Its pretty easy from our out of verse pov but imagining it in-universe it’s just two blond white girls in non-descript outfits with bright red blotches covering their face due to the teargas. It’s pretty reasonable to assume Daisy wouldn’t recognize them. Especially given the photo was taken from behind Joyce and by proxy hides both of their faces a good amount
At its root there is too much fascism is attacking to not look at the intersectonality of what is going on in society. Colonialism, Evangelical Christianity, genocide, homophobia, racism, transphobia, etc. It all goes hand in hand. Existence is resistance and love wins over fear.
The image could have been cops beating the snot out of college students and hyped up the fear and hopelessness. Daisy went with girls smooching. It might’ve been a horny choice, but it also feels like a middle finger to the college and police for supporting genocide.
Not to backseat, but I feel like this indignation towards Daisy would be more justified if we saw something else more “appropriate” happening at the protest. Like, what was Daisy *supposed* to go with? People holding signs? Once the cops shot tear gas everyone just kind of left, that we saw. The only one injured was Amazi-girl, and no one saw that. The only things that happened besides the kiss were people holding signs (boring), Joyce getting arrested (needs context), Amazi-Girl attacking a cop (looks bad unless you already think the school is wrong), and people walking away from tear gas (makes the tear gas look like a reasonable way to clear the field)
Joyce and Dorothy kissing was certainly the most interesting image from the *comic’s* perspective, so why isn’t it the most interesting in-universe? It’s even in the best interests in the protest itself to be represented by photogenic nonthreatening white women being tear-gassed for seemingly no reason.
interesting =/= moral. I’ve said it before, the people in these iconic protest images tend to end up assassinated by the state. joyce and dorothy aren’t in that much danger from a college paper, but on top of outting them to the public, Daisy has made them the local public enemy #1, the faces of the anti-establishment movement of this college. The two of them have become acceptable punching bags for the entire pro-genocide portion of the campus and town.
“Good journalism” often correlates to having direct, pronounced harm on individual people.
Also a cute, small, Aryan dream of a white girl in glasses getting forced to the ground by riot police with the headline “Students brutalized in peaceful protest” would be very striking and resonate with a lot of Americans I feel. Like Joyce fits the exact visual demographics that would make the largest number of people mad about this (unfortunately).
When Daisy isn’t thinking with her legs she’s actually a serious and relatively competent journalist and editor, but I am quite surprised that we didn’t open with the horny side before moving into the serious side.
As I said on Patreon, c’mon, Joyce, other people hate lying too! Have the talk! Be the Joyce I love, not the Joyce who sometimes makes me feel like when I am forced to watch my cat throw litter out of the litterbox in the process of burying her poop!
I don’t think they’re in a polycule at all until they sit down and agree to it, which even Joyce hasn’t done. Joyce has put that conversation on hold until they figure out how much danger the two of them are in, and is probably only now realizing Dorothy is assuming things that didn’t happen. But right now this second is *not* the time for that.
I feel like them mutually coming to the decision to break with their boyfriends to be with each other (because they cheated on them) is a bit different than Dorothy unilaterally deciding Joyce is hers. If anything, Joyce seems to have unilaterally decided Dorothy is *hers*, what with her yoinkage and gloating at Walky.
I wanna say the new question is how the headline knew to make a bi pun if the two kissers were unidentified at the time
But, err, I have been acquainted with more bi women than lesbians, so maybe that was the actual safer guess?
She didn’t intentionally out them; she didn’t recognize them. Aside from not letting Dorothy walk all over her, what is she doing in this strip that is so objectionable?
I mean regardless of who exactly was in the picture, there was a nonzero chance she’d be outing them unless she could verify who it was, which clearly she did not. That’s irresponsible at best and as a lesbian herself she should know that.
If you’re making out in an extremely public place, a reasonable assumption can be drawn that you are already out, or that you are outing yourself at that moment. Of course, that assumption was wrong, but you get the point.
Oh I don’t think that’s a safe assumption to make about college students in particular at all. But maybe that’s informed by my personal history (gay, lotta gay friends, almost none of us were out to our families bc lol red state)
If you do anything that stands out at a protest and there are photografers, you’re gonna get snapped by a journalist.
One man was sitting in front of the police during the protest in gothenburg over NRM being allowed to demonstrate. I went and sat down next to him in solidarity, it might have been a five second window between him and i being the only one sitting and ten others joining, but some photografer managed to get a shot of just the two of us sitting in front of a line of police. Apparently being a
young white woman with pink hair in solidarity to an elderly coloured man was photoworthy.
This is one of those things that I wonder if it’s generational — back when I was in college (the 1990s), there was very little “I’m out on campus but not back home” going on — the only LGBTQ+ folks doing stuff in public were the ones who were “out and proud”, and almost by definition you could assume that if someone was being gay/trans in public, they were okay with it being public knowledge.
I’m only 30 and was at college in the 2010s and this was definitely how I perceived things. If you’re doing things in public, you’re out by definition.
that is a deeply, truly, indescribably incorrect assumption to make about people, and it is a wonder you have not only somehow internalized that lie to yourself, but have typed it out and saw nothing wrong with it before hitting send.
being out to the people in your immediate vicinity does not mean you’re out to your family or the campus or the police or the entire world. like that’s just not how being out operates for anybody ever. no one is assuming their moments of intimacy, even ones had in public spaces, are going to be photographed and recorded for literally everyone else to see at a later date.
There’s a difference between kissing someone on a park bench and in the middle of a protest in the process of being shut down by police, and I would thank you to tone down the moralizing grandstanding. I’m just as gay as you or anyone else, and us having a difference of opinion on what counts as being out does not give you the right to talk down to me.
No, I’m actually the gayest one in these comments per capita. I detransitioned for a day just to fuck that one guy’s dad, I’m basically as gay as humanly possible.
I mean by that same logic you could say they could never print a picture that contained PDA because they have a “non-zero” chance of revealing cheating, or showing a relationship that people wouldn’t approve of. Or if you continue that train of logic they couldn’t show pictures of anyone because they could be outing someone as transitioning.
At some point the onus has to be on the individuals that if you are doing something in public there is a chance people will see you.
I mean honestly I do think photos containing PDA should probably be run past the people in them before being printed in the newspaper. Most photos of people who aren’t known public figures, in fact. I get that that’s not viable in some situations but I genuinely think the state of personal privacy these days sucks shit in a lot of ways.
you shouldn’t be publishing pictures of people at protests, full stop. this is known, having your face out at a protest is like hanging a sign from your neck that says “I hate cops, shoot me shoot me shoot me.” Every modern protester knows this, we all know to wear masks whenever physically possible if we don’t want to become politicians or targets overnight. These college kids are all dumb idiots in a fictional comic and are doing it wrong, but they all knew they were in danger by being there, even in this light and fluffy retread of the brutal reality.
Taking pictures of people’s faces when they’re at protests is basically just putting out a hit on private citizens, and Daisy is a thoughtless brute for doing that to people she knows. Do I think the comic will explore the realistic consequences of that? LORD do I HOPE not!!! In real life, would Joyce and Dorothy have to change their names and move out of the country to ever be safe again? Prrrrrobably!
“pictures of people at protests shouldn’t be published” is not an idea that’s gonna gain much support from the people who care about whatever they’re protesting, just an FYI, since posting pictures of people protesting is often a pretty vital component of that protest accomplishing anything. For many modern protests, it’s literally the only point of having the protest at all, the only bit of it that might accomplish anything.
Pictures of protests with multiple people too zoomed out to make out distinctly, or of police in response to those people, or simply with the public’s faces obscured, or of just the journos in the streets themselves, are all not only possible but are things that are becoming more and more common as more and more journalists start to actually care about the people they report on.
The point of a protest is not to Look Good. It’s to show people in power what public opinion is and what we’re capable of if policy does not change. It’s about protecting your community, making people feel safer, and fighting back against oppression. It’s about standing up to cops where everyone can see so that cops know what’ll happen if they try this shit where no one can see.
IDK where you grew up or who taught you your politics, but your and several others’ view that protests are just a costume you put on to look good on social media so that you can have the *effect* of having done something is not conducive of real change. No one cares that you posted good pics of something, politicians aren’t gauging acceptable behavior via posts and articles, they care that a crowd of people is in the streets outside their mansion. They care that even under threat of military violence, those people will continue to stand up for themselves. They care about being outnumbered.
You don’t protest genocide because it looks good, you protest genocide because its the right thing to do, because if the people in charge don’t change on their own, we can make them change as a society.
That doesn’t require publishing random gay teens’ faces on the internet.
Right, so your argument basically amounts to you not knowing what protests are or how they can accomplish things or what makes them more or less effective. From that point of view, I can see how pictures like this would seem to be bad! If a protest is just empty virtue signalling and meant to be functionally meaningless, like you’re arguing, then obviously the sensible side goal would be to minimize any possible risks to the protestors.
But here, let me help: The protest displayed in the comic is purely an image protest. There’s no implicit threat, no show of power, and no leverage to act on any demands. Image protests are worthwhile solely because of their ability to impact public sentiment – to win converts to the movement and support for the cause – and historically the best way to do that is through humanizing and personalizing them. For an extremely important historical example, see Rosa Parks, who was part of one of the most effective image protests in history.
There are certainly types of protests where having the identity of protestors kept secret makes sense – an image protest definitely isn’t one of them.
It wasn’t like Daisy was taking creepshots, the kiss was part of a protest intentionally designed to get media attention, and (gross headline aside) if the point of the protest was to get photos of the school cracking down on sympathetic students for expressing an opinion and thus build support for said opinion, Daisy did *WAY* more to oppose the genocide than Joyce and Dorothy standing in the background would’ve.
This *is* a creepshot. Idk what you think that word means, but this is one of those. Its a photo of two women in a moment of intimacy taken without their consent and then published for public viewing. That is 100%, without a doubt a creepshot.
if they were at a public restaurant patio, in the back yard, snapped through a window yes, but as i explained below, no matter how ick it is, JOROTHY INHERENTLY GAVE PERMISSION TO BE SNAPPED BY ATTENDING A PUBLIC EVENT.
there is no expactation of privacy, they are at a public event in a public space. the ick factor does not change this.
No? They didn’t? No they didn’t. Idk why you’d think going to a “public event” like a protest is equivalent to signing your rights away to anyone with a smart phone.
because it litterally is the letter of the law in canada.
me a an individaul walkin gdown the street can be photgraphed and published without my knowledge or consent as i am in a public place, and unless you live in a stast or country whose laws specifically cover it, you do not have any control over that. check out my comment below, but tldr, by stepping out onto a public setting yu waive said right to privacy unless the laws of the land state otherwise
haveyou attended a sproting event and ended up on a jumbotron?
by your statement that would be a voilation of your privacy but there is nothing you can leagelly due about it as you are in public.
legal =/= morally correct, jumbotron at a sporting event =/= published alongside protest photos for everyone to see, these arguments =/= understanding my point
sorry as i said on my lowerr post about this, when i was in school we were taught that when i a public setting there is no “expectation of privacy” Literal words from the canadian laws about such, and to agrue one has had their privacy rigths violated one has to prove they were in an environment were there would be a reasonable expectation of privacy, i have repeatedly commented on the “ick ” factor here as i do agree there is ick here and i am not saying daisy morally made the right decision, just that i was taught that i do not have a legal right to expect anonyimty if i am in public.
it is similar to how i was raised that being denied what i want is not a punishment just a fact of life (age 3-13 EVERY time i said i wanted something my sister would sing”you can’t always get what you want”) as i was also raised that there is a destinctio between having something taken from you as a punishement vs not gettin gsomething because you desired it
She could have approved a better front cover that represented the protests better and didn’t potentially out two unidentified queer ladies. Stuff to criticize to be sure.
Not to single you out but this take is completely insane. The entire POINT of a peaceful protest is to create pictures like this that make your opposition look like monsters and thus move public opinion against them. Two white women getting tear gassed for kissing is absolutely the most effective photo if the goal is to actually accomplish something.
I actually don’t want to see protest photos of people kissing. I want to see protest photos of people protesting. Kissing fights it. What about Genocide makes you wanna kiss? That feels like it’s really really distracting from the point of the protest, especially cuz the women making out are not part of the demographic of the people being genocided.
Pictures of people protesting are worthless, unless it’s a huge number of people, which it wasn’t here.
For proof of this, see this very comic, which barely focused on the people protesting at all even in the scenes taking place at said protest. The point of the protest was to make the school look bad to pressure them into divesting from Bulmeria. Photos of like a dozen people holding signs doesn’t do that. Photos of the school tear-gassing photogenic white women who aren’t hurting anyone does.
The tear gassing is the important part. Not that they’re kissing. Also the headline says “Kiss Bombings good-bi” not “god isn’t this fucked up aren’t you pissed about it?” It’s evocative but it’s not SAYING anything. I dunno I would so much rather see people protesting or even images of them being dispersed by the police than two women kissing.
Kissing is such an “all’s well that ends well” sorta thing. Not a “things are bad and getting worse”.
There’s precedent of hippie love-in protests against Vietnam, but yeah, I feel like Daisy’s attempt missed that vibe. Too punny. You want readers, but you also want them to take the article seriously.
They do have a point, photogenic white women in peril get way more sympathy in media and the public than most other demographics (*depending on the source of the peril.) See: “Missing White Woman Syndrome.” Systemic racism and sexism, it’s American as apple pie.
Which is why I think pictures of Joyce being brutalized by riot police or pictures more focused on the tear gassing (you can’t even see the burns bc their faces are mushed together) would’ve been more effective in this case. Cute lil blue eyed white girl in glasses (glasses make you innocent and unthreatening) having her visible effects of tear gassing would really tug at the heart strings up subconsciously racist indianans
Same. When I decide to look at news stories about protests, and the stories have pictures with them, I usually expect those pictures to be of people protesting, not a picture of a couple people kissing at a protest.
I’m not convinced EDM’s take is as bad as it seems at first. Yes, to us, two women kissing is completely irrelevant to the protest, but we’re already on the protesters’ side.
There are many people who still think the cops are good and stuff that’s happening over in some other country doesn’t matter to them, but may be swayed by seeing people who resemble them suffering from police brutality.
Yes, that’s as a clueless and self-centered viewpoint, but having them support the cause, even for those reasons, can still be useful, even if they never take the additional step of looking further into it and thinking outside their mental boxes.
Just to add, though: I agree with Yotomoe’s point about the headline. They could’ve used the text to emphasize the police brutality aspect, but instead they went with a corny pun.
Maybe I can help by giving a counter-argument to my own comment?
This is a college newspaper. Almost all of the people likely to bother reading it almost certainly fall into one of the following categories:
1) well-informed students who already have a better understanding of events than the the kinds of people who’d be swayed by this kind of imagery
2) students who have their attention grabbed by pictures like this, but are only interested for gossip-related reasons and lose interest if it turns to “political stuff”
3) non-students with personal connections to the students involved; potentially people the students in question aren’t out to.
It occurs to me, also, that the comic’s generally vague overview of a simplified copy of a real protest, with the original details replaced by fictional ones, might be making it easier to disregard how the newspaper depiction fails to focus on the protesters’ message (because we already know the real version).
If a real protest was reported on in a way that amounted to “two girls kissed at, I dunno, some protest about something or other”… well, that absolutely would be terrible reporting.
Part of the problem, I suppose, is that we don’t know what the newspaper article itself says. If the picture’s little more than the newspaper version of click bait for a good article, as C.T Phipps suggested below, it’s not so bad (though still likely influenced by Daisy’s horniness).
That is not, in any way, the purpose of a protest. Have you ever organized one or participated in running or leading one? If you get good PR from it that helps the cause, that’s fantastic, but the purpose of a protest is an exercise of power. It is a disruption that is, in and of itself, a public demonstration of your cause’s capacity to cause further disruption if necessary to achieve their ends. It is a demonstration that, when necessary, you can pull thousands and thousands of people to a specific place to disrupt the ordinary functioning of the space you are in. It is a demonstration of the public anger that has been roused by the malfeasance you are protesting, and an implicit statement that if the powers that be do not respond to your demands, you are capable of causing much more significant disruption over a much longer period of time.
Protests are and have always been an exercise of a type of political force. Understanding this is core to utilizing them in an effective way to create political change.
<3 right back atcha, Yotomoe, I've enjoyed yr contributions in this comment section for years now. And yeah, I lead a march through my state's capital city every year with thousands of people following behind me, and I *never* forget that what we are doing is a reminder and a threat.
if you know anything about the reality of modern, american protesting and the public-facing figures of said protests, especially the already marginalized faces like queer ones, this question is insultingly dense, like asking why the sky is blue.
if you DON’T know any of that, then why are you up at 12am, don’t you have algebra homework due soon? does you mom know you’re up past your bedtime?
I mean, she’s blowing off and instantly dismissing two staffers of her paper who are here, letting her know that they’ve been outed involuntarily and that they have been harmed, even if they have not yet gotten to the “Also Joyce’s family is part of a violent cult that have already stormed the campus once with guns” part yet. She’s acting really blithe and careless about the harm she is now being told she has caused, even if her motives were sound when she published the picture.
Counter-point: Joyce and Dorothy are arguing that Daisy should have prioritized Joyce and Dorothy over picking the photo most likely to have the protest actually accomplish any of its goals of *stopping a genocide*.
Like, what should Daisy have done instead? Asma holding a sign? Who care! Amazi-Girl attacking a cop? Makes the protests look bad to anyone who doesn’t already thing assaulting cops is cool. Daisy picking a photo of photogenic white women getting tear gassed for kissing did a million times as much to actually weaken the school’s position than anything Joyce and Dorothy intended to do.
I think the pun headline runs counter to your argument. Actually, I think your other examples would have been better. A protester with a sign (like Asma) gets their message boosted. A popular/proven campus hero covered in her own blood, why not?
White women in peril provably works better. Nobody cares about a minority holding a sign (agitator, doesn’t even belong) or a vigilante that hopefully got the boots put to her by the real heroes. This was the best picture choice and Daisy knew it.
What an insanely cynical thing to say. I love how racism is so deep that people would rather “play the game” of racism than allow someone more personally effected by an issue to ever be a representation of said issue. Really cool. Can’t wait to see the BLM photos of two white guys high-fiving.
Its not cynicism, it’s just a fact that people care way more about white women in peril than any minority. Missing white woman syndrome and all. It sucks but it’s why allies from the majority groups are necessary for minorities to get rights
See the thing is, I feel like the fact that their faces are hidden by the kiss lessens the peril! There are better moments of them in peril, particularly Joyce!
Given that Joyce and Dorothy knew that the protest was being covered by the media, and that photos that could potentially out people were going out to the world, including Joyce’s family — that’s the reason they were there in the first place — it seems to me that the ones being blithe and careless were Joyce and Dorothy, for kissing there in the first place. Daisy made a pretty reasonable assumption that anyone kissing in full view of anybody who cares to look at a public event explicitly intended to attract media attention is pretty much by definition about as out as you can get without having it on your Wikipedia page.
(Waiting for Daisy to say, “Okay, so you’re mad about the photo we ran. Have you seen the video on CNN?”)
same about the have you checked the national news yet?
so yeah the situation has ick factor, you are possibly outing queer people on the front of your paper. BUT and a pretty big but here is (and this might be a genreational thing, as the biggest protests i remember from the end of my high school years were the seattle g20 protests around 98-99) and our social studies teach was very clear about the PUBLIC nature of attending protests, and what the definition of “expectation of privacy in a public place or event” is.
this is early days of digital photography becoming affordable and even then we were explained that by attending any public event we waive our right to anonymity. a hockey game, a protest, a sport festival, etc. there is no expectation of privacy to be had. it simply comes down to the definition of “being in public”. now i know there are places that have coulded this due to the prolification of “95% of pople had hd capable cameras on them” laws regarding the recording of people on the streets, in the interest of people going to and from work and such not having to worry about their daily lives being broadcast with out their permission, but all of them that i have read have exemptions for news events and journalists and public gatherings.
i we can feel that it is icky that daisy published this photo for any number of valid reasons. but by attending the protest with covering their faces Jorothy have waived their right to anonymity even if they didnt realize they did.
I mean Daisy is ridiculous but even from her first appearance I never expected her to be anything else.
It’s not just about whether a character behaves poorly. Character *inconsistency* has been my biggest gripe with this arc from the start, so I don’t see why Daisy should bother me on that front.
No one has been acting inconsistent with anything, and in fact every single action every main character has taken in this arc was pre-established many times over with foreshadowing, similar events, and outright stating what the characters were thinking. This myth that Joyce being gay or whatever is inconsistent writing needs to end, because it’s just a stupid excuse.
Y’know, I’ve always found it weird how few of the characters are involved in any sort of club or organized extracurricular activity at all. There’s the newspaper, and IIRC Dorothy mentioned some kind of political club once, but we’ve never seen her actually at it, and I don’t think it ever came up again. And I think that’s literally it.
Not really. They could be part of the narrative in the same way some of the classes are, and ways to connect characters other than just, “They happen to live on the same hall.”
Roller derby, Ethan went to the LGBTQ+ meet up, church, gym bros, vigilantism, other than that most the cast is antisocial enough to go to class, eat, play video games, and make out. The clubs and extracurriculars have to serve the plot, but can also be characterizations sprinkled in.
The LGBTQ meetup seems to have been a one-off, and even if it wasn’t, no one has gotten involved in it any further, which seems kind of weird in itself given that, per Willis’s bleat the other day, the entire cast is queer.
Lifting heavy things with your buddy, jogging in the morning, or beating up criminals and riot cops (but I repeat myself) aren’t organized extracurricular activities. I wouldn’t classify church as one, either. It’s a community group, not a school one. I’m not sure even the roller derby qualifies. Marcie’s involved, and she’s not a student. Dorothy’s done some off-screen volunteering for a food shelf or something, but that’s another community thing, and another thing that got mentioned once and never heard of again.
There’s the football team now, but it took Tony fifteen years just to crack double-digit appearances, and none of the other team members are even that significant.
I’m not Mr. Super-Social (more Mr. Super-Social Anxiety Disorder), but I was in the Computer Club in college, and the Fencing Club until the other guy graduated so I didn’t have anyone to fence. Several of my friends were involved in the college radio station, such that it became a preferred hangout for my friend group. Some were in a anti-irresponsible-drinking group our RD sponsored, which made it extra-funny when one of them wrote himself up for underage drinking. Our Dorothy was president of the student government (I just googled her, and while she’s sadly not PotUS yet, she’s currently working as a congressional aide). A bunch of us did intramural broomball (we lost every game except one… against the league champions (who were actually Ms. President and the other Fencing Club guy’s team), who beat everyone but us, which I think by the transitive property means that we beat everyone).
And IU has a lot more options available than my tiny technical college did.
And I attended 4.5 era of undergrad and 2.5 years of gradually school without participating in a single club, even though I hung out with groups of people doing planned things (okay, mostly Mafia) all the time.
It’s possible that because you attended clubs, you mostly got to know other people who attended clubs?
tbf, when I was in college just about the only person in my circle who did much in the way of extracurriculars was my one roomie who was in a frat. Oh, and one second-remove acquaintance who was always trying to get me (or anyone else, really) to join the highfallutin’ debate club.
We DID things outside of classes, but none of it organized by clubs
Wait, one more: Two friends who worked for the local campus TWENTY-FIVE WATT radio station. I did sit in for a guest DJ set for one of them and ALMOST joined the radio station as well by then failed my Saving Throw vs. Fuckit
During the initial crossover with its Walky, Mr cheese was saying how there are duplicates, and then the camera panned away to show us the it’s walky version of Shanna and Meighan. Meaning canonically there are versions of Shanna and Meighan somewhere in the DoA universe. We now know where Shanna is – another student reporter, sending in her articles from the holding cells, which honestly is extremely in character.
I’m glad I’m not the only one that caught this. Assuming there’s no Sci-fi club Shanna would still be the brittle overly-neurotic writer trying desperately to deny that she is one. That would be the type to get her story in early.
She’s a character from Fans (sometimes referred to as “Faans”, with two As), a webcomic that had a crossover with It’s Walky! in 2003. Having never read that comic outside of said crossover, I couldn’t give you much more than that, though I think she was a journalist there as well as here.
In particular, she was a reporter who was the best friend of one of the heads of the Sci-Fi Club and attended meetings allegedly so she could report on the things that happened there, but she hid her actual nerddom under a veneer of sarcasm and holier-than- thou attitude because she thought people wouldn’t take her seriously if she was known as someone who was interested in unicorns and such.
By the time of the crossover, she had owned up to it, and her drama came from other vectors.
Fans is an all-time favorite of mine! It’s about a college club of nerds who keep stumbling onto improbable sci-fi storylines and barely saving the day. The comic really built up the club from chaotic outcasts to a team/family who has earned all their skills, with Shanna being one of the best examples. And it’s a fun universe where all these big sci-fi concepts keep bumping up against each other and combining in wild ways.
They can be seen enough that multiple people have recognized both of them, including one person who doesn’t really know of of them well enough to normally be able to pick them out at a glance.
The only person who’s weird for figuring it out is Raidah. Joe could pick them both out from a football field because wuv/knowing the other one since probably kindergarten.
I’ve completely failed to recognize acquaintances because I accidentally met them in unexpected contexts, so I’m inclined to cut Daisy slack on that point – but also her job and position significantly diminish that slack.
Raidah saw them coming back together, in that clothing, and knew they were at the protest. She likely had more context clues than Daisy did, since Daisy didn’t even know either of them were there.
That’s fair, unless she has a cork board with each of Joyce’s friend-group singled out with their full name and a list of potential weaknesses next to it (which she might or might not, we don’t really know how deep the Machiavellian part goes heh).
I do think Lumino’s point about how she knows they were at the protest and saw them in those clothes yesterday is helpful, tho.
I do think Lumino’s point is a good one, that seeing them in the same clothes yesterday smelling like tear gas and confirmed to have been at the protest helps for the credulity of her recognizing Dorothy.
Mind you, I don’t necessarily think this is a good enough cover for Daisy for Willis NOT to have had her do something really shitty. For me, it’s really going to depend on how many other people immediately recognize them upon seeing the photo. If it’s just Joe, Raidah, and presumably Becky, Daisy’s excuse is less transparently awful: if Joyce and Dorothy got recognized by the folks over in Forrest, noooot so much.
But Willis also doesn’t need the Forrest denizens to recognize them, because Lucy or Jennifer and now Alice could easily identify them for anyone in their vicinity.
Where are you getting that from because Daisy is a journalist. She pays attention to details. She could tell that Wally’s shirt stain came from a girl.
Fair point: Daisy is able to distinguish drool on a shirt as being from a woman or not a woman – identifying two women she already knows should be a breeze by comparison!
It does seem kinda unlikely that Daisy would not recognize Dorothy in the picture she took and put on the front page of the newspaper, considering Dorothy works for the newspaper and has done multiple stories for it.
Raidah just saw Joyce and Dorothy last night and they told her they were at the protest. She was actively annoyed at them already and saw how they were dressed. Daisy kind of knows them and wouldn’t be thinking of them specifically with their faces mushed together.
Monica Lewinsky was like, 19. And given his prominence in the Epstein files, probably not the youngest person he took horrible advantage of. So this is a very icky comparison, just FYI.
OK so she didn’t know it was them so you can’t take it as a personal slight. Though still I find some of her decisions questionable when it comes to what should be front page news.
Daisy throws shade at Dorothy for being there and not covering the story. While Daisy was there and was more focused on two girls tongue wrestling each other than the world practically burning down around her. Chances are if Dorothy did make a report of the protest, it would have been scrapped in favor of this.
I’d question how Daisy even got to be in charge of the college News Papar but apparently I’m constantly being reminded that you don’t haft to be good at you job to be in a leadership position.
I have the weird idea the story underneath the picture is an incredibly intricate and well-written discussion of both the police violence as well as the situation in Bulmeria.
But she went for the most attention getting photo possible that also made her horny.
That’s news media in America any more. They’re all fighting for views and to be the most (respectably) scandalous. That’s why I try to listen to mostly NPR in the car and read a variety of other sources. I would rather read AP than CNN or FOX but might read everything to compare slants and bias.
Because that’s what cops do. They protect rich people’s property and beat disobedient libral college students into submission. The real paper did that and the college didn’t change their mind on anything. Reinforcing fear of the police and protesters as powerless and weak hasn’t changed anything in our world.
Maybe a kiss in a fiction story will. (I actually just went through the newspapers archives curious about what photos were taken during the protest and am going to make that a separate thread).
And she was 100% correct to do so! The entire goddamn point of a peaceful protest is to create images like this!! The protestors looking as sympathetic as possible (pretty white girls kissing) and the opposition looking like assholes (tear gassing the pretty white girls).
Not only did Daisy do nothing wrong, Dorothy and Joyce complaining that Daisy shouldn’t have used the photo that was best for the anti-genocide protest THEY WERE AT is morally abhorrent. They’re *literally* saying the genocide was less important than not outing them!
This is not, at all, the point of a protest, and at this point, I have to sincerely and directly ask you: do you have any personal experience with protests or protesting at all? You keep loudly articulating something that is flatly untrue, and misrepresenting the purpose and intent of protests in the process.
We don’t know if Daisy was there. As the editor, it would probably be a bad idea for her to actually be there.
She got a picture of two people kissing at a war protest. At most she’s guilty of due diligence issues for not finding the kissers… But I mean, it took them HOW long to find that sailor and the nurse he kissed without consent on V-J day?
She was under no obligation to track down who was in the photo and frankly the idea of doing so for a story the very next morning is ridiculous, if Joyce and Dorothy didn’t want to be noticed they should’ve picked any other venue to snog in and I’m continually surprised that the majority of commenters think that Daisy is the one who screwed up here. People don’t go to protests to not be seen!
Thanks! And I kind of assumed Daisy would be covering the protest in a “delegating to the underclassmen reporters” sort of way and not “physically on location” sort of way. Unless Daisy was at the protest to actually protest and has been great at keeping that to herself!
Do we know where Daisy is at in terms of college? Not a sophomore, but I don’t know if she is doing graduate work or not.
There’s a bit of the J Jonah Jameson about how Daisy is written, and that includes the fact that if you ignore the one massive massive character flaw she’s otherwise actually pretty good at her job
Yup. ICONIC IMAGERY is a cute way to say “imagery unrepresentative of the event that turns me on” while pretending to objectivity. Daisy’s fulla shit. This wasn’t a celebration, it was a protest against genocide, and two girls kissing (who had been at the multi-day protest for all of 20 minutes) ain’t the subject. If Daisy wants to say sex sells, fine, she can embrace her role as a yellow journalist instead of pretending to be a serious publisher – but a free school paper, funded by student fees, doesn’t need sensationalism, and the student body doesn’t need Daisy nearly as much as Daisy needs student bodies.
Gonna add that if Daisy was as high-minded as she’s trying to seem, she’d have made some sort of effort to contact the subjects of the photo to ask for comment.
Yeah! Daisy shouldn’t have used a striking image where the protestors are depicted as attractive white girls expressing love for each other while offscreen forces rain tear gas down on them! She should have used a “representative” photo of some random person holding a sign! After all, it’s not like the entire fucking point of a peaceful protest is to generate news media that makes you look sympathetic and makes your opposition look like evil goons, thus moving public opinion in your favor!
Considering the newspaper in the background of the last panel of https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/02-look-straight-ahead/pictures/ I have doubts that whoever’s in charge of newspaper funding really cares that much about the actual content.
Daisy gets the newspaper published, and maybe that’s all that’s required of her.
Probably because Dorothy is a reporter for the newspaper, and when she was at an extremely newsworthy event she didn’t even bother to write a story about it.
She definitely could’ve filled Dorothy in while they were running over here! At least a high-level summary. I think her vague response is telling that she’s not eager to explain to Dorothy that they’re not exclusive (yet).
Joyce made the extra time to double back and taunt Walky a second time — if she can do that, she has time to explain the Joe stuff to Dorothy en route haha
Once again asserting that Daisy did nothing wrong, and also that I don’t think Dorothy’s done anything for the school paper since the new semester began? That last part isn’t related to the first part but it only just occurred to me that without Amazi-Girl around her journalism just sort of dries up (presumably for story reasons since most student paper topics not related to the main cast wouldn’t be interesting for us to see, which makes sense, it’s just sort of funny to reflect on)
Dorothy got tasked with covering the Roz scandal, and Dorothy only gets the AG beat because Daisy ends up thinking that from Dorothy’s other stories she’s a better more reliable writer than Jennifer.
So she definitely did stuff, and a lot of her work wasn’t the sort of thing that was important enough for us to see.
I do think the fact that she apparently wrote multiple stories between the Joe/Roz thing and getting the Amazi-Girl beat is a thing that indicates that she’s been a somewhat reliable reporter for Daisy, but we also know that student journalism is something she gave less attention once her grades started to slip.
…oh yeah, Dorothy got an interview with Amazi-Girl, didn’t she? Am I remembering that right? That miiiiiiiight end up dangerous now that the cops are looking for AG 😨
You’re not 100% wrong Daisy, but you still effed it up in your pursuit of an attention-grabbing front page. And love the pencil visually, but do you not have taste buds or notice the metal and rubber textures? Is it typical to not notice them? My teeth hurt looking at that.
“Yyehh?” JFC Joyce, y’all prioritized this over Becky and you still couldn’t make yourself find time to say it’s not Joever.
And yes Joyce, we are very aware of how much and with who you’ve been “compressing your narrative” but don’t put that thought in Daisy’s head of all people.
I’m pretty sure she’s biting on the wood, if she isn’t just holding the pencil with her lips. Very strange idea to put the rubber in your mouth, though.
People (Americans) are desensitized to violence and extremism. It’s gotten so every day that the majority of people tune it out or are so overwhelmed by the echelons of power continually doing horrific things they feel helpless. People certainly will notice and argue about The Gays, though, for better or for worse. We don’t get to read the article (yet?) that goes with the picture.
The businesses that influence the media and government want people to live in fear. People who are scared don’t organize, don’t argue, don’t question, and go out and buy more stuff they don’t need. Two college gals are about the least actually threatening thing there is. For there to be riot police and tear gas and two bi-sexual young woman making out in the middle of it? It’s a pretty ballsy statement for the newspaper to publish and not, “Listen to us or we’ll call the cops on you little fuckers.”
“people certainly will notice or argue about The Gays, though, for better or for worse”
yeah, white BIGOTED people who use that framework of irrelevant, attention-redirecting argument bait to steer the conversation away from what people ACTUALLY need to be talking about
in a game where the goal of debate is to garner attention by looking firm in front of an adversary by whatever means necessary is a very USA politics thing, yes, but it’s also ultimately a right-wing tool for colonizing our attention and headspace
homophobic white fundie folk seek to basically affirm and re-establish themselves as the center of the universe — do NOT treat them as though this is true
I’m not treating them as if they’re right, but it is true that a lot more homophobic white fundke folk would barely notice or approve of student protestors being attacked or arrested. Them seeing a picture of two students kissing is powerful because it takes the fear tactics away from the police brutality.
Those people already aren’t talking about genocide and aren’t going to be swayed. People who are tapped out on the constant negativity and hate in the world are going to be sucked in by the picture and then hopefully be in a ppsition to be outraged at the people in charge of policy at the university.
Not to nitpick a diegetic photo that’s there to mainly add stakes to the cheating stuff, but i wanna push back a little on the idea that a picture of two students kissing on the front page is as radical as you keep saying it is, because the assumption that framing an article about violence (violence overseas, violence on the protesters, the scale of violence the cops have shown, etc etc) by decentering it does rub me the wrong way i think.
It doesn’t show any of the positive work or connections that happened in the encampments because it’s not a photo representative of that mutual support network before the cops arrived, It doesn’t work as a point of contrast because the pithy headline undercuts the severity of the situation around the kiss, and it definitely doesn’t “take the fear tactics away from the police brutality” because that requires framing this kiss between two white girls as a uniquely antithetical statement to the realities of police brutality as we know it, and that’s just straight up not true!
also TBH maybe this might sound mean, but If the affected groups in this particular scenario feel misrepresented or unseen (as evidenced by the fact that Asma and Raidah’s general reaction to said article was exasperation and indignation respectively), then it’s fair game to say that’s it’s doing a bad job acting as an entryway to inform people who are uninvolved about what is going on in a way that is actually meaningful to the goals of those groups.
I’m sympathetic insofar that there really isn’t an easy or clean alternative that Daisy could have pursued, and i really need to emphasize again that the main point of the photo is to add stakes to the romance drama story before anything else, but to act like making *this photo* with *that headline* is a decision that best helps either the protesters or the “bulmerians” in-text is not the move.
Asma reasonably, since she was actually part of the protest, but then she doesn’t seem that upset by the picture.
Raidah does, but she seemed more upset by who it was and her personal issues with them than anything related to supporting the protestors or their cause.
This is going more into the realm of personal interpretation, but I would still consider her general attitude towards the whole thing as fairly exasperated along the lines of “I expected little and yet i’m still let down”, if not a particularly overstated negative response. I also added Raidah there simply because i read that strip as her not realizing it was Joyce and Dorothy until the last panel.
I don’t think Asma looks unbothered by the photo, I think she’s visibly irritated but also tired and unsurprised. Which, of course she is, Raidah asks to see HER copy of the newspaper, Asma already read it some unspecified amount of time before the strip and whatever her reaction was, she’s already had it and settled into “ugh, whatever”.
She doesn’t have Raidah’s fiery disdain for Joyce, so of course she doesn’t match Raidah’s energy at all, but I do not think the intended reading of that strip was “Asma doesn’t even care”.
For one thing, this is definitely one of the strips that was added or altered in response to the very negative readership reaction to the protest kiss. It would be weird if Willis put all that effort into adding more of Asma just for her to be like, “yeah whatever it doesn’t matter.”
No where did I say it is the best picture that could’ve been ran. It’s absolutely a story device, which is fine, but photos of protesters ignoring or responding calmly and lovingly to military response does a lot more to be inspiring than fear baiting. Like when the kid on a skateboard through the tear gas with ICE and LAPD went viral so many people were scared because the kid’s identity might get leaked. Main stream media doesn’t show those scenes and a picture like this (again there would be better pictures of protesters that actually care and have a closer connection to the actual protest) but this is a fictional webcomic and this is the picture that got pulled.
It’s like the MMIW movement. Two blonde college ladies kissing despite tear-gas got more attention from the reporter and editor than anything actually at the protest was doing this day for this article and headline. If they’d been two BIPOC women it might not have ran at all. Which is bad, that’s horrible, but it’s not unrealistic. Gabby Petito became national news and the search for what happened found several missing BIPOC women that had been murdered.
Also the news doesn’t really care about helping people. It cares about selling papers. “Well this is just a college paper ran by college students.” Who are learning what will help them succeed when they leave school.
Daisy makes some good points, but she also chose to make the front page image for a news story about anti-genocide protests and the police response to it be a picture of two women kissing.
I mean. Maybe don’t make out at a public protest if you don’t want people to know about it? I dunno just seems like maybe that’s not the best time and place to expect to not be seen.
Daisy you can’t oscillate between “Definitely not Based” and “Based” like that, it’s like a coin flip each panel whether what you’re saying is valid or not lol
Also Joyce is already blowing this if she really is going to keep the Polycule from Dorothy.
Joyce is basically having Dorothy share her With Joe but refuses the idea of sharing Dorothy with Walky? That’s not a Polycule relationship that’s Joyce trying to manipulate her way into having her own harem.
I don’t think that’s a “yyeh” of “I am going to keep this from you” but “oh yeah the immediate issue put that out of my mind, we still need to talk about that”
That’s a funny way to say “she was distracted by the immediate danger of being outed to her extremely conservative family”! I wonder why you’d say it like that
You act as if she can’t have take several minutes out of her day to ask the straight question of “Hey instead of dumping our respective partners that we’ve both don’t want to dump, do you want to keep this slightly open so we can keep dating them?”
It takes like a minute I’m a half to say that, could have been a on the way conversation.
That absolutely would not have been a minute and a half conversation, and doing it while they’re both stressed over this would be doing everyone involved a disservice. Addressing the immediate danger was the move, then negotiate the polycule when everyone is able to focus better on that.
Everything about the situation stressful, but I they want to find a way to handle it they could focus on what they can control like nipping a certain problem in the bud before that gets out of hand too. Because I can guarantee you I see a dozen ways this part can go south.
Yes! I don’t know exactly which “this part” you’re referring to, but both parts could go badly south! This is exactly why it is a terrible idea to combine them. It is not an unforgivable betrayal of trust to delay the polycule discussion for fifteen minutes while they figure out the “is this going to ruin our lives” part
Well unfortunately those two things aren’t a separate issue, one is part of the mess that they now haft to and prepare to address and the other is something one of them is leaving to fester.
By “leaving to fester,” again, you mean “delaying the discussion of until we figure out if this is going to lead to one of us being disowned by her family”
A simple *propose this question here* and then tell her to just give her an answer later. Communication is not as complicated as one would make it out to be.
Maybe it’s a difference of social interaction styles? I know I very much appreciate the “here’s a thing we need to discuss; think about it and get back to me?” approach, but there are people who would want to address such things immediately, so raising an important subject when they’re busy with something else wouldn’t go down so well.
as someone with some communication anxiety issues, to propose “hey think about this and get beck to me” would basically cripple my ability to function in the moment. so i really get the put a pin in this and deal soon. honestly for me the best would be hey when we get thruog the immediate issues we got important other things to talk about would eb the best way to deal
It can be completely understandable that Joyce would want to focus on the active fire over what’s basically a kettle that hasn’t come to a boil yet?
AND it can be true that if Joyce takes too long to deal with the kettle, it might become a problem.
(I’m also a person who struggles with communication anxiety. If someone’s gonna tell me “by the way we need to talk later”, they need to add a LOT of “and just so you know I’m not mad at you”-type reassurances to it!)
Idk, between her noncommittal answer to Joe and her noncommittal answer to Dorothy here, I could either read it as “I still dunno if I want a polycule” OR as “What if I could have little a Joe, as a treat, and do I *really* need to tell Dorothy?”
I will admit, now that we’re stuck in this storyline, I want it to get MESSY, so I know which one I’m rooting for!
I dont think I agree with either of those reads. I read it as “the whole polycule thing seems like a complicated issue to figure out. But right now its a later issue, if I bring it up it becomes a now issue, I would rather it stay a later issue”
I’m still not convinced Joyce won’t get so overwhelmed that she asks for a break from both Joe and Dorothy. Especially if it goes south and she feels like they’re both putting her on a pedestal and not just accepting her for the hot mess that she is.
The pedestal thing could be quite interesting. Joyce has reacted in the past to people expecting certain behaviors from her or, in this case, idolizing her. Could be a cool source of conflict here.
im perfectly content saying that because its literally true. i wouldn’t say dorothy doesn’t love walky, but like, holy shit she has never loved him even close to how much she loves joyce, for instance; whereas, joyce certainly loves joe and dorothy similar amounts.
I admittedly do not think Dorothy and Walky would have stuck together even if Joyce wasn’t opposed to the idea, but it definitely could be a source of friction.
I mean, she’s not really “keeping the polycule” from Dorothy because she hasn’t agreed to a polycule in the first place. She ran away in the middle of that conversation because she realized there’s a few other important conversations that need to happen first, which is why she snatched up Dorothy to loop her in about them being outed to absolutely everyone who reads the student paper, including possibly Becky and her fundie family. They’re still in the progress of dealing with that issue – figuring out the Facebook relationship statuses is genuinely a less pressing matter, and bringing those up in the middle of this one would not get them anywhere productive. It’s been maybe five minutes since Joe even mentioned the option.
Joyce, I think if Asma were here to hear that comment, I think she’d be legally allowed to hunt you for sport. Be glad she has to work today.
Other than that….yeah, uh, I don’t think they have the reasonable expectation of privacy given the circumstances but DAMN that’s a cold response to being told you accidentally outed someone.
I’m going to be honest, I kind of get it. Kissing at a public demonstration you know is being extremely recorded by the press is sort of a situation where you can’t really be surprised that it got published.
At the moment Joyce is acting more concerned that she was caught cheating which Daisy is calling out. Also as she pointed out their faces aren’t really being shown, only reason Radiah recognized them is she’s way too invested in Sarah’s friends group.
I wish I had thought of this on yesterday’s strip, but has anyone reread the last chapter from beginning to end? Or even the last two?
I’m kind of suspicious/wary of Alice. It seems pretty odd she spent a semester avoiding Jennifer until now and has jumped back in both feet. Everything she says to Asma and Raidah isn’t just gossipy, it’s extremely misrepresented and embellished (based on what she heard)
– conversation with Joyce Jennifer negs Joyce about not even knowing what sex is.
– conversation later with Walky where both Walky and Jennifer double down on that Joyce couldn’t have had sex, and only wishes she had sex with Dorothy.
That’s it. That’s all Alice got. What the hell. (And I also didn’t remember Walky having some warning to Dorothy/Joyce dumping him).
It doesn’t seen odd to me, she very much loved Jennifer and so it required even the smallest that she actually changed for her to jump in. Also yeah gossip tends to be misrepresented and embellished that is what make it gossip.
If she loved Jennifer why would she talk shit about Joyce, who was introduced as Jennifer’s friend, just yesterday? Gossip can be mean, but it doesn’t have to be mean. This feels more pot stir-y than gossipy. Maybe it’s just my bad college experience of someone I thought I could trust was actually super manipulative and vindictive. Even when I’ve gossiped I’ve made sure it’s verifiable, and now I try to do more checks of “Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?”. It took a lot of, “I wonder whatever happened to that guy in high school with the trench coat that exclusively talked through a cat puppet.” moments before I learned to slow down. (Cat puppet guy was sitting with us at that table for dinner, with his wife, who had no idea of what he was like in high school. But it was all fine and he’s doing quite well.)
I don’t see it as her talking shit about her, she just think it’s fun to talk about this stuff. And yeah she is not going to be super mature and think carefully about it, she is like 19 max. I don’t think we had seen any actual evidence of Alice having any ulterior motive or manipulative streek.
all alice has done so far is take the literal things that happened in front of her at face value, and failed to have a social filter. she either likes to gossip, or just does it without thinking about it. which, like, i consider that to not always be great behavior, but it doesn’t automatically make me think somebody is a psychopath
I don’t think her gossip misses the mark that much. In conversation, people use units of time as estimates. Joyce says she “had sex according to another definition” to mean a sexual encounter, and Alice goes with it instead of litigating what counts as sex.
The likely Doylian explanation of her jumping back in with both feet is: “want to add new cast member relatively quickly”. To me it feels like there were a handful of story hooks that were discarded, and Jennifer and Alice slowly reconciling was one of them. And I can see why, that’s a less interesting story than Jennifer wants to reconcile but sometimes people just move on. But that story is a bummer, and kicking Jennifer when she’s down and relegated to recurring character tier. AND it would probably write Alice out of the strip. So skip all that, speedrun a reconciliation and give her a fun personality that hadn’t been shown (in her limited appearances).
I’m not a mind reader, just speculating.
There hasn’t been a timeskip since the big one, and timeskips can be unsatisfying, but not seeing like a week of all these characters’ interactions would make a few things less jarring to me.
While Daisy makes some good points, I’m sure the main reason she made the picture of Dorothy and Joyce kissing at the protest the front page newspaper image was because it was two women kissing. Also, Joyce isn’t doing much to improve my view of her with her responses here.
It occurs to me that by widely distributing an iconic picture of sympathetic white women getting tear gassed for kissing at an anti-genocide protest, thus calling attention to the school cracking down on the protest in the most attention-calling way possible, Daisy has (regards of intention) done orders of magnitude more to oppose the Bulmerian genocide than anyone else in the strip could have even dreamed of.
I get why Asma and Raidah are irritated but in terms of actually moving public opinion, outing Joyce and Dorothy was absolutely the thing that was most going to affect if the school kept investing or not.
From a utilitarian perspective, for Daisy to NOT out Joyce/Dorothy would be to support the genocide in Gaza Bulmeria
I think you’re twisting yourself into pretzels. in this fictional world, the most likely change will be through Charlie, who was reached by the organized protestors, not Daisy picking a picture of Joyce and Dorothy’s tourism kiss.
In the real world, it’s students organizing that have gotten divestment from Israel, Sudan, Apartheid South Africa, and war profiteers.
Do you mean Charlie reaching out to make Carla think about her parent’s company? I thought of Ruttech as more like Amazon/Google than Raytheon/Lockheed-Martin before this story arch, but even Google changed their stance on using their technology for weapons or surveillance.
I don’t think any one thing is going to have an over arching impact on diddly right now. This protest actually happened. And the college hasn’t changed or met the protester’s demands. The class that Leslie teaches is based on doesn’t exist anymore. Colleges are losing international students. Professors fired, curriculums slashed.
Yes, I mean Charlie talking to Carla about it.
Not every protest is going to achieve its aims, most of them don’t, especially not short term. BDS to end apartheid in South Africa wasn’t something that happened suddenly, it built up. While many schools reacted with expulsion of students and firing of faculty last year, some schools did divest from war profiteers or Israel over it’s genocidal policies.
A newspaper editor posting photos only tangentially related to the atrocities, protests, or crackdown, did not do orders of magnitude more for those causes than organizers.
I am very frustrated that every article I can find on the topic is a year old and lists “Nearly no” universities have divested without listing which ones have. I think you might have given me something to look into.
From what I was reading the other day, University of San Francisco has, but says it hasn’t officially. In the US there’s a lot of laws saying freedom of speech and freedom of association doesn’t extend as far as boycotting or divesting from Israel.
I’d say I’m pretty sympathetic to Daisy’s position here and I think this argued me into being more critical of her choice to run with this cover photo.
The photo in real life would get much more eyes on it than the usual photos of protesters holding signs or cops in armour or tear gas. Whether that would manifest results more than a more straightforward photo is unknown.
Keep in Mind Joyce and Dorothy kissing was made the front page while A LITERAL SUPERHERO BEAT UP A HORDE OF COPS.
I’m just saying. That’s a waaaaaaay cooler money shot.
It would have been *incredibly damaging* to the goals of the protest to use a photo showing that a protestor attacked the cops before the cops used tear gas on the protesters!
Insomuch that she’s not protesting the Genocide. She’s simply there to keep the students and protesters safe. She wasn’t there to Protest. If students are in danger, she stops who’s endangering them. That simple.
Yeah, and focusing on the dangers to order posed by anti-fascists protecting protestors, actually sounds more what the fascist-sympathizing mainstream media would do? The best thing you can do for anti-fascists like Amazi-Girl is to not draw too much attention to them, I would think.
Then just use a different photo of amazi-girl where she isn’t hitting a cop? One of her leading protesters away from the tear gas? One of her getting injured? Or immediately after the kiss where she smacks tear gas away with a protest sign? I don’t think it’s as black and white as you suggest.
Amazi-Girl jump-kicking cops in the face seems like it’d be way harder to get a good picture of than two women standing still while tickling each other’s tonsils.
I assume Daisy finally got a girlfriend in the timeskip, because I have never seen her care more about journalism and less about thinking horny thoughts about girls kissing.
I, for one, am glad this is where we’re at, because “did Daisy fuck up here?” is INFINITELY more interesting a topic than anything else in this storyline.
Well I was busy and pretty late to the update and it seems like we’re debating whether to be mad at Daisy or not. I personally find it at least relieving that her argument for the photo is founded in logic over shameless horny although I still have objections but congrats to her for successfully pouring cold water over the fire of my righteous indignation.
That being said. Don’t trust stories told in compressed short form narratives such as comics published in your local school newspaper or perhaps even self published digitally like some sort of “webcomic”.
I got one question though because Daisy’s disappointment that Dorothy didn’t file a story right after surviving that protest is what really bothers me today. Uh, who is this Shanna and how did she possibly file a story from a holding cell when cops take your phone when they arrest you? That feels like a very specific and extreme example designed to somehow still shame Dorothy because she went through very extreme and dangerous circumstances that more than justify her lapse in journalistic intent. But maybe I’m wrong. Dotty should’ve locked in I guess.
Sigh, I didn’t read that thoroughly enough. It’s not especially helpful.
TL;DR: it depends on where you get arrested. But don’t count on being allowed a phone call, and if you are asserting your right to counsel, you have to be very explicit that you are demanding to be allowed to call your lawyer, or to be allowed to call your father to get HIM to contact a lawyer for you.
(I’m having trouble finding the specifics for Indiana, but I would expect it to be more restrictive than, say, California, where you’re allowed 3 phone calls and the police are supposed to provide you phone access ASAP.)
I think a reporter (especially if it is Fans Shanna) would be prepared to contact counsel. A lot of lawyers will be waiting at where ever protesters get held (reading through IDS papers on the actual protest they were taken away in college busses) or have provided their information to protesters before hand.
I’ve gone to several events for parents of trans kids where the ACLU reps have given their updated contact info. We’ve written legal counsel numbers on our arms just in case (some people say don’t do this because it can be used as premeditation for trying to get arrested). Heck a lot of parents of trans kids in my area are lawyers.
It seems very likely that a college student that is press, knows their rights, and already had legal counsel there to make sure the cops don’t break the rules could get their story at least out in a rough draft form.
Honestly mad at like, Law & Order and the like for perpetuating this myth for decades that you can just ask for a phone call and you have to be given one, no matter what. It’s dangerous misinformation. 🙁
A photo of Asma might have gotten her fired or worse. A photo of Joss inadvertently outed her. A blurry photo of two girls kissing wasn’t a bad choice.
But I’m here for the avalanche of consequences that are in motion while they argue with daisy. This is a sunk cost. They have much larger problems waiting for them.
Eh, I think Dorothy’s considering other people’s pain too, considering their entire friend group was recently held hostage (in part) by a guy who was willing to kill/die to force his daughter to be straight. Toedad may be dead, but his friends/church aren’t.
However, that picture shows a weird choice in priorities. Like, I get it, two people kissing in a confrontation with police can be a good message if one wants to show that love conquers all. But at the same time, this is at a protest against genocide where police is deploying tear-gas against students. Personally, I’d have focused on the protest and police violence.
Perhaps the kiss picture could be a smaller one on the same page?
Joyce has such a Calvin expression in the last panel, I have to believe Willis is intentionally channeling Watterson with that comment. It’s a very good likeness.
It’s possible to focus on multiple things in a non-linear way without it being a lie or manipulation or hiding something. Painstakingly working through every single topic that comes up, in the order they came up, is tedious and not always productive.
daisy has a big point here, newspapers can only put so much stuff in the photos and “people kissing amidst violence” shows up in riot/protest photos a decent amount
regardless of whether that’s morally right, that’s been where we’re at with news for decades
plus, you go to an event that you know is being photographed/maybe televised because were texted you about one of those photos that someone you know is there? and you’re surprised that that’s still happening?
also. I don’t know what’s supposed to happen here.
if daisy said sorry they would still be outed.
if daisy printed a retraction and said the people kissing on our previous cover were DEFINITELY NOT GAY OUR BAD FOR REAL they would be mega double outed
Change the photo on the website version of the story, and if the daily newsletter hasn’t be emailed out yet, have a different photo in that. I don’t know if that’s what’s supposed to happen, but it’s what could happen.
The characters focus mostly on the print version, because it makes a good prop and they interact with the print version. But Joyce has mentioned the online version. That her dad probably reads.
That’s basically the only thing they could do that makes any sense of them heading over here as a priority.
Of course, they haven’t brought it up yet and it probably wouldn’t work anyway.
When someone does something that upsets you it’s good to let them know that it upset you so that they can react to how what they did made you feel rather than assuming they’ll find out you found it upsetting all on their own.
I spent time reading actual IDS articles from when the real life protest happened. I loved the history of student protesting at IDS that I learned about and am now half chagrined about spoilers if the comic does elaborate more on that. Dunn Meadow was designated as a freedom of speech place for students in 1969.
On 4/8/24 protesters were asked to move from the Cox Arboretum to Dunn Meadow which they did and someone still got arrested. They planned this during the solar eclipse which just means DoA could have been even more dramatic and had snipers, tear gas, and a solar eclipse. But that was a few weeks before the encampment was created.
Seeing a lot of people say it’s improbable for Daisy to not recognize Joyce and Dot in the photo, and from our outsider POV that is kind of the case sure, but thinking about it within the actual universe of the characters it’s a photo of two blond women in nondescript clothing, probably both crying and leaking snot with red blotches on their face due to the teargas, largely obscured by the fact that photo was taken from behind Joyce.
A lot of the character’s most identifiable traits were not present at the time, covered or likely don’t stand out within the actual in-universe lense of the comic. Similar to how every Joe on the street won’t recognize Clark Kent as Superman because they probably know half a dozen other broad chinned brunettes in their life to the point where it’s not a noticeable trait to them.
Also saw some peeps say the title would indicate Daisy knew it was Joyce and Dot but if you zoom into the actual newspaper Also saw some peeps say the title would indicate Daisy knew it was Joyce and Dot but if you zoom into the actual newspaper it actually has a tag that the title makes an assumption simply for the sake of a pun
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I feel like Daisy should maybe look into getting her vision checked.
I mean, Joyce was running away from the kissing. They even identified as that name with a barely registered suffix.
Its pretty easy from our out of verse pov but imagining it in-universe it’s just two blond white girls in non-descript outfits with bright red blotches covering their face due to the teargas. It’s pretty reasonable to assume Daisy wouldn’t recognize them. Especially given the photo was taken from behind Joyce and by proxy hides both of their faces a good amount
The main reason everyone can tell it’s them is that they have all been expecting it for
yearsdaysDaisy… actually coming from a place of journalistic intent?
The pun’s still in bad taste, Daisy.
Listen, it’s important to bring attention to the real issue on campus: GIRLS KISSING.
Girls kissing does seem antithetical to a fascist and brutal police response to a peaceful campus protest.
not that protest
At its root there is too much fascism is attacking to not look at the intersectonality of what is going on in society. Colonialism, Evangelical Christianity, genocide, homophobia, racism, transphobia, etc. It all goes hand in hand. Existence is resistance and love wins over fear.
The image could have been cops beating the snot out of college students and hyped up the fear and hopelessness. Daisy went with girls smooching. It might’ve been a horny choice, but it also feels like a middle finger to the college and police for supporting genocide.
Brilliantly put.
Not to backseat, but I feel like this indignation towards Daisy would be more justified if we saw something else more “appropriate” happening at the protest. Like, what was Daisy *supposed* to go with? People holding signs? Once the cops shot tear gas everyone just kind of left, that we saw. The only one injured was Amazi-girl, and no one saw that. The only things that happened besides the kiss were people holding signs (boring), Joyce getting arrested (needs context), Amazi-Girl attacking a cop (looks bad unless you already think the school is wrong), and people walking away from tear gas (makes the tear gas look like a reasonable way to clear the field)
Joyce and Dorothy kissing was certainly the most interesting image from the *comic’s* perspective, so why isn’t it the most interesting in-universe? It’s even in the best interests in the protest itself to be represented by photogenic nonthreatening white women being tear-gassed for seemingly no reason.
I believe that if you look at the backgrounds, Amazigirl attacked more than one cop. She also vandalized a fence, and helped “criminals” escape. You can see her taking on two cops in the background of https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/panorama/
interesting =/= moral. I’ve said it before, the people in these iconic protest images tend to end up assassinated by the state. joyce and dorothy aren’t in that much danger from a college paper, but on top of outting them to the public, Daisy has made them the local public enemy #1, the faces of the anti-establishment movement of this college. The two of them have become acceptable punching bags for the entire pro-genocide portion of the campus and town.
“Good journalism” often correlates to having direct, pronounced harm on individual people.
i probably would’ve gone with a photo of the heavily armed riot police throwing tear gas, if anybody captured one.
“acceptable”? no. but striking and important, and nobody would’ve been pinpointed as “definitely was at the protest”
Also a cute, small, Aryan dream of a white girl in glasses getting forced to the ground by riot police with the headline “Students brutalized in peaceful protest” would be very striking and resonate with a lot of Americans I feel. Like Joyce fits the exact visual demographics that would make the largest number of people mad about this (unfortunately).
Only in so much that Joyce has been traumatized by so much and I think the readers are ready for a queer joy story.
When Daisy isn’t thinking with her legs she’s actually a serious and relatively competent journalist and editor, but I am quite surprised that we didn’t open with the horny side before moving into the serious side.
Honestly thank g-d we aren’t opening with that
Come on, Joyce. You’ve got to tell Dorothy that she’s in a polycule now.
Its likely on her to do list, right below important things like getting her comic into the Sunday edition
I’m sure Dorothy will be ecstatic.
Dorothy just has to cover up her eyes from seeing the Joe bits when watching them bang.
Fortunately, watching each other fuck is not typically part of a hinge relationship!
Joyce will undoubtedly be surprised by this.
I assume she also believes Dorothy and Joe will share one big bed.
A waterbed!
she needs more spouses to stack on top of her for maximum smoosh
<<<333
Point of order: As the plural of “mouse” is “mice”, the plural of “spouse” is “spice”.
Which is why Dorothy is very interested in Joe’s spice rack
I think she’s more interested in Amazi-Girl’s rack.
If Dorothy continues to date Walky would that make it a double-hinge relationship?
Polyamory is when everyone is always present for everyone else Always
Priorities!
I know, right?
First the feet dragging with Joe, now with Dorothy. Just fucking speak already!
I doubt this will end with Joyce accidentally going down on Dorothy instead of telling her.
It’d be a hell of a callback 6 months from now when this finally starts getting addressed though.
We can hope, though.
As I said on Patreon, c’mon, Joyce, other people hate lying too! Have the talk! Be the Joyce I love, not the Joyce who sometimes makes me feel like when I am forced to watch my cat throw litter out of the litterbox in the process of burying her poop!
I don’t think they’re in a polycule at all until they sit down and agree to it, which even Joyce hasn’t done. Joyce has put that conversation on hold until they figure out how much danger the two of them are in, and is probably only now realizing Dorothy is assuming things that didn’t happen. But right now this second is *not* the time for that.
wacky hijinks etc etc
Nope. Dorothy decided Joyce is all hers now, and now isn’t the time to upset that narrative.
I feel like them mutually coming to the decision to break with their boyfriends to be with each other (because they cheated on them) is a bit different than Dorothy unilaterally deciding Joyce is hers. If anything, Joyce seems to have unilaterally decided Dorothy is *hers*, what with her yoinkage and gloating at Walky.
….oh, Daisy. Please change.
Also uhhhh we gotta loop Dorothy in on that polycule proposal as soon as ya got a moment Joyce
I wanna say the new question is how the headline knew to make a bi pun if the two kissers were unidentified at the time
But, err, I have been acquainted with more bi women than lesbians, so maybe that was the actual safer guess?
I think there was an asterisk there explaining that the newspaper didn’t know the kissers’ sexuality but said “bi” for the sake of the joke.
Yes. “Making an assumption for the sake of a pun”
Too meta, fourth wall breaky
Didn’t understand what you meant until I reread and caught the “compressing my narrative” line haha
Though I doubt it was intentional, it’s a funny coincidence given that line of criticism! (Note: am a member of that line of criticism)
Walky just talked to the camera.
I think Daisy is worse than most characters people hate in this storyline, tbh
Why?
She didn’t intentionally out them; she didn’t recognize them. Aside from not letting Dorothy walk all over her, what is she doing in this strip that is so objectionable?
I mean regardless of who exactly was in the picture, there was a nonzero chance she’d be outing them unless she could verify who it was, which clearly she did not. That’s irresponsible at best and as a lesbian herself she should know that.
If you’re making out in an extremely public place, a reasonable assumption can be drawn that you are already out, or that you are outing yourself at that moment. Of course, that assumption was wrong, but you get the point.
Oh I don’t think that’s a safe assumption to make about college students in particular at all. But maybe that’s informed by my personal history (gay, lotta gay friends, almost none of us were out to our families bc lol red state)
Sure but how many of them made out in the middle of an extremely highly publicized public protest?
That’s fair, I just wish Daisy would be more aware of…most things, honestly
If you do anything that stands out at a protest and there are photografers, you’re gonna get snapped by a journalist.
One man was sitting in front of the police during the protest in gothenburg over NRM being allowed to demonstrate. I went and sat down next to him in solidarity, it might have been a five second window between him and i being the only one sitting and ten others joining, but some photografer managed to get a shot of just the two of us sitting in front of a line of police. Apparently being a
young white woman with pink hair in solidarity to an elderly coloured man was photoworthy.
Hell, based on some of the stuff that got published in my own college’s daily paper, you could leave the “at a protest” out of your first paragraph.
This is one of those things that I wonder if it’s generational — back when I was in college (the 1990s), there was very little “I’m out on campus but not back home” going on — the only LGBTQ+ folks doing stuff in public were the ones who were “out and proud”, and almost by definition you could assume that if someone was being gay/trans in public, they were okay with it being public knowledge.
I’m only 30 and was at college in the 2010s and this was definitely how I perceived things. If you’re doing things in public, you’re out by definition.
that is a deeply, truly, indescribably incorrect assumption to make about people, and it is a wonder you have not only somehow internalized that lie to yourself, but have typed it out and saw nothing wrong with it before hitting send.
being out to the people in your immediate vicinity does not mean you’re out to your family or the campus or the police or the entire world. like that’s just not how being out operates for anybody ever. no one is assuming their moments of intimacy, even ones had in public spaces, are going to be photographed and recorded for literally everyone else to see at a later date.
There’s a difference between kissing someone on a park bench and in the middle of a protest in the process of being shut down by police, and I would thank you to tone down the moralizing grandstanding. I’m just as gay as you or anyone else, and us having a difference of opinion on what counts as being out does not give you the right to talk down to me.
No, I’m actually the gayest one in these comments per capita. I detransitioned for a day just to fuck that one guy’s dad, I’m basically as gay as humanly possible.
Hey? Hey? Megan? Hey? Imma need that story Megan, you can’t just drop that shit and move on Megan. Imma be thinking about this all day
I mean by that same logic you could say they could never print a picture that contained PDA because they have a “non-zero” chance of revealing cheating, or showing a relationship that people wouldn’t approve of. Or if you continue that train of logic they couldn’t show pictures of anyone because they could be outing someone as transitioning.
At some point the onus has to be on the individuals that if you are doing something in public there is a chance people will see you.
I mean honestly I do think photos containing PDA should probably be run past the people in them before being printed in the newspaper. Most photos of people who aren’t known public figures, in fact. I get that that’s not viable in some situations but I genuinely think the state of personal privacy these days sucks shit in a lot of ways.
I find no flaw in your argument, as known public figures (such as CEOs at Coldplay concerts) aren’t protected.
you shouldn’t be publishing pictures of people at protests, full stop. this is known, having your face out at a protest is like hanging a sign from your neck that says “I hate cops, shoot me shoot me shoot me.” Every modern protester knows this, we all know to wear masks whenever physically possible if we don’t want to become politicians or targets overnight. These college kids are all dumb idiots in a fictional comic and are doing it wrong, but they all knew they were in danger by being there, even in this light and fluffy retread of the brutal reality.
Taking pictures of people’s faces when they’re at protests is basically just putting out a hit on private citizens, and Daisy is a thoughtless brute for doing that to people she knows. Do I think the comic will explore the realistic consequences of that? LORD do I HOPE not!!! In real life, would Joyce and Dorothy have to change their names and move out of the country to ever be safe again? Prrrrrobably!
“pictures of people at protests shouldn’t be published” is not an idea that’s gonna gain much support from the people who care about whatever they’re protesting, just an FYI, since posting pictures of people protesting is often a pretty vital component of that protest accomplishing anything. For many modern protests, it’s literally the only point of having the protest at all, the only bit of it that might accomplish anything.
Pictures of protests with multiple people too zoomed out to make out distinctly, or of police in response to those people, or simply with the public’s faces obscured, or of just the journos in the streets themselves, are all not only possible but are things that are becoming more and more common as more and more journalists start to actually care about the people they report on.
The point of a protest is not to Look Good. It’s to show people in power what public opinion is and what we’re capable of if policy does not change. It’s about protecting your community, making people feel safer, and fighting back against oppression. It’s about standing up to cops where everyone can see so that cops know what’ll happen if they try this shit where no one can see.
IDK where you grew up or who taught you your politics, but your and several others’ view that protests are just a costume you put on to look good on social media so that you can have the *effect* of having done something is not conducive of real change. No one cares that you posted good pics of something, politicians aren’t gauging acceptable behavior via posts and articles, they care that a crowd of people is in the streets outside their mansion. They care that even under threat of military violence, those people will continue to stand up for themselves. They care about being outnumbered.
You don’t protest genocide because it looks good, you protest genocide because its the right thing to do, because if the people in charge don’t change on their own, we can make them change as a society.
That doesn’t require publishing random gay teens’ faces on the internet.
Right, so your argument basically amounts to you not knowing what protests are or how they can accomplish things or what makes them more or less effective. From that point of view, I can see how pictures like this would seem to be bad! If a protest is just empty virtue signalling and meant to be functionally meaningless, like you’re arguing, then obviously the sensible side goal would be to minimize any possible risks to the protestors.
But here, let me help: The protest displayed in the comic is purely an image protest. There’s no implicit threat, no show of power, and no leverage to act on any demands. Image protests are worthwhile solely because of their ability to impact public sentiment – to win converts to the movement and support for the cause – and historically the best way to do that is through humanizing and personalizing them. For an extremely important historical example, see Rosa Parks, who was part of one of the most effective image protests in history.
There are certainly types of protests where having the identity of protestors kept secret makes sense – an image protest definitely isn’t one of them.
Tobias you are a genuinely disturbing person.
I assure you that the feeling is extremely mutual, “genuinely disturbing” is how I feel about most of the things you say here.
It wasn’t like Daisy was taking creepshots, the kiss was part of a protest intentionally designed to get media attention, and (gross headline aside) if the point of the protest was to get photos of the school cracking down on sympathetic students for expressing an opinion and thus build support for said opinion, Daisy did *WAY* more to oppose the genocide than Joyce and Dorothy standing in the background would’ve.
Just because you repeat it doesn’t make it any more true.
This *is* a creepshot. Idk what you think that word means, but this is one of those. Its a photo of two women in a moment of intimacy taken without their consent and then published for public viewing. That is 100%, without a doubt a creepshot.
if they were at a public restaurant patio, in the back yard, snapped through a window yes, but as i explained below, no matter how ick it is, JOROTHY INHERENTLY GAVE PERMISSION TO BE SNAPPED BY ATTENDING A PUBLIC EVENT.
there is no expactation of privacy, they are at a public event in a public space. the ick factor does not change this.
No? They didn’t? No they didn’t. Idk why you’d think going to a “public event” like a protest is equivalent to signing your rights away to anyone with a smart phone.
because it litterally is the letter of the law in canada.
me a an individaul walkin gdown the street can be photgraphed and published without my knowledge or consent as i am in a public place, and unless you live in a stast or country whose laws specifically cover it, you do not have any control over that. check out my comment below, but tldr, by stepping out onto a public setting yu waive said right to privacy unless the laws of the land state otherwise
haveyou attended a sproting event and ended up on a jumbotron?
by your statement that would be a voilation of your privacy but there is nothing you can leagelly due about it as you are in public.
legal =/= morally correct, jumbotron at a sporting event =/= published alongside protest photos for everyone to see, these arguments =/= understanding my point
sorry as i said on my lowerr post about this, when i was in school we were taught that when i a public setting there is no “expectation of privacy” Literal words from the canadian laws about such, and to agrue one has had their privacy rigths violated one has to prove they were in an environment were there would be a reasonable expectation of privacy, i have repeatedly commented on the “ick ” factor here as i do agree there is ick here and i am not saying daisy morally made the right decision, just that i was taught that i do not have a legal right to expect anonyimty if i am in public.
it is similar to how i was raised that being denied what i want is not a punishment just a fact of life (age 3-13 EVERY time i said i wanted something my sister would sing”you can’t always get what you want”) as i was also raised that there is a destinctio between having something taken from you as a punishement vs not gettin gsomething because you desired it
She could have approved a better front cover that represented the protests better and didn’t potentially out two unidentified queer ladies. Stuff to criticize to be sure.
Not to single you out but this take is completely insane. The entire POINT of a peaceful protest is to create pictures like this that make your opposition look like monsters and thus move public opinion against them. Two white women getting tear gassed for kissing is absolutely the most effective photo if the goal is to actually accomplish something.
I actually don’t want to see protest photos of people kissing. I want to see protest photos of people protesting. Kissing fights it. What about Genocide makes you wanna kiss? That feels like it’s really really distracting from the point of the protest, especially cuz the women making out are not part of the demographic of the people being genocided.
Pictures of people protesting are worthless, unless it’s a huge number of people, which it wasn’t here.
For proof of this, see this very comic, which barely focused on the people protesting at all even in the scenes taking place at said protest. The point of the protest was to make the school look bad to pressure them into divesting from Bulmeria. Photos of like a dozen people holding signs doesn’t do that. Photos of the school tear-gassing photogenic white women who aren’t hurting anyone does.
The tear gassing is the important part. Not that they’re kissing. Also the headline says “Kiss Bombings good-bi” not “god isn’t this fucked up aren’t you pissed about it?” It’s evocative but it’s not SAYING anything. I dunno I would so much rather see people protesting or even images of them being dispersed by the police than two women kissing.
Kissing is such an “all’s well that ends well” sorta thing. Not a “things are bad and getting worse”.
👏🏽💯
There’s precedent of hippie love-in protests against Vietnam, but yeah, I feel like Daisy’s attempt missed that vibe. Too punny. You want readers, but you also want them to take the article seriously.
The fact that you keep repeating how they are white women is really fucking weird
They do have a point, photogenic white women in peril get way more sympathy in media and the public than most other demographics (*depending on the source of the peril.) See: “Missing White Woman Syndrome.” Systemic racism and sexism, it’s American as apple pie.
Which is why I think pictures of Joyce being brutalized by riot police or pictures more focused on the tear gassing (you can’t even see the burns bc their faces are mushed together) would’ve been more effective in this case. Cute lil blue eyed white girl in glasses (glasses make you innocent and unthreatening) having her visible effects of tear gassing would really tug at the heart strings up subconsciously racist indianans
Same. When I decide to look at news stories about protests, and the stories have pictures with them, I usually expect those pictures to be of people protesting, not a picture of a couple people kissing at a protest.
Man you really aren’t one to tell anyone they have completely insane takes as demonstrate in this very comment.
I’m not convinced EDM’s take is as bad as it seems at first. Yes, to us, two women kissing is completely irrelevant to the protest, but we’re already on the protesters’ side.
There are many people who still think the cops are good and stuff that’s happening over in some other country doesn’t matter to them, but may be swayed by seeing people who resemble them suffering from police brutality.
Yes, that’s as a clueless and self-centered viewpoint, but having them support the cause, even for those reasons, can still be useful, even if they never take the additional step of looking further into it and thinking outside their mental boxes.
Just to add, though: I agree with Yotomoe’s point about the headline. They could’ve used the text to emphasize the police brutality aspect, but instead they went with a corny pun.
I disagree. I don’t have enough brain power to argue it any more than that i sm going to sleep
Maybe I can help by giving a counter-argument to my own comment?
This is a college newspaper. Almost all of the people likely to bother reading it almost certainly fall into one of the following categories:
1) well-informed students who already have a better understanding of events than the the kinds of people who’d be swayed by this kind of imagery
2) students who have their attention grabbed by pictures like this, but are only interested for gossip-related reasons and lose interest if it turns to “political stuff”
3) non-students with personal connections to the students involved; potentially people the students in question aren’t out to.
It occurs to me, also, that the comic’s generally vague overview of a simplified copy of a real protest, with the original details replaced by fictional ones, might be making it easier to disregard how the newspaper depiction fails to focus on the protesters’ message (because we already know the real version).
If a real protest was reported on in a way that amounted to “two girls kissed at, I dunno, some protest about something or other”… well, that absolutely would be terrible reporting.
Part of the problem, I suppose, is that we don’t know what the newspaper article itself says. If the picture’s little more than the newspaper version of click bait for a good article, as C.T Phipps suggested below, it’s not so bad (though still likely influenced by Daisy’s horniness).
Also, other commenters saved us both the trouble by offering much better counter-arguments than I did. Very helpful!
It’s not a meritless argument but I can’t say they’re arguing it well.
You have a skewed, deleterious, and malformed view of what protests are.
That is not, in any way, the purpose of a protest. Have you ever organized one or participated in running or leading one? If you get good PR from it that helps the cause, that’s fantastic, but the purpose of a protest is an exercise of power. It is a disruption that is, in and of itself, a public demonstration of your cause’s capacity to cause further disruption if necessary to achieve their ends. It is a demonstration that, when necessary, you can pull thousands and thousands of people to a specific place to disrupt the ordinary functioning of the space you are in. It is a demonstration of the public anger that has been roused by the malfeasance you are protesting, and an implicit statement that if the powers that be do not respond to your demands, you are capable of causing much more significant disruption over a much longer period of time.
Protests are and have always been an exercise of a type of political force. Understanding this is core to utilizing them in an effective way to create political change.
<3
<3 right back atcha, Yotomoe, I've enjoyed yr contributions in this comment section for years now. And yeah, I lead a march through my state's capital city every year with thousands of people following behind me, and I *never* forget that what we are doing is a reminder and a threat.
if you know anything about the reality of modern, american protesting and the public-facing figures of said protests, especially the already marginalized faces like queer ones, this question is insultingly dense, like asking why the sky is blue.
if you DON’T know any of that, then why are you up at 12am, don’t you have algebra homework due soon? does you mom know you’re up past your bedtime?
Now that is not fair to young people. Many MANY afults also don’t anything about that. Multiple of them are in charge of a country right now!
In general this is completely true but she’s not actually doing anything objectionable here
I mean, she’s blowing off and instantly dismissing two staffers of her paper who are here, letting her know that they’ve been outed involuntarily and that they have been harmed, even if they have not yet gotten to the “Also Joyce’s family is part of a violent cult that have already stormed the campus once with guns” part yet. She’s acting really blithe and careless about the harm she is now being told she has caused, even if her motives were sound when she published the picture.
Counter-point: Joyce and Dorothy are arguing that Daisy should have prioritized Joyce and Dorothy over picking the photo most likely to have the protest actually accomplish any of its goals of *stopping a genocide*.
Like, what should Daisy have done instead? Asma holding a sign? Who care! Amazi-Girl attacking a cop? Makes the protests look bad to anyone who doesn’t already thing assaulting cops is cool. Daisy picking a photo of photogenic white women getting tear gassed for kissing did a million times as much to actually weaken the school’s position than anything Joyce and Dorothy intended to do.
I think the pun headline runs counter to your argument. Actually, I think your other examples would have been better. A protester with a sign (like Asma) gets their message boosted. A popular/proven campus hero covered in her own blood, why not?
White women in peril provably works better. Nobody cares about a minority holding a sign (agitator, doesn’t even belong) or a vigilante that hopefully got the boots put to her by the real heroes. This was the best picture choice and Daisy knew it.
What an insanely cynical thing to say. I love how racism is so deep that people would rather “play the game” of racism than allow someone more personally effected by an issue to ever be a representation of said issue. Really cool. Can’t wait to see the BLM photos of two white guys high-fiving.
Also sorry if your post was a heavy dose of sarcasm that I failed to pick up on but if you meant this in earnest then see my previous comment.
Its not cynicism, it’s just a fact that people care way more about white women in peril than any minority. Missing white woman syndrome and all. It sucks but it’s why allies from the majority groups are necessary for minorities to get rights
👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽💯 @Yotomoe FUCKING THIS
the point of the protest in the fucking first place is to raise awareness of a genocide
a genocide against ARABS
I’m fucking sick and tired of commenters saying “oh unless the genocide protest story has white girls kissing nobody is gonna pay attention to it”
the “if they happen to be misguided white folk” part of that sentence is conveniently left out
to reframe the marginalization of the real issue as an acceptable biproduct of business getting done is still racism, period
Daisy made a mistake, and no amount of mental gymnastics or flagrant misuse of leftist talking points changes this
See the thing is, I feel like the fact that their faces are hidden by the kiss lessens the peril! There are better moments of them in peril, particularly Joyce!
Given that Joyce and Dorothy knew that the protest was being covered by the media, and that photos that could potentially out people were going out to the world, including Joyce’s family — that’s the reason they were there in the first place — it seems to me that the ones being blithe and careless were Joyce and Dorothy, for kissing there in the first place. Daisy made a pretty reasonable assumption that anyone kissing in full view of anybody who cares to look at a public event explicitly intended to attract media attention is pretty much by definition about as out as you can get without having it on your Wikipedia page.
(Waiting for Daisy to say, “Okay, so you’re mad about the photo we ran. Have you seen the video on CNN?”)
same about the have you checked the national news yet?
so yeah the situation has ick factor, you are possibly outing queer people on the front of your paper. BUT and a pretty big but here is (and this might be a genreational thing, as the biggest protests i remember from the end of my high school years were the seattle g20 protests around 98-99) and our social studies teach was very clear about the PUBLIC nature of attending protests, and what the definition of “expectation of privacy in a public place or event” is.
this is early days of digital photography becoming affordable and even then we were explained that by attending any public event we waive our right to anonymity. a hockey game, a protest, a sport festival, etc. there is no expectation of privacy to be had. it simply comes down to the definition of “being in public”. now i know there are places that have coulded this due to the prolification of “95% of pople had hd capable cameras on them” laws regarding the recording of people on the streets, in the interest of people going to and from work and such not having to worry about their daily lives being broadcast with out their permission, but all of them that i have read have exemptions for news events and journalists and public gatherings.
i we can feel that it is icky that daisy published this photo for any number of valid reasons. but by attending the protest with covering their faces Jorothy have waived their right to anonymity even if they didnt realize they did.
I mean Daisy is ridiculous but even from her first appearance I never expected her to be anything else.
It’s not just about whether a character behaves poorly. Character *inconsistency* has been my biggest gripe with this arc from the start, so I don’t see why Daisy should bother me on that front.
had me in the first half ngl
No one has been acting inconsistent with anything, and in fact every single action every main character has taken in this arc was pre-established many times over with foreshadowing, similar events, and outright stating what the characters were thinking. This myth that Joyce being gay or whatever is inconsistent writing needs to end, because it’s just a stupid excuse.
Tell me again where I said the inconsistency was in Joyce’s sexuality.
Believe it or not, people have other complaints about this story.
okay list them
Plaid will continue until performance improves.
Another Faans reference?
Hell yeah!
Good catch.
I wondered that, too
If Shanna works for the school newspaper, I wonder if Rikk and Tim are heading up the Science Fiction Club on campus?
Y’know, I’ve always found it weird how few of the characters are involved in any sort of club or organized extracurricular activity at all. There’s the newspaper, and IIRC Dorothy mentioned some kind of political club once, but we’ve never seen her actually at it, and I don’t think it ever came up again. And I think that’s literally it.
It’s something that kind of has to happen offscreen to maintain the flow of the narrative.
Not really. They could be part of the narrative in the same way some of the classes are, and ways to connect characters other than just, “They happen to live on the same hall.”
Roller derby, Ethan went to the LGBTQ+ meet up, church, gym bros, vigilantism, other than that most the cast is antisocial enough to go to class, eat, play video games, and make out. The clubs and extracurriculars have to serve the plot, but can also be characterizations sprinkled in.
The LGBTQ meetup seems to have been a one-off, and even if it wasn’t, no one has gotten involved in it any further, which seems kind of weird in itself given that, per Willis’s bleat the other day, the entire cast is queer.
Lifting heavy things with your buddy, jogging in the morning, or beating up criminals and riot cops (but I repeat myself) aren’t organized extracurricular activities. I wouldn’t classify church as one, either. It’s a community group, not a school one. I’m not sure even the roller derby qualifies. Marcie’s involved, and she’s not a student. Dorothy’s done some off-screen volunteering for a food shelf or something, but that’s another community thing, and another thing that got mentioned once and never heard of again.
There’s the football team now, but it took Tony fifteen years just to crack double-digit appearances, and none of the other team members are even that significant.
I’m not Mr. Super-Social (more Mr. Super-Social Anxiety Disorder), but I was in the Computer Club in college, and the Fencing Club until the other guy graduated so I didn’t have anyone to fence. Several of my friends were involved in the college radio station, such that it became a preferred hangout for my friend group. Some were in a anti-irresponsible-drinking group our RD sponsored, which made it extra-funny when one of them wrote himself up for underage drinking. Our Dorothy was president of the student government (I just googled her, and while she’s sadly not PotUS yet, she’s currently working as a congressional aide). A bunch of us did intramural broomball (we lost every game except one… against the league champions (who were actually Ms. President and the other Fencing Club guy’s team), who beat everyone but us, which I think by the transitive property means that we beat everyone).
And IU has a lot more options available than my tiny technical college did.
And I attended 4.5 era of undergrad and 2.5 years of gradually school without participating in a single club, even though I hung out with groups of people doing planned things (okay, mostly Mafia) all the time.
It’s possible that because you attended clubs, you mostly got to know other people who attended clubs?
*snerk* Okay, thanks Autocorrect, for changing “grad school” to “gradually school” – That’s actually pretty spot on!
tbf, when I was in college just about the only person in my circle who did much in the way of extracurriculars was my one roomie who was in a frat. Oh, and one second-remove acquaintance who was always trying to get me (or anyone else, really) to join the highfallutin’ debate club.
We DID things outside of classes, but none of it organized by clubs
Wait, one more: Two friends who worked for the local campus TWENTY-FIVE WATT radio station. I did sit in for a guest DJ set for one of them and ALMOST joined the radio station as well by then failed my Saving Throw vs. Fuckit
I wonder if there is one.
During the initial crossover with its Walky, Mr cheese was saying how there are duplicates, and then the camera panned away to show us the it’s walky version of Shanna and Meighan. Meaning canonically there are versions of Shanna and Meighan somewhere in the DoA universe. We now know where Shanna is – another student reporter, sending in her articles from the holding cells, which honestly is extremely in character.
Shanna Cochran? FAANS Crossover please Campbell and Willis?
I’m glad I’m not the only one that caught this. Assuming there’s no Sci-fi club Shanna would still be the brittle overly-neurotic writer trying desperately to deny that she is one. That would be the type to get her story in early.
I don’t know who Shanna is, but consider me impressed.
Same. I’m assuming Shanna didn’t write the hed or pick the pic.
She’s a character from Fans (sometimes referred to as “Faans”, with two As), a webcomic that had a crossover with It’s Walky! in 2003. Having never read that comic outside of said crossover, I couldn’t give you much more than that, though I think she was a journalist there as well as here.
In particular, she was a reporter who was the best friend of one of the heads of the Sci-Fi Club and attended meetings allegedly so she could report on the things that happened there, but she hid her actual nerddom under a veneer of sarcasm and holier-than- thou attitude because she thought people wouldn’t take her seriously if she was known as someone who was interested in unicorns and such.
By the time of the crossover, she had owned up to it, and her drama came from other vectors.
Fans is an all-time favorite of mine! It’s about a college club of nerds who keep stumbling onto improbable sci-fi storylines and barely saving the day. The comic really built up the club from chaotic outcasts to a team/family who has earned all their skills, with Shanna being one of the best examples. And it’s a fun universe where all these big sci-fi concepts keep bumping up against each other and combining in wild ways.
“I might have to make some changes to Julia Gray and Future President Doris’s relationship.”
I caught that uncertainty Joyce Brown!
We may get some catastrophic drama yet, my friends.
I’m sorry but it stretches credulity for me that Daisy cannot recognize Dorothy when Raidah and Joe can.
To be entirely fair she’s met Joyce like once and I am positive Dorothy isn’t the only blonde white girl on campus
She is a blonde white girl that Daisy sees very often! Certainly more often than Raidah sees her.
Yeah, on that front, Daisy’s excuse is a pretty flimsy one.
Really? Because I assume that neither of them can be directly seen face wise.
Because…they’re kissing.
They can be seen enough that multiple people have recognized both of them, including one person who doesn’t really know of of them well enough to normally be able to pick them out at a glance.
The only person who’s weird for figuring it out is Raidah. Joe could pick them both out from a football field because wuv/knowing the other one since probably kindergarten.
I’ve completely failed to recognize acquaintances because I accidentally met them in unexpected contexts, so I’m inclined to cut Daisy slack on that point – but also her job and position significantly diminish that slack.
Raidah saw them coming back together, in that clothing, and knew they were at the protest. She likely had more context clues than Daisy did, since Daisy didn’t even know either of them were there.
This is a fair point.
Also, Raidah hates Joyce.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/bubblebrained/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/05-this-was-halloween/realestate/
One more citation being added in a reply to myself.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/04-dont-stop-billie-ving/kept/
Joyce is just not someone Raidah barely knows or wouldn’t recognize in a crowd.
I’m in full agreement that Raidah would recognize Joyce at a glance. It’s Dorothy I don’t think she would.
That’s fair, unless she has a cork board with each of Joyce’s friend-group singled out with their full name and a list of potential weaknesses next to it (which she might or might not, we don’t really know how deep the Machiavellian part goes heh).
I do think Lumino’s point about how she knows they were at the protest and saw them in those clothes yesterday is helpful, tho.
… is helpful???
I do think Lumino’s point is a good one, that seeing them in the same clothes yesterday smelling like tear gas and confirmed to have been at the protest helps for the credulity of her recognizing Dorothy.
Mind you, I don’t necessarily think this is a good enough cover for Daisy for Willis NOT to have had her do something really shitty. For me, it’s really going to depend on how many other people immediately recognize them upon seeing the photo. If it’s just Joe, Raidah, and presumably Becky, Daisy’s excuse is less transparently awful: if Joyce and Dorothy got recognized by the folks over in Forrest, noooot so much.
But Willis also doesn’t need the Forrest denizens to recognize them, because Lucy or Jennifer and now Alice could easily identify them for anyone in their vicinity.
Raidah didn’t know them until Asma said something.
Sound like you need better quality credulity if it stretches so easily.
She could have not examined the photo particularly closely (unlikely)
She could just be lying to save face.
She could have some undiagnosed vision problems that she should get checked
Also, because Raidah is very sharp and attentive to detail while Daisy isn’t.
Where are you getting that from because Daisy is a journalist. She pays attention to details. She could tell that Wally’s shirt stain came from a girl.
That is not because of journalism and you know it.
She could not tell. She just hoped it.
Or she could have Prosopagnosia and doesn’t admit it.
Fair point: Daisy is able to distinguish drool on a shirt as being from a woman or not a woman – identifying two women she already knows should be a breeze by comparison!
It does seem kinda unlikely that Daisy would not recognize Dorothy in the picture she took and put on the front page of the newspaper, considering Dorothy works for the newspaper and has done multiple stories for it.
Raidah just saw Joyce and Dorothy last night and they told her they were at the protest. She was actively annoyed at them already and saw how they were dressed. Daisy kind of knows them and wouldn’t be thinking of them specifically with their faces mushed together.
Poor Dorothy is batting zero with her indignant attempts to bring people to task (see Joe).
Are we sure she isn’t a good candidate for the Democratic Party?
*zing*
she’s already got her sexual fiascos ready to go! A younger, slightly more bisexual Bill Clinton in the making this one.
Dorothy is the kind of girl who wouldn’t inhale but puff out to look cool.
maybe a woman CAN be president, but she needs to learn some sick sax riffs, first
Monica Lewinsky was like, 19. And given his prominence in the Epstein files, probably not the youngest person he took horrible advantage of. So this is a very icky comparison, just FYI.
Summing up this entire incident: https://www.reddit.com/r/dumbingofage/s/nXC1uJ7BmL
1. Poor Shanna! I hope she was released (uncharged) the next day, unhurt.
2. EXTREMELY iconic imagery!
um, PRIORITIES Daisy??? (-_-)
Priorities!
OK so she didn’t know it was them so you can’t take it as a personal slight. Though still I find some of her decisions questionable when it comes to what should be front page news.
Daisy throws shade at Dorothy for being there and not covering the story. While Daisy was there and was more focused on two girls tongue wrestling each other than the world practically burning down around her. Chances are if Dorothy did make a report of the protest, it would have been scrapped in favor of this.
I’d question how Daisy even got to be in charge of the college News Papar but apparently I’m constantly being reminded that you don’t haft to be good at you job to be in a leadership position.
I have the weird idea the story underneath the picture is an incredibly intricate and well-written discussion of both the police violence as well as the situation in Bulmeria.
But she went for the most attention getting photo possible that also made her horny.
You literally describing click bait.
…yes?
That’s news media in America any more. They’re all fighting for views and to be the most (respectably) scandalous. That’s why I try to listen to mostly NPR in the car and read a variety of other sources. I would rather read AP than CNN or FOX but might read everything to compare slants and bias.
THIS
like why not show protesters being beat by cops on the front page to get attention
you know, the right kind of attention, that this issue actually NEEDS, that was the point of the protest in the first place???
Because that’s what cops do. They protect rich people’s property and beat disobedient libral college students into submission. The real paper did that and the college didn’t change their mind on anything. Reinforcing fear of the police and protesters as powerless and weak hasn’t changed anything in our world.
Maybe a kiss in a fiction story will. (I actually just went through the newspapers archives curious about what photos were taken during the protest and am going to make that a separate thread).
It’s like The New Republic having Ben Shapiro-like headlines.
And she was 100% correct to do so! The entire goddamn point of a peaceful protest is to create images like this!! The protestors looking as sympathetic as possible (pretty white girls kissing) and the opposition looking like assholes (tear gassing the pretty white girls).
Not only did Daisy do nothing wrong, Dorothy and Joyce complaining that Daisy shouldn’t have used the photo that was best for the anti-genocide protest THEY WERE AT is morally abhorrent. They’re *literally* saying the genocide was less important than not outing them!
This is not, at all, the point of a protest, and at this point, I have to sincerely and directly ask you: do you have any personal experience with protests or protesting at all? You keep loudly articulating something that is flatly untrue, and misrepresenting the purpose and intent of protests in the process.
Depending on the college, partly skills, partly seniority, partly sucking up to whichever faculty is in charge.
There more that one president that demonstrate it!
I don’t think Daisy was there. Shanna is the one who was on the scene and filed the story.
We don’t know if Daisy was there. As the editor, it would probably be a bad idea for her to actually be there.
She got a picture of two people kissing at a war protest. At most she’s guilty of due diligence issues for not finding the kissers… But I mean, it took them HOW long to find that sailor and the nurse he kissed without consent on V-J day?
She was under no obligation to track down who was in the photo and frankly the idea of doing so for a story the very next morning is ridiculous, if Joyce and Dorothy didn’t want to be noticed they should’ve picked any other venue to snog in and I’m continually surprised that the majority of commenters think that Daisy is the one who screwed up here. People don’t go to protests to not be seen!
Oh yeah no, Daisy is fine.
Anyone without the foreknowledge of their 48 hour UST-a-thon would have taken what they did as performance art.
Hell, I look forward to the Theater Department preforming the Kabuki retelling for the end of school year show. though I prefer Noh theater.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/raided/
I could’ve sworn Jennifer says that Daisy was covering it, but I think that was assumed by people in the comments.
Daisy implies she has to cover the protest to Jennifer, but not explicitly
Thanks! And I kind of assumed Daisy would be covering the protest in a “delegating to the underclassmen reporters” sort of way and not “physically on location” sort of way. Unless Daisy was at the protest to actually protest and has been great at keeping that to herself!
Do we know where Daisy is at in terms of college? Not a sophomore, but I don’t know if she is doing graduate work or not.
I think Daisy wasn’t there, she mentions the story about the protest was written by someone named Shanna.
There’s a bit of the J Jonah Jameson about how Daisy is written, and that includes the fact that if you ignore the one massive massive character flaw she’s otherwise actually pretty good at her job
Yup. ICONIC IMAGERY is a cute way to say “imagery unrepresentative of the event that turns me on” while pretending to objectivity. Daisy’s fulla shit. This wasn’t a celebration, it was a protest against genocide, and two girls kissing (who had been at the multi-day protest for all of 20 minutes) ain’t the subject. If Daisy wants to say sex sells, fine, she can embrace her role as a yellow journalist instead of pretending to be a serious publisher – but a free school paper, funded by student fees, doesn’t need sensationalism, and the student body doesn’t need Daisy nearly as much as Daisy needs student bodies.
Gonna add that if Daisy was as high-minded as she’s trying to seem, she’d have made some sort of effort to contact the subjects of the photo to ask for comment.
👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽💯
as entertaining a horny idiot Daisy can be, she really needs a long and thorough talking to about a thing called JOURNALISM ETHICS
Yeah! Daisy shouldn’t have used a striking image where the protestors are depicted as attractive white girls expressing love for each other while offscreen forces rain tear gas down on them! She should have used a “representative” photo of some random person holding a sign! After all, it’s not like the entire fucking point of a peaceful protest is to generate news media that makes you look sympathetic and makes your opposition look like evil goons, thus moving public opinion in your favor!
Honestly I unironically agree with your entire first sentence.
Considering the newspaper in the background of the last panel of
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/02-look-straight-ahead/pictures/ I have doubts that whoever’s in charge of newspaper funding really cares that much about the actual content.
Daisy gets the newspaper published, and maybe that’s all that’s required of her.
Also, Dorothy was not in any way assigned the story, nor would she have been capable of covering it, in the state she was in.
Even if you show someone being beaten by a cop, some people will twist it in to the person somehow being deserving of that violence.
Wait what does she mean by “didn’t file a story?” Why is she dissapointed Dorothy didn’t do that?
Dorothy was assigned to cover it.
Ohhhhhh ok thank you
Yeah, and another writer both attended AND covered it, despite being taken into custody.
Dorothy was dealing with a personal crisis, and as a reader, I recognize that, but yeah, she botched doing her reporting job in the process.
Jennifer, at least, did her due diligence on tracking down Amazi-Girl.
“Wait, she was at a what?”
I don’t think Dorothy was assigned to the protest https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/raided/
If Dorothy was assigned to cover it, we saw no evidence of that whatsoever in the comic and it was never mentioned to my knowledge anywhere.
Dorothy is a reporter at Daisy’s paper. Dorothy attended the protest but didn’t write a story about it.
Probably because Dorothy is a reporter for the newspaper, and when she was at an extremely newsworthy event she didn’t even bother to write a story about it.
Uh oh Joyce
Did somebody not tell Dorothy the full facts about the Joe situation?
Is somebody going to try to keep seeing Joe behind her new soul mate’s back?
Godspeed, you optimistic little shit xD
She hasn’t exactly had a chance to yet with the newspaper situation
She definitely could’ve filled Dorothy in while they were running over here! At least a high-level summary. I think her vague response is telling that she’s not eager to explain to Dorothy that they’re not exclusive (yet).
Joyce made the extra time to double back and taunt Walky a second time — if she can do that, she has time to explain the Joe stuff to Dorothy en route haha
Doesn’t really seem like the sort of conversation that should be had while running
I feel like this sort of conversation needs ones full attention, not a “oh btw” thing while ones focus is elsewhere
OTOH, it’s something you might want to bring up before dumping your girlfriend’s boyfriend for them.
Sometime in between not letting Dorothy break up with Walky how she wanted and getting to Daisy’s office.
She could have yelled that she was still going to suck Joe’s weenus while they ran through the hallway. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
Lost a perfect opportunity for a zinger right there.
more strip we can’t be compresing the storyline!
o_o I’ve made comments that are nearly identical to three bubbles in this strip in the past two days.
Also found two where they were not putting strips in on Sundays:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/02-look-straight-ahead/strip/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/01-sister-christian/split/
Performing Extremely Iconic Imagery, DoA this year in a nutshell
yeah……… you compressed your narrative into Dorothy’s––
Joyce wanted to do more days?? must be that plot-heavy
normally, you’d make it happen by putting Sunday updates as a stretch goal
Once again asserting that Daisy did nothing wrong, and also that I don’t think Dorothy’s done anything for the school paper since the new semester began? That last part isn’t related to the first part but it only just occurred to me that without Amazi-Girl around her journalism just sort of dries up (presumably for story reasons since most student paper topics not related to the main cast wouldn’t be interesting for us to see, which makes sense, it’s just sort of funny to reflect on)
She has written at least one story. It was about Amazi-Girl, admittedly, but.
Which is unethical as Lois Lane pointed out in Superman. Dorothy knows the truth of Amazi-Girl.
It’s ethically dodgy but that’s comics.
Dorothy got tasked with covering the Roz scandal, and Dorothy only gets the AG beat because Daisy ends up thinking that from Dorothy’s other stories she’s a better more reliable writer than Jennifer.
So she definitely did stuff, and a lot of her work wasn’t the sort of thing that was important enough for us to see.
Wasn’t that all last semester?
Yeah, missed that specification. Oops.
I do think the fact that she apparently wrote multiple stories between the Joe/Roz thing and getting the Amazi-Girl beat is a thing that indicates that she’s been a somewhat reliable reporter for Daisy, but we also know that student journalism is something she gave less attention once her grades started to slip.
…oh yeah, Dorothy got an interview with Amazi-Girl, didn’t she? Am I remembering that right? That miiiiiiiight end up dangerous now that the cops are looking for AG 😨
I gotta admit, I very much admire Joyce’s sense of priorities in that final panel.
You’re not 100% wrong Daisy, but you still effed it up in your pursuit of an attention-grabbing front page. And love the pencil visually, but do you not have taste buds or notice the metal and rubber textures? Is it typical to not notice them? My teeth hurt looking at that.
“Yyehh?” JFC Joyce, y’all prioritized this over Becky and you still couldn’t make yourself find time to say it’s not Joever.
And yes Joyce, we are very aware of how much and with who you’ve been “compressing your narrative” but don’t put that thought in Daisy’s head of all people.
You notice but most people don’t nind it especially if they do that a lot.
I’m pretty sure she’s biting on the wood, if she isn’t just holding the pencil with her lips. Very strange idea to put the rubber in your mouth, though.
But why do they make flavoured rubbers if not intended to go in the mouth?
If Daisy cared about the “important public event”, then she wouldn’t have the main story’s title and picture be gossipy as all heck.
Its like click bait except there’s no clicking.
Except online.
Where there is.
This sort of “journalism” precedes the invention of computers by literally hundreds of years.
yeah, its’s basically making a genocide protest, not about the genocide
like, why did she not make people getting tear gassed and BEAT BY COPS the front page?
that would have been a much better way to get people’s attention while not detracting from what the point of the story should be to begin with
People (Americans) are desensitized to violence and extremism. It’s gotten so every day that the majority of people tune it out or are so overwhelmed by the echelons of power continually doing horrific things they feel helpless. People certainly will notice and argue about The Gays, though, for better or for worse. We don’t get to read the article (yet?) that goes with the picture.
The businesses that influence the media and government want people to live in fear. People who are scared don’t organize, don’t argue, don’t question, and go out and buy more stuff they don’t need. Two college gals are about the least actually threatening thing there is. For there to be riot police and tear gas and two bi-sexual young woman making out in the middle of it? It’s a pretty ballsy statement for the newspaper to publish and not, “Listen to us or we’ll call the cops on you little fuckers.”
“people certainly will notice or argue about The Gays, though, for better or for worse”
yeah, white BIGOTED people who use that framework of irrelevant, attention-redirecting argument bait to steer the conversation away from what people ACTUALLY need to be talking about
in a game where the goal of debate is to garner attention by looking firm in front of an adversary by whatever means necessary is a very USA politics thing, yes, but it’s also ultimately a right-wing tool for colonizing our attention and headspace
homophobic white fundie folk seek to basically affirm and re-establish themselves as the center of the universe — do NOT treat them as though this is true
I’m not treating them as if they’re right, but it is true that a lot more homophobic white fundke folk would barely notice or approve of student protestors being attacked or arrested. Them seeing a picture of two students kissing is powerful because it takes the fear tactics away from the police brutality.
Those people already aren’t talking about genocide and aren’t going to be swayed. People who are tapped out on the constant negativity and hate in the world are going to be sucked in by the picture and then hopefully be in a ppsition to be outraged at the people in charge of policy at the university.
Not to nitpick a diegetic photo that’s there to mainly add stakes to the cheating stuff, but i wanna push back a little on the idea that a picture of two students kissing on the front page is as radical as you keep saying it is, because the assumption that framing an article about violence (violence overseas, violence on the protesters, the scale of violence the cops have shown, etc etc) by decentering it does rub me the wrong way i think.
It doesn’t show any of the positive work or connections that happened in the encampments because it’s not a photo representative of that mutual support network before the cops arrived, It doesn’t work as a point of contrast because the pithy headline undercuts the severity of the situation around the kiss, and it definitely doesn’t “take the fear tactics away from the police brutality” because that requires framing this kiss between two white girls as a uniquely antithetical statement to the realities of police brutality as we know it, and that’s just straight up not true!
also TBH maybe this might sound mean, but If the affected groups in this particular scenario feel misrepresented or unseen (as evidenced by the fact that Asma and Raidah’s general reaction to said article was exasperation and indignation respectively), then it’s fair game to say that’s it’s doing a bad job acting as an entryway to inform people who are uninvolved about what is going on in a way that is actually meaningful to the goals of those groups.
I’m sympathetic insofar that there really isn’t an easy or clean alternative that Daisy could have pursued, and i really need to emphasize again that the main point of the photo is to add stakes to the romance drama story before anything else, but to act like making *this photo* with *that headline* is a decision that best helps either the protesters or the “bulmerians” in-text is not the move.
Asma reasonably, since she was actually part of the protest, but then she doesn’t seem that upset by the picture.
Raidah does, but she seemed more upset by who it was and her personal issues with them than anything related to supporting the protestors or their cause.
This is going more into the realm of personal interpretation, but I would still consider her general attitude towards the whole thing as fairly exasperated along the lines of “I expected little and yet i’m still let down”, if not a particularly overstated negative response. I also added Raidah there simply because i read that strip as her not realizing it was Joyce and Dorothy until the last panel.
*Asma’s attitude
+1 for IKWTMLS.
I don’t think Asma looks unbothered by the photo, I think she’s visibly irritated but also tired and unsurprised. Which, of course she is, Raidah asks to see HER copy of the newspaper, Asma already read it some unspecified amount of time before the strip and whatever her reaction was, she’s already had it and settled into “ugh, whatever”.
She doesn’t have Raidah’s fiery disdain for Joyce, so of course she doesn’t match Raidah’s energy at all, but I do not think the intended reading of that strip was “Asma doesn’t even care”.
For one thing, this is definitely one of the strips that was added or altered in response to the very negative readership reaction to the protest kiss. It would be weird if Willis put all that effort into adding more of Asma just for her to be like, “yeah whatever it doesn’t matter.”
No where did I say it is the best picture that could’ve been ran. It’s absolutely a story device, which is fine, but photos of protesters ignoring or responding calmly and lovingly to military response does a lot more to be inspiring than fear baiting. Like when the kid on a skateboard through the tear gas with ICE and LAPD went viral so many people were scared because the kid’s identity might get leaked. Main stream media doesn’t show those scenes and a picture like this (again there would be better pictures of protesters that actually care and have a closer connection to the actual protest) but this is a fictional webcomic and this is the picture that got pulled.
It’s like the MMIW movement. Two blonde college ladies kissing despite tear-gas got more attention from the reporter and editor than anything actually at the protest was doing this day for this article and headline. If they’d been two BIPOC women it might not have ran at all. Which is bad, that’s horrible, but it’s not unrealistic. Gabby Petito became national news and the search for what happened found several missing BIPOC women that had been murdered.
Also the news doesn’t really care about helping people. It cares about selling papers. “Well this is just a college paper ran by college students.” Who are learning what will help them succeed when they leave school.
Daisy makes some good points, but she also chose to make the front page image for a news story about anti-genocide protests and the police response to it be a picture of two women kissing.
I mean. Maybe don’t make out at a public protest if you don’t want people to know about it? I dunno just seems like maybe that’s not the best time and place to expect to not be seen.
Daisy you can’t oscillate between “Definitely not Based” and “Based” like that, it’s like a coin flip each panel whether what you’re saying is valid or not lol
She can be kind of a frustrating character in that respect.
Also Joyce is already blowing this if she really is going to keep the Polycule from Dorothy.
Joyce is basically having Dorothy share her With Joe but refuses the idea of sharing Dorothy with Walky? That’s not a Polycule relationship that’s Joyce trying to manipulate her way into having her own harem.
I don’t think that’s a “yyeh” of “I am going to keep this from you” but “oh yeah the immediate issue put that out of my mind, we still need to talk about that”
Yeah she’s not lying she’s going “oh yeah gotta put a pin in that”
I’m hearing a lot of “She’s not lying, she just kept the truth in Omission till the time was right.”
That’s a funny way to say “she was distracted by the immediate danger of being outed to her extremely conservative family”! I wonder why you’d say it like that
You act as if she can’t have take several minutes out of her day to ask the straight question of “Hey instead of dumping our respective partners that we’ve both don’t want to dump, do you want to keep this slightly open so we can keep dating them?”
It takes like a minute I’m a half to say that, could have been a on the way conversation.
That absolutely would not have been a minute and a half conversation, and doing it while they’re both stressed over this would be doing everyone involved a disservice. Addressing the immediate danger was the move, then negotiate the polycule when everyone is able to focus better on that.
Everything about the situation stressful, but I they want to find a way to handle it they could focus on what they can control like nipping a certain problem in the bud before that gets out of hand too. Because I can guarantee you I see a dozen ways this part can go south.
Yes! I don’t know exactly which “this part” you’re referring to, but both parts could go badly south! This is exactly why it is a terrible idea to combine them. It is not an unforgivable betrayal of trust to delay the polycule discussion for fifteen minutes while they figure out the “is this going to ruin our lives” part
Well unfortunately those two things aren’t a separate issue, one is part of the mess that they now haft to and prepare to address and the other is something one of them is leaving to fester.
By “leaving to fester,” again, you mean “delaying the discussion of until we figure out if this is going to lead to one of us being disowned by her family”
A simple *propose this question here* and then tell her to just give her an answer later. Communication is not as complicated as one would make it out to be.
Yeah no that’s a pretty wild take. I should’ve stopped arguing with you several messages ago.
You know what, the feeling is mutual. Goodnight to you.
Maybe it’s a difference of social interaction styles? I know I very much appreciate the “here’s a thing we need to discuss; think about it and get back to me?” approach, but there are people who would want to address such things immediately, so raising an important subject when they’re busy with something else wouldn’t go down so well.
I think it’s the combination of Joyce not telling Dorothy about Joe’s poly suggestion with Joyce telling Walky “she’s mine now! I win, you lose!”
as someone with some communication anxiety issues, to propose “hey think about this and get beck to me” would basically cripple my ability to function in the moment. so i really get the put a pin in this and deal soon. honestly for me the best would be hey when we get thruog the immediate issues we got important other things to talk about would eb the best way to deal
Two things can be true!!!
It can be completely understandable that Joyce would want to focus on the active fire over what’s basically a kettle that hasn’t come to a boil yet?
AND it can be true that if Joyce takes too long to deal with the kettle, it might become a problem.
(I’m also a person who struggles with communication anxiety. If someone’s gonna tell me “by the way we need to talk later”, they need to add a LOT of “and just so you know I’m not mad at you”-type reassurances to it!)
I mean yeah that is literally not lying.
Idk, between her noncommittal answer to Joe and her noncommittal answer to Dorothy here, I could either read it as “I still dunno if I want a polycule” OR as “What if I could have little a Joe, as a treat, and do I *really* need to tell Dorothy?”
I will admit, now that we’re stuck in this storyline, I want it to get MESSY, so I know which one I’m rooting for!
I dont think I agree with either of those reads. I read it as “the whole polycule thing seems like a complicated issue to figure out. But right now its a later issue, if I bring it up it becomes a now issue, I would rather it stay a later issue”
I feel like that’s basically the same as the former of my two reads, though?
I dont think its her wrestling with wanting the polycule or not. I think its her just wanting to avoid thinking about the choice entirely.
I’m still not convinced Joyce won’t get so overwhelmed that she asks for a break from both Joe and Dorothy. Especially if it goes south and she feels like they’re both putting her on a pedestal and not just accepting her for the hot mess that she is.
The pedestal thing could be quite interesting. Joyce has reacted in the past to people expecting certain behaviors from her or, in this case, idolizing her. Could be a cool source of conflict here.
I highly doubt Dorothy wants to stay with Walky as much as Joyce wants to stay with Joe; though Walky might want to stay just to spite Joyce.
That said, Walky and Amber are a far better match.
Careful, that sounds like you saying Joyce loves Joe more than Dorothy loves Walky.
Feel like that claim might he opening a can of worms.
In what way?
A rule of surviving in fan media is to not encourage shippers to fight.
Beware the cry “One, two, three, four, I declare a shipping war.”
im perfectly content saying that because its literally true. i wouldn’t say dorothy doesn’t love walky, but like, holy shit she has never loved him even close to how much she loves joyce, for instance; whereas, joyce certainly loves joe and dorothy similar amounts.
Honestly, I think another relationship might not be what Walky really needs right now. He should focus on himself before getting with someone else.
I mean, not only is he failing in his studies, but that is also having a very negative impact on his self-image.
Walky, like most people, would probably do well with therapy.
Walky’s not failing. That’s a plotline from last semester. He’s gotten that sorted out.
I admittedly do not think Dorothy and Walky would have stuck together even if Joyce wasn’t opposed to the idea, but it definitely could be a source of friction.
I mean, she’s not really “keeping the polycule” from Dorothy because she hasn’t agreed to a polycule in the first place. She ran away in the middle of that conversation because she realized there’s a few other important conversations that need to happen first, which is why she snatched up Dorothy to loop her in about them being outed to absolutely everyone who reads the student paper, including possibly Becky and her fundie family. They’re still in the progress of dealing with that issue – figuring out the Facebook relationship statuses is genuinely a less pressing matter, and bringing those up in the middle of this one would not get them anywhere productive. It’s been maybe five minutes since Joe even mentioned the option.
oh Shanna, I hope you are ok. But apparently they allow cell phones in the cells, i guess.
Wait. Shanna from Fans! ? 😮
Could be a reference and if so hurrah!
Joyce are you sure you want to draw sunday strips? Do you know how much more you’d have to do for the bigger and coloured ones?
ooh like in It’s Walky ? 😀
Yay coats!
Joyce, I think if Asma were here to hear that comment, I think she’d be legally allowed to hunt you for sport. Be glad she has to work today.
Other than that….yeah, uh, I don’t think they have the reasonable expectation of privacy given the circumstances but DAMN that’s a cold response to being told you accidentally outed someone.
I’m going to be honest, I kind of get it. Kissing at a public demonstration you know is being extremely recorded by the press is sort of a situation where you can’t really be surprised that it got published.
At the moment Joyce is acting more concerned that she was caught cheating which Daisy is calling out. Also as she pointed out their faces aren’t really being shown, only reason Radiah recognized them is she’s way too invested in Sarah’s friends group.
As an aside I am very grateful that this comic runs 7 days a week.
Same. Even if I’m having a bad day, this comic is always here.
Three sapphics, each alike in indignation, In Ernie Pyle Hall, where we lay our scene.
To be read in the voice of Alice, capped by the sound of sipping through a straw?
+1 ;>
Ha HA, “lay”.
/philkensebben
From long-time crush turn’d to new smooching,
Which campus rag makes widely seen.
“Yes. Ex.”
I wish I had thought of this on yesterday’s strip, but has anyone reread the last chapter from beginning to end? Or even the last two?
I’m kind of suspicious/wary of Alice. It seems pretty odd she spent a semester avoiding Jennifer until now and has jumped back in both feet. Everything she says to Asma and Raidah isn’t just gossipy, it’s extremely misrepresented and embellished (based on what she heard)
– conversation with Joyce Jennifer negs Joyce about not even knowing what sex is.
– conversation later with Walky where both Walky and Jennifer double down on that Joyce couldn’t have had sex, and only wishes she had sex with Dorothy.
That’s it. That’s all Alice got. What the hell. (And I also didn’t remember Walky having some warning to Dorothy/Joyce dumping him).
It doesn’t seen odd to me, she very much loved Jennifer and so it required even the smallest that she actually changed for her to jump in. Also yeah gossip tends to be misrepresented and embellished that is what make it gossip.
If she loved Jennifer why would she talk shit about Joyce, who was introduced as Jennifer’s friend, just yesterday? Gossip can be mean, but it doesn’t have to be mean. This feels more pot stir-y than gossipy. Maybe it’s just my bad college experience of someone I thought I could trust was actually super manipulative and vindictive. Even when I’ve gossiped I’ve made sure it’s verifiable, and now I try to do more checks of “Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?”. It took a lot of, “I wonder whatever happened to that guy in high school with the trench coat that exclusively talked through a cat puppet.” moments before I learned to slow down. (Cat puppet guy was sitting with us at that table for dinner, with his wife, who had no idea of what he was like in high school. But it was all fine and he’s doing quite well.)
I don’t see it as her talking shit about her, she just think it’s fun to talk about this stuff. And yeah she is not going to be super mature and think carefully about it, she is like 19 max. I don’t think we had seen any actual evidence of Alice having any ulterior motive or manipulative streek.
all alice has done so far is take the literal things that happened in front of her at face value, and failed to have a social filter. she either likes to gossip, or just does it without thinking about it. which, like, i consider that to not always be great behavior, but it doesn’t automatically make me think somebody is a psychopath
I don’t think her gossip misses the mark that much. In conversation, people use units of time as estimates. Joyce says she “had sex according to another definition” to mean a sexual encounter, and Alice goes with it instead of litigating what counts as sex.
The likely Doylian explanation of her jumping back in with both feet is: “want to add new cast member relatively quickly”. To me it feels like there were a handful of story hooks that were discarded, and Jennifer and Alice slowly reconciling was one of them. And I can see why, that’s a less interesting story than Jennifer wants to reconcile but sometimes people just move on. But that story is a bummer, and kicking Jennifer when she’s down and relegated to recurring character tier. AND it would probably write Alice out of the strip. So skip all that, speedrun a reconciliation and give her a fun personality that hadn’t been shown (in her limited appearances).
I’m not a mind reader, just speculating.
There hasn’t been a timeskip since the big one, and timeskips can be unsatisfying, but not seeing like a week of all these characters’ interactions would make a few things less jarring to me.
While Daisy makes some good points, I’m sure the main reason she made the picture of Dorothy and Joyce kissing at the protest the front page newspaper image was because it was two women kissing. Also, Joyce isn’t doing much to improve my view of her with her responses here.
It occurs to me that by widely distributing an iconic picture of sympathetic white women getting tear gassed for kissing at an anti-genocide protest, thus calling attention to the school cracking down on the protest in the most attention-calling way possible, Daisy has (regards of intention) done orders of magnitude more to oppose the Bulmerian genocide than anyone else in the strip could have even dreamed of.
I get why Asma and Raidah are irritated but in terms of actually moving public opinion, outing Joyce and Dorothy was absolutely the thing that was most going to affect if the school kept investing or not.
From a utilitarian perspective, for Daisy to NOT out Joyce/Dorothy would be to support the genocide in
GazaBulmeriaI had heard utilitarian arguments vefore snd that is certainly one of them.
I think you’re twisting yourself into pretzels. in this fictional world, the most likely change will be through Charlie, who was reached by the organized protestors, not Daisy picking a picture of Joyce and Dorothy’s tourism kiss.
In the real world, it’s students organizing that have gotten divestment from Israel, Sudan, Apartheid South Africa, and war profiteers.
Do you mean Charlie reaching out to make Carla think about her parent’s company? I thought of Ruttech as more like Amazon/Google than Raytheon/Lockheed-Martin before this story arch, but even Google changed their stance on using their technology for weapons or surveillance.
I don’t think any one thing is going to have an over arching impact on diddly right now. This protest actually happened. And the college hasn’t changed or met the protester’s demands. The class that Leslie teaches is based on doesn’t exist anymore. Colleges are losing international students. Professors fired, curriculums slashed.
https://www.idsnews.com/article/2025/05/encampment-iu-palestine-protest-one-year
Yes, I mean Charlie talking to Carla about it.
Not every protest is going to achieve its aims, most of them don’t, especially not short term. BDS to end apartheid in South Africa wasn’t something that happened suddenly, it built up. While many schools reacted with expulsion of students and firing of faculty last year, some schools did divest from war profiteers or Israel over it’s genocidal policies.
A newspaper editor posting photos only tangentially related to the atrocities, protests, or crackdown, did not do orders of magnitude more for those causes than organizers.
I am very frustrated that every article I can find on the topic is a year old and lists “Nearly no” universities have divested without listing which ones have. I think you might have given me something to look into.
From what I was reading the other day, University of San Francisco has, but says it hasn’t officially. In the US there’s a lot of laws saying freedom of speech and freedom of association doesn’t extend as far as boycotting or divesting from Israel.
I’d say I’m pretty sympathetic to Daisy’s position here and I think this argued me into being more critical of her choice to run with this cover photo.
The photo in real life would get much more eyes on it than the usual photos of protesters holding signs or cops in armour or tear gas. Whether that would manifest results more than a more straightforward photo is unknown.
Joyce come on………
Yeah nah. Even *I* don’t think this is what’s important guys. Daisy is not an emergency.
Insane work that this conversation didn’t start with a full speed running start punch in the Jaw.
I think that might be a really fast way get kicked out of college my friend.
Someone should tell that to Ruth and Billie.
“I’ve had enough of your sapphic revelations!”
SHEPARDKEENER PUNCH!Reminded me that one time i imagined the comic female characters fighting in a boxing manga. Amber is the main character.
Joyce is being quite Calvin-like here
Apropos of nothing but does anyone else imagine Daisy talking in one of those Fast-talking 1940s movie voices?
That would admittedly bump her into my top favourite characters if that were the case.
“Her Girl Friday” is my dream title for it
Keep in Mind Joyce and Dorothy kissing was made the front page while A LITERAL SUPERHERO BEAT UP A HORDE OF COPS.
I’m just saying. That’s a waaaaaaay cooler money shot.
But not as appealing to Editorial.
It would have been *incredibly damaging* to the goals of the protest to use a photo showing that a protestor attacked the cops before the cops used tear gas on the protesters!
Amazi-girl’s not a protester. She’s a vigilante.
She was at the protest taking action to prevent police from arresting people. How is that not being a protester?
Insomuch that she’s not protesting the Genocide. She’s simply there to keep the students and protesters safe. She wasn’t there to Protest. If students are in danger, she stops who’s endangering them. That simple.
Yeah, and focusing on the dangers to order posed by anti-fascists protecting protestors, actually sounds more what the fascist-sympathizing mainstream media would do? The best thing you can do for anti-fascists like Amazi-Girl is to not draw too much attention to them, I would think.
Not how the public would see it and that’s the most important thing, the optics.
Mainstream Media: Superhero Dressed Woman Beats Cops to Support Anti-Bulmerianism.
Make Love, not War and all that
Then just use a different photo of amazi-girl where she isn’t hitting a cop? One of her leading protesters away from the tear gas? One of her getting injured? Or immediately after the kiss where she smacks tear gas away with a protest sign? I don’t think it’s as black and white as you suggest.
Amazi-Girl jump-kicking cops in the face seems like it’d be way harder to get a good picture of than two women standing still while tickling each other’s tonsils.
I’m with Daisy on this, like… you cannot call this “outing” considering where they did this
If Dausy didn’t recognize them, why does the headline say good-bi? What if they were lesbians?
For the pun!
There was actually a footnote saying that it was an assumption for the sake of the pun.
FOURTEEN POINT TWO EIGHT FIVE SIX PERCENT!
I assume Daisy finally got a girlfriend in the timeskip, because I have never seen her care more about journalism and less about thinking horny thoughts about girls kissing.
“Well, then maybe don’t cheat on him while performing extremely iconic imagery in the middle of an important public event!”
Get her ass, Daisy!
I, for one, am glad this is where we’re at, because “did Daisy fuck up here?” is INFINITELY more interesting a topic than anything else in this storyline.
Say what you want but Daisy is Dedicated to this Journalist Life.
Well I was busy and pretty late to the update and it seems like we’re debating whether to be mad at Daisy or not. I personally find it at least relieving that her argument for the photo is founded in logic over shameless horny although I still have objections but congrats to her for successfully pouring cold water over the fire of my righteous indignation.
That being said. Don’t trust stories told in compressed short form narratives such as comics published in your local school newspaper or perhaps even self published digitally like some sort of “webcomic”.
Not Willis being prophetic about the Coldplay conert
I got one question though because Daisy’s disappointment that Dorothy didn’t file a story right after surviving that protest is what really bothers me today. Uh, who is this Shanna and how did she possibly file a story from a holding cell when cops take your phone when they arrest you? That feels like a very specific and extreme example designed to somehow still shame Dorothy because she went through very extreme and dangerous circumstances that more than justify her lapse in journalistic intent. But maybe I’m wrong. Dotty should’ve locked in I guess.
Daisy is probably combining events and she filed the story after she got out of jail in the morning.
You can give things/write with your public defender or lawyer. Or she could’ve dictated over the phone with the “one call” rule.
https://legalclarity.org/do-you-get-a-phone-call-when-arrested-what-to-expect/
That’s not how that works. If you’re allowed a call at all, it’s because you’re demanding to call your lawyer. You can’t just call anyone.
Sigh, I didn’t read that thoroughly enough. It’s not especially helpful.
TL;DR: it depends on where you get arrested. But don’t count on being allowed a phone call, and if you are asserting your right to counsel, you have to be very explicit that you are demanding to be allowed to call your lawyer, or to be allowed to call your father to get HIM to contact a lawyer for you.
(I’m having trouble finding the specifics for Indiana, but I would expect it to be more restrictive than, say, California, where you’re allowed 3 phone calls and the police are supposed to provide you phone access ASAP.)
I think a reporter (especially if it is Fans Shanna) would be prepared to contact counsel. A lot of lawyers will be waiting at where ever protesters get held (reading through IDS papers on the actual protest they were taken away in college busses) or have provided their information to protesters before hand.
I’ve gone to several events for parents of trans kids where the ACLU reps have given their updated contact info. We’ve written legal counsel numbers on our arms just in case (some people say don’t do this because it can be used as premeditation for trying to get arrested). Heck a lot of parents of trans kids in my area are lawyers.
It seems very likely that a college student that is press, knows their rights, and already had legal counsel there to make sure the cops don’t break the rules could get their story at least out in a rough draft form.
Sure! Sorry. I’m just…
Honestly mad at like, Law & Order and the like for perpetuating this myth for decades that you can just ask for a phone call and you have to be given one, no matter what. It’s dangerous misinformation. 🙁
I get cha 😉 I try to not watch any copaganda, but my kids like Brooklyn 99 and we have lots of “don’t talk to cops” conversations.
Which is who I said Shanna would have contacted to get a story out for her?
https://www.tumblr.com/dumbingofage/793395574760177664/there-is-a-bit-of-confusion-about-it-was-daisy?source=share
Since it was a point of confusion for some i asked Willis fro clarification
Alt-text: They’re out now. The plaid is redundant.
That’s right, Willis I mean Joyce
And we’re back to non-communication. Good job, Joyce.
A photo of Asma might have gotten her fired or worse. A photo of Joss inadvertently outed her. A blurry photo of two girls kissing wasn’t a bad choice.
But I’m here for the avalanche of consequences that are in motion while they argue with daisy. This is a sunk cost. They have much larger problems waiting for them.
Jocelyne being in a public place ran that risk and I’m sure she was aware of it.
A photo of former congresswoman Robin Desanto, who dropped out of her re-election campaign and effectively endorsed her rival, would have been better.
If not for her sign that was dismissive of the protest.
If only Robin and Leslie had made out instead.
I’m with Daisy, if you don’t want to get outed, don’t make out in the middle of an event, filled with cameras.
Call me oblivious if you like. But, it had not occurred to me until this strip that while Joe may be fine with a polycule, Dorothy might not be.
Dorothy is being revealed to me as someone both dangerously and unpleasantly self-centered
Dorothy: The important thing is OUR pain! Not the students beaten and Amber getting stabbed!
To be fair people who see the newspaper wouldn’t know about that stuff either since there’s no picture of them on the front page.
Eh, I think Dorothy’s considering other people’s pain too, considering their entire friend group was recently held hostage (in part) by a guy who was willing to kill/die to force his daughter to be straight. Toedad may be dead, but his friends/church aren’t.
Daisy telling it like it is.
However, that picture shows a weird choice in priorities. Like, I get it, two people kissing in a confrontation with police can be a good message if one wants to show that love conquers all. But at the same time, this is at a protest against genocide where police is deploying tear-gas against students. Personally, I’d have focused on the protest and police violence.
Perhaps the kiss picture could be a smaller one on the same page?
Joyce has such a Calvin expression in the last panel, I have to believe Willis is intentionally channeling Watterson with that comment. It’s a very good likeness.
But Willis, if you don’t draw them in plaid, how will people remember that they’ve gone sapphic on us?
In New Zealand, wearing plaid or check is traditional in the country. Maybe they are all gay?
Wait Joyce and Dorothy are gay? But this whole time I thought they were gals being pals… /S
If you don’t wanna be outed don’t smooch at a big public protest 🤷♀️
Repercussion arc continues to be fun! I was a sicko who also enjoys realistic consequences.
It’s possible to focus on multiple things in a non-linear way without it being a lie or manipulation or hiding something. Painstakingly working through every single topic that comes up, in the order they came up, is tedious and not always productive.
At first, I was sympathetic for Joyce. Now I am sure she’s a sociopath.
???????????
She committed the worst crime of them all
Providing a punchline in a comedy webcomic
Are you unsympathetic because she’s (in your mind) a sociopath? Do you have something against sociopaths?
At least sociopaths can’t help it, compared to your general variety asshole, who absolutely can.
Daisy, to Joyce: “the newspaper’s kickstarter failed to reach that stretch goal”
daisy has a big point here, newspapers can only put so much stuff in the photos and “people kissing amidst violence” shows up in riot/protest photos a decent amount
regardless of whether that’s morally right, that’s been where we’re at with news for decades
plus, you go to an event that you know is being photographed/maybe televised because were texted you about one of those photos that someone you know is there? and you’re surprised that that’s still happening?
also. I don’t know what’s supposed to happen here.
if daisy said sorry they would still be outed.
if daisy printed a retraction and said the people kissing on our previous cover were DEFINITELY NOT GAY OUR BAD FOR REAL they would be mega double outed
“They’re not gay, they’re just Italian!”
Yeah really not sure why this would be their first stop. The paper’s out, it’s not going away. Is the idea of talking to Becky really that awful?
It’s #738 on the list. Give them time.
Change the photo on the website version of the story, and if the daily newsletter hasn’t be emailed out yet, have a different photo in that. I don’t know if that’s what’s supposed to happen, but it’s what could happen.
The characters focus mostly on the print version, because it makes a good prop and they interact with the print version. But Joyce has mentioned the online version. That her dad probably reads.
Fair!
That’s basically the only thing they could do that makes any sense of them heading over here as a priority.
Of course, they haven’t brought it up yet and it probably wouldn’t work anyway.
When someone does something that upsets you it’s good to let them know that it upset you so that they can react to how what they did made you feel rather than assuming they’ll find out you found it upsetting all on their own.
I mean sure, but it seems that would be a fairly low priority in what they were a few strips ago treating as a crisis.
Oh… this relationship is going to last a sarcastically long time
Wuh oh Dorothy
I spent time reading actual IDS articles from when the real life protest happened. I loved the history of student protesting at IDS that I learned about and am now half chagrined about spoilers if the comic does elaborate more on that. Dunn Meadow was designated as a freedom of speech place for students in 1969.
On 4/8/24 protesters were asked to move from the Cox Arboretum to Dunn Meadow which they did and someone still got arrested. They planned this during the solar eclipse which just means DoA could have been even more dramatic and had snipers, tear gas, and a solar eclipse. But that was a few weeks before the encampment was created.
Hold on: adding am eclipse would crash the site entirely
Right? I linked to the article, but that comment is awaiting moderation and I am terrified I did something wrong.
Hrm… that last panel… seems autobiographical?
Your mom is autobiographical
(focusing on Joyce) she thinkin bout it
I want to know about Walky’s cartoon!
Seeing a lot of people say it’s improbable for Daisy to not recognize Joyce and Dot in the photo, and from our outsider POV that is kind of the case sure, but thinking about it within the actual universe of the characters it’s a photo of two blond women in nondescript clothing, probably both crying and leaking snot with red blotches on their face due to the teargas, largely obscured by the fact that photo was taken from behind Joyce.
A lot of the character’s most identifiable traits were not present at the time, covered or likely don’t stand out within the actual in-universe lense of the comic. Similar to how every Joe on the street won’t recognize Clark Kent as Superman because they probably know half a dozen other broad chinned brunettes in their life to the point where it’s not a noticeable trait to them.
Also saw some peeps say the title would indicate Daisy knew it was Joyce and Dot but if you zoom into the actual newspaper Also saw some peeps say the title would indicate Daisy knew it was Joyce and Dot but if you zoom into the actual newspaper it actually has a tag that the title makes an assumption simply for the sake of a pun
The photo is close up enough and in good enough detail that this doesn’t pass muster for me, sorry. Dorothy should at least be recognizable to Daisy.
Oh well
Did you know that you don’t have to reply to every comment you see with something snide
is that snide? i can’t gauge any emotion coming off there tbh
Yes that is why i don’t.