Genuinely might be a massive problem for both of them, because even though they’ve only really been aware of it for a little over a day at most, to an outside observer it might appear like it’s been an ongoing thing for a much longer span of time
That’s a hell of a good thought — any of the cast could conceivably decide that behaviors that existed in that quantum state between “actively romantically interested in each other” and “just the best gal pals of all time” might now be considered to obviously have been in that first box.
Trying to figure a joke of those two dueling and “I’m not left handed either!”, but my mind is going back to the laundry episode. (maybe dueling masturbation…?)
Westly and Inigo Montoya, panting, sweaty, eyes locked on each other, each tightly grasping their blade.
“You are wonderful.”
“Thank you; I’ve worked hard to become so.”
“I admit it, you are better than I am.”
“Then why are you smiling?”
“Because I know something you don’t know.”
“And what is that?”
“I am not left-handed.”
*Inigo switches hands, moves faster, stronger, with more powerful strokes. Westley grits his teeth. Both begin panting hard*
“You are amazing.”
“I ought to be, after 20 years.”
“Oh, there’s something I ought to tell you.”
*whispers* “Tell me.”
“I’m not left-handed either.”
I’m sure there’s probably a sect that shuns replicators and modern tech in favor of following the teachings Surak in the same way Vulcans did in his time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Vulcan lore says, yes, there is such a thing. The movie Star Trek: The Motion Picture (very first ST movie!) has Spock on Vulcan, about to get inducted into such a sect, all about pure logic, when he feels the call of V’Ger. So no golconda for him, and he joins the crew.
I’m not sure it’s possible to move *just* the middle two fingers like that. I sure can’t. (Hell, when you think about it, a regular scissors movement is really just the forefinger moving; the middle finger just sits there.
I think that’s just how your hand works. My middle finger moves when I do a scissor motion and I can do a scissor motion with just my two middle fingers.
When I do a scissors motion, my forefinger and ring move the same distance apart, if not the ring finger moving slightly more.
I wonder if there’s a barely-used muscle that has to be trained?
I remember a time – middle school, probably – when I couldn’t do a Vulcan salute without taking one hand and physically separating the ring and middle fingers. After a while, I could do it with one hand, then with both hands, and now I basically can act as if the gap between my middle and ring fingers are the jaws of a crab’s claw and pick up objects. Just a lot of practice over and over.
I can’t tell if you’re trying to say lesbians don’t actually scissor. I also don’t know if you’re a lesbian so if you are and I’ve completely misinterpreted, please forgive the saphsplaining I’m about to do:
We definitely scissor. If you’re sapphic and you don’t scissor I highly recommend trying it out. Also there are different reasons to use different fingers and different angles. Not a one-size-fits-all situation, so really any finger at all is fine for an example of what a sapphic person might do with another sapphic person.
I am a lesbian, albeit a trans lesbian who wouldn’t normally scissor because I don’t have the equipment, and my experience within my own community is that scissoring is relatively rare; most lesbians I know go for fingering, eating out, or fucking with a strap, and maybe try scissoring once or twice before deeming it too much work for not enough reward. Obviously there’ll be differences in experience and opinion in different social circles and I’m not being particularly serious here regardless.
I wonder if every gender/sexuality combo has a sex act that is common in porn but that is often considered entirely too much work for not enough reward in real life, because cis men have at least one common one I can think of.
Probably, but I really disagree that scissoring is any more work than using a strap, so I think it’s definitely down to personal likes and what you get out of it rather than an over-arching opinion.
Fair enough! I’m just very tired of the idea that “lesbians don’t actually scissor” because it’s just so untrue and I find it frustrating to have a thing I actually super enjoy portrayed generally like it’s a thing done in porn for men and for no other reason.
You weren’t portraying it that way, but that’s a super common thing I have to push back on so I wanted to gently push back here too before it went that route.
There are HTML tricks that could be done, like putting in a tag, but changing the HTML to display:none, or making the text the same color as the background, but looking at the source shows that Willis did not opt for anything like that.
booster i will forgive you for your annoying contribution to this annoying storyline ♥ i’m sure under ordinary circumstances i would have found your candor amusing and pleasant.
I mean, this is pretty innocuous so far. They’re just toying with and teasing Joyce and Dorothy, amused at the antics but not making any threats or throwing any verbal punches or anything. The gals are acting wacky, Booster’s having fun with it, and hopefully it won’t go much further beyond some maybe genuinely good-natured advice.
well yes this, this is a finer point; that the ribbing here is harmless and mild, nor do they even “punch down” often enough to feel like it warrants commenting especially in reply to my original comment. which has absolutely nothing to do with the tone or appropriateness of their comments to begin with. but, you know, i DO maintain that they can punch whatever direction they want forever.
so fun and quirky banter is off the table for them forever because of what they’ve went through? i dunno if the past 5-10 years of comics is compatible with that sentiment
The comic’s tone is whatever Willis wants it to be at any given moment.
Earlier this week, we had Sarah laying down some heavy truth.
Today and yesterday, we’re back to wacky antics.
Tune in next week!
Many people find humor a helpful coping mechanism. Now if someone clearly indicates you’re pushing past their comfort zone and you keep going, then you’re a creep.
God I would hate if people stopped being funny and themselves around me just because I went through some shit. Normalcy is so important, treating traumatized people like they’re breakable is generally not.
Booster is 19. If Dorothy and Joyce are allowed to be imperfect enough to cheat on their boyfriends, I think we can allow Booster to not be a perfectly responsible and considerate teenager.
the niche is “analytical character who has the bluntness (or lack of interest in social norms) to bring awareness to certain attributes (attractions, flaws, ect) in focal characters as narratively relevant” even if the finer details differ.
Yeah, I find Booster really annoying. Mike was… not someone I would want to know in real life, but was entertaining to read about. Booster does enough of the same shit to be an asshole, but they’re not over-the-top enough about it to graduate to actually funny.
Also, Mike — in both universes! — ended up giving his life in an effort to protect someone he cared about. I cannot picture Booster, in the same situation, doing anything but standing around affecting detachment and making snarky comments.
And that’s why Willis got rid of him, he was too cartoony to fit in the new setting and it was too difficult to do anything interesting with him without completely remaking his character
Yeah, can’t say I miss the character who was just openly verbally abusive a lot of the time. Booster is more fun than Mike imo, but to each their own Greek chorus!
See, the vibe I’ve always got is that Booster DOES know better, they’re just trying to cloak that in a schtick so they don’t get called on it as often.
Booster is someone who can with minimal prompting bluntly observe social dynamics in a way that’s mean/snarky enough to read as a joke and not lazy exposition.
Hr,m. Maybe I’ve read Mike wrong this whole time. I never really saw him doing the things the replies are saying. I always just saw him as kind of a jerk for the sake of it.
I often perceive Booster’s attitude as so above/just doing it for my own satisfaction, which I find grating. Whether it helps, hurts or just annoys isn’t their problem. Sometimes Mike was a gratuitous asshole, but he never claimed to be anything else. And at least sometimes he helped people, albeit in the most dickish way he could think of.
See, I see Booster as doing the same things Mike did — both basically jerks spouting mostly-correct assumptions about people’s inner turmoil for the sake of their own entertainment, but wrapping it in a different disguise (jokey psychobabble and gratuitous meanness, respectively)
We see that Booster is pretty different from Mike, as in they actually shown that they can and do care about other people and wanting them to be better (with their sister and wanting Sarah to go let herself be vulnerable and happy with Tony).
But we didn’t actually knew that about him during the vast majority of his apparence in yhis comic until the up to the dying block. And even when we know the way he showed his care was several times more awful that how Booster does, make it very difficult to tell which moments are him caring and which him just fucking with people. I don’t know how else i can explain that besides superficial role similarities, Mike and Booster are fundamentally different type of people.
There’s pretty much always been a split in the comments between people who think Mike was a good guy doing fifth-dimensional chess to help people and those who think he was just an asshole who liked hurting people. Personally, I’m one of the latter group, and I don’t miss Mike at all. If Booster is a replacement Mike, they’re a far superior version.
i don’t want to ask directly since it’s none of my business and it seems kind of rude but i am always mildly curious how much the transparent homoeroticism of joyce’s comic recontextualizes it’s roomies
wait shoot you were talking about Julia Gray Roomies not Roomies Roomies. Anyways I hope this means that there’s a walkyverse out there where Joe and Danny hooked up.
I’m not totally sure how much Joyce was considered The Willis self insert in Roomies, given Danny was the main character initially, and then Walky, in this flagship strip by David Willis, who often goes by Willis.
the thing i like best about roomies-era danny is that that he was based to let billie forcefem him that one time. i hope sal is based enough to do it to him in this universe
In four years when someone wants to reference this comic, everyone who knows about multiple-character-tag searches is going to be briefly frustrated as hell.
I always think it’s interesting when this happens lol. There was another commenter (I cannot remember who it was now) with a very unique name who liked one of my tiktok comments and I didn’t know if it would be creepy or fun to say “I saw you on tiktok” so I just didn’t say anything at all.
funny enough, I met one of my trans friends on a YouTube Poop fan server on discord because she just so happened to be a DoA fan and reads the comments all the time and noticed my handle LOL
I’m weird enough about it that I’ve gone out of my way to make sure I have a couple of different “online identities”, none of which can be linked back to my actual self with Google.
Although anyone who’s interacted with both “Big Z” and my other main online handle probably suspects we’re the same person.
Its a fun bit of meta-humor (am I using that term right?) even if it will ever so slightly mess up the website’s search strips by character feature.
Also, and this is unrelated, but out of curiosity I followed your username hyperlink last night and ended up playing your Ouroborosing game. It was really fun. Great job.
nobody says slashfic in the year 2025. even in fandom circles I haven’t heard it said in like 15 years. even when this webcomic debuted it was going out of style
Just fic or just slash. From what I’ve seen, people feel less of a need to distinguish it from other fic. It’s just a type of fic, like hurt/comfort, coffee shop AU, or omegaverse.
like StarfighterVicki said, these days people just say “fanfic” with the implication that it’s always about romantic ships and often about erotic ones at that. it’s actually become a modern problem that you cannot say you’re writing fanfiction without people assuming it’s horny and one actually has to specify otherwise
Heh, I remember when I was writing fanfic back about twenty years ago, and even then I was careful to specify I was writing Wing Commander fanfiction so no one would assume we were writing smut, when in reality we were writing thinly veiled WWII pilot tales IN SPACE.
And then Chris Roberts not only made the games have FMV cutscenes, but he hired literal a pornstar to be your ship’s mechanic and potential love interest.
but you see poggers is much much more modern than slashfic. Booster would have to say shit like “i can haz cheeseburger?” and “omg you win 1 cookie on teh internetz!!” for it to match this level of old terminology
Counterpoint: kids like their parents’ music all the time, and Joyce was not the type of teen who’d think her parents’ taste in music was automatically bad.
I mean, I was primarily into music from 50s and 60s and 70s when I was growing up in the late 80s, because that’s what my mom liked and she controlled the radio. (She disliked 80s music, skipped straight from the 70s to the 90s once that music was available.)
Today it seems especially strange to me to talk about kids being too young to like xyz music or TV show, because so much stuff will just get thrown at you via algorithms.
I often have to stop myself from interjecting in these kinds of conversations with “What, that’s nonsense, of course kids like stuff from their parents’ generation and before”, because I have to remember I was absolutely spoiled on musical variety, between my parents and the local library. I learned how to rip and burn a disc when my age was in the single digits, so I could borrow CDs from the library and clone them for myself and friends. It seems like an uncommon occurrence among millennials (damn millennials ruining the millennials learning how to make bootlegs industry).
As for the algorithm, NEVER skip that music video YouTube recommends you at 2:06 AM, uploaded 12 years ago, by some group you’ve never heard of. Half my current playlist comes from those magical deliveries.
The era before CD burners were common had casette tapes. Absolutely anyone could record songs with those babies. It was not difficult to create mix tapes! Like with VCRs, you bought some cheap blank tapes and just pressed the record button when something you liked was playing on the radio. I had at least one device with more than one casette tape slot so I was also able to record from other casette tapes, but taping things off the radio was super heckin easy.
Sure but you just lived with that. Like you usually lived with commercials being on your VHS tapes.
It was still really really easy to do, involving buttons that are a prominent part of the interface. By contrast? How many people even have external CD/DVD drives on their computers. And creating a CD or DVD that will actually play in typical players requires special programs. And sometimes you’ll just ruin a blank CD or DVD, at a MUCH higher rate than accidentally ruining a cassette tape or VHS tape.
Companies have added looooots of hoops to jump through for digital media copying, very much on purpose, and it sucks.
CDs were harder to work with – though the lack of decay over many generations of copies is very nice. Even purchased cassette tapes wore out pretty quickly and copies of copies were never as good as the original.
Of course, then there was the Napster era and the following one where it was easy to buy digital copies of music rather than just subscribing to streaming services.
Still, it’s pretty hard to argue we’re not still living in a golden age of access to media.
A digital copy is prettier! And as long as the files never get corrupted, pretty enduring.
But I’m thinking of wide accessibility. Lots of folks struggled to program their VCRs (from “can’t get it to record on a timer” to “can’t get the clock set”), but most people who owned one could still manage to record stuff off the TV. They just needed to be home at the right time.
“Still, it’s pretty hard to argue we’re not still living in a golden age of access to media.”
I mean, that very much depends on what you mean by “access” and also what you mean by “media”. This “golden age” sure has a lot of media that’s only accessible now via pirating, IF that. Streaming services cancel projects quickly, and many shows never get DVD or blueray releases. Not to mention all the movies that studios are just… opting not to release at all, in order to write them off as losses for tax breaks.
As someone who HAS a teenage kid, it’s deeply interesting to me how her music playlists are almost literally 30% music I played in her earshot, 30% stuff my partner has played, and 40% new stuff that I’ve never once in my life heard of.
She doesn’t have the extra 40% yet. She’s working on it! She now likes at least one Paramore song. But yeah, her music taste is definitely largely stuff her parents like. Plus some stuff her siblings thought was cool when she was five, probably.
Becky doesn’t seem to have had any more access to secular media than Joyce did, despite her more rebellious inclinations. And, like, given Ross, I imagine that between the two of them Joyce’s music was more fun and more widely listened to.
Oof I’m dying, please give me a reference sheet so I can stop sounding old. Just give me all the “oh yeah, that’s a millennial or above” keywords in a list, help
Why? You don’t sound old, you just sound your age. There’s genuinely nothing wrong with that. Rather than trying to purge your own language why not focus on picking up what you enjoy from the next generation and weaving that in with your older language?
Bonus points: Use the new word wrong whenever you want to annoy the younger people in your life.
My favorite game is using words *right* to embarrass children, like actually I 100% know what “Ohio Rizz” means and only don’t use it because I don’t feel the need to
I love this game. My teen has consciously decided she’s too cool for modern slang and viral nonsense and I delight in saying things like “Oh, hey, did you watch this Skibidi Toilet thing? It reminds me of the G-Mod Idiot Box skits that were funny twenty years ago! No cap!” (note: do not look up the G-Mod Idiot Box, unless you like 2010 edgelord humor, it’s problematic as hell in between the hilarious bits)
My sister’s a teacher, and speaks fluent Kids These Days. She can code-switch into it. It’s hilarious, and mortifies my nieces. They get all, “Oh my GOD Mom, you’re OLD! You’re not supposed to say ‘rizz’!”
like, where? I’m pretty active in fandom circles and I have not encountered the word in the wild for YEARS. granted, my experience is biased because obviously I only read fandom stuff on things that I am interested in, so if this word is still in hot use around in uh….disney fanfics? I would not know
Reminding myself of all the people who said “this came out of nowhere,” and “there were no signs,” and “Joyce got re-written to enable this,” and IT WAS IN THE SCHOOL NEWSPAPER THE WHOLE TIME, GANG <3
And the cheating is definitely not what people are referring to when they say that.
To be meta, both the girl love and people taking it seriously as cheating are both, to me, in deference to Being Better about LGBTQIA+ representation and listening to fan concerns over harmful stereotypes. Willis has cited being inspired by the likes of Leslie Knope/Anne Perkins and other similar sitcom duos, and wanting to explore what it would be like if they actually realised how gay they were for one another – I don’t know if the latter part was there from the beginning, but I do appreciate the turn of events, and feel while it isn’t moral, it is realistic given how long this has going on (longer than either of them have had affection for anyone else in the comic.)
Maybe “this came out of nowhere” and “there were no signs”. But I’ve said “Joyce got rewritten to enable this” (paraphrased, obviously, I didn’t say that word for word), and I’ve seen other people say that, and it was referring to the cheating-and-subsequent-reaction-to-having-cheated, so I disagree with your assertion.
I understand that queerbaiting in other media partially spurred this. I don’t understand why cheating would be…in deference to Being Better, because Dorothy and Joyce could’ve still gotten together without cheating, so it’s not like it’s one or the other. Maybe I’m not understanding your usage of “in deference to”.
Anyway. The situation as a whole doesn’t feel realistic to me personally, because Joyce is usually mostly relatable to me (i.e. I usually understand why she is doing what she’s doing and can imagine myself doing similar if I was in the same context she is) and her current behavior is so completely unrelatable that I have difficulty conceptualizing why someone would be acting the way she is right now.
But I’m glad you’re appreciating it. It’s nice to have things you enjoy. 🙂
I don’t think this is out of character for Joyce. At least not necessarily.
It seems very much inline with her Jacob arc, which while not actually cheating was at least cheating adjacent. I thought she’d learned from that, but there is precedent. Her romantic instincts override other thoughts. It’s love, so it must be right.
I had the same reaction initially, that it felt like it was very OOC for Joyce to just casually toss Joe aside like that because she is a very thoughtful and usually kind person and it seemed totally out of her character to just say, “Joe, who?” after a new thing was dangled in her face.
However, as this has gone on and as people have commented I’ve started to realize that I was just only seeing half of Joyce, and through people’s reminders I understand that this is actually completely in character for Joyce. As sweet and thoughtful as Joyce can be, she is equally selfish and stubborn, especially in matters of the heart. Joyce was totally ready to be a homewrecker just because a friend convinced her she deserved a guy she liked because his girlfriend is a mean person. She hated on Walky for almost the entirety his relationship with Dorothy because she simply didn’t feel like he deserved her, despite how good he was and was trying to be for Dorothy. Immediately antagonized Jason for dating Ruth because it was different from what she was used to and was clearly an affront to Ruth’s sexuality.
She’s still a good person, don’t get me wrong, but she is more than fully capable of being selfish, inconsiderate and just generally not caring about something until she no longer can avoid the consequences. This just happens to be the worst it has been, which has been building as a consequence of her very unyielding upbringing.
Joyce has done bad things and been mean and rude and a jerk in the past, yes. Her moral compass is centered around people she cares about. Not the general concept of a person, or the idea of right and wrong in a vacuum. She never at any point cared about Raidah or her feelings, and she didn’t think she was hurting Jacob, so why wouldn’t she try to wreck their relationship? She doesn’t care about Walky, and thought that Dorothy would be better off without him, even if that meant making her a little upset in the short term. The same with Becky during the atheist spat; a little fight is whatever, it’s fine, Becky needs to realize that God isn’t real and short term discomfort is okay because this is better for Becky in the long term.
Her justifications when she’s hurting people she cares about are justifications of why that’s good for those people. To just copy what I wrote like a week ago: I can’t remember any previous instances where Joyce realized she was truly hurting someone she loved and didn’t change course immediately to try and stop hurting them. Joyce has realized she’s hurting Joe, and that realization has not completely ground her life to a halt like it has every previous time.
It’s not that this feels out of character for Joyce because she’s perfect and can do no wrong. It’s because Joyce has never shown so little regard for someone she cares so much about. I do not know how to reconcile this Joyce, who is not currently so riddled with guilt and anxiety that she can’t function, with the previous Joyce whose defining character trait was loyalty.
Impulsively cheating? Okay, that’s shitty and I don’t want to read about it, but I can see Joyce doing it. But THIS part, the weeks afterward of her continuously making the wrong choice over and over while having plenty of time to think about it? And she isn’t a complete wreck about it? This is the part that I cannot comprehend.
I’m on my phone and it’s hard to proof read comments on mobile so apologies if any of that was badly edited. Not that anyone will read this comment now that the next page is up, anyway.
I will say as a minor caveat the actual timescale is literally one day of shenanigans. So while I agree I’m genuinely confused by Joyce’s attitude to Joe (especially the apology BJ like ugh why) if we’re going to argue it’s a temporary state of ignoring his feelings that’s at least plausible in the in comic universe. Though to be fair I also thought Dorothy gave more of a crap about Walky as well. It’s like Dorothy is obsessed with morals right now and Joyce isn’t that bothered by that aspect. Now why neither of them care about two people they have strong relationships with (i.e. have known for a while and so are at least friends they care about, obviously the romance/sex stuff is newer) I have no idea.
Joe confronted Dorothy about her feelings for Joyce and Dorothy tried to tempt Wally with the idea of Joyce joining them in bed. When he rebuffed her, she rolled her eyes and said something like, “Okay I guess we’re pretending not to know Joyce is hot,” and Walky said, “Well, one of us is doing a shit job of that.”
Neither of them will be surprised by the kissing. It’s only the cheating that might be a surprise.
Okay, first of all, I love that joke in panels 3-4 of the Joe+Dorothy comic linked since I’ve been doing that same thing in certain of my friend groups for twenty years.
Not to mention this strip (https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/04-for-me-it-was-tuesday/flush/), which I’ve been increasingly perceiving as Joe basically saying “if you like Dorothy in that way, please just don’t string me along”. (as opposed to the “if you like Dorothy, I’d be cool with poly” interpretation that many folks have/want).
Yeah, it lends itself pretty equally to “you’re allowed to like more people than me…”, or “I would force myself to be okay with sharing you…” or “I will do my best not to be upset if you dump me for her…”.
Not exactly the scorching dissection of the situation that I was hoping for from Booster, but I’ll take it, for now. There’s still time for this conversation to get worse.
Love the concept of Dorothy saving all of Joyce’s terrible comics. (We already knew she read them all.) It’s an adorable parallel to Ruth saving a copy of the first issue of the school newspaper Jennifer got an article into.
I would be wondering if Booster knows Joyce and Joe are an item, but they definitely know Dorothy and Walky are (it was part of them asking Amber if she’d encouraged Dorothy to send the lewd in an attempt to free Walky up for herself…), so.
I know, I linked a strip from it earlier 🙂 But there were multiple conversations going on, so I wouldn’t have been surprised if Willis had decided Booster didn’t notice that part.
5 dots in both Perception and Intuition with a specialty for “Spicy Drama” (because the socially-focused World of Darkness system would suit Booster much better than D&D).
Now there’s a proposal… leaves me wondering how one would sort the DoA cast. Heck, which sorting method to even use? Do you assign them to vampire clans? Werewolf tribes? Mage traditions? All or any of the above?
I’m assuming Booster knows Joyce and Dorothy are already dating Joe and Walky. If they’ve figured out that these two are cheating on their boyfriends, I wonder if they care.
They had a whole conversation with amber about enjoying a good Trainwreck iirc, specifically WRT cheating (Ethan and Asher that time though, probably?)
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s new information. I certainly don’t remember it ever being referenced before and… boy does it another hilarious layer to all this.
I spent three years writing for our small-scale college newspaper (at our small college) and nobody ever read one of my stories with little hearts floating in the air.
Seems like the girls are suffering from a sort of projected Gay Panic. ‘It’s not parts of US that is scandalized, it’s the WORLD that is scandalized!’. They live in a very supportive (and unsurprised) community. That’s why they phrase every planned action as “Act normal!”. It take quite an act of faith the untie from the old wharf and sail into a new ocean.
1) I’m guessing Becky says something next.
2) I think two more encounters with people, before a boyfriend finds out. Everyone in the cast would be too many, but the Rule of Three needs to get fucked up it’s overplayed ass, so I’ll guess one more.
Unlike many people, I think Dorothy and Joyce are adorable, but even so let me take this comic to note YAY MORE BOOSTER! Booster is great. Booster needs more story arcs.
I tried writing slashfic. Quickly lost interest. There are only so many way you can describe Jason Voorheese killing a dude before it gets repetitive and boring.
It’s like a fanfic-specific form of Darwinism. Writers who are not willing to commit fully to the Dork Side* filter themselves out from the corpus of fan literature… survival of the most sicko.
Booster’s shirt has the visual gravity of a black hole. It draws my eye no matter what I’m trying to look at. I don’t even like the shirt, it’s just like that.
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so much for not leaving a paper trail XD
Ahhh, yes, comics. The Other Slashfic. 😀
Oh My God They Were Roommates
Just gals being pals, as you do.
You fools! The very act of trying to… umm “School?” your reactions has given Booster all the insight they need to deduce all of your secrets!!!
Wait, when did Booster become Galasso?
…*have* we seen Galasso since Booster’s introduction?
Come to think of it, Spider-Car’s also been conspicuously absent…
Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all night.
Don’t trust blatant self insert locally published fanfic.
I meant to say slashfic but fanfic is probably sus too.
Fanfic? More like SUSFIC.
If “susfic” isn’t a thing, it damn well should be now.
Huh. A quick googling gets me squickfic but no susfic. Ah well.
shudders
squickfic
Even gen can give away a lot about a person.
Can confirm.
“how could anyone have seen this coming”
The washing machine sure saw it coming.
har har har
*SNORT*
Ha!
*applauds
The perfect comment, we’ve found it everyone go home
Hurt my gut suppressing that laugh.
Everyone already knows, and has since the first week.
Genuinely might be a massive problem for both of them, because even though they’ve only really been aware of it for a little over a day at most, to an outside observer it might appear like it’s been an ongoing thing for a much longer span of time
It honestly seems that things might be going that way, which I’m not gonna lie, is a much more interesting angle for the story to take.
That’s a hell of a good thought — any of the cast could conceivably decide that behaviors that existed in that quantum state between “actively romantically interested in each other” and “just the best gal pals of all time” might now be considered to obviously have been in that first box.
at least they were never roommates, we can remove that box from the discussion entirely
It’s already been suggested to Walky that Joyce and Dorothy have been bangin’ for a week already.
They’re going to feature in Leslie’s Human Sexuality class next week.
“IMPERCEIVABLE!”
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
That’s only because it’s meaning is imperceivable.
Hello, my name is Dorothy Keener you have perceived me… prepare to die. ~<3
xD !
Trying to figure a joke of those two dueling and “I’m not left handed either!”, but my mind is going back to the laundry episode. (maybe dueling masturbation…?)
Whaaa…? That seems like a stretch, right?
Westly and Inigo Montoya, panting, sweaty, eyes locked on each other, each tightly grasping their blade.
“You are wonderful.”
“Thank you; I’ve worked hard to become so.”
“I admit it, you are better than I am.”
“Then why are you smiling?”
“Because I know something you don’t know.”
“And what is that?”
“I am not left-handed.”
*Inigo switches hands, moves faster, stronger, with more powerful strokes. Westley grits his teeth. Both begin panting hard*
“You are amazing.”
“I ought to be, after 20 years.”
“Oh, there’s something I ought to tell you.”
*whispers* “Tell me.”
“I’m not left-handed either.”
Yeah, that entire scene is so yaoi. Not so much yuri.
So Dorothy is now John Cena?
Interesting hand gesture there at the end, Booster. XD
Should really be the middle two fingers…
Who does a scissor shape with the middle two fingers?
Those who also say, “Live long and prosper”? ;p
Do Vulcan’s have scissors. I thought they were more evolved than that.
I’m sure there’s probably a sect that shuns replicators and modern tech in favor of following the teachings Surak in the same way Vulcans did in his time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Vulcan lore says, yes, there is such a thing. The movie Star Trek: The Motion Picture (very first ST movie!) has Spock on Vulcan, about to get inducted into such a sect, all about pure logic, when he feels the call of V’Ger. So no golconda for him, and he joins the crew.
That’s not with the just middle two fingers, that’s with all four, and it’s considerably more natural.
I’m not sure it’s possible to move *just* the middle two fingers like that. I sure can’t. (Hell, when you think about it, a regular scissors movement is really just the forefinger moving; the middle finger just sits there.
Not in my case. However, moving ring finger and pinky finger independently pretty much only works when the pinky is blocked.
I can do both easily left-handed, but only awkwardly and painfully right-handed. I credit my guitar, though I haven’t even picked it up in years.
Just tried, found it extremely awkward but possible.
I think that’s just how your hand works. My middle finger moves when I do a scissor motion and I can do a scissor motion with just my two middle fingers.
When I do a scissors motion, my forefinger and ring move the same distance apart, if not the ring finger moving slightly more.
I wonder if there’s a barely-used muscle that has to be trained?
I remember a time – middle school, probably – when I couldn’t do a Vulcan salute without taking one hand and physically separating the ring and middle fingers. After a while, I could do it with one hand, then with both hands, and now I basically can act as if the gap between my middle and ring fingers are the jaws of a crab’s claw and pick up objects. Just a lot of practice over and over.
Individual differences. The ligaments of the hand can hook up in different ways. Some people cannot handle certain instruments without surgery.
Well see I’m thinking more along the lines of things gay women actually do
While what you say is true, I can’t say I’ve ever seen someone casually pantomime that they way they do with the figure position Booster is using.
I can’t tell if you’re trying to say lesbians don’t actually scissor. I also don’t know if you’re a lesbian so if you are and I’ve completely misinterpreted, please forgive the saphsplaining I’m about to do:
We definitely scissor. If you’re sapphic and you don’t scissor I highly recommend trying it out. Also there are different reasons to use different fingers and different angles. Not a one-size-fits-all situation, so really any finger at all is fine for an example of what a sapphic person might do with another sapphic person.
I am a lesbian, albeit a trans lesbian who wouldn’t normally scissor because I don’t have the equipment, and my experience within my own community is that scissoring is relatively rare; most lesbians I know go for fingering, eating out, or fucking with a strap, and maybe try scissoring once or twice before deeming it too much work for not enough reward. Obviously there’ll be differences in experience and opinion in different social circles and I’m not being particularly serious here regardless.
I wonder if every gender/sexuality combo has a sex act that is common in porn but that is often considered entirely too much work for not enough reward in real life, because cis men have at least one common one I can think of.
Probably, but I really disagree that scissoring is any more work than using a strap, so I think it’s definitely down to personal likes and what you get out of it rather than an over-arching opinion.
Fair enough! I’m just very tired of the idea that “lesbians don’t actually scissor” because it’s just so untrue and I find it frustrating to have a thing I actually super enjoy portrayed generally like it’s a thing done in porn for men and for no other reason.
You weren’t portraying it that way, but that’s a super common thing I have to push back on so I wanted to gently push back here too before it went that route.
No worries, different strokes for different folks after all and as I said opinions will vary among social circles and communities.
💕
I would still have the same question, because using just the middle two fingers seems equally uncomfortable regardless of the gesture.
They’re miming scissors.
I think its just “point one, roomates. Point two, she clips and saves them”
Two things can be true
But never three.
Waiting for the imperceivable vs imperceptible joke…
Not tagging Dorothy is genius.
^^^
Why? I can’t see her.
Can’t see who?
What? You can’t see her tag?
There are HTML tricks that could be done, like putting in a tag, but changing the HTML to display:none, or making the text the same color as the background, but looking at the source shows that Willis did not opt for anything like that.
booster i will forgive you for your annoying contribution to this annoying storyline ♥ i’m sure under ordinary circumstances i would have found your candor amusing and pleasant.
They are awesome but don’t seem to have an ability to understand the difference between punching up and punching down.
they can punch whatever direction they want forever
I mean, this is pretty innocuous so far. They’re just toying with and teasing Joyce and Dorothy, amused at the antics but not making any threats or throwing any verbal punches or anything. The gals are acting wacky, Booster’s having fun with it, and hopefully it won’t go much further beyond some maybe genuinely good-natured advice.
well yes this, this is a finer point; that the ribbing here is harmless and mild, nor do they even “punch down” often enough to feel like it warrants commenting especially in reply to my original comment. which has absolutely nothing to do with the tone or appropriateness of their comments to begin with. but, you know, i DO maintain that they can punch whatever direction they want forever.
I dunno, in RL, this floor is full of incredibly emotionally fragile trauma victims.
It’s all fun and games except for the fact they’re kidnapping victims by religious terrorists and one being a survivor of sexual assault.
and absolutely none of that is relevant to this strip or a single word i said.
Saying that Booster’s playfulness seems a bit irresponsible with this group.
so fun and quirky banter is off the table for them forever because of what they’ve went through? i dunno if the past 5-10 years of comics is compatible with that sentiment
The comic’s tone is whatever Willis wants it to be at any given moment.
Earlier this week, we had Sarah laying down some heavy truth.
Today and yesterday, we’re back to wacky antics.
Tune in next week!
Many people find humor a helpful coping mechanism. Now if someone clearly indicates you’re pushing past their comfort zone and you keep going, then you’re a creep.
God I would hate if people stopped being funny and themselves around me just because I went through some shit. Normalcy is so important, treating traumatized people like they’re breakable is generally not.
Booster is 19. If Dorothy and Joyce are allowed to be imperfect enough to cheat on their boyfriends, I think we can allow Booster to not be a perfectly responsible and considerate teenager.
honestly they kinda have always made stuff worse for the cast, so if anything things are gonna get outta hand soon lol
Booster fills a similar niche to Mike but in a much less fun way, I find
That’s a shame. I find them to be a LOT of fun, but I did like Mike as well.
What’s the niche? I’m indifferent to Booster but they seem to operate much differently from how Mike did.
the niche is “analytical character who has the bluntness (or lack of interest in social norms) to bring awareness to certain attributes (attractions, flaws, ect) in focal characters as narratively relevant” even if the finer details differ.
Yeah Mike was funnier about it
How?
Yeah, I find Booster really annoying. Mike was… not someone I would want to know in real life, but was entertaining to read about. Booster does enough of the same shit to be an asshole, but they’re not over-the-top enough about it to graduate to actually funny.
Also, Mike — in both universes! — ended up giving his life in an effort to protect someone he cared about. I cannot picture Booster, in the same situation, doing anything but standing around affecting detachment and making snarky comments.
Weird ass.
I know people like Booster and I generally don’t like them. I wouldn’t like to know a Mike, but he was a lot more of a cartoon character anyway.
Spoken like someone without an inner Mike that has to be kept under control.
And that’s why Willis got rid of him, he was too cartoony to fit in the new setting and it was too difficult to do anything interesting with him without completely remaking his character
Possibly that they both offer unasked for personal comments that are usually more correct that people want them to be? Mike was just ruder about it.
Yeah, can’t say I miss the character who was just openly verbally abusive a lot of the time. Booster is more fun than Mike imo, but to each their own Greek chorus!
Mike was deliberately rude about it. Booster just doesn’t seem to know better.
See, the vibe I’ve always got is that Booster DOES know better, they’re just trying to cloak that in a schtick so they don’t get called on it as often.
Booster is someone who can with minimal prompting bluntly observe social dynamics in a way that’s mean/snarky enough to read as a joke and not lazy exposition.
Hr,m. Maybe I’ve read Mike wrong this whole time. I never really saw him doing the things the replies are saying. I always just saw him as kind of a jerk for the sake of it.
I often perceive Booster’s attitude as so above/just doing it for my own satisfaction, which I find grating. Whether it helps, hurts or just annoys isn’t their problem. Sometimes Mike was a gratuitous asshole, but he never claimed to be anything else. And at least sometimes he helped people, albeit in the most dickish way he could think of.
See, I see Booster as doing the same things Mike did — both basically jerks spouting mostly-correct assumptions about people’s inner turmoil for the sake of their own entertainment, but wrapping it in a different disguise (jokey psychobabble and gratuitous meanness, respectively)
We see that Booster is pretty different from Mike, as in they actually shown that they can and do care about other people and wanting them to be better (with their sister and wanting Sarah to go let herself be vulnerable and happy with Tony).
Mike cared about people too.
But we didn’t actually knew that about him during the vast majority of his apparence in yhis comic until the up to the dying block. And even when we know the way he showed his care was several times more awful that how Booster does, make it very difficult to tell which moments are him caring and which him just fucking with people. I don’t know how else i can explain that besides superficial role similarities, Mike and Booster are fundamentally different type of people.
Yes and that is what made Mike a more interesting character
Thankfully Willis disagreed
There’s pretty much always been a split in the comments between people who think Mike was a good guy doing fifth-dimensional chess to help people and those who think he was just an asshole who liked hurting people. Personally, I’m one of the latter group, and I don’t miss Mike at all. If Booster is a replacement Mike, they’re a far superior version.
You get it.
This, except I’m not entirely convinced that Booster is better.
(and yes, I’m aware of the irony re: my current gravatar)
And they were roommates
Oh my god, they were roommates.
Was there only one bed?
At least they’re not cousins.
That’s only in the dub 🌙
oh my gosh they were self-insert-student-newspaper-comic roommates
i wonder if walky is going to find out from his roommate
I do love Booster
i don’t want to ask directly since it’s none of my business and it seems kind of rude but i am always mildly curious how much the transparent homoeroticism of joyce’s comic recontextualizes it’s roomies
It does make her “crush” on Danny 10000x funnier if it was insane comphet.
wait shoot you were talking about Julia Gray Roomies not Roomies Roomies. Anyways I hope this means that there’s a walkyverse out there where Joe and Danny hooked up.
oh, no, i was absolutely talking about walkyverse roomies, was that also based on a childhood crush
I’m incredibly doubtful, but unless Willis decides to chime in it’s probably none of our business
I’m not totally sure how much Joyce was considered The Willis self insert in Roomies, given Danny was the main character initially, and then Walky, in this flagship strip by David Willis, who often goes by Willis.
well, no, but joyce and dorothy are clearly the danny/joe expies in her version of the strip
if danny and joe were gay for each other that would probably be the one thing that could have saved walkyverse danny from being so insufferable
I might be the only roomies-era Danny liker out there in the world and I cannot emphasize how right you are
the thing i like best about roomies-era danny is that that he was based to let billie forcefem him that one time. i hope sal is based enough to do it to him in this universe
“force”
You are not alone!
I enjoy that Booster is just like “Yep I’ve been known. Congrats on catching up “
Hah!
You’ve definitely tagged characters before who didn’t speak or had less screen space that Dorothy’s hair. C’mon now
Ok but what if the character cant be perceived, as clearly stated in the comic by the disembodied word bubble
It’s a joke. About Dorothy not being perceived.
Dorothy is here?
No.
In four years when someone wants to reference this comic, everyone who knows about multiple-character-tag searches is going to be briefly frustrated as hell.
Exactly! 💯
Not really? The strip right before this one has the exact same tagged characters so it’s just a matter of clicking next once.
Okay, VERY briefly frustrated as hell. 😉
(it was a joke, mon ami(e))
Daisy only prints the queer comics of Julia Gray, I’m sure.
Which is admittedly most of them.
🙂
I randomly stumbled across you on the Friends Reddit earlier today.
Oh no! Now you know my true name and can bind me to your service!
I always think it’s interesting when this happens lol. There was another commenter (I cannot remember who it was now) with a very unique name who liked one of my tiktok comments and I didn’t know if it would be creepy or fun to say “I saw you on tiktok” so I just didn’t say anything at all.
I like being spotted in the wild but generally prefer it for my reviews or books.
😀
funny enough, I met one of my trans friends on a YouTube Poop fan server on discord because she just so happened to be a DoA fan and reads the comments all the time and noticed my handle LOL
Cool!
Oooh which YTP fan server? I need to join some of those :::333
A few of the people I know from a local discord server are also DOA and QC fans, so getting to know them IRL was kinda cool
Someone found me on my Tumblr from here
I’m weird enough about it that I’ve gone out of my way to make sure I have a couple of different “online identities”, none of which can be linked back to my actual self with Google.
Although anyone who’s interacted with both “Big Z” and my other main online handle probably suspects we’re the same person.
Timely: https://xkcd.com/3128/
Okay the tags on this one might be my favourite joke in the entire comic
Its a fun bit of meta-humor (am I using that term right?) even if it will ever so slightly mess up the website’s search strips by character feature.
Also, and this is unrelated, but out of curiosity I followed your username hyperlink last night and ended up playing your Ouroborosing game. It was really fun. Great job.
Just Joyce and Booster in this one, yep, no one else, nope, no one, I see no one else
nobody says slashfic in the year 2025. even in fandom circles I haven’t heard it said in like 15 years. even when this webcomic debuted it was going out of style
Amber does…
Amber is not a real person
What term do they use then (I was never too into fanfics so I wouldn’t know)?
Just fic or just slash. From what I’ve seen, people feel less of a need to distinguish it from other fic. It’s just a type of fic, like hurt/comfort, coffee shop AU, or omegaverse.
Interesting. By the way, I really like your Avatar and username, and the combination is super cool.
like StarfighterVicki said, these days people just say “fanfic” with the implication that it’s always about romantic ships and often about erotic ones at that. it’s actually become a modern problem that you cannot say you’re writing fanfiction without people assuming it’s horny and one actually has to specify otherwise
Heh, I remember when I was writing fanfic back about twenty years ago, and even then I was careful to specify I was writing Wing Commander fanfiction so no one would assume we were writing smut, when in reality we were writing thinly veiled WWII pilot tales IN SPACE.
And then Chris Roberts not only made the games have FMV cutscenes, but he hired literal a pornstar to be your ship’s mechanic and potential love interest.
Booster is the type to use such a term ironically. They’ll be saying totes poggers next
Ask if Amber’s planning a lemon or lime comic next.
but you see poggers is much much more modern than slashfic. Booster would have to say shit like “i can haz cheeseburger?” and “omg you win 1 cookie on teh internetz!!” for it to match this level of old terminology
I made you a cookie…but I eated it 🥺
Sometimes the author’s age shines through and makes the teens/twenty somethings sound like they were born in the 80’s.
Joyce being into DC Talk is a good example. Even fundie kids think that’s their parents music!
Counterpoint: kids like their parents’ music all the time, and Joyce was not the type of teen who’d think her parents’ taste in music was automatically bad.
I mean, I was primarily into music from 50s and 60s and 70s when I was growing up in the late 80s, because that’s what my mom liked and she controlled the radio. (She disliked 80s music, skipped straight from the 70s to the 90s once that music was available.)
Today it seems especially strange to me to talk about kids being too young to like xyz music or TV show, because so much stuff will just get thrown at you via algorithms.
I often have to stop myself from interjecting in these kinds of conversations with “What, that’s nonsense, of course kids like stuff from their parents’ generation and before”, because I have to remember I was absolutely spoiled on musical variety, between my parents and the local library. I learned how to rip and burn a disc when my age was in the single digits, so I could borrow CDs from the library and clone them for myself and friends. It seems like an uncommon occurrence among millennials (damn millennials ruining the millennials learning how to make bootlegs industry).
As for the algorithm, NEVER skip that music video YouTube recommends you at 2:06 AM, uploaded 12 years ago, by some group you’ve never heard of. Half my current playlist comes from those magical deliveries.
The era before CD burners were common had casette tapes. Absolutely anyone could record songs with those babies. It was not difficult to create mix tapes! Like with VCRs, you bought some cheap blank tapes and just pressed the record button when something you liked was playing on the radio. I had at least one device with more than one casette tape slot so I was also able to record from other casette tapes, but taping things off the radio was super heckin easy.
Easy, except that they either didn’t announce the song in time to catch the start of it or started talking over the end of it.
Sure but you just lived with that. Like you usually lived with commercials being on your VHS tapes.
It was still really really easy to do, involving buttons that are a prominent part of the interface. By contrast? How many people even have external CD/DVD drives on their computers. And creating a CD or DVD that will actually play in typical players requires special programs. And sometimes you’ll just ruin a blank CD or DVD, at a MUCH higher rate than accidentally ruining a cassette tape or VHS tape.
Companies have added looooots of hoops to jump through for digital media copying, very much on purpose, and it sucks.
CDs were harder to work with – though the lack of decay over many generations of copies is very nice. Even purchased cassette tapes wore out pretty quickly and copies of copies were never as good as the original.
Of course, then there was the Napster era and the following one where it was easy to buy digital copies of music rather than just subscribing to streaming services.
Still, it’s pretty hard to argue we’re not still living in a golden age of access to media.
A digital copy is prettier! And as long as the files never get corrupted, pretty enduring.
But I’m thinking of wide accessibility. Lots of folks struggled to program their VCRs (from “can’t get it to record on a timer” to “can’t get the clock set”), but most people who owned one could still manage to record stuff off the TV. They just needed to be home at the right time.
“Still, it’s pretty hard to argue we’re not still living in a golden age of access to media.”
I mean, that very much depends on what you mean by “access” and also what you mean by “media”. This “golden age” sure has a lot of media that’s only accessible now via pirating, IF that. Streaming services cancel projects quickly, and many shows never get DVD or blueray releases. Not to mention all the movies that studios are just… opting not to release at all, in order to write them off as losses for tax breaks.
As someone who HAS a teenage kid, it’s deeply interesting to me how her music playlists are almost literally 30% music I played in her earshot, 30% stuff my partner has played, and 40% new stuff that I’ve never once in my life heard of.
Plus, again, IT’S JOYCE.
She doesn’t have the extra 40% yet. She’s working on it! She now likes at least one Paramore song. But yeah, her music taste is definitely largely stuff her parents like. Plus some stuff her siblings thought was cool when she was five, probably.
I’m surprised Becky didn’t have more secret music that she hooked Joyce on.
Becky doesn’t seem to have had any more access to secular media than Joyce did, despite her more rebellious inclinations. And, like, given Ross, I imagine that between the two of them Joyce’s music was more fun and more widely listened to.
Oof I’m dying, please give me a reference sheet so I can stop sounding old. Just give me all the “oh yeah, that’s a millennial or above” keywords in a list, help
Why? You don’t sound old, you just sound your age. There’s genuinely nothing wrong with that. Rather than trying to purge your own language why not focus on picking up what you enjoy from the next generation and weaving that in with your older language?
Bonus points: Use the new word wrong whenever you want to annoy the younger people in your life.
My favorite game is using words *right* to embarrass children, like actually I 100% know what “Ohio Rizz” means and only don’t use it because I don’t feel the need to
I love this game. My teen has consciously decided she’s too cool for modern slang and viral nonsense and I delight in saying things like “Oh, hey, did you watch this Skibidi Toilet thing? It reminds me of the G-Mod Idiot Box skits that were funny twenty years ago! No cap!” (note: do not look up the G-Mod Idiot Box, unless you like 2010 edgelord humor, it’s problematic as hell in between the hilarious bits)
My sister’s a teacher, and speaks fluent Kids These Days. She can code-switch into it. It’s hilarious, and mortifies my nieces. They get all, “Oh my GOD Mom, you’re OLD! You’re not supposed to say ‘rizz’!”
I do. I say it.
People say slashfic all the time. I see it constantly.
like, where? I’m pretty active in fandom circles and I have not encountered the word in the wild for YEARS. granted, my experience is biased because obviously I only read fandom stuff on things that I am interested in, so if this word is still in hot use around in uh….disney fanfics? I would not know
According to who?
OH MY GOD, THEY WERE ROOMMATES tm
Is this Joyce’s first GD it?
No.
Reminding myself of all the people who said “this came out of nowhere,” and “there were no signs,” and “Joyce got re-written to enable this,” and IT WAS IN THE SCHOOL NEWSPAPER THE WHOLE TIME, GANG <3
joyce didn’t cheat on anyone in the school newspaper
And the cheating is definitely not what people are referring to when they say that.
To be meta, both the girl love and people taking it seriously as cheating are both, to me, in deference to Being Better about LGBTQIA+ representation and listening to fan concerns over harmful stereotypes. Willis has cited being inspired by the likes of Leslie Knope/Anne Perkins and other similar sitcom duos, and wanting to explore what it would be like if they actually realised how gay they were for one another – I don’t know if the latter part was there from the beginning, but I do appreciate the turn of events, and feel while it isn’t moral, it is realistic given how long this has going on (longer than either of them have had affection for anyone else in the comic.)
Maybe “this came out of nowhere” and “there were no signs”. But I’ve said “Joyce got rewritten to enable this” (paraphrased, obviously, I didn’t say that word for word), and I’ve seen other people say that, and it was referring to the cheating-and-subsequent-reaction-to-having-cheated, so I disagree with your assertion.
I understand that queerbaiting in other media partially spurred this. I don’t understand why cheating would be…in deference to Being Better, because Dorothy and Joyce could’ve still gotten together without cheating, so it’s not like it’s one or the other. Maybe I’m not understanding your usage of “in deference to”.
Anyway. The situation as a whole doesn’t feel realistic to me personally, because Joyce is usually mostly relatable to me (i.e. I usually understand why she is doing what she’s doing and can imagine myself doing similar if I was in the same context she is) and her current behavior is so completely unrelatable that I have difficulty conceptualizing why someone would be acting the way she is right now.
But I’m glad you’re appreciating it. It’s nice to have things you enjoy. 🙂
I don’t think this is out of character for Joyce. At least not necessarily.
It seems very much inline with her Jacob arc, which while not actually cheating was at least cheating adjacent. I thought she’d learned from that, but there is precedent. Her romantic instincts override other thoughts. It’s love, so it must be right.
I had the same reaction initially, that it felt like it was very OOC for Joyce to just casually toss Joe aside like that because she is a very thoughtful and usually kind person and it seemed totally out of her character to just say, “Joe, who?” after a new thing was dangled in her face.
However, as this has gone on and as people have commented I’ve started to realize that I was just only seeing half of Joyce, and through people’s reminders I understand that this is actually completely in character for Joyce. As sweet and thoughtful as Joyce can be, she is equally selfish and stubborn, especially in matters of the heart. Joyce was totally ready to be a homewrecker just because a friend convinced her she deserved a guy she liked because his girlfriend is a mean person. She hated on Walky for almost the entirety his relationship with Dorothy because she simply didn’t feel like he deserved her, despite how good he was and was trying to be for Dorothy. Immediately antagonized Jason for dating Ruth because it was different from what she was used to and was clearly an affront to Ruth’s sexuality.
She’s still a good person, don’t get me wrong, but she is more than fully capable of being selfish, inconsiderate and just generally not caring about something until she no longer can avoid the consequences. This just happens to be the worst it has been, which has been building as a consequence of her very unyielding upbringing.
Joyce has done bad things and been mean and rude and a jerk in the past, yes. Her moral compass is centered around people she cares about. Not the general concept of a person, or the idea of right and wrong in a vacuum. She never at any point cared about Raidah or her feelings, and she didn’t think she was hurting Jacob, so why wouldn’t she try to wreck their relationship? She doesn’t care about Walky, and thought that Dorothy would be better off without him, even if that meant making her a little upset in the short term. The same with Becky during the atheist spat; a little fight is whatever, it’s fine, Becky needs to realize that God isn’t real and short term discomfort is okay because this is better for Becky in the long term.
Her justifications when she’s hurting people she cares about are justifications of why that’s good for those people. To just copy what I wrote like a week ago: I can’t remember any previous instances where Joyce realized she was truly hurting someone she loved and didn’t change course immediately to try and stop hurting them. Joyce has realized she’s hurting Joe, and that realization has not completely ground her life to a halt like it has every previous time.
It’s not that this feels out of character for Joyce because she’s perfect and can do no wrong. It’s because Joyce has never shown so little regard for someone she cares so much about. I do not know how to reconcile this Joyce, who is not currently so riddled with guilt and anxiety that she can’t function, with the previous Joyce whose defining character trait was loyalty.
Impulsively cheating? Okay, that’s shitty and I don’t want to read about it, but I can see Joyce doing it. But THIS part, the weeks afterward of her continuously making the wrong choice over and over while having plenty of time to think about it? And she isn’t a complete wreck about it? This is the part that I cannot comprehend.
I’m on my phone and it’s hard to proof read comments on mobile so apologies if any of that was badly edited. Not that anyone will read this comment now that the next page is up, anyway.
I’m with you on this Fuzzy
Honestly I totally agree with you.
I will say as a minor caveat the actual timescale is literally one day of shenanigans. So while I agree I’m genuinely confused by Joyce’s attitude to Joe (especially the apology BJ like ugh why) if we’re going to argue it’s a temporary state of ignoring his feelings that’s at least plausible in the in comic universe. Though to be fair I also thought Dorothy gave more of a crap about Walky as well. It’s like Dorothy is obsessed with morals right now and Joyce isn’t that bothered by that aspect. Now why neither of them care about two people they have strong relationships with (i.e. have known for a while and so are at least friends they care about, obviously the romance/sex stuff is newer) I have no idea.
Booster literally looks like Christmas came early.
I know, happy Booster is best Booster. Give them all the Christmas because their smile is magic.
I didn’t know John Cena was in this comic.
I can’t see him?
This should be tagged with Dorothy’s hair.
You can’t tag her, she’s imperceivable.
Sort of weird for Willis to just leave two blank frames at the end.
It’s definitely foreshadowing.
Well alright then
10 panels!
Closet of Very Low Opacity!
Another character that the strip could drop and no one would notice.
The imperceivable one?
Yeah, that one.
Wow. They really are SO gay for each other.
who said that
Ah yes, Space Force Captain Julia Gray and President Doris. Historical holo-records will remember them as roommates.
Oh, I forgot all about that obvious ass comic.
Maybe it won’t be as unsurprising as I expected. Ooh, that might make it worse.
Which one of the boys do you think would be the most resigned to this being an inevitability?
Ethan.
Both of them.
Joe confronted Dorothy about her feelings for Joyce and Dorothy tried to tempt Wally with the idea of Joyce joining them in bed. When he rebuffed her, she rolled her eyes and said something like, “Okay I guess we’re pretending not to know Joyce is hot,” and Walky said, “Well, one of us is doing a shit job of that.”
Neither of them will be surprised by the kissing. It’s only the cheating that might be a surprise.
Just in case anyone wants to revisit those strips:
Joe confronting Dorothy starts at https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/03-me-and-who-you-say-i-was-yesterday/howyoudoing/ and Dorothy failing to pretend Joyce isn’t attractive was https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/04-for-me-it-was-tuesday/sweeten-2/
Okay, first of all, I love that joke in panels 3-4 of the Joe+Dorothy comic linked since I’ve been doing that same thing in certain of my friend groups for twenty years.
Thank you!
Not to mention this strip (https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/04-for-me-it-was-tuesday/flush/), which I’ve been increasingly perceiving as Joe basically saying “if you like Dorothy in that way, please just don’t string me along”. (as opposed to the “if you like Dorothy, I’d be cool with poly” interpretation that many folks have/want).
I feel like the “I don’t get to be jealous” does lend itself to an interpretation like “I would force myself to be okay with sharing you”.
Which you’ll note isn’t “I’d be cool with it”! But yeah.
Yeah, it lends itself pretty equally to “you’re allowed to like more people than me…”, or “I would force myself to be okay with sharing you…” or “I will do my best not to be upset if you dump me for her…”.
People talk about the difference between consent and “enthusiastic” consent. Not coerced, not reluctant, genuine and sincere.
This is the former.
Ugh thanks for making me feel sad for Joe again, I wasn’t thinking about it for about ten minutes.
I wonder what Booster thinks about this strip
Not exactly the scorching dissection of the situation that I was hoping for from Booster, but I’ll take it, for now. There’s still time for this conversation to get worse.
Love Booster.
Love the concept of Dorothy saving all of Joyce’s terrible comics. (We already knew she read them all.) It’s an adorable parallel to Ruth saving a copy of the first issue of the school newspaper Jennifer got an article into.
I would be wondering if Booster knows Joyce and Joe are an item, but they definitely know Dorothy and Walky are (it was part of them asking Amber if she’d encouraged Dorothy to send the lewd in an attempt to free Walky up for herself…), so.
Booster is definitely here to #represent the sickos, heh.
They’re a positively wonderful omniscient character.
Booster was at the party where this was happening: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/04-for-me-it-was-tuesday/bozo/
I know, I linked a strip from it earlier 🙂 But there were multiple conversations going on, so I wouldn’t have been surprised if Willis had decided Booster didn’t notice that part.
The parallels to Ruth/Billie are about the only thing making Joyce/Dorothy at all bearable as a couple to me.
I am genuinely sorry you feel that way.
Unfortunately for these two (and everyone else really) Booster has a +20 in all their perception checks ever
And took Skill Focus (Sense Motive).
I think this is an insight check for sure, and their passive insight has been min-maxed somehow
IMO, an entirely unmodified roll would have been quite sufficient.
rolls a 1 “Yup, nothing to see here!”
5 dots in both Perception and Intuition with a specialty for “Spicy Drama” (because the socially-focused World of Darkness system would suit Booster much better than D&D).
Now there’s a proposal… leaves me wondering how one would sort the DoA cast. Heck, which sorting method to even use? Do you assign them to vampire clans? Werewolf tribes? Mage traditions? All or any of the above?
Seriously, someone help me workshop this.
Bit overkill. The DC to notice these two is like, um, 3…max.
I’m assuming Booster knows Joyce and Dorothy are already dating Joe and Walky. If they’ve figured out that these two are cheating on their boyfriends, I wonder if they care.
They had a whole conversation with amber about enjoying a good Trainwreck iirc, specifically WRT cheating (Ethan and Asher that time though, probably?)
In another conversation with Amber he reacted with glee when he realized Amber was pushing Joyce and Dorothy together so that she could snag Walky.
They.
Booster uses they/them pronouns.
Ah, my mistake.
Okay, FINE, Booster, I’ll say it.
“Oh my god, they were roommates!”
♫Just two frieeends hanging out together♫
Chillin’ in a
hot tubwashing machine, no feet apart because they are gay.Willis, you are a madman with those tags! 😂
As usual, Joyce is acting with all the subtlety and grace of a brick through a window.
Is this the first we hear about Dorothy saving all the comic strips?! What a plot twist! (Or something I forgot, if that happens to be the case 😅) 🙂 !
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s new information. I certainly don’t remember it ever being referenced before and… boy does it another hilarious layer to all this.
Let’s say we could extrapolate it from this one.
“I keep a copy when I’m in it (your strip count)”
Dorothy would surely read every new comic like this
Dorothy spoke, she still has to be tagged
I spent three years writing for our small-scale college newspaper (at our small college) and nobody ever read one of my stories with little hearts floating in the air.
Perhaps I was writing them wrong?
lmao “I knew it even before you girls did”
How is the alt text not “She was just behind the bwack.”
Seems like the girls are suffering from a sort of projected Gay Panic. ‘It’s not parts of US that is scandalized, it’s the WORLD that is scandalized!’. They live in a very supportive (and unsurprised) community. That’s why they phrase every planned action as “Act normal!”. It take quite an act of faith the untie from the old wharf and sail into a new ocean.
I don’t think so? They are showing classic symptoms of “I have a secret and I’m absolutely horrible at hiding it.”
Kinda like my dog looking guilty when I ask, “Who did this?”. LOL
XD
As opposed to cats who are all like “yes, human! It was me, it was me the whole time! What are you going to do about it? NOTHING!”
They know who is in charge XD
They are trying to act normal to cover up the fact they are cheating. Not due to any kind of gay panic.
“My mind is Opaque!”
“Your mind is an extensive newsletter, with commentary, that you forcefully signed me up for.”
Glad I noticed the tag joke before I moused over
OK, but having Dorothy outside of the window framing is legitimately both genius and hilarious.
The hover text was absolutely hilarious today.
Okay, so far we have variations on “You two are super obvious and this isn’t news” from Sal, Sarah, and Booster.
Now for a lottery. Prize? This squid → 🦑. Their name is Wavy Jones:
#1 Who will be the next new cast member to comment on Joyce/Dorothy?
#2 How many new people will comment on Joyce/Dorothy before Walky and Joe find out?
OMG I love Wavy Jone sand I need to win:
1) Carla, and she’ll finally be able to tell them apart for the bit.
2) 4 more.
Trick question. Joe and Walky already know. 😛
OMG Wavy Jones is such a good name.
1) I’m guessing Becky says something next.
2) I think two more encounters with people, before a boyfriend finds out. Everyone in the cast would be too many, but the Rule of Three needs to get fucked up it’s overplayed ass, so I’ll guess one more.
GOOD FRIENDS
JUST ROOMMATES
THE FIRST WOMAN PRESIDENT AND HER FIGHTER JET PILOT GAL PAL
(i wonder if they have any 9 inch long smoothed oblong objects which are used for ritual purposes only)
The subtext is text now!
“My mind is Opaque!”
“Your mind is an open book, and all the pages are dog-eared.”
god, booster is funny. imagine hating booster. couldn’t be me
Survey results! https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-fu7pUMvpsBTEiYJetnuNDw_3D_3D/
Link if you still want to take the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZRHLW8K
I can’t share the survey directly, but I can email the raw data to anyone who wants it!
finally. sickos rep
Unlike many people, I think Dorothy and Joyce are adorable, but even so let me take this comic to note YAY MORE BOOSTER! Booster is great. Booster needs more story arcs.
Finally, someone who understands.
Looks like their relationship was a surprise to exactly two people only. And Booster is reading them like an open book. About Julia Gray and her roommate.
Also: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/03-see-you-in-the-funny-page/rainorsunshine/
No warning to read Patreon tomorrow? I’m worried.
She keeps saying that word. I don’t think it means what she thinks it means
Occasionally I find Booster’s call outs too mean…not this time, right now they’re right on the money.
I tried writing slashfic. Quickly lost interest. There are only so many way you can describe Jason Voorheese killing a dude before it gets repetitive and boring.
That sounds like quitter talk!
It’s like a fanfic-specific form of Darwinism. Writers who are not willing to commit fully to the Dork Side* filter themselves out from the corpus of fan literature… survival of the most sicko.
* (Not a typo)
Have you tried writing about Jason having sex with men instead?
Doesn’t stop them from making sequels
If anything it’ll make sequels easier. “Son of Jason” followed by “Son of Son of Jason” followed by “Daughter of Son of Son of Jason” etc.
Anyone else here watching the new digital circus episode?
I found it very enjoyable. It takes all the best parts of the previous episodes and combines them.
Is it just me seeing shared vibes between Dorothy and Ragatha?
No you right they had a similar thing going on. They wanna be helpful and liked while not really knowing what they want for themselves.
At least Ragatha had a voice of reason gently encouraging her to back off on the busybodying. Dorothy needs that bad.
Kinger is such a girl dad and I love him. Also Jax is gonna crash out hard.
Booster’s shirt has the visual gravity of a black hole. It draws my eye no matter what I’m trying to look at. I don’t even like the shirt, it’s just like that.