Nobody saw this coming! (nobody saw this cumming?) It’s JOYCE(?!) and DOROTHY in “FRIEND OF DOROTHY (THE BIGGEST),” the newest Dumbing of Age Pornographique featured over on SLIPSHINE! It’s 19 all-new, full-page comic pages of definitely Not Safe For Work stuff. It hankies AND it pankies. It knows all the sexifying ways without having to Google anything first!
So go grab a subscription and your wife, I mean girlfriend. I definitely meant to say girlfriend.
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aaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwweeee (T~T) <3
*plays “Beautiful Fantasy” from Sailor Moon Soundtrack CD*
I do have to say, the announcement that no-one saw coming is damn good copy.
Also alt-text, pay no attention to the comment section. Oh, wait. I’m part of the comment section. Let me think about this.
Don’t trust the comment section.
We have always been at war with Commentsectionia
Our greatest ally has always been Commentsectionia.
…well, I mean?
The comment section always had the choice of, oh I don’t know, reading something else?
juss sayin
If ever a comment deserved to be upvoted, it’s this one. 👍
FRIENDS OF DOROTHY RISE UP
It’s nice to have friends
THE AGE OF JOEJOYCE IS OVER, NO MORE FALSE OTPS
FOLLOW US AND YOU WILL NEVER AGAIN BE QUEERBAITED
(is this anything idk)
Joeyorthy is still possible. We already know Dottie likes watching.
Yep… poly not only isn’t off the table, but is actively being engaged in with 2 out of 3 consenting (number 3 still really needs to be informed before Hanky Panky, yet another infraction by Joyce.)
Joyce didn’t consent to anything. She said ‘let me think about it’. That’s not ‘yes’ There is no active poly being engaged here. Joe does not have any active boyfriend privileges.
People really love bending over backwards to excuse Joyce, eh?
Dorothy thinks Joyce broke up with Joe.
Joyce herself thinks she didn’t.
Therefore, Joyce is being dishonest with Dorothy.
That’s needlessly confrontational. I like Joyce sure. I like Joe and Walky too. I’m not bending over backwards for anything. I just don’t like the insinuation that just because Joyce didn’t tell Joe to pound sand, but left that open for consideration later, she’s now going for a poly relationship. For all we know, tomorrow she goes to Joe and says ‘nah’ and this whole thing is a nothingburger. (Unlikely in the narrrative, but entirely plausible in universe)
Joyce did break up the existing relationship. Just because she didn’t immediately shoot down the poly relationship doesn’t mean she agreed to it. Joe does not get to kiss her, date her, call her any fancy words, Joyce is not doing anything romantic with Joe.
Is she a bit hesitant with the ‘oh yeah, this needs to be brought up’? Sure. But quite frankly, she has the right to reveal this when she wants. You don’t have to reveal every half baked consideration of opening up a poly relationship that is in your head. Because right now, nothing is happening with Joe.
When Joyce decides that ‘actually, yeah, I do want to go for it’ then, before she does anything else, she should talk to Dorothy. Right now, this is fine being parked where it is while these two have good times.
She still very much cheated on Joe, and basically paused any possible confrontation over it
She did cheat on Joe, but she went and had the confrontation over it. Joe basically ignored it and offered the poly instead. If Joyce does reject that, I can’t see it then turning into a confrontation about the cheating. That’s done.
I mean. Yes. In that she gave Dorothy a spur of the moment kiss, then chickened out out of breaking up, then slept together with Dorothy, and then finally came clean and ended the relation as it was. (While not immediately rejecting a different kind of relationship) Yes, this would count as cheating. But we can accept nuance that there is a difference in amount of reaction between this, and deliberately hiding things for a long amount of time.
But with Joe, the consequences aren’t ‘paused’. There are none from him. Should Joyce say ‘no poly relationship’ it’s not like Joe would go ‘Well, now I’m angry at you’.
Shogeton didn’t say a single word about excusing Joyce or whether Joyce is being dishonest with Dorothy. You pulled all of that outrage directly from your own asshole.
The comment you’re replying to is about whether or not Joyce consented to be in a polyamorous relationship (and she didn’t). Like demonstrably in the text there is zero “Yeah let’s try poly” coming from Joyce. In fact, she says the opposite in that scene.
Do I think she’s GOING to try it? I hope so.
I want to know where Joyce said she would consider a poly relationship, because I don’t remember that happening.
Yeah, it’s a massive stretch to say that Joyce “said” she would consider a poly relationship. It was Joe who said he was fine with Joyce dating two people at the same time. Is Joyce is considering the possibility? Mmmmaybe? She says she can’t because she’s “not a hussy,” but then she’s like “Wait, I AM a hussy.”
nobody engaging with the tfone reference. sob
This ship does nothing for me, but I do appreciate the slipshine name.
So you’re saying this ship has sailed?
The ship has sailed and reached open waters, plus or minus a few potential rocks.
You did it, Dorothy. You actually landed a girlfriend who comes with instructions.
No, Dorothy’s the one who comes with instructions, I think that’s been made very clear tonight xD
The Slipshine should make it clear who ends up coming with the instructions. Hopefully both of them.
Does it count if you’re the one writing the instructions?
That is where all instructions come from. I sometimes write up detailed instructions for something I couldn’t find any for once I have figured it out.
(No, not naughty stuff like this. Computer printers and such.)
Sounds to me like you should branch out a bit.
You could have a second career.
my father taught post secondary technical communication for 15 years. you canmake good money (and win awards) for writing good instruction mamuals
damn, she brought out the graphs?
now we gettin kinky.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
SLIPSHINE ALERT!!!!
SLIPSHINE ALERT!!!!
EVERYONE READY YOUR WALLETS!!!!
THIS IS NOT A DRILL!!!!!
*^-^* <3
There might be a drill involved, you don’t know yet.
Omg…Dorothy is gonna do a Dahmer?! That’s horrifying!
I always thought “getting drilled” was more of a P in V thing
dildo on a drill,,,,,,,,or reciprocating saw
sorry for the accidental report
I was gonna and saw the minimum and nope, as much as i want to see some friend of Dorothy content that goess well out of my budget for the month, and probably any other month.
Yeah, Slipshine is pricy.
Fortunately, the comics don’t go away (or not Willis’s anyway), so you can take your time. Maybe buy yourself a subscription as a Solstice present or something.
Their pricing model has gone to the anti-binge protocol, too, which is both understandable and painful.
Double price for the first month to get a little extra revenue from people who are there for one specific thing rather than for a subscription porn-comic service is I guess the least shitty way to maintain a business when a significant portion of the fans are fans of one thing and likely to subscribe on a “minimum period, only when fav author releases something” basis, but it’s still a lot of money for a lot of people.
(and because the economics of the situation suck and I think more people should know about it, CCBill and other “adult” payment processors charge something like triple the fees that a Mastercard/Visa/Paypal would, for worse service. There’s an excellent bsky thread about it here.)
IIRC it’s also somewhat annoying to cancel. Much easier to sign up. I haven’t looked yet, but I vaguely remember the initial month always having been double (or at least significantly higher).
But yeah, I’m in the sign up for a month when Willis puts up a new slipshine group. There just isn’t a lot else there that I’m interested in.
I just read the slipshine and cancelled, it’s not really that hard to cancel in my experience LOL
From personal experience, CCBill can, occasionally, make it very difficult to cancel but only sometimes and not for everyone. Glad you had good luck with it; recommend you double check next month’s credit card bill all the same.
(as linked above, this is not really Slipshine’s fault; every adult-content payment processor is terrible)
all I did was click “Account Panel”
entered my account email and subscription ID to search for the subscription, and clicked “cancel”
an email confirming cancelation was sent immediately
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
guess will have to wait tho
yeah, i wish it was available on its own. i’d be willing to pay for that, but not for a month’s subscription.
*plays “Jungle Boogie” by Kool And The Gang on hacked muzak*
Personally, I’m so glad to see that. For plot reasons.
See, as much as I’ve enjoyed the last few strips, there’s been the thought that as long as the camera didn’t cut away, the odds of them not going through with it were increasing.
Thank you Willis for not giving me the female voyeur equivalent of blue balls.
Yes! Smash cut to Slipshine is basically catharsis with this strip. We can relax now. No more interruptions. Let them enjoy themselves. All the sickos can rejoice that they made it. All the paladins can cool off knowing that the story will be moving somewhat on from this.
And, having now read it, the Slipshine only adds to the catharsis with its final joke.
A hearty bravo and cheers to Willis for a truly enjoyable read!
I cannot read it because no money can you tell me what it is?
“hmm, maybe I AM the Abraham Lincoln of getting Joyce to cum”
moments later, Dorothy be grabbed back down and say
“… oh, right, girls don’t have a refractory period”
then the caption say “JUST THE BEGINNING, DAAAAAAAAAANG”
Thanks you that’s awesome.
hey no problem!
heck I’d post a whole transcript of it here if I had the time (and ideally Willis’s permission)
I’m usually so sad to be spoiled by accident but NOT THIS TIME, because yeah all of the “lol watch it turn out that Joyce and Dorothy are only biromantic, not bisexual” comments over the last few months I’m just so incredibly relieved.
Finally, the One Slipshine Comic I’ve been hoping for for years! – this weekend I’mma get myself a sub for one month and binge all the Slippy, Shiny DoA comics! ^^
Oh
i was too busy cackling at the slipshine title to be the first commenter nooo
Hater containment thread was a great success yesterday so I’m bringing it back for today.
Kvetch here! Let the shippers have their fun elsewhere!
Honestly, I consider this a good thing. It means that we’ll get to focus on some other characters for a few days!
The pendulum swings mercifully
That’s my entire opinion, at this point. “Usually a Slipshine means we have 0-1 more strips focusing on the Slipshine-ers, and then we cut away”.
One can hope that will hold true and we’ll get something actually interesting to read again instead of bland twu wuv.
I can’t believe Joyce is cheating on the washing machine. What are they going to tell the dryer?!
I could make a pun about Joyce and Dorothy probably being wet…
Too soon? Too much?
you May want to Tag it, next time
Thank you… *bile commences*
I hate this more than EVEEEEERRRRR! And now that stupid slipshine is all right there. Taunting me. *holds flaming torch*
Burn it. Burn it all.
I really hope I can keep reading the comic for fun instead of like, hatreading it– DoA was my first real webcomic! I love doa! I would just love it more if dorothy wasn’t in DoA; I don’t think cheaters deserve to be happy but I *really* don’t think dorothy deserves to be happy
ok side bar thread my first webcomic was 8 bit theater.
How I felt when all that murder happened before the time skip
i remember that you told me how to pronounce kvetch, but did not actually remember the pronunciation of kvetch that you told me, so i’m kvetching about my failure to retain the information
Kuh-vetch, with the vetch sounding like it’d rhyme with fetch.
No, one syllable. Kv works the same way as kw/qu.
Oh, my apologies!
It still rhymes with fetch tho.
was just gonna say this
There are SOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooo many comics explicitly showing shes attracted to Joe, Jacob and Ethan.
and she was explicitly suppressing her attraction to men the entire comic , which is why many of us wanted that arc to its completion.
( and that completion MIGHT actually entail her discovering shes been manipulated by comp-het and her extreme physical attraction to tall Dark Muscular Men with square jaws, and round butts doesnt include having a penis put in her. But until then, she’s Bi )
I think that arc did come to completion when she put a penis in her mouth? I was surprised-slash-disappointed that didn’t get a slipshine. Depending on how you count, Joyce had sex with Joe like 3 times, and didn’t get a slipshine. Maybe because it would have launched too close to this one? idk
Starting to move into the acceptance phase. As much as I like Joe and Joyce, these two are also very cute together once you get over the double cheating thing
It kind of sucks that we need a Hater Containment Thread, to be honest. Like I don’t even consider myself a *hater* because I think it’s pretty normal to find the circumstances under which all this started kind of uncomfortable.
I dunno I feel like so many people are reading such a different comic from me, even outside of this stuff, like all the shit with Hank a couple days ago. I’m not frustrated with the direction of the comic like some people are, because the author has made his intentions with it pretty clear, but I do just feel like there’s a large portion of the audience who don’t want nuance, and only want a rotating wheel of characters to kiss each other at various times which… I dunno. That ain’t fun to me.
I guess what I’m trying to say is I wish people could just be… Less rabid, like in general.
That and maybe we could check in on Danny and Sal for a bit and if could all be very low stakes for a couple of weeks. That’d be nice.
I feel you on the ‘other people are reading a different comic’ thing, I know this is a long running comic but sometimes people will say blatantly false things in this comic that have me wonder what the hell is happening. Like when people were arguing about Ruth and Jennifer and deciding they broke up on Halloween because of Jennifer’s alcohol issues, as if those people completely forgot the arc set before Halloween where she finally worked on kicking alcohol and the break up having nothing to do with that.
I understand people forget details after long periods of time, we’ve all done it, but what I find difficult is when people are just taking entirely different readings from *recent strips* or *entire characters*.
I know grace has to be given for this, people have different levels of reading comprehension, and no one is immune to projecting their own baggage onto the media they’re consuming, not even me here, talking on my soapbox like I have the One True Correct Reading of Dumbing of Age.
I did, after all, take a lot of Joyce’s insistence that she wasn’t into women at face value, because *my* life has involved a lot of explaining to a lot of people that yes, *I really am straight* despite it apparently not seeming that way.
But even then, I was able to go “Damn, guess I was wrong there.”, where it feels like a lot of people just hardcore cling on to these very hyperspecific interpretations of the comic, even when the comic itself doesn’t really support them.
Iunno.
This’s one reason I so often go back and find strips relevant to my comments; not just to link them in support, but also to make sure I’m remembering correctly. There’ve been times I’ve had to change or cancel a reply because the evidence contradicted my memories.
people get headcannon blinders going, and refuse to admit that they misinterpreted/misread/misunderstood. just like homicide detectives
It’s somewhat understandable since this is a long ongoing story and there is a tendency to edit memories over time to fit a general understanding of what’s going on.
But for some people this happens faster than with others.
Ninja-ed for the second time tonight.
Lol, sorry.
My “favorite” as a Joeyce shipper was the ones who would insist to me that Joyce utterly hated Joe until “after the timeskip”. They’d been texting a lot and confiding in each other well BEFORE that, in fact, but meh.
They retconned that in their minds so they could justify throwing away more than a decade of slow-burn storytelling for whatever today’s comic is.
Checking in on Danny and Sal would be lovely. They’ve got a sort of sweet and semi stable thing going that interests me greatly, in comparison to this. Plus I’m pulling for Danny’s egg to crack at some point, so there’s that too.
Personally I’m hoping Walky but I’d be down for both
Yeah, Walky still doesn’t know about Amber’s injury.
And who else is he going to hang out with.
For a while now it’s felt like a whole bunch of people here have been reading an entirely different comic than the one I’ve been reading. Like they’ve been reading a comic where Joyce and Dorothy didn’t start their relationship by cheating, and continue it by behaving really badly towards almost all their friends and acquaintances.
No, what’s going on here is something different: people disagree on how bad cheating is exactly, especially in fiction. There’s a really wide range there, as we’ve seen.
I’m sorry, but there have definitely been a cadre of pro- posters whose opinion is that this is categorically not cheating, for a variety of rationales — I’ve personally seen “kissing isn’t cheating” as well as “having a queer awakening wipes the relationship slate clean, so it’s not cheating” and “if you didn’t EXPLICITLY discuss exclusivity, regardless of any subtext or cultural expectations, it’s not cheating”.
That last one is me because it’s a stupid and destructive cultural expectation. And it wasn’t always like this. What the heck is wrong with you people? Oh, and yeah, get off my lawn.
I can agree it’s stupid and destructive; I can also acknowledge that someone who’s operating under those expectations is still gonna be hurt by me breaking them, y’know?
And more to the point for the story being told in-comic, it’s one of those things where when someone DOESN’T have those expectations, it’s just a little *zzzt* against my suspension of disbelief. Joe’s reaction less so — I can buy into “actually was angling for poly the whole time”.
If I’m allowed in the containment area as a non-hater. Strictly speaking, Dorothy and Joyce kissed while they were both in a relationship, and neither of their relationship allowed it. So, yes, they cheated.
But I personally make a serious nuance with ‘Alright, this was a spur of the moment we realized we should tell our respective partners, and after a few hours of dawdling and an illicit sleeping together while wearing clothes, we actually do that’ on one hand, and ‘Be in a relationship, go out fully intending to have sex with others, do that, and lie about it for an extended period of time’
Just like ‘shoplifting from Walmart’ and ‘breaking and entering in someone’s house and taking all their stuff’ are both stealing, but the former is just gonna get a ‘shrug’ from me. I’m not going to say I’m feeling any outrage about Joyce and Dorothy’s cheating here.
I fully acknowledge this is a lot of people’s position, and one I’m not unsympathetic to.
But then it brings us back to the criticism of “then this is a badly-constructed cheating arc.” All told, Joyce and Dorothy really only did a little bit worse at coming clean about everything than Jacob did with Raidah.
To kinda amplify something I said yesterday (I think), it seems like many of the fights on this basis are subtly about whether a given person thinks this is supposed to be a cheating arc or a coming-out arc.
And it does really seem like the “cheating arc” part of it is essentially irrelevant to the point that it’s just a distraction, but yet it’s still there. Woulda been a better story without it, IMHO, especially given how Willis has talked about it — if there was to be a cheating arc, I think a lot of folks would have preferred it be significantly messier than this.
Right – as I said elsewhere, the plain fact is that this was the exact wrong couple for Willis to try their very first cheating arc out with.
I feel like ‘cheating arc’ is way too much. An arc suggests that the cheating gets a lot of time and narrative importance. It did not. It is simply a case of ‘yeah, Joyce and Dorothy did things messily’. But I feel that some people put a way bigger importance on the, to me marginal wrongdoing, than the story does. They feel the crime is more severe than the story and writer seem to think, and so, they’ll not be happy with the result.
Like, Sarah giving Joyce a harsh wake up call, and Joyce having to deal with some uncomfortable moments with Joe is, to me, all the resolution I need of the cheating. It was never an arc. It was a small sidenote to show that things are messy, and people are imperfect and will fuck up. And I don’t expect that it’s going to have any further consequences.
This does not square with Willis’ comments regarding wanting to explore a cheating storyline since that’s not something they’ve done before.
It’s okay to steal from Walmart’s because if they close their store, we can just steal from Mom and Pop stores.
Mom and Pop have less stuff in general, so I’d feel pretty bad stealing a car stereo from them.
i feel this yeah
but i also think part of it is that because the comic has gone on for so long, and its one where the characters change gradually, people will (understandably) forget or misremember stuff
and not everyone will go read meta stuff from willis (also going back a long time)
so then in a way people who have read the same comic are operating on different assumptions about what is happening/what is likely to happen
I’ve been trying my best to stop being hateful in the comment section.
HOWEVER.
I honestly just don’t care for Dorothy. Of all my WLW ships with Joyce she’s near the bottom. (Joyce/Billie, Joyce/Liz, Joyce/Carla even) I feel like she’s poison. She had two bad breakups with Walky (and was the one who pushed him to date Lucy) and a bad breakup with Danny. And it feels like there’s a trend of people she dates putting her on this pedestal. I really hope Joyce kinda demystifies her if their relationship continues.
This, definitely. I actually like Dorothy a lot as a character but I admit she’s flawed in how she treats other people and think I’d like her better if those flaws were explored more in the narrative. She’s been a terrible partner in her last two relationships and if she has no complaints with Joyce it’ll make her look worse, since it implies Danny and Walky’s problem is that they didn’t fawn over her enough (even though they were doing that way too much). I’ve said before Dorothy needs to date someone who’ll remind her she isn’t all that, if only so she stops feeling the need to be Little Miss Perfect all the time.
I too would like Dorothy more if I had more reason to hate her.
Dorothy is one of my favorite characters, in part because of the ways she’s flawed? The trying to do right by all the things so hard you actually don’t do right by any of them is like. Really interesting. I like when she’s thoughtfully trying to balance her priorities and being confronted with choices and tradeoffs, and I like that her relationships with Walky, while breaking that framework a bit and then breaking under that framework, engaged with it. Unfortunately the wholehearted “you are my highest priority” vibe with Joyce feels like it disengages from what makes her interesting, to the point that I’m REALLY hoping for some amount of structure rebuilding for it to have to compete with/be fit into. There was never a world where I was gonna be happy about this ship going full romantic, but honestly I think it might have been a lot more interesting pre-crashout and I hope it will hit SOME of those notes post-crashout.
Skinny girl saying her thighs are gross and fat is honestly so real, writing wise. & like I wasn’t in the moment in the first place so I won’t say it took me out of it, but it did make me roll my eyes. This strip does come a day after me thinking about like…the bodies in the comics I read though (including DoA), so it’s accidental bad timing for me to get particularly annoyed about it instead of sort of squinting & moving on. Fully caught me on the wrong foot.
Honestly, female beauty standards (especially for young women) are a hell of a thing.
I worded this so carefully/vaguely because I didn’t want to be too judgy, or misunderstood, but to be more haterful: a comic with a majority skinny cast (& lbr the most characters, especially the girls, get is “curvy”) mentioning fatness explicitly negatively really peeved me today. Probably especially because it’s so realistic, and also because it’s supposed to be a cute moment. Which it is, otherwise. I forgot about those stupid sheets Dorothy filled out – fun callback (to end on a nice note) (not that I had to, but credit where credit is due: they’re cute. I just don’t like the brand, so to speak.)
Still sort of mild. Whatever. Unrelated to that – I still think the cheating plotline is the second worst thing about this because Willis didn’t commit in almost any way. I don’t even care about cheating plotlines in media, they get sort of tiring the same way a generic love triangle does after a while (and tbf I think both are like, hard to do well), but going out of it without any of the conflict about broken trust,or secrecy or whatnot is just so sauceless. And like, “whoops, the thing you, the audience, thought mattered because it’s been telegraphed as such actually isn’t really a problem” works as a fun (? debatable) move maybe twice, but not x times in a row for a whole arc. (Though I still think the Carla/Charlie storyline was worse in that regard. Waste of damn time just when I thought Carla could get some focus on her interiority instead of being comic relief full time. Fingers crossed for the future though!)
The worst thing is of course the protest.
One thing that irks me about the cheating part, from a writing perspective, is: David Willis, by their own admission, avoided writing cheating in relationships… and then, when this is remarked upon, they decided to fix this by having a cheating arc about what was arguably the most telegraphed and anticipated relationship planned for the comic.
That is: with a significant lack of experience at writing cheating storylines, they gambled the DoJo relationship on getting it right (and, regardless of how we may feel about DoJo, it’s pretty important as far as the comic’s concerned).
I think this is a point – this is one of the most important relationships in the entire strip, possibly one that’s intended to last for the rest of the series’ run. It’s probably an unwise move to have your first cheating arc ever – by your own admission, because they make you uncomfortable – be what lights the fire, especially if most of the cheating drama then gets ignored anyway in favor of a coming out narrative that I’m sure most people would have been completely fine with if the initial cheating hadn’t left a bad taste in their mouths.
That said even without the cheating the protest backdrop is easily one of Willis’ worst creative decisions, up there with that thing Mike did with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song back in Shortpacked!
I’ve read Shortpacked! a couple of times, But I don’t recall the Mike thing in question.
I don’t care to check the archives, but it’s entirely possible that it was stricken from the archive because it was like, really really bad. Basically Mike talking about sexually assaulting someone while singing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song to make them no longer a TMNT fan because of the associated trauma. I believe the term he used was “rape therapy.”
I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but I’ve been reading Willis comics for awhile and I do not recall that happening. Until you get to the actual term, it sounds like something Mike would say to/about Amber.
I hate even linking to it, but:
https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/rape
I did find it.
Thank you. I notice that Willis says “pretend I never wrote this one.”
Willis’ handling of their trans women characters is a source of constant frustration for me. He seems intent on playing with kid gloves on when it comes to them and consistently shows away from actually confronting the hard parts of the trans experience and how they affect us. They’ve come close twice – with Mary’s transphobia and Jocelyne’s abortive coming out – but the former segued into a comedic beat of comeuppance at Mary’s expense (not a bad thing to be sure, but sacrificed dramatic potential), and the latter was cut off to instead center Joyce and *her* coming out – as if we haven’t had enough of that yet!
I just want the trans women in this strip to feel like real people who actually go through the same struggles and face the same adversity I have, but Carla is one of the shallowest characters in the story beyond maybe having to deal with her parents’ complicity in genocide (a welcome arc, if it goes anywhere) and Jocelyne has been out of the picture for years until recently, and had a moment I was really looking forward to aborted for the sake of Joyce’s arc. That really annoyed me as a trans woman.
but if you then get that payoff now, that we have moved past the outing/merging of joyrothy, and willis can show jocelyne and here coming out to her father on her terms, and maybe even spend a few weeks just focusing on her and her life without the specter of the will they wont they. sgurcoated lesbians. would you enjoy it more? being that she could truely get to have the star and spotlight?
I can’t directly speak for the trans experience but at least from a narrative one I have hope Jocelyne’s reintroduction into the story as hopefully a more permanent side character role means we will actually get more forward facing trans identity stories beyond Carla the incredibly privileged billionaire heiress that gets whatever she wants and already went through the struggles of transitioning before the comic started. Carla is an entertaining character but I think it’s valid that if you’re looking for a trans character to relate to she’s not really it.
I think Jocelyne aborting her coming out to Hank is part of trying to tell those more relatable trans identity stories. I don’t think it was sacrificing her development for Joyce’s. I just think her coming out to Hank will be a slow burn because she’s gonna be here awhile. She clearly wasn’t ready to do it this time.
I’m hating because Joyce/Dorothy/Walky was my OT3 back in 2015 and now that’ll never happen.
Give it time.
Walky doesn’t even have a mouse costume yet.
Not to encroach on the hater containment thread like a jerk bringing positivity to Garbage Roof, but this one actually lands a lot better for me. Dorothy feels more Dorothy. The callback to the Joyce Sex Diagram is really fun. The doodle of Joyce’s face on it is goddamn delightful goofy.
In other hater news, I’m a little peeved about the options for the new poll. All the response options that are positive or neutral are cheeky lighthearted fun, and the only truly negative option available just feels over-the-top judgy.
The poll feels mean-spirited again, like those stupid website popups that say “wanna sign up for our newsletter?” And the only two options are 1. “Yes, I love getting quality content for free!” And 2. “No! I’m a grumpy jerk who hates awesome newsletters and hates you and hates puppies! >:(“
I don’t mind a snarky or funny poll, but sometimes the clapback attempts just don’t land for me.
All of the polls since the tear gas wedding strip went up have been leading questions, with answers that clearly indicate Willis has their thumb on the scale trying to make anyone who doesn’t like the direction the story’s going look like a hater devoid of nuance.
Plus the extremely sarcastic “MAXIMUM NUANCE” poll.
I am kinda hoping that their first time isnt amazing? Like, that there are some kinda bad parts but they are learning? I remember my first time having gay sex wasn’t glorious but you learn the tricks and get used to the new sensations ^^’
But Slipshines are for fun, so properly not haha
At this point I’m considering just staying away from the comic for a few weeks so that when I read again they’ll have hopefully actually addressed the fact that Joyce has now had most of a day to tell her new gf that she isn’t explicitly done with her previous partner. Though seeing as how they both cheated, perhaps they’ll be okay with that.
Unless, maybe she is done. I mean, I hope not, but I’ve seen nothing that convinces me she’s considering it.
What convinces me that she’s not considering it is the fact that she was so anxious for a clean break between Dorothy and Walky. If she wants to have Dorothy and Joe too, the obvious selling point is that Dorothy gets Joyce and Walky too. If she actually wanted to continue a relationship with Joe, this would have at least crossed her mind, and additionally the specter of eventually bringing it up with Dorothy would be causing her anxiety.
So, no, she’s not considering Joe’s offer.
Disagree – I don’t think Joyce has considered the possibility that Dorothy would want to continue seeing Walky at all, and the fact that she foreclosed on that relationship on Dorothy’s behalf without telling Dorothy that polyamory was an option is a juicy vein of drama that I want to see explored – bonus points if Dorothy broaches the topic with Walky and it gives him a chance to really let her have it for the yo-yo act she’s subjected him to all school year.
I’m imagining Joyce being like “Stop! Wait! Dorothy, are you all right with me dating you and Joe both? Because Joe is OK with that and I am OK with that.” And Dorothy might NOT be OK with that, but because she’s Very Horny she’ll brush that aside and be like “Sure, fine, whatever, let’s just get each other off right now!” Then later she’ll have Misgivings.
Also, all the “love” talk and the hearts seem real cheesy to me. Like sure they love each other, but what they’re feeling right now seems like it’s less about love and more about being horny horndogs. Wanting to get off so badly that you can’t even wait for the elevator, much less wait until you’ve finished the conversation about who’s dating who.
I mean they are in love. You do say mushy things when you’re in love. I really don’t like the criticism that suggests Dorothy and Joyce are more horny than actually romantically interested in one another. It’s clearly not accurate.
That said, Dorothy agreeing to poly without really thinking through all the implications – because she’s afraid she’ll lose Joyce otherwise, because she feels guilty about “stealing” her from Joe, whatever the reason – and then becoming the tension point later when she realizes she doesn’t like it – that is my ideal dramatic scenario.
I understand. I’d personally rather see Walky choosing between Amber and Dorothy, but you take your drama where you find it.
Ah, later in the day, now we see the emergence of my second-least-favorite kind of comments here.
Sadly, I think with the number of haters who have expressed that they are starting or have been disliking DoA as a whole, I can’t even be THAT annoyed at the “you can always stop reading if you don’t like it” folks.
I do think the significant majority of the “haters” are “I don’t like this one aspect of a strip I otherwise love” variety, though, and asking why they don’t leave is just asinine.
Too much wholesome trust happening! It burnssssss us!
Don’t trust wholesomeness.
No, no. Trust it implicitly. That will make it all the more glorious when the world burns.
Oh it’s a slipshine!
Maybe we can get to spend some time with Ruth or Carla. I wanna see more of them, because we’ve gotta give these two some privacy
I like where this is going, so I guess I’ll see myself out of here! 😅
When Dorothy’s right she’s right, Joyce does have some very nice thighs
Awwwwwwwww the sillies are fuckinnnnnnnn
Dorothy’s actually kinda decent at drawing.
SICKOS WIN.
FRIEND(OFDOROTHY)SHIP
Side note, anyone remember when the mapping regions thing was? I can’t recall if any other characters were in the relevant scene, and I don’t think my archive-fu is quite cut out for searching through all 730 strips in which they both appear.
(That’s as many as two 365s. And that’s terrible.)
Luckily, Roz was there to segue into things.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-15/01-love-dares-you-to-change/windowshopping/
Starts here!
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-15/01-love-dares-you-to-change/fairlysafe/
Also a good callback, here’s Dorothy mentioning the thigh thing
Which was itself a callback to https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-13/02-turning-saints-into-the-sea/bigger-2/
Huh! I had been wondering how Dorothy knew, just figured maybe it was some gal talk. Dorothy’s a good girlfriend for Joyce she really listens
And here’s the comic with the joyce line dotty’s referencing in this one
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-16/01-not-so-smooth-criminals/justkissing/
:p
It utterly boggles my goggles that there are people who have, at least in theory, read that strip and the strips that follow it, but somehow have arrived at the conclusion that the Joyce/Dorothy relationship popped up out of nowhere with no foreshadowing.
Finally
Ohhhh, because she’s gonna eat her out.
Damn, we got called out hard
I can strongly recommend for anyone who needs it to take regular breaks from looking at comments in this or any other place you frequent. I did it the last few days, only putting like two comments without looking at anything else and no joke it actually improved my mood, fell lot less anxious and frustrated and could just enjoy the comics by themselves. It is pretty nice.
Yeah, it’s nice when you can’t see the comments directly threatening to murder you with a knife.
Don’t be silly that’s just a cell ph
one, that’s what we all thought, back in the day.
two, i’m surprised people still remember that.
three,
the comments section never forgets.
Never? Damn, imagine you’re dying and the last thought before the lights go out forever is “Remember when that weird fruit kept calling a knife a phone?” There’s gotta be a better way.
If it’s any consolation, I’ve started intentionally misremembering that it wasn’t a phone, because it’s even funnier if Amber stabbed a guy several times with a blunt object.
To misquote Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves…
“Why a phone, Amber? Why not a knife?”
“Because it’s dull, you twit. It’ll hurt more.”
A while back, I made an obscure reference here to a forum in-joke for a completely different webcomic that’s been defunct for like twenty years now which I didn’t even remember that I remembered until it popped into my head, and someone else here caught it.
Never.
I always prefer for it to be a surprise.
yeah and like,
according to a poll someone made here a while ago, a majority of readers don’t even look at the comments at all
starting to think there’s a reason for that o3o
They got the right idea, frankly if i wasn’t terminally addicted to it i leave the comments permanently (same reason i am still on Twitter).
well at the very least the comments section ain’t a fascist-owned disinformation fountain where posts are used for AI scraping, so there’s that 👀
also at least not *everyone* here is devote to biting Willis’s head off and acting like it’s a personality, unlike a certain discord server which for now shall remain nameless
For sure they are not equal levels of bad but I would certainly fells less stressed overall if i leave them.
Thicc thighs save lives, Joyce. Believe me.
it’s about time
These dumb annoying schlorpy motherfuckers deserve every moment of love and happiness they’re going to give each other. Just lock them in there for like three days, they can get water from the shared bathroom tap, everyone will be happier.
I don’t like where this going, so i’m in the comments section. I hate this so much I could burst from the anger.
/s
I don’t actually care.
No!! No!! Let the hate flow through you.
I love that the Poll had a Questionable Content reference (and that it was the most voted option), seeing my two fav webcomic (and their Fanbases) interacting is always fun.
I would love to see some kind of short Crossover side comic or something, Dorothy and Hanners could probably be good friends, as would Dina and Hanners. Danny and Clinton would also be fun. Walky and ANY Android would be a fun interaction. Amber meeting Faye would be great.
Pintsize and Roz.
Bubbles and … Ruth?
Marten and Ethan /s
Roko and Blowjob Cat
…OK, yes, I’m trying to see how silly I can get, but I was kinda’ serious about Pintsize and Roz. They’d either get along great, or she’d kill him within 5 seconds.
But the most completely off-the-wall nothing-in-common pairing I can think of? Yay and Jacob.
But but, I’d like to see Yay and Sarah interact. I think they’d get each other and maybe even be friends.
Dina had a brief cameo in Questionable Content years ago, when Marigold, Emily, and Dale were speculating about how T-rexes boned down and they lost Marigold to the Bone Zone. You just see Dina pop up behind the counter, and the author comment or title of the strip (Can’t remember which) says “Hi Dina!”
That comic is how I learned the word “senpai”
Dina gets around. She menaced Thorp in Girl Genius the other year.
The poll today made me laugh so hard I choked on a piece of lettuce lolololol
Right, right, but the important part is the donuts. I distinctly remember reading something here about maple donuts a while back.
Wait, they’re not starting with the shoulders? Ugh, this ship is the worst.
It’s like they’ve never played Meet and Fuck in their entire lives.
After much careful deliberation I have come to the conclusion that the class of “Relationship Paladin” is overrated. I would, however, be very interested in hearing about what fun toys the Relationship Artificers have come up with.
Wait until you see the weird shit you get with homebrew relationship clssses.
Good news! We’ve re-worked The Throngler!
…oh goddammit how long were you sitting on that joke
Callback to…a decade ago? That can’t be right.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/04-the-whiteboard-dong-bandit/earliest/
And frankly even then that joke was a long time in the making
GWSS guest comic link. That takes me back. Wow.
oh god are we old
I love that the Slipshine banner has finally changed to these two queers gettin’ it on, because now even when the event is over, the haters will have to see it right under whatever comic is running that day, until someone else fucks importantly enough to get a pay-per-screw story. Danny’s mom shows up to tell him she ate his father’s intestines and a side of French fries (or whatever the fuck she’s up to these days, idk), and off to the side is Joyce perpetually yanking on Dorothy’s top.
I mean, they’re fine over there. Slipshine is a great place for gratifying content with not much drama in it.
I like where this is going for them, but I don’t wanna watch, thanks for the offer. Not anti it, just not into it.
Okay, begrudgingly enjoying their cuteness! I like these two together
.But I’ve been kinda struggling with this arc as a former polyamorous person because it like… Feels like they got out of the uncomfortable part of this too easily? Or maybe because in my experience, when you get something you really want like this–without taking the time to fill your other partners in, without doing the right steps to be kindest to those you’re letting down.. there’s always this blowback. That hammer of guilt and feeling that you’ve fucked everything up and experiencing the actual misery of people you care about that you, even with the goodest of intentions, have caused. I feel like this is missing from this arc so far…
But who knows, Maybe this will happen later and we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop? Heh. I’m curious how/if there’s a way to reconcile all of this, and i really hope Joe gets to still be in the picture.
I’ve been reading Willis comics for the better part of a decade. There’s *always* a catch sooner or later.
I get you, but also, as someone who has experienced both sides of blowback of this nature, I would massively prefer it not crop up in this comic, as these are among the worst experiences a human being can emotionally have, and there is no coming back from that, bridges are not unburnt and friend groups are not salvaged. Both times, on both sides, I have literally moved countries to be able to rebuild. We need to learn grace and forgiveness, our bonds are so much more important than whether romantic feelings were sufficiently honoured or not, and every person has their own definition of varying severity as to what sufficient honour is. Societally, we’re so much happier to slap on the scarlet letter than we are to acknowledge the damage an angry pitchfork mob does to -everyone- involved.
Just imagine – twice, two different boyfriends cheat on me, one with my best friend, one with multiple people in a separate friend group. Each time, I am seen as the problem , I lose my friends and I lose trust. Years and years later, I marry one of those cheating boyfriends and realise after a year or so that I will never trust him again, I leaver him and quickly pick up with the person who is now my husband of over a decade, and the father of my children. My entire friend group takes my ex-husband’s side and I even have coworkers telling me how awful and inconsiderate I am for moving on so soon. I thought the time I found out about his cheating was painful, this was a million times worse.
It’s not people’s business, I am not friends with any of the people who judged me or betrayed me then, I have had several false starts of trying to reconcile but each time could not overcome the feelings of betrayal. That shouldn’t happen here, it shouldn’t happen at all, people are so myopic about the value of two people fucking that they don’t get the actual long term damage, and I include my former self in that. Nothing ever hurt me as much as losing the faith and respect of my support network did, and I specifically avoided citing the cheating and distrust as why I left my ex-husband so that he wouldn’t have to deal with that feeling of losing everybody.
Dorothy and Joyce have been the central main characters of this comic throughout its entire run, it would be extremely bizarre if the consequences people are looking for happened, and given it took a full year before my coworkers started treating me normally for even suspecting without any confirmation that I left my husband to go with another man, people legitimately would not be able to cope with the comparative decades of intense, acerbic treatment of two of the main cast by the entire rest of the cast to sufficiently mirror the ire and consequences team Consequences seem to be looking for.
Let’s just not do that, aight? It’s a comic, things can work out and people can understand without the rituals and faff and actual time investment into making the change authentic enough for the majority to accept.
Ah wow. I’m sorry all that happened to you. i get that this misery is something you don’t really want to experience vicariously in fiction. And tbh i don’t really want to experience what i have, and the emotional consequences of the bad choices I’ve made, either… So maybe I’m just having emotions about it? Heh. I do feel like some more self reflection and a little more struggle for them would probably be good…. But yeah this is a David Willis comic so why am i worried there’s not enough struggle haha
the first three panels have such good joyce faces
I can’t believe Billie & Ruth aren’t winning the poll, that’s clearly the funniest answer.
I just *really like* donuts.
To be fair. They’re pretty nice thighs. I agree.
They’d be nicer covered in London Pub® Steak & Chop Sauce.
Everything is. That’s why I only eat London Pub® Steak & Chop Sauce with London Pub® Steak & Chop Sauce on top.
Oh my god, Dorothy. Your autism is off the charts.
I read that in Vegeta’s voice XD
and hell yeah!
Uh, no, her autism is all over those charts.
(that she drew)
((ba dum tsss))
Go Dorothy! Positive reinforcement the hell out of her!
Not answering the poll because it doesn’t have my reason: “This was one of the first webcomics I ever read back when I was 15* and I can’t quit now”
*I’m 27 now.
There wasn’t an option for “I’ve been reading this comic for over a decade and don’t want to stop just because I dislike the current storyline”, so I picked the “I thought this was Questionable Content” option in the poll instead.
Kyulen, I’m with you entirely. I’m waiting for the storyline to pivot back to any other combination of characters (most of whom I enjoy far more than this mess), and hoping next year’s Valentine’s day strip brings me the Joyrothy cracking of the rose-tinted glasses that I crave.
Well, DoJo’s impending activities will be over on Slipshine, so that pivot you’re waiting for will probably be very soon.
Yup, same thing.
“I live here” would have been a nice option.
Oh god I’m old.
The little naked cartoon Joyce diagram is fucking hilarious.
I really liked that original moment with Dorothy, because it’s such a Dorothy thing for her to have done: to want to be the “problem solver” so badly that you diagram all of your friend’s erogenous zones. “No I don’t have any feelings for Joyce, WHATEVER could’ve made you think that???”
So it’s a really delightful callback for me.
Naked, but with glasses!
The author and I agree on that point.
Okay I still kinda anti-ship this but this one IS cute.
I don’t know where the “haters” get the stamina to write walls of text about how they don’t like whatever every single day. Collating them into one thread was a nice idea since you know you can stop the scroll when the comments shrink again.
Eh, I find I write about the things I like and the things I dislike about the same amount in forums like this. Maybe I do write longer when I have a critique, but not by an order of magnitude or anything. Plus critique usually takes longer to articulate anyway.
You have to write for longer when you’re being negative, because if you aren’t exhaustively specific with what you’re saying, you’ll get slightly misinterpreted and accused of god-knows-what personal failing.
…and then get deliberately misinterpreted anyway…
Yup. It’s not even something you can necessarily get MAD at because there are a whole lot of bigoted shitheads out there who for some reason comment about this comic in various venues, but at the same time there are several commenters in this space who will take any opportunity to twist “I don’t like Do/Jo” into “you’re a homophobe/misogynist/bigot” — people as anodyne and thoughtful as Li and Yotomoe have caught strays of this type just in the last couple of weeks, let alone cranky jerks like me.
I learned the word Anodyne today, thank you very much.
It’s such a good word, isn’t it? It’s one of my favorites that I overuse, alongside “ostensibly”.
Anodyne is one of the hater power words. Use it early and often.
Not that you’re using it in hater context here, of course.
Awww. 🙂
How is this not part of the Slipshine? º///º
It’s still very funny to me that willis set out to write a cheating arc and even then it’s two characters realizing they’re attracted to each other when they kiss for the first time and immediately rushing to break up with their partners so they can be together. like, there’s no deception, no hiding the relationship, no leading the other partners on, it’s still very much by the book, it’s just slightly messier than other breakups because of the mutual breakthrough.
I never felt this as a cheating arc storyline.
(not certain what Willis was going for at the first first first draft… but as you said, this wasn’t one… and I seriously prefer this one of how it ended up :P)
And after all, a cheating (soap-opera) arc would be better with some…. not so great ethical characters. This 2 women were always on the side of the light side. 😀
No deception or leading the other partners on… apart from Joyce lying to Dorothy about where she left things with Joe, and delaying her promise to Joe that she’d “finish this conversation later” in favour of having sex with Dorothy?
How is that lying? She did not agree to Joe and there’s barely been room to breathe about anything else with the stress of public outing on newspaper cover story + Becky + Hank + protecting Jocelyne from being outed that has happened since that conversation.
Like for whatever reason the lighting was dark when they left Hank but also they didn’t get breakfast and supposedly would have gone for an early-ish pizza lunch with Hank, so we aren’t likely rocking past 2 pm on this day of so many dominos falling.
If Joyce is seriously considering Joe’s suggestion, then neglecting to tell Dorothy that she did not make a fully clean break with Joe and that she is considering a poly dynamic with him is information that Dorothy would likely want to know and information that might affect how comfortable Dorothy is with jumping right into sex, especially since Dorothy had previously made a list of things to do before they could be physically affectionate at all. Joyce is not lying to Dorothy’s face, but she’s definitely flitting around “lie of omission” territory.
All of which I’d care more about if a) it wasn’t less of a deal than the cheating itself (or follow on stuff like giving Joe a bj instead of breaking up with him) and b) given reactions so far, I thought there any real chance Dorothy would care.
I disagree there. Joyce has not actually done anything. Not agreed to anything All she is doing is considering something. And I don’t feel that being in a relationship means you are obligated to open up any thought you might have, even if those strongly affect the relationship.
Let’s say a couple is together, and one day, when they have a fight, a friend of a partner says ‘I think you should break up’ and said partner goes ‘I don’t know, maybe’ and sits on that for a few days with some vague ‘it’s fine’ to their partners. But they don’t take any action to actually end the relationship, don’t have sex with someone else. And only after some time thinking about it, do they either decide ‘no, I want to stay with them’, put their shoulders on the relationship and try to make it work, or decide otherwise and break up.
Was that person being bad when they didn’t tell their partner for those few days? I think not. I think that sometimes, it is good for people to give themselves time to mull things over in the privacy of their own head, and choose the right time to bring it up. As long as they speak up once they’re ready to do things.
I think this case is different because it’s the very start of the relationship and she’s potentially contemplating not making the clean break with her old relationship that Dorothy thinks she has.
I agree with the hypothetical you describe, but see this as different.
That’s… a very large huuuuge reach.
At worst Joyce has left that discussion unfinished.
Reality wise, she has explicitly broke up with Joe. Joe just didn’t want to break up.
From her point of view, she is kind of done. She has expressed she is with Dorothy now.
Ofc this will come back for more discussions, but saying that Joyce is deceptive or lying is…ROFL!!!!
I must again point out that when given the opportunity to explicitly, unambiguously confirm that Joe is her ex-boyfriend, Joyce instead made a noncommittal verbal shrug.
After explicitly calling him her boyfriend.
In the middle of a pretty intense situation where the point wasn’t her status with Joe?
You mean this:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-16/01-not-so-smooth-criminals/splash/
Yeeeeeee, that’s literally Joyce’s brain coming up to terms with weird things she never had even thought about.
But pls, keep continuing trying to shame these young women. That makes perfect sense.
rofl!
And yes. Joyce/Dorothy has done nothing wrong. Fact.
You can knock off the accusatory tone anytime, pal.
But this is what I mean, look at how slender that thread is! meanwhile she’s called dorothy her wife repeatedly. i’m not complaining, the generally low stakes in DoA is one of the things i like about it, but even by the strip’s standards this is barely anything
She said she’d talk to Joe later. She didn’t say as soon as she finished with the current crisis. She didn’t say later today. She said later. This evening will be latter. Tomorrow will be later. Next week will be later. Honestly, it’s probably better that she take a little more time to be sure of her feelings before she has this conversation, (although it would be nice, if she thinks it’s going to take a significant amount of time, to give Joe a heads-up about that). And no, she’s not obligated to suspend everything with Dorothy until she has this conversation.
oh!!!
I’m sorry I just can’t imagine hating this. These two goobers are perfect for each other
Agreed 🙂
From a “reading” standpoint, that’s kind of the issue, though?
If they’re perfect for each other, then if one isn’t interested in reading a drama-free romance, there’s not much here at the moment.
It seems to me like there have been a number of romances in DoA that have been cute and drama-free for long periods, even years in real-time, without getting the kind of backlash this one has. Becky/Dina and Danny/Sal for example.
Becky and Dina have always had an undercurrent of tension where Becky is obviously still in love with Joyce and Dina sees herself as the silver medal winner in her girlfriend’s eyes (plus the emergent tension of Becky’s anxiety over change and Dina’s possible flexibility with labels), and Sal had to wrestle with whether she wants to be with Danny when he’s everything her racist parents wanted in a partner for her. I actually agree that Danny and Sal are mostly fluff when they’re around, but that’s why we get them in bursts and not unceasingly for weeks on end.
(This is also a reason to do a transition arc with Danny because it complicates her relationship with Sal btw)
It has seemed to me, and I’ll be clear that I didn’t go back and count anything, that both of the ships you mention (Danny/Sal and Dina/Becky) don’t have nearly the same amount of perceived runtime as this ship does, and both of those couples have been less of the focus of storylines.
Dot also adequately summarizes the fact that both couples mentioned have ongoing arcs where there was some tension that played into it from the beginning.
And honestly, I think at least some of the focus on “but it was CHEATING” comes from that — if that’s hanging over their heads, then there’s something interestingly non-saccharine here, and as a bonus it’s interestingly non-saccharine without being explicitly/solely homophobic like most external sources of tension would pretty much have to be. (I am expressly not even considering the protest, as that’s its own set of issues; I’m also expressly glad that the Hank storyline didn’t turn queerphobic, because that would have just sucked to read).
I can even appreciate the desire to have a couple with no INTERNAL sources of tension (although I could have also enjoyed “Dorothy’s issues make her a uncomfortable fit in a relationship she can’t adjust on the fly to suit her immediate desires like she sometimes does with Walky, whose relationship style appears to be ‘just happy to be here’.”), y’know?
But if there’s no internal tension, and no external tension, then there’s just the ship itself.
(usual disclaimer – I am annoyed at the existence of “haters” who just want to punish queers and/or women, and frankly they can fold their opinion until it’s all corners and stick it in whichever place is least comfortable for them.)
(disclaimer to the disclaimer: man, I’m all over the place in how I want to describe homophobia today, and in particular my previous post would have benefited from another 30 seconds in the mental oven and/or an edit button)
The tension here is pretty clearly setting up to be a slow burn about the fallout of Joyce not fully breaking up with Joe and this seemingly worsening Walky’s already pretty low mental health. Two strips ago we cut to Sarah doing literally nothing but feeling bad for Joe, and before that we had multiple dedicated pages of Billie trying to comfort Walky, and calling Dorothy out for hurting Walky, and then before that Sarah called Joyce out for hurting Joe.
Just because its not immediately blasting you in the face with angst the moment it starts doesn’t mean there’s no tension anywhere.
And even if there wasn’t, that’s…fine, actually? Like, literally every other relationship has had some kind of angst bullshit attached to it. It would be boring and kind of unfulfilled if none of the romances were ever allowed to actually be happy.
At that point we’re back to the first paragraph — it FEELS (again, expressly no data) we have had a lot more of “these two are just so cute together, aren’t they” in a more rapid-fire way than any given other couple, especially compared to the so-far mild pushback from parties not directly harmed.
And even if there wasn’t, that’s…fine, actually?
I mean, that’s just a point where reasonable people can disagree about what they like in a story, which is also just fine by me.
Similarly, if every other relationship has some angst attached, then it seems reasonable to me that there would be some disagreement over whether an angst-free relationship was “a breath of fresh air” or “a tone shift; not what I’m here for”.
Yeah for me in order for angst to be effective there have to be moments that are not angst. The Becky/Dina angst currently going on doesn’t really hit as hard for me as it used to because literally all of Becky’s life in this comic barring some very brief, very minor moments of respite or levity have been one long continuous train of trauma and angst.
That said, I don’t get the impression Jorothy is going to be angst-free. Like I said, this is pretty clearly setting up some long-term Angst Bullshit I was already not looking forward to reading before today but am looking forward to even less now for personal irl mental health reasons.
It is, all other discussions aside, a really sucky thing when media you otherwise enjoy takes a turn that crashes against one’s mental health.
(personally I find those moments of respite to be enough for my own Angst Contrast needs to be met, at least in a story where most things are kinda drama-ridden most of the time. For whatever internal reason, I personally prefer my angst-free stories to be completely separate from the ones with ups and downs)
Then I guess it’s just not for you. That’s fine. The story works for a lot of other people, not everything has to work for everyone.
This feels really condescending tbh
They really are, and it’s just wonderful.
Aha, I see now how the switch flips.
How far we’ve come from the simple tongue
mfw thigh gaps ain’t worth
They made it!
Yippee!!
Hot diggity, kinda got hit outta nowhere with that Slipshine announcement. Not that that’s a bad thing, of course.
ooh my.
You know, I’m starting to wonder if Joyce won’t be the weak link in the poly setup because it feels like she’s way more invested here than she was with Joe. Maybe it’s cuz she’s more assertive with Dorothy, but comparing this to the tentative intimacy with Joe you could reasonably interpret their last conversation as her taking the out to (in her mind) not hurt him as bad.
I think she’s just a switch honestly
I mean you’re not wrong, but idk she just seemed way more cautious around Joe. Part of that’s gotta be that she has no lingering trauma related to girl sex though. I’m also very curious how post-nut clarity this intense is gonna hit them.
I agree she seems way more cautious around Joe, but I’d like to add into the mix that Joe is also way more cautious around Joyce – no dount due to several layers of guilt complex (knowing his own past behaviour with The List, his previous failed date with Joyce, his knowledge of the assault on Joyce at the party, his father’s behaviour, the reaction of Sarah’s sister to intimacy etc.)
Dorothy has had the advantage of being able to make friends with Joyce without the sexual tension or guilt there, and Joe has been holding back all his insecurities because he is hyper aware of many things and scared of messing up.
(without the *conscious* sexual tension there, I should clarify)
Considering a couple of previous events, I suspect it’s not so much boy sex she’s nervous about as much as… well, lingering traces of her upbringing may have still been whispering that, if she has PiV sex once, she’ll be tainted forever.
Yep, she’s neurotic and OCD about this one thing because six months ago, or maybe more, she was telling Roz every time you have sex it’s like ripping a flower petal off, and one day you’ll have none left.
Dorothy presents a loophole she doesn’t have to think about.
honestly if they both blast each other off and then are immediately hit with the crushing weight of everything they’ve buried under sheer raw horniness for the past few weeks, that would make for a really funny couple of strips
Team DoJo’s Blasting Off Again: A Slipshine Pokemon Parody?
FRIENDS!!!! OF!!!! DOROTHY!!!!!
(oh well I wish dollars didn’t convert so highly in my currency)
Chekhov’s Gun, not to be confused with Chekov’s phaser.
I love these two nerdy dorks, and I love how they actually have charts and graphs for sex with each other. They’re so cute and adorable.
Willis missed the opportunity (so far) to publish those completed charts. 🙂
Is anyone else getting a Claude AI ad covering the whole page? It had nowhere to click that wasn’t the link so I couldn’t report it
It’s been happening for weeks now.
That’s a pretty common one. Gotta get adblock until hiveworks gets their crap together about it.
This story arc has been a lot of things, but more than anything else, I think this has been a decade (at least) long coming out story for Joyce. (And Dotty, but primarily Joyce.) And I am not sure that Joyce will be doing Joe’s poly suggestion after this. Put aside the completely unforced dialogue that these two are able to have (to me, it seems effortless in a way that her talks with Joe never quite felt) or how easy Joyce declares her feelings for Dotty… the clue is in the color scheme.
Between Joyce’s flannel, white shirt, and purple-striped underwear, Joyce is literally a walking lesbian flag. And she has been for YEARS of real-world time. Her vest in the early strips? C’mon now. I think Joyce had to see what being with Joe was like – she does care for him – but my sense is that this is now who she is. I will be very surprised if Joyce and Joe (or any other male character) are ever in a romantic relationship after this.
If Joyce is a lesbian, and the rule that characters’ sexualities are the same across universes, then, well… start buying up trans Walky stock now.
But I already have SO MUCH trans-Walky stock. Do I need more?
I’ll buy more. Just in case.
From a completely Doylist perspective, it would surprise me if Willis had teased a main character poly relationship with no intention to at least explore it.
I think the poly option was always overhyped. Of the three people that would need to be onboard, Dorothy isn’t even aware that it was broached, Joyce emphatically declined (“I can’t date two people at once!”) and was just interrupted before she could fully explain herself, and even Joe seems to view it more as a consolation prize than something he positively wanted. So two-and-a-half people would need to change their minds. Billie/Ruth/Alice is probably as close to happening; at least none of them has actually rejected the idea yet.
Personally, I think the idea that Joyce “declined” Joe when she actually had a kneejerk reaction that both wasn’t true (she CAN date two people at once, if she wants to, she just has never considered the possibility) and that Joe immediately undercut (“I’m not a hussy”/“you cheated on me on the front page of the newspaper”) is what’s overhyped.
Yeah, one of the few things in this arc that Sarah is right about is that polyamory is not an automatic “fix everything” button for this conflict. Not everyone is cut out to handle a polyamorous relationship, and Joe does not strike me as the kind of person that would actually be okay with seeing his partner dating other people.
He might say he is, but the way he looked at Joyce after she left when he initially said that pretty clearly implied he’s forcing himself to lie about it so that Joyce doesnt break up with him.
The fact that he deliberately and actively sought Dorothy out to push her into accepting her feelings for Joyce indicates that he is in fact open to the concept as more than just a hail mary, and I read his final glance as one of either anxiety about what she’ll say, or allowing himself to express hurt that this is how Joyce ended up going about things.
If anyone is the tension point in a poly dynamic, it’s probably Dorothy, who has already shown a possessive tendency towards Joyce.
I mean, that could also just be his justified feelings of self-loathing and guilt for the way he acted pre-character development causing him to self-sabotage his own happiness. Like I said, Joe has way too many hangups about this kind of thing for me to believe a polyamorous relationship with him involved would be at all mentally healthy for anyone, but especially him.
I don’t expect a poly dynamic between these three to be either healthy or successful, but that is not the same thing as expecting or wanting it to happen anyway.
Endorsed, with a side serving of “Joe’s hangups mean I have a hard time believing in his offer as genuinely something he wants, as opposed to a straw he’s grasping at”.
Yesssss, gimme unhealthy messy polyamory right now. Today. When do we start?
Just because it won’t be healthy doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Just because it doesn’t start great doesn’t mean the characters can’t grow and change in ways that make it work unproblematically for them.
If you want characters to grow and have arcs, you have to give them friction. Not just the sexy kind.
You and I are lockstep on this one at this point, I think
You know what, it’d at least be interesting. Sign me on.
She couldn’t even get the practice breakup speech with joe out of her mouth before she looked like she was going to cry. I suspect she’s going to be torn in two directions and maybe Dorothy’s dislike of polyamory forces her hand to decide.
(affectionately) nerrrrrrrrds
Being closeted is drawing a naked picture of your crush, but in a platonic way.
(Way back in the mid 1970’s) on the analogous occasion I read what descriptive, instructional books were available first. Other than ensuring conception control, I can’t say it contributed much to the experience.
Today there’s a wealth of information available, but fundy types keep trying to ban those books.
Fortunately for the girls there are guides sources available in the webcomic world.
https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3790
i’d say kudos on the alt text AND the side poll calling out ppl’s bullshit, but at this point im convinced most of the regulars here see the scarlet letter as aspirationally consequence instead of as a cautionary tale against misogyny, so the discrimination continues. good effort, though! i think the next step is some real, multiple alive humans moderation being introduced!!!
If he haven’t done it by now he probably literally can’t do it.
Well now I am looking forward the next Joe x Joyce slipshine~
Gross.
You’re incapable of explaining why it’s gross.
Wanting Joycs to go back to repressing her attraction to women so she can continue having sex with a man is in fact gross.
How *dare* those bisexuals not pick a side m i rite?
I mean…it’s not like someone could ever possibly have an attraction to both sexes without some sort of repression at work. …That would be crazy talk!
Joyce doesn’t need to repress her attraction to women to have sex with men. She’s not a lesbian, she’s bisexual.
Dot, those don’t exist. A bisexual? What liking women and men (and possibly even others)? Is there even a word for that?
Ah, biphobia. As constant as the tides.
Having to immediately stop exploring your attraction for women you’ve never gotten to explore before so you keep dating a man is in fact repressing even if you are bi
Who said “having to”? Who said “immediately stop exploring”? You’re so fucking addicted to being upset, you have to make up new sentences to pretend people are upsetting you.
Polyamory is a thing that does, in fact, exist! Being bisexual and polyamorous (as the story keeps implying might happen) does actually open up the possibility of JoycexJoe AND JoycexDorothy continuing without either needing to “immediately stop” or “repress” anything.
Also, yeah, bi people exist and you’re being super weird about them.
There is canonically a poly option on the table. I don’t know if it’s going to happen, but if she winds up having sex with Joe, that’s the mostly like way.
Who said anything about “going back to repressing”, ya stupid cockbite? It’s actually fine to fuck women and also men, so take your bi-erasure and shove it up your ass.
I believe The Big One is transfem, so please don’t use that kind of language to describe her, no matter how much you may disagree with her.
If somebody wants to play stupid, they can get called out for it directly. I don’t see what being transfem has to do with that.
Come to think of it, trans women can also bite cocks, so if that’s the objectionable part, I don’t see a need to exclude based on that.
I don’t think you know what repression is if you think retreating back to a relationship with a man after finally being able to explore your relationship with a woman is in fact repression.
*is not in fact repression.
Who said “retreating back”, besides you? Why is every single argument you make so worthless?
It is not necessarily retreating or repression, it depends entirely upon circumstances. You seem to be operating under a framework of lesbian compulsory heterosexuality which is not easily mappable onto a bisexual woman.
Yay bi erasure
And see here is why I replied to you the way I did.
It was definitely having the context of seeing you say stuff like this elsewhere that feels like a very comphet reading of these two.
I know, right?
I mean, liking both men and women? Is there even a WORD for that?
There can’t be a word for that, because any woman attracted to women can’t possibly also be attracted to men. Allegedly.
What gets me is she’s been told multiple times over multiple days that her choses phrasing bothers bi folk, and she keeps doubling down
I’m beginning to suspect it’s the person I remember spouting similar nonsense at myself and other posters on Reddit before doing the ol’ “reply and block” to me. I think they got eventually got banned?
I was always sad I never got to see that response. I bet it was all sorts of scathing and witty
There’s definitely a kind of person in this world who is stuck on their own personal needs regarding a particular thing to the extent that they can’t even imagine that other people might have a different set of needs or perspectives.
A bisexual being with both men and women isn’t repression. Insisting that we should only express attraction to one gender, regardless of what gender that is, is encouraging repression.
In my one finished, online published story line, a bard investigating a deceased wizard’s interdimensional attic comes across what she at first thinks is his porn stash, but turns out to be a book on what can done between consenting adults while avoiding the structures of that world’s various deities. With illustrations.
Strictures, not structures. But ye ken what I mean.
Willis was playing the long game.
I’m now curious as to how many readers don’t get the “Friend of Dorothy” reference?
Got to go with Cap here and assume it’s a reference to the Wiz
References for those who may want them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend_of_Dorothy
and
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/04-the-whiteboard-dong-bandit/earliest/
“Friend of Dorothy” is slang for “Someone who is ‘over-the-rainbow'” i.e. someone who is LGBTQ+
Specifically, the phrase traditionally refers to gay men, although its usage broadened over the years.
Fun fact: The US Armed Forces caught wind of the phrase and spent YEARS trying to track down “Dorothy”, whom they assumed was some Mata Hari-type spy.
Yeah, I was definitely going with modern usage, but the history of a term is always good to bear in mind!
Interesting, but in VERY old slang, sending someone ‘over the rainbow’ did not have a gender connotation I am aware of.
Dorothy for President!
[So go grab a subscription and your wife, I mean girlfriend. I definitely meant to say girlfriend.]
Why not both? 😁
You know, looking back at when Joyce and Joe talked, I can see why people summarize it as “she’s not actually broken up with him so Dorothy is being misled”, and why this is even consistent with how Joyce is thinking, but simultaneously why most people including me don’t see it as as major a transgression as that implies.
Because Joyce said multiple times in that conversation that she intended to break up with Joe. He countered with an idea new to her, and she was nonplussed, but then had to race out without substantively responding other than to promise another conversation. So the following things are all sort of true at the same time:
– She is not fully broken up with him
– She doesn’t herself feel the closure of a breakup yet and feels some justified guilt
– She is like 80% broken up with him in practice
– She has fully disclosed to him
– It would be reasonable for him to assume they’re broken up unless/until he hears otherwise because she was so firm about her need for Dorothy, that was the one thing she was consistent about throughout the conversation, and he knows her system default has been for monogamy
So it’s a pretty different situation from a hypothetical where he was not in the loop about her getting with Dorothy at all, and I predict that while Dorothy might be hurt when she gets the full story, she will be extremely ready to forgive – the full story being not so much “I’ve been two-timed” as “There were some details I really ought to have been filled in on.”
Shit is complicated!
Hot.
Anyways hopefully this means the next page will be smth interesting.
Yo Sarah WYA girl? WYU2
Sarah’s phone buzzes. It’s a text from Jay reading “U up?”
They look like good, strong thighs, don’t they?
Wow, that radically altered the tone of the scene.
Also, I appreciate the reference!
To the poll: I actually did cum here because of Questionable Content. Jeff mentioned that robot college was like Dumbing of Age at some point 5ish years ago.
This making me imagine an April fools style collab where the DoA cast are all celebrating graduation together and their heads all pop off on springs because they were QC style robots all along, probably with FutureLife bodies.
(2300’s Willis is guest starring in the backgrounds as a cameo)
FutureLife bodies would absolutely make their heads pop off! I don’t get the 2300 reference, though.
We can go somewhere else in the comic now that there is a money-printing Slipshine, right? We can finally take a rest from these two? Please?
You can take a rest from these two any time! There’s a whole internet of options for you.
No thanks, then I wouldn’t get to see your lovely comments.
Okay! Up to you.
That’s rather insulting of David Willis, you know. As he mentioned on his Blue Sky. Dorothy and Joyce are the closest the comic has to protagonists. For your sake I hope that you learn to appreciate them, or else you’re really going to spend a lot of time hate reading.
They’re always going to be a big part, but we’ve had a lot more on them the last few in comic days than we usually have on any one arc. Even when other characters appeared without them, it was to comment on parts of this particular arc. No cutaways to check in on what other characters are up to.
I love this comic, and I love seeing the comments; new viewpoints, discussing the complex situations, and yes enjoying the ships, and slipshines.
However some of the comments lately have been frankly disgusting, and I can only hope that things will improve. Because whether you like it, or not, this comic is not going to suddenly change course, and accommodate your personal bias.
Please temper your comments with understanding rather than hatred.
I’m far from perfect; I’ve been on the hating side too, but I am trying to improve, and I want to learn from my mistakes.
Totes do I like where this is going.
And I like the (so very)Slip(pery)shine.