not every protest is the same and not every protest is the time or place for a self-centering kiss between two white women. It’s not prudishness, it’s operatinal discipline.
It’s not like she hunted them down to give her opinion. They came to her, she’s saying how she feels. It’s a reasonable feeling AND it’s not her job to lie about how she feels in order to make them feel all better.
It’s actually fine that she has opinions on whether a kiss between two white girls was the imagery she hoped would come out of a protest about genocide and civil war.
Time and place, Joyce. You kissing Dotty in the middle of a protest just as everything goes to Hell, while insanely romantic IN THEORY, negated the whole point of the protest and the paper just made it worse. For all we know the casual readers thought this was about gay rights, not convincing the college to divest in armaments used for genocide.
Did the reporter interview ANY of the protestors before the Kiss Seen Around the State?
This is a weird mix of graceful and judgmental, in that Asma accurately realized that it’s not like Dorothy and Joyce particularly wanted to have a bunch of journalistic attention devoted to their declaration of love, but then she also flat out says they shouldn’t have done it? Like, make up your mind, yeesh
There’s no contradiction between not blaming Joyce and Dorothy for their kiss making front page news, and believing that the protest was the wrong time and place to have that kiss. Asma’s position, so far as it appears, is that the girls did something only a little bit wrong, and it becoming bigger than that is not their fault.
If the objection is that it distracted from the actual reason for the protest because of the unwanted news coverage of Dorothy and Joyce making the subtext into text, well, I guess I don’t see what the problem is, because no one would have known without that aspect… But I suppose I could see her opinion being that. Just still seems a little repressed to me; in such a situation, emotions are heightened, people do emotional things.
“You shouldn’t have been playing in the street, but also you couldn’t have known that a truck driver carrying a load of explosives would be texting on his phone, look up to see you at the last minute, and swerve directly into a school full of children.”
I love this! Dorothy still wants to apologize because she feels guilty, but she also realized that Joyce had a point, so she compromises by finding the closest thing she can to a personal transgression against Asma and apologizes for that instead. Good job Keener, you are being cringe, but you just barely avoided the racism!
I respect Asma for giving Joyce and Dorothy the benefit of the doubt, and not holding blame over them if they weren’t trying to make front page news on purpose. I think I like her.
I may need another perspective on this, because on my first read-through it seemed like Asma was coming across as either being sex-regressive (PDAs are bad, sex is something to only be discussed in private and in hushed tones etc.) or, worse, that she was anti-LGBT (which seems a bit strange considering the strip where she seemed to have a crush on Alice, but she would be far from the first person to be a self-hating/denying closet gay.)
Anyway, I digress. So, what exactly is happening in this strip, from your analysis?
Let me try to rewrite the conversation to get across how I’m reading it.
Dorothy: Hey Asma, how are you doing?
Asma: I’m fine.
Dorothy: Sorry for the bad vibes.
Asma: Cringe.
Joyce: I regret nothing.
Asma: I hope that you weren’t doing it for the cameras, even though the cameras found you.
Joyce: Was it wrong to kiss her?
Asma: Yes.
Joyce: I couldn’t have not kissed her!
Asma: That’s why you shouldn’t have put yourself in a situation where kissing her would be in appropriate.
Joyce: Then I wouldn’t have kissed her!
Asma: Correct.
Asma is saying that the middle of a protest is the wrong place to kiss, that doing it to get attention is even wronger, and that she hopes that they weren’t doing it get attention. She then proposes that if Joyce can’t resist kissing Dorothy then she shouldn’t be with Dorothy in situations where kissing would be inappropriate.
It’s a really simple thing she’s saying. “Maybe practice some restraint and tact during high-profile events that don’t concern you?”
Anyone treating that as her being a prude, a homophobe, or any of those other handy little words, is being stupid on purpose for attention.
…I’m sorry, why are they apologizing to Asma again?
Willis, this whole thing has been awkward from start to finish. But it’s happened now, the best thing to do is just… move forward, and not spend endless strips pointing out the meta-cringe.
Because they’re specifically Protestant atheists. In Catholicism, you seek absolution from your sins from a priest, because if you don’t, they’re still there when you die, and then you’re in trouble. Luther pointed out that the sacrament of absolution isn’t in the Bible, so he got rid of it. So how do you get rid of your sins then? Sure you can ask God for absolution directly, but he doesn’t talk back. Bach composed oodles of tormented church music as a way to ask God. Americans prefer to seek absolution from their victims, or some stand-in for their victims, the way Catholics do from a priest. Then they forget what the original point of this whole elaborate apology culture was, and continue to do it after they lose religion.
I think I meant more that, Asma isn’t one of their “victims.” Are they even friends with Asma?
This is like if I went over to a Black coworker whom I barely talk to, and apologize to him because I showed up on Youtube making out with someone during a BLM rally.
They are not friends with Asma. Checking the tags shows before the protest they each only interacted with her once. Dorothy to tell her that she broke a washing machine and Joyce was picking up some socks. I honestly don’t think they even care about Asma and that this apology is very transparently about making themselves feel better while actively annoying the person they’re apologizing to.
They probably have a sort of parasocial relationship with her, in the sense that if this dorm works like my dorm used to she’s the one they’d have to talk to to get oversized mail/packages or a key to the kitchenette or whatever other shared resources are gatekept by the front desk.
It’s fairly plausible that D&J feel like they are basically friends (all of their interactions with her are positive! She hands them care packages from home and refills their laundry card and whatnot!) and meanwhile Asma basically sees them as interchangeable with the dozens of dorks she deals with on the day-to-day in her job.
I think you’re right. Asma raised a good point to me which was they didn’t remember her name when they met her at the protest despite whatever assumed parasocial relationship. Ruth even remembered her name. J&D need to try a little harder than this if they ever even bother talking to Asma again.
That’s not how she’s behaving, though. I’m not surprised – many aspects of Catholicism as actually practiced in the US feel weirdly Protestant to me; they just come from living in a Protestant environment. There are even Catholics in the US who call themselves “evangelical”!
The apology thing has long seeped into general American culture, is what I’m trying to say. Lots of people with no awareness of where it comes from take it for granted.
For one I think Asma has a point and it’s not that kissing is bad or even that kissing specifically at a protest is bad. I think that she just means there would’ve been a different outcome if Joyce had practiced some restraint. We often act like emotions are something we can’t control. That’s not true. Joyce didn’t have to kiss Dorothy at that exact moment even if she wanted to. I actually find her inability to comprehend that very annoying. It’s an example of her own privilege when I imagine Asma has to practice the same restraint everyday and not just when the stakes are high and she’s out protesting to protect her family and freedoms. I really don’t think it’s more complicated than that.
Two. I’m not really against the kiss or where it happened and how, from a narrative standpoint. I don’t think protests are hallowed ground and trying to tell any kind of story there is fair game no matter what the subject is. This is kind of the point of telling stories in a sense. If you have criticisms that it wasn’t handled well, insensitive, or just poorly written that is all valid, but I don’t think the argument it should’ve just be dropped is fair. We should be saying try again and do better next time. Asma being a more vocal character with direct agency about a plot point that directly affects her is already learning and improving. In some ways I actually like the story beats and how they happened and that it reveals bad things about some of our favorite characters. Or at least characters long established they’re supposed to be seen as favored protagonists. I like that Dorothy and Joyce come off as unaware, selfish, trash lesbians because of what they’ve done and are only apologizing to feel less guilty. Let them be awful!
That’s it. Remember not to trust half assed and disingenuous apologies!
I don’t think that’s Asma’s argument. The dialogue feels a little clunky here. Maybe it needed another pass, but think she’s just saying they could’ve had some restraint instead of acting on impulse. That’s a fair criticism to me considering what happened.
“Run them down,” in this context, is an idiom similar to “dressing down;” Astariel is point out that Raidah will always try to say the most hurtful and destabilizing thing to Joyce and Dorothy, every time she sees them, no matter what, because social manipulation and warfare is her core personality trait, and her sole function in the comic up until just recently.
I think two things can be true at once, and I think it’s… interesting how many folks have decided Raidah can’t possibly have any interest in the protest just because we didn’t see her at the tiny portion of the protest that Joyce and Dorothy went to.
What makes it Asma’s business? Joyce bringing it up unprompted, specifically to be confrontational and turn it into the focus of the conversation. Nobody was talking about the kiss until Joyce opened her maw.
Joyce literally made it her business in panel one!!!! Why are people acting like asma hunted them down to interrogate them and not the other way around????????
Don’t you hate it when you go out of your way to talk to someone who clearly doesn’t want to talk to you and they have the nerve to respond to things you’re saying negatively? How dare!
Woah, Joyce, yikes. I get that the NRE is strong, but that stance is uh… Let’s just say I think Ryan and others like him would also use that “logic” as a defense.
Obviously I know Dorothy consented and it’s fine, but run your words in your head first before saying them out loud, girl.
Sorry, I think I misread what you just wrote. Because there is absolutely no way you just compared a victim of SA and recently outed queer woman to literal rapists. That would just be unreal, so that can’t be what happened.
Wanting to do things that are consensual but not approved of has absolutely zero ground with assaulting someone.
There’s a glimmer of a point there that if you consider “I mean, what am I supposed to do, NOT kiss her?” and “But she was right there, it was impossible not to!” in a complete vacuum unconnected from anything else, they could go either way on the “high romance” or “kinda suspect” spectrum.
You just have to ignore 100% of the context leading up to said statements to get there, up to and including this strip itself and their context in this specific conversation.
Yeah, all that was actually commented on, was not the context, but that “if I want to do something, it’s unreasonable to expect me not to do it” is a really obviously negative and anti-social belief to hold, and that it’s usually the commonly-given non-apology for all of the worst human behaviors. I don’t see any reason to actually think aSE was actively trying to compare the two situations, they were just giving the strongest possible example that demonstrates how bad a line of thinking Joyce is on, here.
Yes, this is it. I was not actively trying to compare her recently outed queer status to that situation, just the words taken out of context.
However, I recognize how shitty that was to do. Intent does not negate affect. I should not have done that, I sincerely apologize.
I don’t know if anyone will go back and look at this comment on a now previous day’s comic, but an apology should be given nonetheless.
I do still find Joyce’s “But she was right there, it was impossible not to” as extremely immature and trying to absolve herself of responsibility in a situation that she absolutely did have responsibility in. But, this is a comic about dumb university kids in the messy phase of figuring out how to adult the hard way. I get that. That line still really rubbed me the wrong way (as does other things that she has said over the timeline of the comic. Hopefully she learns from this too, as she has learned and grown from other cringe moments).
I disagree with their comparison in this instance as Joyce is definitely speaking about a consensual moment between her and Dorothy.
That said I wouldn’t say Joyce’s status as a victim wholly makes her immune to the rhetoric and acting upon a predatory culture. I can see how that phrasing can be a bit sus though obviously context is the key here.
Pretty sure contrary to what some commenters are saying, Asma isn’t shading their kissing for religious reasons. She’s shading them because – whether the paper centered them or not – they turned an earnest protest against a people’s genocide into their own little romantic getaway. Made it about their own white girl selves, in other words.
Which is fine and dandy, but a political protest for the rights of brown folks being bombed was NOT the time or place and it was, at best, extremely thoughtless of them to PDA then and there specifically.
People keep saying “but people kiss at protests all the time” as if there is only one kind of protest and only one set of social rules and etiquette governing all forms of popular resistance.
Also, a lot of the kisses in other protests are selfish attention grabbing from people who don’t care about the protest. “You say it is wrong, but people do it all the time,” is not a moral argument, all it means is that people do wrong all the time, and we know that people do wrong all the time! In Christianity we call this the fallen nature of man, in the Cult of the Machine God we say the flesh is weak, in secularism we don’t have a pithy term for it but are generally aware that our mental and emotional processes are imperfect and fallible.
I mean, for my part, I have not been making a moral argument, because the comments I am responding to on this topic keep claiming that no one would ever kiss at a protest in real life, or that no one would ever make a kiss photo the headline, or that kissing only ever happens at protests specifically for LGBTQIA+ rights.
None of those things are true.
That they’re untrue also doesn’t in any way negate criticism of Joyce and Dorothy’s timing, heh.
Asma faces the problem of a new character in a third season hit sit-com; a frantic acceleration at the on-ramp to merge a busy highway of established characters. The strip didn’t parse well until broken into two parts. First, she laments that the import of the protest was demeaned by being centered on the frivolous kiss. Second, she adheres to a “purity culture” and the number one rule of all purity cultures is ‘Don’t put yourself in situations of temptation’.
Not putting yourself in situations of temptation is an empirically effective way to exercise willpower and self-control, no purity culture needed. Research shows that people who have high willpower attain it by strategically avoiding temptation. A person who keeps their phone outside their bedroom will have more success not doomscrolling in bed than someone who keeps it by their nightstand. Effective self-control uses willpower as a backup, not a frontline.
tl;dr Asma is just as horny for girls as Daisy is, but Asma is preventing herself from getting a date by never being anywhere that dateable girls may reside, as opposed to Daisy, who prevents herself from getting a date by exuding an aura of raw desperation that can be felt at 500m.
Absolutely correct. Alcoholics should avoid bars, gambling addicts should avoid the track, athletic hopefuls should avoid Xbox, etc. Since the behavior to be avoided is gay kissing, it is purity culture no matter what church you belong to.
If so, that’s even worse. Don’t be in public with your girlfriend/best friend is an absurd way to avoid temptation. I get your argument above, but it’s absurd to apply it here. You’ve got to have enough self-control to avoid just randomly kissing uncontrollably if you want to function in society.
Mind you, I don’t think that’s at all what Asma saying.
Don’t be with the girlfriend you can’t stop kissing in a situation where it would be inappropriate to kiss her. Out in public is not one of those situations.
You love to see an author take criticism to heart and try to do better, genuinely.
That said, I think it’s worth pointing out that doing so solely in-character is a problem. My understanding of things, at least, was that the problem with the protest was pretty squarely Doylist- not that Joyce and Dorothy kissing at the protest was itself an issue, but the way the comic/narrative framed and centered it. And trying to address the criticism solely from a Watsonian POV is missing the mark.
Ultimately, I think Willis is using the wrong set of tools to fix this problem. He’s trying to use a monkey wrench for a problem that needs a screwdriver.
Man, lots of people jumping to “only Muslim character of note is a bigot” and not “these two fucked up and now have to be gentle walked through their fuck up”.
Stop letting these two off the hook, part of this is their fault. You can definitely argue that the photo taker and Leslie share MORE of the blame, but that doesn’t make these two blameless.
The people ultimately have final say of what’s kosher in the protest and this obviously wasn’t. It was bad for the message and bad for security because then people had to scatter and Amazigirl got hurt doing cover for them to get out after they put themselves in the middle of tear gas.
If these two can’t put the act of protesting above their need to be all over each other, they need to either not attend them ever again, or only ones where that’s explicitly allowed. Not all protests are carbon copies.
The protest was “over” in the sense that it was in the active process of being forcibly suppressed by riot cops. That aside, the fact that the photograph of their kiss has become a focal point of the local conversation regarding the protest means that it’s completely fair game to discuss it in that context.
No one’s arguing Joyce and Dorothy didn’t have a right to kiss in public just that they had bad decision making in the moment. If they had waited even a minute to think things through or focus on the events around them that picture never gets taken. It’s not really even on them. Daisy chose to run the photo. And to be frank for a moment between Dorothy and Joyce’s lack of self awareness and Daisy pretty cavalier justification for running the photo basically being “I’m horny” there’s a lot of white women taking little to no responsibility for under cutting a protest that they have definitively less stake in. God forbid any minority be annoyed at that.
“Listen, this is the content that readers demand. It’s me, I’m readers.” That’s a joke, she’s being funny.
On the next page she gets serious and gives the real reason: She thought it was the best photo because it resulted in high reader engagement. Arguably, this is her doing her job as an editor. One of the most important metrics on whether you are doing your job as a news editor is reader engagement. It doesn’t matter how well you report the news if nobody reads it, and as editor you have an obligation to your paper to get and maintain readership. At the same time you have an ethical responsibility to report honestly and truthfully inform your readership. Daisy believes she is fulfilling both responsibilities by using the most striking and eyeball-grabbing front page image she had, and then putting the full report on the protest directly behind it. Obviously Raidah and most people here disagree that she acted correctly, but the point is her decision is one that many editors make on a regular basis.
Now let’s use our thinking caps to consider what systemic forces might be at play in determining why a picture of two white women kissing might get the most engagement for an article on a genocide protest, and whether it might be perfectly within reason for people of color and Muslims to object to it
The systemic issue is that humans are drawn to sex and violence, and a passionate kiss while a protest being violently suppressed in the background has both. That said, yeah it’s entirely reasonable to be upset with Daisy’s decision. While she tried to achieve both engagement and truth-telling, she did not actually achieved it. The fact is Daisy prioritized engagement, and in a serious matter like this she should have prioritized truth-telling.
I don’t think the dynamics of the situation play differently without people of colour, which suggests racism is a weak factor at best. If it were a protest in Germany over the financial ties to Russia, a picture of two girls kissing while riot police violently suppressed the protest would still be the most eyeball-grabbing image.
@Lys that’s a real “what if the world was made of pudding” type argument. Like no wayyy if you change the factors and context of a situation entirely the outcome and dynamics might actually be different? That’s so crazy.
Except my point is that altering the situation so that a particular factor is removed, the underlying incentives remain the same, which suggests that factor is not very relevant the incentives in question. Dot is saying that the picture of girls kissing as the protest is violently suppressed gets the most eyeballs because people are too racist to care about the genocide in Bulmeria. I am saying that it is the most striking picture because people like sex and violence, and people not being racist wouldn’t change this.
The title of the article was “kiss bombings good bi. Despite cops assaulting students and bombings still happening. Misleading fluff title that undercuts the seriousness of the issue to focus on girls kissing. I’m sure all the people who camped out there for a week really appreciate the violent police crackdown not at all taking focus or precedent.
Like, shit, people already mentioned Protest Frog Guy above, except a lot of people seem fuzzy on the detail that him showing up in an inflatable frog costume was a deliberate strategy to make it impossible for the police or media to imply that the ongoing campaign of fascist violence against citizens bore any shred of legitimacy. It was smart protestors using clever tactics to ensure more people could see, who the real aggressors and bad actors were, even if outlets and pundits tried to spin it otherwise.
Joyce and Dorothy was not that, and I’m surely not gonna suggest that the dedicated members of the movement, such as Asma and Jocelyn, can’t be upset that their messaging got drowned out by clickbait journalism that doesn’t support or advance any part of their end goals.
I think your argument makes Daisy look even worse. It was either for personal titulation or shameless sensationalism or likely both. And when the Muslim woman raises valid complaints she doesn’t have an answer. Then we leave the scene. Making a joke of it shows Daisy doesn’t take the situation as seriously. Even if metrics are all that matters.
The sad thing is, the sort of decision Daisy made on this strip, is the best advertisement she could have made for her portfolio as a future career journalist. It may be an ethically bankrupt move in favor of profit, but as it turns out, “willing to be ethically bankrupt in favor of making more profit” is exactly the kind of attitude that every recruiter in her broader industry will be looking for, when it’s time for her to get an actual career.
She’s objectively wrong, and selfish, but she’s doing the sort of thing that outlets actually want out of a “journalist” in 2025, and that’s part of the problem, itself.
This isn’t a new thing, so much as an old thing coming back. The broken incentives that lead to Yellow Journalism in the 19th century are pretty fundamental to doing news reporting in a free market with a highly competitive attention economy. For some reason the 20th Century American Consensus was able to tamp down on this, which is why the inexorable return sensationalist reporting feels new. My off the cuff speculation is that it was the result of government censorship of media during the two World Wars. Just as Prohibition drove down alcohol consumption for decades after its repeal, I think the World Wars created a culture of responsible journalism that also carried on for decades after. However generational turnover has eroded that culture and left behind the fundamental bedrock truth: News is business, business needs profit, and profit requires attention. So here we are.
No, astariel’s genuine and very firmly held position is that Dorothy and Joyce did literally nothing worthy of any criticism whatsoever vis a vis the kiss and its immediate lead-up and aftermath
Nah fuck it, they did not have the right to throw a tantrum about their dumbass feelings and make out in the middle of a teargas fountain when everyone who knew better was saying “get the fuck out”. They’re like professional nuisances and not even in the cool disruptive protest way. They’re just really good at being annoying
Anyone can kiss anyone on impulse at a protest, with consent between the two kissers. If such natural human behavior is used to hijack the message of the protest, that’s the fault of the hijackers.
If I’m at a protest and I happen to kiss my wife, and some reporter decides to put that front and center because we’re of different races even though that has nothing to do with the point of the protest we’re at, that is not our fault.
Yeah a lot of this reaction is Daisy’s fault for letting her libido dictate her job. Joyce and Dorothy may have had crap timing but it’s not like they were trying to hijack the protest or draw attention to themselves.
She actually stole a sign from a much smarter, more engaged protestor, to go perform martyrdom as a means of self-harm via Cop Suplex, because she can’t mentally distance herself from her crippling need for moral purity. If Joyce hadn’t temporarily cured her with smooches, Dorothy may have had to actually reckon with some introspection; but, now, stuff is just happening, and so she’s got something outward to focus on.
Bungling up an apology for something one is not at fault for is the apologizer’s fault, yes. Not the issue I was addressing though. People have been assigning fault to Joyce and Dorothy for this long before the last couple of days.
Do we know anything in particular about how strictly religious Asma is? There is potentially some interesting story elements that could happen between Joyce/Asma as a way to explore the way different religions interact with the broader culture.
For instance Joyce is coming from a fundie Christian background and her arc has largely been “I was very religious but then I got better” with her move to being more secular being a big positive progressive step.
Could be an interesting narrative space for her to misunderstand the cultural nuance and try and push the “more secular = more progressive” idea onto a devout Muslim character.
Sal already passed them by, though if she recognised it for what it was is anyone’s guess. Raidah might be about to confront these two, though, now that she’s done with Daisy and prayer time.
I think Sal is one of the characters with the most reason to guess it might not have been okay with Walky, but. Walky isn’t the most communicative. I can see her assuming:
“They broke up and Walky hasn’t told me about it yet.”
But the joke in that strip was that they weren’t even acting as gay as usual in front of her, and then she almost IMMEDIATELY had to deal with Amber, which I imagine was sufficiently distracting from “Joyce and Dorothy were being a little weird.”
I specified biwoc there, black and indigenous. I don’t think Japanese counts unless she’s ryukyu or ainu or something. Generally refers to brown poc specifically, and I think a lot of people here have subconscious (I wanna be charitable) issues with brown skin
We’ve seen Raidah (a character we typically are meant to dislike) criticize Dorothy and Joyce, and she was called all sorts of awful things for it. We saw Sarah (someone we’re meant to like) criticize them and be called all sorts of awful things. We’ve now seen Asma criticize them and be called awful things. It really is quite awful seeing how gross, racist, and islamophobic people are getting for the sake of fictional white girls kissing.
I mean, I’m not happy about it, but I’m not shocked that some white commenters have an equal level of understanding of these issues as Joyce and Dorothy. Having met white people, yeah…not the greatest at unpacking their own culturally-imperialist assumptions, and even worse at taking critiques of them.
This arc is a great example of how writers create something but have no control over how readers interpret interpret it. There are now sects and denominations of readers in the comments.
I’m viewing this as part of the cascade of consequences which has resulted in apology tour through the cast. If it proceeded just as I expected and wanted it to, it wouldn’t be worth reading.
Yotomoe linked a really good comic from the past earlier, and I was floored at just how many fewer comments per strip we used to be getting. Willis has really turned the comments section into a perpetual all-out war between competing moralist factions, and while I hope it’s good for his analytics, it’s been really bad for my enjoyment of the comics.
Like, I was actually struggling with the idea of “did it really used to take so much time and energy to take a quick look at the comments every day?” Turns out, no, it didn’t; there used to be 100 comments of people being casual, now I gotta rev up my Discourse Engine to “fraught environment” to make any given comment, lest I be accused of multiple conflicting bigotries, and there’s 4x as many comments to get through.
The Kiss strip itself broke records, but we’ve been here before. What’s different is those were mostly fairly contained – a chapter or so of focus on the conflict at most. This has gone on basically without reprieve for like half a year.
I’d like to remind everyone that these two climbed on to an elevated surface to kiss. This was not a “oh, we kissed and we happened to be in the geographical area of a protest” situation. They went into a protest without caring what it was about, then when the organisers told people to disperse, Dorothy climbed onto a… mound?, made a lot of noise about a situation that she knew nothing about and didn’t care about literally five seconds earlier, and then Joyce climbed up after her to kiss her.
That’s absolutely not true. Dorothy %100 cares about it .she’s the only one in the entirety of this comic to perfectly explain straight up facts what the protest was about.
Dorothy couldn’t name one pro-Bulmeria talking point if she tried. She may have morally pure intentions, but to suggest she’s actually educated on the topic just…seems to have no evidence to back it up.
Kinda gross how many people just assume asma is homophobic and not comfortable with women kissing and that if she were that it’s explicitely because of her religion
Y’all. We have sooooo many queer/ally religious people in this comic. why is this the gun everyone’s jumping to?
Because a lot, A LOT, of people who are queer and reading the “a religious fundamentalist goes to college and unpacks the horrible way she was raised and finds out who she really is and loses her family as a result” comic have religious trauma.
It’s not an excuse for what’s happening in the comments here today, but it is absolutely a huge part of the reason.
having just come out of toxic (often authoritarian Christian) belief systems, a lot of them are in this fearful headspace where ANY religion or devotee thereof looks suspicious to them
that still doesn’t make Islamophobia like this okay
Well yes, Islam (and a lot of religions in general) say one should strive to avoid temptations and giving in to lust etc – it’s not an uncommon position in some practices that it’s alright to be gay but since it’s not allowed to marry one must carry on being celibate regardless.
Usual caveat that my experience with Islam is different from yours etc etc
Crazy how no one had the same reaction to the fucking. MORMON. Not like they have a reputation right? Like yeah Aggie is lovely but assuming she’d be homophobic is just as fair and charitable as assuming Asma would be, and less racist.
To be fair, Agatha didn’t say anything that could even really be twisted into homophobia, while Asma’s talking here about resisting the temptation to kiss girls.
I don’t think she’s being homophobic, more of a “there’s a time and a place and that wasn’t it”, but there is something there to work with. Unlike “Everything you do is swell!”
Bro, Asma and Dorothy are somewhat irritating here. I don’t even know why Dorothy needs to apologize in the first place. And it’s dumb Asma has any right to be mad about someone kissing.
Dorothy is properly contrite about making a protest about people being wiped out the backdrop of her gay panic fueled tantrum when they had no business there to begin with, and Asma is just rightly telling them they probably could have kept it in their pants until they left the protest for that said thing like they were being told to do anyways. There’s such a thing as a time and a place.
Not that she’s even in the wrong for bringing it up because it was actually Joyce bringing it up without prompting to let everyone know how epic it is to kiss Dorothy again. Asma is more or less an innocent dragged into the mess that Jorothy has become.
Of course she’s allowed in the protest. It’s absolutely ridiculous Asma would assume one of her school mates is a cop knowing her reputation as a school reporter and seeing her daily. I just assumed Dorothy is overall apologizing for being in the front page, which is absolutely not her fault that happened either. But I didn’t really have a problem, specifically about the cop thing. It’s just THiS conversation is just unnecessary. I wonder if this scene exists in the original comic in the bufferm
And with that. it’s dumb they both think the lovers are at fault for the media coverage. I’m assuming Asma is having the exact same stance Rhyda is having, a couple strips earlier. But at least Rydia is being mad at the one actually responsible for the newspaper. Joyce may have brought up the kissing specifically, but obviously Asma already has her own opinion about it
And her opinion about the kissing is just a big huge example of hindsight bias. (Lol, I was saying bystander effect earlier but had to Google to confirm the right concept) It’s what makes it so cringy to my eyes. That “I told you, you shouldn’t have ____, now look what happened?!” mentality
That’s they have no business was not to say they can’t be there if they wanted to be there for the right reasons, but they weren’t. They were not there because they cared about the people dying they were there to find Jocelyne, but then stuck around well past the demonstration for their own personal reasons and turned it into a set piece for their drama. It’s a faux pas to say the least, which is why Dorothy is apologizing because she’s recognized that.
I don’t think anybody fault’s them for the media, even in the strip itself Asma is giving them leeway and saying that the journalism centered it. She’s still giving them flak for turning a protest of genocide into a place to make out though, she has an opinion that I feel like is generally normal that you really ought to not be swapping spit in a scenario like this. People are dying and it’s a protest for the school’s active involvement in it, it’s not giving the situation the respect it deserves. Which is why Asma, among other characters have been derisive of it outside of the media coverage. They made a spectacle about it so much so that Amazigirl and Asma both saw it well before the media coverage, hell Amazigirl saw it while fighting cops and helping other people leave.
Asma is just telling them that it wasn’t the time or the place for it after Joyce specifically asked if not kissing her was what she was supposed to do, which she is not wrong about. I don’t think anybody can really argue that a rally against genocide is not the place to have your revelation on wanting your best friend romantically.
Dorothy is apologizing for the newspaper and “cop” thing. Not what you’re suggesting. Dorothy is the only one in the comic to explain the very core of the protest’s message to the rest of the cast who hears. She totally can protest and should be welcomed there. As a previous protester I welcome her and any other people of various “reasons”. Tho not here specifically, since you can die, but regular ones without snipers and stuff, or if the plan involves looting, yeah, I steer away from those. Even those that do it for “brownie points”, completely valid. The willingness to grow in strength of a protest in numbers is always appreciated. Unless the protest is for something stupidly wrong, of course. But she absolutely knew what it was about. ESOECIALLY of Dorothy ‘s ethnicity which is already pulled into the very misrepresented politics disguising the war.
Asma can say whatever she wants. I’m just annoyed she has those opinions.i don’t get why people care about pda and why is the newspaper really that big of a deal for her, suspensions of belief wise. Is this really supposed to show her personality here? Stuff like that. So I understand that there is no “right” rules about this. There’s no rules about protests either. A protest isn’t one person cloned a few thousands times who has the exact definitions and policies of that same protest. Some are going to be more uniformed than others. So I’m disagreeing with you about the kiss, but I admit that there is no right or wrong objective answer to that.
True, Dorothy is totally capable of protesting this, which is a shame that she did not come there to protest at all and then used it as a platform for something else entirely. She probably should have tried doing that. I think a lot of people would be less mad at her if her presence wasn’t just a final last stand that was more about her feelings she couldn’t have than care about the people dying that the event was about.
I think your problem is you’re too caught up on the newspaper, which Asma mentioned once and immediately dropped from the conversation and aren’t focused enough on what Asma is actually saying. There’s no right or wrong way to protest except not to be there to protest at all, Joyce and Dorothy were not there to protest at all. They weren’t not protesters and Joyce still hasn’t even shown an inclination of caring in that regard at all.
I simply cannot agree that Asma is doing anything wrong when telling them that maybe they should have just sat this one out. Instead they showed up, begged for information on one of the people there for the protest, ignored the people who were running the protests direct orders to leave as the cops got violent, then went into the middle of the scene and made out. I simply don’t know how you are arriving to this being an Asma hates PDA thing., and not an Asma hates hijacking protests for your own personal drama completely devoid of any relation to the protests.
To be entirely fair, I spent an entire semester with a friend of mine being undercover in my class and didn’t realize until she and the professor revealed it on the last day. She wasn’t a cop, she was something else I forget relating to education, but it was deeply unnerving and affected my trust. It is totally possible for a schoolmate to be a cop.
But I’m pretty sure Asma’s bigger concern was Dorothy either being an informant or a plant.
Gee!! Now that you say it like that. That’s a very very BOLD thing for Asma to do, oh my God lmao! Tho I have to remember Dorothy ‘s last name doesnt sound Jewish so I’m sure Asma wouldn’t know. I never really thought about informants. Does police discovering the discord chat really deter in any protests tho? Hmmm, stuff to ponder. But if I’m villifying the opposite side like that… Yeah. Yeah. “They WOULD send a child. Child labor!” Lol
It depends on the security culture of the group. Most of the time the issue isn’t so much that they’ll figure out who is at the protest or what the plan is, since those are public, but more that they’ll figure out who is organizing/leading it, and sometimes they’ll intentionally push doing something illegal or cause disunity.
Holy crap people, she didn’t try to imply Dorothy was an undercover cop. She said Dorothy had “cop energy,” which is to say, she thought it was very reasonable that a random, uninvolved person showing up at the protest, demanding the specific location of a named participant, should not be treated as trustworthy.
Like, this storyline exists in a social backdrop where actual American citizens are getting black-vanned and disappeared out of the country. It’s basic protesting 101 to not just give the names and locations of participants to random people, and the fact that Dorothy and Joyce did not clock at all that their behavior was strange, dangerous, and out of place, was even further reason to suspect their motives.
Who’s to say Joyce wasn’t looking for Jocelyn at the behest of her Dad and older brother, who want to find her to “save” her from the Godless communists who have infected her brain with communist transgender ideology? Who’s to say that they weren’t there for reasons that were dangerous to Jocelyn? Asma couldn’t possibly have known that, and she acted objectively correctly in being skeptical of two new random white freshwomen, who haven’t been spotted at the weeks-long protest a single time before now, showing up and asking for people by name, when the cops are less than five minutes from storming in and making arrests.
If you don’t understand why Asma was right, I can understand that belief, given the clear gaps in your knowledge of this issue. But she was right, and if she did anything but what she did at the protest, we would have all rightfully judged her for it.
I mean Asma didn’t ask for an apology and talked about the kiss cuz Joyce decided to randomly bring it up. Even then she didn’t say she was upset about the kiss itself, mainly her annoyance that it ended up taking center stage in the paper which ends up kind of overshadowing the protest by proxy
She has a right to be mad, she has a right to any emotion she wants, in fact (as do we all). But that’s not the same as someone having explicitly wronged her or owing her an apology or deserving a dressing down or anything (nor does it reject any of those possibilites).
I’m not surprised that when the people she’s annoyed at come up and annoy her more, she snaps at them, especially considering she’s unaware of the actual reason (lacking important details anyway) they were at the protest. From her perspective it looks like two people just wanted to go to the protest “for the experience” or to hang out or something and used the situation as a romantic backdrop, which would be potentially profoundly objectifying. And they didn’t intend to do that, but it is partly true that that’s happened.
Getting mad at people for kissing is silly, sorry. They’re not the ones who printed it on the front page of the school paper. I feel like Asma’s anger here is a little misplaced, though Joyce could also stand to shut up for once. Joyce is being a stereotypical conservative white girl, despite doing the first bits of work deconstructing that. Daisy’s actions were far more problematic.
Joyce and Dorothy approach Asma and –while probably reeking sex– just stand there staring at her with smiles on their faces while holding each other.
Asma breaks the tension by jokingly accusing them of propositioning her for a threesome.
Dorothy asks how Asma is and apologizes for her “cop energy”. Asma indicates she does not enjoy this conversation.
Joyce brings up how she is NOT apologetic for their front-page news kiss.
Asma -in reference to how their kiss has overshadowed the protest and the violent police crackdown– says that she hopes they did not intend to be front page news.
Joyce is aghast and offended at even the hint that there could be inappropriate times and places to do whatever she wants (in this case kissing Dorothy).
Some days I really feel like I”m reading a completely different comic from the people in the comments. These two walked up on Asma and started being pretty obnoxious when she was already frustrated by their (intentional or otherwise from Asma’s perspective) actions.
as cringe as this interaction is, I actually APPRECIATE that this interaction is happening between Asma and these idiots?
I dunno bruh it’s just nice whenever the comic explores racism in ways that doesn’t always manifest itself as like, “cartoon supervillainy” as Jennifer once put it
fundie or not, for white folk like Joyce and Dorothy to do this kinda shit is hardly uncommon IRL, what given how our US society is built on a Confessional Model and racism being baked so much into our culture, how we speak, how we do things, etc.
Also I’m kinda concerned why people are bringing up religion here. From my understanding. The protest had nothing to do with current situation. Period
but when it got retconned recently to be so. The irl version has nothing to do with religion. The ____ phobia propaganda was just strawman argument for the offending government to do what they want. You can smell the bs because my president “loves” this government and concerned about the strawman despite being massively racist. It’s out of character of him to give a shit about that. Dorothy explains it really well at some page somewhere.
Asma is a receptionist in a residence with LGBT friendly policies. So, I don’t think she’s taking a religious stance.
Tho, I don’t have more context, so might have to eat my own hat in tonight’s strip
Interesting that at least 2 people have pointed out what we have actually seen/read in this strip (felt a need to point out?).
There is always a lot of ‘assuming’ that goes on in the comments. Some are ‘I think this’ followed by ‘called it’, which seems to be a legitimate game. But some read more like “this is what happened” (not even ‘in my opinion’). Often these are based on assumptions that it is really not valid to make. And with a comic that updates EVERY day (thanks Willis), *my opinion* is that it is more fun to note what we do, and what we do not know, in silent but excited anticipation of what will be revealed next.
My example here is the (opinion) thought that Asma doesn’t blame them for the photo, but does clearly (stated) think that they should not have kissed/kissed there and then. The intriguing question is why Asma says this. Of course there are many possibilities, that is why it is fun. Will Willis tell us (now or eventually): that is also a question! But I certainly don’t want to jump to any conclusions based on what Asma’s experiences, logical thought processes, prejudices, wokeness (meant in the positive sense) might be that contribute, precisely because we know so little about Asma. So well done Willis for using that fact to advantage for intrigue value!
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Alice / Asma shippers catching strays from this one.
lots of ships leavin port, and some sinkin on the horizon this arc.
How so?
asma, do you happen to keep a spray bottle under the desk? might be the best way to get through to her
Asma: “So no more inappropriate PDA for a while, okay?”
Joyce: “…Alright.”
Dorothy: “Agreed.”
Asma: “Where are you heading, anyway?”
Joyce: “The laundry room!”
Asma: (spritz, spritz!)
as a front desk receptionist would be surprised if predecessor was like “we tried to but college policy doesn’t allow us too” and she’s not as bold as ruth to suplex anyone lol
“See? Because of me, they have a new rule!”
She does have a poking stick (broom) to deal with couples making out.
This apology is going great. Very genuine and not self centered
What is Joyce supposed to do, go two sentences without mentioning that she and Dorothy are totally in love?
She’s at the same stage of coming to terms with her sexuality that Becky was at when she couldn’t go three sentences without loudly announcing “I’m a lesbian!”.
Next stage is fucking on top of a dinosaur, but it may have to wait, I get the feeling Dina isn’t in the mood.
Maybe they can do it on top of the weighted blanket that Joe just bought for her.
I don’t think that’s how a weighted blanket works. The whole point is being under it!
It’s weighted, so it sinks to the bottom. Physics!
Weighted blankets are just like the lethal nets from the Predator movies if you’re patient enough.
“I’m not just a lesbian, I’m a super huge MEGA lesbian.
I’m so gay heterosexuality is no longer conceivable to me”
y’all think this is the most annoying she can get? just wait until she’s finished coming out as a lesbian, and remembers that she needs to come out as bisexual, next
Dina revenge of having a Dorothy/Joyce threesome.
Basically Joyce’s M.O. for the last month or two.
erm, Joyce literally doesn’t say she wants to apologize.
First panel yo.
In which case why is she even there
It would be nice if Joyce could stop being self-centered for more than a few minutes.
Hater containment thread ⬇️
I did a great many things in college of which I am not proud, but I can say with some satisfaction that I was at least never this ignorantly white.
right??? Asma is so justified here
my only pet peeve is that calling what Daisy did “”journalism”” seems… a little too generous if you ask me
for Daisy to make birthday balloons the highlight of a story about a funeral was a shitty move, but so was bringing balloons to that funeral in the first place
Oh I felt that “Journalism” was just DRIPPING with sarcasm
They need to just leave asma alone forever at this point.
Asma is a better person than me, I woulda lost all patience with them by now
If they left Asma alone, we wouldn’t get to see her.
Also, do I understand that you haven’t lost all patience with them by now?
Other people can talk to Asma.
I’m so annoyed by them going to Asma.
Joyce literally pointed out exactly why going to bother Asma about their own guilty feelings was the wrong move.
And then they just…did it anyway. Okay. Sure. Whatever, I guess.
It makes me wonder if the strip where pointed out they shouldn’t do this was from before the new strips with Asma were inserted, and originally they listened to her.
Hmmm. Being born ‘white’ is not something you can control. Being brought up ‘white’ isn’t, either. Getting to late teens and starting to think about is seems to me to be about the first time you get to exercise your own control. Joyce seems to be doing that.
Heck, nearly in my 70s and still finding things to re-assess.
I can confidently say that when I was in college I didn’t kiss someone at an anti-genocide protest.
I have never been this ignorantly white. I HAVE been this ignorantly cismale, but fortunately I had that beaten out of me (pretty nicely, all things considered) by my own dorm’s lesbians who instructed me pretty clearly on how not to be a dumbass about participating in my first Take Back The Night rally.
I wish that were me!
I think I was very much Dorothy at 18 in a lot of ways, and she woke up to the problems of liberalism a lot earlier than I did.
I mean, I’be never done this specific thing, but I also didn’t go to protests in college and I grew up in a very white part of the country, so in my case I think it’s less “knew better” than “was never in this position”.
God I fucking hate Joyce now jesus christ there’s nothing redeemable about her at the moment and her character has been literally shredded
I wasnt even planning on commenting today thinking we’d gotten to a part where i can just vibe and read but this page just makes me LOATHE oyce
I feel like she’s been this way for an extremely long time, just she’s getting more aggressive about it.
It may go hand-in-hand with Ruth’s prediction that she would one day stumble into an orgasm and end up screwing half the town. Joyce’s barriers smashed alla sudden and she has a LOT of reorienting to do.
Oh wait, just remembered her “I’m a jackass atheist now” phase. yeah this is how Joyce is til she actually matures, rather than mistaking grabbing at new things or whatever it is for maturity.
Also probably doesn’t help that Dorothy is an enabler and Joyce just ignores anyone who would actually rebuke her, like Sarah.
One of many reasons I like Sarah best of all these idiot sandwiches except maybe Dina.
The name is a coincidence.
I’ll bang on the drum forever that Joyce’s entire good-girl persona was an obsessive fear of sin. Joyce’s entire moral compass was the Sin Alarm, and she has deprogrammed the Sin Alarm completely. She has absolutely zero idea how to operate in a moral paradigm that isn’t externally prescribed by a deity, under threat of eternal omni-violence.
She had to deliberately learn to not have a complete internal shutdown over the prospect of ever doing anything morally wrong, and as a result, she’s convinced herself that there aren’t actually any meaningful, worldly consequences; very easily, in fact, because she was rarely ever scared of those, she was scared of the Sin Alarm.
So, she fixed one problem with herself…and exposed half a dozen new problems, because her being severely over-developed in one particular coping mechanism, was masking a shitload of her genuine gaps in what we seculars consider to be basic social skills and moral reasoning.
Recovering from toxic shit in one’s head, often does follow that pattern. You make yourself worse, long before you actually make yourself better.
I just hate cuz one of the best strips of the entire run has Joyce addressing this fact. Doesn’t mean she’s perfect at circumventing it but man it was a level of introspection on her programming that I just…feel like is going to the wayside now.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/freeing/
Oh ouch. You’re right.
The next strip after, Dorothy correctly identifies that Joyce fucked up specifically because she had been completely suppressing her libido for seven or eight solid years, and was led astray by inconceivable levels of horniness.
So I guess Joyce had one orgasm, and as it turns out, that was her Factory Reset button. She used to care about the consequences of her actions, now she only cares about doinking as often as humanly possible. Why ever have introspection, if introspection won’t lead to more yummy good brain chemicals?
also now im just sad because there’s a ton of real cute strips after that point, lol
actually, tacky reply to myself to acknowledge that, perhaps, it’s fair to consider whether her current sex fugue is, in fact, escapist behavior to avoid all of the actual hard work that comes with said introspection.
Oh, so we’re in Chobits now.
I wish Joyce had remembered that moment of introspection, but she seems to have completely forgotten about it since she started to realize her feelings for Dorothy.
When people complain that all this is super in character for Joyce and not an example of her backsliding, it is this strip I’m wishing she’d followed the trajectory of instead.
Right? Going back to that strip reminds me of when I loved Joyce. She was flawed, she made mistakes, sometimes really big mistakes, but she was trying. She was actively trying to be better and was responsive to people calling her out on her behavior.
Yes. So very much this.
I get that people can screw up multiple times before a lesson really sinks in, even if they realize after each time that it was a mistake, but in the narrative it really seems to undermine her growth.
Did I read this strip wrong all these years. She seems like she clearly envying the”promiscuous” lives of other people.
I suspect Joyce will have a crashout later, but that remains to be seen. IMO this is one of her biggest personal flaws. She’ll feel ashamed of hurting people after the fact, but she easily gets carried away while in the moment and goes too far, particularly if she has ‘encouragement’ from a friend (Sarah -> Jacob, Liz -> dirtbag atheist, Dorothy -> now).
I think this is likely just her brand of neurospicy, i.e. she doesn’t have good intuition about when she should restrain herself to be polite, so she’d been using religious rules as a crutch. Or, in the absence of that, a friend to moor herself to.
Ooh. That’s a good one! It’s nice to see Joyce is taking steps now to explore herself in a world without her previous foundations holding her. Tho I don’t see much contradiction here on this page since Asma can’t be hurt here if she doesn’t know Joyce’s personal relationships she is testing or even friends in the first place
Came here to find this and discuss the “without God you can’t be a moral person” fundie concept.
This seems to be Joyce’s paradigm right now. We’re all losing patience with her (or have been without patience for a while), but admittedly she’s spiralling because of the pile up of everything all nearly at once and needs to find her feet.
But her whole world has crashed. There’s of course the big traumas of attempted rape and Toedad, but also on a smaller scale her parents divorcing, realizing her older brother is a terrible person, leaving her church, finding out she’s a sexual being – that was a big one for her, finding out she’s by, having to navigate feelings for two people at once when her whole life she’s been taught “you meet one person and love them forever the end”, being the instrument of her BFF’s hurt, hurting Joe whom she loves, starting probably for the first time in her life to think about politics instead of just repeating Chick-fil-A talking points, and of course all that while trying to get an education instead of a husband, her whole future and worldview completely upended.
And she’s 17 (?) and out of her parents’ house for the first time. It’s just a lot.
So it’s rather realistic she’d react by following her hormones for a while. If she wasn’t we’d be complaining about her Mary Sue-ness.
Her question to Dorothy yesterday re: guilt assuaging is promising.
Now I’m waiting for her to find out about morality-without-a-deity. Turns out we’re not all being horrible all the time!
Well she’s at least 18. She stars in slipshines after all.
This is where I always stand with these kids in this strip. Yes, they’re absolute train-wrecks. But most people cannot handle the incredible excess of trauma that all of them have had, both before coming to college and since enrolling, gracefully. Like, I’d wager less than 1% of this comment thread has been through two kidnappings in their life. Let alone two in the span of a year, or less.
These characters are unrealistically hare-brained, even for college kids; but ffs, in real life they’d all be in inpatient care. Just…expect less of them, people. It’s an entire cast of broken-ass individuals, primed for further trauma, being driven at each other like bumper cars. Willis loves putting all his characters through the absolute ringer in the most over-the-top dramatic stakes possible, and I’ve never met anybody going through life events the way this cast does, who stayed at their absolute lifetime best composure and behavior through traumas that destabilizing.
Joyce has been this way since page one of the comic, especially when romance is involved.
Hoping Asma is not talkin about temptation, due to potential bigoted reasons.
More likely appropriate conduct at a protest against genocide
Meh. I see nothing inappropriate about a kiss during a highly emotional situation. There’s a lot these two have done wrong, but this is the exact wrong thing for them to be berated about.
There is a time and place.
I feel like I shouldn’t have to tell people “don’t swap spit with teargas on your lips, you fucking dentheads”. I feel like thats just a reasonable thing people should feel internally.
Yeah, I take umbrage with the overall idea that “kissing at a protest is selfish, because you should expect to end up being made the Main Character of Life,” because that’s gonna be unrealistic at 99% of protests. I don’t take umbrage with the premise that “making out while armed fascists are attacking, is definitely going to get somebody hurt.” The former can be false while the latter is true.
Especially since this protest was supposed to be an encampment, with people living there for days or weeks. There definitely would have been more than kissing going on if all had gone according to plan.
You’re right, “Make Love, Not War” totally worked in the ’60s and isn’t kind of embarrassingly reductive in 2025.
It’s quite expected in Asma’s presumed worldview as a observant Muslim to assert that worldly temptations are too be resisted, not acted on.
just crossin my fingers we don’t get another fundamentalist hate-sink to finger wag the cast lol
I doubt very seriously that’s where Willis is going with Asma for several reasons:
– She also appears to be queer
– This is the ~start~ of her arc, not the end
– Willis put in more Asma to have actual Muslim rep and I doubt they did that just to make her a different kind of 2D cardboard cut-out of a person
Maybe but from a narrative perspective there is some ground to be had about deconstructing Christian fundie vs Muslim fundie. Like Joyce going on her whole “I was religious but I got better” arc and getting praise for it and trying to push that secular is better idea onto a Muslim character and not getting why that is different.
It’s a little hard to parse, but remember her demeanor when Raidah and Alice were talking to her? That exchange wasn’t perfect evidence of being fine with girlkissing, but it suggests this is about situational discretion, not a “don’t shove it down my throat”. Asma definitely has a ton of experience with having to police one’s own emotional responses in public for one’s own safetly.
Also homophobes aren’t known for quips like the “receptive third propositionee” line. Also also she emphasized that middle word in a way that makes me think she is not unattracted to womenses.
I think it’s worth noting here that Asma doesn’t actually have to be homophobic as such to still hold herself and people who chose to talk at her to not engage in or make excuses for inappropriate PDA…
Agreed!
Oh god no wait… please don’t let Joyce mistakenly think Asma is homophobic. I don’t think that will happen, but they’re potentially miscommunicating in a way where it could, and she could easily assume that her own upbringing maps to other (presumably) religious people.
I categorically deny that the public display of affection is inappropriate. I’ve certainly always enjoyed being around people that felt free to express their affection for each other. It’s a positive thing not a negative one.
I mean you can cross over a line and I’m not saying get hot and heavy in the street, and maybe formal occasions call for decorum generally, but I tend to think that it’s the people that can’t tolerate people kissing, holding hands or hugging that are the problem. Seriously.
How about making out while people are getting teargassed or shot? Would you consider that inappropriate?
Or maybe going and making someone talk to you while they’re on the clock and you’re carrying around the dirty sheets just after you finished having sex, just so you can deliver an insincere apology that would only make you feel better?
I don’t consider my own discomforts to be anyone else’s problem on principle, and I can’t say with certainty whether KM finds it inappropriate, but the societal perception of it as inappropriate, And Asma’s perception in particular, is the main point here, rather than whether it actually IS a problem.
Also Asma is surely fed up with these two enough that she’s less able to let things go right now, especially with Joyce arguably seeming aggressive about it with zero provocation, in the middle of what was supposed to be an apology of some kind. Joyce doesn’t have Becky’s charisma or tragic backstory, she can’t pull off punctuating other people’s sentences with I’M GAY
Annnnd that’s when I remember how patronizing Joyce was to Raidah about religion. “I would NOT like to apologize for kissing her” might be Joyce expressing her upbringing in the form of unconscious yet intrusive assumptions about Asma.
It should be clear that it’s not about what I personally think, but what I, a person who is somewhat familiar with various expressions of Islamic values from liberal to conservative, think Asma thinks based on what we have seen of Asma to date and the words she had chosen to use.
I think people in the comments are being super weird about this. Like, yes, someone complaining about ‘inappropriate PDA’ does raise questions of what kind of PDA they consider inappropriate, but those questions are more or less already answered by the “hope it wasn’t intentionally center stage for the cameras at the protest” part.
People in this comment section have a habit of being extremely quick to read homophobic intent into the words of women of color. Happened with Sarah, happened with Raidah, now it’s happening with Asma.
FWIW, I don’t think Asma’s being homophobic (though I could see Joyce leaping to that conclusion based on wording and their limited exposure to one another). I do think she might be a bit envious. “Be discrete.” “Avoid the temptation to act on your desires.” “Don’t kiss in public places.” That reads to me like the rules someone who is very, very worried about her own position would follow.
We know Asma at least appreciates attractive ladies (Alice). And while it’s possible she’s from a more liberal sect of Islam that’s accepting of homosexuality (American Muslims are about tied with Protestant Christians in terms of being just over majority-support for same-sex rights, with a sizeable minority opposed), it’s also very likely at least some in her family and social circles would be condemnatory. So she’s had to learn these rules, and is perhaps a bit resentful that Joyce and Dorothy can be so casual and open about it.
I had to reread this strip like 5 times to parse it and I still don’t understand why this conversation flowed this way at all. What the heck is Asma talking about? Also Joyce and Dorothy’s overwhelming affection for each other has not yet become cute for me.
I also just don’t…feel like Panel 2 is phrased well. Like it doesn’t feel like it flows naturally from the previous statement?
It’s Asma’s meaning very obtuse? I think it’s very clear what she means. Though it’s probably against the worldview of most people here, since it’s essentially “if you being in situation X will lead to you sinning, don’t put yourself in situation X to begin with”
I should rephrase. I understand what she “means”. I don’t know WHY she’s saying it or why she’s saying it the way she’s saying it. It’s phrased so awkwardly and feels so disproportionate with the rest of the conversation that it makes me want to go back through the comic and see if Asma is meant to be ESL.
Ok someone helped me parse it better. I think she’s saying
“I HOPE you weren’t in the middle of the protest doing something so out of place. surely the newspaper photographer just happened to catch you”
I really really struggled reading it correctly.
I think in that panel, Asma is implying that she hopes they weren’t doing that, like, “Let’s do a performative gay kiss to own the conservatives!” that people do at protests sometimes? Especially because this one was entirely unrelated to gay rights.
Or maybe she’s hoping they weren’t just using a protest against genocide that resulted in police violence as a romantic date spot?
Asma was there when Joyce and Dorothy needed Amazi-Girl to smack a can of tear gas away from them and probably heard them getting told off for forcing Amazi-Girl to make detours when she was trying to make an exit for people that were trapped.
So even without the article she could assume the two of them considered kissing more important than the protest.
Oh, wait, I forgot that Asma was present for this conversation. I think THIS is what her comments are about.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-16/01-not-so-smooth-criminals/whatshername/
This!! Thank you!! This is a much better summation of how I feel about this strip. It’s just… I don’t get it? And then on like the 3rd reread it seemed like Asma is speaking For the Critics and Joyce is speaking For Willis.
W: I will not apologize for Doythy.
C: Yeah I hope the whole protest backdrop was like, an oversight or something.
W: I mean what was I supposed to do, NOT have my OTP kiss?
C: Yes.
W: But the setting was so emotionally charged! It was perfect!
C: Right so maybe change that so they’re not narratively co-opting this thing that has very real parallels to real life.
W: But this is the ship I’ve secretly wanted all along and I really like how impactful and dynamic this moment is for THEM!
C: Yeah so I think we’ve found the problem.
You mean they should get their own comic or something?
dang, this is… dang.
Willis has in fact specifically said the protest backdrop was an oversight, caused by them holding back the kiss while showing it to a sensitivity reader, so…
Like. Sometimes characters say things that do not in fact directly reflect the author’s feelings, especially when those characters are being rather dramatically lampshaded as being wrong and shortsighted.
But to say it again: doesn’t mean the execution is above reproach. Things that come from a sincere place can still suck big time.
I know Dorothy was one of your least favourites but has Joyce slid past her? Feels like this storyline has been way harsher on Joyce’s image than Dorothy’s.
I think I probably still like Dorothy less. Joyce is obnoxious but she doesn’t have Dorothy’s level of know-it-all, self righteousness going for her. This whole apology business is a prime example.
There’s been quite a bit of dotty idling off to the side t-posting with a blank stare like a broken npc place while Joyce gets righteous at people about why she just had to kiss her crush then and there
Asma’s point is that white people at protests shouldn’t do anything potentially photogenic lest a horny newspaper editor make that the picture on a student newspaper instead of making the story about the genocide itself which is totally a thing that would’ve happened had Joyce/Dorothy not kissed.
And it makes sense for Asma to make this argument, because she’s mad this happened and Dorothy/Joyce are thus Bad by proxy and also semi-unintentionally antagonizing her over it. And Asma’s argument is a way of addressing the meta criticism of how DoA itself used the Gaza protests as background set dressing, so it’s in conversation with the audience in an interesting way.
But also when you zoom out from the specifics of this situation Asma’s argument is kind of insane, lol. Especially in the current news cycle where some random dude wore an inflatable frog costume to an anti-ICE protest to be funny, which is much sillier than kissing someone, and it’s turned into a bit of a resistance icon and a symbol of the anti-ICE protests.
So that’s where the Bulmaria protest went wrong. They should have all started kissing each other.
Except the frog costume thing is entirely different. It was a deliberate protest tactic to make police violence against protestors seem even more out of place. Beating up on masked black bloc types can look justified, but beating up dancing frogs?
I have autism and poor impulse control (in general, but also like, some impulse-control related disorders), and “what am I supposed to do, control my impulses?” always drives me crazy. Yes! If it is inappropriate or unsafe (which that moment was!), you don’t do the thing!
I don’t actually blame Joyce much in the moment the kiss happened- it wasn’t planned, she hadn’t considered the idea of it being news that overshadowed the protest itself and I don’t think she could have expected that, etc. It’s the way she’s talking about it, when she already acknowledged on the stairs that this is supposed to be something good for Asma and not for their egos, that is driving me nuts.
What am I, responsible for my actions or something!?
That’s not a real thing!
I hate this even more than normal DoJo strips. I would like this to stop now, please.
Good news: discorse has largely moved on from the cheating
Bad news: it happened because they’re being low-key racist instead
they’re speed-running WhiteWoman%
idk I feel like this is a hater containment strip with Asma there to represent everyone not being gleeful at Joyce & Dorothy being together.
I am kinda mad that Joyce went to talk to Asma before Joe.
At this point its ridiculous, like, is she procrastinating the conversation?
I like Asma, I want more of her, less of them talking to her because of guilt
Turns out, she is kinda interesting on her own
I thought talking to Asma was Dorothy’s idea.
So for Joyce to go talk to Joe right this moment would mean she’d first have to think of him, then suggest going against Dorothy’s idea, and possibly explaining why she would want to talk to Joe instead of Asma.
There’s no way all 3 things would pop into Joyce’s head at this moment, especially since she’s still riding the high of being in a relationship with Dorothy as well as just having sex with Dorothy.
Great job, Joyce, good work at making Dorothy’s half-assed apology ALSO about your goddamn hornyness.
Also,
I’m connecting Asma’s assertion about temptation to the previous Asma-involved conversation in which Raidah(?) asserted that Joyce is a serial cheater.
And as Asma’s the front-desk worker in their dorm, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s seen Joyce and Joe together.
Long story short, I don’t think Asma’s being a scold about PDAs or about LGBTQ+ folks, I think that (in addition to her annoyance at these two being the faces of the protest) Asma’s a relationship paladin.
Agreed. Not just because of that previous conversation, but also because if Willis’ solution to the lack of Muslim characters in the comic was to give Asma more prominence by making her a bigot… That kinda just makes it worse? So I’m choosing to believe the less offensive option until proven wrong.
I really don’t think it makes her a bigot to snap at Joyce that if she can’t help herself then she should remove herself from the temptation when Joyce goaded her into a response (Asma did not at any point insist on the conversation, the conversation was forced on her). I do think it reveals something about how Asma does approach temptations in general – if you disagree with me that this is also related to her religion that’s fine. I could be wrong too, but I think if we accept that Asma is a whole complete Muslim person and not just someone with a label of Muslim, it’s fair to take note of how her words track with a worldview based on avoiding the temptations of the material world and staying true to scripture
It’s a good point to highlight that Asma’s choice of words and attitude during this interaction, probably have a ton to do with the fact that this interaction was forced on her, in a setting where she can’t ignore or refuse it. Getting Joyce to “so I can’t just do the thing I secretly wanted to do,” as quickly and tersely as possible, is actually really apt, since from Asma’s perspective, the white women really should have resisted the temptation of starting this conversation.
The temptation part can be religious framing without being homophobic.
This starts with the context of the kiss, not with it being a queer kiss. And the temptation part doesn’t come up until Joyce says it was impossible not to.
What in any of Asma’s appearances, one of which involved her checking out and showing visible attraction to another woman freely and without hesitation or shame, even remotely signals to someone that she would be homophobic
I don’t think she’s the least bit homophobic. I do suspect she’s envious of the fact that some lesbians seem to be able to parade their sexuality around without being condemned for it. As an American Muslim, odds are her elder family members, at least, are traditionalists about the subject, meaning they have some degree of homophobia in their thought processes. So “Stay discrete” and “Avoid Temptation” to me read like rules she’s had to follow most of her life to avoid ostracism, at the least.
Lmao oh yeah I forgot about that. Bad look
I don’t even feel personally all that bothered, just objectively and in the comic. Joyce is being so fucking annoying right now dear God. Literally all she had to do was say nothing. Dotty had this. The conversation could’ve ended after the cringe cop energy apology and they could have walked away. But Joyce had to be annoying and say she wasn’t apologizing for the kiss, completely unprompted. Like girl……. lovingly, shut up, god
Always nice when I’m reminded some people care more about the two white cartoon characters smootching than the feelings of brown people that exist in real life
Joyce is just boring as hell now. She has no character besides jumping Dorothy’s bones. Even in her apology she is immediately derailed by her desire to not even hypothetically be off Dorothy’s dick. There’s not been one thing since this storyline has began that made her do anything but constantly reaffirm how much she just wants Dorothy.
When will she be allowed to have any of her other personality traits back? That’s my biggest gripe here now, cheating has been talked to death but Joyce has just been like a broken record for so long.
I think a possible explanation (which doesn’t make it any more repetitive or annoying for anybody) is that Joyce has very little frame of reference for doing anything passionate, sans zealotry. Her main role model to copy “being a lesbian” behavior from, is Becky. So, that’s part of her core concept of “how lesbians act,” and Joyce absolutely gets through social situations by mirroring the behavior of people she sees as more authoritative or confident.
Furthermore, Joyce probably hasn’t actually finished unpacking the perspective that homosexual relations are wrong; she fully believes they are 100% right, now, because she can’t accept nuance anywhere in her moral fiber. So, she’s even more all-in on being Lesbian Zealot Proselytizer Joyce Brown, because at her gut instinct, she expects the amount of push-back for her current relationship, that she personally would have given that same relationship, two years ago.
She’s basically treating “being a homosexual” no differently than she used to treat “being a good Christian woman.” This is the only way she knows how to express an identity concept. And, she’s deeply afraid that her and Dorothy will get push-back, or have their relationship questioned, even though that’s not reflective of reality. Honestly, we’re risking several different future strips, of Joyce getting a constructive criticism about how her relationship is going, and immediately knee-jerk reacting as if the person doing the criticizing is some kind of homophobe for criticizing her.
There’s also just the fact that, she knows there’s a bunch of shit that her and Dorothy getting together have directly put into motion, that actually begs their responses, vis a vis social responsibility to other people in their lives; but, from those peoples’ perspectives, right or wrong, they all have been wronged; due to her completely rigid sense of internal ethics, Joyce cannot readily distinguish that aspects of her relationship have caused problems, from “my entire relationship is bad, because things are bad or good, and there’s un-good, here.”
She needs the constant reassurance that “kissing Dorothy was not just okay, but the morally correct thing to do, and also fate, and also the climax in the narrative of my entire life” for herself, because she’s in a very stressful situation outside this relationship, and she absolutely needs the reassurance that nothing she did here could possibly have been wrong in any way, because it involved her attaining true love with her future spouse, which is the singular life goal she was raised with, that she willfully hasn’t actually finished unpacking, because she’s scared she’ll find out that love can be a morally grey area; after all, if love is morally grey, that means her and Dorothy may not be bulletproof, and thus, may not be true love, and thus, may have possibly in some ways not been completely perfect, or maybe even some type of mistake.
Joyce is outwardly boring right now, but it’s because internally, she’s like a nine year old trying to drive an adult life with no lessons or manual. Her prior existing paradigm for how to behave on a moment to moment basis is completely gone, and she’s trying to learn ten plus years of social and moral skills in the space of a few weeks, story time. She used to be a Good Little Jesus Robot, and now she’s free; but, as it turns out, freedom has way more responsibilities and consequences, because unlike scripture, secular life demands nuance and compromise, which are arguably the two skillsets where Joyce is the most deficient.
Joyce, you’re going to have to learn some impulse control that’s not based on fear of being punished by God, parents, your community, or all three.
It’s why she wants to teach kids. Similar impulse control.
Nah, that was based on her assumption of getting a “Mrs. degree” and someday home-schooling her own kids.
That was the initial idea but during lunch with Jacob’s brother she thought about and said that yeah, she actually would want to teach kids.
Not even God can stop Joyce from doing what she instinctively wants to do.
he used to, but she got better. well, worse. well, you know, baby steps, or whatever
I’m not convinced he ever did.
That sounds like she tried to fck with Dorothy right there in the park.
It was a kiss…
alt-text intercepting the DID YOU FORGET SOMEONE? memes, gonna have to work harder team
I wonder what sort of books Asma reads, seems like she’s always got something open.
I’m going to assume that they are printouts of Amber’s fiction. I’m sure they aren’t, but I’m going to assume it anyway.
🎶 2 More Days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween 2 More days to Halloween, Silver Shamrock 🎶
1 more daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.
Shit i fucked it up 😭 its 11 pm where i am.
🎶 1 More Days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween 2
1 More days to Halloween, Silver Shamrock 🎶
Well I screwed it up… again 1 day to Halloween 🎃 silver 🍀
You’re fine ❤️ celebration good
What’s the over/under on the next strip being an official Dina/Becky breakup? If there’s a day for it to happen it’s gotta be halloween
Is Joyce more or less obnoxious than Becky was when she came out
Right now I’m going with more.
More.
More?…oh please….MORE!!
Way more
Much more. Becky had sexuality euphoria but discretion and empathy. Joyce is hyperfocused on herself, which just… does not feel like where her character growth was taking her.
Obnoxious? Joyce is more. Becky was worse when she first came out though, cuz she kept talking about how horny for Joyce she was even though Joyce was extremely uncomfortable with it (and joked that she thought Joyce being uncomfortable was part of what made her attractive). Joyce is being incredibly obnoxious and irritating and callous, but at least she’s not sexually harassing anyone.
lol, Becky was SO more.
It’s not even a draw.
This is surprisingly dumbfuck of Joyce. I’d even say out of character.
Ever since Joyce kissed Dorothy she’s been insufferably selfish and tactless. She really only seems to care about what she wants
Way back when, a commenter said it perfectly:
“Joyce has a fairytale notion of love. Anything and everything is OK, as long as it is in service to ‘True Wuv’.”
This is a Joyce Drum I don’t personally bang on about, but it’s an extremely truthful drum. She can’t be considered a reliable narrator or a trustworthy actor where romantic things are concerned, because she actually feels obligated to perform/express the maximum conceivable amount of love for whoever she’s with, at all times.
She may have given up religion, but she hasn’t unpacked her own implicit belief that her spouse must be the sum total purpose of her human life. She hasn’t really been confronted about the idea, yet, that her way of talking about love and her way of loving, are incredibly incredibly over the top and beyond the pale.
See also her rewriting of history to make it so that in her mind she was always deeply in romantic love with Dorothy and always secretly wanted to kiss her, because it makes a better love story, when the reality is that as with most people she fell in love with Dorothy gradually and didn’t actually realize that’s what she felt until at most two days ago.
It’s consistent, but it definitely makes it feel like she learned nothing from her debacle with Jacob, even though it seemed to pretty deeply effect her pre-timeskip.
Joyce’s first obvious character trait ever since Roomies is how obsessive she is over romantic relationships. Finding a husband was her primary motivation for attending college, she employed assault to police her date’s behaviour, and the Jacob romance plot was a trashfire of tactless selfishness. I think the comic has developed to be more grounded and realistic now with more three dimensional side characters, so her bongoness stands out way more.
Never underestimate The Power of Horny
especially when backed up by the ability to rewrite history/memory to justify it as, well, what Lumino said/quoted.
Even before that, Joyce had already demonstrated certain possessive behaviors towards Dorothy.
she and Dorothy are both very realistic for teenage white Christian atheists
And if thatis what they are, then Willis is doing a good job of actualising them? I mean, as being what they are, as opposed to what lots of people seem to want them to be?
But is it that they don’t want them to be realistic, don’t want them to be teenage, don’t want them to be white, or don’t want them to be Christian atheists (or Jewish atheists in Dorothy’s case)?
Joyce being an utter dipfuck is perfectly in character, especially when it comes to romance. She’s stupid as shit and has terminal romcom brain. And she’s absolutely way too white to recognize how much she’s centering herself in this very important thing that has nothing to do with her. We’ve seen her act like this before, most of this storyline is very in character for her I’d say. It’s just. Annoying.
yup. all of her *least* appealing character traits/flaws are getting shown off in this storyline, which is really bad when she’s supposed to be a character (and part of a relationship) we like and/or sympathize with.
Asma’s a homophobe. Now that I said it as a joke, you can’t say it seriously without being compared to the joke. Haha.
ah, I see ya got some halloween “candy” early hehehe
how’re the scooby snax? :9
Is this a reference to eating out Feo Ul?
I was thinkin hallo-weed actually, but hey I guess that works too XD
Shit, I wish. I can’t hit that til the weekend.
There’s a non-zero percent chance that this conversations eventually leads to Joyce calling Asma a homophobe because of Islam or something.
Why not, the comments alrrady did it a week or two ago
Judging by some of the replies to earlier comments today, they certainly haven’t stopped.
Hopefully not the cringe of this whole situation is nearing critical mass, we dont need to add anymore fuel.
I don’t think Joyce has unpacked her learned islamophobia yet (tbh most Americans haven’t. Most westerners haven’t) so yeah I can see that
I wish this had worked.
Nope, still works. Earnestly calling Asma homophobic is still clownshoes behavior. Nobody better do it if they don’t want stuffed into a tiny car with a dozen other clowns.
okay, this comment sucks, actually
not because of the sentiment. i just want to make a joke where i melodramatically protest the idea of being crammed in the clown car, to the point that it’s implied i’m horny for the clowns. but if i do that, at least one person will misconstrue it as me throwing down chips on the “asma is a homophobe” table, and i’m not willing to wear that letter
Damn, the intersectionality of homophobes and clownfuckers. How could I forget?
I’ve been trying to forget for so long…
As a clown, I’m devastated to hear our shoes and our cars being mocked. Don’t you know clowns are VERY pro-LGBTC (the C is for clowns, it’s gonna catch on any day now)??
I’m sorry, I only know clowns carnally. I will aspire to do better as an ally and advocate.
She certainly sounds like a prude… and that’s problematic for many reasons.
We’ll see.
Yeah, how prudish of her to advise not making out under the circumstances in which Joyce and Dorothy started making out.
How prudish to not want to talk to two people carrying their sex-soiled sheets around with them
lmfao being a prude is something shitty men made up when women wouldn’t fuck them. The only thing problematic is your insistence that a woman with opinions about “appropriateness” and “temptation” is a prude because her opinions don’t align with yours. Get real.
She’s a prude for responding to a dumbass argument Joyce started for no reason
Im running out of characters to like
who remains lol
charlie hasn’t committed Bad yet
Skill issue.
Asma really wished she could go back to being a background character right about now
willis sends his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers o7
She was offended that two randos she’s barely spoken to didn’t know her name, even though she also didn’t know their names. Somehow she knew they were the main characters.
Eh, she hands out mail/packages for their dorm and probably has other front desk duties. They’ve almost definitely had quite a few interactions with her off-screen, it is pretty rude they don’t know her name.
She doesn’t work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. She’s the face of the front desk because it’s a comic so a consistent character is depicted in that role, not because she’s there literally all of the time.
I don’t know, man.
I fully comprehend the impulse towards course correction in the wake of some of the criticism of the protect arc, but this just kind of leaves me cold. It does not feel meaningful to me to suddenly center Asma, who for the entire lifetime of this strip has not been much more than a running joke about the inability of the entire cast to remember her name. I can’t imagine that the framework of the story is going to suddenly alter radically to make her a central character of the cast, so it’s hitting me a bit odd to have these interactions with her in the fringes of the active plot, completely auxiliary to the main story. I don’t know that I’m enjoying seeing this one-note joke character inorganically propped up to be a spokesperson for Muslim people.
It has absolutely nothing to do with Joyrothy, really. Even if they had misbehaved somehow, I can’t imagine they’d be terribly self-aware about it. The panel where they went right on making out after their big moment felt like a much more natural reaction to me than the self-conscious reaction that was grafted on after the backlash. But even in a world where they had misbehaved AND were painfully conscious of having done so, why would it even be a thought in their head to apologize to Asma? They don’t know her. They are hardly acquaintances. It only makes sense as a thing to do in a world where Asma has been propped up as a representative of Muslim people.
And to be clear – I don’t actually think Joyrothy really did anything wrong at the protest. Were I present, I don’t think the sight of two white girls making out in my periphery would even make the cut for short-term memory. God knows I’ve seen weirder shit and worse behavior at protests in the past. It is really more of a problem how the comic itself built up and framed the event. Maybe the second panel is trying to be a little self-aware about it; if it is, it’s kind of ringing hollow to me.
I really think the protest was a serious misstep and that the subject matter was biting off a lot more than this dramady slice-of-life comic was prepared to chew. If it had been left off-camera, vague, and up to the imagination, I think the tone of the comic might not strike me as so dissonant. There are protests on university campuses all the time, after all. But the parallels drawn towards the Palestinian genocide brought up some serious moral questions with which this cast of characters is just not equipped to contend. Now the question hangs over every single cast member: are they aware of what is going on? Are they shutting out information about an ongoing genocide by choice, or by happenstance? I don’t think characters like Walky or Ethan are designed to fall under this kind of scrutiny, but here they have found themselves.
Dorothy being the imperfect collegiate liberal who means well but is fundamentally self-centered works for her character, but what about Joyce? She came to that protest looking for her sister and stayed out of concern for Dorothy, but certainly she isn’t impervious to the circumstances under which it developed. Is she indifferent? Oblivious? So much buzz has been written about Jocelyne mustering up genuine feeling for Joe’s plight, but forget giving half a fiddling fuck about her younger sister’s love life – would she not care deeply about informing Joyce about the world events that led her to the campus to protest in the first place? This is all of course complicated by it being the on-ramp into what appears to be the main relationship of the comic, which is a heavier weight to bear than an arc about infidelity by far.
It’s just a hell of a place to have written oneself into and I cannot say that I have any idea what I’d do with it. I don’t envy you.
My guess is they’re apologising to Asma as a distraction from having to talk to Becky. It’s a middle ground from “let’s be irresponsible and not think about the impact of our actions” and “oh jeez we have to talk to our roommate/best friend who’s devastated right now”.
It’s weird to suggest they should talk to Becky. They already did, she is devastated, seeing them hurts her, there is genuinely nothing they can say that wouldn’t twist the knife. Becky needs help, but not from them.
good comment tbh
Unless these particular strips are an exception, I ‘m pretty sure Willis wrote these strips months ago and none of this is “course correction in the wake of some of the criticism.”
I imagine there’s SOME direction he’s going with this since Joyce is being deliberately written to be obnoxious here. It’s not like she’s being painted in a flattering light.
So I don’t think these strips are a ‘look, support my ship!’ insertion.
They have said as much that they are.
He did deliberately point out that, with his year-long buffer, that he had no excuse to modify the existing backlog of strips, such that more material with his Muslim characters could be inserted without having to wait a full year or more.
Maybe that’s why the script for this strip is so awkward? He tried to insert it too soon to get it reading crisp, and created a rush job for himself?
I always come back to this thought:
We have never, not once, received any information on the actual group facing genocide in Bulmeria. That they are probably Arab and predominantly Muslim is mostly extrapolation readers have made from the real-world events being fictionalized and the reactions of characters like Asma and Raidah.
There’s a casual dehumanization at play there, where the victims of genocide are reduced to a faceless, formless entity, a mere plot contrivance. We don’t know their history, we don’t know their culture, we don’t even know their name.
I had the feeling that Willis wanted an issue which would both be able to reference the Gaza protests at Indiana University AND be vague-enough to stand in as a place holder such that his comic would stay relevant long into the future (after all this isn’t the first or last time a protest in the US would wind up like this, right?),
and without necessarily meaning to do so, made a plot which marginalized this really serious racial issue as a background decoration without necessarily meaning to do so
like, I GET the desire to make the comic more relevant to the intended audience, but given the highly decompressed storytelling the strip is known for
it’s not exactly like it can be South Park or something XD
in the end Willis tried to do too much and juggle too many plates at once, and is trying his best to course correct within the constraints of the buffer and in-comic time
I keep coming to the conclusion that the protest subplot as a whole, at least the version of it that we got, was overall a mistake
maybe it could have been landed better, had the journey to the Jorothy endgame taken as long as willis had originally intended; however, the obvious truth is, that endgame was always a Hindenburg waiting to happen
I really wish the protest storyline had never happened, and unfortunately these insert strips only make it worse for me, not better :/ More Asma is good, but the content could have been. Literally anything else.
I truly do not know if Bulmeria is genociding another fictional country, a real world country or having some kind of civil war. And that bugs me.
it’s supposed to be a place-holder for US protests in general, because I think the main intention was to show how US authority react to student protesters, such that it would stay relevant that way long into the future
but at the same time Willis also wanted to hint at Gaza just enough so as to reference the IRL Indiana University protests about it in particular
in the end it was all fudged up and wound up being insensitive to this issue affecting us without meaning to be
I guess sometimes authors don’t fully realize there’s holes until they’re crossed this way, in Willis’s best attempts to course correct, at least now he knows for next time
Can you imagine if we got enough information on Bulmeria for the comments section to start forming opinions about whatever is happening there?? We’d have to have a SECOND containment thread.
There are already multiple uncontained threads anyway.
There are already people who come out of the woodwork anytime the conversation turns to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people in the context of the Bulmerian situation so I’m not sure there’d be much of a difference
It also undercuts the story in a more direct Cinema-Sins-y kind of way: If Joyce hadn’t kissed Dorothy, what would the front page of the paper been? It would’ve been “College Cops Tear Gas Students”, which also has nothing to do with Bulmeria, because as far as we’ve seen the protest didn’t actually do…anything. It was like 20 dudes holding signs.
If everything else had gone the same way except for the kiss, it probably would have been “Campus superhero assaults cops”.
The Kiss might have been a better front page.
How would knowing anything about about the situation in Bulmeria improve the story? What’s relevant to the narrative is that there is a protest in the Indiana University campus because the University has financial ties to organizations supplying arms to the conflict, but the details of that conflict don’t actually matter because the story remains the same regardless of what they are.
I think it’s really gross to use genocide as a backdrop to this plotline without giving any details whatsoever about the people being genocided 🤷♀️
So it gives you bad vibes, I suppose that’s fair. I’ve liked this whole arc a lot and thought it was beautifully done. The details of what is happening in Bulmeria just aren’t important to me because it’s backdrop. It seems to me that for a lot of people some subjects are so serious they shouldn’t be used it as a backdrop, such that if you bring it up you have to center it. It most often comes up in the context of sexual violence, so using rape is a side detail is seen as very tasteless, but it makes sense it would apply to genocide as well. Personally, I’m of the opinion that any and all subjects are backgroundable, but obviously it’s a matter of taste.
I regret using the phrasing, “I suppose that’s fair”, as this is not something that warrants grudging acquiescence. It is ENTIRELY fair to get bad vibes from how this serious and sensitive matter is being handled, even if I don’t share the sentiment.
Well, it affects how Asma’s tied into it, for example. The Gaza parallels imply that it’s Muslims genocided, probably by non-Muslims (if not necessarily by Jews). Willis explicitly deciding that he needs to give Muslim characters more prominence in response pretty much confirms that.
That’s a good point! Whether Asma feels a personal stake in the conflict due to the victims being coreligionists is relevant to the story.
Begging and pleading for Willis to name drop the group being genocides here ONCE cmoooon man it’s so basiiiic
Like fuck, would it be the hardest thing in the world to have a tv on in the background say something like “the X people, a predominantly muslim minority group living in the Y region of Bulmeria,”
Literally just add three or four words to one piece of dialogue. “We’re protesting the genocide in bulmeria *against the X people*”. There, done. Fixed. Jesus, Superman did it and they even basically had the same fake country name for the genociders
This puts a lot of what I’ve been feeling about the new strips into words better than I could’ve. Hanging in-universe lampshades about the mishandled protest storyline is just iterating upon the initial blunder, not undoing it. I like the idea of Asma becoming a character and Raidah gaining more nuance in a void but in practice their new screentime has been not as characters at all but as stand-ins for the criticism. I have not given up hope that they actually will be incorporated into future storylines in more organic and less tokenizing ways that aren’t all about the protest fallout. But for now these strips feel like the same genre of anxious and self-defeating apology as Joyce and Dorothy are performing in universe.
willis did post on bsky about wanting to include asma more for the representation https://bsky.app/profile/damnyouwillis.bsky.social/post/3ltzl6kdm622q
Just to expand since you linked the bluesky post, for anyone wondering whether these strips are originally planned or not, you can see in the following posts that Willis admitted that initially, Asma’s next reappearance after the protest was in a strip he was drawing at that point, one with Carla in it. So, clearly every strip with Asma in it from after escaping the protest (yes, including the strip where Asma sat at her desk alone and decompressed from the protest) is part of Willis’ effort to include Asma more and fix his mistakes.
Which, so far, seems to be going about as well as Joyce and Dorothy’s attempt to fix their mistake(s) with Asma.
(dang, there are layers here.)
Wow, in retrospect, that’s kind of crazy. Seeing her at the protest and then having no idea what happened to her for months is wild. I think a lot of people probably would’ve assumed she got arrested or something.
Agreed, leaving Asma’s fate up in the air for a year would have been CRAZY.
I still assume that Robin got arrested.
Leslie’s fine though.
Well yeah, Leslie has to bail Robin out. It’s the next step in their lovers to enemies to friends to lovers route.
God I want this.
I just want to know if Robin fulfilled her dream of shouting “Do you know who I am?” while being thrown in the back of a police car.
I gotta be honest. I don’t like the idea of only including more of them due to your desire for representation, or worse, guilt over cultural insensitivity. Representation isn’t bad but also every character doesn’t need to be a major character with storylines and arcs. It’s not like I’m chomping at the bit to know more about rose and Ken and sayid and Arnold and other Rachel are doing. If we get more of them that’s great. But if they’re not a priority or fun for Willis to write then I’d rather they just stay in the capacity they currently are.
Otherwise you just get dropped out of the narrative like those two women Leslie dated who haven’t been seen in 6 years.
It’s understandable, but the logic they’re using is sort of the thing that got them here in the first place. Willis has this expectation that their comic should represent the entire spectrum of human experience, and that’s very noble, but it’s something that even big budget TV and film struggle at. The difference is that we judge that stuff more harshly because they have the resources to bring in people with the proper backgrounds to make sure representations are authentic and not token attempt. Willis is just one person, sure you could hire sensitivity readers, but in the end people don’t have that kind of expectation towards independent creators doing it on their own. The best stuff in DoA, imo, has always been Joyce’s religious upbringing because that’s the stuff Willis actually lived through and the emotions are the most authentic. I’m not saying they’re terrible at everything else, but tackling Israel/Palestine clearly was not something they were equipped for. Poorly done representation is often worse than no representation at all.
Going off of the first part of what you said, I’m epileptic but I’m not gonna assume Willis is anti epileptic just cause an epileptic character has never appeared in the comic.
This is a stellar post, but I do think I have an answer for one tiny detail. I suspect I know why Jocelyn has absolutely zero priority for trying to educate Joyce about the Bulmerian Genocide, or about proper practical protesting skills: Jocelyn still sees Joyce as a child, basically.
Why the hell would Jocelyn want to get her little sister involved in the movement she wants to productively help? Joyce is way, way too immature, and furthermore, Jocelyn knows Joyce well enough to know that Joyce does nothing in moderation, or with half her heart; in Jocelyn’s head, radicalizing 19 year old Joyce, is probably a real risk factor for 20 year old Joyce being in jail, or somewhere even worse. Jocelyn is capable of being a smart, pragmatic, effective irritant to the system; Joyce will get herself put in the hospital by riot cops, or, hell, she might just embarrass and de-legitimize the movement, by doing a dumb-but-well-meaning-and-passionate thing, at any given moment.
There’s no point in radicalizing people who aren’t useful to the struggle. Jocelyn is mature and intelligent enough to recognize this. And, selfishly, she probably cares a whole lot more about her little sisters’ safety, than she does her own.
Yeah this is kinda the big problem with this, Willis is obviously using the two as a way to be self-critical, but it doesn’t really makes sense for them to feel this bad in the context of the comic. They kissed in moment of high stress and then got photographed and put on the front page (of a college newspaper not even a real paper) which they had no control over. The real problem is the storyline itself and how it’s presented to the reader. Willis used a made up country because they didn’t want to date the comic, but it ended up just making the whole thing come off in real poor taste. And because it has to be as non-specific as possible it can’t get into the real issues of Israel/Palestine, like the lunch with Joyce’s Dad being done offscreen so we don’t have to show the characters actually debating it. It just creates this weird dissonance where it’s obvious WHAT the protest really is, but comic doesn’t want to acknowledge it so things don’t really make sense in-context. Why does what character like Asma and Raidah think matter above characters of any other ethnicity? If it’s because they’re Muslim isn’t it really strange that hasn’t come up once in any conversation with them? Or at all when it comes to the protest?
“Why does what character like Asma and Raidah think matter above characters of any other ethnicity?”
With the current framing of the story, I BELIEVE the reason they (Joyce and Dorothy) care about what Asma thinks is because she was someone present at the protest who they saw and interacted with. There weren’t a lot of other named students there who they know (I may be wrong here, didn’t double check), so to assuage their guilt over the kiss they’re going to the person they know who was involved in the protest who they haven’t already spoken with.
As for Raidah, she’s pissed that the paper frontpaged two white girls kissing when the protest was about/for a situation that is obviously more impactful to people of a specific minority status. In her criticisms she isn’t outright upset for her own sake, but for the sake of the protest and for Daisy assisting Doythy in “hijacking” said protest. She’s full of righteous fury.
Why do we care about what she specifically thinks? Outside of the story, because Willis wants to give his Muslim characters more screentime given the obvious real-world parallels to this storyline and his lack of including them in the comic thus far. So within the story, because she’s someone who would be upset and outspoken enough about this to complain.
People wanting “course correction” really fantasize of a different reality.
Also this was written a year ago.
And there was never a real reason for any course correction. This is a wild take indeed.
Willis has said that prior to inserting strip’s that Asma’s next appearance was in a year, involving Carla. So everything with her til then is “new.”
No, it wasn’t! Willis wrote and inserted new strips to include Asma (& to an extend Raidah) more in the fallout of the protest storyline & they did that after taking criticism about it. There’s a link to a bsky thread by Willis floating around here somewhere where they talk about that, if you’re interested in learning any context.
https://bsky.app/profile/damnyouwillis.bsky.social/post/3ltzl6kdm622q
It’s a course correction. I understand that you want to pretend people are making things up, but these comments are based in an admitted reality. I encourage you to give it a peek!
Agreed in every way, Miri. This is what I’ve been feeling as well.
Inshallah Asma’s wisdom is understood
Asma probably understands very well the concept of resisting earthly temptations, seeing as she appears to be observant. Desires are a test to be resisted.
Well, this is AN opinion, but not necessarily THE opinion. People think differently. Not a criticism of Asma or KM for having and expressing an opinion, everyone is entitled to one. But. Bigotry arises from the assumption that one’s own opinion is correct and others’ opinions are wrong. Acceptance of that is key. (In my personal opinion).
If you don’t think your own opinion is correct (and hence others are wrong) then shouldn’t you change your opinions?
I actually think it’s okay to accept that one’s opinion can be tenuous or spurious, a holding pattern, until one can come across more solid information to change or form that opinion. Even if, or rather, especially if, said opinion is not on any topic that the person holding it is passionate about expanding their understanding.
If you have an opinion that you aren’t sure doesn’t suck, you can still have that opinion! Just keep in mind, you shouldn’t be too attached to the opinions in your mind, which you have previously vetted to be tenuous or spurious. Like anything more tangible in life, it’s okay to have an imperfect opinion, as long as you’re willing to upgrade or change it as necessary, when you get access to more related information or resources.
You seem to think my opinion is that desires are a test to be resisted. It is not. But I understand Asma is not merely a default liberal white person cosplaying as a hijabi and in a reply to a person who opened with “inshallah” articulated my presumption that she probably has a worldview that would be consistent with what she is saying and her presumed presentation as a hijabi Muslim.
Keep in mind, *this* is probably like all of the personal information she knows about Joyce, other than her mail-ordering habits. It’s no wonder she thinks Joyce is impulsive with these kinds of things.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-16/01-not-so-smooth-criminals/whatshername/
Pro tip, don’t apologize for something if you aren’t actually sorry and are just looking for validation that you did nothing wrong
OMG DONT I BE SAYIN IT 👏🏽
Dorothy, at least, is contrite in her own manner, though not really for the right reasons. Joyce, as has become her modus operandi, can’t help but get carried away about kissing Dorothy.
Dorothy actually started this off fairly well. Then Joyce took it off the rails.
To be fair, it was probably going there anyway, but damn.
And I just realized that Joyce here doesn’t actually contradict what she was saying a couple days ago. Her insistence on not apologizing for the kiss can follow directly from her question about whether Asma wants an apology.
Literally all she had to do was keep saying nothing,,,,,,
Also don’t show up to tell people specifically you’re not Sorry for something. Unless your goal is to be an asshole.
(More of a general piece of advice than a reference to anything in this strip)
okay I’m just starting to laugh now XD
that this pair of dorks be doin exactly this is funny
if only it weren’t so sad
Yeah. 😐
Lol. Does no one read what is said?
Joyce is saying on the first panel that she is not there to apologize for the kiss.
She brought this up completely unprompted. No reason to mention it.
Which makes it all the more obnoxious. She’s bothering Asma just to go out of her way to tell her she’s NOT sorry for anything. Just fuck off Joyce
okay genuinely for anybody reading the comments every day and having a bad time: i am giving you permission to not do that. you simply do not have to.
there is no rule saying anybody has to read the comic every day either. you are allowed to just catch up when youre in the mood.
i will not be reading any hypothetical replies i work nights. stay golden doaheads
Asma was done with this conversation before it even started. Joyce, Dorothy please just let her read her book in peace, Its the best thing for all parties involved.
“Out of the way, off in a corner” …of the currently-beseiged-by-cops protest site?
I mean yeah? Jocelyn (the person they were supposedly there for) was leaving, told them to leave, and that it was all breaking down, but they just stuck around for reasons and made it their time to make out instead of going literally anywhere else. They could have gone like, 5 feet away from the protest zone. But they didn’t because ~drama~
Right so that’s my confusion with this line. She’s NOT saying “I hope you were doing this outside of the protest zone” or “I wish you had just done it outside of the protest zone”. She’s saying “I know you were doing this within the protest zone, I just hope it was somewhere out of the way”. Which doesn’t make sense to me given the “protest zone” was quickly falling apart and there were cops and tear gas everywhere. Given the situation, where would “out of the way, off in a corner” even be??
Somewhere other than up on the little mound that Dorothy had climbed onto to wave a sign and make her unwanted dramatic last stand.
I *think* she’s saying she hoped it wouldn’t get much attention and distract from the matter of the protest. And then she saw it on the front page of the paper
It’s possible that if Asma didn’t directly witness the kiss it’s not clear to her that it didn’t happen earlier in the protest.
Like, surely any reporter taking pictures after the cops were attacking would be taking pictures of that instead, right?
It took me a while to parse but I think shes saying “I hope you to were kissing off to the side for personal reasons and just by chance a photographer caught you in an intimate moment and blew up.
Like if they were just sharing a kiss as they were leaving and that’s when the chaos started rather than kissing in front of every thing to like…make a statement.
Be nice to know how Joe or Walky or Becky or Dina are doing but I suppose we’ll just get comic after comic of Joyce and Dorothy apprantly being cute until we all agree they are, in fact, the cutest couple the world has ever seen
I think Carla and Charlie are cuter but thats just my opinion.
Don’t you understand? They’re the main characters .
That means the story of everyone else is totally irrelevant and are only allowed 2 pages maximum before more joyrothy continue to confess their undying love for each other
I mean, it was kinda in a spot where others should have been fleeing, so sorta out of the way?
I wish they had listened to Joyce two[?] strips ago and not done this
I wish this whole storyline never happened or at least not how it happened
I wish this comic didn’t have a comments section.
But then where would you complain about it having one?
there’s gotta be a PO Box somewhere, where we can write some sternly-worded letters?
Probably re- reh…. 🤢 Reddit….
But since it does, we MUST all read it.
Oh that’s actually really easy to fix! When you first open the comic, read the comic all the way through, and then just hit the lil ‘x’ in the top right of the screen! The way Willis has it set up, you actually have to click a whole unique button to open the comics on the current-day page and if you just don’t do that, it’ll be like the comments aren’t there at all!
If you can’t figure that out, lmk! I’ll do a deeper dive explanation with screenshots <3
“What am I supposed to do, not read the comments?”
“yes”
“But they are right there. It’s impossible not to read them.”
Yeah this plotline’s not for me either, but I feel better and less negative commenting on Joyce not following her own advice than I would going into detail on that.
No, no. This is the Internet. You are required to complain bitterly each day about how unpleasing you find the comic we come back here every day to read. Feeling negative is just the price we pay.
Joyce is sort of following her own advice. She’s not apologizing.
you’re right
she’s giving a self-guilt-assuaging pseudo-apology, which is honestly worse
Isn’t that more Dorothy? I don’t think Joyce is even hitting “pseudo-apology” level.
That would have been really nice.
She’s starting to get it!
Well, one of them is.
Dorothy I can see giving pause… but Joyce? Her inner romantic has taken over and she just wants to make out/have sex with her new girlfriend every waking moment, and anyone who tells her to chill is obviously a super-conservative bigot just like the ones in her former church. Full hedonism is the way to go now, or at least until the winter semester ends and Joyce can have a spring wedding with Dorothy. (Don’t tell me she hasn’t thought of marrying Dotty ASAP. I’m expecting Joyce to full-on propose on Valentine’s Day.)
At what point does this become harassing Asma at her job?
Because thats what it feels like to me by the end of the strip
the point was when the conversation started
Or you kidding? This is the most fun Asma has had in ages.
Another annoying character the strip could do without.
Uh, your name is a lie, though? You’re not dead. So like, why should anyone trust anything you say, if you’re effectively introducing yourself as something you’re not?
In contrast, I can attest that Taffy really is made from sugar and molasses, boiled with butter and pulled until glossy.
And if you were wondering, i too am someone you can go over the edge with.
I’m soft, sweet, and can be found in a variety of flavors, many of them fruity.
Best when salty.
Unfortunately, Joyce and Dorothy are two of the biggest main characters of this strip.
Yes how dare she *checks notes* have an opinion she is calmly stating.
What a bongo.
Idk man Joyce is a main character. Thankfully there are cool and rad people like Asma to make this stuff more bearable
Pretty sure Asma is not aware that was their first kiss, so Panel 2 would probably be about her assumption they were kissing before the protest and in her opinion either A) need to do less of that pretty intense PDA because it’s weird, or B) need to be more careful about the PDA because safety. It does not read like religious judgment!
We can also be pretty certain that Asma does NOT feel comfortable telling white women in public that she has a religious objection to their behavior between themselves. Don’t attribute Fundie shit to her without more evidence, especially with her (AFAIK?) entire previous lack of judgment on The Gay Stuff, even when talking with and listening to Raidah and Alice. “Congrats to them”, “I’ve… heard good reviews”, “receptive third propositionee”… these don’t have homophobe vibes.
Tbh I don’t think it’s out of character for Asma to be positive about other couples and crack jokes about the pleasures of kissing – but when people start talking at her about how they just couldn’t help themselves – switch to a more aggressive “you aren’t supposed to give in to temptations” stance like she did here.
I think I may have accidentally implied that being anti-PDA and having a religious objection were connected, but I meant that those two things could be conflated. I’m with you here.
Let me put it this way. Religion enters the picture not on the topic of girls kissing. It enters the picture in terms of how Asma as a woman of faith thinks one should approach avoiding temptations when riled up by Joyce’s “it was impossible for me not to”. Asma woulds have said the same thing if it was a hetero kiss or cutting class. It’s not about if she’s homophobic or not at all.
I mean. She works in a college dorm. And saying “I just couldn’t help myself” sexually is, if it’s not consensually agreed upon dirty talk, just kinda nasty and maybe reflective of Joyce’s fundie “men just lose control around temptation” upbringing. Except she’s gay so she’s inserting herself in that role.
I just realized that it fully tracks that Asma would not think that that is their first kiss; she just recently heard the (false) narrative that Joyce and Dorothy have been fucking for days, and that Joyce sleeps around heavily. That makes it completely understandable that she assumes them making out at the protest was even stupider and more self-absorbed than it actually was. Or, that she assumed that the two women who reeked of sex two feet in front of her, were there to proposition her.
Asma is right to say all of this stuff and also I absolutely avoid talking to people in service work positions outside of immediately relevant stuff that I need them to do because I’m terrified of being an inconvenience
Joyce is just committed to being a fucking idiot, isn’t she?
she got halfway through the word “fucking” and decided she was all-in before she finished reading the contract
Good for you, Joyce! Don’t back down!
Don’t back down from this weird unnecessary argument you started yourself, for literally no reason.
Leave this poor woman alone to her book, damn
Don’t back down, Joyce! Stick it to this woman who’s essentially a hostage audience behind her work desk, who was minding her damn business before you randomly started a confrontation about the least important thing that’s ever happened!
That’ll teach her.
Keep going, Asma. Joyce won’t listen, but maybe someone else will. If we’re lucky, you’ll eventually get to be in a story arc that isn’t just an apology for being tone deaf about Palestine. Maybe you’ll even get a backstory! That would be neat.
is this scene also a more recent insert? I don’t see any reason it couldn’t have been written alongside the rest of the buffer.
IIRC (admittedly I don’t recall correctly as often as I’d like) the change to add strips focusing on her soon after the protest was because as written it would have taken a really long time to get back to her, not than it wouldn’t.
Willis commented a while back that “I’m sorry, Asma will get more screen time a year from now” was a pretty weak response to the problem of their Muslim characters being so minor. Not that I think this strip by itself would be much of an improvement on Asma’s screen time, but the comment did imply that she hadn’t shown up again after the protest previously.
Yeah, basically any time between now and a year from the protest storyline, all Asma appearances will have been added in. In an effort to actually flesh out and explore one (or more, I have hopes it’ll be more!!) of the Muslim characters.
I hope Asma’s criticism doesn’t get veered off into “giving into temptation is bad territory” just because Joyce brought up not be able to resist kissing Dorothy
Gods, this conversation is so cringe to warch
watch* read
Anyway, hope to see more of this cringe tomorrow LOL
It is kinda funny
But you are watching. At least I hope that this is more than just reading.
I think I reserve watching for like animated medium, but I think reading is definitely still enough on its own. I am indeed watching this slow train wreck, got my popcorn and everything
Oh god, as other commenter’s point out, this might be more of a misunderstanding that Joyce is a serial affair collector 😭 Oh gods, could this non-apology get any more
funnyworse.Joyce could always accuse Asma of being homophobic. I really hope she doesn’t, but it’s entirely within the realm of possibility
Replying to myself again to elaborate: This is not me thinking Asma thinks “giving into temptation” = bad, but my worry that the writing will depict her as such in the next strip. Therefore muddling a prospective reader’s view of her, but I think that’s already happening now :/
Asma is full of shit here.
I’d say she’s pretty on point. “What am I supposed to do, not makeout with someone in the middle of a protest?!”
“Yeah.”
*Shocked Joyce face.*
That’s fucking bullshit.
I get the idea that them kissing at a protest wouldn’t be an inherently wrong thing to do; however, try reading Miroku’s sentence more like “What am I supposed to do? Not make out with someone in a cloud of tear gas, while armed police are storming my position and taking people to jail?” I think that’s the more particular reason that Asma is accusing the girls of being really, really foolish and reckless.
Depends on the protest. Where I used to live, makeouts during a protest were expected and cheered, and people being against two girls kissing were jeered and not welcome.
I think reducing this to “makeouts at a protest are bad” isn’t a good approach. It’s not what Asma says. You’re right that it doesn’t match protest culture (at least from what I’ve seen).
As I keep saying it depends entirely on the protest and the energy being sought by organizers.
Yeah I don’t think it should have to be said but here we are.
I think if you’re protesting for say, gay marriage then yes making out with your girlfriend is totally okay and will be met kindly. Not so much the protest of people being actively wiped out, think you should be able to reign it in unless you only care about yourself.
But surely Asma is the mean one in this scenario.
Asma can actually be as mean as she wants right now, because she is at work and thus is unable to escape this conversation, and ambushing service employees to unload personal baggage on them is a much more mundane and recognizable wrong than most of the other things Joyce and Dorothy have done in the last two days. With other stuff, there’s at least some nuances, but this is just weird, tone-deaf, socially-malignant behavior, and Joyce and Dorothy are too passionate not to let themselves be temporarily, conveniently blind to that.
No, she’s pretty much entirely correct here.
No u
Wait a sec. Is Asma going to teach Joyce that discipline, self-control, and delayed gratification are actually valuable skills to have, and isn’t automatically horrible and disgusting because her past church twisted those concepts to control her to be in one specific image?
……. pfffffffff *snork* haaahh…. yeah… no.
Better chance that the result of this conversation will have Asma removing her hijab, grabbing a pair of scissors, and converting it into some sort of string bikini.
Okay. So, 1st off. Between Asma making a belated pass at Alice this morning and just now making a crack about being invited to a threesome… Her problem is not with Joyce and Dorothy being in a relationship with each other.
Here is how its gone down.
Yesterday, Asma joins a protest that is important enough to her that she knowingly risks her job, freedom, and possibly life to join (she calmly states that fences are being put up for the purpose of arresting all the attendees and points out where at least one sniper is overlooking them all).
Then two white girls with “cop energy” show up, refer to her by her job, express ignorance on what is going on with the protest, and ask after another protester.
I.E. They are rude tourists at best and snitches at worst.
Asma escapes the fallout and has a quiet freakout about everything.
The next morning Asma learns that while she was running for her life, those two girls were using the violence as a photogenic backdrop for a make-out session.
She learns this because said make-out session is frontpage news — as opposed to the University attempting to entrap and arrest the protesters using clubs, teargas, and the threat of deadly gunfire.
Next said two girls, in pajamas, with dirty laundry, and probably reeking of sex come up to her all smiles just to tell her.
“Hey how are ya? Sorry ’bout our vibes yesterday. Just wanted to let you know we aren’t sorry about the make-out session.”
Asma is like, “yeah… I wouldn’t normally care, but then the news made it the most important thing that happened yesterday.”
Then Joyce gets offended at the concept that there are times and places where she should exercise restraint and self-control instead of doing whatever she wants where-ever she is.
thank you, perfectly put, this is not a post i was willing to put in the effort to make, but I think this is what a lot of us feel about how Asma has reacted so far.
Thank you for this comment 😭
The first panel covers a lot of ground, both visually and verbally, so we are set up to look at the the 3 pairs of following panels. These are simply ‘talking heads’ panels, but it is worth ignoring the spoken words and reading the facial expressions here. The changes drawn are quite striking. Asma is thoughtful about a complex situation and all its implications, then moves to answering a direct question directly, so her focus narrows, then irritated, as her focus narrows even more. Joyce’s journey is quite different.
Art thread anyone? v
I like how you can notice by the last panel, as Joyce is getting indignant, she’s fully taken her arm off of Dorothy’s shoulder and straightened them down with tension. (Uh oh, I wonder what she’s gonna say next!)
I definitely feel Asma rolling her eyes on panel 2, even if it’s just a still in time.
Oh interesting. I didn’t read that as an eye roll, I read it as looking away while she considered the fact that it wasn’t D&J’s fault that the picture was taken and put on the front page, even if she thinks them at fault for doing it (as to why she would think that, I don’t think that is as yet clear.
But nice that interpretations differ and can be discussed.
When did Dorothy display cop energy?
When she started to ask around “Have you seen this woman?” in the middle of a protest that was being sieged by cops.
That wasn’t being a cop, there, though.
That’s the most cop thing you can do in a protest besides being in the ranks of the stormtroopers that are about to escalate the violence. They literally infiltrate activist movements the same way they do with organized crime. Guess what for?
I mean, they were there precisely to warn someone that she had been spotted on social media by her father. Trying to do that is the opposite of being a cop.
When DIDN’T she.
Yeah seconding this. Dorothy lives in her Cop Energy.
I reallreally don’t see it.
She wanted to be the president.
Literally all the time
I assume from the day she was born
Joyce has made growth, in the fact that she now acknowledges that protests are not evil liberal agendas, but real action taken against injustice.
But growth isn’t a checkbox, and learning the real risks that protest entails, respecting that ‘white knight activism’ doesn’t serve the needs of marginalized people, and having the maturity to accept that criticism with humility and self-reflection, all these things take time and intentional effort. This isn’t to justify Joyce, but just to acknowledge that she has a long road, a lot of baggage to let go of, and is an impulsive freshman. Goodness knows I was a real shitknocker when I was a freshman.
If two unaffiliated girls showed up to a protest about my chosen peoples being subjected to genocide, said genocide using weapons that my school was apparently investing in, welcome girls. If the reaction to the protest is at the level of police state casual attempted murder including at least one of those girls taking a grenade to the face, and their response was to defy the encroaching hate with an expression of love, mazel tov.
It was a protest about a war but the target of the protest was the school. All students of the school should be there in support of the protest and in opposition to the school’s odious investments.
When did the comic say this was a genocide against Muslim people? If it is it’s really strange this hasn’t been brought up at all.
The comic hasn’t explicitly said so, but context heavily imply it. And Willis’s outside comments, while again not explicitly saying so again imply it, since he’s talked about adding more appearances by Muslim characters due to problems with this arc.
I think it’s important for people to remember the protest had nothing to do with them and they weren’t even going to go if not for Jocelyn, who explicitly told them to leave because she was leaving too. Instead they stayed to make out because dramatic tension I guess.
I wish more of the Joyce and Dorothy defenders remembered this.
Saying ‘they stayed to make out’ is a ridiculous oversimplification of what we all read.
Yeah, they stayed to have an overwrought, melodramatic moment where they invented new stakes to fight against even though they had pretty much no reason to stick around. And then they made out during that stupid moment where the only danger was the kind they deliberately put themselves in.
You’re right. Dotty stayed to throw a lil tantrum about being gay for her friend and Joyce came back to make out with teargas flavored spit
Seriously, pretty and romantic sure but that must’ve been the nastiest kiss known to man. Making out is already kinda gross by virtue of saliva and tongues and breath smell, but add teargas and snot into it??? Ew
It’s true. It’s actually way WORSE in context because Dorothy reentered the settlement against the wishes of the organizers and everyone in order to make a point to herself that she could stand up for what’s right despite her not giving a shit about Bulmeria. She willingly put herself and others in danger because she was feeling bad about her morals and politics. She made everything about her.
i like how this isnt even rly their fault, its how it was photographed and the college’s paper that decided to front page it
Yeah, Joyce and Dorothy are just being the whipping girls here for regrets about the protest storyline.
I mean Joyce could’ve just. Not brought it up. She literally started this stupid argument by saying something stupid. Kinda like she and dotty chose to stick around in the middle of the no-longer-a-protest for no reason other than to be melodramatic lil dipshits, and put themselves in danger bc yeah fuckers you were told multiple times to run while you still could
“WE DO NOT RECOGNIZE HIS AUTHORITY ANY MORE, ALT-TEXT”
-Joyce, probably
Asma sounds like a prude here.
Also she forgets literally any of the million of kisses given in protests.. and their thousands of photos.
https://www.gettyimages.at/fotos/riot-kiss
Oh well…
Not every protest is the same and not every protest is the time or place for a self-centering kiss between two white women. It’s not prudishness, it’s operatinal discipline.
It’s not like she hunted them down to give her opinion. They came to her, she’s saying how she feels. It’s a reasonable feeling AND it’s not her job to lie about how she feels in order to make them feel all better.
It’s actually fine that she has opinions on whether a kiss between two white girls was the imagery she hoped would come out of a protest about genocide and civil war.
Time and place, Joyce. You kissing Dotty in the middle of a protest just as everything goes to Hell, while insanely romantic IN THEORY, negated the whole point of the protest and the paper just made it worse. For all we know the casual readers thought this was about gay rights, not convincing the college to divest in armaments used for genocide.
Did the reporter interview ANY of the protestors before the Kiss Seen Around the State?
This is a weird mix of graceful and judgmental, in that Asma accurately realized that it’s not like Dorothy and Joyce particularly wanted to have a bunch of journalistic attention devoted to their declaration of love, but then she also flat out says they shouldn’t have done it? Like, make up your mind, yeesh
There’s no contradiction between not blaming Joyce and Dorothy for their kiss making front page news, and believing that the protest was the wrong time and place to have that kiss. Asma’s position, so far as it appears, is that the girls did something only a little bit wrong, and it becoming bigger than that is not their fault.
If the objection is that it distracted from the actual reason for the protest because of the unwanted news coverage of Dorothy and Joyce making the subtext into text, well, I guess I don’t see what the problem is, because no one would have known without that aspect… But I suppose I could see her opinion being that. Just still seems a little repressed to me; in such a situation, emotions are heightened, people do emotional things.
“You shouldn’t have been playing in the street, but also you couldn’t have known that a truck driver carrying a load of explosives would be texting on his phone, look up to see you at the last minute, and swerve directly into a school full of children.”
I love this! Dorothy still wants to apologize because she feels guilty, but she also realized that Joyce had a point, so she compromises by finding the closest thing she can to a personal transgression against Asma and apologizes for that instead. Good job Keener, you are being cringe, but you just barely avoided the racism!
I respect Asma for giving Joyce and Dorothy the benefit of the doubt, and not holding blame over them if they weren’t trying to make front page news on purpose. I think I like her.
I may need another perspective on this, because on my first read-through it seemed like Asma was coming across as either being sex-regressive (PDAs are bad, sex is something to only be discussed in private and in hushed tones etc.) or, worse, that she was anti-LGBT (which seems a bit strange considering the strip where she seemed to have a crush on Alice, but she would be far from the first person to be a self-hating/denying closet gay.)
Anyway, I digress. So, what exactly is happening in this strip, from your analysis?
Think of the “out of the way, off in a corner” as being about not upstaging the protest, rather than about keeping the kiss private in general.
Let me try to rewrite the conversation to get across how I’m reading it.
Dorothy: Hey Asma, how are you doing?
Asma: I’m fine.
Dorothy: Sorry for the bad vibes.
Asma: Cringe.
Joyce: I regret nothing.
Asma: I hope that you weren’t doing it for the cameras, even though the cameras found you.
Joyce: Was it wrong to kiss her?
Asma: Yes.
Joyce: I couldn’t have not kissed her!
Asma: That’s why you shouldn’t have put yourself in a situation where kissing her would be in appropriate.
Joyce: Then I wouldn’t have kissed her!
Asma: Correct.
Asma is saying that the middle of a protest is the wrong place to kiss, that doing it to get attention is even wronger, and that she hopes that they weren’t doing it get attention. She then proposes that if Joyce can’t resist kissing Dorothy then she shouldn’t be with Dorothy in situations where kissing would be inappropriate.
this is the best cliffs note version of the strip thusfar
Thank you!
Asma is entirely correct here.
Nah, Joyce is.
Nah “have basic self control” is pretty reasonable and Joyce is being annoying for no reason
Cue “It was the heat of the moment” “They were overwhelmed by passion”
It’s a really simple thing she’s saying. “Maybe practice some restraint and tact during high-profile events that don’t concern you?”
Anyone treating that as her being a prude, a homophobe, or any of those other handy little words, is being stupid on purpose for attention.
they are bad at apologies
Embarrassingly so!
I wonder what Asma’s “secret thing that she wants to do, but won’t put herself out there” is?
She really wants to draw Sonic the Hedgehog yaoi. Her OTP is Silver and Jet, but she’s scared to share them with the world.
Uh, Alice I guess?
…I’m sorry, why are they apologizing to Asma again?
Willis, this whole thing has been awkward from start to finish. But it’s happened now, the best thing to do is just… move forward, and not spend endless strips pointing out the meta-cringe.
Because they’re specifically Protestant atheists. In Catholicism, you seek absolution from your sins from a priest, because if you don’t, they’re still there when you die, and then you’re in trouble. Luther pointed out that the sacrament of absolution isn’t in the Bible, so he got rid of it. So how do you get rid of your sins then? Sure you can ask God for absolution directly, but he doesn’t talk back. Bach composed oodles of tormented church music as a way to ask God. Americans prefer to seek absolution from their victims, or some stand-in for their victims, the way Catholics do from a priest. Then they forget what the original point of this whole elaborate apology culture was, and continue to do it after they lose religion.
Ha!
I think I meant more that, Asma isn’t one of their “victims.” Are they even friends with Asma?
This is like if I went over to a Black coworker whom I barely talk to, and apologize to him because I showed up on Youtube making out with someone during a BLM rally.
They are not friends with Asma. Checking the tags shows before the protest they each only interacted with her once. Dorothy to tell her that she broke a washing machine and Joyce was picking up some socks. I honestly don’t think they even care about Asma and that this apology is very transparently about making themselves feel better while actively annoying the person they’re apologizing to.
They probably have a sort of parasocial relationship with her, in the sense that if this dorm works like my dorm used to she’s the one they’d have to talk to to get oversized mail/packages or a key to the kitchenette or whatever other shared resources are gatekept by the front desk.
It’s fairly plausible that D&J feel like they are basically friends (all of their interactions with her are positive! She hands them care packages from home and refills their laundry card and whatnot!) and meanwhile Asma basically sees them as interchangeable with the dozens of dorks she deals with on the day-to-day in her job.
I think you’re right. Asma raised a good point to me which was they didn’t remember her name when they met her at the protest despite whatever assumed parasocial relationship. Ruth even remembered her name. J&D need to try a little harder than this if they ever even bother talking to Asma again.
lmao i just realized that Asma has probably put together, from all the information that she has available, just how that washing machine got broken.
protestants that don’t know how to protest
hahahah
Dorothy’s family is Catholic and Jewish, raised areligiously. Calling her a Protestant atheist is downright silly.
That’s not how she’s behaving, though. I’m not surprised – many aspects of Catholicism as actually practiced in the US feel weirdly Protestant to me; they just come from living in a Protestant environment. There are even Catholics in the US who call themselves “evangelical”!
The apology thing has long seeped into general American culture, is what I’m trying to say. Lots of people with no awareness of where it comes from take it for granted.
I guess I have some thoughts on this.
For one I think Asma has a point and it’s not that kissing is bad or even that kissing specifically at a protest is bad. I think that she just means there would’ve been a different outcome if Joyce had practiced some restraint. We often act like emotions are something we can’t control. That’s not true. Joyce didn’t have to kiss Dorothy at that exact moment even if she wanted to. I actually find her inability to comprehend that very annoying. It’s an example of her own privilege when I imagine Asma has to practice the same restraint everyday and not just when the stakes are high and she’s out protesting to protect her family and freedoms. I really don’t think it’s more complicated than that.
Two. I’m not really against the kiss or where it happened and how, from a narrative standpoint. I don’t think protests are hallowed ground and trying to tell any kind of story there is fair game no matter what the subject is. This is kind of the point of telling stories in a sense. If you have criticisms that it wasn’t handled well, insensitive, or just poorly written that is all valid, but I don’t think the argument it should’ve just be dropped is fair. We should be saying try again and do better next time. Asma being a more vocal character with direct agency about a plot point that directly affects her is already learning and improving. In some ways I actually like the story beats and how they happened and that it reveals bad things about some of our favorite characters. Or at least characters long established they’re supposed to be seen as favored protagonists. I like that Dorothy and Joyce come off as unaware, selfish, trash lesbians because of what they’ve done and are only apologizing to feel less guilty. Let them be awful!
That’s it. Remember not to trust half assed and disingenuous apologies!
You can’t control your emotions.
But you can absolutely control what you do with them.
Thank you. That’s better.
❤️
“Have you tried _not_ kissing her?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Have you tried not being anywhere near her?”
“Still don’t understand.”
What makes it any of Asma’s business whether they kissed or not? It’s not like they staged it to get it on the front page of the paper.
I don’t think that’s Asma’s argument. The dialogue feels a little clunky here. Maybe it needed another pass, but think she’s just saying they could’ve had some restraint instead of acting on impulse. That’s a fair criticism to me considering what happened.
That’s kind of the point though.
Asma doesn’t know they didn’t. That’s basically what she’s talking about in Panel 2.
Think also of Raidah’s “Did you get the attention you wanted?” when she met them right after the protest. Same basic concern.
Except the only concern Raidah had was running down Joyce and Dorothy because she hates them. Asma is (hopefully) not that bad.
She didn’t “run them down”, she passed them in the hallway of the dorm building they share with her.
“Run them down,” in this context, is an idiom similar to “dressing down;” Astariel is point out that Raidah will always try to say the most hurtful and destabilizing thing to Joyce and Dorothy, every time she sees them, no matter what, because social manipulation and warfare is her core personality trait, and her sole function in the comic up until just recently.
I think two things can be true at once, and I think it’s… interesting how many folks have decided Raidah can’t possibly have any interest in the protest just because we didn’t see her at the tiny portion of the protest that Joyce and Dorothy went to.
What makes it Asma’s business? Joyce bringing it up unprompted, specifically to be confrontational and turn it into the focus of the conversation. Nobody was talking about the kiss until Joyce opened her maw.
Joyce literally made it her business in panel one!!!! Why are people acting like asma hunted them down to interrogate them and not the other way around????????
Don’t you hate it when you go out of your way to talk to someone who clearly doesn’t want to talk to you and they have the nerve to respond to things you’re saying negatively? How dare!
Woah, Joyce, yikes. I get that the NRE is strong, but that stance is uh… Let’s just say I think Ryan and others like him would also use that “logic” as a defense.
Obviously I know Dorothy consented and it’s fine, but run your words in your head first before saying them out loud, girl.
Sorry, I think I misread what you just wrote. Because there is absolutely no way you just compared a victim of SA and recently outed queer woman to literal rapists. That would just be unreal, so that can’t be what happened.
Wanting to do things that are consensual but not approved of has absolutely zero ground with assaulting someone.
There’s a glimmer of a point there that if you consider “I mean, what am I supposed to do, NOT kiss her?” and “But she was right there, it was impossible not to!” in a complete vacuum unconnected from anything else, they could go either way on the “high romance” or “kinda suspect” spectrum.
You just have to ignore 100% of the context leading up to said statements to get there, up to and including this strip itself and their context in this specific conversation.
Yeah, all that was actually commented on, was not the context, but that “if I want to do something, it’s unreasonable to expect me not to do it” is a really obviously negative and anti-social belief to hold, and that it’s usually the commonly-given non-apology for all of the worst human behaviors. I don’t see any reason to actually think aSE was actively trying to compare the two situations, they were just giving the strongest possible example that demonstrates how bad a line of thinking Joyce is on, here.
Yes, this is it. I was not actively trying to compare her recently outed queer status to that situation, just the words taken out of context.
However, I recognize how shitty that was to do. Intent does not negate affect. I should not have done that, I sincerely apologize.
I don’t know if anyone will go back and look at this comment on a now previous day’s comic, but an apology should be given nonetheless.
I do still find Joyce’s “But she was right there, it was impossible not to” as extremely immature and trying to absolve herself of responsibility in a situation that she absolutely did have responsibility in. But, this is a comic about dumb university kids in the messy phase of figuring out how to adult the hard way. I get that. That line still really rubbed me the wrong way (as does other things that she has said over the timeline of the comic. Hopefully she learns from this too, as she has learned and grown from other cringe moments).
I disagree with their comparison in this instance as Joyce is definitely speaking about a consensual moment between her and Dorothy.
That said I wouldn’t say Joyce’s status as a victim wholly makes her immune to the rhetoric and acting upon a predatory culture. I can see how that phrasing can be a bit sus though obviously context is the key here.
her feelings are getting dangerously close to something we shouldn’t waste time caring about…
Pretty sure contrary to what some commenters are saying, Asma isn’t shading their kissing for religious reasons. She’s shading them because – whether the paper centered them or not – they turned an earnest protest against a people’s genocide into their own little romantic getaway. Made it about their own white girl selves, in other words.
Which is fine and dandy, but a political protest for the rights of brown folks being bombed was NOT the time or place and it was, at best, extremely thoughtless of them to PDA then and there specifically.
People keep saying “but people kiss at protests all the time” as if there is only one kind of protest and only one set of social rules and etiquette governing all forms of popular resistance.
Also, a lot of the kisses in other protests are selfish attention grabbing from people who don’t care about the protest. “You say it is wrong, but people do it all the time,” is not a moral argument, all it means is that people do wrong all the time, and we know that people do wrong all the time! In Christianity we call this the fallen nature of man, in the Cult of the Machine God we say the flesh is weak, in secularism we don’t have a pithy term for it but are generally aware that our mental and emotional processes are imperfect and fallible.
I mean, for my part, I have not been making a moral argument, because the comments I am responding to on this topic keep claiming that no one would ever kiss at a protest in real life, or that no one would ever make a kiss photo the headline, or that kissing only ever happens at protests specifically for LGBTQIA+ rights.
None of those things are true.
That they’re untrue also doesn’t in any way negate criticism of Joyce and Dorothy’s timing, heh.
Oh yeah, no disagreement on that point. Right or wrong, everything that has happened in this plotline are things that happen in real life.
I would have made some sort of joke about costumes vigilantes at protests, but then we got Frog Guy.
Asma faces the problem of a new character in a third season hit sit-com; a frantic acceleration at the on-ramp to merge a busy highway of established characters. The strip didn’t parse well until broken into two parts. First, she laments that the import of the protest was demeaned by being centered on the frivolous kiss. Second, she adheres to a “purity culture” and the number one rule of all purity cultures is ‘Don’t put yourself in situations of temptation’.
Not putting yourself in situations of temptation is an empirically effective way to exercise willpower and self-control, no purity culture needed. Research shows that people who have high willpower attain it by strategically avoiding temptation. A person who keeps their phone outside their bedroom will have more success not doomscrolling in bed than someone who keeps it by their nightstand. Effective self-control uses willpower as a backup, not a frontline.
Here’s a paper about it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886914005339
tl;dr Asma is just as horny for girls as Daisy is, but Asma is preventing herself from getting a date by never being anywhere that dateable girls may reside, as opposed to Daisy, who prevents herself from getting a date by exuding an aura of raw desperation that can be felt at 500m.
Absolutely correct. Alcoholics should avoid bars, gambling addicts should avoid the track, athletic hopefuls should avoid Xbox, etc. Since the behavior to be avoided is gay kissing, it is purity culture no matter what church you belong to.
Asma is not telling Joyce to avoid kissing Dorothy, but to avoid being with Dorothy in places where kissing her would be inappropriate.
If so, that’s even worse. Don’t be in public with your girlfriend/best friend is an absurd way to avoid temptation. I get your argument above, but it’s absurd to apply it here. You’ve got to have enough self-control to avoid just randomly kissing uncontrollably if you want to function in society.
Mind you, I don’t think that’s at all what Asma saying.
Don’t be with the girlfriend you can’t stop kissing in a situation where it would be inappropriate to kiss her. Out in public is not one of those situations.
You love to see an author take criticism to heart and try to do better, genuinely.
That said, I think it’s worth pointing out that doing so solely in-character is a problem. My understanding of things, at least, was that the problem with the protest was pretty squarely Doylist- not that Joyce and Dorothy kissing at the protest was itself an issue, but the way the comic/narrative framed and centered it. And trying to address the criticism solely from a Watsonian POV is missing the mark.
Ultimately, I think Willis is using the wrong set of tools to fix this problem. He’s trying to use a monkey wrench for a problem that needs a screwdriver.
I have no socials, if they didn’t do this I would basically have to assume that they didn’t care about any of the criticism at all.
Man, lots of people jumping to “only Muslim character of note is a bigot” and not “these two fucked up and now have to be gentle walked through their fuck up”.
Stop letting these two off the hook, part of this is their fault. You can definitely argue that the photo taker and Leslie share MORE of the blame, but that doesn’t make these two blameless.
The people ultimately have final say of what’s kosher in the protest and this obviously wasn’t. It was bad for the message and bad for security because then people had to scatter and Amazigirl got hurt doing cover for them to get out after they put themselves in the middle of tear gas.
If these two can’t put the act of protesting above their need to be all over each other, they need to either not attend them ever again, or only ones where that’s explicitly allowed. Not all protests are carbon copies.
Nope, Joyce and Dorothy did nothing wrong. The protest was over and they’re allowed to have personal breakthroughs in public.
The protest was “over” in the sense that it was in the active process of being forcibly suppressed by riot cops. That aside, the fact that the photograph of their kiss has become a focal point of the local conversation regarding the protest means that it’s completely fair game to discuss it in that context.
No one’s arguing Joyce and Dorothy didn’t have a right to kiss in public just that they had bad decision making in the moment. If they had waited even a minute to think things through or focus on the events around them that picture never gets taken. It’s not really even on them. Daisy chose to run the photo. And to be frank for a moment between Dorothy and Joyce’s lack of self awareness and Daisy pretty cavalier justification for running the photo basically being “I’m horny” there’s a lot of white women taking little to no responsibility for under cutting a protest that they have definitively less stake in. God forbid any minority be annoyed at that.
Daisy was joking when she said she did it because she was horny.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-16/01-not-so-smooth-criminals/editor/
“Listen, this is the content that readers demand. It’s me, I’m readers.” That’s a joke, she’s being funny.
On the next page she gets serious and gives the real reason: She thought it was the best photo because it resulted in high reader engagement. Arguably, this is her doing her job as an editor. One of the most important metrics on whether you are doing your job as a news editor is reader engagement. It doesn’t matter how well you report the news if nobody reads it, and as editor you have an obligation to your paper to get and maintain readership. At the same time you have an ethical responsibility to report honestly and truthfully inform your readership. Daisy believes she is fulfilling both responsibilities by using the most striking and eyeball-grabbing front page image she had, and then putting the full report on the protest directly behind it. Obviously Raidah and most people here disagree that she acted correctly, but the point is her decision is one that many editors make on a regular basis.
Now let’s use our thinking caps to consider what systemic forces might be at play in determining why a picture of two white women kissing might get the most engagement for an article on a genocide protest, and whether it might be perfectly within reason for people of color and Muslims to object to it
The systemic issue is that humans are drawn to sex and violence, and a passionate kiss while a protest being violently suppressed in the background has both. That said, yeah it’s entirely reasonable to be upset with Daisy’s decision. While she tried to achieve both engagement and truth-telling, she did not actually achieved it. The fact is Daisy prioritized engagement, and in a serious matter like this she should have prioritized truth-telling.
BZZZZZT!!!!
The answer we were looking for is…. Racism!!!!
I don’t think the dynamics of the situation play differently without people of colour, which suggests racism is a weak factor at best. If it were a protest in Germany over the financial ties to Russia, a picture of two girls kissing while riot police violently suppressed the protest would still be the most eyeball-grabbing image.
@Lys that’s a real “what if the world was made of pudding” type argument. Like no wayyy if you change the factors and context of a situation entirely the outcome and dynamics might actually be different? That’s so crazy.
Except my point is that altering the situation so that a particular factor is removed, the underlying incentives remain the same, which suggests that factor is not very relevant the incentives in question. Dot is saying that the picture of girls kissing as the protest is violently suppressed gets the most eyeballs because people are too racist to care about the genocide in Bulmeria. I am saying that it is the most striking picture because people like sex and violence, and people not being racist wouldn’t change this.
The title of the article was “kiss bombings good bi. Despite cops assaulting students and bombings still happening. Misleading fluff title that undercuts the seriousness of the issue to focus on girls kissing. I’m sure all the people who camped out there for a week really appreciate the violent police crackdown not at all taking focus or precedent.
Like, shit, people already mentioned Protest Frog Guy above, except a lot of people seem fuzzy on the detail that him showing up in an inflatable frog costume was a deliberate strategy to make it impossible for the police or media to imply that the ongoing campaign of fascist violence against citizens bore any shred of legitimacy. It was smart protestors using clever tactics to ensure more people could see, who the real aggressors and bad actors were, even if outlets and pundits tried to spin it otherwise.
Joyce and Dorothy was not that, and I’m surely not gonna suggest that the dedicated members of the movement, such as Asma and Jocelyn, can’t be upset that their messaging got drowned out by clickbait journalism that doesn’t support or advance any part of their end goals.
I think your argument makes Daisy look even worse. It was either for personal titulation or shameless sensationalism or likely both. And when the Muslim woman raises valid complaints she doesn’t have an answer. Then we leave the scene. Making a joke of it shows Daisy doesn’t take the situation as seriously. Even if metrics are all that matters.
The sad thing is, the sort of decision Daisy made on this strip, is the best advertisement she could have made for her portfolio as a future career journalist. It may be an ethically bankrupt move in favor of profit, but as it turns out, “willing to be ethically bankrupt in favor of making more profit” is exactly the kind of attitude that every recruiter in her broader industry will be looking for, when it’s time for her to get an actual career.
She’s objectively wrong, and selfish, but she’s doing the sort of thing that outlets actually want out of a “journalist” in 2025, and that’s part of the problem, itself.
This isn’t a new thing, so much as an old thing coming back. The broken incentives that lead to Yellow Journalism in the 19th century are pretty fundamental to doing news reporting in a free market with a highly competitive attention economy. For some reason the 20th Century American Consensus was able to tamp down on this, which is why the inexorable return sensationalist reporting feels new. My off the cuff speculation is that it was the result of government censorship of media during the two World Wars. Just as Prohibition drove down alcohol consumption for decades after its repeal, I think the World Wars created a culture of responsible journalism that also carried on for decades after. However generational turnover has eroded that culture and left behind the fundamental bedrock truth: News is business, business needs profit, and profit requires attention. So here we are.
Being funny doesn’t make it a joke.
Daisy actually believes this unironically. It’s funny, but she hasn’t noticed and doesn’t mean it that way.
Is this a joke? I can’t tell.
No, astariel’s genuine and very firmly held position is that Dorothy and Joyce did literally nothing worthy of any criticism whatsoever vis a vis the kiss and its immediate lead-up and aftermath
Nah fuck it, they did not have the right to throw a tantrum about their dumbass feelings and make out in the middle of a teargas fountain when everyone who knew better was saying “get the fuck out”. They’re like professional nuisances and not even in the cool disruptive protest way. They’re just really good at being annoying
Poor Asma can probably smell that laundry.
Anyone can kiss anyone on impulse at a protest, with consent between the two kissers. If such natural human behavior is used to hijack the message of the protest, that’s the fault of the hijackers.
If I’m at a protest and I happen to kiss my wife, and some reporter decides to put that front and center because we’re of different races even though that has nothing to do with the point of the protest we’re at, that is not our fault.
Yeah a lot of this reaction is Daisy’s fault for letting her libido dictate her job. Joyce and Dorothy may have had crap timing but it’s not like they were trying to hijack the protest or draw attention to themselves.
Dorothy literally climbed up on a mound of snow after being told to leave by several people. How was she *not* trying to draw attention to herself?
She actually stole a sign from a much smarter, more engaged protestor, to go perform martyrdom as a means of self-harm via Cop Suplex, because she can’t mentally distance herself from her crippling need for moral purity. If Joyce hadn’t temporarily cured her with smooches, Dorothy may have had to actually reckon with some introspection; but, now, stuff is just happening, and so she’s got something outward to focus on.
Even dumber, she didn’t steal the sign. She paid the guy $20 for it. Absolute dipshit behavior.
holy fuck my memory fully glossed over that detail. poor guy must have been so confused
Yeah, people focusing on just “is kissing at protests okay” miss a lot of the context that made this whole thing actually a mistake.
If you then track down some other protector the day after to rub that kiss in their face, you are absolutely at fault.
Bungling up an apology for something one is not at fault for is the apologizer’s fault, yes. Not the issue I was addressing though. People have been assigning fault to Joyce and Dorothy for this long before the last couple of days.
Do we know anything in particular about how strictly religious Asma is? There is potentially some interesting story elements that could happen between Joyce/Asma as a way to explore the way different religions interact with the broader culture.
For instance Joyce is coming from a fundie Christian background and her arc has largely been “I was very religious but then I got better” with her move to being more secular being a big positive progressive step.
Could be an interesting narrative space for her to misunderstand the cultural nuance and try and push the “more secular = more progressive” idea onto a devout Muslim character.
I really don’t want to see more of Joyce microaggressing Asma, thanks
Doa commenters handle a woman of color criticizing their otp without being racist challenge: impossible difficulty
Wanna take bets on who the next woc to get raked over the coals for mildly chastising DoJo will be? My money is on Sal.
Sal already passed them by, though if she recognised it for what it was is anyone’s guess. Raidah might be about to confront these two, though, now that she’s done with Daisy and prayer time.
She probably didn’t know her lil bro had been cheated on at the time
I think Sal is one of the characters with the most reason to guess it might not have been okay with Walky, but. Walky isn’t the most communicative. I can see her assuming:
“They broke up and Walky hasn’t told me about it yet.”
But the joke in that strip was that they weren’t even acting as gay as usual in front of her, and then she almost IMMEDIATELY had to deal with Amber, which I imagine was sufficiently distracting from “Joyce and Dorothy were being a little weird.”
Maybe Sarah again. Or spice things up with Dina, see if this bias is reserved for biwoc or if everybody gets it
Isn’t Dina a woc as well?
I specified biwoc there, black and indigenous. I don’t think Japanese counts unless she’s ryukyu or ainu or something. Generally refers to brown poc specifically, and I think a lot of people here have subconscious (I wanna be charitable) issues with brown skin
Oh, I see, I see.
good fucking shit i am sick and fucking tired of the “Hijabi = homophobia/oppression” bullshit,
whitebred takes be nothing more than a condescending “gatcha” moment
just fucking racist and gross, im outta here bruh
We’ve seen Raidah (a character we typically are meant to dislike) criticize Dorothy and Joyce, and she was called all sorts of awful things for it. We saw Sarah (someone we’re meant to like) criticize them and be called all sorts of awful things. We’ve now seen Asma criticize them and be called awful things. It really is quite awful seeing how gross, racist, and islamophobic people are getting for the sake of fictional white girls kissing.
I mean, I’m not happy about it, but I’m not shocked that some white commenters have an equal level of understanding of these issues as Joyce and Dorothy. Having met white people, yeah…not the greatest at unpacking their own culturally-imperialist assumptions, and even worse at taking critiques of them.
nice to see that Willis has their whackamole mallet out for some of these comments.
This arc is a great example of how writers create something but have no control over how readers interpret interpret it. There are now sects and denominations of readers in the comments.
I’m viewing this as part of the cascade of consequences which has resulted in apology tour through the cast. If it proceeded just as I expected and wanted it to, it wouldn’t be worth reading.
Whatever you say, Bitmoji
sects, denominations? Cabals? Schisms?
I’m very down for this!
One fun thing to do is to spin your scroll wheel as fast as you can and see how long it takes to get through all of the the comments.
…it takes a moment.
This is nothing, the day of the kiss the comments broke 2k
Yotomoe linked a really good comic from the past earlier, and I was floored at just how many fewer comments per strip we used to be getting. Willis has really turned the comments section into a perpetual all-out war between competing moralist factions, and while I hope it’s good for his analytics, it’s been really bad for my enjoyment of the comics.
Like, I was actually struggling with the idea of “did it really used to take so much time and energy to take a quick look at the comments every day?” Turns out, no, it didn’t; there used to be 100 comments of people being casual, now I gotta rev up my Discourse Engine to “fraught environment” to make any given comment, lest I be accused of multiple conflicting bigotries, and there’s 4x as many comments to get through.
The Kiss strip itself broke records, but we’ve been here before. What’s different is those were mostly fairly contained – a chapter or so of focus on the conflict at most. This has gone on basically without reprieve for like half a year.
I’d like to remind everyone that these two climbed on to an elevated surface to kiss. This was not a “oh, we kissed and we happened to be in the geographical area of a protest” situation. They went into a protest without caring what it was about, then when the organisers told people to disperse, Dorothy climbed onto a… mound?, made a lot of noise about a situation that she knew nothing about and didn’t care about literally five seconds earlier, and then Joyce climbed up after her to kiss her.
That’s absolutely not true. Dorothy %100 cares about it .she’s the only one in the entirety of this comic to perfectly explain straight up facts what the protest was about.
Dorothy couldn’t name one pro-Bulmeria talking point if she tried. She may have morally pure intentions, but to suggest she’s actually educated on the topic just…seems to have no evidence to back it up.
The only time she actually engaged in a debate on the topic, with Mary, she both-sidesed the situation.
Kinda gross how many people just assume asma is homophobic and not comfortable with women kissing and that if she were that it’s explicitely because of her religion
Y’all. We have sooooo many queer/ally religious people in this comic. why is this the gun everyone’s jumping to?
Because a lot, A LOT, of people who are queer and reading the “a religious fundamentalist goes to college and unpacks the horrible way she was raised and finds out who she really is and loses her family as a result” comic have religious trauma.
It’s not an excuse for what’s happening in the comments here today, but it is absolutely a huge part of the reason.
like I can GET that
having just come out of toxic (often authoritarian Christian) belief systems, a lot of them are in this fearful headspace where ANY religion or devotee thereof looks suspicious to them
that still doesn’t make Islamophobia like this okay
Yep, and I absolutely was not implying it made islamophobia okay.
I wasn’t trying to imply you were implying that haha
for reals tho like FUCK
so many people here acting like Muslims act like puritan white CHRISTIANS o3o (-_-)
(this is how you can tell how little they actually talk to real muslims, if at all)
Like all my Muslim friends are either gay themselves or at the very least pro-queer leftists.
And they all tell me there is no doctrine essential to Islam which condemns being gay
Well yes, Islam (and a lot of religions in general) say one should strive to avoid temptations and giving in to lust etc – it’s not an uncommon position in some practices that it’s alright to be gay but since it’s not allowed to marry one must carry on being celibate regardless.
Usual caveat that my experience with Islam is different from yours etc etc
Crazy how no one had the same reaction to the fucking. MORMON. Not like they have a reputation right? Like yeah Aggie is lovely but assuming she’d be homophobic is just as fair and charitable as assuming Asma would be, and less racist.
To be fair, Agatha didn’t say anything that could even really be twisted into homophobia, while Asma’s talking here about resisting the temptation to kiss girls.
I don’t think she’s being homophobic, more of a “there’s a time and a place and that wasn’t it”, but there is something there to work with. Unlike “Everything you do is swell!”
Bro, Asma and Dorothy are somewhat irritating here. I don’t even know why Dorothy needs to apologize in the first place. And it’s dumb Asma has any right to be mad about someone kissing.
Dorothy is properly contrite about making a protest about people being wiped out the backdrop of her gay panic fueled tantrum when they had no business there to begin with, and Asma is just rightly telling them they probably could have kept it in their pants until they left the protest for that said thing like they were being told to do anyways. There’s such a thing as a time and a place.
Not that she’s even in the wrong for bringing it up because it was actually Joyce bringing it up without prompting to let everyone know how epic it is to kiss Dorothy again. Asma is more or less an innocent dragged into the mess that Jorothy has become.
Of course she’s allowed in the protest. It’s absolutely ridiculous Asma would assume one of her school mates is a cop knowing her reputation as a school reporter and seeing her daily. I just assumed Dorothy is overall apologizing for being in the front page, which is absolutely not her fault that happened either. But I didn’t really have a problem, specifically about the cop thing. It’s just THiS conversation is just unnecessary. I wonder if this scene exists in the original comic in the bufferm
And with that. it’s dumb they both think the lovers are at fault for the media coverage. I’m assuming Asma is having the exact same stance Rhyda is having, a couple strips earlier. But at least Rydia is being mad at the one actually responsible for the newspaper. Joyce may have brought up the kissing specifically, but obviously Asma already has her own opinion about it
And her opinion about the kissing is just a big huge example of hindsight bias. (Lol, I was saying bystander effect earlier but had to Google to confirm the right concept) It’s what makes it so cringy to my eyes. That “I told you, you shouldn’t have ____, now look what happened?!” mentality
That’s they have no business was not to say they can’t be there if they wanted to be there for the right reasons, but they weren’t. They were not there because they cared about the people dying they were there to find Jocelyne, but then stuck around well past the demonstration for their own personal reasons and turned it into a set piece for their drama. It’s a faux pas to say the least, which is why Dorothy is apologizing because she’s recognized that.
I don’t think anybody fault’s them for the media, even in the strip itself Asma is giving them leeway and saying that the journalism centered it. She’s still giving them flak for turning a protest of genocide into a place to make out though, she has an opinion that I feel like is generally normal that you really ought to not be swapping spit in a scenario like this. People are dying and it’s a protest for the school’s active involvement in it, it’s not giving the situation the respect it deserves. Which is why Asma, among other characters have been derisive of it outside of the media coverage. They made a spectacle about it so much so that Amazigirl and Asma both saw it well before the media coverage, hell Amazigirl saw it while fighting cops and helping other people leave.
Asma is just telling them that it wasn’t the time or the place for it after Joyce specifically asked if not kissing her was what she was supposed to do, which she is not wrong about. I don’t think anybody can really argue that a rally against genocide is not the place to have your revelation on wanting your best friend romantically.
Dorothy is apologizing for the newspaper and “cop” thing. Not what you’re suggesting. Dorothy is the only one in the comic to explain the very core of the protest’s message to the rest of the cast who hears. She totally can protest and should be welcomed there. As a previous protester I welcome her and any other people of various “reasons”. Tho not here specifically, since you can die, but regular ones without snipers and stuff, or if the plan involves looting, yeah, I steer away from those. Even those that do it for “brownie points”, completely valid. The willingness to grow in strength of a protest in numbers is always appreciated. Unless the protest is for something stupidly wrong, of course. But she absolutely knew what it was about. ESOECIALLY of Dorothy ‘s ethnicity which is already pulled into the very misrepresented politics disguising the war.
Asma can say whatever she wants. I’m just annoyed she has those opinions.i don’t get why people care about pda and why is the newspaper really that big of a deal for her, suspensions of belief wise. Is this really supposed to show her personality here? Stuff like that. So I understand that there is no “right” rules about this. There’s no rules about protests either. A protest isn’t one person cloned a few thousands times who has the exact definitions and policies of that same protest. Some are going to be more uniformed than others. So I’m disagreeing with you about the kiss, but I admit that there is no right or wrong objective answer to that.
Maybe this whole storyline just isn’t very well written.
True, Dorothy is totally capable of protesting this, which is a shame that she did not come there to protest at all and then used it as a platform for something else entirely. She probably should have tried doing that. I think a lot of people would be less mad at her if her presence wasn’t just a final last stand that was more about her feelings she couldn’t have than care about the people dying that the event was about.
I think your problem is you’re too caught up on the newspaper, which Asma mentioned once and immediately dropped from the conversation and aren’t focused enough on what Asma is actually saying. There’s no right or wrong way to protest except not to be there to protest at all, Joyce and Dorothy were not there to protest at all. They weren’t not protesters and Joyce still hasn’t even shown an inclination of caring in that regard at all.
I simply cannot agree that Asma is doing anything wrong when telling them that maybe they should have just sat this one out. Instead they showed up, begged for information on one of the people there for the protest, ignored the people who were running the protests direct orders to leave as the cops got violent, then went into the middle of the scene and made out. I simply don’t know how you are arriving to this being an Asma hates PDA thing., and not an Asma hates hijacking protests for your own personal drama completely devoid of any relation to the protests.
To be entirely fair, I spent an entire semester with a friend of mine being undercover in my class and didn’t realize until she and the professor revealed it on the last day. She wasn’t a cop, she was something else I forget relating to education, but it was deeply unnerving and affected my trust. It is totally possible for a schoolmate to be a cop.
But I’m pretty sure Asma’s bigger concern was Dorothy either being an informant or a plant.
Gee!! Now that you say it like that. That’s a very very BOLD thing for Asma to do, oh my God lmao! Tho I have to remember Dorothy ‘s last name doesnt sound Jewish so I’m sure Asma wouldn’t know. I never really thought about informants. Does police discovering the discord chat really deter in any protests tho? Hmmm, stuff to ponder. But if I’m villifying the opposite side like that… Yeah. Yeah. “They WOULD send a child. Child labor!” Lol
It depends on the security culture of the group. Most of the time the issue isn’t so much that they’ll figure out who is at the protest or what the plan is, since those are public, but more that they’ll figure out who is organizing/leading it, and sometimes they’ll intentionally push doing something illegal or cause disunity.
Holy crap people, she didn’t try to imply Dorothy was an undercover cop. She said Dorothy had “cop energy,” which is to say, she thought it was very reasonable that a random, uninvolved person showing up at the protest, demanding the specific location of a named participant, should not be treated as trustworthy.
Like, this storyline exists in a social backdrop where actual American citizens are getting black-vanned and disappeared out of the country. It’s basic protesting 101 to not just give the names and locations of participants to random people, and the fact that Dorothy and Joyce did not clock at all that their behavior was strange, dangerous, and out of place, was even further reason to suspect their motives.
Who’s to say Joyce wasn’t looking for Jocelyn at the behest of her Dad and older brother, who want to find her to “save” her from the Godless communists who have infected her brain with communist transgender ideology? Who’s to say that they weren’t there for reasons that were dangerous to Jocelyn? Asma couldn’t possibly have known that, and she acted objectively correctly in being skeptical of two new random white freshwomen, who haven’t been spotted at the weeks-long protest a single time before now, showing up and asking for people by name, when the cops are less than five minutes from storming in and making arrests.
If you don’t understand why Asma was right, I can understand that belief, given the clear gaps in your knowledge of this issue. But she was right, and if she did anything but what she did at the protest, we would have all rightfully judged her for it.
I mean Asma didn’t ask for an apology and talked about the kiss cuz Joyce decided to randomly bring it up. Even then she didn’t say she was upset about the kiss itself, mainly her annoyance that it ended up taking center stage in the paper which ends up kind of overshadowing the protest by proxy
True…. I don’t exactly hate any of them here or anything. But this is the story that’s happening today, and that’s my reaction -____-.
She has a right to be mad, she has a right to any emotion she wants, in fact (as do we all). But that’s not the same as someone having explicitly wronged her or owing her an apology or deserving a dressing down or anything (nor does it reject any of those possibilites).
I’m not surprised that when the people she’s annoyed at come up and annoy her more, she snaps at them, especially considering she’s unaware of the actual reason (lacking important details anyway) they were at the protest. From her perspective it looks like two people just wanted to go to the protest “for the experience” or to hang out or something and used the situation as a romantic backdrop, which would be potentially profoundly objectifying. And they didn’t intend to do that, but it is partly true that that’s happened.
Getting mad at people for kissing is silly, sorry. They’re not the ones who printed it on the front page of the school paper. I feel like Asma’s anger here is a little misplaced, though Joyce could also stand to shut up for once. Joyce is being a stereotypical conservative white girl, despite doing the first bits of work deconstructing that. Daisy’s actions were far more problematic.
Here’s how the conversation went.
Joyce and Dorothy approach Asma and –while probably reeking sex– just stand there staring at her with smiles on their faces while holding each other.
Asma breaks the tension by jokingly accusing them of propositioning her for a threesome.
Dorothy asks how Asma is and apologizes for her “cop energy”. Asma indicates she does not enjoy this conversation.
Joyce brings up how she is NOT apologetic for their front-page news kiss.
Asma -in reference to how their kiss has overshadowed the protest and the violent police crackdown– says that she hopes they did not intend to be front page news.
Joyce is aghast and offended at even the hint that there could be inappropriate times and places to do whatever she wants (in this case kissing Dorothy).
Aghast? Is that the face of someone aghast?
Where exactly are you getting that she’s angry at them for anything?
Annoyed or exhausted by them I could see, but she does not seem angry in this strip
Some days I really feel like I”m reading a completely different comic from the people in the comments. These two walked up on Asma and started being pretty obnoxious when she was already frustrated by their (intentional or otherwise from Asma’s perspective) actions.
Look, Joyce: Joe did better than you, because he brought donuts.
imma just say, disgusting comments aside,
as cringe as this interaction is, I actually APPRECIATE that this interaction is happening between Asma and these idiots?
I dunno bruh it’s just nice whenever the comic explores racism in ways that doesn’t always manifest itself as like, “cartoon supervillainy” as Jennifer once put it
fundie or not, for white folk like Joyce and Dorothy to do this kinda shit is hardly uncommon IRL, what given how our US society is built on a Confessional Model and racism being baked so much into our culture, how we speak, how we do things, etc.
ye I hope some white people find it instructive.
It’s not looking like they do, the ones that aren’t already aware.
Also I’m kinda concerned why people are bringing up religion here. From my understanding. The protest had nothing to do with current situation. Period
but when it got retconned recently to be so. The irl version has nothing to do with religion. The ____ phobia propaganda was just strawman argument for the offending government to do what they want. You can smell the bs because my president “loves” this government and concerned about the strawman despite being massively racist. It’s out of character of him to give a shit about that. Dorothy explains it really well at some page somewhere.
Asma is a receptionist in a residence with LGBT friendly policies. So, I don’t think she’s taking a religious stance.
Tho, I don’t have more context, so might have to eat my own hat in tonight’s strip
Interesting that at least 2 people have pointed out what we have actually seen/read in this strip (felt a need to point out?).
There is always a lot of ‘assuming’ that goes on in the comments. Some are ‘I think this’ followed by ‘called it’, which seems to be a legitimate game. But some read more like “this is what happened” (not even ‘in my opinion’). Often these are based on assumptions that it is really not valid to make. And with a comic that updates EVERY day (thanks Willis), *my opinion* is that it is more fun to note what we do, and what we do not know, in silent but excited anticipation of what will be revealed next.
My example here is the (opinion) thought that Asma doesn’t blame them for the photo, but does clearly (stated) think that they should not have kissed/kissed there and then. The intriguing question is why Asma says this. Of course there are many possibilities, that is why it is fun. Will Willis tell us (now or eventually): that is also a question! But I certainly don’t want to jump to any conclusions based on what Asma’s experiences, logical thought processes, prejudices, wokeness (meant in the positive sense) might be that contribute, precisely because we know so little about Asma. So well done Willis for using that fact to advantage for intrigue value!
“you should exercise some self control” can only be motivated by religion, yes.
Well, that is an assumption!