Actually I’m rereading the archives and it looks like she always went barefoot into the showers. She’s barefoot on her way into the showers when a towel wrapped roz stops her to talk about her and Joyce’s night out at the bar, on the May 6 2024 page.
Seriously. I get that it’s all new and exciting for her – both being able to be horny with someone and being gay and the new forbidden relationship and yadda yadda… But like, dang, could she stop cheating on Joe for even just a couple of hours before she breaks it off with him?
Some people peek out of the closet and slowly step out. Some explode out. The latter is more often the case when they were repressing a lot.
Joyce was so repressed, honestly, she’s not really fully in control of her faculties right now. Her inhibitions have basically lost their hold on the reigns, and the horses are running wild, and her inhibitions are just hanging on for dear life and won’t be able to regain control until the horses stop.
Basically, Joyce is drunk on her own freedom on the moment, except without drunkeness’s convenient downing, slow down, inability to consent, and blacking out.
It’s like only having the inhibition loss, and nothing will snap you out of it until it’s run its course, and then you have to figure out who this new person you actually are is afterwards.
PS: it’s perfectly natural to have strong preferences for which fictional character tops, people have been arguing about this at least as far back as Ancient Greece. Where it gets problematic is when bottom=passive=feminine=bad. Break that chain, don’t use these terms to describe real people, and you’re fine.
Also tops and bottoms absolutely exist in real life. Some people are also verses, but lots of folks do in fact have very strong preferences for one over the other. Also bottoms are more common, so just. Try to keep that in mind. Top != the “universally agreed-upon better” position, more people would pick bottom if given the choice.
PPS: some people’s shipping “order” preferences are directly tied to their dysphoria!
If you can agree that it would be shitty to demand every fic writer disclose their dysphoria before being allowed to express a strong “order” preference – you should also be able to agree that maybe it’s okay for strangers to like things you think are silly.
She’s been like that especially in regard to Dorothy. After the timeskip, she no longer had any restraints, except “I’m straight”. It was kinda predictable that it would get worse that fast.
1) When Joe told Dorothy (jokingly) that she was worse than him, he was actually right. Joyce was pretty much exactly this horny and over-the-top with him in the early phases of their relationship as well. And while Joe was certainly willing, he felt that it would be taking advantage of Joyce to indulge and pumped the brakes until he was sure that she was thinking clearly and not just in a hormone driven mess.
While Dorothy IS setting up boundaries now, she had to be guilted into doing it.
2) Sarah said she was going to take a shower, so there is a non-zero chance she is hearing Joyce’s comedic “What if we?” comment literally five minutes after she dressed them down for their cheating ways.
To be fair to Dorothy she has, so far, always been the one trying to pump the breaks. She’s the one saying “we need to tell our boyfriends” and “we shouldn’t kiss anymore”. She just hasn’t done a good job of enforcing those decisions.
Joe was able to resist Joyce pulling this bullshit, but Dorothy isn’t. Joe wasn’t even in a relationship at the time, there was nothing more than his own concern for Joyce (and himself, let’s be honest) that held him back.
Therefore, my statement that he is better than Dorothy still stands.
That’s fair now, but the context of him saying that was that Dorothy was worse than he was.
Which makes sense for him to say, given his trauma around cheating, but is a lot more complicated given all the other problems with his previous behavior.
Ladies, remember to AVOID men who think it’s their job to protect you from your own enthusiastically consenting desires. Especially those who think of it in terms of “taking advantage of you” if they also enthusiastically consent to a normal activity. It suggests they have you on a pedestal and don’t trust you to make your own choices/think they know better than you what you want for yourself. Not good.
Joyce is an adult, wanting to have sex isn’t some wild damaging thing she should be saved from. If Dorothy has sex with Joyce, it won’t make her worse than Joe (unless she does it right now while they’re cheating, thaaaat would be bad lmao).
There’s a weird kinda double vision I have over that second paragraph as a cis guy, in all honestly, and I while these days I land where you do (people who are enthusiastically consenting are allowed to make their own mistakes), from Joe’s POV in particular and from a generic cis-male-chunk POV there are some complicating factors:
– He’s Joyce’s friend, too, from before the relationship, and wants to make extra sure that even if she makes a mistake about what she wants that he’s not the person who was part of that mistake. He might well, right or wrong, see himself both as “the person with whom she is consenting” and “the friend she is consulting to see if she’s on a good course”
– When you’re a dude of a certain bulk, but a decent person, you ALWAYS have in the back of your mind the fact that you can be unintentionally intimidating just by virtue of being literally twice someone’s size, and that can affect/twist your perception of “enthusiastic” such that you take extra care. It’s stupid, but (twenty years ago) I had a set of rules that boiled down to “I am never standing when she’s sitting, I’m never between her and the door, I don’t escalate to the next tier of sex act, etc.” and got a frankly absurd amount of positive feedback for it.
I’m absolutely not including “taking extra care” in my statement. Being aware of your partner’s feelings and how the world looks from their point of view is not at all what Lumino was discussing.
You can (and I am sure you do) behave like that without completely dismissing their ability to consent. Calling sex between two consenting partners “taking advantage” and calling Joyce being horny “this bullshit” and implying Dorothy is a bad person for not “resisting” it is just… very different.
@Nymph: Yeah, I guess what I’m also kinda trying to flail at, point-wise, is that from within the head of the cis-male-chunk of college age, it’s not a super bright line between “I don’t want to take advantage” and “I’m trying to avoid being implicitly/unintentionally coercive”.
To be clear, I think Lumino’s off-base, but largely because there’s not the same implicit coercion risk just by nature of Dorothy not being twice Joyce’s size and a regular weightlifter, etc.
Totally valid, not a headspace I’ve ever been in so I don’t know what that’s like. I still think that’s not really what Lumino specifically was saying, but I get the point you are making.
Thank you for your translation of it, I kinda tripped over my point.
Joe, being the more experienced one, was obviously concerned that Joyce was swept up in the moment and would regret such actions if they acted impulsively. He cared too much about Joyce for their first time to be something she regretted. He wanted to be absolutely, 100% certain that this was what Joyce wanted, and he didn’t take her hormone driven, over-the-top flirtations as an invitation. He took them of an indication of desire, but not as a statement of intent.
When Joyce made it clear to him that yes, she wanted to do that with him, he was absolutely willing to consent. The date wasn’t Joyce on a horny high, it was her actually making the conscience decision. And, importantly, she still had the where-with-all to revoke her consent when she realized she really was NOT ready for everything.
That was only possible BECAUSE Joe was so cautious about ensuring she was really consenting and not just swept up in the euphoria of it. Even when he was in horn dog mode, consent and proper expectations were SUPER important to Joe.
Dorothy thought poorly of Joe, but she’s clearly MUCH less prepared to deal with Joyce’s emotional highs, as evidenced by her frequently getting her boundaries trampled on by them.
Here’s the thing — I’m deliberately not framing it as “experience” because I don’t think that’s the actual issue at hand.
Joe taking extra care by nature of being “twice her size/strength” being implicitly potentially intimidating doesn’t really relate in any way to Dorothy’s behavior, because the surrounding context is different. As such, I don’t think there’s any actual issue in terms of “resistance to boundary-pushing” happening here, the thing that’s happening is of a different kind.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on that point, Big Z. While I certainly think the size issue was a factor for Joe, I think it was more on him feeling he had to take things super slow, since this was all extremely new for Joyce and he didn’t want to hurt her.
If that was his choice to make or not is another question entirely.
I don’t understand the implication that Joe’s actions towards Joyce were driven by pure ethical concern rather than, you know, being in love for the first time while also having had a horrific experience with nearly having sex with someone he saw as very similar to Joyce. Also (misplaced) concern for Joyce as a person. You can’t compare avoiding sex out of fear and concern for the person you’re potentially boinking with avoiding sex out of concern for other, uninvolved people.
I’m not gonna chime in on who is “worse” though. I think the whole point of that strip was that Dorothy was being self-righteous and ridiculous by putting things on those terms, and the act of ranking ppl is itself the problem.
Cut Dorothy some slack. She and Joyce first kissed “yesterday.” The emotional blast of new love overrode rationality. Getting herself back together by the next morning is pretty good in my book.
Their dynamic at one point looked like it could be characterized as Dorothy being an instigator, but the longer this goes on it really starts looking more like just the ordinary distinction between “the planner” and “the impulsive”. And now that Joyce’s impulsiveness is directed at Dorothy as much as Dorothy’s need-to-fix was directed Joyce-ward, we’ve got a weird kind of tipping the scales the opposite direction from what it used to appear.
I mean you gotta remember these two have been extremely gay in a platonic-ish way since the very beginning, like nearly half a year ago at this point. Sal was being flippant but she wasn’t wrong when she said them making out is hardly the gayest thing they’ve done in public.
Without going back to re-read, the sense I get is that we keep seeing a pattern that boils down to…
Dorothy: Okay, but we need to dial it back until we actually break up with our boyfriends.
Joyce: I agree. Also, we should smooch again.
Dorothy: That’s not what we agreed on!
Joyce: You’re right. Also, we should smooch again.
100%. Speaking from experience — even if you’re NOT trying to do anything sexy, two people in one shower is just awkward and inefficient. You are genuinely better off just showering in turns.
Unless they stand close enough to both be under the water – or unless they’re washing each other’s hair and back and then swapping spots. It feels much nicer to wash somebody’s hair and then have yours washed in turn than just washing your own. Also you can keep a conversation going.
Swapping spots is one of the major problems, though. You don’t realize it when you’re alone in the shower but there’s a load of soak/rinse/lather/scrub/rinse process going on, and you’re moving in and out of the stream of water for many parts of it. Multiply that by (usually) 3 for soap, shampoo, and conditioner and you’re switching places a lot. That’s dead easy with one person, and a whole to-do with two people in the same stall. Lots of scooting past and bumping into each other.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s FUN. But it’s the opposite of efficient.
It’s not so inefficient to be the opposite of efficient. It’s still about the same time. My wife takes 10 min, I’m about 15-20 to shower usually, but when we go together we’re usually out within 20-30, depending on how much of the extra skin/hair care routines we do (counting the times that we’re only showering in there).
Speaking from my own experience, this is entirely determined by the size of the shower stall and spray radius vs. the size of the participants. Dorm showers where I went to school would have been pretty conducive to efficient partner showering, had I been the kind of person to try to sneak girls in there (I hadn’t realized I also like some guys back then).
Ohmygod is Rachel gonna be the one to blow this right open
Also, Joyce omfg what is that face in the last panel, that’s a terrifying expression. I’d almost be worried she’s having like a hypomanic/manic episode if I didn’t know better, that’s the look I made when I decided to bake a life size Minecraft creeper cake for my daughter’s birthday.
(For those curious, no I was not able to do that and I’m happy my husband was able to say “What? No!” when I suggested it. I instead made a Minecraft cake cake. )
It’s been clear from the start that, for whatever value their thoughtful contributions have, Nadamás is not going to skimp out on a rude/insulting one-liner if they feel like the situation needs one.
We should also consider the option where they can’t hold off from each other, the boyfriends walk in and join them and then everything falls apart in a dramatic mess. That way we hit all the bases.
I really am disappointed in joyce…. gotta keep reminding .myself this is all new to her and that excitement is hard to fight off. But man Joe is gonna be crushed and its gonna be one hell of a testament to his character arc that he doesn’t let this revert him back to his old ways. …..but I sense a twist that someone heard from one of the other stalls and while they are showering words gonna spread back to their boys
People keep saying “none of the characters will catch on, Joyce isn’t acting any differently” but IMO there’s a big big difference between the ways Joyce has been stumbling ignorantly into “lol she’s bi” jokes over the strip’s run, and the way she has been very obviously horny and giddy and flirty.
Sarah picking up on this IMMEDIATELY with the weighted blanket, even though they weren’t “technically” doing anything they haven’t done a bunch of times already, is a good example. Joyce’s intent and demeanor is clearly different.
We can’t hear vocal tone but going by dialouge what Sarah overheard and what was said in this strip are drasticly different in how obvious they’re being given their typical interactions prior to the kiss.
Oh, that smarm look on Dotty, that radicalization due to your friend being stabbed just popped right out of that head thanks to those sexy sexy jug shoes.
I’ll be honest: I don’t really “get” this response.
Do app the “real activists” just forgo all hygiene (showering, brushing teeth) and relationships and sex and so forth so they can full commit themselves to the cause?
Or can there be some kind of balance between the two?
Some people really do seem to believe that, in order to want to affect real change, you must let it completely take over your life. You must never be happy or relax or take a break. IDK if Ghola is one of those, but certainly the answer is that yes some people really believe in just dropping everything for one singular cause.
without disputing any point that you make, it is also the case that, in the interval between the steely clenching of the jaw facing the camera, and taking literally any single action guided by your newfound resolve, people might entertain some skepticism about how profound your paradigm shift really is.
“this is more than simply unfair, it is despotic. oooh, boobies” relatable, but not so much admirable
This was my stance yeah. We went from “Amber is hurt and I must Do Something.” Steely face to “Oh you, my new GF wants to bang in her jug shoes, and I make’a the funny face!”
I mean…only seeing herself as a vessel to solve other people’s problems is Dorothy’s thing. She’s always been doing that to fill an internal need, not because of other peoples’ external ones.
But the Amber thing is a solved problem. Sal solved it. It’s pretty hard for Dorothy to keep obsessing about a thing that she can’t immediately do anything about? But it’s very easy for her to obsess over the hot girl who’s right in front of her?
Like, the concern couldn’t be performative, she didn’t do it for anybody. I don’t think the two panel focus on her newfound stern consternation at the establishment power structure is for Dina’s benefit, because Dina was never shown reacting to it. And fictional characters aren’t faking their emotional responses to gaslight us, the audience, who they are literally unaware of by virtue of this being a piece of fiction.
She didn’t do that tho, Joyce offered and she said no, just with a dmile. If you gonna get mad at Dorothy you could at least do it about things tgat are actually happening.
Yesterday people were mad at Dorothy for wanting do do something, anything, to assuage her fears. Today they’re mad at her for letting go after she was told it’s all taken care of, and also for getting propositioned while in a relationship, even though she turned it down firmly. Hopefully they’re not the same people, I don’t keep track 🙂
Anyway we’re all like those emotion junkies from Fforde’s BookWorld. We come here for our fix, and we WILL get it, doesn’t matter if it’s in the form of joy, anger, despair or lust.
Just checked for you: at the time I typed this, none of the names in this thread are attached to any of yesterday’s comments that were complaining about Dorothy’s intent to take action.
…and, because I’m overly cautious, I doublechecked after posting to confirm that no one snuck in a comment between the previous check and my actually posting that.
Not sure if it’d’ve mattered if they had, but they hadn’t.
I mean either way, the stony resolve is for a future decision or action. Right now she’s just here to shower, to perform her daily hygiene’s. I’m sure we’ll see the ramifications of her radicalizations soon enough. Maybe November, or even 2026.
What an incredibly weird thing to say. The judgement you apply to these characters makes no sense to me, and I would hope this is not how you view and judge people in real life.
Regarding real life, without commenting on Ghola’s take on the strip, I will say that when this sort of thing (taking up the mantle of a CAUSE, never really actualizing it) becomes a pattern I do personally get judgy.
That said, this is definitely one of those cases where “uh, dude, it’s been less than a day” DOES apply, in-strip. There’s plenty of time for her to figure out an effective approach to activism AND stall coming clean to the boys some more.
Yes. How dare she… shower? Respond to a comment she had no way to stop Joyce from making? Be happy, for a few seconds, at all, because there isn’t anything she can really do in the short term?
If you want extra reasons to be judgmental and weird about Dorothy, no one’s going to be able to stop you, but you ARE being weird.
It’s normal for activists to have a real life. Sometimes that includes smiling with family and friends despite the horrific shit you just found out. Because the alternative is burn out and depression at minimum.
This whole thing reminds me of some annoying comments I’ve seen on other sites: someone tries to raise awareness of an issue and someone else reacts by saying something along the lines of “bet you post stuff like this to feel good about yourself but never actually do anything to help” (without any support for the latter part of the claim), or — this latter some months back — someone tries to encourage their fellow Americans to vote blue, to protect against horrible things Republicans are saying they’ll do, and someone else responds by arguing that the Democrats aren’t much better (as though voting for the side you consider at least minimally better and actually has a chance of winning somehow impedes your ability to, outside the voting booth, work toward something that’s better still).
Sorry for the mini-rant. This thread reawakened some tangentially-related frustrations.
Yeah, you run into these people all over the place doing any kind of advocacy work. They just want you to either be a paragon of virtue (because they then get to feel better about not doing anything, since THEY couldn’t possibly match YOU) or they want you to be a piece of shit doing it for selfish reasons (because they then get to feel better about not doing anything, since THEY wouldn’t want to be selfish and horrible and performative).
It’s crabs in a bucket, and it can get so exhausting.
It’s honestly disheartening how applicable the “crabs in a bucket” analogy has been since I learned of it. So many people more interested in tearing down rather than lifting up, even to their own detriment.
One should remember that the idea that the world is zero-sum (“if someone gets more, someone else NECESSARILY gets less”) and that the world is just (“if someone HAS more, it’s because they deserve it”; and the dark variant “if I figure out how to get more I was supposed to have more, even if I take it from others”) have both been heavily propagandized into Western and specifically American culture since before there was a mass media other than newspapers.
No. No we do not. Speaking as someone who helps to organize a several thousand person queer protest and march each year, we, in fact, lead the most normal, happy lives we can, when we’re not organizing or out on the street as activists, because it is INCREDIBLY EXHAUSTING WORK, and it is incredibly important that we take care of ourselves.
Organizers and activists tend to burn out at incredibly quick rates, if they try to be about the cause every single second of every single day of their lives.
I was really mad about that genocide or whatever, but then I cranked one out, and now my politics have completely shifted. And I was just about to go join the Peace Corps, darn it.
This is why I tape oven mitts to any friend who has a new political awakening. No horny times until you’ve successfully defunded the police or had them held accountable.
Besides, Dorothy seemed fired up to fight injustice after learning about what happened to Amazi-Girl and Amber. Martial arts training may help, so a DoJo is fitting.
Dorothy is gonna get some nasty bacterial infection by going BAREFEET in the communal shower, gross. there’s no need to go to Joyce’s ridiculous lengths but at least wear some damn flip flops
Gross and unhygienic are not the same thing. Dorothy isn’t going to get any bacterial infection whatsoever if she isn’t injured; are there glass shards on the floor or something?
Well yes, dead bodies are famously unresponsive to sensations. You could argue that one is never more insensitive than after one had joined the choir invisible.
I’m saying the reaction is one of disgust “ew gross” and that’s being framed as rational concern about disease – probably not consciously.
We live in a world where people refused to wear masks to avoid a pandemic disease that killed millions (or gave up the masks far too early), but I’m expected to believe we obsess about sandals in the shower over reasonable concerns for health?
having open wounds makes you more susceptible to infection, but having unbroken skin does not make you immune. granted the most likely thing she might get is athlete’s foot (which is fungal); but the chances of her getting a bacterial or viral infection are not zero. why risk it?
Not to be a paladin about this but I can’t help but notice the whole shower stalls situation is a cute way of showing these two stalling from telling their respective boyfriends about how badly they want to shower together.
Them…. taking a shower… is stalling? So you would have accepted nothing less than them waking up, in their PJs, sprinting to their boyfriend’s rooms, and confessing immediately?
If they get breakfast or have to pee, is that also stalling? What are the rules, here?
Let’s be real: literally everything including and after Joyce going to tell Joe and “accepting a gift and putting her mouth on weenus” is stalling. They have been stalling 100% of the time since deciding they needed to come clean.
I mean, they didn’t even “get up and take a shower” — Dorothy DID run to someone’s room in her PJs… and it wasn’t Walky’s.
They have each, therefore, done at least one thing that COULD have been “confessing/breaking up” but was not. Stalling.
Being fair: Amber is her next-door neighbor. She ran back to her room to get her toiletries etc for showering and getting dressed, but Amber was right there to check on.
She had no actual reason to do so, though. Her expressed reason was to see if she remembered seeing anything, which does not matter because she’s ostensibly about to tell Walky everything anyway.
— First I just wanna acknowledge! I do think you are generally correct that Dorothy is latching onto opportunities, large and small, to delay talking to Walky.
— But also, I was replying directly to Big Z, and he said: “they didn’t ‘get up and take a shower’ — Dorothy DID run to someone’s room in her PJs”, which to me makes it sound like Big Z was forgetting that Amber shares a half-bath with Dorothy, and Dorothy came in through said half-bath. So, point of order: she ran to her own room in her PJs. Less of an obvious avoidance tactic than if she’d run off to check on anyone else.
— Also, similar point of order: “Her expressed reason was to see if she remembered seeing anything”… not quite?
Dorothy peeks in, sees Dina, and says: “‘Morning, Dina. Just checking in on… ‘Amber’.”
Dina tells her that the lights are off so that Amber/Amazi-Girl can rest.
Dorothy says, “Good, good…” then asks if Amber told Dina if she saw anything.
So: I think it’s more likely that Dorothy is trying to ask Dina if Amber/Amazi-Girl spilled the beans, which I think is still in line with her trying to collate her mental spreadsheets about who knows she and Joyce are an item, and whether anyone who knows is likely to have already told Walky and/or Joe, which is something I think makes sense for her to want to know ahead of her conversation with him.
(Also I imagine that if Amazi-Girl/Amber had been awake, Dorothy would have first asked her how she’s feeling (a question she thought she’d gotten the answer to in this strip — “doing okay, resting”), and then asked if she’d said anything to anyone.
So, same priorities.)
— idk, I think this particular incident makes sense!
As mentioned, I do also think Dorothy is delaying generally, but I think checking in on her half-bath-mate also makes sense. Like, I think she did have a reason, on a “wanting to be prepared” level, even if going to Walky ASAP would be the better course of action.
My general counterargument runs along two lines, although I had forgotten they share a half-bath.
– Dorothy, as you point out, has been obviously delaying. Therefore, I grant her much less benefit of the doubt.
– Dorothy thought the news said Amazi-girl got away! She didn’t have any reason to suspect Amber was injured or otherwise in need of checking up on — I interpret “Just checking in on … Amber” as Dorothy coming up with an excuse rather than being strictly concerned when her later dialogue in that scene has her genuinely shocked that Amber is injured.
I mean yeah, so they have to shower, but Dorothy has time to run to somebody’s room(Who isn’t Walky.) not because she knew she was grievously injured but because she wanted to make sure she didn’t see her making out with somebody not her boyfriend when she could have used all that running to run to said boyfriend to tell him the truth and break up with him and it wouldn’t matter what Amber saw.
Making sure their mutual friend didn’t see her cheating is important enough to put off a shower but breaking up with the boyfriend you’re cheating on is not? Sounds like stalling to me.
Dorothy knew that Amber was fighting cops, was at the protest, and didn’t leave when they did. That is more than enough information to want to go check on a friend, even if the news didn’t start with “masked vigilante totally clobbered!!”.
I was just trying to associate shower stalls with the word stall having a double meaning. I thought it was a clever connection. I wasn’t really trying to critique Joyce and Dorothy here. I didn’t think it was that big a deal.
just have soapy shower sex so that after you dump your manthings, you can just mention the soapy shower sex and they can both just get distracted from anger by imagining that for the rest of their lives
Really hurts to see how quickly and easily Joyce is able to just ignore the whole “My boyfriend, Joe” aspect of this. Like, beyond even the binds of being in a relationship with him, he’s her friend! But even after having her behavior very very clearly laid out in front of her, she’s still just knowingly treating him like he doesn’t matter. Like the way she’s digging that knife in deeper and deeper isn’t a bother. You found yourself, congratulations, I guess it doesn’t matter how you treat the other people who love and care for you now. :/
Honestly, yeah. Like. It’s pretty clear that her brain has revolved around Dorothy for so long without her noticing that she’s also never noticed how other people react to it or like… that there might be any reason at all to cool it down a few notches, if only because she doesn’t want some rando telling Joe before she does.
I hope he then realizes how much he fucked up literally just a few months ago and how much it meant to him that people were willing to give him a second chance instead of just writing him off. Joyce especially.
The difference is Joe went on a whole arc of self discovery since then, and never asked anyone to forgive him but just focused on being better and accepted forgivness when it was offered. Joyce is still at ‘avoiding owning up to my mistakes while doubling down and digging myself in deeper.’ Not saying she can’t make amends, but first she’ll need to actually acknowledge she did something wrong.
Yep. It was one thing when they were just giddy and not thinking straight (lol puns). I get it, you’re caught up in the moment, you’re not thinking about the consequences or who they’re gonna hurt.
But Sarah just dropped a very heavy reminder on them both and Joyce doesn’t seem to even care. Just in one ear, out the other. Really gross and disappointing behavior from a character I wasn’t expecting it from.
And since Joyce is the closest we have to a central character / protagonist it’s even worse. She’s also the writer’s self insert in many aspects, so is her attitude how Willis thinks about this?
To be fair, I think we’re finally getting to the “framing this negatively/as not great behavior” part of the cheating arc. I can’t put my finger on what’s different this page than the others, maybe it’s the presence of Rachel, but I feel pretty confident someone’s gonna tell Joe/Walky before either of them get to and they’re gonna get to have their moments.
For sure, this seems like an excellent time for us to try to extrapolate a moral picture of Willis from his characters, so we can begin judging him, the way we’ve been judging the characters for the last month.
This is a reasonable way to respond to a work of fiction, I think.
It’s a brave new judgment frontier for the comments section. After passing moral judgment on the characters and each other, what’s left but the creator?
I like your energy. May I join you on this quest? I also would like to ask Him about His fan club. We can “good cop/bad cop” it, I will ask nicely, and you will ask with a cricket bat if He’s evasive.
In short, he’s so instinctively opposed to it that, despite writing a strip about horny college idiots for years, his wife had to point out to him that none of them ever cheat.
Apparently he felt obliged to fix that, and now we have our DoJo disaster. Love it or hate it, at least it’s interesting (though I personally felt it took a while to get to the interesting part and is progressing slowly even now… still, gotta have room for the sapphic sweetness, I guess).
That, and while I know that Joyce does not know what Dorothy knows about Amber, obviously, I am annoyed at how fast Joyce brushes off that Dorothy is obviously distressed. It’s not just that she doesn’t care about Joe, though that does hurt. She also doesn’t care about Walky; ok, she doesn’t like Walky, but that’s just another thing she doesn’t consider. They couldn’t make it through their sleep over without Joyce whispering sweet nothings, and Joyce got over the confrontation with Sarah–which she spent trying to downplay their behavior–in a “Dorothy face touch,” and Dorothy had to tell her “Sarah’s right, hands off.” And now this.
At this point, I’m kind of tired that Joyce doesn’t seem to care that DOROTHY is trying to set a boundary of “hands off until we deal with some stuff.” Dorothy’s not blameless, she reciprocates the horny, but Dorothy has also tried to say, “Ok, we have to tell the boys before we keep doing this. Ok, we at least have to do the list first. Ok, you didn’t break up with Joe like you said you would, but I guess we can have a sleep over and deal with this tomorrow. Ok, Sarah knows because we fail at subtlety, but she’s right, hands off.” And even when Dorothy makes a weak attempt to do that, or a flat out declaration that they can’t keep doing this until they deal with things, Joyce keeps doing stuff like this.
We get it, Joyce, you are very horny for this woman. Glad that you had that revelation [no sarcasm]. But could you care about literally anything else for more than a panel at a time? Please? It’s not passion in the heat of the moment any more, now you’re just ignoring that other people exist, and it’s getting to be tiresome.
It’s a far less extreme example of course but it does remind me of when Billie was trying to get Ruth to start drinking again in that it’s a blatant effort to violate the boundaries Dorothy has been trying to set, boundaries Joyce clearly does not respect.
I’d been trying to give Joyce the benefit of the doubt about this, and speculating that maybe she’d just been overwhelmed by New Relationship Energy and the almost-constant presence of people she has feelings for since the kiss… but there’s very little doubt left for her to benefit from.
In particular, while Dorothy was checking on Amber, Joyce had a great opportunity to reflect, largely undistracted, on Sarah’s words. It’d be something to do while waiting for a stall, for one thing. And yet…
Weird how Thag posted it hours ago and no one came to yell at them. Almost like when you get pushback about similar thoughts it might have something to do with the way you personally communicate it.
I hate to bring a sour note to this saphic symphony but I’m commenting from a wheelchair in a nursing home that is likely to be my permanent residence until I pass on. I fell and broke my fibula back in 6/10 because I had muscle relaxers in my system, lost my balance and lost my fibula, knee, and hip on my right side, the second time I injured that hipj. I still have 3 blank spots on my customer loyalty card before I get that spa day at the Elysian Fields resort, and maybe get off this merry-go-round…
As someone who is also dealing with a lot of medical issues that inspire you to dwell on your own mortality and what the current situation means going forward, I do sincerely send you best wishes. My only advice I can give as a stranger to another is to not neglect your emotional support systems during this time. It is very easy to spiral and those relationships mean the world during times like this.
Hey, I hope they’re able to make you as comfortable as possible while you heal, and if they’re willing to give it to you, physical therapy can be a lifesaver for regaining function and restoring mobility and stability. Both my knees, my left hip, my SI and my spine are all various degrees of fucked up, from “totally” to “badly,” and physical therapy was really a lifesaver for me in regaining my mobility. I hope it can do the same for you, and restore your independence.
Wishing you nothing but the best possible luck and outcome, Opus, and the strength to get through it. I hope you get to hang around this world every second that you want to.
If people think shower stall floors are a place where pathogenic bacteria that can either function of the skin surface (athlete’s foot), penetrate the skin, or get from the feet to a suitable point of entry, what makes them think that flip flops would, in any way prevent this? Warm water will be splashing about at foot level and droplets from the floor surface are going to get into flip flops.
I imagine if people are concerned about it they let the shower run a couple minutes before stepping in. Plus, it’s still at least a nice preventative idea. Reduces the contact between your feet and the shower floor. Some droplets may still find their way in but it’s a lot fewer compared to just walking with your grippers out. Plus I feel most of the water that’ll wind up in your flip flops would be water dripping down your legs during the shower.
I don’t get wearing shower shoes in the shower, myself. I always thought the point of shower flip-flops was so your clean feet don’t get covered in dorm hall stank before you get socks on, IMHO you obviously take ’em off to shower and if you’re worried about showerfunk you rinse it down first like Doopyboop said.
I really don’t understand why people are so shocked about Joyce’s behavior. To quote someone else, Joyce has spent the whole comic going head first, heart full into whatever she does. So like of course this is how she behaves when she realizes she’s in love with Dorothy even though she’s dating someone else.
To quote Willis, it’s the Joycest thing she’s ever done.
There’s a part of me that thinks we’re getting curveballed at some point, and Joyce realizes that she feels she *can’t* break up with Joe, because she doesn’t want to, even if it means that she’ll have to break up with Dorothy.
Right now, I feel like her line of thinking thus far has been “welp, I’m in lesbians now, so therefore I logically conclude that I must break up with my boyfriend, because isn’t that what you do after you kiss a girl?” As evidenced by her freaking blowing Joe, she is rushing into this to the point that she’s not considering the ramifications of everything until the moment she’s literally confronted with any one thing. She is 100% set on renting a U-Haul with Dorothy, up until the exact second she’s in the presence of Joe, because the reality is that Joyce loves autistically deeply, and she loves them both so, so much.
I think there’s a possibility that Joyce-logic eventually leads her to think that it would be better (slash it would feel better for her personally) to stay with Joe and also fuck Dorothy while still maintaining their platonic friendship, and then not be able to wrap her head around why neither Joe and Dorothy are going to be okay with that.
In essence, I don’t know if Joyce is going to be able to figure out what the fuck she actually wants to move forward with, unless she’s either actually in the same room with both Joe and Dorothy, OR if she were to get sufficient space from both of them, to figure that out for herself.
Neither of which is likely to happen, for obvious reasons.
The truth IMO is that Joyce doesn’t want to break up with anybody, and is not committing any mental energy towards figuring out her deeper feelings about that, let alone how to solve the obvious downstream problems from that reality; just like she isn’t putting any actual serious effort, into actually going and breaking up with Joe.
Joyce seems to be hedonistically seeking pleasure and joy in whatever the current situation is, and not thinking about the bigger picture at all.
She was getting ready to take the scary (for an ex-fundie), life changing step of penetrative hetero sex with Joe, and at the same time discovered the non-scary sapphic attraction to her perfect cinnamon roll.
The spontaneious oral sex with Joe suggests she’s still really hot for him and wants to climb him like a big, sexy tree.
We’ve seen Joyce back away from full penetrative sex with Joe, on the evening that he ended up fingering her. We’ve seen Joyce have nightmares about penetrative sex in the past, more than once, I think? Certainly at least the one time.
It’s odd to me that more folks aren’t considering that maybe this has always been something that she was told she was supposed to want, but that for reasons she never understood until this moment, scared and repulsed her in ways she couldn’t explain.
I’m inclined to treat this as another one of those tightropes that Willis does so well (frustratingly so, damn you Willis, etc).
It seems to me equally plausible:
– Joyce is having a post-fundie-trauma reaction to the idea of PIV sex/”going all the way” that’s separated from her willingness to put mouth on ween and other sex-adjacent things because it’s not “losing her virginity” and other such cultural baggage.
– Joyce is more lesbian than bi, and is actually fundamentally repulsed by PIV sex because it’s not included in her actual orientation/preferences.
Honestly, I think the average folk is considering that “if she’s willing to engage sexually in other ways with Joe-wang, she’s not conceptually repulsed by it” — certainly that’s where I was until you pointed it out, as I’ve always (pre-cheating) identified with Joyce’s journey and my cismale ass had the same gut-level “I will not do PIV, even after I’ve been atheist and done everything but, because that’s DIFFERENT and IMPORTANT” reaction until I finally impulse-decided to force myself to do it (in the middle of a mental health crisis in college, which I strenuously don’t recommend).
Good point. It may of course be that for all her ”boy crazy” aesthetic crushes, penis-in-vulva sex isn’t actually in Joyce’s sexual play book. More lesbian than bi is a valid read of what we have seen.
My personal guess is that she’s fully into both, and it’s the fundie thing that makes ”losing her virginity” in the biblical and stupid sense extra spicy.
It ended up being very lucky — my roommate called it as wildly out of character the next day and started a conversation that ended with him dragging me to the on-campus mental health clinic, and once THAT got settled down the person I had sex with ended up being a great FWB for many years. (first thing she says to me when I announce I’m taking medical leave for the semester was “oh God, that’s not MY fault, is it? I’m so sorry.”)
This. Exactly this. Nothing Joyce has done has been surprising so far. We’ve always known she’s a flawed character, and she’s been careless and hurt people before. Like, this is orders of magnitude worse than the whole Jacob situation, but it’s also been building up for that much longer, so naturally the fallout would be worse. Point is, there’s nothing surprising about Joyce’s repressed horniness making her make bad decisions that hurt others, we’ve seen it before. Doesn’t mean you have to like it, but you can’t say it was unexpected.
The thing that people find out of character isn’t her passion towards Dorothy, but rather her callousness towards Joe. She previously hasn’t been someone who so readily follows her own desires at the expense of someone she cares about.
I dont think its callousness at all. I think its literally something Joyce has always done. Its a hyoerfixation. This has been building since literally the moment they met and now I believe it’s just overwhelming her. If it was callousness she would have just dropped Joe and not been conflicted or blown him.
Now I’m suddenly imagining Joyce as having a mental slot for “person I’m in love with”, sort of like a video game equipment slot, and slotting in either Joe or Dorothy depending on which one she’s interacting with at that moment.
Girl needs to invest in that upgrade for a second slot.
Personally, I’ve never been surprised by it. I’m just irked by her consistently refusing to address the problem. Even if she doesn’t personally have the social understanding to realise why it is a problem, others have made it evident that it is. Mostly Sarah, but even Dorothy has pointed it out… yet it seems like, the instant it stops being actively focused on, the entire concept seems to just fall out of her brain.
So… yes, this is very Joyce. That doesn’t mean it can’t also be very annoying.
I’ve never cared about shipping wars or people’s ships before, so it’s SUCH a strange feeling to hate this one so much. I want to torpedo this vessel and watch it sink to the briny deep. On a scale of 1 to 10, I went from Apathy to War Criminal. No wonder people get in trouble inside their own fandoms when conciliating with something they don’t like. Even worse when it’s… canon. 🤢
/s I am making fun of myself here, don’t get too upset with me.
Yo… where did you get that footage? The dude who was holding the phone promised me he wasn’t gonna post it. Oh I am going to have some words with him… very aggressive whistling and musical words… but words all the same.
Well, we’ve seen that they had trouble with Amber’s Amazi-Girl Evolution (Dark Type / Fighting Type), but I would normally lean towards Ghost and Psychic types, maybe?
According to this, quite a few things. I’m going to choose to invoke the spirit of the alligator for this one. Y’all feel free to select your own mascots. Once we get a full roster, we can go full Power Rangers on this shit.
Joyce and Dorothy are less interesting together than literally every other couple in the strip; which is weird because they are apparently Willis’s favourite.
I’m reminded of poofdepoof’s comment on the March 6th, 2025 strip, featuring a similar style of punchline:
Something I do when I read this strip is take final panel jokes out of character a little bit. Like, this is the final panel because it’s funnier / more entertaining storytelling than if we maintained the tension further, not necessarily because this is like, a reversal of character for the patient, understanding Joe we’ve seen in all the other panels of the last few strips…
Thanks to rereading old strips and storylines, I present everyone with a strip where Joyce says she thinks Walky smells nice solely because she thinks he smells like Dorothy
Joe wasn’t perfect, but he was all about informed consent. As far as we know, he made sure the girls he was with knew what he was about and were OK with it. With Sarah’s sister, as soon as she revoked consent, he was full stop.
His list and otherwise objectification of women was problematic, but as far as we know Joe the womanizer was above board as far as his sexual activities.
The problem with “as far as we know” is that we know almost nothing. He was good with Liz, but that was well after he started to change. When he hit on Joyce very early on, he certainly wasn’t up front with her about only wanting to get into her pants, rather than any kind of relationship, despite telling others he wanted to fix her with his penis.
Other than that, we never saw him hit on anyone with any success at all, so we really don’t know.
We know from Dorothy that for someone all about consent, in his younger years, he wasn’t above trying to shame the women that turned him down.
More recently, his vaunted principles about cheating didn’t seem to extend to not fantasising about his best friend’s girlfriend in front of him, putting Amazi-Girl on his to do list and speculating about her kinkiness over Danny’s discomfort and protests.
Yes, he wasn’t a monster, but I feel like that’s a very low bar to clear. He’s had a ton of growth from the unpleasant guy he used to be, and I think flattening that out into saying he was always principled to make him look better than the queer girl who’s too horny for her own good… Isn’t great.
For the record (and the eleventieth time of saying this) it wasn’t him being horny all the time.
It was the lack of interest in women’s boundaries, the misogyny, and the shitty treatment of his own “best friend” that people took objection to. He was a gross character, it had nothing to do with being horny and everything to do with how he behaved as a result of being horny. Which was mostly to harass women.
People tried to say this at the time, too! They tried to say folks were slut-shaming Joe, over all of our many protests that that wasn’t the dang problem. Argh!
In WHAT WORLD are you seeing Joyce GET A PASS? This very comments section is full of people yelling about how awful she is, how bad a person she is, how immoral she is, how they hope she gets punished in this way or that way!
Also, my recollection is, people were upset with Joe for the way he treated women like objects and a scoreboard, instead of people with an interiority and feelings, in his pursuit of treating coupling as a meaningless thing with no attachment, so he could never be hurt or betrayed like his mom was. He acted in a pretty shitty way towards a lot of folks during that period of time, including his “ranking list”, and then, over time, he changed! And has become one of the most beloved characters in the comics. So I genuinely do *not* know what comments section you are reading, here.
I’ve found people who think Joyce sucks think there are a lot of people defending her, and people defending her think there are a lot of people who think Joyce sucks. I can’t be damned to do a tally though, Willis removed that poll before it got anywhere.
Joyce had to be reminded to take her BC that she takes for medical reasons, not contraceptive ones, I don’t think Joyce should date around casually or participate in hookup culture rn. BC can actually sometimes make babies *more* likely to happen in certain situations (hence why some docs recommend couples trying to get pregnant to get on BC to regulate their cycle first.) Heck, I’m about as fertile as the Sahara and I got a kid off of BC.
Plus there’s like diseases too. Given her recent behavior and inability to think farther than the end of the panel, Joyce is probably the character I would least trust to have safe sex. I would almost bet money on her going “I’m on the pill, so I guess it’s fine” if a dude pressed the issue like an ass.
But I agree, I kind of think that maybe Joyce shouldn’t be in a committed relationship at all if she can’t break it off with Joe. Joe deserves better, Dorothy doesn’t deserve to be led on like that because nobody deserves that, and it’s a painful lesson that I think Joyce needs to learn.
I dont think thats the case. We know shes attracted to him and likes him. I think its just that her feelings for Dorothy have been building for such a long time and she’s overwhelmed by them. When she doesnt have that with Joe.
There are generally two ways to interpret how Joyce feels about Joe. She either genuinley loves him AND dorothy, but just doesn’t really feel much guilt about either. She thinks both love is genuine (and as was succinctly put, lacks object permanence with it). What she is doing with dorothy cant be bad because she loves her.
The other option is that she is absolutley willing to drop Joe because she realised what she had with him was a safe place to explore sexuality, but she never actually liked him in the way she LOVES dorothy, which is clear to her now because she actually has it here. In that case, Joe is essentially already broken up with in her mind, she just doesn’t want to actually go through the difficult process of doing it because she’s immature and avoidant.
In both cases, her being flirty with dorothy is consistant. Either she is writing off joe and so it doesn’t really matter, or she is unwilling to supress either of her relationships.
I tend to think its the second she likes Joe finds him attractive and exciting to explore sexually but is writing him off because Dorothy is who she loves and has been pining for since meeting compared to joe
I’m losing a lot of respect for Joyce. The first kiss at the protest I could get but this is not OK. Joe has been really good to her and they had a really good relationship. I’m having a hard time wanting to keep reading. Her character use to have standards. Now it’s like she only cares about herself.
She has never had “standards.” She had a doctrine of belief that was causing her immense unceasing anxiety and stress, and now that she’s free from it, she’s learning how to be a person.
We are currently watching her horribly mismanage that, because she doesn’t understand how her actions can hurt people. This specific arc is highlighting her acting on her (extremely well established) desires, and will probably show her learning about those consequences.
“Learning how to be a person” doesn’t imply that at all. It’s a turn of phrase to state that she is figuring out how to exist in the world without the structures that she was using before. This feels like a nearly absurd misrepresentation of what I was saying
Remember when Sarah said Joyce would one day snap and suck a thosuand dicks or whatever. Like between her being so forward with both Dorothy and Joe while obviously not being in a position to be fully committed to either I actually do think it would be best if Joyce called off all relationships and just dated causally.
I actually do think a one night stand would be better for Joyce at the moment.
I think for her sex is still too tied to romance for her to be ready for one night stands. She’s horny and not thinking or behaving well because she’s in love (or at least crushing hard), not just randomly.
Look, I’ll go one further than thejeff — based on how she’s been acting and justifying herself so far, Joyce CAN’T have a one night stand. She might TRY, but if she does she’s just going to believe THAT person is her one special somepony forever and ever…
…plausibly until she sees Joe or Dorothy alone again.
In point of fact, I don’t think she’s going to be able to break up with Joe unless Dorothy is with her, because I suspect that a combo of “guilt/shame” and “I actually do really like him AND lust after him on several levels” will induce her to choose weenus over straightening out her drama without a constant reminder of why she wants to break up with him within eyesight.
I feel like Joyce being completely new at relationships in general is something that should be considered more than it seems to. People learn through two basic ways: either they learn from a trusted authority, or they learn through experience. And unfortunately, learning from experience is usually what locks the lessons in. We know that prior to starting college, Joyce was not getting any significant worthwhile relationship advice from the dominant authorities in her pre-college life, and we know that she had minimal first-hand experience to draw from. I wish she had done this right (or at least better) with respect to Joe, but it should not be much of a surprise that she is fumbling through this. I can’t bring myself to condemn her as a person. People need to be able to make some mistakes sometimes, and breaking up with someone in a shitty way is definitely shitty, it also seems far from an unforgivable offense to me. Maybe she can atone and make amends, or maybe she can’t. We will see.
It will be fine for about 10 seconds until Joyce sees someone has stuck a piece of hair on one of the walls of the stall and climbs Dorothy to get away from it.
I think it’s unfair to label Dorothy as prudish for sticking to the boundary she’s set for her and Joyce while they still haven’t broken up with their boyfriends.
This strip really highlights one of Joyce’s flaws, which is that she does not respect the relationship boundaries others set. It’s one of her most consistent foibles. Dorothy has told her, repeatedly, that they can’t be touching and kissing while doing so would be cheating (I.E. Dorothy is setting a boundary). Joyce expressed extremely ambivalent acceptance of this and is now trying to get them naked together anyway.
It’s mitigated for me right now by the way Dorothy is responding: she hasn’t yet seemed even really exasperated, much less distressed.
Could just be that it’s still all too new to be grating for her, but combining this with the fact that Dorothy does clearly also want to be smooching and more, but just feels that they shouldn’t, I’m not yet concerned.
Absolutely open to revising, for my part, if any of the above changes.
But you’re right that she did the same thing with Joe repeatedly, and he hadn’t yet actually told her he felt anxious about “taking” her virginity…
Dorothy’s actually stated the boundary, but Joyce would be correct if she assumes Dorothy doesn’t actually want to wait (more feels obligated to wait), so.
We’ll see how Joyce handles it when a partner both doesn’t want something and says no clearly.
Also as someone who’s done it before… shower sexy times are never as fun or as sexy as you think they’ll be and usually end in someone hacking up water or slipping on tile.
Yeah, seriously. In theory, it’s all rivulets of water tracing glistening curves, and in practice it’s all hard, uncomfortable surfaces with nothing to support you, and water makes a lousy lubricant and washes away the natural ones, so the only thing that’s actually slippery is the floor, and then someone gets a faucet or shower knob in the spine and accidentally turns the water to freezing or scalding, and going down on a woman in the shower is basically just a sexier way to get waterboarded…
I managed to have a lot of fun in the shower in my sophomore year. Hot water was included in the rent at a fixed price, and I love the shower anyway. Having sex there was great for me at least.
A month of sneaking around cheating and the fallout from police brutality at a protest is… Not a very fun stretch for this comic. I look forward to when DoJo becomes public knowledge in-universe so that we can get to the parts of the relationship drama that I find more interesting.
You’d save negative 1 hour of time Joyce, know yourself better XD
Can’t wait till everyone knows so we can get to the interesting parts of the relationship. WILL Joe be willing to accept polyamory? WILL Dorothy be willing to share? WILL Joyce accept that she has needs that one person can’t fill, that the love between her and Joe and the love between her and Dorothy are very different creatures that fundamentally can coexist while not excluding the need for each other?
Find out next time, when they get their sh*! together!
I can’t help but wonder if Rachel being the one to be nearby when Joyce and Dorothy are acting sus is a narrative decision for later. I’ve said it before, it’d be cathartic for Joe to figure it out first and be the one doing the dumping.
If I understand correctly, then yes. Apparently the Joyce/Dorothy hookup was not originally planned for a while before Willis decided to change course. As a result, I suspect a lot of the comics they had already planned need to be scrapped or at least altered. Hence the shrunken buffer time.
I don’t think that’s why. They draw the comics as they go, so they would only have drawn the latter comics after Dorothy and Joyce got together. I think it’s probably a lot more to do with the feedback they got about muslim rep and actually taking the Bulmeria thing more seriously, but I’m also just guessing.
Hopefully we’ll get some awesome new story out of it!
I look forward to whatever our Fearless Leader produces, though we still reserve the right to shout the song of our people. All rise for the “Damn You, Willis,” as is tradition.
Yeah Bulmeria/Muslim rep is one of the couple good reasons Willis decided to slash the buffer
He’s realized at this point that if his goal is to make the comic more relevant to an audience of modern US college students, then a really long buffer would inevitably be an obstacle no matter which way ya slice it
Pretty number go up, but pretty number have point of diminishing returns!
I actually think a lot of alterations and additions are being made, because the cheating plotline and speedrunning into Joyce/Dorothy has not landed well.
Trying to mitigate the ”anti-genocide protest as a romantic backdrop” is of course as big factor as well.
You know… I referred to this comic (endearingly, mind you) as a cartoon soap opera, and I’m trying to work out how I could work in some joke regarding shower/bathing/soap into this, but I’ve sat on it all day and still not coming up with anything.
Only thing that goes through my head is a line from a friend from middle school, whose response to drama was “this opera is so soapy I could wash my hands with it.” I’m still chuckling at it all these years later.
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*plays “Mystery Kindaichi Band” on hacked muzak*
Dorothy is distressing sensible.
Usually I’d agree, but if she’s going barefoot into the communal showers, that’s another signal of DEEP distress.
Actually I’m rereading the archives and it looks like she always went barefoot into the showers. She’s barefoot on her way into the showers when a towel wrapped roz stops her to talk about her and Joyce’s night out at the bar, on the May 6 2024 page.
Amazigirl is immune to criticism. Dorothy is immune to athletes foot.
Maybe consider reining it in a little, Joyce
What am I talking about, she doesn’t have hold of her own reins
She’s good with Dorothy in control of her reigns.
She’s the ruler of multiple countries?
Give her time.
Huuuuge tracts of land!
But is she mistress of her domain?
Seriously. I get that it’s all new and exciting for her – both being able to be horny with someone and being gay and the new forbidden relationship and yadda yadda… But like, dang, could she stop cheating on Joe for even just a couple of hours before she breaks it off with him?
Some people peek out of the closet and slowly step out. Some explode out. The latter is more often the case when they were repressing a lot.
Joyce was so repressed, honestly, she’s not really fully in control of her faculties right now. Her inhibitions have basically lost their hold on the reigns, and the horses are running wild, and her inhibitions are just hanging on for dear life and won’t be able to regain control until the horses stop.
Basically, Joyce is drunk on her own freedom on the moment, except without drunkeness’s convenient downing, slow down, inability to consent, and blacking out.
It’s like only having the inhibition loss, and nothing will snap you out of it until it’s run its course, and then you have to figure out who this new person you actually are is afterwards.
Drunk on her freedom… that’s an excellent turn of phrase. While it ain’t how I escaped, I have definitely seen other ex-fundies go that route.
Joyce, there’s already a popular Slipshine about a different shower couple. You can’t step on their turf.
Sure she can, she’s wearing protective shoes.
Excellent comment
jugs
Same instinct I had. (proper nomenclature is important)
If it were proper nomenclature it would be capitalized.
You’re right. That should be “Jugs is wearing proper shoes.”
<3
Yeah, but she’s wearing them with socks!
Once again we see Joyce as an instigatior.
Wait, Joyce is the domme/semme in this relationship!
Always has been meme.
SEMME was the other continuity.
What does semme mean in this context? I have never encountered that.
Those are terms i haven’t heard in a long time.
It comes from yaoi/boys in love manga. The seme is the more dominant partner. The counter part is uke which is the more submissive partner.
TIL what the other summer is. You can tell because my autocorrect doesn’t know “semme “.
From what I can find, “semme” is an insulting term for an effeminate man. Has evolved in some places to be a meaningless insult for anyone.
Semme: possibly derived from femme, means as you describe.
SEMME: Willis’s fictional spy org from the Walkyverse
Seme: Japanese shipping-specific term for the partner who physically tops. Might or might not have other connotations, derived from 攻める (semeru).
PS: it’s perfectly natural to have strong preferences for which fictional character tops, people have been arguing about this at least as far back as Ancient Greece. Where it gets problematic is when bottom=passive=feminine=bad. Break that chain, don’t use these terms to describe real people, and you’re fine.
Also tops and bottoms absolutely exist in real life. Some people are also verses, but lots of folks do in fact have very strong preferences for one over the other. Also bottoms are more common, so just. Try to keep that in mind. Top != the “universally agreed-upon better” position, more people would pick bottom if given the choice.
PPS: some people’s shipping “order” preferences are directly tied to their dysphoria!
If you can agree that it would be shitty to demand every fic writer disclose their dysphoria before being allowed to express a strong “order” preference – you should also be able to agree that maybe it’s okay for strangers to like things you think are silly.
I’ve always had a massive bone to pick with the top/bottom thing, and all flavours of effeminite = womanlike = weak = inferior.
It really annoys me, and I’m a middle aged straight male.
she only ever instigations the best stuff tho
She is and has always been deeply reckless in terms of love. Now that there’s no God she is going to be so, so, so much worse.
She’s been like that especially in regard to Dorothy. After the timeskip, she no longer had any restraints, except “I’m straight”. It was kinda predictable that it would get worse that fast.
Two things I have realized:
1) When Joe told Dorothy (jokingly) that she was worse than him, he was actually right. Joyce was pretty much exactly this horny and over-the-top with him in the early phases of their relationship as well. And while Joe was certainly willing, he felt that it would be taking advantage of Joyce to indulge and pumped the brakes until he was sure that she was thinking clearly and not just in a hormone driven mess.
While Dorothy IS setting up boundaries now, she had to be guilted into doing it.
2) Sarah said she was going to take a shower, so there is a non-zero chance she is hearing Joyce’s comedic “What if we?” comment literally five minutes after she dressed them down for their cheating ways.
To be fair to Dorothy she has, so far, always been the one trying to pump the breaks. She’s the one saying “we need to tell our boyfriends” and “we shouldn’t kiss anymore”. She just hasn’t done a good job of enforcing those decisions.
Joe was able to resist Joyce pulling this bullshit, but Dorothy isn’t. Joe wasn’t even in a relationship at the time, there was nothing more than his own concern for Joyce (and himself, let’s be honest) that held him back.
Therefore, my statement that he is better than Dorothy still stands.
That’s fair now, but the context of him saying that was that Dorothy was worse than he was.
Which makes sense for him to say, given his trauma around cheating, but is a lot more complicated given all the other problems with his previous behavior.
Um, “this bullshit” meaning… a healthy sex drive?
Ladies, remember to AVOID men who think it’s their job to protect you from your own enthusiastically consenting desires. Especially those who think of it in terms of “taking advantage of you” if they also enthusiastically consent to a normal activity. It suggests they have you on a pedestal and don’t trust you to make your own choices/think they know better than you what you want for yourself. Not good.
Joyce is an adult, wanting to have sex isn’t some wild damaging thing she should be saved from. If Dorothy has sex with Joyce, it won’t make her worse than Joe (unless she does it right now while they’re cheating, thaaaat would be bad lmao).
There’s a weird kinda double vision I have over that second paragraph as a cis guy, in all honestly, and I while these days I land where you do (people who are enthusiastically consenting are allowed to make their own mistakes), from Joe’s POV in particular and from a generic cis-male-chunk POV there are some complicating factors:
– He’s Joyce’s friend, too, from before the relationship, and wants to make extra sure that even if she makes a mistake about what she wants that he’s not the person who was part of that mistake. He might well, right or wrong, see himself both as “the person with whom she is consenting” and “the friend she is consulting to see if she’s on a good course”
– When you’re a dude of a certain bulk, but a decent person, you ALWAYS have in the back of your mind the fact that you can be unintentionally intimidating just by virtue of being literally twice someone’s size, and that can affect/twist your perception of “enthusiastic” such that you take extra care. It’s stupid, but (twenty years ago) I had a set of rules that boiled down to “I am never standing when she’s sitting, I’m never between her and the door, I don’t escalate to the next tier of sex act, etc.” and got a frankly absurd amount of positive feedback for it.
I’m absolutely not including “taking extra care” in my statement. Being aware of your partner’s feelings and how the world looks from their point of view is not at all what Lumino was discussing.
You can (and I am sure you do) behave like that without completely dismissing their ability to consent. Calling sex between two consenting partners “taking advantage” and calling Joyce being horny “this bullshit” and implying Dorothy is a bad person for not “resisting” it is just… very different.
@Nymph: Yeah, I guess what I’m also kinda trying to flail at, point-wise, is that from within the head of the cis-male-chunk of college age, it’s not a super bright line between “I don’t want to take advantage” and “I’m trying to avoid being implicitly/unintentionally coercive”.
To be clear, I think Lumino’s off-base, but largely because there’s not the same implicit coercion risk just by nature of Dorothy not being twice Joyce’s size and a regular weightlifter, etc.
Totally valid, not a headspace I’ve ever been in so I don’t know what that’s like. I still think that’s not really what Lumino specifically was saying, but I get the point you are making.
Thank you for your translation of it, I kinda tripped over my point.
Joe, being the more experienced one, was obviously concerned that Joyce was swept up in the moment and would regret such actions if they acted impulsively. He cared too much about Joyce for their first time to be something she regretted. He wanted to be absolutely, 100% certain that this was what Joyce wanted, and he didn’t take her hormone driven, over-the-top flirtations as an invitation. He took them of an indication of desire, but not as a statement of intent.
When Joyce made it clear to him that yes, she wanted to do that with him, he was absolutely willing to consent. The date wasn’t Joyce on a horny high, it was her actually making the conscience decision. And, importantly, she still had the where-with-all to revoke her consent when she realized she really was NOT ready for everything.
That was only possible BECAUSE Joe was so cautious about ensuring she was really consenting and not just swept up in the euphoria of it. Even when he was in horn dog mode, consent and proper expectations were SUPER important to Joe.
Dorothy thought poorly of Joe, but she’s clearly MUCH less prepared to deal with Joyce’s emotional highs, as evidenced by her frequently getting her boundaries trampled on by them.
Here’s the thing — I’m deliberately not framing it as “experience” because I don’t think that’s the actual issue at hand.
Joe taking extra care by nature of being “twice her size/strength” being implicitly potentially intimidating doesn’t really relate in any way to Dorothy’s behavior, because the surrounding context is different. As such, I don’t think there’s any actual issue in terms of “resistance to boundary-pushing” happening here, the thing that’s happening is of a different kind.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on that point, Big Z. While I certainly think the size issue was a factor for Joe, I think it was more on him feeling he had to take things super slow, since this was all extremely new for Joyce and he didn’t want to hurt her.
If that was his choice to make or not is another question entirely.
Thank you, Limino!
Do you think you could give us your full moral rankings of the characters, from worst to best? Could you do it in the form of a leaderboard?
annotated to show how much guilt each character should be feeling for the rest of their lives to be properly deserving of respect, of course!
I don’t understand the implication that Joe’s actions towards Joyce were driven by pure ethical concern rather than, you know, being in love for the first time while also having had a horrific experience with nearly having sex with someone he saw as very similar to Joyce. Also (misplaced) concern for Joyce as a person. You can’t compare avoiding sex out of fear and concern for the person you’re potentially boinking with avoiding sex out of concern for other, uninvolved people.
I’m not gonna chime in on who is “worse” though. I think the whole point of that strip was that Dorothy was being self-righteous and ridiculous by putting things on those terms, and the act of ranking ppl is itself the problem.
Cut Dorothy some slack. She and Joyce first kissed “yesterday.” The emotional blast of new love overrode rationality. Getting herself back together by the next morning is pretty good in my book.
Their dynamic at one point looked like it could be characterized as Dorothy being an instigator, but the longer this goes on it really starts looking more like just the ordinary distinction between “the planner” and “the impulsive”. And now that Joyce’s impulsiveness is directed at Dorothy as much as Dorothy’s need-to-fix was directed Joyce-ward, we’ve got a weird kind of tipping the scales the opposite direction from what it used to appear.
Joyce I thought you were at least trying to pretend you’re not totally super fuckng gay for each other
On second thought, trying does not mean succeeding.
Once Joyce commits—
Wait, no not like that.
Yes like that! Joyce has just unlocked the power of “be gay,” to ascend to the next level she needs to “do crime!”
I mean you gotta remember these two have been extremely gay in a platonic-ish way since the very beginning, like nearly half a year ago at this point. Sal was being flippant but she wasn’t wrong when she said them making out is hardly the gayest thing they’ve done in public.
Without going back to re-read, the sense I get is that we keep seeing a pattern that boils down to…
Dorothy: Okay, but we need to dial it back until we actually break up with our boyfriends.
Joyce: I agree. Also, we should smooch again.
Dorothy: That’s not what we agreed on!
Joyce: You’re right. Also, we should smooch again.
LESBIAN SHOWER SECKS
I love Joyce’s expression in the last panel.
It’s diabolical.
I love Dorothy’s expression in the last panel! She’s so into it… I’m pretty sure it took her a LOT of willpower to get that “no” out
One of the Joyce faces of all time.
Dorothy: I’ve decided to become a cop! To REFORM THE SYSTEM FROM WITHIN!
Joyce: You wanna reform MY system from within?
Dorothy: No. I mean, yes. But no.
I’m not too proud to admit that line would probably work on me.
Yeah, good call, Dorothy.
Joyce, c’mon, plausible deniability.
Don’t you mean implausible deniability?
Or plausible undeniability
I mean implausible undeniability.
Just for the sake of completeness.
That seems unfair to incomplete implausible undeniability.
She has suggested that it’s just to save time.
Plausible deniability, check.
Now on with the shower sex!
somehow i doubt much time would be saved
100%. Speaking from experience — even if you’re NOT trying to do anything sexy, two people in one shower is just awkward and inefficient. You are genuinely better off just showering in turns.
Unless they stand close enough to both be under the water – or unless they’re washing each other’s hair and back and then swapping spots. It feels much nicer to wash somebody’s hair and then have yours washed in turn than just washing your own. Also you can keep a conversation going.
Swapping spots is one of the major problems, though. You don’t realize it when you’re alone in the shower but there’s a load of soak/rinse/lather/scrub/rinse process going on, and you’re moving in and out of the stream of water for many parts of it. Multiply that by (usually) 3 for soap, shampoo, and conditioner and you’re switching places a lot. That’s dead easy with one person, and a whole to-do with two people in the same stall. Lots of scooting past and bumping into each other.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s FUN. But it’s the opposite of efficient.
It’s not so inefficient to be the opposite of efficient. It’s still about the same time. My wife takes 10 min, I’m about 15-20 to shower usually, but when we go together we’re usually out within 20-30, depending on how much of the extra skin/hair care routines we do (counting the times that we’re only showering in there).
Speaking from my own experience, this is entirely determined by the size of the shower stall and spray radius vs. the size of the participants. Dorm showers where I went to school would have been pretty conducive to efficient partner showering, had I been the kind of person to try to sneak girls in there (I hadn’t realized I also like some guys back then).
Eager/horny Joyce continues to be surprisingly adorable.
Masturbation can take off the edge and so can someone jerking you off but hey guess what happy chems never stop going brrrrrrrrrrrr
Horny Joyce is the best Joyce.
Damn Joyce is horny.
Should we trust that?
We can certainly trust that Joyce is horny. It may be the one thing we can trust.
Whether we can trust Joyce when she’s horny is a completely different question.
More like Joeyce
…oh thank god. I was so worried they’d shower together. Good girls! No more cheating for now! 🙂
“We’d save a lot of time”
Oh Joyce. Lesbian sex is not in fact a time saver
But what if you save the time from a different, more boring way to be spent, like not having lesbian sex?
Save as in rescue, not save as in reserve. I like this.
Also the Clairevatar is perfect for semantic debates and I love it
But combining lesbian sex with showering saves the extra time you would have spent showering.
Your logic is irrefutable.
Joyce is actually ahead of the game in not trusting shower stalls. That’s a smart cookie right there. A very smart, very horny cookie.
Lmao Joyce you horndog 😂
Keep It Clean part 2?
Ohmygod is Rachel gonna be the one to blow this right open
Also, Joyce omfg what is that face in the last panel, that’s a terrifying expression. I’d almost be worried she’s having like a hypomanic/manic episode if I didn’t know better, that’s the look I made when I decided to bake a life size Minecraft creeper cake for my daughter’s birthday.
(For those curious, no I was not able to do that and I’m happy my husband was able to say “What? No!” when I suggested it. I instead made a Minecraft cake cake. )
Milk, sugar, egg, wheat?
Uhg. Joyce, get a grip.
No, not like that.
Messing about in a soapy wet environment while standing on jug clogs sounds like a safety hazard to me…
Your mom is a safety hazard
Your mom jokes are so not funny any more. Repeated your mom jokes even less so.
They funny to me snd that’s all i care about.
Yes, but other comments on here offend your sensibilities. So you could consider other people’s sensibilities.
K
It’s been clear from the start that, for whatever value their thoughtful contributions have, Nadamás is not going to skimp out on a rude/insulting one-liner if they feel like the situation needs one.
I couldn’t call them one liners, that imply a level of thought i do not put into it.
I believe the rule is that your mom jokes are only funny if they involve nickels.
Your mom’s your mom jokes aren’t funny.
Damn can’t believe i missed that one i am getting rusty.
Your mom’s getting rusty (since I stopped visiting).
Sounds like you need to pay a visit and give her the wD-40.
Your mom thought it was funny.
Respectfully disagreed — repeated your mom jokes are funny as hell, as long as you can avoid the standard sexist/body-shaming/etc tropes.
Your mom is funny as hell.
She’s been working hard on her stand-up routine, and the effort’s paying off.
Your mom is paying off!
And we’re proud of her for getting her mortgage finished up early, that extra $100 a week she was putting toward the principal really added up.
I specifically avoid those because they are the standard and expected use of the joje, and i only find it funny when it makes absolutely no sense.
Nadamás fights for our right to use stupid annoying insults here.
I do my best but i warn that i am very weak and out of shape so i will end up losing that fight.
Honor dictates only that you fight with all your might. There is no dishonor in defeat, so long as you truly gave it your all.
Sorry for this very cringe response. I was kinda riding high off “aww hell yeah, work day is over!” vibes at the time.
Wait, how come Dorothy, High Lady of Health and Safety, Praetor of Perfectionism, Eparch of Etiquette doesn’t have flip-flops on?
“flipflops are just another prison man” -new dorothy
Duuuuuuude. That’s far out, man.
Maybe it’s fine since she plans to wash her feet anyways in the shower? Or she’s so distracted she’s not paying attention to it.
Even if you wash your feet in the shower, your still exposing your feet to bathroom gunk and fungus on the way out.
barefoot D:
I really hoping these two can hold off from each other until after they actually talk with their boyfriends and break up with them.
I hope they can’t, and the boys walk in on them, and join in.
I hope they can’t, and the boys walk in on them, and everything falls apart in a dramatic mess.
If I could post pictures, rest assured I would be replying with an image of a smiling George Takei with the phrase “OH MY!” at the bottom of it.
We should also consider the option where they can’t hold off from each other, the boyfriends walk in and join them and then everything falls apart in a dramatic mess. That way we hit all the bases.
Excellent point, my distinguished mess connoisseur!
I hope they can’t, because I don’t want to wait that long.
“No” as in “No, we wouldn’t save any time,” and I say that with the voice of experience.
I really am disappointed in joyce…. gotta keep reminding .myself this is all new to her and that excitement is hard to fight off. But man Joe is gonna be crushed and its gonna be one hell of a testament to his character arc that he doesn’t let this revert him back to his old ways. …..but I sense a twist that someone heard from one of the other stalls and while they are showering words gonna spread back to their boys
Heard what? They haven’t said anything out of the normal for those two in this strip.
That last panel is super flirty in a very obvious way.
That would be a lot of speculation for someone to put across given this pair is almost always in a soft homoerotic undertone state.
People keep saying “none of the characters will catch on, Joyce isn’t acting any differently” but IMO there’s a big big difference between the ways Joyce has been stumbling ignorantly into “lol she’s bi” jokes over the strip’s run, and the way she has been very obviously horny and giddy and flirty.
Sarah picking up on this IMMEDIATELY with the weighted blanket, even though they weren’t “technically” doing anything they haven’t done a bunch of times already, is a good example. Joyce’s intent and demeanor is clearly different.
We can’t hear vocal tone but going by dialouge what Sarah overheard and what was said in this strip are drasticly different in how obvious they’re being given their typical interactions prior to the kiss.
Exactly. That’s why it tracks perfectly to everything else the two have ever said in this entire strip.
Sure, but in the “so you’re finally acting on it” sense, not in the “when will these two realize it” sense.
So, typical for the two of them since about the second week of college.
New Joyceface unlocked: Horny for Shower Sex Joyce
It will make a fine addition to the collection.
The lack of shower sandals on Dorothy’s feet is distressing to me.
It really is. My feet itch just looking at her.
Oh, that smarm look on Dotty, that radicalization due to your friend being stabbed just popped right out of that head thanks to those sexy sexy jug shoes.
I’ll be honest: I don’t really “get” this response.
Do app the “real activists” just forgo all hygiene (showering, brushing teeth) and relationships and sex and so forth so they can full commit themselves to the cause?
Or can there be some kind of balance between the two?
Some people really do seem to believe that, in order to want to affect real change, you must let it completely take over your life. You must never be happy or relax or take a break. IDK if Ghola is one of those, but certainly the answer is that yes some people really believe in just dropping everything for one singular cause.
without disputing any point that you make, it is also the case that, in the interval between the steely clenching of the jaw facing the camera, and taking literally any single action guided by your newfound resolve, people might entertain some skepticism about how profound your paradigm shift really is.
“this is more than simply unfair, it is despotic. oooh, boobies” relatable, but not so much admirable
This was my stance yeah. We went from “Amber is hurt and I must Do Something.” Steely face to “Oh you, my new GF wants to bang in her jug shoes, and I make’a the funny face!”
Just fully deflates the gravitas.
Does it have to be admirable? It’s just, life.
Indeed
Makes all of her concern about Amber feel performative. Your friend gets stabbed, you’re feeling The Guilt, stony resolve for the audience.
Then… Eh, never mind. Eyebrow waggle and sex joke.
That’s Pre-Growth Joe’s thing.
I mean…only seeing herself as a vessel to solve other people’s problems is Dorothy’s thing. She’s always been doing that to fill an internal need, not because of other peoples’ external ones.
But the Amber thing is a solved problem. Sal solved it. It’s pretty hard for Dorothy to keep obsessing about a thing that she can’t immediately do anything about? But it’s very easy for her to obsess over the hot girl who’s right in front of her?
Like, the concern couldn’t be performative, she didn’t do it for anybody. I don’t think the two panel focus on her newfound stern consternation at the establishment power structure is for Dina’s benefit, because Dina was never shown reacting to it. And fictional characters aren’t faking their emotional responses to gaslight us, the audience, who they are literally unaware of by virtue of this being a piece of fiction.
Unless they’re Deadpool, I guess. Or Pinkie Pie.
She didn’t do that tho, Joyce offered and she said no, just with a dmile. If you gonna get mad at Dorothy you could at least do it about things tgat are actually happening.
Yesterday people were mad at Dorothy for wanting do do something, anything, to assuage her fears. Today they’re mad at her for letting go after she was told it’s all taken care of, and also for getting propositioned while in a relationship, even though she turned it down firmly. Hopefully they’re not the same people, I don’t keep track 🙂
Anyway we’re all like those emotion junkies from Fforde’s BookWorld. We come here for our fix, and we WILL get it, doesn’t matter if it’s in the form of joy, anger, despair or lust.
Just checked for you: at the time I typed this, none of the names in this thread are attached to any of yesterday’s comments that were complaining about Dorothy’s intent to take action.
…and, because I’m overly cautious, I doublechecked after posting to confirm that no one snuck in a comment between the previous check and my actually posting that.
Not sure if it’d’ve mattered if they had, but they hadn’t.
Thanks for checking, now I can rest easy in the illusion that people make sense. Even though I know I usually don’t 😀
I mean either way, the stony resolve is for a future decision or action. Right now she’s just here to shower, to perform her daily hygiene’s. I’m sure we’ll see the ramifications of her radicalizations soon enough. Maybe November, or even 2026.
What an incredibly weird thing to say. The judgement you apply to these characters makes no sense to me, and I would hope this is not how you view and judge people in real life.
Regarding real life, without commenting on Ghola’s take on the strip, I will say that when this sort of thing (taking up the mantle of a CAUSE, never really actualizing it) becomes a pattern I do personally get judgy.
That said, this is definitely one of those cases where “uh, dude, it’s been less than a day” DOES apply, in-strip. There’s plenty of time for her to figure out an effective approach to activism AND stall coming clean to the boys some more.
Yes. How dare she… shower? Respond to a comment she had no way to stop Joyce from making? Be happy, for a few seconds, at all, because there isn’t anything she can really do in the short term?
If you want extra reasons to be judgmental and weird about Dorothy, no one’s going to be able to stop you, but you ARE being weird.
It’s normal for activists to have a real life. Sometimes that includes smiling with family and friends despite the horrific shit you just found out. Because the alternative is burn out and depression at minimum.
Didn’t you hear? Showers and general hygiene is a tool of the bourgeois. Shed your decadent sqeuaky-clean ways and join the Smelly Resistance!
This whole thing reminds me of some annoying comments I’ve seen on other sites: someone tries to raise awareness of an issue and someone else reacts by saying something along the lines of “bet you post stuff like this to feel good about yourself but never actually do anything to help” (without any support for the latter part of the claim), or — this latter some months back — someone tries to encourage their fellow Americans to vote blue, to protect against horrible things Republicans are saying they’ll do, and someone else responds by arguing that the Democrats aren’t much better (as though voting for the side you consider at least minimally better and actually has a chance of winning somehow impedes your ability to, outside the voting booth, work toward something that’s better still).
Sorry for the mini-rant. This thread reawakened some tangentially-related frustrations.
Yeah, you run into these people all over the place doing any kind of advocacy work. They just want you to either be a paragon of virtue (because they then get to feel better about not doing anything, since THEY couldn’t possibly match YOU) or they want you to be a piece of shit doing it for selfish reasons (because they then get to feel better about not doing anything, since THEY wouldn’t want to be selfish and horrible and performative).
It’s crabs in a bucket, and it can get so exhausting.
It’s honestly disheartening how applicable the “crabs in a bucket” analogy has been since I learned of it. So many people more interested in tearing down rather than lifting up, even to their own detriment.
One should remember that the idea that the world is zero-sum (“if someone gets more, someone else NECESSARILY gets less”) and that the world is just (“if someone HAS more, it’s because they deserve it”; and the dark variant “if I figure out how to get more I was supposed to have more, even if I take it from others”) have both been heavily propagandized into Western and specifically American culture since before there was a mass media other than newspapers.
All very, very true. In some ways what we see now is not so much a shift as a culmination of a trend decades (or more) in the making.
No. No we do not. Speaking as someone who helps to organize a several thousand person queer protest and march each year, we, in fact, lead the most normal, happy lives we can, when we’re not organizing or out on the street as activists, because it is INCREDIBLY EXHAUSTING WORK, and it is incredibly important that we take care of ourselves.
Organizers and activists tend to burn out at incredibly quick rates, if they try to be about the cause every single second of every single day of their lives.
This, this thing I’m responding to, is 100% correct. You don’t need to be in sackcloth and ashes to be a real activist or doing positive change.
To quote Greta Christina, “We want to be driven by compassion, but the targets of our compassion should include ourselves.”
I salute you!
being able to find joy in life despite being radicalized against the state is a sign that one lacks object permanence, obviously
I was really mad about that genocide or whatever, but then I cranked one out, and now my politics have completely shifted. And I was just about to go join the Peace Corps, darn it.
This is why I tape oven mitts to any friend who has a new political awakening. No horny times until you’ve successfully defunded the police or had them held accountable.
Your friends don’t have the proper degree of commitment to horny if a little thing like oven mitts stops them. I’m disappointed, frankly.
Your caring Joe avatar makes this comment even better.
It’s a surprisingly versatile custom gravatar.
JOKE’S ON YOU, THAT’S MY EXACT FETISH! 😆
See, this is EXACTLY the sort of thing I was talking about.
As a longtime denizen of the internet, I felt it my duty to respond thusly, if no one else did. 😉
HEY! HEY NO! YOU STOP THAT RIGHT NOW!!
Ahahahahaha, it’s too late, I have already begun a life that balances both activism and self-care and no one can stop it now! WITNESS ME!!!!!
*rushes up to spray your face silver* I couldn’t find skin-safe spraypaint, this is edible glitter.
Aww, you got me the chocolate flavored glitter too. Such a thoughtful comrade.
somebody else pointed it out but i love how comfortable joyce is with dorothy. doyce forever
of all of the terrible ship names ive seen so far, doyce is the best one by far. here for doyce.
What, you’re not partial to joytty or joyrathy?
Sticking with DoJo.
It also pairs nicely with JoJo.
Besides, Dorothy seemed fired up to fight injustice after learning about what happened to Amazi-Girl and Amber. Martial arts training may help, so a DoJo is fitting.
Okay, but hear me out… a sapphic dojo sounds like something that, if it doesn’t already, needs to exist.
Joyce NO.
Joyce YES!
👍🏻!
Dorothy is gonna get some nasty bacterial infection by going BAREFEET in the communal shower, gross. there’s no need to go to Joyce’s ridiculous lengths but at least wear some damn flip flops
Gross and unhygienic are not the same thing. Dorothy isn’t going to get any bacterial infection whatsoever if she isn’t injured; are there glass shards on the floor or something?
It’s possible to pick up some fungal stuff from communal showers, but it’s far from as automatic as some comments here claim.
Seems to me that some people are just really grossed out by simple things and probably subconsciously equate that to risk of disease.
Like hair clumps in a shower may be gross, but there’s nothing dangerous about them.
Tell that to Beverly Marsh!
My mom was actually killed by a lump of shower hair. This is so insensitive.
Your mom was insensitive.
(and dead. due to the shower hair)
Well yes, dead bodies are famously unresponsive to sensations. You could argue that one is never more insensitive than after one had joined the choir invisible.
it’s not subconscious my guy, there IS a risk of disease
I’m saying the reaction is one of disgust “ew gross” and that’s being framed as rational concern about disease – probably not consciously.
We live in a world where people refused to wear masks to avoid a pandemic disease that killed millions (or gave up the masks far too early), but I’m expected to believe we obsess about sandals in the shower over reasonable concerns for health?
having open wounds makes you more susceptible to infection, but having unbroken skin does not make you immune. granted the most likely thing she might get is athlete’s foot (which is fungal); but the chances of her getting a bacterial or viral infection are not zero. why risk it?
https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/2023/06/beware-of-shower-floor
The chances of getting a bacterial infection from eating leftovers is also non-zero. Do you throw out anything you don’t finish?
Damn, Joyce is another level of horny with a woman.
Which, like, girl I totally get you
Not to be a paladin about this but I can’t help but notice the whole shower stalls situation is a cute way of showing these two stalling from telling their respective boyfriends about how badly they want to shower together.
Them…. taking a shower… is stalling? So you would have accepted nothing less than them waking up, in their PJs, sprinting to their boyfriend’s rooms, and confessing immediately?
If they get breakfast or have to pee, is that also stalling? What are the rules, here?
Let’s be real: literally everything including and after Joyce going to tell Joe and “accepting a gift and putting her mouth on weenus” is stalling. They have been stalling 100% of the time since deciding they needed to come clean.
I mean, they didn’t even “get up and take a shower” — Dorothy DID run to someone’s room in her PJs… and it wasn’t Walky’s.
They have each, therefore, done at least one thing that COULD have been “confessing/breaking up” but was not. Stalling.
Being fair: Amber is her next-door neighbor. She ran back to her room to get her toiletries etc for showering and getting dressed, but Amber was right there to check on.
She had no actual reason to do so, though. Her expressed reason was to see if she remembered seeing anything, which does not matter because she’s ostensibly about to tell Walky everything anyway.
— First I just wanna acknowledge! I do think you are generally correct that Dorothy is latching onto opportunities, large and small, to delay talking to Walky.
— But also, I was replying directly to Big Z, and he said: “they didn’t ‘get up and take a shower’ — Dorothy DID run to someone’s room in her PJs”, which to me makes it sound like Big Z was forgetting that Amber shares a half-bath with Dorothy, and Dorothy came in through said half-bath. So, point of order: she ran to her own room in her PJs. Less of an obvious avoidance tactic than if she’d run off to check on anyone else.
— Also, similar point of order: “Her expressed reason was to see if she remembered seeing anything”… not quite?
Dorothy peeks in, sees Dina, and says: “‘Morning, Dina. Just checking in on… ‘Amber’.”
Dina tells her that the lights are off so that Amber/Amazi-Girl can rest.
Dorothy says, “Good, good…” then asks if Amber told Dina if she saw anything.
So: I think it’s more likely that Dorothy is trying to ask Dina if Amber/Amazi-Girl spilled the beans, which I think is still in line with her trying to collate her mental spreadsheets about who knows she and Joyce are an item, and whether anyone who knows is likely to have already told Walky and/or Joe, which is something I think makes sense for her to want to know ahead of her conversation with him.
(Also I imagine that if Amazi-Girl/Amber had been awake, Dorothy would have first asked her how she’s feeling (a question she thought she’d gotten the answer to in this strip — “doing okay, resting”), and then asked if she’d said anything to anyone.
So, same priorities.)
— idk, I think this particular incident makes sense!
As mentioned, I do also think Dorothy is delaying generally, but I think checking in on her half-bath-mate also makes sense. Like, I think she did have a reason, on a “wanting to be prepared” level, even if going to Walky ASAP would be the better course of action.
My general counterargument runs along two lines, although I had forgotten they share a half-bath.
– Dorothy, as you point out, has been obviously delaying. Therefore, I grant her much less benefit of the doubt.
– Dorothy thought the news said Amazi-girl got away! She didn’t have any reason to suspect Amber was injured or otherwise in need of checking up on — I interpret “Just checking in on … Amber” as Dorothy coming up with an excuse rather than being strictly concerned when her later dialogue in that scene has her genuinely shocked that Amber is injured.
I mean, I do think she was mostly planning on asking if she told anyone about the kiss, because like you said, she thought Amazi-Girl was okay!
I just also think that’s a not-unreasonable thing to do.
BUT ALSO I’m sure stalling was not not a factor 😉
I mean yeah, so they have to shower, but Dorothy has time to run to somebody’s room(Who isn’t Walky.) not because she knew she was grievously injured but because she wanted to make sure she didn’t see her making out with somebody not her boyfriend when she could have used all that running to run to said boyfriend to tell him the truth and break up with him and it wouldn’t matter what Amber saw.
Making sure their mutual friend didn’t see her cheating is important enough to put off a shower but breaking up with the boyfriend you’re cheating on is not? Sounds like stalling to me.
“I sucked Joe off instead of telling him” is stalling
“Let’s just do it in the morning” is stalling
Dorothy checking in on Amber for no good reason is stalling
And yeah, they’re stalling here. As visually communicated by the, you know, stalls
There was a good reason to check in on Amber, but I do agree that they’re stalling.
There was, but Dorothy didn’t know about it.
Dorothy knew that Amber was fighting cops, was at the protest, and didn’t leave when they did. That is more than enough information to want to go check on a friend, even if the news didn’t start with “masked vigilante totally clobbered!!”.
Yes, but again that isn’t *why* Dorothy did it!
I was just trying to associate shower stalls with the word stall having a double meaning. I thought it was a clever connection. I wasn’t really trying to critique Joyce and Dorothy here. I didn’t think it was that big a deal.
It wasn’t
It isn’t, you’re not incorrect either. I think the anger at Joyce and Dorothy has made people a little defensive.
You and me both… sat here trying to come up with some shower stall/stalling wordplay but couldn’t come up with anything.
Your shower word play stalled out?
[angry upvote.png] srsly tho, well played.
It is one of my favorite time savers when playing The Sims.
Shoulda gone with the triangle smile, Joyce.
This whole cheating arc has been great for Dorothy, Joyce? Well she’s figuring it out
Dorothy? I need to be more politically focused and do good, break up with the boyfriends
Joyce: woooooo! Party time!
truly too hornt to function
She’s feeling feelings so much
Which is such a classically college experience lmao
I bet it’s terrible using a stall after Rachel because she has a lot of hair and doesn’t believe in redemption.
don’t trust rachel’s shower stall
Unless she’s very careful with her hair and her scepticism about redemption is founded in the knowledge that others aren’t?
just have soapy shower sex so that after you dump your manthings, you can just mention the soapy shower sex and they can both just get distracted from anger by imagining that for the rest of their lives
Now there is something peak, 5D chess strategy.
*some (Damn autocorrect)
dorothy doesn’t wear shower shoes?
Really hurts to see how quickly and easily Joyce is able to just ignore the whole “My boyfriend, Joe” aspect of this. Like, beyond even the binds of being in a relationship with him, he’s her friend! But even after having her behavior very very clearly laid out in front of her, she’s still just knowingly treating him like he doesn’t matter. Like the way she’s digging that knife in deeper and deeper isn’t a bother. You found yourself, congratulations, I guess it doesn’t matter how you treat the other people who love and care for you now. :/
Honestly, yeah. Like. It’s pretty clear that her brain has revolved around Dorothy for so long without her noticing that she’s also never noticed how other people react to it or like… that there might be any reason at all to cool it down a few notches, if only because she doesn’t want some rando telling Joe before she does.
Same. It bothers me how little Joyce seems to care about Joe when he’s not around. He deserves much better than this.
God I hope she tries apologizing to him and he just shuts her down.
I hope he then realizes how much he fucked up literally just a few months ago and how much it meant to him that people were willing to give him a second chance instead of just writing him off. Joyce especially.
The difference is Joe went on a whole arc of self discovery since then, and never asked anyone to forgive him but just focused on being better and accepted forgivness when it was offered. Joyce is still at ‘avoiding owning up to my mistakes while doubling down and digging myself in deeper.’ Not saying she can’t make amends, but first she’ll need to actually acknowledge she did something wrong.
I hope that Joyce goes to break up with him and finds herself unable to do it.
Yep. It was one thing when they were just giddy and not thinking straight (lol puns). I get it, you’re caught up in the moment, you’re not thinking about the consequences or who they’re gonna hurt.
But Sarah just dropped a very heavy reminder on them both and Joyce doesn’t seem to even care. Just in one ear, out the other. Really gross and disappointing behavior from a character I wasn’t expecting it from.
And since Joyce is the closest we have to a central character / protagonist it’s even worse. She’s also the writer’s self insert in many aspects, so is her attitude how Willis thinks about this?
Well, let’s see. Did Willis believe the earth was only a few thousand years old for much of DoA’s run?
To be fair, I think we’re finally getting to the “framing this negatively/as not great behavior” part of the cheating arc. I can’t put my finger on what’s different this page than the others, maybe it’s the presence of Rachel, but I feel pretty confident someone’s gonna tell Joe/Walky before either of them get to and they’re gonna get to have their moments.
For sure, this seems like an excellent time for us to try to extrapolate a moral picture of Willis from his characters, so we can begin judging him, the way we’ve been judging the characters for the last month.
This is a reasonable way to respond to a work of fiction, I think.
It’s a brave new judgment frontier for the comments section. After passing moral judgment on the characters and each other, what’s left but the creator?
I skipped that and went directly to judging God.
All creeping around the Pearly Gates with a cricket bat, yelling “Come out, I just wanna talk about how you manage your fan club!”
I like your energy. May I join you on this quest? I also would like to ask Him about His fan club. We can “good cop/bad cop” it, I will ask nicely, and you will ask with a cricket bat if He’s evasive.
“Hi God, we’ve been trying to reach you about Earth’s extended warranty.”
Climate change is just humanity voiding Earth’s warranty, which would actually explain a lot.
Look, if there’s any sort of almighty powerhouse deity, I’m tagging along to fistfight it.
Conveniently, David Willis has already answered how he feels about cheating:
https://www.tumblr.com/itswalky/789435763608682496/was-rereading-the-old-its-walky-archives-and-found?source=share
In short, he’s so instinctively opposed to it that, despite writing a strip about horny college idiots for years, his wife had to point out to him that none of them ever cheat.
Apparently he felt obliged to fix that, and now we have our DoJo disaster. Love it or hate it, at least it’s interesting (though I personally felt it took a while to get to the interesting part and is progressing slowly even now… still, gotta have room for the sapphic sweetness, I guess).
So instead of making moral judgements about Willis, the judgment crew should be going after a higher power? Namely Willis’s wife?
deranged thing to say. then again, I guess this is the logical endpoint of all of the morality police shit people have been spewing in here
That, and while I know that Joyce does not know what Dorothy knows about Amber, obviously, I am annoyed at how fast Joyce brushes off that Dorothy is obviously distressed. It’s not just that she doesn’t care about Joe, though that does hurt. She also doesn’t care about Walky; ok, she doesn’t like Walky, but that’s just another thing she doesn’t consider. They couldn’t make it through their sleep over without Joyce whispering sweet nothings, and Joyce got over the confrontation with Sarah–which she spent trying to downplay their behavior–in a “Dorothy face touch,” and Dorothy had to tell her “Sarah’s right, hands off.” And now this.
At this point, I’m kind of tired that Joyce doesn’t seem to care that DOROTHY is trying to set a boundary of “hands off until we deal with some stuff.” Dorothy’s not blameless, she reciprocates the horny, but Dorothy has also tried to say, “Ok, we have to tell the boys before we keep doing this. Ok, we at least have to do the list first. Ok, you didn’t break up with Joe like you said you would, but I guess we can have a sleep over and deal with this tomorrow. Ok, Sarah knows because we fail at subtlety, but she’s right, hands off.” And even when Dorothy makes a weak attempt to do that, or a flat out declaration that they can’t keep doing this until they deal with things, Joyce keeps doing stuff like this.
We get it, Joyce, you are very horny for this woman. Glad that you had that revelation [no sarcasm]. But could you care about literally anything else for more than a panel at a time? Please? It’s not passion in the heat of the moment any more, now you’re just ignoring that other people exist, and it’s getting to be tiresome.
It’s a far less extreme example of course but it does remind me of when Billie was trying to get Ruth to start drinking again in that it’s a blatant effort to violate the boundaries Dorothy has been trying to set, boundaries Joyce clearly does not respect.
I’d been trying to give Joyce the benefit of the doubt about this, and speculating that maybe she’d just been overwhelmed by New Relationship Energy and the almost-constant presence of people she has feelings for since the kiss… but there’s very little doubt left for her to benefit from.
In particular, while Dorothy was checking on Amber, Joyce had a great opportunity to reflect, largely undistracted, on Sarah’s words. It’d be something to do while waiting for a stall, for one thing. And yet…
Feels like we’re taking another run at the Joyce / Jacob thing, except this time with potentially much more permanent consequences.
Careful, the sickos are gonna come yell at you for this perfectly reasonable take
Weird how Thag posted it hours ago and no one came to yell at them. Almost like when you get pushback about similar thoughts it might have something to do with the way you personally communicate it.
Nah, couldn’t be.
Stabbing him in the back! Twisting the knife deeper! Other violent, bloody metaphors!
I could come to yell at them for the bit if that make them fell better.
Joyce kissed one girl and suddenly she’s sapphotron 5000, bleeding pink orange and white
Kinda real of her tbh
I hate to bring a sour note to this saphic symphony but I’m commenting from a wheelchair in a nursing home that is likely to be my permanent residence until I pass on. I fell and broke my fibula back in 6/10 because I had muscle relaxers in my system, lost my balance and lost my fibula, knee, and hip on my right side, the second time I injured that hipj. I still have 3 blank spots on my customer loyalty card before I get that spa day at the Elysian Fields resort, and maybe get off this merry-go-round…
Sincerest well wishes to hopefully a recovery.
as long as you don’t go to the hotel tartarus instead…
but for real I’m sorry to hear about all your injuries and well, everything else there.
As someone who is also dealing with a lot of medical issues that inspire you to dwell on your own mortality and what the current situation means going forward, I do sincerely send you best wishes. My only advice I can give as a stranger to another is to not neglect your emotional support systems during this time. It is very easy to spiral and those relationships mean the world during times like this.
I don’t know what to say, that sounds like it really fucking sucks.
I hope you can get to a place where you’re comfortable and happy and as recovered as you can be.
Hey, I hope they’re able to make you as comfortable as possible while you heal, and if they’re willing to give it to you, physical therapy can be a lifesaver for regaining function and restoring mobility and stability. Both my knees, my left hip, my SI and my spine are all various degrees of fucked up, from “totally” to “badly,” and physical therapy was really a lifesaver for me in regaining my mobility. I hope it can do the same for you, and restore your independence.
Wishing you nothing but the best possible luck and outcome, Opus, and the strength to get through it. I hope you get to hang around this world every second that you want to.
Wishing you happy outcomes!
that’s so sad ;-;
i hope you heal well and recover swiftly
I’m so sorry.
No, you don’t consent, or no it won’t save time?
Forget life, buy Dina plush!
We’ve opened a flood-gate.
If people think shower stall floors are a place where pathogenic bacteria that can either function of the skin surface (athlete’s foot), penetrate the skin, or get from the feet to a suitable point of entry, what makes them think that flip flops would, in any way prevent this? Warm water will be splashing about at foot level and droplets from the floor surface are going to get into flip flops.
Where did you get the idea that the flip flops are serving a contraceptive purpose?
I think they’re responding to the dozens of existing comments about the exact topic.
Dozens, one, same thing really.
Are they not? OMG, I thought…. Um. Should I get a pregnancy test? Can you even get pregnant without a uterus?
According to certain kind of fanfic? Absolutely. Tell a doctor today.
In the Willisverse you can get lesbian pregnant.
it makes me feel like I’m not walking on a slimy shower floor
though on the other hand I’d be a LOT more likely to fall over in flip flops
I imagine if people are concerned about it they let the shower run a couple minutes before stepping in. Plus, it’s still at least a nice preventative idea. Reduces the contact between your feet and the shower floor. Some droplets may still find their way in but it’s a lot fewer compared to just walking with your grippers out. Plus I feel most of the water that’ll wind up in your flip flops would be water dripping down your legs during the shower.
I don’t get wearing shower shoes in the shower, myself. I always thought the point of shower flip-flops was so your clean feet don’t get covered in dorm hall stank before you get socks on, IMHO you obviously take ’em off to shower and if you’re worried about showerfunk you rinse it down first like Doopyboop said.
I really don’t understand why people are so shocked about Joyce’s behavior. To quote someone else, Joyce has spent the whole comic going head first, heart full into whatever she does. So like of course this is how she behaves when she realizes she’s in love with Dorothy even though she’s dating someone else.
To quote Willis, it’s the Joycest thing she’s ever done.
There’s a part of me that thinks we’re getting curveballed at some point, and Joyce realizes that she feels she *can’t* break up with Joe, because she doesn’t want to, even if it means that she’ll have to break up with Dorothy.
Right now, I feel like her line of thinking thus far has been “welp, I’m in lesbians now, so therefore I logically conclude that I must break up with my boyfriend, because isn’t that what you do after you kiss a girl?” As evidenced by her freaking blowing Joe, she is rushing into this to the point that she’s not considering the ramifications of everything until the moment she’s literally confronted with any one thing. She is 100% set on renting a U-Haul with Dorothy, up until the exact second she’s in the presence of Joe, because the reality is that Joyce loves autistically deeply, and she loves them both so, so much.
I think there’s a possibility that Joyce-logic eventually leads her to think that it would be better (slash it would feel better for her personally) to stay with Joe and also fuck Dorothy while still maintaining their platonic friendship, and then not be able to wrap her head around why neither Joe and Dorothy are going to be okay with that.
In essence, I don’t know if Joyce is going to be able to figure out what the fuck she actually wants to move forward with, unless she’s either actually in the same room with both Joe and Dorothy, OR if she were to get sufficient space from both of them, to figure that out for herself.
Neither of which is likely to happen, for obvious reasons.
The truth IMO is that Joyce doesn’t want to break up with anybody, and is not committing any mental energy towards figuring out her deeper feelings about that, let alone how to solve the obvious downstream problems from that reality; just like she isn’t putting any actual serious effort, into actually going and breaking up with Joe.
I agree with what you wrote Throwatron.
Joyce seems to be hedonistically seeking pleasure and joy in whatever the current situation is, and not thinking about the bigger picture at all.
She was getting ready to take the scary (for an ex-fundie), life changing step of penetrative hetero sex with Joe, and at the same time discovered the non-scary sapphic attraction to her perfect cinnamon roll.
The spontaneious oral sex with Joe suggests she’s still really hot for him and wants to climb him like a big, sexy tree.
We’ve seen Joyce back away from full penetrative sex with Joe, on the evening that he ended up fingering her. We’ve seen Joyce have nightmares about penetrative sex in the past, more than once, I think? Certainly at least the one time.
It’s odd to me that more folks aren’t considering that maybe this has always been something that she was told she was supposed to want, but that for reasons she never understood until this moment, scared and repulsed her in ways she couldn’t explain.
I’m inclined to treat this as another one of those tightropes that Willis does so well (frustratingly so, damn you Willis, etc).
It seems to me equally plausible:
– Joyce is having a post-fundie-trauma reaction to the idea of PIV sex/”going all the way” that’s separated from her willingness to put mouth on ween and other sex-adjacent things because it’s not “losing her virginity” and other such cultural baggage.
– Joyce is more lesbian than bi, and is actually fundamentally repulsed by PIV sex because it’s not included in her actual orientation/preferences.
Honestly, I think the average folk is considering that “if she’s willing to engage sexually in other ways with Joe-wang, she’s not conceptually repulsed by it” — certainly that’s where I was until you pointed it out, as I’ve always (pre-cheating) identified with Joyce’s journey and my cismale ass had the same gut-level “I will not do PIV, even after I’ve been atheist and done everything but, because that’s DIFFERENT and IMPORTANT” reaction until I finally impulse-decided to force myself to do it (in the middle of a mental health crisis in college, which I strenuously don’t recommend).
Good point. It may of course be that for all her ”boy crazy” aesthetic crushes, penis-in-vulva sex isn’t actually in Joyce’s sexual play book. More lesbian than bi is a valid read of what we have seen.
My personal guess is that she’s fully into both, and it’s the fundie thing that makes ”losing her virginity” in the biblical and stupid sense extra spicy.
Uh, and I’m sorry you forced yourself to go through with it. Did it resolve anything, or did you just inflict trauma on yourself?
It ended up being very lucky — my roommate called it as wildly out of character the next day and started a conversation that ended with him dragging me to the on-campus mental health clinic, and once THAT got settled down the person I had sex with ended up being a great FWB for many years. (first thing she says to me when I announce I’m taking medical leave for the semester was “oh God, that’s not MY fault, is it? I’m so sorry.”)
Ok, nice to hear it ended well at least.
This. Exactly this. Nothing Joyce has done has been surprising so far. We’ve always known she’s a flawed character, and she’s been careless and hurt people before. Like, this is orders of magnitude worse than the whole Jacob situation, but it’s also been building up for that much longer, so naturally the fallout would be worse. Point is, there’s nothing surprising about Joyce’s repressed horniness making her make bad decisions that hurt others, we’ve seen it before. Doesn’t mean you have to like it, but you can’t say it was unexpected.
The thing that people find out of character isn’t her passion towards Dorothy, but rather her callousness towards Joe. She previously hasn’t been someone who so readily follows her own desires at the expense of someone she cares about.
I dont think its callousness at all. I think its literally something Joyce has always done. Its a hyoerfixation. This has been building since literally the moment they met and now I believe it’s just overwhelming her. If it was callousness she would have just dropped Joe and not been conflicted or blown him.
Now I’m suddenly imagining Joyce as having a mental slot for “person I’m in love with”, sort of like a video game equipment slot, and slotting in either Joe or Dorothy depending on which one she’s interacting with at that moment.
Girl needs to invest in that upgrade for a second slot.
Look, Joyce Brown’s heart operates on a stance system, and the sooner people realize that, the sooner we can stop calling for patches and hotfixes.
This is what it feels like. She has no object permanence in this. Will she crash when she comes into a room with both of them there?
Personally, I’ve never been surprised by it. I’m just irked by her consistently refusing to address the problem. Even if she doesn’t personally have the social understanding to realise why it is a problem, others have made it evident that it is. Mostly Sarah, but even Dorothy has pointed it out… yet it seems like, the instant it stops being actively focused on, the entire concept seems to just fall out of her brain.
So… yes, this is very Joyce. That doesn’t mean it can’t also be very annoying.
I’ve never cared about shipping wars or people’s ships before, so it’s SUCH a strange feeling to hate this one so much. I want to torpedo this vessel and watch it sink to the briny deep. On a scale of 1 to 10, I went from Apathy to War Criminal. No wonder people get in trouble inside their own fandoms when conciliating with something they don’t like. Even worse when it’s… canon. 🤢
/s I am making fun of myself here, don’t get too upset with me.
I’m so upset with you right now!!!!
[angry Mockingbird noises.gif]
Actual footage of Tequila Mockingbird: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_ttJD-JJyIg
Yo… where did you get that footage? The dude who was holding the phone promised me he wasn’t gonna post it. Oh I am going to have some words with him… very aggressive whistling and musical words… but words all the same.
It will be nice for the two of them to no longer smell like tear gas, before too many cop-types start nosing around
What would be the elemental weakness of the cop type? 🤔
Camera type moves.
Well, we’ve seen that they had trouble with Amber’s Amazi-Girl Evolution (Dark Type / Fighting Type), but I would normally lean towards Ghost and Psychic types, maybe?
Dark/Steel, perhaps? It would explain the weakness to fighting.
According to this, quite a few things. I’m going to choose to invoke the spirit of the alligator for this one. Y’all feel free to select your own mascots. Once we get a full roster, we can go full Power Rangers on this shit.
https://farmhouseguide.com/predators-that-eat-pigs/
Donut type.
This was so obvious I’m somewhat miffed I didn’t think of it myself.
Still a dull couple.
Joyce and Dorothy are less interesting together than literally every other couple in the strip; which is weird because they are apparently Willis’s favourite.
Seconded. It’s weird.
I’m reminded of poofdepoof’s comment on the March 6th, 2025 strip, featuring a similar style of punchline:
old 1960’s hippie slogan: “Save Water – Shower With A Friend”
Oh my god, Joyce.
Keep it in your pants. Or at least a private shower stall.
Thanks to rereading old strips and storylines, I present everyone with a strip where Joyce says she thinks Walky smells nice solely because she thinks he smells like Dorothy
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-9-comic/02-but-the-sun-still-shines/offbase/
Just, you know. For the ‘it came out of nowhere’ crowd.
This is the conversation that caused Lucy to describe Joyce as “kind of a white bisexual version of me”.
Dorothy of all people not having shower sandals is surprising.
hey, remember comments a few years ago? “Joe is sooo awful for being horny all the time” etc etc etc
for some reason it seems joyce gets a pass for this..
What comments section are YOU reading? People are reading Joyce for absolute filth for all this, she’s WIDELY hated right now.
I don’t mind the horny, I mind the callousness and selfishness. Joe had principles.
Yeah, while I’m sure there were some, “Joe is sooo awful for being horny all the time” is such an incredible misread on reactions to the character.
Did he, though?
Joe wasn’t perfect, but he was all about informed consent. As far as we know, he made sure the girls he was with knew what he was about and were OK with it. With Sarah’s sister, as soon as she revoked consent, he was full stop.
His list and otherwise objectification of women was problematic, but as far as we know Joe the womanizer was above board as far as his sexual activities.
The problem with “as far as we know” is that we know almost nothing. He was good with Liz, but that was well after he started to change. When he hit on Joyce very early on, he certainly wasn’t up front with her about only wanting to get into her pants, rather than any kind of relationship, despite telling others he wanted to fix her with his penis.
Other than that, we never saw him hit on anyone with any success at all, so we really don’t know.
We know from Dorothy that for someone all about consent, in his younger years, he wasn’t above trying to shame the women that turned him down.
More recently, his vaunted principles about cheating didn’t seem to extend to not fantasising about his best friend’s girlfriend in front of him, putting Amazi-Girl on his to do list and speculating about her kinkiness over Danny’s discomfort and protests.
Yes, he wasn’t a monster, but I feel like that’s a very low bar to clear. He’s had a ton of growth from the unpleasant guy he used to be, and I think flattening that out into saying he was always principled to make him look better than the queer girl who’s too horny for her own good… Isn’t great.
For the record (and the eleventieth time of saying this) it wasn’t him being horny all the time.
It was the lack of interest in women’s boundaries, the misogyny, and the shitty treatment of his own “best friend” that people took objection to. He was a gross character, it had nothing to do with being horny and everything to do with how he behaved as a result of being horny. Which was mostly to harass women.
This this this this.
People tried to say this at the time, too! They tried to say folks were slut-shaming Joe, over all of our many protests that that wasn’t the dang problem. Argh!
In WHAT WORLD are you seeing Joyce GET A PASS? This very comments section is full of people yelling about how awful she is, how bad a person she is, how immoral she is, how they hope she gets punished in this way or that way!
Also, my recollection is, people were upset with Joe for the way he treated women like objects and a scoreboard, instead of people with an interiority and feelings, in his pursuit of treating coupling as a meaningless thing with no attachment, so he could never be hurt or betrayed like his mom was. He acted in a pretty shitty way towards a lot of folks during that period of time, including his “ranking list”, and then, over time, he changed! And has become one of the most beloved characters in the comics. So I genuinely do *not* know what comments section you are reading, here.
There are like three people total doing anything like giving Joyce a pass, and I’m pretty sure at least two of them are doing it as a bit.
I’ve found people who think Joyce sucks think there are a lot of people defending her, and people defending her think there are a lot of people who think Joyce sucks. I can’t be damned to do a tally though, Willis removed that poll before it got anywhere.
This is the basic truth of every conflict in this comment section (and probably elsewhere, but I’ve noticed it most often here.)
Man Joyce stocks have not stabilized, this stuff is still plummeting
Joyce I think that shower needs to be a cold one
Sickos Meeeeeme!<3!
Joyce just doesn’t give two shits about Joe anymore, huh?
Immediate loss of fucks and its honestly a little annoying to read at this point
Joe isn’t here. Dorothy is.
Yeah she really lacks romantic object permanence.
Honestly tells me she shouldn’t be with either Joe or Dorothy in a romantic relationship and should maybe just date around casually instead.
Joyce had to be reminded to take her BC that she takes for medical reasons, not contraceptive ones, I don’t think Joyce should date around casually or participate in hookup culture rn. BC can actually sometimes make babies *more* likely to happen in certain situations (hence why some docs recommend couples trying to get pregnant to get on BC to regulate their cycle first.) Heck, I’m about as fertile as the Sahara and I got a kid off of BC.
Plus there’s like diseases too. Given her recent behavior and inability to think farther than the end of the panel, Joyce is probably the character I would least trust to have safe sex. I would almost bet money on her going “I’m on the pill, so I guess it’s fine” if a dude pressed the issue like an ass.
But I agree, I kind of think that maybe Joyce shouldn’t be in a committed relationship at all if she can’t break it off with Joe. Joe deserves better, Dorothy doesn’t deserve to be led on like that because nobody deserves that, and it’s a painful lesson that I think Joyce needs to learn.
I dont think thats the case. We know shes attracted to him and likes him. I think its just that her feelings for Dorothy have been building for such a long time and she’s overwhelmed by them. When she doesnt have that with Joe.
There are generally two ways to interpret how Joyce feels about Joe. She either genuinley loves him AND dorothy, but just doesn’t really feel much guilt about either. She thinks both love is genuine (and as was succinctly put, lacks object permanence with it). What she is doing with dorothy cant be bad because she loves her.
The other option is that she is absolutley willing to drop Joe because she realised what she had with him was a safe place to explore sexuality, but she never actually liked him in the way she LOVES dorothy, which is clear to her now because she actually has it here. In that case, Joe is essentially already broken up with in her mind, she just doesn’t want to actually go through the difficult process of doing it because she’s immature and avoidant.
In both cases, her being flirty with dorothy is consistant. Either she is writing off joe and so it doesn’t really matter, or she is unwilling to supress either of her relationships.
I tend to think its the second she likes Joe finds him attractive and exciting to explore sexually but is writing him off because Dorothy is who she loves and has been pining for since meeting compared to joe
I can attest that, although I haven’t done that often, when I did, showering together did not, in fact, save a lot of time.
I’m losing a lot of respect for Joyce. The first kiss at the protest I could get but this is not OK. Joe has been really good to her and they had a really good relationship. I’m having a hard time wanting to keep reading. Her character use to have standards. Now it’s like she only cares about herself.
Thaaaat’s politics.
She has never had “standards.” She had a doctrine of belief that was causing her immense unceasing anxiety and stress, and now that she’s free from it, she’s learning how to be a person.
We are currently watching her horribly mismanage that, because she doesn’t understand how her actions can hurt people. This specific arc is highlighting her acting on her (extremely well established) desires, and will probably show her learning about those consequences.
Saying Joyce wasn’t a person is an incredibly dismissive take. It’s like saying Becky wasn’t.
“Learning how to be a person” doesn’t imply that at all. It’s a turn of phrase to state that she is figuring out how to exist in the world without the structures that she was using before. This feels like a nearly absurd misrepresentation of what I was saying
Do Grace and Mandy (and sometimes Sierra) shower this way?
Remember when Sarah said Joyce would one day snap and suck a thosuand dicks or whatever. Like between her being so forward with both Dorothy and Joe while obviously not being in a position to be fully committed to either I actually do think it would be best if Joyce called off all relationships and just dated causally.
I actually do think a one night stand would be better for Joyce at the moment.
I think for her sex is still too tied to romance for her to be ready for one night stands. She’s horny and not thinking or behaving well because she’s in love (or at least crushing hard), not just randomly.
Look, I’ll go one further than thejeff — based on how she’s been acting and justifying herself so far, Joyce CAN’T have a one night stand. She might TRY, but if she does she’s just going to believe THAT person is her one special somepony forever and ever…
…plausibly until she sees Joe or Dorothy alone again.
In point of fact, I don’t think she’s going to be able to break up with Joe unless Dorothy is with her, because I suspect that a combo of “guilt/shame” and “I actually do really like him AND lust after him on several levels” will induce her to choose weenus over straightening out her drama without a constant reminder of why she wants to break up with him within eyesight.
Joyce doesn’t (and possibly can’t) do anything “casually”.
It’s been a constant that she is dramatic and intense about everything.
You only save time if you’re really bad at it.
I feel like Joyce being completely new at relationships in general is something that should be considered more than it seems to. People learn through two basic ways: either they learn from a trusted authority, or they learn through experience. And unfortunately, learning from experience is usually what locks the lessons in. We know that prior to starting college, Joyce was not getting any significant worthwhile relationship advice from the dominant authorities in her pre-college life, and we know that she had minimal first-hand experience to draw from. I wish she had done this right (or at least better) with respect to Joe, but it should not be much of a surprise that she is fumbling through this. I can’t bring myself to condemn her as a person. People need to be able to make some mistakes sometimes, and breaking up with someone in a shitty way is definitely shitty, it also seems far from an unforgivable offense to me. Maybe she can atone and make amends, or maybe she can’t. We will see.
i hope dotties got her slippers in her basket
just gross
I think it’s gross too. Dotty could really use some jugs.
nice Lara Croft cosplay in panel 3 there
Aw Joyce can tell when Dorothy is upset from her eyes
And I can tell she wants to jump her bones… those tiny beady blue eyes
Save time! Save time!!
It will be fine for about 10 seconds until Joyce sees someone has stuck a piece of hair on one of the walls of the stall and climbs Dorothy to get away from it.
New gravitar face detected
C’mon Dorothy, you know you want to. Kill the inner prude!
I think it’s unfair to label Dorothy as prudish for sticking to the boundary she’s set for her and Joyce while they still haven’t broken up with their boyfriends.
dorothy is right they’d just get filthier!
She still hasn’t told her boyfriend.
–We’d save a lot of time.
—-No, we wouldn’t. 😏😏😏😏
i love you horndog joyce
Joyce is just the queen of bad decisions now isn’t she lol
Euphoria will do that to you.
Yeah i heard weird things about that show.
Not sure whether “kiss and tell” goes like that
they ain’t the second coming of Ruth and Jennifer either
If they were I might actually like them!
This strip really highlights one of Joyce’s flaws, which is that she does not respect the relationship boundaries others set. It’s one of her most consistent foibles. Dorothy has told her, repeatedly, that they can’t be touching and kissing while doing so would be cheating (I.E. Dorothy is setting a boundary). Joyce expressed extremely ambivalent acceptance of this and is now trying to get them naked together anyway.
That’s a good point! It certainly is a pattern.
Going all the way back to Roomies! It’s one of her core character traits, and was part of why Dorothy made such a good foil to her in Joyce and Walky!
It’s mitigated for me right now by the way Dorothy is responding: she hasn’t yet seemed even really exasperated, much less distressed.
Could just be that it’s still all too new to be grating for her, but combining this with the fact that Dorothy does clearly also want to be smooching and more, but just feels that they shouldn’t, I’m not yet concerned.
Absolutely open to revising, for my part, if any of the above changes.
But you’re right that she did the same thing with Joe repeatedly, and he hadn’t yet actually told her he felt anxious about “taking” her virginity…
Dorothy’s actually stated the boundary, but Joyce would be correct if she assumes Dorothy doesn’t actually want to wait (more feels obligated to wait), so.
We’ll see how Joyce handles it when a partner both doesn’t want something and says no clearly.
Also as someone who’s done it before… shower sexy times are never as fun or as sexy as you think they’ll be and usually end in someone hacking up water or slipping on tile.
Skill issue
Yeah, seriously. In theory, it’s all rivulets of water tracing glistening curves, and in practice it’s all hard, uncomfortable surfaces with nothing to support you, and water makes a lousy lubricant and washes away the natural ones, so the only thing that’s actually slippery is the floor, and then someone gets a faucet or shower knob in the spine and accidentally turns the water to freezing or scalding, and going down on a woman in the shower is basically just a sexier way to get waterboarded…
I managed to have a lot of fun in the shower in my sophomore year. Hot water was included in the rent at a fixed price, and I love the shower anyway. Having sex there was great for me at least.
A month of sneaking around cheating and the fallout from police brutality at a protest is… Not a very fun stretch for this comic. I look forward to when DoJo becomes public knowledge in-universe so that we can get to the parts of the relationship drama that I find more interesting.
Has it been a month?
God this arc cant end soon enough.
You’d save negative 1 hour of time Joyce, know yourself better XD
Can’t wait till everyone knows so we can get to the interesting parts of the relationship. WILL Joe be willing to accept polyamory? WILL Dorothy be willing to share? WILL Joyce accept that she has needs that one person can’t fill, that the love between her and Joe and the love between her and Dorothy are very different creatures that fundamentally can coexist while not excluding the need for each other?
Find out next time, when they get their sh*! together!
Oh, it’s going to be longer than that before they get their shit together. They don’t have a volumetric shit compressor.
And while I know nothing about said devices, as a former broke college student myself, I suspect that’s not something one can afford on such a budget.
Save time by doing 3 things at once!
1. fucking
2. getting clean
3. letting the other people in the shower room know you’re cheating, so they can tell your boyfriends and you don’t have to
Now that’s what I call efficiency.
also explaining that the person who saved you both got horribly injured
She’s saying no, but I see a hint of a grin at the thought…
I can’t help but wonder if Rachel being the one to be nearby when Joyce and Dorothy are acting sus is a narrative decision for later. I’ve said it before, it’d be cathartic for Joe to figure it out first and be the one doing the dumping.
I just noticed the buffer got slashed by several months, it was till July a few weeks ago now its back to November.
I know that probably means nothing but I just wanted to share
Yeah, thats a heck of a drop, is willis redrawing things ? XD
If I understand correctly, then yes. Apparently the Joyce/Dorothy hookup was not originally planned for a while before Willis decided to change course. As a result, I suspect a lot of the comics they had already planned need to be scrapped or at least altered. Hence the shrunken buffer time.
I don’t think that’s why. They draw the comics as they go, so they would only have drawn the latter comics after Dorothy and Joyce got together. I think it’s probably a lot more to do with the feedback they got about muslim rep and actually taking the Bulmeria thing more seriously, but I’m also just guessing.
Hopefully we’ll get some awesome new story out of it!
I look forward to whatever our Fearless Leader produces, though we still reserve the right to shout the song of our people. All rise for the “Damn You, Willis,” as is tradition.
Yeah Bulmeria/Muslim rep is one of the couple good reasons Willis decided to slash the buffer
He’s realized at this point that if his goal is to make the comic more relevant to an audience of modern US college students, then a really long buffer would inevitably be an obstacle no matter which way ya slice it
Pretty number go up, but pretty number have point of diminishing returns!
Also: more gay
Joyce/Dorothy had been planned since about 2017, DW’s own words.
I actually think a lot of alterations and additions are being made, because the cheating plotline and speedrunning into Joyce/Dorothy has not landed well.
Trying to mitigate the ”anti-genocide protest as a romantic backdrop” is of course as big factor as well.
I seriously don’t think the cheating plotline is as factor at all, he seems perfectly happy with it.
Joyce is wearing socks into the shower.
What?
Okay, now I am hating Joyce.
Interestingly, not in the Patreon early update.
She was also initially wearing socks in Regroup five comics ago, until she wasn’t. Seems there has been correcting going on.
You know… I referred to this comic (endearingly, mind you) as a cartoon soap opera, and I’m trying to work out how I could work in some joke regarding shower/bathing/soap into this, but I’ve sat on it all day and still not coming up with anything.
Only thing that goes through my head is a line from a friend from middle school, whose response to drama was “this opera is so soapy I could wash my hands with it.” I’m still chuckling at it all these years later.