pfft, y’all think this is going to go the way of Raidah getting in Daisy’s face about it, but Daisy is so inherently thirsty (look how she reacted to seeing Raidah) that it is instead going to comically devolve into Daisy flirting, Raidah either rebuking or leading her on to use her. and it’ll be fun to watch either way. ~<3
As much as Raidah is a bit of a scumbag I don’t think she’s mean queer enough to queerbait or gay enough to want to flirt back. Daisy’s definitely gonna do some flirting though.
Is it though?
I mean, if it had been two women PoC making out instead of two white women, I’m sure Daisy would still have put it on the cover. She’s equal opportunity when it comes to lesbian thirst.
At no point did Raidah complain about any specifics of the girls in question, just that they were being focused on instead of the protest.
Admittedly, considering https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/reek/ she might be a little more annoyed about the specific pair of girls who got on the front page, but that’s not what she’s specifically complaining about right now.
So was Mike’s death. Does that mean people not only aren’t allowed to be upset about it, but aren’t allowed to agree with people in-universe saying Blaine was wrong to kill Mike?
Raidah is definitely not the kind of person who would remember to use alt text herself lol, she’d be over on Blacksky trying to suck up to prominent bloggers and journalists.
Yeah nah, Raidah is neither right-wing nor remotely in a demographic that would be safe on Twitter. Her obnoxiousness is a combination of ableism and bog-standard ambition.
She’s basically Dorothy without any of the stuff Dorothy has holding her back (both good and bad traits) and plus being affected by racism.
Plenty of people who’d be the first to tell you they care deeply about social issues don’t care that it’s a nazi bar now, because they’re so addicted to the quote dunk culture over there they can justify staying to themselves. Now, I don’t have a good enough read on Raidah to tell whether she’d be one of them, but they definitely exist
Raidah clearly isn’t one for overlooking bigotry. She does care a lot about making connections, but Twitter’s utility in that regard has waned. The social media I’d bed on her putting the most time into is LinkedIn.
No no. They’re staying over there because they’re so dependent on internet arguments, sometimes with the bigots, that they’re not moving. The presence of bigots is a feature, not a bug, for them
Again, not saying necessarily that Raidah would be one of them, I haven’t thought about her character that much. But it’s possible!
she may not be factually wrong or even morally wrong, but she is an unlikable asshole who’s not even fun to hate
which for a fictional character is far more damning. like it’s a short list of characters in this comic that I have X-Pac Heat for and two of ’em are dead already.
and it is entirely possible to be right for the wrong reasons; not for nothing, but if the two blonde white girls in question were two people that she did not personally look down on nor previously antagonize, she wouldn’t give two shits about who’s on the front page of some college newsrag unless it was her
Yeah I don’t know about that one. She does in fact say “What the entire fuck is this?” when she sees the newspaper (reasonable reaction IMO) before recognizing Joyce & Dorothy. Sounds kinda like she gives at least one shit
I mean it it mattered so much to her she would’ve been at the protest herself
but clearly she wasn’t, because otherwise the smell of teargas wouldn’t have been noteworthy enough to mention before going “bluh ur white”
…in fact right around the time the protest was going on, she was throwing a tantrum over Sarah hooking up with Tony. yeah she’s real concerned about this protest, just ALL tore up over it, you can tell
Yeah I don’t like Raidah but this is a valid complaint.
It might work as clickbait to get people who otherwise wouldn’t read about the protest to read about the protest but I think Daisy’s just horny. And it says nothing about the protest itself.
Unfortunately, clickbait is absolutely necessary in today’s attention economy. It is however important, yet lacking for respectable media outlets to balance it with informative content. Is Daisy’s surrender to sapphic romance not that different than other editors’ acquiescence to avarice? I’m glad she has an ethical compass in Raidah (despite that I cringe it had to be her).
Surely this wasn’t the only attention-grabbing photo taken there. Also, caving entirely to the most obvious clickbait (if this even is that) is really shitty journalistic behavior.
Also it seems like she did this because horny, not even because clickbait.
Her only counterpoint is that she is horny and bad at starting relationships. Which is a very bad rebuttal. So, ya, Raidah is objectively correct to be angry about this. Now we will have to see if she makes it Joice and Dorothy’s problem or not. Because that would be fucked up to be angry at them when they are also against being on the front page of this newspaper. But I can see her trying to take the piss out of Joice for an easy target to take her frustration out on.
I never said this wasn’t valid but are we just ignoring the context for this complaint? From the story presented Raidah never once spoke of or showed interest in the protest until after it was mentioned in passing by Joyce and Dorothy and that her complaint is motivated by her rivalry with them?
I can appreciate the muslim woman being upset that two white woman stole the media’s attention of an important protest involving and about her culture, but that’s not the story being told here. I also understand that is why this story really upsets a lot of people too.
It rankled me that Daisy seemed to originally get away with her flanderized thirsting knocking a protest and its message off the front page so hamfisted insertion as it may be I’m glad someone in-universe is calling it out.
Pull your head out of your ass. You know damn well what fucking genocide they’re talking about, and you know damn well this Bulmeria thing draws from it.
To be fair to Raidah, we don’t know that because she’s a tertiary character at best. It’s entirely possible she was extremely invested and we’re going to find that out now
It’s also possible that she wasn’t personally invested until she saw the story being badly mishandled by the student paper, which like. Also kinda fair given the givens
I also find it interesting and probably a flaw in the writing that we’ve known about the protest for days and the most prominent muslim character never mentioned it once until after it was over. Maybe that’s an intentional characterization of Raidah or a bit of a whoopsy?
yeah that’s to do with the fact that Willis said himself he noticed a lack of Muslim characters in his strip who actually play serious narrative roles and thus has recently set out to amend that
And I’ll say, by the looks of this strip alone he’s already doing the issue justice so far, can’t wait to see where else this goes!
She didn’t show interest because the protest wasn’t a relevant part of the story yetw it is and we see that Raidah cares about it. We can learn new information about characters. She can have a grudge towards Dorothy and Joyce AND also care about tge tge movement genuinely.
I honestly don’t know how to feel on this one anymore. This is clearly a hotter issue than I intended to spark with my first comment. I’ll just bow out for the day that seems like the smart move.
It’s like that one scene with Randy Marsh in the later seasons of south park…”Did everyone enjoy the Halloween special?” “No randy only you did.” “Oh, well that was my target audience anyway.”
Yeah, I’m guessing Daisy only has that job because no one else wants to do it. So she’s able to put content *she* wants to see in the paper.
OTOH, I’m sure the university is happy with the front page being about two white girls making out, instead of actually about the protest — and possibly even about the lengths the university went to to get it shut down.
My own university has pretty much that issue; corporate sponsors and investments that tie to Palestinian genocide. Students and some faculty have not been quiet about it, and the Pres is like; “Hey, look over there, is that Bigfoot?”
But it was the most important thing happening in this universe because Joyce and Dorothy, by virtue of being the main characters are the most important people in the universe. A bunch of other fictional people we will never see only matter as far it effects the characters we do see.
If the tear gas is visible in the photo (I don’t recall offhand), I’d argue that makes it an even worse pick for front page, given that they’re having no visible reaction to it. Could make readers go “I guess it’s not that bad since they didn’t even stop their smooching for it”
I hear all your complaints and reject them as irrelevant at best.
This wasn’t Kent State, with a photo of a woman kneeling beside bodies relegated to page eighteen. Photos of the police being the police won’t move the needle for anyone still on Hank’s side. This was the most interesting event during the kettling, and a photographer nailed it.
You need a better criticism than puffing out your cheeks or making fun of someone’s name. Use your words.
Maybe you’re joking, but lots of people in real life do seem to be like this when it comes to politics. Their government doing terrible things is bad when the political party they don’t like is in power, but when the party they do like is in power, it’s fine when they do many of the same terrible things.
The fact that it has on multiple occasions verged on or even outright crossed into harmful stereotypes about lesbians being desperate, lonely, or predatory is what makes it offensive.
I’d agree if she was the only lesbian character, but she isn’t, and none of the others act like her at all. I don’t like her and find her annoying, but I don’t think it’s offensive.
I don’t think we have many lesbians in DoA, tbh. Off the top of my head it’s just Becky, Leslie, and Daisy. All other female characters are either straight or bisexual.
There’s the lesbian polycule too, but we don’t really know how they identify. Still, there’s a lot of women who love other women, esp considering percentage wise of characters.
Mandy, Sierra, Grace, Marcie, and Guns were all bisexual in ‘It’s Walky’ (they all slept with Joe [at once]) and by Willis’ ‘no ones sexuality changes’ rule still are. Also Sierra has mentioned being bi in DoA and Sarah tried to get the polycule to go after Joe so she must have reason to think they’re bi.
Does a woman sleeping with a man once make her “not a lesbian”? I would have thought the term was more broadly inclusive on the kinsey scale, much as straight, and bi, and gay are. They all describe something of a range. If they weren’t, then 99%+ of the world would be bi or pan, and gay/lesbian/straights (being absolutes) would be extremely rare.
They are now bi in that universe too. People discovering new things about their sexuality can happen at any age.
This “rule” was also only introduced because SO MANY PEOPLE kept demanding to know if Ethan was “still” going to be gay in DoA, a question no one had at the time about any other character. So keep that in mind.
More relevantly, there’s a Patreon bonus comic indicating that she had a happy and positive and very casual night with a guy in DoA; IIRC, Sal is a bit confused by it, Marcie indicates that she and Malaya are keeping things open.
If Daisy was in any major way a huge piece of the series lesbian rep I’d agree with you but when we have chars like Billie and becky being good positive rep we can have 1 pos
I can’t say I really agree. The joke has always seemed pretty low stakes and lighthearted, certainly never predatory. I think it’s a fair criticism that the joke is stale or boring, but there has never been any real indication that it’s like, a reflection on lesbians as a whole.
Daisy’s always felt a little predatory to me. This scene specifically gave me the ick, but also there’s a punchline in a previous comic where she laments that no one ever offers to bribe her with sexual favors. Which seems a lot less like a joke after this scene.
This kinda reminds me of that recent strip where Joyce is wondering if it’s transphobic to still call Jocelyne “dumb” or if it’s transphobic to stop. It’d be strange for it to be off-limits for one of the lesbian characters to be problematic or one-note in a strip where we’ve had lots of problematic characters. If we saw Daisy more than twice a decade and/or didn’t have other lesbian characters we see far more often who aren’t like this, maybe that’s different, but…
And one so profoundly circular as to be meaningless, as it provides no real rational criteria. Name anything that one person does, and you’re likely to be able to find more than few people that are offended by it.
Incorrect. Dot did not say they were offended; they said the running gag itself is “borderline offensive”. There’s a difference. Dot is apparently offended, but Decidedly Orthagonal us not; therefore, simply saying it is offensive is more a matter of centering one’s own judgment.
What even is the point of this comment? Obviously saying something is offensive is one’s own judgement. That’s literally my point in mocking Orthagonal for declaring that Dot couldn’t possibly say she found something offensive.
I don’t think there’s the same! When people say “that’s offensive,” it seems like they’re saying it as a blanket term like, this thing is wrong and everyone should see it as wrong. Whereas “I am offended” is specific to the person. They are two different things
Ultimately I even agree that Daisy’s characterization is at least somewhat problematic, but ‘is offensive’ definitely isn’t a statement about personally getting the ick.
But you were allowed to. Nobody stopped you. Your comment was not removed. People may have disagreed. People may even have said you were not correct, but that is not the same as not being allowed to. Disagreement is not denial of freedom of speech or freedom of platform.
When you say “we”, the comic is written by one person: Willis. Yeah, OK, it is perfectly justified to express your opinion to Willis, here. But it is not ‘we’ or ‘us’ who would be dropping it, because we are not making it, only commenting on it.
Planet Tharg. But I was a Thargle not a Zillon. I was sent to Earth to collect semen. Or possibly it was seamen, I forget. I’m not part of Horizontal Command.
Does that adequately answer your question?
This is what’s established for her character, so it would be kind of strange for it to suddenly disappear. That said, I think I’ve seen the hilariously desperate Lesbian joke character enough times not to really like it either. At least here she’s getting called out on it?
I don’t care much whether they were white, or not; I care about the fact that it has basically nothing to do with the protest, and seems to only be on the front page because Daisy is horny, and doesn’t have a girlfriend to help relieve that.
There’s an extremely good reason for that photo to be on the front page: without it Willis would have had to come up with some other way for Dad Brown to find out about his daughter being queer that is super visible and possible for Joyce to physically hide.
Daisy needs to behave in a completely nonsense way for the last week (or more?) of strips to happen and that is…certainly a storytelling choice
Daisy is behaving in a way consistent with both her characterization and the way professional (as in it’s their job that they’re paid to do not as in the behavior is professional) newspaper editors would have handled getting that picture to use.
She may be behaving poorly but she is not behaving nonsensically.
He didn’t need to see the photo, he only needed to be at risk of seeing the photo. If there hadn’t been that photo there wouldn’t have been all this panicked running around using Becky asa distraction
Yeah, but also on the other hand I feel like she wasn’t making that point out of genuine concern (and/or disgust at the actions of prior presidents), but rather just trying to wreck Dorothy’s dreams because Dorothy is close to Sarah and Raidah hates Sarah.
Raidah seems (at least from what we’ve seen) like everything she does is for her own benefit and taking others down a peg.
Upvoting ruins everything it touches. If you like or dislike what a person’s said, just say it directly instead of hiding behind a little number next to an arrow.
You’ve described the situation so incredibly vague that it’s not recognizeable. The protest wasn’t about some indistinct “hate and oppression”, it was about crimes against humanity in another country and the school’s culpability from its ties to weapons manufacturers profiting on those crimes.
It is a terrible front page, and the real IDS did a much better job.
I find it weird that it’s precisely Raidah taking exception to the magazine cover, when she’s always come across as a self-centered, self-serving douchebag. I’m guessing she has either ulterior motives or some kind of personal connection to the issue (family in Bulmeria?)
The personal connection is that it’s Joyce on the cover. When she saw the front page she was focused on it being them, not on anything about the cause itself or how the photo distracted from it.
Yeah, but it’s not just that she didn’t like Joyce getting cover time: it’s that she decided to confront the magazine’s editor about it. That’s pretty much overkill no matter how you look at it, especially considering that the “damage” is already done.
Is it overkill? It’s a student newspaper. “Confronting the editor” has different connotations when the editor is, like, right there, on campus with you, instead of being some distant figure, possibly in another city. Whilst writing a letter to the editor would be a more normal course of action when disputed the practices of a national newspaper, there’s no real need to do that when the editor is. Y’know. Your neighbour.
True that, but the bold face in the conversation implies that Raidah is upset about “these two girls” being “frontpaged”, and perhaps the race card is played to provide respectable cover for the outrage.
After all, the protest was not about racial injustice but making wealth from genocide.
Look, Raidah, if you didn’t want the photo of Joyce and Dorothy making out to be the front page, maybe YOU should’ve been at the protest making out with someone hotter.
Raidah may be a jerk but she’s far from the worst person in this comic. Even restricting ourselves to characters who haven’t been killed off (or stabbed to within an inch of their lives), she’s at bare minimum better than Mary, Carol, and Clint.
Yeah I mean, I can’t really argue with Raidah on that one
Also between Joyrothy and this, it feels like this story is just begging for one more person/party to barge in on Daisy about the headline. Rule of Threes and all that.
dawg i got midterms AND an entire installation i need to do this week, genuinely need to log off and lock in so all I’m going to say is that if you genuinely try to argue that Daisy’s libido motivated daily bugle ass editorial choices are anything other than sensationalist junk I’m gonna throw tomatoes at you 🫳 🍅🍅🍅
gonna be honest this was probably a good move from a journalistic standpoint. The protest was a stance against the college. I don’t know how much freedom the paper would have in terms of something like that, but doing a front-page story critical of the school does seem risky in one way or another.
Doing it this way . . . I’m reminded of Star Trek: TOS where the writers would add in risque scenes to distract the censors if they were doing a Vietnam allegory or something.
The IDS is a real paper, there was a real protest, and the paper published real stories that were critical of the school with real photographs about the real protest and the real police response, on the front page, without using thirst trap photos.
Fair enough, wasn’t aware of the context, I was more going by, well, general vibes of how freedom of the press is going these days. Guess I was more thinking if Ruttech is funding the paper or something along those lines it could risk not having the cash to keep publishing on a regular basis.
Sorry, to be clear — what I meant was more, you put the thirst trap on the front page and the critical article inside. That way those who might be upset with the critical aspect are going “oh, the article’s just going to be about the couple making out” and relax.
As numerous previous protests around the world have demonstrated, Daisy made the exact editorial decision here that literally every serious mainstream journalist would make. You get that picture at a protest, you run with that picture on your front page.
It will bring eyeballs to the story! I guarantee that more people turned to page 18 because of that photo than would have with any other photo she might have used.
You presumably have photos of people of color actually protesting, you presumably hav pictures of police firing tear gas at protestors, you have lots of striking photos to use.
Centering the white girls is a choice. And it is not the correct one.
This is what I keep wondering about. The cover sucks for multiple reasons including putting the girls in the pic, but would running a picture of protesters of color be better or worse? Seems worse, for the reasons given During the protest.
and the editors that make those decisions are not serious journalists. The real IDS covered the real anti-genocide protests so much better than the Times et fucking cetera
Do you think Bari Weiss is a serious journalist because she’s being made the head of CBS News?
It doesn’t, like, actually inform anyone of a damn thing, and this is a print mediumput out for free so the eyeballs are utterly meaningless, so it’s basically aping the toxic post-vulture capital wasteland that’s systematically destroyed the profession for no benefit to anyone, but there will be eyeballs!
I’m guessing that Daisy does have more coherent and less thirsty reasons for including the picture (like “it’s a visible sign of defiance in the face of a violent police crackdown” as well as “a lot more people are going to read about the protest and the unwarranted violence by police once they’ve been lured in by two girls kissing”), and this is more “daily comic needs to end on a gag” regarding the final panels.
Not that Daisy isn’t thirsty as fuck, because she absolutely is. Just that she probably also has legit reasons that wouldn’t fit into those last two panels.
those aren’t legit reasons. It’s not a visible sign of defiance, the police weren’t cracking down on anyone kissing. and if people are looking to read stories about kissing, they’re going to stop reading the story. The photo is not serving a purpose to inform people.
The picture is definitely attention-gardening and draws in curious readers, but Raidah’s concerns are valid. Neither is won’t yet, but also come on daisy 😮💨
A flower-in-a-battlefield type image can be rather striking. A striking image and an attention grabbing headline is typical front page fare – it was the clickbait before there was clickbait.
Raidah is so hated by the comments board that if she supports the Bulmerian people against the US contractors, a not insignificant chunk will turn against them.
It’d be pretty funny (in a certain sense of the word) if Raidah is the villain of this storyline while being the only character who actually cares about helping Not!Gaza.
Ugh, that’s another problem with this subplot. The only way to do a genocide commentary right is to center the voices of the people affected, but Willis can’t do that because he made it about a country that doesn’t exist. The “Bulmerians” will always be a nameless, faceless, off-screen minority.
I mean, that’s kind of the issue. It’s not a genocide commentary because it was meant to be a backdrop for Joyce and Dorothy. I’m not sure that it can really pivot the way some fans want (especially since it’s not about a RL people and shouldn’t be).
It shouldn’t have been about them then lol. It shouldn’t have been made a parallel if there was no way to do it correctly. If the protest had been about LGBTQ+ issues, it would’ve worked so much better. Especially since the previous semester had them as a pretty prominent political issue that recurred and that multiple characters brought up pretty often.
Fuck, Raidah isn’t actually in the cast list… actually a lot of people aren’t.
I’m 90% sure she’s Black. She’s also a Muslim, which could mean anything considering both the existence of North Africa and the communities of Black American Muslims. Since Raidah is an Arabic name, chances are good it’s one of those and she’s not a convert.
Some similarity in that Joyce looked tear gassed at that moment and the couv couple had been shoved to the ground by the riot police despite being bystanders. I think some people are forgetting why Joyce was there originally.
I personally prefer that if news stories about people protesting against genocide include pictures, they actually be pictures of the people protesting, not two women kissing.
Also: Cops tear-gassing a couple of kids kissing is not a good look.
You want sympathy for student protestors? That’s how you get it.
Especially when the alternate newsworthy photos would be of a buttload of cops getting the shit kicked out of them by a student, which is the sort of thing that would make tear gas look like a reasonable response to people who weren’t there to know that the tear gas preceded the cop-kicking.
Hot take: a newspaper can have two photos on its cover. Sometimes they have a collage of 4 or 5! Maybe this one photo shouldn’t have taken up the entire first page (to the exclusion of text and articles as well). Daisy even stuck the headline referencing the actual protest, “below the fold.”
She’s editor to a college paper. I don’t get the impression she has like legions of photographers to deploy to every event.
She had Shanna on the scene, who got arrested, so who knows how long she was on hand taking photos. And she had Dorothy, who was really just there as a protestor and didn’t actually submit anything to the paper from her time there.
It may have been “Inspired” by RL Protests, but it clearly does not match them.
The real events that inspired this story had no Daisy in the editor’s seat, no front page photo of Joyce and Dorothy Kissing, and indeed, even the subject of the protest, the Bulmerians, are entirely invented.
So we cannot assume any similarities beyond what is evident in the comic itself.
Even apart from Daisy edging ever closer to sex pest territory and needing to have her influence curtailed on that account… tbh Raidah has potential just taking over the paper.
Which makes me imagine her chomping a cigar while accidintentiontally running the comics in reverse order to spoiler them and publishing headlines like “Joyce Brown: Boingo or Ding-Dong?”
I have a question. I have seen both “making out” and “macking out” in the comments (not this lot, past ones). I’ve tried searching both “making out vs macking out” and “macking out”, but I get nothing for macking out. Is macking out just a typo or misspelling? Or is there something called macking out that is not making out?
macking out is british slang for heavy kissing with light petting, snogging is french kissing, as explained in a british animated show i forget the name of.
I’m glad somebody else is calling Daisy out for her decision to have the front page image for a story on the anti-genocide protest be a picture of two women kissing. Raidah may often be a jerk, but in this case she’s right.
“Finding love in the middle of carnage and chaos” is an iconic image for a reason, and the picture does exactly that. Does it get to the heart of what the protest was about? No – but it does show at least some of the overreaction by the police to the protest and the use of at least copious amounts of tear gas against the protestors. As far as I’m aware, we haven’t seen the story itself, so it’s entirely possible that criticism of it focusing on young love in the middle of the chaos overshadows the purpose of the protest and the violence deployed against the protestors – but you want a front page image that captures the attention and interest of potential readers, and the image does exactly that.
In terms of good, proper journalism, Raidah is absolutely right to call it out. Daisy, unfortunately, does not seem to believe in proper journalism if ladies being sexualized or ladies kissing are present in photos.
Is there a significant difference between running a cover photo that centers two white women kissing as the primary story focus of a protest against substitute-Palestinian genocide, and writing a webcomic that centers two white women kissing as the primary story focus of a protest against substitute-Palestinian genocide?
I ask this mostly because of the sea of “fuck you Daisy” comments so far and the absence of recognition that this is a pretty obvious bit of meta self-criticism for creative choices made during the previous storyline, which in turn makes the degree to which Daisy vitriol is manifesting sort of weird.
I would say doing that in an actual news publication that ought to be reporting on actual events is a lot worse than doing it in a purely fictional comic that has always focused on the two white women in question, even if the second still deserves criticism.
Yeah I read this pretty directly as a uh. Look guys, literally responsibility is different for a webcomic vs a real news publication and that swings bot in favor of and against Daisy’s choices, but as far as I read it in this strip Willis is Daisy. Reading from a Doylist lens he is taking the critique and he is acknowledging his personal messiness, a thing he also did on Twitter after the kiss comic ran and he got this criticism. This strip probably is running as part of a decision to center the voices of more characters of color and specifically Muslim characters more often and more intentionally. This represents a part of learning and growing.
Sorry, I’ve never been on either website and I kind of forget that bsky is very intentionally not twitter post-x. I kinda see the format and my brain is like oh it’s a twitter post. That’s my bad.
Yeah, I’m seeing way too many comments saying Raidah is either jealous or otherwise out of line. This strip is clearly WILLIS confessing that HE was out of line in making a brown people’s protest all about two white girls finding love.
I’m pretty sure at the time this comic was drawn, the kiss still hadn’t been published, so I’m not sure how it could be a response to criticisms he got for that.
He made a post on bluesky when the storyline was happening saying that he realized that it was a bit tone-deaf that his actual Muslim characters didn’t have a lot being involved in the storyline, so he added some more strips and inserted them into his buffer, mostly the Asma/Raidah ones.
Yes, but he made the choice to have Raidah, whom we have plenty of reason to be suspicious of, rather than Asma, whom everyone pretty much would like, be the one to issue the critique. Raidah has baggage, particularly related to Joyce, and it’s impossible to read the scene without it including some of that.
I feel like a lot of people missed the (somewhat important) bit where one of the primary characters of the entire comic also realigned her political ambitions during this saga and became inspired to join the protest herself, something that will presumably come up again.
Why are people taking this comic so seriously lately? Have the comments always been like this? Like oh my god, it’s a comic, to read and see what characters do. But it feels like a lot of comments are like, basing real world personal moral stances on characters that don’t exist in real life, it’s bonkers
Interesting, because you go to unusual lengths to hate on characters based on things they didn’t even do but that would seem logical for them to be doing – by your logic and nobody else’s.
Sure, sure.
Thats why she actually points out that the central political topics of the protest and the police brutality got silenced out of reporting by Daisys thirst and failed journalism.
I´m well aware of that idea being a racist talking point in general.
With the slight caveat that it absolutely can be.
Ever been to Japan? I had an insightful evening in a tokio hotel once, where for some reason the bedstand contained ultra-nationalistic politics literature my japanese friend roughly translated for me.
What those folks think and write about “long-nosed stinking barbarians” was truly enlightening for a german-raised european dude who always got told how singular white racism against the rest of humanity was.
Tribalism and othering is a general human trait, not exclusive to us pasty ones.
If you think whatever you read was bad, you should see what Imperial Japan thought and did to the Chinese and the Koreans. Unit 731 looked at what Wirths was doing and basically went, “here, hold my sake”. It’s like “the Nazis, but over there”, except Japan never reckoned with it the way Germany did.
It sounds like she had an eyecatching photo on the front page, and put their voices on page 1B, which is arguably not the proper way to prioritize that information, but it doesn’t sound like anybody was “silenced” by the Daisy’s editing here.
Huh. Yeah, okay – call it deprioritizing then, or shadowbanning, or red hering lead, or forming the narrative battlefield.
You are of course technically correct. Its not outright silencing as such.
Blame my first language not being english, the late hour I commented yesterday or a hyperbolic character trait.
But in the end, its all tactics to get relevant points out of sight and substitute less relevant ones.
Which should be a professional sin for journalists,
Aw, shite, I think I unintentionally reported your post. sorry.
She did not point out any of those things. All she did was complain about the white girls making out. There is no indication in this comic of her motives or what she’s actually mad about, you are projecting your thoughts onto someone who happens to agree with you that the photo was a bad choice. That doesn’t mean they actually agree with your reasons, it just means they agree with your result.
We KNOW Raidah hates Joyce and Dorothy. We know she’s a disingenuous person for whom virtually every social interaction is about gaining power and influence. She is not quite the *worst* person in the comic, but she’d definitely in the proverbial league of evil.
I wouldn’t put it past Willis to do an arc where she makes a good point, or learns to be better, but at the moment, she has done absolutely nothing to earn the benefit of the doubt from the reader.
“This photo, with these two girls, versus literally ANY other infrormation about the protest” …. is pretty clear I would say.
She starts by pointing out that the title page is not at all about the protest.
Then enforces her point by adding the identity aspect of two people of a non-involved ethnicity being superimposed.
And fair is fair: Reception of literature (and all other text) is always tinged by personal biases.
But I´m not whlly in the clear wether it´s me or you who is doing the heavier projection here.
JFC, the number of people in the comments Raidah just because she doesn’t want the whole point of the protest hijacked to “There was police violence at the protest about genocide of brown people. But on the bright side, these two tangentially involved white girls found love!” Raidah’s problem is that the whole point of the genocide protest is, as usual, being cast aside because the editor wants something “hot”.
Reporting what happend in the protest is supportive of the protest and the risk the protesters willingly took.
Not reporting or misleading the audience about the protest is fundamentally working against their intent and trying to negate supress any effect.
Journalists CAN report on police brutality and crimes at protests without outing individual demonstrators, intentionally or by being sloppy.
The good ones do it all the time.
To be fair, and while I’ve seen many examples of student journalism being better than professional journalism, they are there to learn and possibly make mistakes.
We’ve been over this, Raidah. The picture is titillating sensationalism, it’s cheap but it’s going to do a lot more to get people to read the actual story and find out the good thing the protest was trying to do and the bad thing the cops did, than any combination of words and pictures you could put on the front page
Oh definitely. But it seems Shanna did the writing from jail so I think we’re fine. (I read through seven months of comic to check that just cause it bothered me I couldn’t remember if it had been mentioned who wrote it.)
I feel like this makes it a tiny bit worse, actually. I demand Shanna’s opinion on the photo picked lol. My mom has gotten confronted because her editor ran with a bad photo for a story, I want to know if Shanna thinks this is a good pic or if she’s gonna get random intermittent grief for something she didn’t even pick
Taking a step back from how obviously and continuously horny Daisy is, the image really is an iconic one, and conveys everything you need to know about how the protest ended, with excessive force being used to drive away peaceful protestors. Clouds of (granted, strangely pink) tear gas floating around the last few protestors who haven’t escaped the grounds yet – with the focus on two people finding love in the middle of that violence. Yes, Daisy is horny, frustrated, and incredibly biased because of the fact that it’s two girls smooching – but that doesn’t change the fact that it really is a worthy front page picture (much to the chagrin of Joyce, Dorothy, and Jocelyne).
… And I just realized that the most effecient way to refer to the trio just sounds kinda… not great.
Raidah has to be a true asshole to be so angry for a photo of a protest that, just the day before, she considered useless, made by the whites freshman just to clear their consciences and from which she was careful not to participate. If she had been in it, she might have had a right to criticize Daisy, but she wasn’t and it’s only angry because the two girls are her enemies. The worst possible hypocrisy! She’s also rube because she immediately attacks Daisy without even introduce herself.
We’ve seen nothing to indicate that Raidah considers the protest useless. She may be directly affected by whatever is going on in Bulmeria and has a right to an opinion on the protest whether she personally attends it or not.
She was pretty targetted in her criticisms. Made it pretty clear her grievance was with Joyce and Dorothy, not with the protest itself. Felt they’d make the protest all about themselves, not the issues, which is arguably what happened, though it’s not what Joyce and Dorothy wanted to happen. They were as put out as anybody when they found themselves on that front page.
Exactly. Was she a bit rude in how she talked to Joyce and Dorothy? Sure. Does she probably have experience with inexperienced white savior types trying to get involved in issues personal to her just to stroke their own egos? More than likely.
Does it bother her that she’s had no success whatsoever turning these white girls against their good friend Sarah and they’re happily living their best lives in spite of Sarah being a part of their group? 100%
Honestly I don’t think she’s tried to turn them against Sarah in… months? Dorothy, she doesn’t like due to her wanting to be president but Joyce is Raidah’s number one enemy because of Jacob rather than anything to do with Sarah. Any relation to Sarah is just a plus as far as her anger goes I think.
Yeah, she stopped because it *wasn’t working*, but the fact that she *tried* still stands against her character. Raidah is a bully and a narcissist, and has been since she was introduced to the comic. I see no reason to suddenly give her the benefit of the doubt now.
I’d also need a little more than two months since somebody acted on a vendetta before I considered the vendetta dropped, personally. Unless there was some specific way an olive branch had been extended or something.
Raidah has 100% absolutely valid reasons to hate Joyce. Her hatred of Dorothy reasoning validity is more debatable and I’m not opening that can of worms, but Raidah has more valid reason than damn near anyone in the cast to hate Joyce. I don’t hate the women that stole boyfriends from me in the past (even the ones that did so deliberately), but fwiu nobody would give me grief if I did as long as I still hated the dude too lol.
If Raidah had considered the protest useful she would have be in it. Instead she completely ignored it and even criticized Joyce and Dorothy for going. She can only consider it useless or/and stupid.
Raidah is a true asshole, we’ve seen enough examples throughout the comic. This is not one of those times. She’s entirely in the right to complain about how the picture completely overshadows, even with the story continued on page 1B, what actually happened at the protest.
To me, Daisy is a one note joke long past its expiration date, and considering the current topic I doubt she gets any development anytime soon.
Wha what? She didn’t say that at all?? She thinks Joyce and Dorothy specifically doing it was dor attention she didn’t say anything about protesting itself being useless. If you gonna be mad at least don’t make shit up.
So, in summary, the photo distracted from the point of the protest and outed two queer women, at least one of whom has bigoted family to worry about, while framing itself as the celebration of an inspiring love story.
To be fair, I don’t think that Daisy recognized Joyce or Dorothy in the picture (though her head might have been clouded by sexual frustration in that case) and even if she had, I seriously doubt that she’d have been at all aware of the threat posed by Joyce’s family (well, OK, her mom specifically, though at the time we didn’t know how Hank would take the news, so it being revealed to him was still a pretty significant risk).
I can understand why Raidah is upset about the photo – but the picture itself is the bait to get people interested in the story while (hopefully) the article behind it gives a more accurate view of the protest, what it was about, and the disproportionate response to it. It’s advertising 101, taking advantage of a classic image to draw interest, even if that image isn’t perfectly representative of what was going on.
It was implied Daisy has some sort of unchecked vision problems that prevented her from recognizing Joyce and Dorothy, wasn’t it?
Does she need glasses or did I misread that?
But yeah, definite case of rushing the photo out without taking the time to figure anything out or consider the consequences. A better journalist probably would’ve found a way to meet deadlines without being so reckless and cavalier to callatoral damage or fallout.
The photographer who took the photo is also an element of this. She presumably recognized her coworker sucking face with not her coworkers boyfriend. Is there some grudge there we haven’t learned about yet?
We have no idea who took the photo. Or if they’d have any reason to recognize either Joyce or Dorothy as contributors to the paper, much less know the details of their love lives.
David Willis posted a bit more detail on tumblr. She’s apparently some deep pull from the old Walkyverse and we saw the tip of her head in one of the crowd shots at the protest.
But either way, whoever took the photo must work at the newspaper, so I don’t see how they could not know Dorothy. This newspaper isn’t exactly a multinational conglomerate. It’s a college paper that can probably count their contributors on your fingers.
Shanna’s a reference to the old webcomic Faans, which crossed over with It’s Walky! back in the day. I’d forgotten she’d been name-dropped.
Small paper, so they may have met, but it’s not like we’ve seen any evidence of meetings with all the reporters or them going into the office to work. She’s likely know Dorothy’s name, but could easily not have recognized her in the confusion, unless they’ve been working more closely than we know. There’s certainly no reason for Shanna to know about Dorothy’s love life.
Makes sense. In the modern workplace, coworkers can have surprisingly little to do with eachother sometimes. If everybody just e-mails their work to Daisy they don’t necessarily need to worry about who else is involved in the project or what they’re doing. It’s Daisy’s job to keep track of all that stuff after all.
Is Raidah, suggesting that it would have been better if two girls of color were on the front page, making out? I totally support that kind of representation; more bi/lesbian black/brown girls please!
Her grievance seems to be that the important information was on page 1B instead of page 1. In a college paper that’s distributed through all of two city blocks.
It’s a legitimate grievance, for sure. But still a fairly minor one to go calling anybody’s supervisor over.
Raidah doesn’t know who Daisy is, she’s explicitly going to complain to someone she doesn’t know about someone she doesn’t know over the coverage of a protest she didn’t attend because, I guess, she doesn’t like one of the people that were in the photo.
This isn’t about anybody “knowing their place.” What exactly is the bigotry she has a legitimate grievance *about*? Were there some black girls making out at the protest that Willis hasn’t shown us yet?
At this point, I wish the entire stupid protest scene would just get reconned out of the story. It’s dragging down the entire rest of the comic, lately.
Nah.
Art making people think and talk about reality is great. Its what art should do.
If that makes you uncomfortable or sad : I get it.
Its a hard topic, many feels, big taboos, much dug-in tribalism and people calling other people names/out.
But again – thats what good art should do.
To my mind, it liftet this sllice-of-life teen drama comic to another level. Good on willis to leave his comfortable reservation where he could rely on most of his built-up audience to be with him on questions of love, gender and sexuality.
If Willis is doing some self-criticism via comic here, somewhat using Daisy as a stand-in for themself, I gotta say it was not a good choice to have Raidah say it, mostly because people do not like her and are more likely to dismiss anything she says. Which sucks when it’s also just something real people in this very comment section have been and are saying.
I am guessing Willis trusted, for some reason, in people ability to separate their personal fellings for the character from the merits of ger argument.
The only thing people like less that someone who’s actually almost always wrong (like Mary) is someone like Raidah who’s pretty often right but for the wrong reasons or with “bad” motivations (for example, “judging people based on their ability to help her climb the social ladder”).
If she wanted to she could reach out and hold hands with Mary. Or hit her with a steel chair. This strip feels like another situation where he could have easily used Asma (a Muslim character who was actually at the protest giving her much more reason to care about the protests coverage) instead of using a widely hated character and gotten the point across without people being distracted by the involvement of one of the worst student characters in the comic.
That’s if he wanted it to just be the authorial voice, which I suspect is unlikely given how he set up Raidah finding out about the photo and her initial reaction (as well as her reaction when Joyce and Dorothy got back from the protest.)
I mean, I for one welcome Asma not being the the single Muslim character (of what, 3? 4? I’m pretty sure there’s some extras I cannot remember the names of) who cares, because that, to me, would still feel pretty welrd! If Willis made the decision to invest more screentime into his Muslim characters, generally but also in the context of this storyline specifically, then I’d hope it wouldn’t just be put on one of them.
Especially since we already /had/ Raidah as a character who’s faith was known, and yeah it hasn’t come up in any way since it was essentially used as part of a setup for a punchline with Joyce, but I’m, again, hoping that that’s part of something Willis is working on. Because unlike apparently a lot of people (?) think it’s way more interesting if characters have like, nuances. Including antagonists! It’d be a nice change of pace. And maybe that’s not at all what Willis is doing, who knows. I’m honestly not optimistic, but we’ll see! Commentariat will continue to be insufferable about her either way.
well it def gets ur attention but assume info about the protest would’ve been posted somewhere unless it was organized by someone word of mouth/discreetly with burner phones or so
See, this pisses me off. Outing two young adults like that, publically? Opens the newspaper and college up to a whole heap of trouble. Not to mention lawsuits, and the problems caused for the two in question. NOT SMART. Not good journalism I’m any sense of the word.
Yeah, people attempting to be discrete about their orientation don’t usually engage in Public Displays of Affection at events where an express goal is to get press coverage.
It’s not like that never happens, and Daisy could’ve investigated the situation more thoroughly, but it’s kind of in the same vein as that executive a few weeks ago getting caught with his mistress on the kiss cam at the coldplay concert. The folks at coldplay didn’t think they were putting him on blast when they pointed the camera at him.
He didn’t even get caught because his wife just happened to be watching the Coldplay concert video.
He posted to facebook something like “I know that looks like us at the Coldplay Concert, but that’s totally not us, I assure you”, which prompted all his friends and family to look into what the heck he was talking about.
Which is a particularly funny element to the story imo.
Yeah, like who the heck knows what the CEO of Astronomer looks like? Not like he appeared on the kiss cam and everybody was instantly like “I know that guy! Call the press!”
very late addition to the everything! but one thing that i think is overlooked about Raidah as a character is that, yes, she’s a social climber, yes she has a bad habit of using people/surrounding herself specifically with people she thinks are “going somewhere”…. but unless I’m blanking on some particularly noxious moments, she absolutely does care about social issues + particularly racial issues, and she does it in a particular way that makes *sense* given her current positioning
like, when she calls out Dorothy about the President thing? She’s not wrong. She’s not being nice about it (and she doesn’t have to be, she’s not friends with Dorothy), but she’s ABSOLUTELY correct. Her beef with Sarah about Dana has some definite undertones about ratting on a friend a) to parents b) about drugs c) getting them pulled out of school (while Dana is not a person of color, both Sarah and Raidah are, so the tension being between *them* makes sense to me)
so like, nothing about this strip seems counter to Raidah’s characterization to me — it’s just an element we haven’t seen foregrounded as much when it’s not being used against someone we *like*, because she does make an excellent foil, but it is definitely past time for her to be in the right about an uncomfortable race situation (much like how Roz is often right! but she’s right in a way that grates in a very realistic and very specific way that makes Roz an excellent antagonist-cum-initiating force for character growth)
It’s possible, but the only times we’ve really seen her comment on social issues she was pretty transparently using them to manipulate – mostly bringing up Jacob’s brother’s work on the big trans rights case in front of fundie Joyce.
“Injustice” just seems like such a strong word for having to read past the headline to get all the details…
Like, if Daisy had forewent communicating what the protest was about at all, sure, but Raidah’s big complaint here seems to be that the information on page 1b should’ve been on page 1, and the information on page 1 should’ve been relegated to 1b or possibly dropped entirely.
Amazigirl was standing up to injustice when she fistfought cops in riot gear. Raidah is nitpicking the particularities of how the story was formatted.
Sorry, I was commenting outside of the story. There is plenty of race-base injustice to strive against, but people don’t realize they are buying into racist beliefs when they belittle efforts from a group with “no standing” as the judges say. Every voice is needed, and every voices counts.
In story though, I got the feeling from the bold face text that Raidah’s complaint was that “those two girls” were “Frontpaged”, and didn’t play the race card until the end when she had to justify her objection.
While she may be an asshole, Raidah’s quickly becoming easily the most interesting character in this entire arc. She’s pretty unambiguously said nothing but true things since the protest, but what is ambiguous is the degree to which she’s saying them because they’re true, vs. the degree to which she’s just glad to have a veneer for the personal feelings she was already going to have.
In the strip where she finds the newspaper, it’s not immediately clear if “Wait, are you shitting me? This is Joyce and Dorothy!” should be read as her just noticing that it’s Joyce and Dorothy, which would establish that she actually was already bothered by the choice to put two white girls making out on the front page instead of something more substantial, or if it should be read as her reacting to Asma’s indifference to Joyce and Dorothy making out with “Wait, are you shitting me?” in which case she’s actually being a massive hypocrite.
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I. 👏🏽 Called. 👏🏽 It. 👏🏽
She’s right, and this isn’t something that can be dismissed as social climbing. And there are so many media outlets that lack a functional ombudsman.
Apologies for the accidental report!
pfft, y’all think this is going to go the way of Raidah getting in Daisy’s face about it, but Daisy is so inherently thirsty (look how she reacted to seeing Raidah) that it is instead going to comically devolve into Daisy flirting, Raidah either rebuking or leading her on to use her. and it’ll be fun to watch either way. ~<3
As much as Raidah is a bit of a scumbag I don’t think she’s mean queer enough to queerbait or gay enough to want to flirt back. Daisy’s definitely gonna do some flirting though.
I think she won’t notice, to be real.
Today I learned the “universal term” for what is called “défenseur des droits” in France!
This is an excellent complaint that I wish would go somewhere.
Agree!
Is it though?
I mean, if it had been two women PoC making out instead of two white women, I’m sure Daisy would still have put it on the cover. She’s equal opportunity when it comes to lesbian thirst.
1. Is she?
2. Moot because the complaint is that the photo is barely relevant, at best.
At no point did Raidah complain about any specifics of the girls in question, just that they were being focused on instead of the protest.
Admittedly, considering https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/reek/ she might be a little more annoyed about the specific pair of girls who got on the front page, but that’s not what she’s specifically complaining about right now.
Oops… Somehow missed her specifying “white girls” in panel 4. It’s not yet clear how much she cares about that aspect, though.
I personally think it’s a descriptive intensifier and not a key part of the complaint. Future comics may show otherwise.
If Joyce were of the right race it may have been halfway relevant. Dorothy is Jewish right?
Dorothy is partly Jewish. Enough for the worst antisemites to care, but not really anyone else. “white girl” isn’t really wrong.
This seems relevant: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/reek/
Daisy wishes that things would go somewhere, too.
I think those upset may have to just accept that this was a necessary development to further the overall plot.
So was Mike’s death. Does that mean people not only aren’t allowed to be upset about it, but aren’t allowed to agree with people in-universe saying Blaine was wrong to kill Mike?
I care more about whether it was right for Willis to kill Mike than for Blaine to do it tbh.
His story, not ours. We’re just here to experience it all.
Raidah really has nothing going on huh?
bluesky was down so she couldn’t yell at people for forgetting to use alt text
Raidah is definitely not the kind of person who would remember to use alt text herself lol, she’d be over on Blacksky trying to suck up to prominent bloggers and journalists.
Pretty sure — of all people — Raidah (and/or the fundy) would still be on le twittre.
Considerably how many racist live there i seriously doubt she give it the time of day.
Yeah nah, Raidah is neither right-wing nor remotely in a demographic that would be safe on Twitter. Her obnoxiousness is a combination of ableism and bog-standard ambition.
She’s basically Dorothy without any of the stuff Dorothy has holding her back (both good and bad traits) and plus being affected by racism.
Plenty of people who’d be the first to tell you they care deeply about social issues don’t care that it’s a nazi bar now, because they’re so addicted to the quote dunk culture over there they can justify staying to themselves. Now, I don’t have a good enough read on Raidah to tell whether she’d be one of them, but they definitely exist
Raidah clearly isn’t one for overlooking bigotry. She does care a lot about making connections, but Twitter’s utility in that regard has waned. The social media I’d bed on her putting the most time into is LinkedIn.
No no. They’re staying over there because they’re so dependent on internet arguments, sometimes with the bigots, that they’re not moving. The presence of bigots is a feature, not a bug, for them
Again, not saying necessarily that Raidah would be one of them, I haven’t thought about her character that much. But it’s possible!
Now I’m imagining Raidah posting pro-AI posts with short one sentence paragraphs. It is a far more horrid fate than she could ever deserve.
Shots fired, dayum.
I feel like complaining about how an issue you care about was covered is a relatively reasonable thing to be doing
Yeah like what’s actually wrong with this lol
She’s Raidah and thus always wrong regardless of whether Sarah tries to break up her relationship or tells Dorothy she’s been unreasonably idealistic.
she may not be factually wrong or even morally wrong, but she is an unlikable asshole who’s not even fun to hate
which for a fictional character is far more damning. like it’s a short list of characters in this comic that I have X-Pac Heat for and two of ’em are dead already.
and it is entirely possible to be right for the wrong reasons; not for nothing, but if the two blonde white girls in question were two people that she did not personally look down on nor previously antagonize, she wouldn’t give two shits about who’s on the front page of some college newsrag unless it was her
Brilliantly stated.
Yeah I don’t know about that one. She does in fact say “What the entire fuck is this?” when she sees the newspaper (reasonable reaction IMO) before recognizing Joyce & Dorothy. Sounds kinda like she gives at least one shit
I mean it it mattered so much to her she would’ve been at the protest herself
but clearly she wasn’t, because otherwise the smell of teargas wouldn’t have been noteworthy enough to mention before going “bluh ur white”
…in fact right around the time the protest was going on, she was throwing a tantrum over Sarah hooking up with Tony. yeah she’s real concerned about this protest, just ALL tore up over it, you can tell
Tragic: the worst person you know just made a good point
Especially when the person directly responsible for it’s easily accessible abd technically a peer.
Yeah I don’t like Raidah but this is a valid complaint.
It might work as clickbait to get people who otherwise wouldn’t read about the protest to read about the protest but I think Daisy’s just horny. And it says nothing about the protest itself.
Unfortunately, clickbait is absolutely necessary in today’s attention economy. It is however important, yet lacking for respectable media outlets to balance it with informative content. Is Daisy’s surrender to sapphic romance not that different than other editors’ acquiescence to avarice? I’m glad she has an ethical compass in Raidah (despite that I cringe it had to be her).
Surely this wasn’t the only attention-grabbing photo taken there. Also, caving entirely to the most obvious clickbait (if this even is that) is really shitty journalistic behavior.
Also it seems like she did this because horny, not even because clickbait.
Yeah, I think Raidah’s a bottomless pit of a human being, but she does have a point on this one. And I don’t think Daisy has a coherent counterpoint
Her only counterpoint is that she is horny and bad at starting relationships. Which is a very bad rebuttal. So, ya, Raidah is objectively correct to be angry about this. Now we will have to see if she makes it Joice and Dorothy’s problem or not. Because that would be fucked up to be angry at them when they are also against being on the front page of this newspaper. But I can see her trying to take the piss out of Joice for an easy target to take her frustration out on.
I never said this wasn’t valid but are we just ignoring the context for this complaint? From the story presented Raidah never once spoke of or showed interest in the protest until after it was mentioned in passing by Joyce and Dorothy and that her complaint is motivated by her rivalry with them?
I can appreciate the muslim woman being upset that two white woman stole the media’s attention of an important protest involving and about her culture, but that’s not the story being told here. I also understand that is why this story really upsets a lot of people too.
Raidah has barely been a character, and until Jocelyn was on her way to the protest nobody acknowledged it or the reason for it at all.
I’d put money down the only reason this comic exists is as part of the ham fisted shoving in of extra strips to make up for that very fact.
It rankled me that Daisy seemed to originally get away with her flanderized thirsting knocking a protest and its message off the front page so hamfisted insertion as it may be I’m glad someone in-universe is calling it out.
Oh yes I’m glad it’s being called out but like… Willis should’ve thought about that during the first draft, not needed it pointed out after you know?
People learn by making mistake.
Co-opting a very real protest about a very real genocide for a romcom moment is a bit more than an oopsie
I didn’t say it was “Just an oopsie”. They took the criticism of it, and they set out to act on them to improve the story.
Real genocide? Phew, maybe you can clear something up for me. Which continent is Bulmeria on?
Pull your head out of your ass. You know damn well what fucking genocide they’re talking about, and you know damn well this Bulmeria thing draws from it.
To be fair to Raidah, we don’t know that because she’s a tertiary character at best. It’s entirely possible she was extremely invested and we’re going to find that out now
It’s also possible that she wasn’t personally invested until she saw the story being badly mishandled by the student paper, which like. Also kinda fair given the givens
I also find it interesting and probably a flaw in the writing that we’ve known about the protest for days and the most prominent muslim character never mentioned it once until after it was over. Maybe that’s an intentional characterization of Raidah or a bit of a whoopsy?
yeah that’s to do with the fact that Willis said himself he noticed a lack of Muslim characters in his strip who actually play serious narrative roles and thus has recently set out to amend that
And I’ll say, by the looks of this strip alone he’s already doing the issue justice so far, can’t wait to see where else this goes!
She didn’t show interest because the protest wasn’t a relevant part of the story yetw it is and we see that Raidah cares about it. We can learn new information about characters. She can have a grudge towards Dorothy and Joyce AND also care about tge tge movement genuinely.
I honestly don’t know how to feel on this one anymore. This is clearly a hotter issue than I intended to spark with my first comment. I’ll just bow out for the day that seems like the smart move.
Yeah I don’t Raidah is doing anything wrong in this case.
For fuck sakes Daisy.
It’s like that one scene with Randy Marsh in the later seasons of south park…”Did everyone enjoy the Halloween special?” “No randy only you did.” “Oh, well that was my target audience anyway.”
Yeah, I’m guessing Daisy only has that job because no one else wants to do it. So she’s able to put content *she* wants to see in the paper.
OTOH, I’m sure the university is happy with the front page being about two white girls making out, instead of actually about the protest — and possibly even about the lengths the university went to to get it shut down.
My own university has pretty much that issue; corporate sponsors and investments that tie to Palestinian genocide. Students and some faculty have not been quiet about it, and the Pres is like; “Hey, look over there, is that Bigfoot?”
We were all readers that day.
Some of us had the awareness to realize that that was not even close to being the most important thing happening at that time.
But it was the most important thing happening in this universe because Joyce and Dorothy, by virtue of being the main characters are the most important people in the universe. A bunch of other fictional people we will never see only matter as far it effects the characters we do see.
Don’t trust readers. Yes that likely includes everyone reading this comic!
Jokes on you I can’t read
It is a picture of the protest, with the reason for the protest in the headline. It even depicts the police response to the protest.
It is a picture of something that happened in the same location as the protest, with the police response cropped out.
Tear-gas yuri bubbles beg to differ.
do you even hear yourself?
Do y’all see photos of protestors standing amid gas grenades and go ‘huh, must be foggy?’
If the tear gas is visible in the photo (I don’t recall offhand), I’d argue that makes it an even worse pick for front page, given that they’re having no visible reaction to it. Could make readers go “I guess it’s not that bad since they didn’t even stop their smooching for it”
Name checks out
You must feel so proud.
Come on.
That’s such a reach, it’s a reach-a-fuckin’-round, son.
I hear all your complaints and reject them as irrelevant at best.
This wasn’t Kent State, with a photo of a woman kneeling beside bodies relegated to page eighteen. Photos of the police being the police won’t move the needle for anyone still on Hank’s side. This was the most interesting event during the kettling, and a photographer nailed it.
You need a better criticism than puffing out your cheeks or making fun of someone’s name. Use your words.
Honestly, by far the most interesting event during the kettling was Amazi-Girl beating up police with apparent impunity.
This is probably a better photo in terms of positive political impact than any image of that could have been.
See, that’s fair. Albeit probably not great for Amazi-Girl’s continued presence and safety.
The correct poll answer is both.
I hope Daisy sees reason. I want to go back to liking her.
daisy is hoping raidah “makes” her see reason…….and stars
Wait until we find out the politics of the DOA verse.
Republicans: Support Bulmerian government.
Democrats: Supports Bulmerian government.
Daisy sides, of course, with the Democrats.
Maybe you’re joking, but lots of people in real life do seem to be like this when it comes to politics. Their government doing terrible things is bad when the political party they don’t like is in power, but when the party they do like is in power, it’s fine when they do many of the same terrible things.
For example, the number of people who stopped caring about ICE detention facilities once Biden came into office.
Can we please drop this stupid fucking borderline offensive joke that makes me dread anytime Daisy appears
Daisy being perpetually thirsty?
That’s one way to put it
You don’t like it =/= it’s offensive
The fact that it has on multiple occasions verged on or even outright crossed into harmful stereotypes about lesbians being desperate, lonely, or predatory is what makes it offensive.
I’d agree if she was the only lesbian character, but she isn’t, and none of the others act like her at all. I don’t like her and find her annoying, but I don’t think it’s offensive.
I don’t think we have many lesbians in DoA, tbh. Off the top of my head it’s just Becky, Leslie, and Daisy. All other female characters are either straight or bisexual.
There’s the lesbian polycule too, but we don’t really know how they identify. Still, there’s a lot of women who love other women, esp considering percentage wise of characters.
Mandy, Sierra, Grace, Marcie, and Guns were all bisexual in ‘It’s Walky’ (they all slept with Joe [at once]) and by Willis’ ‘no ones sexuality changes’ rule still are. Also Sierra has mentioned being bi in DoA and Sarah tried to get the polycule to go after Joe so she must have reason to think they’re bi.
But didn’t Joyce, Danny and Dorothy’s changed? I don’t remember them being bi in IW.
Does a woman sleeping with a man once make her “not a lesbian”? I would have thought the term was more broadly inclusive on the kinsey scale, much as straight, and bi, and gay are. They all describe something of a range. If they weren’t, then 99%+ of the world would be bi or pan, and gay/lesbian/straights (being absolutes) would be extremely rare.
They are now bi in that universe too. People discovering new things about their sexuality can happen at any age.
This “rule” was also only introduced because SO MANY PEOPLE kept demanding to know if Ethan was “still” going to be gay in DoA, a question no one had at the time about any other character. So keep that in mind.
Carla is an ace lesbian. I am pretty sure Marcie is a lesbian?
Charlie could maybe be a lesbian, I don’t know.
Marcie was seeing Jason in the Walkyverse.
More relevantly, there’s a Patreon bonus comic indicating that she had a happy and positive and very casual night with a guy in DoA; IIRC, Sal is a bit confused by it, Marcie indicates that she and Malaya are keeping things open.
I hate that you can’t search Patreon strips.
I don’t remember this one.
If Daisy was in any major way a huge piece of the series lesbian rep I’d agree with you but when we have chars like Billie and becky being good positive rep we can have 1 pos
Billie is good positive rep? For who?
Becky I’ll give you easy though.
I’m sure Jay meant Becky. Jennifer isn’t a lesbian.
Replace Billie with Leslie. Leslie is fantastic.
I can’t say I really agree. The joke has always seemed pretty low stakes and lighthearted, certainly never predatory. I think it’s a fair criticism that the joke is stale or boring, but there has never been any real indication that it’s like, a reflection on lesbians as a whole.
Daisy’s always felt a little predatory to me. This scene specifically gave me the ick, but also there’s a punchline in a previous comic where she laments that no one ever offers to bribe her with sexual favors. Which seems a lot less like a joke after this scene.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/likethis/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/blameless/
This kinda reminds me of that recent strip where Joyce is wondering if it’s transphobic to still call Jocelyne “dumb” or if it’s transphobic to stop. It’d be strange for it to be off-limits for one of the lesbian characters to be problematic or one-note in a strip where we’ve had lots of problematic characters. If we saw Daisy more than twice a decade and/or didn’t have other lesbian characters we see far more often who aren’t like this, maybe that’s different, but…
if someone is offended it is, therefore, by definition, offensive. it’s literally one of the definitions for the word.
And one so profoundly circular as to be meaningless, as it provides no real rational criteria. Name anything that one person does, and you’re likely to be able to find more than few people that are offended by it.
It’s also an approach that lets bigots weaponize offense. Like terfs calling “cis” a slur.
Dot: this offends me
You: not it doesn’t
Incorrect. Dot did not say they were offended; they said the running gag itself is “borderline offensive”. There’s a difference. Dot is apparently offended, but Decidedly Orthagonal us not; therefore, simply saying it is offensive is more a matter of centering one’s own judgment.
What even is the point of this comment? Obviously saying something is offensive is one’s own judgement. That’s literally my point in mocking Orthagonal for declaring that Dot couldn’t possibly say she found something offensive.
I don’t think there’s the same! When people say “that’s offensive,” it seems like they’re saying it as a blanket term like, this thing is wrong and everyone should see it as wrong. Whereas “I am offended” is specific to the person. They are two different things
Ultimately I even agree that Daisy’s characterization is at least somewhat problematic, but ‘is offensive’ definitely isn’t a statement about personally getting the ick.
TIL lesbians aren’t allowed to be irritated by non-lesbians making jokes out of harmful lesbian stereotypes
But you were allowed to. Nobody stopped you. Your comment was not removed. People may have disagreed. People may even have said you were not correct, but that is not the same as not being allowed to. Disagreement is not denial of freedom of speech or freedom of platform.
maybe as soon as daisy gets some
yeah I’m majorly sick of it. extremely tired joke
I think Daisy being thirsty in general? Not a terrible trait.
When it impedes her professionalism? A lot less fun.
When you say “we”, the comic is written by one person: Willis. Yeah, OK, it is perfectly justified to express your opinion to Willis, here. But it is not ‘we’ or ‘us’ who would be dropping it, because we are not making it, only commenting on it.
Are you from Mars
Planet Tharg. But I was a Thargle not a Zillon. I was sent to Earth to collect semen. Or possibly it was seamen, I forget. I’m not part of Horizontal Command.
Does that adequately answer your question?
This is what’s established for her character, so it would be kind of strange for it to suddenly disappear. That said, I think I’ve seen the hilariously desperate Lesbian joke character enough times not to really like it either. At least here she’s getting called out on it?
Maybe if she dropped that joke she could find someone and not be desperate about it?
Heaven forbid we may find another joke for Daisy.
You can dislike Raidah and accept when she is right about something.
I still hate Raidah, but she’s right. There is no good reason for that photo to be on the first page of the paper.
Especially since, as she points out, it’s *white* girls. Ew.
I don’t care much whether they were white, or not; I care about the fact that it has basically nothing to do with the protest, and seems to only be on the front page because Daisy is horny, and doesn’t have a girlfriend to help relieve that.
There’s an extremely good reason for that photo to be on the front page: without it Willis would have had to come up with some other way for Dad Brown to find out about his daughter being queer that is super visible and possible for Joyce to physically hide.
Daisy needs to behave in a completely nonsense way for the last week (or more?) of strips to happen and that is…certainly a storytelling choice
Daisy is behaving in a way consistent with both her characterization and the way professional (as in it’s their job that they’re paid to do not as in the behavior is professional) newspaper editors would have handled getting that picture to use.
She may be behaving poorly but she is not behaving nonsensically.
That’s not even how her dad found out about that. He found out because Joyce told him.
He saw a photo of Jocelyne at the protest in some other newspaper. But as far as I’m aware he never actually saw the photo of Joyce.
He didn’t need to see the photo, he only needed to be at risk of seeing the photo. If there hadn’t been that photo there wouldn’t have been all this panicked running around using Becky asa distraction
Even a blind squirrel can find a broken clock…or something…
I believe the expression you are looking for is: “Even a blind nut can find a squirrel eventually.”
No no no, it’s “Even a clocky, broke squirrel can blindly nut.”
Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point
(This arguably makes two for Raidah!)
What’s the first, out of curiosity?
Possibly the point about Presidents she made to Dorothy.
Yeah, but also on the other hand I feel like she wasn’t making that point out of genuine concern (and/or disgust at the actions of prior presidents), but rather just trying to wreck Dorothy’s dreams because Dorothy is close to Sarah and Raidah hates Sarah.
Raidah seems (at least from what we’ve seen) like everything she does is for her own benefit and taking others down a peg.
Wish I could upvote comments.
I’d say that’s what the reddits for but….yeah no that place is a cesspool
Upvoting ruins everything it touches. If you like or dislike what a person’s said, just say it directly instead of hiding behind a little number next to an arrow.
Hard disagree. A picture of two people finding love while surrounded by the violence brought about by hate and oppression? That’s a great front page!
…Daisy probably didn’t do it for THAT reason, but you’d have to know her to suspect otherwise.
Many people in these comments had already explained why that is very much not a good frint oage for a genocide protest.
You’ve described the situation so incredibly vague that it’s not recognizeable. The protest wasn’t about some indistinct “hate and oppression”, it was about crimes against humanity in another country and the school’s culpability from its ties to weapons manufacturers profiting on those crimes.
It is a terrible front page, and the real IDS did a much better job.
I find it weird that it’s precisely Raidah taking exception to the magazine cover, when she’s always come across as a self-centered, self-serving douchebag. I’m guessing she has either ulterior motives or some kind of personal connection to the issue (family in Bulmeria?)
Most people are more complex than that. (Trump isn’t, but most.)
Also, it hasn’t been established where Bulmeria is or what’s going on there, but if it’s similar enough to I/P, well, there’s a plausible motivation.
The personal connection is that it’s Joyce on the cover. When she saw the front page she was focused on it being them, not on anything about the cause itself or how the photo distracted from it.
Yeah, but it’s not just that she didn’t like Joyce getting cover time: it’s that she decided to confront the magazine’s editor about it. That’s pretty much overkill no matter how you look at it, especially considering that the “damage” is already done.
Is it overkill? It’s a student newspaper. “Confronting the editor” has different connotations when the editor is, like, right there, on campus with you, instead of being some distant figure, possibly in another city. Whilst writing a letter to the editor would be a more normal course of action when disputed the practices of a national newspaper, there’s no real need to do that when the editor is. Y’know. Your neighbour.
She can has been an douchebag and still genuinely care about this.
True that, but the bold face in the conversation implies that Raidah is upset about “these two girls” being “frontpaged”, and perhaps the race card is played to provide respectable cover for the outrage.
After all, the protest was not about racial injustice but making wealth from genocide.
Race very much still plays a role in this tho.
Look, Raidah, if you didn’t want the photo of Joyce and Dorothy making out to be the front page, maybe YOU should’ve been at the protest making out with someone hotter.
Hear! Hear!
I am Reader-cus!
(Now kiss)
Also hi Raidah! I’m sure the comments will be really normal no that you’re around again.
Failed step one
fuck, page 18? Like, almost in the end…
1B
Twenty-seven pages in? How long is the IDS?
longer since they’ve been hexed.
yeeeeeeeeaaaaah probably gonna skip the comments on this one
just not in the mood for sifting through gross white-centric takes,
also apropos of nothing i had a nightmare where Michele Knotz was torturing me with really badly written scripts about how vaccines are evil
peace
Probably for the best yesh.
That is a really shitty dream.
+1
A wise choice. Stay strong!
oh yeah one more thing before I go
The report comment button WORKS.
peace
Most of what Ive been seeing so far is “Well damn, Raidah’s not wrong lol”
Then you must have some very selective vision
“Worst person you know makes a good point.”
I give Raidah credit for not just assuming they posed for a picture in the middle of a protest.
Raidah may be a jerk but she’s far from the worst person in this comic. Even restricting ourselves to characters who haven’t been killed off (or stabbed to within an inch of their lives), she’s at bare minimum better than Mary, Carol, and Clint.
Yeah I mean, I can’t really argue with Raidah on that one
Also between Joyrothy and this, it feels like this story is just begging for one more person/party to barge in on Daisy about the headline. Rule of Threes and all that.
I thought Raidah was the 3rd; didn’t Joyce/Dorothy, and Billie, already confront her about this?
Billie confronted Daisy about an unrelated issue in a storyline earlier this year. I don’t see any recent Billie appearances in Daisy’s tag.
Ah, that must be what I was thinking of; my apologies.
We did get a brief mention of her work for the newspaper in this storyline, but Daisy wasn’t in that strip.
Page 18?? It’s not just a headline to grab attention??
Daisy. Girl. Come on…..
1B or 1b
1B or not one B, that is the question.
And the answer is yes, it’s 1B.
as loath as I am to defend her I do think it’s “1 B”
absolute self report from Daisy here. Coulda said “it was the most striking image we got” but no had to own up to being a weirdo
dawg i got midterms AND an entire installation i need to do this week, genuinely need to log off and lock in so all I’m going to say is that if you genuinely try to argue that Daisy’s libido motivated daily bugle ass editorial choices are anything other than sensationalist junk I’m gonna throw tomatoes at you 🫳 🍅🍅🍅
hard same
well, except for me it’s coding a Deltarune style inventory for one of my clients,
and instead of tomatoes, it’s water balloons full of mud
Water balloons full for mud would be very painful, and even potentially dangerous. Good choice!
had to improvise cuz I ain’t wastin no produce when I have yet to get EBT o3o
I don’t have any of that going on, but you’re right.
gonna be honest this was probably a good move from a journalistic standpoint. The protest was a stance against the college. I don’t know how much freedom the paper would have in terms of something like that, but doing a front-page story critical of the school does seem risky in one way or another.
Doing it this way . . . I’m reminded of Star Trek: TOS where the writers would add in risque scenes to distract the censors if they were doing a Vietnam allegory or something.
The IDS is a real paper, there was a real protest, and the paper published real stories that were critical of the school with real photographs about the real protest and the real police response, on the front page, without using thirst trap photos.
If the real IDS had that photo, they absolutely would have run it on the front page, though.
no.
Fair enough, wasn’t aware of the context, I was more going by, well, general vibes of how freedom of the press is going these days. Guess I was more thinking if Ruttech is funding the paper or something along those lines it could risk not having the cash to keep publishing on a regular basis.
end of april, beginning of May, idsnews.com, you can look it up on archive.org.
Thirsttrap clickbait is bad journalism. It’s New York Post bullshit.
may of 2024*
and what you’re describing of a journalistic outlet pulling coverage critical of a corporation that holds their purse strings is also bad journalism.
Sorry, to be clear — what I meant was more, you put the thirst trap on the front page and the critical article inside. That way those who might be upset with the critical aspect are going “oh, the article’s just going to be about the couple making out” and relax.
people who are going to be upset about the article are going to find out from word of mouth.
Calling a chaste kiss between two women a “Thirst Trap” also kind of seems questionable in its own right.
It’s a romantic shot of a young couple finding love on the battlefield, not like, softcore porn or anything.
Daisy has so much thirst it can be trapped by a vaguely female-presenting alien entity in a completely different planet, though.
Reminder that she once asked Walky, “Did a WOMAN lick that shirt?!”
daisy wants raidah.
‘s job.
you’re readers
As numerous previous protests around the world have demonstrated, Daisy made the exact editorial decision here that literally every serious mainstream journalist would make. You get that picture at a protest, you run with that picture on your front page.
It will bring eyeballs to the story! I guarantee that more people turned to page 18 because of that photo than would have with any other photo she might have used.
You presumably have photos of people of color actually protesting, you presumably hav pictures of police firing tear gas at protestors, you have lots of striking photos to use.
Centering the white girls is a choice. And it is not the correct one.
This is what I keep wondering about. The cover sucks for multiple reasons including putting the girls in the pic, but would running a picture of protesters of color be better or worse? Seems worse, for the reasons given During the protest.
Outing not putting
no mainstream journalist that would make that choice would be a serious journalist.
Unfortunately, we have very few of those.
The AP would make that exact decision, and has in the past. AFP. The Times. et fuckin cetera
This is a decision actual journalists have had to make before, and that is the decision they made
Maybe they deserve to have Raidahs call them out on it too though.
And that just shows that a lot of actual journalists are not very good.
The New York Times is a right-wing rag that isn’t fit to wrap yesterday’s catch.
and the editors that make those decisions are not serious journalists. The real IDS covered the real anti-genocide protests so much better than the Times et fucking cetera
Do you think Bari Weiss is a serious journalist because she’s being made the head of CBS News?
It’s true, clickbait bullshit brings eyeballs.
It doesn’t, like, actually inform anyone of a damn thing, and this is a print mediumput out for free so the eyeballs are utterly meaningless, so it’s basically aping the toxic post-vulture capital wasteland that’s systematically destroyed the profession for no benefit to anyone, but there will be eyeballs!
The question is, do more of those eyeballs go to read the story itself than if they used a more appropriate but less clickbaity photo.
Hope Raidah can get Daisy to do some self-reflection.
Heartbreaking: Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point!
I’m guessing that Daisy does have more coherent and less thirsty reasons for including the picture (like “it’s a visible sign of defiance in the face of a violent police crackdown” as well as “a lot more people are going to read about the protest and the unwarranted violence by police once they’ve been lured in by two girls kissing”), and this is more “daily comic needs to end on a gag” regarding the final panels.
Not that Daisy isn’t thirsty as fuck, because she absolutely is. Just that she probably also has legit reasons that wouldn’t fit into those last two panels.
The legit reason is probably how it gets attention, regardless of what reaction it generates.
Yeaaaah that’s kinda the point.
Say what you will but people are more likely to look at something if the headline or picture catches their attention
those aren’t legit reasons. It’s not a visible sign of defiance, the police weren’t cracking down on anyone kissing. and if people are looking to read stories about kissing, they’re going to stop reading the story. The photo is not serving a purpose to inform people.
I’m fine just accepting Daisy did it because she likes LGBTA content over any, particularly the L.
We don’t have to defend her if she doesn’t feel inclined to defend herself.
Considering the depth of her character shown in the comic throughout… uh, its entirety, I doubt that. I’m open to being wrong!
Although even if she does, Raidah will absolutely blast through it.
Am I the only one seeing 1B (1b)?
Why do people keep saying it’s 18?
If you’re reading on a phone it initally looks like 8 but if you zoom in its b i thought it was 18 until I zoomed in.
It’s definitely 1B, but I can see how at a quick glance people could make that mistake.
Anybody else think this is confusing enough it might be best to edit it to like, “page 3”? Or am I in the minority?
Which suddenly pulled up the phrase “page 3 girl” in my memory…
What even is page 1-B???
It’s in a supplement.
First page of the second section
because we are dumb
The picture is definitely attention-gardening and draws in curious readers, but Raidah’s concerns are valid. Neither is won’t yet, but also come on daisy 😮💨
A flower-in-a-battlefield type image can be rather striking. A striking image and an attention grabbing headline is typical front page fare – it was the clickbait before there was clickbait.
Raidah is so hated by the comments board that if she supports the Bulmerian people against the US contractors, a not insignificant chunk will turn against them.
Yay, Raidah targeting somebody who needs HELLA consequences, she keeps letting her horny guide decisions
It’d be pretty funny (in a certain sense of the word) if Raidah is the villain of this storyline while being the only character who actually cares about helping Not!Gaza.
I see it.
Too late, Jocelyne and Asma beat her too it.
Random question, but what ethnicity is Raidah? I always assumed she was Black like Sarah, but I’m not really sure.
Its possible given the nature of the RL protest that Raidah may actually be Bulmerian American.
Ugh, that’s another problem with this subplot. The only way to do a genocide commentary right is to center the voices of the people affected, but Willis can’t do that because he made it about a country that doesn’t exist. The “Bulmerians” will always be a nameless, faceless, off-screen minority.
I mean, that’s kind of the issue. It’s not a genocide commentary because it was meant to be a backdrop for Joyce and Dorothy. I’m not sure that it can really pivot the way some fans want (especially since it’s not about a RL people and shouldn’t be).
It shouldn’t have been about them then lol. It shouldn’t have been made a parallel if there was no way to do it correctly. If the protest had been about LGBTQ+ issues, it would’ve worked so much better. Especially since the previous semester had them as a pretty prominent political issue that recurred and that multiple characters brought up pretty often.
Fuck, Raidah isn’t actually in the cast list… actually a lot of people aren’t.
I’m 90% sure she’s Black. She’s also a Muslim, which could mean anything considering both the existence of North Africa and the communities of Black American Muslims. Since Raidah is an Arabic name, chances are good it’s one of those and she’s not a convert.
I thought she was Indian.
I’d bet on Indian or Pakistani
I’ve seen Black, Arab, Pakistani, and Indian all suggested as possibilities.
I’m guessing South Asian, “Likes: … Aasif Mandvi” seems like the kind of thing a 13 years younger Willis might use to shorthand that.
I just keep thinking of this photo.
Some similarity in that Joyce looked tear gassed at that moment and the couv couple had been shoved to the ground by the riot police despite being bystanders. I think some people are forgetting why Joyce was there originally.
People forgetting that a good photo kiss in the middle of a riot/protest IS a good photo of the protest.
It’s astounding how many people think that replacing every front page photo with people kissing would be good journalism.
I personally prefer that if news stories about people protesting against genocide include pictures, they actually be pictures of the people protesting, not two women kissing.
So… who’s in line to replace Daisy as editor?
Raidah?
Also: Cops tear-gassing a couple of kids kissing is not a good look.
You want sympathy for student protestors? That’s how you get it.
Especially when the alternate newsworthy photos would be of a buttload of cops getting the shit kicked out of them by a student, which is the sort of thing that would make tear gas look like a reasonable response to people who weren’t there to know that the tear gas preceded the cop-kicking.
Hot take: a newspaper can have two photos on its cover. Sometimes they have a collage of 4 or 5! Maybe this one photo shouldn’t have taken up the entire first page (to the exclusion of text and articles as well). Daisy even stuck the headline referencing the actual protest, “below the fold.”
How many photos did Daisy even have?
She’s editor to a college paper. I don’t get the impression she has like legions of photographers to deploy to every event.
She had Shanna on the scene, who got arrested, so who knows how long she was on hand taking photos. And she had Dorothy, who was really just there as a protestor and didn’t actually submit anything to the paper from her time there.
Were there any other IDS agents at the protest?
The DoA protest was inspired by RL protests, and the IDS had like dozens of photos. Each photographer can take lots of photos.
It may have been “Inspired” by RL Protests, but it clearly does not match them.
The real events that inspired this story had no Daisy in the editor’s seat, no front page photo of Joyce and Dorothy Kissing, and indeed, even the subject of the protest, the Bulmerians, are entirely invented.
So we cannot assume any similarities beyond what is evident in the comic itself.
Daisy, no D:
Putting aside that Daisy is a sex starved catastrophe — it’s a pretty good photo.
Even apart from Daisy edging ever closer to sex pest territory and needing to have her influence curtailed on that account… tbh Raidah has potential just taking over the paper.
Which makes me imagine her chomping a cigar while accidintentiontally running the comics in reverse order to spoiler them and publishing headlines like “Joyce Brown: Boingo or Ding-Dong?”
So has there been a ‘come clean’ from Willis about when this one was drawn?
I have a question. I have seen both “making out” and “macking out” in the comments (not this lot, past ones). I’ve tried searching both “making out vs macking out” and “macking out”, but I get nothing for macking out. Is macking out just a typo or misspelling? Or is there something called macking out that is not making out?
Taffy: feel free to make something entertaining up!
Make it up yourself, I’m not a dancing fucking monkey.
Feel free not to! I just enjoy your flights of fancy.
“Macking on” is a thing, could be a deliberate combination of the two or case of crossed wires.
Have you seen any cases of making on?
Thank you. Yes, macking on gets hits on search engines. Either a crossover or possibly I’m an idiot and didn’t spot the diff between out and on…
Macking out is slang for kissing. Try urban dictionary. Maybe it’s old person slang at this point. Might be from the late 90s or early 2000s.
macking out is british slang for heavy kissing with light petting, snogging is french kissing, as explained in a british animated show i forget the name of.
THERE’S Dorothy! Why isn’t she tagged?
I’m glad somebody else is calling Daisy out for her decision to have the front page image for a story on the anti-genocide protest be a picture of two women kissing. Raidah may often be a jerk, but in this case she’s right.
“Finding love in the middle of carnage and chaos” is an iconic image for a reason, and the picture does exactly that. Does it get to the heart of what the protest was about? No – but it does show at least some of the overreaction by the police to the protest and the use of at least copious amounts of tear gas against the protestors. As far as I’m aware, we haven’t seen the story itself, so it’s entirely possible that criticism of it focusing on young love in the middle of the chaos overshadows the purpose of the protest and the violence deployed against the protestors – but you want a front page image that captures the attention and interest of potential readers, and the image does exactly that.
In terms of good, proper journalism, Raidah is absolutely right to call it out. Daisy, unfortunately, does not seem to believe in proper journalism if ladies being sexualized or ladies kissing are present in photos.
Complicating things further, stuff like this is very much part of a long, long history of bad journalism.
Y’know what? Fuck Raidah, but she’s actually completely right in this case. Raidah, tell her off. Daisy, stop letting your crotch make choices.
Dang. Raidah being correct.
Is there a significant difference between running a cover photo that centers two white women kissing as the primary story focus of a protest against substitute-Palestinian genocide, and writing a webcomic that centers two white women kissing as the primary story focus of a protest against substitute-Palestinian genocide?
I ask this mostly because of the sea of “fuck you Daisy” comments so far and the absence of recognition that this is a pretty obvious bit of meta self-criticism for creative choices made during the previous storyline, which in turn makes the degree to which Daisy vitriol is manifesting sort of weird.
I would say doing that in an actual news publication that ought to be reporting on actual events is a lot worse than doing it in a purely fictional comic that has always focused on the two white women in question, even if the second still deserves criticism.
I mean, to paraphrase Danny sticking his foot in his mouth in front of Ethan: unlike the “actual news publication,” this webcomic is real.
Yeah, the comic isn’t really about a protest. It just has a story arc where a protest happens. It’s about school drama.
Coming to Dumbing of Age for journalistic integrity would be misguided at best.
Ugh don’t say this. He will make a new comic fully centered on campus protests
The second doesn’t deserve criticism.
Yeah I read this pretty directly as a uh. Look guys, literally responsibility is different for a webcomic vs a real news publication and that swings bot in favor of and against Daisy’s choices, but as far as I read it in this strip Willis is Daisy. Reading from a Doylist lens he is taking the critique and he is acknowledging his personal messiness, a thing he also did on Twitter after the kiss comic ran and he got this criticism. This strip probably is running as part of a decision to center the voices of more characters of color and specifically Muslim characters more often and more intentionally. This represents a part of learning and growing.
I thought Willis was not on Twitter anymore?
Bluesky, same difference.
Sorry, I’ve never been on either website and I kind of forget that bsky is very intentionally not twitter post-x. I kinda see the format and my brain is like oh it’s a twitter post. That’s my bad.
Yeah, I’m seeing way too many comments saying Raidah is either jealous or otherwise out of line. This strip is clearly WILLIS confessing that HE was out of line in making a brown people’s protest all about two white girls finding love.
I’m pretty sure at the time this comic was drawn, the kiss still hadn’t been published, so I’m not sure how it could be a response to criticisms he got for that.
He draws all these comics pretty far in advance.
He made a post on bluesky when the storyline was happening saying that he realized that it was a bit tone-deaf that his actual Muslim characters didn’t have a lot being involved in the storyline, so he added some more strips and inserted them into his buffer, mostly the Asma/Raidah ones.
Interesting! I didn’t realize that.
Yes, but he made the choice to have Raidah, whom we have plenty of reason to be suspicious of, rather than Asma, whom everyone pretty much would like, be the one to issue the critique. Raidah has baggage, particularly related to Joyce, and it’s impossible to read the scene without it including some of that.
Daisy vitriol is passive aggressive.
Daisy is clearly a self aware being responsible for her own actions.
Willis is a character we made up in our heads to avoid responsibility for what we read.
It’s weird
Willis is the friends we made along the way?
I mean I think Willis made it Bulmeria so people would know it’s not Palestine and could enjoy the story without RL baggage.
I mean that wasn’t what I was addressing but if avoiding real-life baggage was Willis’ goal then I’m pretty sure they consider it a failure!
So noted!
I feel like a lot of people missed the (somewhat important) bit where one of the primary characters of the entire comic also realigned her political ambitions during this saga and became inspired to join the protest herself, something that will presumably come up again.
Making out and macking on are the idioms I know
Thanks. Got it now!
Tbf, a big gay kiss at a protest does make for a good front page cover.
for a different protest. Not for this protest.
Why are people taking this comic so seriously lately? Have the comments always been like this? Like oh my god, it’s a comic, to read and see what characters do. But it feels like a lot of comments are like, basing real world personal moral stances on characters that don’t exist in real life, it’s bonkers
The comic takes three things seriously:
1. Ship Wars
2. Politics that can relate to RL
3. Hating on X character
Some people just like to be mad about stuff. Internet runs on it now. Everyone must know how angry and snarky and flawless I am.
That makes me mad!
I shall be angry and snarky at you!
🙂
Giant Babies.
Interesting, because you go to unusual lengths to hate on characters based on things they didn’t even do but that would seem logical for them to be doing – by your logic and nobody else’s.
pretty sure the one thing she’s angry about is that they’re two white girls making out, not that they’re making out lmao
Sure, sure.
Thats why she actually points out that the central political topics of the protest and the police brutality got silenced out of reporting by Daisys thirst and failed journalism.
Has to be her anti-white racism, not her concern for bulmerian civilians or citizens right to voice grievances.
Anti white racisms isn’t real
I´m well aware of that idea being a racist talking point in general.
With the slight caveat that it absolutely can be.
Ever been to Japan? I had an insightful evening in a tokio hotel once, where for some reason the bedstand contained ultra-nationalistic politics literature my japanese friend roughly translated for me.
What those folks think and write about “long-nosed stinking barbarians” was truly enlightening for a german-raised european dude who always got told how singular white racism against the rest of humanity was.
Tribalism and othering is a general human trait, not exclusive to us pasty ones.
But right here I did use it as a joke to ridicule the idea that Rhaida was upset about the ethnicity of the misleading title page.
If you think whatever you read was bad, you should see what Imperial Japan thought and did to the Chinese and the Koreans. Unit 731 looked at what Wirths was doing and basically went, “here, hold my sake”. It’s like “the Nazis, but over there”, except Japan never reckoned with it the way Germany did.
They did get nuked, though.
Did she silence their voices?
It sounds like she had an eyecatching photo on the front page, and put their voices on page 1B, which is arguably not the proper way to prioritize that information, but it doesn’t sound like anybody was “silenced” by the Daisy’s editing here.
Huh. Yeah, okay – call it deprioritizing then, or shadowbanning, or red hering lead, or forming the narrative battlefield.
You are of course technically correct. Its not outright silencing as such.
Blame my first language not being english, the late hour I commented yesterday or a hyperbolic character trait.
But in the end, its all tactics to get relevant points out of sight and substitute less relevant ones.
Which should be a professional sin for journalists,
Aw, shite, I think I unintentionally reported your post. sorry.
She did not point out any of those things. All she did was complain about the white girls making out. There is no indication in this comic of her motives or what she’s actually mad about, you are projecting your thoughts onto someone who happens to agree with you that the photo was a bad choice. That doesn’t mean they actually agree with your reasons, it just means they agree with your result.
We KNOW Raidah hates Joyce and Dorothy. We know she’s a disingenuous person for whom virtually every social interaction is about gaining power and influence. She is not quite the *worst* person in the comic, but she’d definitely in the proverbial league of evil.
I wouldn’t put it past Willis to do an arc where she makes a good point, or learns to be better, but at the moment, she has done absolutely nothing to earn the benefit of the doubt from the reader.
“This photo, with these two girls, versus literally ANY other infrormation about the protest” …. is pretty clear I would say.
She starts by pointing out that the title page is not at all about the protest.
Then enforces her point by adding the identity aspect of two people of a non-involved ethnicity being superimposed.
And fair is fair: Reception of literature (and all other text) is always tinged by personal biases.
But I´m not whlly in the clear wether it´s me or you who is doing the heavier projection here.
JFC, the number of people in the comments Raidah just because she doesn’t want the whole point of the protest hijacked to “There was police violence at the protest about genocide of brown people. But on the bright side, these two tangentially involved white girls found love!” Raidah’s problem is that the whole point of the genocide protest is, as usual, being cast aside because the editor wants something “hot”.
If this had been an
That’s what she’s saying to Daisy here, but when she first saw the photo she focused on it being Joyce and Dorothy and on how Joyce was a hussy.
This is at least somewhat personal for her because of Joyce.
That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a point, just that her motives aren’t entirely pure.
Reporting what happened at the police riot could get innocent people arrested .
Raidah had a valid criticism of them at the protest. But they actually did that. It was newsworthy iconic and stupid.
Dorothy and Joyce did center themselves, After the protest was declared over and real protestors were trying to escape.
Reporting what happend in the protest is supportive of the protest and the risk the protesters willingly took.
Not reporting or misleading the audience about the protest is fundamentally working against their intent and trying to negate supress any effect.
Journalists CAN report on police brutality and crimes at protests without outing individual demonstrators, intentionally or by being sloppy.
The good ones do it all the time.
To be fair, and while I’ve seen many examples of student journalism being better than professional journalism, they are there to learn and possibly make mistakes.
Of course. Plus all of this is a comic. 😉
A closeup of Asma would probably get her fired. And trafficked to another country by armed masked thugs.
Thats why a good reporter would blur her face for publication, or get a quote from “A.”
Not reporting is actively counteracting what the protesters want.
A protest that doesnt get publicised? Missed its goal wholesale.
Raidah should put Daisy in a meat grinder. Verbal or literal, whichever is funnier idfc
I mean.
She has been asking of photos of girls kissing for months (decades). 😛
Heartbreaking. The worst person you know just made a great point.
We’ve been over this, Raidah. The picture is titillating sensationalism, it’s cheap but it’s going to do a lot more to get people to read the actual story and find out the good thing the protest was trying to do and the bad thing the cops did, than any combination of words and pictures you could put on the front page
I fully 100% believe that if Daisy wrote the story, she’d discuss the kissing way more than the protest.
Oh definitely. But it seems Shanna did the writing from jail so I think we’re fine. (I read through seven months of comic to check that just cause it bothered me I couldn’t remember if it had been mentioned who wrote it.)
I feel like this makes it a tiny bit worse, actually. I demand Shanna’s opinion on the photo picked lol. My mom has gotten confronted because her editor ran with a bad photo for a story, I want to know if Shanna thinks this is a good pic or if she’s gonna get random intermittent grief for something she didn’t even pick
Are we sure Shanna didn’t take the photo?
What other IDS Operatives were even at the protest?
Taking a step back from how obviously and continuously horny Daisy is, the image really is an iconic one, and conveys everything you need to know about how the protest ended, with excessive force being used to drive away peaceful protestors. Clouds of (granted, strangely pink) tear gas floating around the last few protestors who haven’t escaped the grounds yet – with the focus on two people finding love in the middle of that violence. Yes, Daisy is horny, frustrated, and incredibly biased because of the fact that it’s two girls smooching – but that doesn’t change the fact that it really is a worthy front page picture (much to the chagrin of Joyce, Dorothy, and Jocelyne).
… And I just realized that the most effecient way to refer to the trio just sounds kinda… not great.
And it’s probably better than centering the other obvious dramatic potential photo: Amazi-Girl beating up cops.
It IS a good protest photo. 😀
@Myra V, totally irrelevant but I just wanted to say I love your pfp.
I blame Daisy for this.
(And not Willis. )
Daisy is guilty
Guilty of thirst.
*First degree* thirst.
Thirst in the 33rd degree. Super secret society of Thirsty shippers.
Daisy is fast crossing over to creepy territory.
Yeah screw journalism we want content!!!
Didn’t mean this to be a reply, sorry
All mistakes are retroactively valid. Uneditable like life itself
Raidah has to be a true asshole to be so angry for a photo of a protest that, just the day before, she considered useless, made by the whites freshman just to clear their consciences and from which she was careful not to participate. If she had been in it, she might have had a right to criticize Daisy, but she wasn’t and it’s only angry because the two girls are her enemies. The worst possible hypocrisy! She’s also rube because she immediately attacks Daisy without even introduce herself.
Raidah has an angle, but what is it?
Someone else is social climbing and it’s not her. And Sarah roommate that stole her bf.
Maybe the fact you can’t figure out an angle for this it’s a clue that there isn’t one.
We’ve seen nothing to indicate that Raidah considers the protest useless. She may be directly affected by whatever is going on in Bulmeria and has a right to an opinion on the protest whether she personally attends it or not.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/reek/
She was pretty targetted in her criticisms. Made it pretty clear her grievance was with Joyce and Dorothy, not with the protest itself. Felt they’d make the protest all about themselves, not the issues, which is arguably what happened, though it’s not what Joyce and Dorothy wanted to happen. They were as put out as anybody when they found themselves on that front page.
Exactly. Was she a bit rude in how she talked to Joyce and Dorothy? Sure. Does she probably have experience with inexperienced white savior types trying to get involved in issues personal to her just to stroke their own egos? More than likely.
Does it bother her that she’s had no success whatsoever turning these white girls against their good friend Sarah and they’re happily living their best lives in spite of Sarah being a part of their group? 100%
Honestly I don’t think she’s tried to turn them against Sarah in… months? Dorothy, she doesn’t like due to her wanting to be president but Joyce is Raidah’s number one enemy because of Jacob rather than anything to do with Sarah. Any relation to Sarah is just a plus as far as her anger goes I think.
Yeah, she stopped because it *wasn’t working*, but the fact that she *tried* still stands against her character. Raidah is a bully and a narcissist, and has been since she was introduced to the comic. I see no reason to suddenly give her the benefit of the doubt now.
I’d also need a little more than two months since somebody acted on a vendetta before I considered the vendetta dropped, personally. Unless there was some specific way an olive branch had been extended or something.
Hasn’t been that long in comic. Came up in her brunch with Walky and Lucy.
Raidah has 100% absolutely valid reasons to hate Joyce. Her hatred of Dorothy reasoning validity is more debatable and I’m not opening that can of worms, but Raidah has more valid reason than damn near anyone in the cast to hate Joyce. I don’t hate the women that stole boyfriends from me in the past (even the ones that did so deliberately), but fwiu nobody would give me grief if I did as long as I still hated the dude too lol.
If Raidah had considered the protest useful she would have be in it. Instead she completely ignored it and even criticized Joyce and Dorothy for going. She can only consider it useless or/and stupid.
People can not go to a protest for whatever reason, their safety, their schedule, etc, and still care about it. This gatekeeping shit is tiresome
Is gatekeeping not what Raida was doing when she told Joyce and Dorothy off for attending the protest?
Nad if it’s bad when she does it it’s still bad when commenters here do it.
Yes, precisely.
Even without personal photos, I’m pretty sure I can guess who’s white in these comments.
Usually the people reminding everyone of white centeredness.
White people love talking about white people
It’s a great skill. I’m unable to understand that kind of things just from how someone write. What was the part that made you understand it?
Raidah is a true asshole, we’ve seen enough examples throughout the comic. This is not one of those times. She’s entirely in the right to complain about how the picture completely overshadows, even with the story continued on page 1B, what actually happened at the protest.
To me, Daisy is a one note joke long past its expiration date, and considering the current topic I doubt she gets any development anytime soon.
Wha what? She didn’t say that at all?? She thinks Joyce and Dorothy specifically doing it was dor attention she didn’t say anything about protesting itself being useless. If you gonna be mad at least don’t make shit up.
So, in summary, the photo distracted from the point of the protest and outed two queer women, at least one of whom has bigoted family to worry about, while framing itself as the celebration of an inspiring love story.
Now that’s some goshdang American journalism!
To be fair, I don’t think that Daisy recognized Joyce or Dorothy in the picture (though her head might have been clouded by sexual frustration in that case) and even if she had, I seriously doubt that she’d have been at all aware of the threat posed by Joyce’s family (well, OK, her mom specifically, though at the time we didn’t know how Hank would take the news, so it being revealed to him was still a pretty significant risk).
I can understand why Raidah is upset about the photo – but the picture itself is the bait to get people interested in the story while (hopefully) the article behind it gives a more accurate view of the protest, what it was about, and the disproportionate response to it. It’s advertising 101, taking advantage of a classic image to draw interest, even if that image isn’t perfectly representative of what was going on.
It was implied Daisy has some sort of unchecked vision problems that prevented her from recognizing Joyce and Dorothy, wasn’t it?
Does she need glasses or did I misread that?
But yeah, definite case of rushing the photo out without taking the time to figure anything out or consider the consequences. A better journalist probably would’ve found a way to meet deadlines without being so reckless and cavalier to callatoral damage or fallout.
The photographer who took the photo is also an element of this. She presumably recognized her coworker sucking face with not her coworkers boyfriend. Is there some grudge there we haven’t learned about yet?
We have no idea who took the photo. Or if they’d have any reason to recognize either Joyce or Dorothy as contributors to the paper, much less know the details of their love lives.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-16/01-not-so-smooth-criminals/splash/
It was Shanna, wasn’t it?
David Willis posted a bit more detail on tumblr. She’s apparently some deep pull from the old Walkyverse and we saw the tip of her head in one of the crowd shots at the protest.
But either way, whoever took the photo must work at the newspaper, so I don’t see how they could not know Dorothy. This newspaper isn’t exactly a multinational conglomerate. It’s a college paper that can probably count their contributors on your fingers.
Shanna’s a reference to the old webcomic Faans, which crossed over with It’s Walky! back in the day. I’d forgotten she’d been name-dropped.
Small paper, so they may have met, but it’s not like we’ve seen any evidence of meetings with all the reporters or them going into the office to work. She’s likely know Dorothy’s name, but could easily not have recognized her in the confusion, unless they’ve been working more closely than we know. There’s certainly no reason for Shanna to know about Dorothy’s love life.
Makes sense. In the modern workplace, coworkers can have surprisingly little to do with eachother sometimes. If everybody just e-mails their work to Daisy they don’t necessarily need to worry about who else is involved in the project or what they’re doing. It’s Daisy’s job to keep track of all that stuff after all.
Any picture of a, face could put people in danger of arrest. It’s probably the least harmful
Photo didn’t do that. The comic dud. Joyce and Dorothy did.
You’re even more detached from reality than I am.
The photo was not appropriate to publish, but Nothing we know about Raidah remotely suggests that this complaint is in good faith.
“It’s me. I’m Readers.”
-Daisy Conrad, 2025.
She knows what we want.
Off: I’m sorry for the loss of your father, Willis.
I’m sorry as well. Take care of yourself, Willis.
okay Raidah, I see you
you’re volunteering to be one of two non-white girls making out on the front cover, yea? sounds great
Is Raidah, suggesting that it would have been better if two girls of color were on the front page, making out? I totally support that kind of representation; more bi/lesbian black/brown girls please!
One of each! Salt & Pepper.
no. She’s suggesting the photo should be about the protest.
It is. It’s about two people who were at the protest who did something dramatic during the height of the action there.
It is not about the content or substance of the protest.
Of course SHE would be the one to go full Karen about that.
Granted, my money was on Mary. But I should’ve factored Raidah in.
“going Karen” is when a PoC has a legitimate grievance about bigotry.
Her grievance seems to be that the important information was on page 1B instead of page 1. In a college paper that’s distributed through all of two city blocks.
It’s a legitimate grievance, for sure. But still a fairly minor one to go calling anybody’s supervisor over.
Daisy’s the one who picked the photo. Who’s the supervisor? Nevermind, I guess Raidah should just know her place.
Raidah doesn’t know who Daisy is, she’s explicitly going to complain to someone she doesn’t know about someone she doesn’t know over the coverage of a protest she didn’t attend because, I guess, she doesn’t like one of the people that were in the photo.
This isn’t about anybody “knowing their place.” What exactly is the bigotry she has a legitimate grievance *about*? Were there some black girls making out at the protest that Willis hasn’t shown us yet?
Oh my god what? Are you serious. You all are breaking my fucking brain with this shit.
At this point, I wish the entire stupid protest scene would just get reconned out of the story. It’s dragging down the entire rest of the comic, lately.
Nah.
Art making people think and talk about reality is great. Its what art should do.
If that makes you uncomfortable or sad : I get it.
Its a hard topic, many feels, big taboos, much dug-in tribalism and people calling other people names/out.
But again – thats what good art should do.
To my mind, it liftet this sllice-of-life teen drama comic to another level. Good on willis to leave his comfortable reservation where he could rely on most of his built-up audience to be with him on questions of love, gender and sexuality.
That’s a shit take and you should feel ashamed of yourself for putting it where others could read it.
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Yes Art does do that. I don’t think I’d feel ashamed of that opinion.
Mary is probably mad that the newspaper is covering the protest at all -_-
it’s called clickbait, I refer you to the tried and true Youtube technique of “the thumbnail is a butt”
Yeah, and that’s bas. It is a bad thing on YouTube and it is a bad thing on a newspaper.
Journalistic integrity is a myth
Alas, papers have been sold with what we now call “clickbait” since before there was radio, television, or the Internet.
If Willis is doing some self-criticism via comic here, somewhat using Daisy as a stand-in for themself, I gotta say it was not a good choice to have Raidah say it, mostly because people do not like her and are more likely to dismiss anything she says. Which sucks when it’s also just something real people in this very comment section have been and are saying.
I am guessing Willis trusted, for some reason, in people ability to separate their personal fellings for the character from the merits of ger argument.
People in this comment section have proven themselves utterly incapable of accepting anything that comes out of Raidah’s mouth, even when she’s right.
Raidah has never been right.
Raidah has absolutely been right a few times.
The only thing people like less that someone who’s actually almost always wrong (like Mary) is someone like Raidah who’s pretty often right but for the wrong reasons or with “bad” motivations (for example, “judging people based on their ability to help her climb the social ladder”).
Some “people in this comment section…”
Not All people in this comment section
Probably not even most people…
i mean, i get why ppl dislike her but raidah’s hardly the worst
She’s not the worst, but you can see it from her position.
If she wanted to she could reach out and hold hands with Mary. Or hit her with a steel chair. This strip feels like another situation where he could have easily used Asma (a Muslim character who was actually at the protest giving her much more reason to care about the protests coverage) instead of using a widely hated character and gotten the point across without people being distracted by the involvement of one of the worst student characters in the comic.
I vote steel chair, or hit her with a herring, or more pies.
That’s if he wanted it to just be the authorial voice, which I suspect is unlikely given how he set up Raidah finding out about the photo and her initial reaction (as well as her reaction when Joyce and Dorothy got back from the protest.)
I mean, I for one welcome Asma not being the the single Muslim character (of what, 3? 4? I’m pretty sure there’s some extras I cannot remember the names of) who cares, because that, to me, would still feel pretty welrd! If Willis made the decision to invest more screentime into his Muslim characters, generally but also in the context of this storyline specifically, then I’d hope it wouldn’t just be put on one of them.
Especially since we already /had/ Raidah as a character who’s faith was known, and yeah it hasn’t come up in any way since it was essentially used as part of a setup for a punchline with Joyce, but I’m, again, hoping that that’s part of something Willis is working on. Because unlike apparently a lot of people (?) think it’s way more interesting if characters have like, nuances. Including antagonists! It’d be a nice change of pace. And maybe that’s not at all what Willis is doing, who knows. I’m honestly not optimistic, but we’ll see! Commentariat will continue to be insufferable about her either way.
well it def gets ur attention but assume info about the protest would’ve been posted somewhere unless it was organized by someone word of mouth/discreetly with burner phones or so
She’s not racist, Raidah, she’s just gay as fuck.
this is the kinda shit 20 year old white leftists do lol
See, this pisses me off. Outing two young adults like that, publically? Opens the newspaper and college up to a whole heap of trouble. Not to mention lawsuits, and the problems caused for the two in question. NOT SMART. Not good journalism I’m any sense of the word.
I mean, this one isn’t really on Daisy. They kissed in a SUPER public setting with tens if not hundreds of recording devices aimed at the scene.
Yeah, people attempting to be discrete about their orientation don’t usually engage in Public Displays of Affection at events where an express goal is to get press coverage.
It’s not like that never happens, and Daisy could’ve investigated the situation more thoroughly, but it’s kind of in the same vein as that executive a few weeks ago getting caught with his mistress on the kiss cam at the coldplay concert. The folks at coldplay didn’t think they were putting him on blast when they pointed the camera at him.
* nods *
Two words: “Coldplay concert.”
Actually I think the people at the coldplay concert had a much more reasonable expectation of privacy, they just got unlucky.
Yeah, they were just part of a very large audience and got unlucky. Dotty and Joyce were basically The Centrepiece of that protest.
He didn’t even get caught because his wife just happened to be watching the Coldplay concert video.
He posted to facebook something like “I know that looks like us at the Coldplay Concert, but that’s totally not us, I assure you”, which prompted all his friends and family to look into what the heck he was talking about.
Which is a particularly funny element to the story imo.
I didn’t know that part, that increases the laugh factor x2
Yeah, like who the heck knows what the CEO of Astronomer looks like? Not like he appeared on the kiss cam and everybody was instantly like “I know that guy! Call the press!”
It really does increase the laugh factor so much.
Streisand effect in full swing.
Ugh, Raidah.
very late addition to the everything! but one thing that i think is overlooked about Raidah as a character is that, yes, she’s a social climber, yes she has a bad habit of using people/surrounding herself specifically with people she thinks are “going somewhere”…. but unless I’m blanking on some particularly noxious moments, she absolutely does care about social issues + particularly racial issues, and she does it in a particular way that makes *sense* given her current positioning
like, when she calls out Dorothy about the President thing? She’s not wrong. She’s not being nice about it (and she doesn’t have to be, she’s not friends with Dorothy), but she’s ABSOLUTELY correct. Her beef with Sarah about Dana has some definite undertones about ratting on a friend a) to parents b) about drugs c) getting them pulled out of school (while Dana is not a person of color, both Sarah and Raidah are, so the tension being between *them* makes sense to me)
so like, nothing about this strip seems counter to Raidah’s characterization to me — it’s just an element we haven’t seen foregrounded as much when it’s not being used against someone we *like*, because she does make an excellent foil, but it is definitely past time for her to be in the right about an uncomfortable race situation (much like how Roz is often right! but she’s right in a way that grates in a very realistic and very specific way that makes Roz an excellent antagonist-cum-initiating force for character growth)
It’s possible, but the only times we’ve really seen her comment on social issues she was pretty transparently using them to manipulate – mostly bringing up Jacob’s brother’s work on the big trans rights case in front of fundie Joyce.
(just a response to so many of the comments today, many well intended)
Any good person can stand against injustice. There are no disqualifiers.
The amount of “skin” you have in the fight does not heighten nor lessen the value of your effort.
“Injustice” just seems like such a strong word for having to read past the headline to get all the details…
Like, if Daisy had forewent communicating what the protest was about at all, sure, but Raidah’s big complaint here seems to be that the information on page 1b should’ve been on page 1, and the information on page 1 should’ve been relegated to 1b or possibly dropped entirely.
Amazigirl was standing up to injustice when she fistfought cops in riot gear. Raidah is nitpicking the particularities of how the story was formatted.
Whoosh there goes the point flying right over your head.
Sorry, I was commenting outside of the story. There is plenty of race-base injustice to strive against, but people don’t realize they are buying into racist beliefs when they belittle efforts from a group with “no standing” as the judges say. Every voice is needed, and every voices counts.
In story though, I got the feeling from the bold face text that Raidah’s complaint was that “those two girls” were “Frontpaged”, and didn’t play the race card until the end when she had to justify her objection.
Can someone explain to me why in this comment script there are some comments without “reply/commen” buttons?
The comment chain only goes so deep. Once there are a certain number of replies to replies to replies there’s just no more space to go any further.
May or may not match up to when you actually run out of space on your device. Obviously there are a lot of different kind of screens and monitors.
ohh-kay… weird.
Thanks you.
I mean what’d you expect, this is a wordpress site which was put together over ten years ago,
frankly not too bad
I said it once and I’ll say it again,
Web 2.0 was (mostly) a mistake :/
Honestly a good system, I still remember the old Tumblr where reblogs became completely unreadable past a certain point XD
Well, complaining to the editor is a very Raidah thing to do…
While she may be an asshole, Raidah’s quickly becoming easily the most interesting character in this entire arc. She’s pretty unambiguously said nothing but true things since the protest, but what is ambiguous is the degree to which she’s saying them because they’re true, vs. the degree to which she’s just glad to have a veneer for the personal feelings she was already going to have.
In the strip where she finds the newspaper, it’s not immediately clear if “Wait, are you shitting me? This is Joyce and Dorothy!” should be read as her just noticing that it’s Joyce and Dorothy, which would establish that she actually was already bothered by the choice to put two white girls making out on the front page instead of something more substantial, or if it should be read as her reacting to Asma’s indifference to Joyce and Dorothy making out with “Wait, are you shitting me?” in which case she’s actually being a massive hypocrite.
How can Daisy be so wrong yet also so valid
It is a mystery
how many pages ya got there