My brother took me out for sushi on my birthday last year and I got what was called a Spicy Girl. The greatest gift of all was him saying “Ah, a spicy girl for a spicy girl!” (I’m a trans woman)
I’m pretty simple though, one of my favorite rolls is simply just raw salmon.
Love Sushi but i am pretty sure jve only really had Americnaized/Canadian Sushi i had a rainbow 🌈 roll and a salomn roll recently 🍣 . I have serious doubt that ill ever be able to afford a trip Japan i suppose ill have to settle sushi from a Toronto Japanese restaurant which is the closest to authentic sushi ill be able to get.
Sushi doesn’t have to be raw. I eat sushi with cooked shrimp all the time. And Egg sushi exists too. The word sushi refers to the rice used in it’s preparation.
I suppose I could make it a day goal or something….
Eh, who am I kidding. Had raw salmon with eggs for breakfast yesterday.
The eggs weren’t raw yesterday – but I’ve had an absolutely delicious ‘sashimi martini’ with raw quail eggs.
The only one I haven’t particularly liked was the raw chicken. I haven’t tried raw alligator or frog, but I suspect they wouldn’t be great either. And raw snail seems like a bad idea.
My favourite piece of sushi is a lightly flambéd salmon with fried onion on black rice nigiri. Only ever eaten it in one place. Fried unagi (eel) is my favourite staple piece. Rolls-wise… Not sure. Mood-dependent I think. So many rich flavours.
The best piece of a sushi dinner I’ve ever had was a pacific tuna sashimi my I ate with my friends when we decided to blow a thousand pounds on a collective 30-year birthday dinner. It’s been over a decade and I can still feel it melting on my tongue. I’ve become more of a sashimi person as I’ve aged.
Sadly eating bluefin tuna is like eating tiger sashimi. They are apex predator fish, and in no way numerous enough to be treated as food. Please don’t buy tuna.
I’m a simple girl, I love my maki 😀 I love to get a good variation and decide throughout the meal what order I eat them. I love alternating, like avocado -> salmon -> cucumber -> salmon – > cream cheese-spring onion etc.
I would eat sushi once or twice a week if it wasn’t so pricy! I love red tuna, don’t usually pay up for otoro because I’m too much of a simpleton to tell much of a difference. Salmon is delightful when it’s really good but just fine otherwise.
For rolls a really good fresh hand roll with fish, something crunchy and roe is delicious but hard to eat! Other than that just gimme some interesting flavor combos and I’m happy. Except avoid shrimp. I don’t like shrimp in a roll and I don’t like cold shrimp at all so no shrimp in sushi for me.
very fond of kappa maki (my boss said it was eaten as a palate cleanser in his homeland), my cities sushi tradition is reletively authentic (considering we are smack innthemiddle of north america, we have a tradition food scene that is the envy of most cities 3times our size.) currently there is a lot more of the BC’ized sushi than there used to here, but most of our sushi chefs till about 20 years ago all trained under the same japanese guy who opened a sushi place in the city years ago serving traditional japanese sushi and dinners (they were extremely popular with the cities japanese diaspora, and the japanese family buisness i worked for said they were about the closest to home cooking he could get in north america). also love the taryaki rolls
I loved tuna before I was vegetarian (as in the kind used in sashimi and sushi, not that I minded canned for a melt or whatever), now my favourites are yam rolls, avocado rolls, and fancy rolls with mango or whatever. Oh, and a place used to have an amazing specialty asparagus roll.
And if I’m getting sushi, sunomono salad and gomae as sides
I swear to Christ if these children stopped hitting each other for five seconds they’d all simultaneously be the best fucking friends in the world. If they live to see 25 they’re all going to be living together in a two-bedroom apartment in Seattle with three trans women and someone’s adorable exotic pet autism service animal.
Now if you’ll excuse me, apparently I’ll be writing a short fanfiction.
Also I’m pretty sure not everyone was on board for that partoxular”tell everyone we had sex” arc. Though I will say the posts Li posted have a notable difference. And that is that dina and Becky are close friends with everyone in that room. While Lucy and Joyce are like…acquaintances at best.
I think Lucy was actually genuinely friends with Becky, and I think she wanted to be better friends.
I’m not sure if she and Becky are still close post-Walky-dumping, but. That second strip is Lucy volunteering to help Becky convince Joyce to take birth control, so I think “acquaintance” is probably a weak word for it.
Yeah it’s crazy how quickly I’ve soured on this relationship. I get these are college kids and the priorities of college kids are 1) don’t fail out and 2) find the next orgasm, in the reverse order, but good lord, Joyce.
You mean that we should start a sub-thread inside the hater containment thread for people that hate hater containment thread?
I don’t think I could make the second comment their though, because I’m more like, meh, it’s sometimes amusing. But I think Dot’s missing a trick by not bribing NPGZ to let her have the hater Containment thread as the first comment thread.
I mean she kind of did, we just haven’t gotten to the part of the storyline where we address how much Joyce ignores things that Dorothy says not to do out of respect just because she wants to anyway.
As noted by others: It was’t that long ago that they both witnessed the cringe that was Becky shouting from the mountaintops that she and Dina has Done The Deed.
I’ve never hidden it. Its just fun to point at these bongoes, turn to someone else who feels likewise and say “lmao do you see this fuckin’ shit? Wack.”
Its really no deeper than that. They bore me together, so I make my own fun.
Not a full pass, but… a bit of leeway, I suppose? It was decently clear that she was doing it as a coping mechanism, caught between wanting to brag about it but also not feeling like she was ready to tell Joyce.
She was also a less graphic than Joyce is being to Lucy, so there’s that too.
And yeah, I’ll admit that there’s a bit of “she’s already obnoxious and attention-grabbing about her sexuality so this isn’t nearly as much of a step up” at play too.
All this said? I wasn’t impressed by Becky doing it either. But I’m definitely less impressed here.
I think it’s less a pass and more an acknowledgement of that Becky is an annoying loudmouth we expect this from and matches her character. Joyce was not that and has lost all semblance of herself to become this way, making it feel more jarring and outlandish as a result.
Joyce who was always about loudly declaring anger and freedom?
I mean she’s more rude these days about it but I don’t think it’s that uncharacteristic now that she’s decided she will no longer feel shame about sex.
Still rude and uncalled for, but I don’t feel that it’s jarring.
Unless I’m forgetting it, I don’t think anyone would have known that she was masturbating now or that she was having sexual encounters with Joe unless she was talking to someone she was already very comfortable with or who had already figured it out. This is a very sudden post-Dorothy change and yeah, it feels jarring for it, especially considering it hasn’t even been 24 hours since she openly realized she’s not straight.
And wasn’t she usually declaring anger and freedom in response to her or one of her friends being hurt in some way?
Word choice matters a lot on something like this. “Dorothy was inside me” is SIGNIFICANTLY more cringe and invasive than…well I can’t remember exactly when it happened to look it up but I think Becky blurted out something like “We totes fucked!”, which I feel is really not all that wild at all for close friends in this age bracket.
Really, it’s so far over the line that, if someone said something like that to me, I’d assume it was actually referring to something nonsexual that they were trying to make sound sexual for a joke. Like dentistry, for example. It’s a very unnecessary level of detail for without the bait-and-switch humour, unless you somehow already know the listener’s fine with that level of detail.
That said, I’m not actually hating on this. Joyce being creepy and offputting is at least more interesting than their generic relationship stuff was, so if it’s one or the other, I prefer Joyce doing everything wrong.
I’m just glad the comic’s actually framing it as bad, though. If I wanted to read people being creepy and cringeworthy in a comic that tries to pretend they’re being perfectly reasonable, I’d read 9 Chickweed Lane.
Every comic that passes without actually addressing the fact that Joyce left her Schrodinger’s boyfriend on read vis a vis the actual state of their relationship is another gray hair on my scalp.
Like, yes yes, these two are dweebs and that’s very nice, Willis, but I could have sworn this storyline had, like. A story?
It just makes me check out more and more. For a cheating storyline, I’d either expect overwhelming shame (especially from at least one of these two) or the kind of self-centered rationalization to justify it until the reveal occurs, and then a bunch of shame as a result of the judgement of the people around them.
And it’s fine to be the latter and get a slow burn on it, but then I don’t get the point of making it be front page news and have Joyce’s dad already show up and have Joyce come out of the closet to him, while very heavily avoiding the feeling of shame on multiple occasions AND also inserting this C plot of “white girls kissing takes away from the point of the protest and the characters invested in the protest are bothered by it”.
Maybe the point could be that everything is blowing up at once, but not if we’re going to do things like put all of that on pause for them to go have sex and act all lovey-dovey in private, or if they’re going to go out of their way to have a performative apology and arrange a double date with poor description mixup shenanigans. It doesn’t feel like a messy situation, it feels like a messy story with a lack of focus.
TBF, I don’t think Joyce ever got around to mentioning she didn’t actually break up with Joe? Dorothy is the one who’s most likely to freak out and she thinks everything is… well, legal, if not moral. Which, let’s be real, is really more what she’s been about in the first place. Like, she’s legalistic as a shortcut to being moral, but that means that she’s able to lean on the legalism to avoid feeling guilt over doing harm.
Cause, fun fact, you can okay legally, even okay morally, and still do harm to someone. And it doesn’t help fix the harm that you were in the right.
I think the thing is that is isn’t primarily being approached as a cheating storyline. It is being approached as a rom-com.
In a cheating story, where the protagonist is the cheater, the central conflict is the protagonist’s own limitations. Can they recognize that they did wrong? Can they try to repair what they broke? How will they grow from their mistake?
A rom-com focuses on the couple coming together. Other things are thrown in to create drama, but the central conflict is “Will they manage to make their love work?”. The cheating is just an obstacle to be overcome on the path to love.
Given the strip about how Joyce is “not coming back”, I think the actual explanation for this (in that it’s the one Willis wants us to believe) is that Joyce literally forgot about him.
Which is interesting, because lack of object permanence and lack of peope permanence is a potential neurodivergent trait that some people have. We might be learning the hard way that Joyce has a degree of that.
I’ve never been a fan of Dorothy; but not a hater: more of a “meh”.
Anyway, all these haters will be surprised in 50 years when Lord Willis pulls a “How I Met Your Mother” ending to DoA. (or, even worse(?): a Seinfeld ending)
Willis reveals that Dorothy died a long time ago and her kids with Joyce urge her to go be with Joe because the story told them she loved him and nobody likes it because actually the story moved on from that ages ago?
It is frustrating that Dorothy is aware that they have burned a lot of their friends and tells Joyce this, yet Joyce still does not seem to care. It goes beyond not being aware. It has been spelled out for her that she has hurt a lot of people, and she has just being awful and selfish. She is even defying Dorothy’s request for decorum.
Not one brown woman on campus is safe from these losers. I was considering Lucy on the “which woc is gonna be subjected to this bs next” comment a couple days ago but thought, naaaahh she’s not gonna be relevant to this”. Oh my hubris.
Telling Roz comes when Joyce starts looking for people not in the friend group.
Roz is definitely not their friend.
Though she may possibly be the most welcoming of the situation (other than the characters who are just cheerful and friendly all the time like Agatha and Sierra) due to Joyce and Dorothy’s increased sexual liberation of realizing they’re bi and consummating the act (tho that might not be the best word choice).
Roz would be interesting. I’d be curious to see if she has anything to say about it RE: the way she blew up at Joyce about her homophobia back in gender studies class. But I also feel like she and the main cast have antagonized each other so much that she wouldn’t really be THAT invested in the discussion.
Honestly though, I’m more interested in seeing them bounce off personalities like Roz. More potential for strong responses of any type, which is what I’m desperately lacking at the moment.
I hate the fact that some people in these comments get so upset with any criticism of this storyline and their favorite shipping couple that we apparently need a hater containment thread.
And I hate feeling like I’m quarantined to this designated thread with some of my opinions, because apparently certain commenters don’t think I deserve to have negative opinions in the “main” comments thread.
But here we are. At the very least, people in this thread don’t accuse me of homophobia as much. Yaaaaaay.
Anyone else feeling the whiplash from how many times one (or both) of these characters have gone between feeling shame for hurting the folks they care about and simply just refusing to give a damn?
Like, I think it could’ve been interesting for Dorothy to be having that post-sex clarity cause it to really sink in how shitty her actions were. And even for this to contrast Joyce doing her previous Joyce behavior where she overcomes some boundary and rides the high of doing so up until she has to directly face someone who’s hurt by her actions (that she actually cares about).
But we already had them face their boyfriends. And Becky. Joyce left Joe hanging, yanked Dorothy away from Walky (and Dorothy just went with it) and they both went and gushed about how their relationship directly in front of Becky… twice. And even before that, they decided to sleep together with Sarah in the room in spite of being so worried about ending things with their boyfriends that neither of them could go through with it yet.
Oh, and also the story just keeps shoving away the characters they’ve hurt to keep focusing on how in love they are. Even Sarah just didn’t do anything about the two of them sharing a bed despite clearly picking up on what was going on, and while I don’t expect her to be invested enough/willing to fight enough to completely stop things there, I also wouldn’t expect her to just implicitly condone it all night with her presence.
I just can’t see myself caring about anything to do with this relationship now. Like, if this relationship later becomes the OTP of the strip, it’ll just feel rushed, but also if we later get proper drama from the cheating, it’ll just feel like too little, too late.
Its possible some of the disjointedness is because this was originally a straight follow up from the stairway strip: we know Asma strips were new additions.
(unless the staircase strip was also a new insertion because it mentioned going to see Asma, in which case this might have originally followed up from the strip where joyce is begging dorothy to move in with her)
Or I could be completely wrong! Who knows! There’s few concrete ways to tell what was originally made and what was added later.
I did just finish complaining about that in another comment, but it’s actually not even one of the parts I was thinking about with this one. This one’s JUST about the way they keep flipping between caring about their friends/boyfriends and not, which would be fine if the difference was purely from trying not to think about it when they don’t have them directly in front of them, but, no, they’ve both brazenly neglected them right to their faces multiple times. So I just can’t care that Dorothy is doing the bare minimum here while completely having no issue with Joyce acting like a shitty version of Becky.
Another, funnier side effect of the Asma strips being inserted in between “Joyce and Dorothy take their dirty sex laundry” and “Joyce and Dorothy wash their dirty sex laundry” is that it implies they had a bunch of dirty sex laundry just off-panel during the conversation with Asma
I just don’t know what the storyline expects me feel at this point. Because of how messy it is, I’m not sure if I can really get into it because the focus is all over the place… Well, the focus is Joyce and Dorothy.
I wonder what the reaction would be if Joyce had had PIV with Joe and shown the same exhibitionist attitude. I suspect people would be more critical of her behavior.
Said elsewhere — there’s a vast difference between “We had sex!” and … whatever the hell this oversharing nonsense is.
Personally, in that scenario?
– “I had sex with Joe!” – borderline but acceptable
– “I lost my virginity to Joe!” – over the line
– “Joe’s penis was inside me!” – WAY over the line, what the hell.
I’m genuinely glad that, based on the alt text, Willis’s #1 audience member enjoyed this joke.
It’s just a bit too creepy to be funny for me, though. Joyce isn’t really close with Lucy like she’s close with, say, Jennifer. So something about Lucy’s reaction is too close to “actually creeped out” rather than just “ugh, Joyce is being weird again”
i know this comic isnt an airport and departure need not be announced, but i think it’s time for me to realize that I have never felt so… unenthusiastic about a favoured creator’s abilities before. Use a site blocker and have someone else set the passkey for it, check on it in a year or two when a point is made and a storyline is formed again.
I love that these two have figured out their feelings and got together, but I hate every decision they made with such miniscule conflict, and an exhausting marathon of a narrative to boot. i cannot in any reality suspend disbelief that the discussion with asma would have turned out that way after their obvious white and/or sheltered ignorance on full blast, even for a comedy comic, and it’s doing absolutely nothing for me.
for others who may be tired of it, I also recommend site blockers if this comic is a routine habit. if you are experiencing such little joy, it might be a good idea for you to find something that fills your time with more joy and fulfillment. explore other comics and find something that makes you happy if this isnt anymore, and revisit it later when you can speed through these bits to parts you care about again. then, you can also assess if the story is worth continuing to read, if you need another break, or if it’s time to drop it entirely.
I’ve definitely ended up reading it less than before… It is a habit though. It’s not like I don’t have faith it’ll improve, I trust Willis as a creator for the most part. But this one is just… Pushing all of my buttons. I wanted Dorothy and Joyce to end up together, but having it done this way where they’re self centered, overshadowing, racist, insensitive, and also cheaters like… Maybe I’d be more engaged if any of that actually mattered? It’s like there’s a tug of war in the narrative going like “DoJo is cute! More DoJo being cute!” And “Oh yeah… The world around them and their interpersonal relationships still exist.”
Author’s stated on numerous platforms that this couple is fun to draw and one that they personally enjoy, my dude. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
I haven’t played yet (no, AdHoc, you’re not going to get my money until the game is fully out – and at a hefty discount – when you’re holding on to it for a fucking gimmick), but from what I’ve glimpsed my biggest issue with the Invisigirl situation isn’t even that she punches you in the face so hard you fall out of the chair, it’s that if you try to report her for it the game makes you say it was your fault that she assaulted you, which is cray-cray, vomit-worthy shit.
You’re referring to Lucy calling Joyce a bisexual version of her after their first meeting?
In which case, Lucy being the first person in the friend group Joyce tells, on purpose and without a sense of obligation, is oddly fitting.
I was literally thinking earlier today, “Man, it’s been a while since we’ve seen Lucy. She’s one of my favorite characters. Hope we get to see her again, soon.” …was NOT expecting this to be the context. LOL
Meanwhile, Lucy’s at the top of my ‘meh’ list (I don’t hate these characters, but they generally bore me), and this is, as a result, my favorite of her appearances.
Yes it was.
But were people really comparing Lucy and Dorothy specifically or just LucyXWalky to DorothyXWalky?
I mean Lucy and Joyce were compared directly to each other by both Lucy and Joyce in comic, so when I read the original post, I assumed they meant Joyce and accidentally typed Dorothy (of course that may also be because I did the opposite a few days ago).
Heads up for people in areas that don’t do daylight saving time or do it on a different schedule, the current daylight saving time adjustment is about to end for the year in the US… so if the comic seems to suddenly shift when it’s posted for you, that’s why.
It’s hard to be clear about daylight saving time sometimes! It’s both annoying and often poorly understood no matter if you’re in an area that does it or not.
She was in the friend group because she wanted to boink walky, and seems to have stuck around mostly out of inertia. She goes to church with Becky and of course rooms with Billie but otherwise doesn’t really have close relationships with anyone else in the group.
Though she immediately followed up the “I want to be friends with Sarah and fit into this friend group” by seducing Jacob, so despite Sarah going into her weird “I’m cheerful” phase afterwards (and then hooking up with Tony), I doubt that “closer to Sarah” lasted.
Not intended to be harsh in that sense. The point being that those “getting closer to Sarah” scenes were before that and that’s not really likely to happen any more.
This is a question I truly have thoughts on. Cause she joined the friend group to blatantly get at Walky, which I always thought was a bit manipulative and now that that relationship has soured she’s not been around as much. It could mean she’s honeymooning hard like most fresh couples are, or maybe she was never really that great a friend, or maybe the friend group wasn’t that great to her?
I dunno, busybody seems like too harsh a word. Maybe I am biased, because I think Lucy is adorable and I absolutely love that she got together with Jacob and that they are cute together.
Yeah, cause it was. She switched classes specifically to hangout with Walky. She already had friends too, she just didn’t like them (because they’re admittedly one note, background, gag characters). She spent almost all her time not actually hanging with most of the group except for the morning walk, she just followed Walky around until he asked her out. Lucy was also real in to joining Raidah’s group at one point. Y’know, those people we don’t like? (Not that Raidah even has a group anymore, lol.)
Saying manipulative is not necessarily even good or bad. Becky’s been pretty manipulative in the past too. Lucy really wanted to date Walky and be seen as a sort of popular alpha friend like what she thinks Jennifer is. She manipulated her situation to try and get both and maybe it didn’t workout by kind of did in another way? And now she’s back to mostly doing her own thing. Interesting to me that she was so eager to be a support but now that some friends actually need that support she’s nowhere to be found for them.
I feel like we’re arguing a technicality now and I’m not sure to what end because I don’t think it contradicts my point. Switching classes, switching schedules, applying to a different section? To me there’s not really a difference when my point is that Lucy is more than willing to manipulate people and circumstances to her benefit. Another example is her trying to manipulate the Walkertons into liking her with a fake girlfriend scheme multiple people warned her wouldn’t work including her then boyfriend, Walky.
Is it wrong to point these things out because Lucy is chipper and pleasant?
For me it’s about the framing of Lucy’s actions. Switching a class to align specifically with Walky sounds borderline stalkerish whereas choosing a class time that matches friends and lets you walk to class with them is far more reasonable and normal. Lucy is a smart young woman who does understand people well enough to people please and get results but I feel like your description of her in your comments here are very uncharitable readings of her character. God forbid a girl want her boyfriend’s parents to like her. The scheme, which Walky helped think up, was very stupid yes. Like Walky, Lucy seemed to think she could treat the situation like a sitcom plot.
Switching between classes or even sections mid-semester is a much more drastic action than picking a section a friend is in when choosing classes for the next semester.
And if we’re going to frame that as manipulative, how about Joyce choosing an entire non-required class because Dorothy was taking it?
@thejeff. Yeah. I’d say that was manipulative. In fact considering where we are with Joyce and Dorothy that was probably even foreshadowing.
@Doopyboop I mean…I kinda don’t know where the line is on this. I feel like Lucy’s actions are no better or worse than any other character really. I thought I was being fairly objective. I was wrong.
I’m sorry I was kind of trolling with that last response. I just think it’s kind of funny in hindsight that you can recontextualize a lot of previous Joyce and Dorothy behavior. Wanting to hang with friends isn’t manipulative. I’ll leave it at that.
@Sirksome: FTR I think the word “manipulative” is just. Going to keep hitting a lot of folks as SUPER negative.
Whether you mean it that way or not, it’s going to keep sounding to a lot of people like you’re saying Lucy is a bad person who employed devious methods to get into Walky’s pants.
I know folks complain about Forest quad’s characterization, but it’s nevertheless pretty clear that they’ve got short attention spans and gravitate towards the new and shiny. They dropped Lucy for Billie when she showed up, and if Lucy was less than touched by their renewed interest in how “cool” she seemed when she was in a bad mood after she dumped Walky, well, I don’t blame her for assuming it wouldn’t last.
I’m not sure what tone you meant to use for “what is Lucy doing now besides Jacob” but “Lucy is nowhere to be found when friends need support” seems like a very uncharitable read for her given the way the comic cuts to a few characters at a time.
It’s not. The first comment was just kinda tongue and cheek since she hasn’t really been around since hooking up with Jake.
But uh when did we start being generous with our character reads? Dorothy and Joyce have been getting flayed for weeks for living in sin and making that everyone else’s problem.
I don’t think Lucy is above being criticized at least.
At the very least, Lucy knows everyone involved and hasn’t been *shown* to talk to anyone about it.
It’s possible that Lucy has comforted comforted everyone who feels some type of way about Joyce and Dorothy and it’s possible she can’t be bothered.
So criticism of her behavior is possible, but I don’t think it’s warranted, yet, at least in regards to the fallout from Joyce and Dorothy.
She’s probably more Becky’s friend than anyone elses at this point by virtue of them both going to church together and even supporting Becky’s attempt to reconvert Joyce. Most of her friends before she joined the story kinda…dumped her to idolise Jennifer and Hell, even Sarah straight up told Lucy that nobody in the friend group actually liked her/was her friend and only hung out with her because she was attatched to Walky.
There are waaaaaaaay too many lesbians who aren’t attracted to men at all nonetheless deep into M/M slash (including erotica) for “must feature people I’m attracted to” to be a requirement for shipping.
Even if Lucy was a close friend to Joyce, you do not just tell people that right away. There needs to be at least some kind of segue into the conversation first.
Honestly, my policy is that the only person who needs to know that kind of information is the doctor when they ask about it. That is not something I would ever share with friends, even if they wanted to know.
Two rules for life: tell the cops nothing, tell the EMT everything.
I can’t just keep saying “Don’t trust Joyce and Dorothy” despite every other strip proving that. Ya’ll definitely get it by now. Don’t trust smartphones I guess? Don’t trust randomly solicited sexual information?
This might have been a lot funnier without the Asma strips – not that they should be cut, but going from Joyce not saying anything about Dorothy to Agatha and saying “should we even be apologizing to Asma” to insisting she get to tell someone that she had sex (in a very weird way).
As an ex-fundie myself… I suspect the shame reflex is going to kick in not too long after the afterglow wears off. But then, maybe Joyce has made more progress on that front than I have. 😅
In the recent Questionable Content, do you think Jeff is teeing up a storyline with Elliot and Clinton’s Mom? I was going to make a joke about it happening now that he’s single and she likes young buff guys … But then they outwardly acknowledged it. Do you think it’s possible?
Yeah, plus she has met Elliot in person and was aware that he and Clinton were dating. We already had the gag about her finding him attractive, establishing she knew it was inappropriate. It would be very out of character for her to both pursue and actually go through with it.
Feels more like a one-sided thing than anything, Elliot doesn’t seem to have shown any attraction to her at all.
(I kinda want him to meet another tall buff soft boy that will guide him through therapy. Smol/tall is cute but most of the couples in QC are already that.)
The men Aurelia sleeps with tend to be pretty happy to have no strings attached casual sex without asking too much of her emotionally. They show up for her booty calls and leave with big smiles on their faces but don’t actually seem to show up anywhere else in her personal life.
While Elliot fits the mold physically I don’t think on an emotional level he’s actually capable of the kind of sexual encounter she’s looking for.
The only thing that Aurelia will offer Elliot is to be a mom, if it would help him cope. Maybe she’ll provide the exactly right encouragement to find an effective therapist.
I had the idea that if Elliot can’t work past the anxiety to go to a therapist, Pintsize will befriend Elliot, and be surprisingly effective at talking him through his anxiety attacks.
Of course, Pintsize’s gremlin shenanigans will nonetheless lead to both of them being chased down the street by an enraged invisible emu.
I never considered this match up, but dang, that might be incredibly entertaining (and be a chance fir Pintsize to show off his secret wholesome side he only brings out once in a blue moon.)
I like to imagine that during the timeskip, there was a day when Joyce pretended to switch bodies with Dorothy (Dorothy wasn’t onboard with this) so that I can imagine them having the dialogue from Community.
Joyce: “Guys I need to apologize for my behavior today. When I switched bodies with Dorothy…”
Dorothy: “Nope!”
Joyce: “I thought I would know what it would be like to have Dorothy inside of me.”
Dorothy: “That did not happen.”
Joyce: “But as it turns out, having Dorothy inside of me…”
Dorothy: “Nope again.”
Joyce: “…only brought out the worst in me. Which is to say, having Dorothy inside of me…”
Dorothy: “No one was inside of anyone!”
Joyce: “…was wrong…to have Dorothy inside of me.”
Seconded. I’m once again very glad for the addition of those strips, because they do a lot to break up the monotony of kissing and bragging on repeat. Without the addition of Asma’s subplot, we kind of… Don’t have a plot right now? It’s just Joyce and Dorothy wandering around and hooking up in various locations.
Joyce and Dorothy are bringing their dirty laundry down the stairs. Joyce suggests talking to Asma. They do so. Now they are washing the laundry.
Doesn’t that imply they had the sex sheets still with them during the Asma conversation? They literally made Asma look at the dirty laundry from their hook-up?
I feel like Asma’s speech makes a lot more sense when you realize she’s literally looking at the gross sex-stained bedsheets these two random women she doesn’t even know have brought before her for some ungodly reason.
Yeah, I’d missed it. Man, that’s such a weirdly passive-aggressive thing for them to do and neither Joyce nor Dorothy (nor Willis?) even thought about it. “Hello, Muslim woman who’s name I think is Asthma. I am here to apologize for being too publicly into my girlfriend. I have brought a box of sheets moistened with my sexual juices, please ignore that”.
The laundry is set down behind them during the conversation.
I really don’t think it’s that weird to speak to somebody on your way to do some laundry though. In a dorm like this, where everybody’s using the same laundry room, you’re gonna see some dirty sheets from time to time.
Yeah, but the very specific context of “bringing my dirty sheets from sex with girlfriend to apologize to woman I don’t know very well for kissing my girlfriend” makes it kind of weird. Not, like “Cancel Joyce” weird, just…that’s very huh if you think about it.
Fun fact: Sheets with lady juice on them don’t glow like a radioactive ghoul in Fallout. Nor are they generally so strong-smelling that they can be detected by the average human nose at any distance (unless one or more of the ladies involved has a medical condition). As far as Asma should be aware, these two weirdos stopped to talk to her on their way to the laundry room, and that’s as far as that goes.
I will second this. Sex has a noticeable odor (or several, really), but you get that smell concentrated enough to be noticeable by having sex in a small room with the door and windows shut. Unless Asma gets a lot closer to the laundry, she’s not going to be smelling anything.
It also seems just. So incredibly unlikely that they crumpled up the sheets in such a way that the stained parts of them are visible to passersby rather than being, you know, tucked away and hidden?
Thank you! I’ve been a little weirded out by the comment section over the last week-ish being so obsessed with the sheets and how they must just be totally obviously stained with a giant red letter (S for Sapphic, maybe?) that anyone and everyone will know what they’ve been up to.
Some commenters will find the weirdest things to focus on. Even if they don’t make any sense in ANY reality.
Whatever to keep on hating on Joyce and Dorothy.
Like, they all use the same shower rooms too. It’s just been a fact of their living situation that sometimes you’re going to see people coming and going from the shower.
Like, it’s cute that Joyce still feels some need to hide the evidence of what she did there. Still got a bit of that fundamentalist brain. But literally every time at this college dorm that anybody’s gotten their sheets dirty for any reason they’ve had to walk them through the halls like this. It’s a normal part of their daily existence.
They specifically talked to Asma because she’s on the way to the laundry room. She is situated between the laundry room and the dorm rooms where Joyce lives, such that everybody who lives there must walk past Asma’s desk every time they make this trip.
It is. They probably detoured slightly to talk to Asma, by leaving the stairwell (which probably lets out onto the lobby for fire safety reasons) and then approaching the desk, then went back in and down. Still, once the decision had been made, however badly, to talk to Asma about this, the route they took makes more sense than going to the laundry, first.
Personally, I’m assuming the thought is that if you have to wash the sheets immediately after having sex, that you must have had some fluids that needed to be dealt with, and many of the fluids involved in sex can have distinctive smells.
But in this case it’s just as likely that the “distinctive smells” if anything are “tear gas residue”, or equally that Joyce is just that fastidious about it.
Everybody is acting like Joyce is being excessive in this strip, but I feel like this 100% is how my college friends were when they had a new significant other. And I was the “early comic Joyce” friend that they thought couldn’t handle hearing the more explicit details! This seems like absolutely normal college student behavior.
Yeah, I mean Lucy may not have walked up to people and told ’em (that we saw, she really might’ve with some of the people in her dorm) that she banged Jacob but she REALLY was not shy with who was aware either.
That’s interesting, because among my college friends (in the late 1990s), even the fraternity guys, usually didn’t get this graphic! IMHO there’s a vast difference in politeness level between “Dudes, I totally fucked so-and-so!” and any further discussion of actual mechanics or acts.
There’s a musical episode and JD and Turk do a song where JD has the line “you’re the only man who’s ever been inside me” and Turk rushes to clarify that he’s talking about surgery (and JD insists there’s no need to clarify).
It’s Guy Love Between Two Guys (song title), and one of the pieces of media Willis has specifically referenced while talking about the trope of super-long-running-joke-where-two-characters-are-deeply-in-love-but-also-straight-so-they-never-get-together.
Idk I’m also ace but I’m pretty sure I’ve never shoved anyone’s face away or said “ew gross” to anyone IRL even when they were oversharing with me.
I’ve definitely also had friends say more graphic things than this by a lot without specifically making sure it was okay first? Kind of depends on everyone’s senses of humor and stuff. Especially when we were teenagers and just kind of fumbling around, trying to figure out what kinds of sexual behavior were “normal”.
Like. One of my friends once told me that one of HIS friends told HIM that he’d had a sex dream about me. I was not thrilled by that disclosure and I was in fact quite uncomfortable but I also didn’t shove him or tell him that was gross. I just froze up lol.
Like. You’re entitled to your own boundaries, they’re no more universal than mine. I’m not trying to say you’re weird for feeling the way you do. And that last example is something where maybe I should have said something instead of freezing up! But when I tried to think of the sorts of things that were actually said to me in high school, that was the first one to pop into my mind.
And for all that some commenters have tried to draw very hard lines between high school behavior and college behavior, there’s definitely overlap, especially among college freshman.
From my memories, guys tended to be more just the boast of “Dudes, I totally fucked so-and-so!”, while women among themselves would go into more explicit detail.
(Yes yes her actual words were a little less graphic. I maintain my stance that it doesn’t make you a prude by default to not wanna hear that shit outta nowhere.)
“Really? … Weird.”
– lots and lots of people when someone manages to explain to them that “oversharing” is a thing, and not everyone wants to hear about their Special Interest, whether that’s trains or Transformers or all the sex they’re having lately
I think that they’re not friends would be news to Joyce.
It might or might not be how Lucy feels — she seemed to get along great with Becky, and the two of them even texted each other about how to handle it after Joyce dropped the “atheist” bomb — but I think Joyce thinks of everyone in the main cast as her friend (except Walky, possibly).
Something I’ve been wondering for a while now: Was Joyce ever truly attracted to Joe, or was she even deeper in comphet than we thought? We’ve only seen her engage in m/f sex acts for his pleasure (the handjob, the proactive apology blowjob) and the night they came the closest to full PIV sex she requested just fingering, something Dorothy could’ve also done with her. Obviously some of that apprehension has to come from her trauma, but it also kinda looks like Dorothy wasn’t the only one in this relationship using a guy as a vector.
The comphet thing has come up a few times, but I really don’t think that’s the case. Sometimes you just don’t want a cock inside your body, and that doesn’t have to mean you’d only ever want it if you could have your tongue in another woman.
I’m partial to the theory that conservative fundie conditioning makes one SPECIFICALLY have brainworms about PIV sex and the possibility of pregnancy being the thing that is REALLY off the table for “good girls” (see also: “hussy pills”), and thus her hesitance with Joe is more about that than about resisting comphet.
I’m pretty sure she was attracted to Joe, and also Ethan (when she thought he was straight). At least, I dont see any sign of revulsion, and she DOES have excitement (and temptation, in fall semester) about the opposite sex. And she definitely liked Jacob.
Shes shown subtle, possibly subconscious attraction to women, too, so I think Bi or Pan fit her well. I feel sure that the excitement here isn’t because it’s a woman, but because its DOROTHY, and shes with someone she actually loves, and not just someone who is cute and she likes and wants to see where it leads.
We have repeatedly seen Joyce loudly exclaim about various aspects of Joe that she found physically attractive, including his face, just as we’ve seen her loudly exclaim about various aspects of various women that she’s found physically attractive.
As AG observed (aloud) to Amber a while back (in a recently linked strip where Joyce was gleefully talking about how she and Joe were going to have All The Sex), “That girl is hornt.” And now she’s no longer repressing any of it.
Willis keeps drawing her in the bi colors for a reason y’all. Go back to when they first got together. The only thing keeping her wild lust in check was her deep fundie shame around PiV sex. She was (is) so, so attracted to him. And Jacob. There was no comphet need to go after Jacob like she did, she just wanted him
I mean, Dorothy broke up with Walky to be with Joyce, so even if Sal wouldn’t mind their relationship, she probably wouldn’t want to hear about it the relationship that caused her twin to spiral (even more).
At this point I kinda feel bad for anyone who interacts with Joyce, with how shitty she’s behaving towards other characters in this storyline. And anyone who interacts with Dorothy too, since she keeps enabling this bad behavior.
Hey, Joyce actually tried, briefly, to head off the Asma convo. She failed, yes, but their bad socializing isn’t all on her, with Dorothy just ‘enabling’.
Yeah. I mean, things between Walky and Lucy didn’t end amicably, but it also didn’t end BADLY enough for Lucy to maybe take schadenfreude satisfaction from a “HAH! I knew he was a terrible partner” direction. As it is, this just comes off as being kinda weird and creepy from Joyce. >.>
Joyce has *already* gloated in an uncalled for way at Walky, and I think Dorothy not calling her on it is a factor in why some of us are not really enjoying these two together (yes, gaslighters, that sort very moderate pushback is all we meant by “consequences”, nobody was saying they should be branded with scarlet letters and run off campus). Telling her not to make it worse is a step in the right direction, I guess, but I’ll need there to be more (and FFS tell Dorothy about the poly stuff, Joyce).
For Walky, it was never a question that Joyce was in love with Dorothy. He had called it from the get go, and Joyce undermining their relationship constantly in the name of “friendship” always had him snarking. It was him in doubt that Dorothy would blow up their relationship to be with Joyce (which she did.
There is no buffer now for Joyce and Dorothy’s relationship. There’s no Walky in the way, there’s no Joe having what he doesn’t deserve (I’m only describing the lads the way Dorothy and Joyce described them at different times). There’s just them—and they’ll have to eventually deal with that when the honeymoon phase is over.
Well. Maybe. I can see Joe immediately ready to help Joyce deal through this relationship.
One thing that I’m interested in seeing, after things die down in who knows how many real world months, is the new dynamic Dorothy will have with Joe and Joyce will have with Walky.
Because Joe and Walky aren’t going to suddenly appear less, and, outside of some new important characters showing up, they’re all four going to be around each other due to their friend group and classes.
Dorothy thought very poorly of Joe, but Joe has changed, he was good with and for Joyce, and helped he helped them realize their feelings; also he never cheated, giving him the moral and ethical high ground in that regard.
How is Dorothy going to reconcile that?
As for Joyce, she and Walky have an antagonistic relationship with each other, but they do and have hung out with each other, they’ve given advice to each other, they are friends, and she even called him family around the time Becky first showed up.
Almost every single person they’re close to, the other is close to.
Because of that and their shared class (do they share more than one anymore?) they often eat together.
But that almost HAS to change, especially considering how cruel Joyce was about laughing in his face.
Is she planning on keeping that same energy every time she sees him?
Is she going to think she went a step too far and give a halfhearted not-apology?
And let’s not forget that Walky and Becky share several character traits and dynamics with Joyce (that’s probably part of the reason they ended up friends despite themselves), and since Joyce probably won’t be getting her Becky fix in the near future, will she end up getting closer to Walky despite everything?
Will this situation end the friendship they had or will it end up deepening it?
I think Joyce and Walky might actually come to an understanding eventually oddly. Walky may even treat it as a sort of, ‘well, it *IS* what I would have done if the shoe was on the other foot’. Now that the matter of Dorothy’s heart feels settled for both of them, Joyce and Walky might even go to vitriolic best buds territory.
I am not sure the same could be said for Dorothy and Joe, but I can’t put my finger on why. Maybe it’s because they’re differently wired? Or at least Dorothy doesn’t seem wired for that. As you pointed out, Walky, Joyce, and Becky all share a few traits (big Labrador energy at times including). Dotty and Joe though? We might get some politeness at most?
Actually.
It’s funny, I kinda want to see how Dorothy would handle competition. She for the longest time in universe had Walky (consciously) and Joyce (subconsciously) fighting over her. I’m not sure how she would handle Joe as an ever present threat even if a polycule takes place.
I hope they don’t. I really hope Walky learns to stand up for himself a bit.
But then, I don’t think Walky would have done the same if the shoe was on the other foot. Sure, he teases her and goes too far sometimes, but that was just mean and aimed directly at his moment of loss.
Make no mistake—I want the same, but my line of thinking is it’s Dorothy he needs to put his foot down on from here on. I think he would have done the same because you just stated it—he goes too far sometimes. That is their adversarial relationship.
But Dorothy just let it happen. That’s kind of been the M.O.. She would chastise Walky getting on Joyce, but not really the other way around. That final moment was indicative of how it always was.
Look, even if you just fully excise all the many times he “teased” Joyce about being attracted to Dorothy, even though that made her visibly uncomfortable every single time, there’s still this strip where he was obnoxious about it enough for Sal to feel compelled to remind him that it’s shitty to do this sort of thing to a survivor of sexual assault:
In the next strip, Dorothy tells him, “Come on, stop harassing Joyce,” and he retorts: “Or what? Or you’ll break up with me?”
Because he was Upset to have been dumped (understandably). And taking it out on Joyce (less so, in this particular moment).
Like, Joyce has also been antagonistic to him, this is not a situation where she never said an unkind word to or about him until the Looney Tunes “I stole your girlfriend haha” scene, but it’s also very much not the case that “Walky only ever teased Joyce and was never actually mean to her”.
(And I really, really do think “Walky spent months calling Joyce a lesbian and specifically making fun of her for being attracted to Dorothy while Joyce spluttered and protested” is extremely relevant to “Joyce then gloated after ‘winning’ Dorothy away from him”. I do not think you can just ignore that context.)
I mean 1. That’s at like at the start of the comic.
and 2. Context matters. One can argue that cheating on him and stealing his girlfriend is a way that Joyce is directly wronging him. While Walky dating Dorothy is just…a thing they’re doing. Walky’s still being a complete jerkass here but it’s like the difference between laughing at someone getting kicked in the stomach and kicking someone in the stomach and then laughing at them.
Like this may be just how I feel but I think a big difference between Walky’s teasing and Joyce’s is that Walky’s teasing often mocks her conservative fundie upbringing. Like in the second strip here, Walky mentioning Joyce wanting to have sex with Jacob is challenging her unwillinglyness to acknowledge her own blatantly obvious sexual attraction. He’s mocking the programming that we can all agree wasn’t healthy for her mindset.
Joyce, alternatively, mostly mocks walky by reinforcing his own anxieties about not being good enough, not being wanted and failure. Now walky puts on a strong front but its’s pretty obvious he has pretty low self-esteem. Especially when he’s struggling at school. Walky’s actual problems are his inability to dedicate himself to something and his tendency to half-ass things. But I feel more often Joyce’s insults kinda just reinforce his anxieties while challenging his world view.
@Yotomoe: the second strip I linked was from 2018.
Also it’s not “Walky dating Dorothy” that was “wronging” Joyce, it’s that he alternately teased and harassed her for months about being attracted to Dorothy while also occasionally literally rubbing the fact that he was dating Dorothy in Joyce’s face.
Also the 2018 strip is not about her attraction to Dorothy at all, it’s about Jacob, and is, as I mentioned, Walky borderline sexually harassing Joyce about how much she wants to have sex with Jacob, and he’s pretty explicitly going farther than he usually does because Dorothy dumped him, so no one can make him leave Joyce alone.
Historians will say The War for Dorothy’s smooches had no casualties. Just two college students being high key levels of toxic at each other to focus their sexual tension on Dorothy and ignore any awkward sexual tension they had with each other.
I don’t know. Seems seems a bit much to spend ten thousand years gloating that you have Dorothy and she doesn’t, only to turn around and declare it’s punching below the belt to gloat now that she’s stolen your girl.
“But I’m insecure, actually” then maybe those in glass houses shouldn’t be throwing stones in the first place.
@Yotomoe 2: your second comment makes some points that I think are fair enough, but Walky definitely was not making fun of Joyce’s fundie programming in any kind of Socratic Effort to Help Her in the 2018 sequence. Read the strip right after the one I linked, he was definitely just being mean on purpose.
I agree that the fact that Walky’s targets on Joyce are often her fundie programming does make it feel different for us as readers who didn’t undergo that kind of programming, but I would also gently push back on the idea that that makes it less personally painful for his target. Even if Walky thinks of it as making fun of Joyce’s parents’ efforts to brainwash her, that’s still an area of trauma that Joyce was struggling to get past, and one that Walky has no experience with.
Like. Walky does not mean it this way, but isn’t the joke there kind of “haha, your parents really messed you up and you were stupid to listen to them”?
BUT ALSO: I don’t think Walky gives worse than he gets! I don’t think Joyce is his victim. I think they’re just on a pretty similar level with each other. They’ve both had moments of crossing the line on the Mean Event Horizon.
@Li
my first comment was responding to Sirksome’s comment not yours.
But yeah I’m not saying Walky is blameless. I think one thing that also makes it hit wrong is that Walky’s…usually seen as a jerk? Like you said, Dorothy chastises him. Sal chastises him. When Walky oversteps people will often call him out. In the laughing scene Dorothy just kinda…lets her do that to him. And there’s never even a giggling “wow that was kinda mean” from her.
Now there’s plenty of times when Walky says messed up stuff and DOESN’T get punished for it, but I definitely feel like the laughing rubbed people the wrong way partially cuz it’s treated by the narrative as a fair thing for Joyce to do. Y’know. After his girlfriend just cheated on him.
@ Yoto I mean I just think it’s recency bias more than anything. Joyce hasn’t exactly been likable for this recent story. I don’t really like her much these days and would prefer Walky. I just don’t like the idea one has done worse than the other when they’ve both been jerks to each other from the start. I don’t think there’s a line where you can argue Joyce went too far for laughing at Walky. I also think Dorothy is more to blame for cheating on Walky than Joyce is for laughing at him.
Like it’s fine if you prefer Walky and relate and sympathize with him more.
@Yotomoe: so here I think is the main thing? If I may.
The timing was terrible.
It’s not just recency bias, although that doesn’t help (human brains just work that way). It’s not JUST that Walky has at least had a couple of people point out that he was crossing a line when Joyce hasn’t yet had that pointed out to her.
It’s also that that strip happened when folks were still holding their breath in hopes that at least ONE boyfriend would actually be upset with the girls for cheating on him.
So whether or not it is actually, on paper, worse than Walky poking Joyce in this particular sore spot for months matters less than the fact that we got that strip, and a moment where it felt like the narrative intent was at least “well what did you expect Joyce to do?” if not actively laughing at Walky with Joyce, at a moment when a lot of readers were very specifically hoping Walky would flip both girls the double bird.
Some sort of powerful anti-catharsis.
(The narrative has also been “on Walky’s side” a lot when making fun of Joyce’s fundie beliefs happens. Not always! But often there’s enough cringing-at-Willis’s-past-self going on that we are at least encouraged to agree with Walky that the things he’s making fun of deserve mockery. It’s always been more rare for Willis to actually take Joyce’s brittle religious beliefs and how it would feel for to have them mocked more seriously.
Which I think is just another point in your favor. If we put the work in to imagine things from Joyce’s perspective, it’s pretty easy to be like, “Wow, does she even like Walky? Does she consider him a friend?” …but that was often not the perspective the comic presented. It’s much more frequently been presented as just kind of a “siblings bickering” thing.
With the “haha I stole your girlfriend” comic, meanwhile, we were similarly not encouraged to consider things from Walky’s perspective, at exactly a moment when many people had been hoping to see righteous anger from him.)
I don’t know if this matters or makes a difference to anyone, but I went back through the archives with the Joyce+Walky tags and the Walky+Dorothy tags looking for times Walky mocked Joyce for her feelings towards Dorothy.
Other than him saying he wanted to side eye her for her desire to view Dorothy’s flood of sexy (apology) selfies, he has said anything to her about her liking Dorothy since before the timeskip (which is when I stopped, so I don’t know the exact last time).
Regardless, he hasn’t mocked her like that in weeks and possibly months.
As for him saying something to Dorothy, I got tired of looking so only got as far as karaoke, but other than when she brought up Joyce watching them have sex, he didn’t say anything.
Yes it was an extremely common thing before the timeskip. Once Walky was no longer dating Dorothy, he (mostly) stopped specifically antagonizing Joyce about this, but again he was still antagonizing her about other sexual things (see: above link to the Jacob sequence), and he did still think it was hilarious — when Lucy originally described Joyce as a kind of bisexual version of herself, Walky laughed super hard and told her he loved her.
I just noticed the final panel of “LIVE JOCELYNE REACTION” got changed BACK to the two just kissing more. Did that change then reversion get brought up somewhere?
Thanks for the heads-up about this! I love that strip and I think it’s a lot better when it’s just focused on the two of them. Also more true to character.
Is Lucy part of the friend group? I feel like she was only a fringe friend, someone who is friends with your friend, so you hang out sometimes and are polite to each other, but never hang out when that friend isn’t around.
Yeesh. I had a conversation a few days ago about having seen the “let people enjoy things” mindset being about “if I have to see any negative reception of the media I like, it ruins everything”, and not just people jumping into comment threads to tell others why they’re wrong for liking stuff.
Not sure what came up later that needed to be reported, but that makes it sound like most of the reports were just reporting the entire thread for existing rather than actually going after a problem.
@Li Yeah, between the “I refuse to be confined by this thread” and “I never want to see any negativity ever”, both “sides” have their share of people with some wild takes on what an essentially unmoderated discussion SHOULD be.
I suspect that the review-bombing of the hater thread is going to be ultimately counterproductive for everyone, frankly.
Right, I mean, that’s what the hater containment thread was SUPPOSED to be for: “I don’t like this, and I’m being blatant about that” goes here, “I like this, unapologetically” gets the entire rest of the section, split with “let’s discuss the positives and negatives of this”
My kingdom for a “collapse/expand” button for sure.
Hmmmmmm.
I bet I could rig something up with Grease/Tampermonkey. Folks would have to willingly install the browser extension, and it probably wouldn’t work on mobile, but.
I suspect at least part of it was accidental. I’d be hard-pressed to name five people in the daily discussions that I’d suspect of being petty/asshole enough to push that button.
I mean, I could probably name three I wouldn’t put it past, but it’s a rare day I see more than one of them comment at a time.
I said it before. Nothing will stop me hating. I’m in this for the love of the game. I hate because I was born to it. I *will* call this Styrofoam ship boring and no force or god on earth or heaven can stop me.
I also suspect that the kind of folks who report-bombed the hater thread will a) not find it as easy to report-bomb the dislike going back to being diffuse and b) will attract the attention of actual moderators to adjust things if we start seeing an essentially arbitrary smattering of reporting throughout the discussion.
we don’t even know if it was deleted by Willis himself or flagged out of existence,
even if it was the latter,
people who read the comments (and thus report) do not always write them, and if I’m being real here, the people who don’t write them probably outnumber us
heck if Willis were any webcomic author, he would have also burned his comments section down, but still needs an easy way to do sensitivity checks by people who read this comic but don’t use social media.
At the same time though, he knows the kind of *ahem* problematic dynamics that go on down here, hence adding the “report comment” feature to mitigate at least the very worse of it
all in all like I said before, it’s not like we can treat the comments like the center of the universe, and honestly for many reasons this is actually a GOOD thing
I honestly cannot imagine Willis specifically nuking the kind of relatively anodyne haters that the hater thread gathered, when it comes to that. Just doesn’t seem like the kind of person they are.
Makes me wonder with DoA character could throw down in that department. Joe seems to be an obvious answer. He’s changing his ways but he probably has plenty of stories from before his tone shift. Roz, perhaps? Mike would probably revel in such a challenge, but he’s obviously no longer available.
So exactly what kind of behaviour do you think creating a thread on someone’s own website every single day specifically for toxic bile aimed at them and their creation is?
I think Willis being a grown adult who’s been creating content for years is more than likely okay with it, because part of making a creation that gets popular is understanding that there will be things you make that people won’t like and that’s okay. There’s not one thing in this world that is universally loved.
It’s not like people are calling for Willis’ head on a pike. Calling it toxic bile or assholish is pushing it.
Bile’s gonna be there whether I make the thread or not, so if I can make a space to contain it so folks can scroll on past and engage in positivity or constructive discussion elsewhere then yeah, I’m gonna fuckin’ do it. You’re welcome.
Wah, wah, a lady who’s been reading Willis’ work since she was in middle school is saying some not nice things about the current state of the comic and curating a space for others to complain so the rest of the commentariat doesn’t have to engage with cathartic negativity if they don’t want to, someone call the fucking feds.
You’re clearly the worst. When you die, they’re gonna have to kick Blaine out of hell because you’re filled with so much pure evil there won’t be any room left for him.
if I may add, I think we’re all forgetting something here,
For all we know, all or most of the reports were accidentally made when people were trying to reply to it to begin with!
I mean think about it, if the purpose was to get a bunch of people to reply to the same thread, what are the chances that many of them would hit “report” by accident? 😅
Hell, I would go so far as to say that I suspect many of the denizens of the “hater” thread are assiduous about reporting the ACTUAL toxic bile (i.e., racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc) when it does show up.
How would folks feel about a Positivity Corner Thread or something similar? In the spirit of Yotomoe’s original Joyce/Dorothy positivity thread.
The Hater Containment Thread was and is a good place for likeminded folks to talk amongst themselves about their complaints! I for one think it would both feel more fair to the haters and foster similar discussion on the “””other side””” to also have a thread for positivity where you can gush if you wanna and know that you’re gonna get replies from other folks who feel similarly.
One “rule” (since nothing is actually enforceable for us non-mods, lol) would be no poking the bear. If your comment is “I LOVE JOYCE/DOROTHY AND ANYONE WHO FEELS DIFFERENTLY IS [string of mean words],” I regret to inform you that hating the haters isn’t actually positivity.
I don’t know if this is positivity but I do in general like the potential shake up that’s happening because of Joyce and Dorothy becoming a couple. It feels like a new status quo is developing or at least the potential for one if Willis follows through. Characters might be doing different things by the time this settles down.
It would make ME feel better anyway, I am always disappointed when I see what I THINK is a positive comment I could maybe reply to for a bit of pleasant discussion and then that hairpin left turn into flipping off “the haters”. :/
On top of everything else it feels like a dead giveaway that they aren’t actually regular readers and aren’t gonna become regular commenters. It’s not even worth the energy to try to explain that most of the negative commenters are chill and reasonable and don’t deserve to be flipped off, because they’re not even gonna read any of the replies to their comment.
These folks THINK they’re chucking a metaphorical live grenade into a den of homophobes and running away cackling, when instead they’re playing ding-dong ditch in the middle of the day when all the adults are at work.
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That’s right, when she stuffed that sushi in my mouth all those months ago
heh guess that’s a good a topic as any for off-topic diffusion
anyone here like sushi? what are your favorite rolls?
My brother took me out for sushi on my birthday last year and I got what was called a Spicy Girl. The greatest gift of all was him saying “Ah, a spicy girl for a spicy girl!” (I’m a trans woman)
I’m pretty simple though, one of my favorite rolls is simply just raw salmon.
Love Sushi but i am pretty sure jve only really had Americnaized/Canadian Sushi i had a rainbow 🌈 roll and a salomn roll recently 🍣 . I have serious doubt that ill ever be able to afford a trip Japan i suppose ill have to settle sushi from a Toronto Japanese restaurant which is the closest to authentic sushi ill be able to get.
I love sushi! I can’t say I have a favorite roll mostly because I don’t think I’ve had enough varieties yet.
I mean, when it come to nigiri, you can never go wrong with just raw salmon. I love the stuff.
But for actual maki rolls? Lots of possibilities I don’t think I’ve managed to sample yet.
If I tried sushi, I would probably love it, but I’ve made it a personal goal to get through life eating as few raw meats as possible.
Sushi doesn’t have to be raw. I eat sushi with cooked shrimp all the time. And Egg sushi exists too. The word sushi refers to the rice used in it’s preparation.
That seems like an odd goal.
I suppose I could make it a day goal or something….
Eh, who am I kidding. Had raw salmon with eggs for breakfast yesterday.
The eggs weren’t raw yesterday – but I’ve had an absolutely delicious ‘sashimi martini’ with raw quail eggs.
The only one I haven’t particularly liked was the raw chicken. I haven’t tried raw alligator or frog, but I suspect they wouldn’t be great either. And raw snail seems like a bad idea.
Raw CHICKEN seems like a bad idea. Salmonella?
I would love it except that the vinegar rice doesn’t work for my taste buds. Sashimi, on the other hand, yummmmm
My favourite piece of sushi is a lightly flambéd salmon with fried onion on black rice nigiri. Only ever eaten it in one place. Fried unagi (eel) is my favourite staple piece. Rolls-wise… Not sure. Mood-dependent I think. So many rich flavours.
The best piece of a sushi dinner I’ve ever had was a pacific tuna sashimi my I ate with my friends when we decided to blow a thousand pounds on a collective 30-year birthday dinner. It’s been over a decade and I can still feel it melting on my tongue. I’ve become more of a sashimi person as I’ve aged.
Sadly eating bluefin tuna is like eating tiger sashimi. They are apex predator fish, and in no way numerous enough to be treated as food. Please don’t buy tuna.
/ecologist
Now I’m gonna eat 10,000 tuna fish a day, just to show you how wrong you are.
I thought you said you were a biologist?
I’m a simple girl, I love my maki 😀 I love to get a good variation and decide throughout the meal what order I eat them. I love alternating, like avocado -> salmon -> cucumber -> salmon – > cream cheese-spring onion etc.
I would eat sushi once or twice a week if it wasn’t so pricy! I love red tuna, don’t usually pay up for otoro because I’m too much of a simpleton to tell much of a difference. Salmon is delightful when it’s really good but just fine otherwise.
For rolls a really good fresh hand roll with fish, something crunchy and roe is delicious but hard to eat! Other than that just gimme some interesting flavor combos and I’m happy. Except avoid shrimp. I don’t like shrimp in a roll and I don’t like cold shrimp at all so no shrimp in sushi for me.
very fond of kappa maki (my boss said it was eaten as a palate cleanser in his homeland), my cities sushi tradition is reletively authentic (considering we are smack innthemiddle of north america, we have a tradition food scene that is the envy of most cities 3times our size.) currently there is a lot more of the BC’ized sushi than there used to here, but most of our sushi chefs till about 20 years ago all trained under the same japanese guy who opened a sushi place in the city years ago serving traditional japanese sushi and dinners (they were extremely popular with the cities japanese diaspora, and the japanese family buisness i worked for said they were about the closest to home cooking he could get in north america). also love the taryaki rolls
I loved tuna before I was vegetarian (as in the kind used in sashimi and sushi, not that I minded canned for a melt or whatever), now my favourites are yam rolls, avocado rolls, and fancy rolls with mango or whatever. Oh, and a place used to have an amazing specialty asparagus roll.
And if I’m getting sushi, sunomono salad and gomae as sides
good lord it’s even worse than when Becky came out XD
I guess the analogue would be when Becky and Dina did it and they were practically shouting it down the hallway.
I swear to Christ if these children stopped hitting each other for five seconds they’d all simultaneously be the best fucking friends in the world. If they live to see 25 they’re all going to be living together in a two-bedroom apartment in Seattle with three trans women and someone’s adorable exotic pet autism service animal.
Now if you’ll excuse me, apparently I’ll be writing a short fanfiction.
Be sure to link it, because I would read the hell out of that.
in retrospect; Dina was pretty chill with Becky announcing the news like that lol
Becky was just kind of loud, Joyce is getting dangerously close to sexual harassment.
Yeah there’s a difference between “I’m a lesbian” and “my girlfriend had her fingers inside my vagina an hour ago”
How we never picked up on the lack of her social understanding as Joyce actually being on the spectrum still get me lol
Well, there’s being on the spectrum and there’s being raised as an Evangelical Xtian, and she hit the daily double.
wombo combo of suppressed hornies lol
I don’t think that’s the comparison to be made, so much as this:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/04-dont-stop-billie-ving/judgyjudgy/
Which. Y’know. Is this really “worse”.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/04-dont-stop-billie-ving/unknowable/
Like Joyce isn’t even being more explicit about it than Dina in the first panel here.
Oh, there’s always an excuse to double standard Joyce & Dorothy.
@Astariel: look, there are things we agree on, I’m not asking you to avoid me in the comment section or anything, but pls. Pls.
Reasonable people can just forget that a thing happened, it does not have to be double standards.
Also I’m pretty sure not everyone was on board for that partoxular”tell everyone we had sex” arc. Though I will say the posts Li posted have a notable difference. And that is that dina and Becky are close friends with everyone in that room. While Lucy and Joyce are like…acquaintances at best.
@Yotomoe: re: “Joyce and Lucy are acquaintances as best”
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/03-trial-and-sarah/godstrings/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-13/02-turning-saints-into-the-sea/helper/
I think Lucy was actually genuinely friends with Becky, and I think she wanted to be better friends.
I’m not sure if she and Becky are still close post-Walky-dumping, but. That second strip is Lucy volunteering to help Becky convince Joyce to take birth control, so I think “acquaintance” is probably a weak word for it.
Hater containment thread ⬇️
Jesus Christ we’re back to this huh. Just when I thought we were getting somewhere
Pffffft!🤣
I choose to believe that Lucy is sitting across from Jacob.
Yeah it’s crazy how quickly I’ve soured on this relationship. I get these are college kids and the priorities of college kids are 1) don’t fail out and 2) find the next orgasm, in the reverse order, but good lord, Joyce.
I gotta say I love “hater containment thread” and then the next comment being you like “It’s me, I’m haters” lmao
Sometimes you gotta be the zookeeper of your own enclosure
You mean that we should start a sub-thread inside the hater containment thread for people that hate hater containment thread?
I don’t think I could make the second comment their though, because I’m more like, meh, it’s sometimes amusing. But I think Dot’s missing a trick by not bribing NPGZ to let her have the hater Containment thread as the first comment thread.
At some point I’ll subcontract the containment thread out to them
i’m starting to think Joyce might have some exhibitionist tendencies.
Not a problem in a vacuum, but, like. Leave people alone, girl.
Why the hell isn’t Dorothy informing her that no informing people unprompted that you’ve just had sex is something of a social faux pas
I mean she kind of did, we just haven’t gotten to the part of the storyline where we address how much Joyce ignores things that Dorothy says not to do out of respect just because she wants to anyway.
As noted by others: It was’t that long ago that they both witnessed the cringe that was Becky shouting from the mountaintops that she and Dina has Done The Deed.
In a goofier, more boisterous, and more vague way, all of which helps it feel less creepy.
When does this start to cross the line into harassment
I mean Becky and Dina were doing it too. It’s still like, ehhh but on the list of Bad Joyce things this one is… like, whatever at this point.
I think I just get more apathetic about it with each strip. Yes yes Joyce is a menace.
That wasn’t really a super serious criticism. At this point I’m just hating for the love of the game. I was born to Hate.
I have such a large amount of respect for you for admitting this. Just like, earnestly really funny.
I’ve never hidden it. Its just fun to point at these bongoes, turn to someone else who feels likewise and say “lmao do you see this fuckin’ shit? Wack.”
Its really no deeper than that. They bore me together, so I make my own fun.
It makes way more sense for Becky’s character. As well as Dina’s to go along with it.
But it didn’t make it any less rude? Like do we give Becky a pass because “oh that’s just how Becky is”?
Not a full pass, but… a bit of leeway, I suppose? It was decently clear that she was doing it as a coping mechanism, caught between wanting to brag about it but also not feeling like she was ready to tell Joyce.
She was also a less graphic than Joyce is being to Lucy, so there’s that too.
And yeah, I’ll admit that there’s a bit of “she’s already obnoxious and attention-grabbing about her sexuality so this isn’t nearly as much of a step up” at play too.
All this said? I wasn’t impressed by Becky doing it either. But I’m definitely less impressed here.
I think it’s less a pass and more an acknowledgement of that Becky is an annoying loudmouth we expect this from and matches her character. Joyce was not that and has lost all semblance of herself to become this way, making it feel more jarring and outlandish as a result.
Joyce who was always about loudly declaring anger and freedom?
I mean she’s more rude these days about it but I don’t think it’s that uncharacteristic now that she’s decided she will no longer feel shame about sex.
Still rude and uncalled for, but I don’t feel that it’s jarring.
Unless I’m forgetting it, I don’t think anyone would have known that she was masturbating now or that she was having sexual encounters with Joe unless she was talking to someone she was already very comfortable with or who had already figured it out. This is a very sudden post-Dorothy change and yeah, it feels jarring for it, especially considering it hasn’t even been 24 hours since she openly realized she’s not straight.
And wasn’t she usually declaring anger and freedom in response to her or one of her friends being hurt in some way?
Word choice matters a lot on something like this. “Dorothy was inside me” is SIGNIFICANTLY more cringe and invasive than…well I can’t remember exactly when it happened to look it up but I think Becky blurted out something like “We totes fucked!”, which I feel is really not all that wild at all for close friends in this age bracket.
This right here. Bragging about HAVING sex is on the line. Bragging about the SPECIFIC MECHANICS of sex is over the line.
Compare/contrast “We’re trying for a baby!” and “My husband shoots fat loads into me every night!”
Really, it’s so far over the line that, if someone said something like that to me, I’d assume it was actually referring to something nonsexual that they were trying to make sound sexual for a joke. Like dentistry, for example. It’s a very unnecessary level of detail for without the bait-and-switch humour, unless you somehow already know the listener’s fine with that level of detail.
That said, I’m not actually hating on this. Joyce being creepy and offputting is at least more interesting than their generic relationship stuff was, so if it’s one or the other, I prefer Joyce doing everything wrong.
I’m just glad the comic’s actually framing it as bad, though. If I wanted to read people being creepy and cringeworthy in a comic that tries to pretend they’re being perfectly reasonable, I’d read 9 Chickweed Lane.
Every comic that passes without actually addressing the fact that Joyce left her Schrodinger’s boyfriend on read vis a vis the actual state of their relationship is another gray hair on my scalp.
Like, yes yes, these two are dweebs and that’s very nice, Willis, but I could have sworn this storyline had, like. A story?
It just makes me check out more and more. For a cheating storyline, I’d either expect overwhelming shame (especially from at least one of these two) or the kind of self-centered rationalization to justify it until the reveal occurs, and then a bunch of shame as a result of the judgement of the people around them.
And it’s fine to be the latter and get a slow burn on it, but then I don’t get the point of making it be front page news and have Joyce’s dad already show up and have Joyce come out of the closet to him, while very heavily avoiding the feeling of shame on multiple occasions AND also inserting this C plot of “white girls kissing takes away from the point of the protest and the characters invested in the protest are bothered by it”.
Maybe the point could be that everything is blowing up at once, but not if we’re going to do things like put all of that on pause for them to go have sex and act all lovey-dovey in private, or if they’re going to go out of their way to have a performative apology and arrange a double date with poor description mixup shenanigans. It doesn’t feel like a messy situation, it feels like a messy story with a lack of focus.
TBF, I don’t think Joyce ever got around to mentioning she didn’t actually break up with Joe? Dorothy is the one who’s most likely to freak out and she thinks everything is… well, legal, if not moral. Which, let’s be real, is really more what she’s been about in the first place. Like, she’s legalistic as a shortcut to being moral, but that means that she’s able to lean on the legalism to avoid feeling guilt over doing harm.
Cause, fun fact, you can okay legally, even okay morally, and still do harm to someone. And it doesn’t help fix the harm that you were in the right.
It feels like a badly written fanfic about somebody’s OTP.
I think the thing is that is isn’t primarily being approached as a cheating storyline. It is being approached as a rom-com.
In a cheating story, where the protagonist is the cheater, the central conflict is the protagonist’s own limitations. Can they recognize that they did wrong? Can they try to repair what they broke? How will they grow from their mistake?
A rom-com focuses on the couple coming together. Other things are thrown in to create drama, but the central conflict is “Will they manage to make their love work?”. The cheating is just an obstacle to be overcome on the path to love.
Given the strip about how Joyce is “not coming back”, I think the actual explanation for this (in that it’s the one Willis wants us to believe) is that Joyce literally forgot about him.
Which is just awful because Joe was her FRIEND.
Joyce threw everyone and everything under the bus to satiated her own libido.
That’s what burns me about all this. And he was a good enough friend that he’s trying not to be angry and that means he’s just 100% hurt instead.
We’re gonna be in this “nobody besides Dorothy exists to Joyce if she can’t physically see them” loop for a while my guy
Which is interesting, because lack of object permanence and lack of peope permanence is a potential neurodivergent trait that some people have. We might be learning the hard way that Joyce has a degree of that.
It’s weird though, because I don’t think we’ve seen any sign of that before this arc.
I was about to be offended but then I realized that I’M that way. I’m sorry for my almost knee jerk reaction. My object permeance sucks so bad
Most authors aim for character progression, it’s a bold move to go fir character regression
I made the exact same face as Lucy reading this. Jiminy Christ Cricket, Joyce. Nobody wants to hear it. TMI
I’ve never been a fan of Dorothy; but not a hater: more of a “meh”.
Anyway, all these haters will be surprised in 50 years when Lord Willis pulls a “How I Met Your Mother” ending to DoA. (or, even worse(?): a Seinfeld ending)
Willis reveals that Dorothy died a long time ago and her kids with Joyce urge her to go be with Joe because the story told them she loved him and nobody likes it because actually the story moved on from that ages ago?
Is that after the 24 episodes of Joe and Ethan’s wedding?
Mais bien sûr!
It is frustrating that Dorothy is aware that they have burned a lot of their friends and tells Joyce this, yet Joyce still does not seem to care. It goes beyond not being aware. It has been spelled out for her that she has hurt a lot of people, and she has just being awful and selfish. She is even defying Dorothy’s request for decorum.
Otherwise this was a funny moment if you don’t think about the context.
At what point does the erstwhile main character being an annoying asshole to everyone around her become unsustainable? It’s been weeks.
Not one brown woman on campus is safe from these losers. I was considering Lucy on the “which woc is gonna be subjected to this bs next” comment a couple days ago but thought, naaaahh she’s not gonna be relevant to this”. Oh my hubris.
never underestimate the whitebread!
Somehow it’s Nash next.
I’m surprised she just didn’t go tell Roz. Maybe she’s next.
Telling Roz comes when Joyce starts looking for people not in the friend group.
Roz is definitely not their friend.
Though she may possibly be the most welcoming of the situation (other than the characters who are just cheerful and friendly all the time like Agatha and Sierra) due to Joyce and Dorothy’s increased sexual liberation of realizing they’re bi and consummating the act (tho that might not be the best word choice).
Roz would be interesting. I’d be curious to see if she has anything to say about it RE: the way she blew up at Joyce about her homophobia back in gender studies class. But I also feel like she and the main cast have antagonized each other so much that she wouldn’t really be THAT invested in the discussion.
Honestly though, I’m more interested in seeing them bounce off personalities like Roz. More potential for strong responses of any type, which is what I’m desperately lacking at the moment.
Isn’t Lucy black?
(Correct me if I’m wrong here.)
Yes. Lucy is Black.
I believe they know Lucy is black and that they’re using brown in the literal color sense and not the “black or brown people” sense.
I literally just posted a comment about this haha. The crazy white people and their harassment of POC always in this comic I swear.
Yep… It’s just as bad as it was yesterday…
I got all my horrified shock out of the way so I can’t laugh anymore.
ugh I hate the hater thread so much
Scroll past it then.
It’s near the top and REALLY long lol getting harder and harder to scroll past it
Maybe we need two containment threads!
I wonder what could be causing this thread to get so long it’s causing people to take notice…? xD
Sorry but I really don’t see that as a real problem. Just scroll fast and you’re fine.
I just love these responses tho:
“Hey, I have done a thing that is literally the limit of the power I have as a commenter on this relatively low-featured discussion platform.”
“I HATE THAT YOU DIDN’T DO MORE.”
My siblings in Pelor, what do you expect Dot to do? Telepathically force Willis to add the ability to minimize threads?
damn bro I hate me too. Wanna hold hands about it?
Good gravatar for that comment.
I hate the fact that some people in these comments get so upset with any criticism of this storyline and their favorite shipping couple that we apparently need a hater containment thread.
*escorts AbacusWizard out of the thread with a pushbroom* Then kindly fuck off over there away from it.
And I hate feeling like I’m quarantined to this designated thread with some of my opinions, because apparently certain commenters don’t think I deserve to have negative opinions in the “main” comments thread.
But here we are. At the very least, people in this thread don’t accuse me of homophobia as much. Yaaaaaay.
Scroll past it if you hate it so much.
I’ll admit, while I am tired of the extended focus on this plotline, the punchline of this comic made me giggle
Yeah, this is a good gag!
Anyone else feeling the whiplash from how many times one (or both) of these characters have gone between feeling shame for hurting the folks they care about and simply just refusing to give a damn?
Like, I think it could’ve been interesting for Dorothy to be having that post-sex clarity cause it to really sink in how shitty her actions were. And even for this to contrast Joyce doing her previous Joyce behavior where she overcomes some boundary and rides the high of doing so up until she has to directly face someone who’s hurt by her actions (that she actually cares about).
But we already had them face their boyfriends. And Becky. Joyce left Joe hanging, yanked Dorothy away from Walky (and Dorothy just went with it) and they both went and gushed about how their relationship directly in front of Becky… twice. And even before that, they decided to sleep together with Sarah in the room in spite of being so worried about ending things with their boyfriends that neither of them could go through with it yet.
Oh, and also the story just keeps shoving away the characters they’ve hurt to keep focusing on how in love they are. Even Sarah just didn’t do anything about the two of them sharing a bed despite clearly picking up on what was going on, and while I don’t expect her to be invested enough/willing to fight enough to completely stop things there, I also wouldn’t expect her to just implicitly condone it all night with her presence.
I just can’t see myself caring about anything to do with this relationship now. Like, if this relationship later becomes the OTP of the strip, it’ll just feel rushed, but also if we later get proper drama from the cheating, it’ll just feel like too little, too late.
Its possible some of the disjointedness is because this was originally a straight follow up from the stairway strip: we know Asma strips were new additions.
(unless the staircase strip was also a new insertion because it mentioned going to see Asma, in which case this might have originally followed up from the strip where joyce is begging dorothy to move in with her)
Or I could be completely wrong! Who knows! There’s few concrete ways to tell what was originally made and what was added later.
I did just finish complaining about that in another comment, but it’s actually not even one of the parts I was thinking about with this one. This one’s JUST about the way they keep flipping between caring about their friends/boyfriends and not, which would be fine if the difference was purely from trying not to think about it when they don’t have them directly in front of them, but, no, they’ve both brazenly neglected them right to their faces multiple times. So I just can’t care that Dorothy is doing the bare minimum here while completely having no issue with Joyce acting like a shitty version of Becky.
Another, funnier side effect of the Asma strips being inserted in between “Joyce and Dorothy take their dirty sex laundry” and “Joyce and Dorothy wash their dirty sex laundry” is that it implies they had a bunch of dirty sex laundry just off-panel during the conversation with Asma
The laundry sack was actually on-panel at points
Oh my god, you’re right.
God, that’s so fucked up. No wonder Asma was so hung up on the PDA angle.
You have certainly hit the nail on the head. Well done.
I just don’t know what the storyline expects me feel at this point. Because of how messy it is, I’m not sure if I can really get into it because the focus is all over the place… Well, the focus is Joyce and Dorothy.
I wonder what the reaction would be if Joyce had had PIV with Joe and shown the same exhibitionist attitude. I suspect people would be more critical of her behavior.
Sorry hetero sex doesn’t exist in Read Hall.
Sal’s days are numbered.
They had sex in Danny’s room though, so they’re safe for now.
I have a solution for her and Danny actually
Said elsewhere — there’s a vast difference between “We had sex!” and … whatever the hell this oversharing nonsense is.
Personally, in that scenario?
– “I had sex with Joe!” – borderline but acceptable
– “I lost my virginity to Joe!” – over the line
– “Joe’s penis was inside me!” – WAY over the line, what the hell.
is it really a containment thread when it’s over half the comment section lmfao
joyce has lost all shame
It’s not OUR fault that there’s less and less good to say about these two as this toryline drags on.
Man this sucks
Well, I guess it’s like a TYPE of Faz comic right now.
Could still use some charts, though…
I’m genuinely glad that, based on the alt text, Willis’s #1 audience member enjoyed this joke.
It’s just a bit too creepy to be funny for me, though. Joyce isn’t really close with Lucy like she’s close with, say, Jennifer. So something about Lucy’s reaction is too close to “actually creeped out” rather than just “ugh, Joyce is being weird again”
“did anyone else enjoy the Halloween special?
“No, Randy, just you”
“Oh. Well, that was my target audience anyway”
I think I find Joyce more annoying than Dorothy, though Dorothy keeps enabling all of Joyce’s worst impulses.
*screams into pillow*
This is repellent
i know this comic isnt an airport and departure need not be announced, but i think it’s time for me to realize that I have never felt so… unenthusiastic about a favoured creator’s abilities before. Use a site blocker and have someone else set the passkey for it, check on it in a year or two when a point is made and a storyline is formed again.
I love that these two have figured out their feelings and got together, but I hate every decision they made with such miniscule conflict, and an exhausting marathon of a narrative to boot. i cannot in any reality suspend disbelief that the discussion with asma would have turned out that way after their obvious white and/or sheltered ignorance on full blast, even for a comedy comic, and it’s doing absolutely nothing for me.
for others who may be tired of it, I also recommend site blockers if this comic is a routine habit. if you are experiencing such little joy, it might be a good idea for you to find something that fills your time with more joy and fulfillment. explore other comics and find something that makes you happy if this isnt anymore, and revisit it later when you can speed through these bits to parts you care about again. then, you can also assess if the story is worth continuing to read, if you need another break, or if it’s time to drop it entirely.
I’ve definitely ended up reading it less than before… It is a habit though. It’s not like I don’t have faith it’ll improve, I trust Willis as a creator for the most part. But this one is just… Pushing all of my buttons. I wanted Dorothy and Joyce to end up together, but having it done this way where they’re self centered, overshadowing, racist, insensitive, and also cheaters like… Maybe I’d be more engaged if any of that actually mattered? It’s like there’s a tug of war in the narrative going like “DoJo is cute! More DoJo being cute!” And “Oh yeah… The world around them and their interpersonal relationships still exist.”
I’m pretty sure now that it’s the author’s intent to run this ship onto the rocks.
You think he is lying in his blog?
*their
Author’s stated on numerous platforms that this couple is fun to draw and one that they personally enjoy, my dude. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
i am becoming haters lol i am getting kind of sick of them i was like “yaaay lesbianism” but am like oh they are … doing so much shit
which, i guess we are supposed to dislike them right now! so okay!
you know; having now played Dispatch, I figured that your choice in gravitar would make you more accepting of these HR violations lol
Joke’s on you, I went with Blazer.
…which is an entirely different kind of HR violation.
I haven’t played yet (no, AdHoc, you’re not going to get my money until the game is fully out – and at a hefty discount – when you’re holding on to it for a fucking gimmick), but from what I’ve glimpsed my biggest issue with the Invisigirl situation isn’t even that she punches you in the face so hard you fall out of the chair, it’s that if you try to report her for it the game makes you say it was your fault that she assaulted you, which is cray-cray, vomit-worthy shit.
Dumbing of Age Book 16: Dorothy Was Inside Me
Hey first comment! Also god that Lucy expression feels so early doa (complimentary)
Like don’t get me wrong the arts improved a lot with time but the Lucy face here captures such a specific early doa art charm
Lucy, in fairness, called it.
You’re referring to Lucy calling Joyce a bisexual version of her after their first meeting?
In which case, Lucy being the first person in the friend group Joyce tells, on purpose and without a sense of obligation, is oddly fitting.
Not hurt, per se, but maybe a little traumatized.
Thoroughly wibbed out.
What’s Lucy even been doing lately, besides Jacob?
Hey that’s a pretty worthwhile endeavor.
I’ll bet k-pop demon hunters binge watch.
Oh no question. 100%
Can you consider that a binge watch? I usually only use that term for like…a series, rather than a solitary film.
Unless you are like me that get so distracted that it takes several days and multiple micro viewing to finish a movie.
I would say it depends on how many times you binged watching it.
Oh hey – I was going to say nearly the same thing as Clif.
Given that I’ve managed to watch KPDH well over a dozen times, I’d say I count as binging it.
so i can say i binge watched the 1986 transformers movie when i discovered it (watched 3 times the 1st day)
I actually forgot is a movie not a series. My bad
Creepy-Ass Joyce new Favorite Joyce.
Classy, Joyce. Really classy.
Classy is her middle name!
What is Joyce’s middle name. For some reason i think its Margaret, it probably isn’t but I feel it fits her.
I think Dorothy’s middle name was Margot.
I just told you! (For real tho I think it’s hannah)
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-13/02-turning-saints-into-the-sea/sexpartspills/
“Joyce Hannah Brown”
Starting to feel like it should be “Faz” after today’s comic
I was literally thinking earlier today, “Man, it’s been a while since we’ve seen Lucy. She’s one of my favorite characters. Hope we get to see her again, soon.” …was NOT expecting this to be the context. LOL
+1
And on the monkey’s paw, the finger curls… 🙂
Meanwhile, Lucy’s at the top of my ‘meh’ list (I don’t hate these characters, but they generally bore me), and this is, as a result, my favorite of her appearances.
I love Gremlin-Creeping-Over-Wall Joyce, gotta be one of my favorite Joyces
We’ve discovered a level of friendship that’s too much even for Lucy.
Lucy can rest easy knowing that vanishingly few people would compare her and Dorothy anymore.
And if they do, she has proven herself to he the better girlfriend for not cheating on the guy she claimed to “love.”
Lucy > Joyce confirmed.
Can’t recall when Joyce claimed to love Joe.
Original post in the thread was about Dorothy, who has in fact said she loves Walky.
Yes it was.
But were people really comparing Lucy and Dorothy specifically or just LucyXWalky to DorothyXWalky?
I mean Lucy and Joyce were compared directly to each other by both Lucy and Joyce in comic, so when I read the original post, I assumed they meant Joyce and accidentally typed Dorothy (of course that may also be because I did the opposite a few days ago).
I mean, sure, but at that point we really need to have a discussion where that’s said rather than just sort of assuming it in the responses.
Ah missed that thanks.
Heads up for people in areas that don’t do daylight saving time or do it on a different schedule, the current daylight saving time adjustment is about to end for the year in the US… so if the comic seems to suddenly shift when it’s posted for you, that’s why.
Yup, but that’s at 3a.m./2a.m. Tomorrow’s comic is the affected one.
I hate daylight time *and* the semi-annual back and forth.
Yeah, that was my point, as a heads-up– thought it was clear, but guess not.
It’s hard to be clear about daylight saving time sometimes! It’s both annoying and often poorly understood no matter if you’re in an area that does it or not.
I love having to reschedule every single online meeting and forget when things happen for 5 months out of every year 🙃
Is Lucy in their friend group and, if so, for how long?
She goes with them to math.
Yeah, at least she goes walking to class with them even after breaking uo with Walky and starting dating jacob.
She was in the friend group because she wanted to boink walky, and seems to have stuck around mostly out of inertia. She goes to church with Becky and of course rooms with Billie but otherwise doesn’t really have close relationships with anyone else in the group.
She’s actually getting closer to Sarah now too! From https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-13/04-but-dont-give-yourself-away/treat/ all the way to https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/04-for-me-it-was-tuesday/halfright/ , the two of them are basically buds at this point, and being friendly at other times too.
But imo Lucy’s involvement in the board game party night really cinches her position in the friend group. She’s pals with them, even if not besties.
I remember the strips starting from the second link was like ‘wait, Lucy is likable now? She has a backbone? She no-sells Dorothy and Walky?’.
Kinda wish she rode that a bit longer before disappearing into another relationship, but I’m cool with Lucky post-Walky breakup.
Though she immediately followed up the “I want to be friends with Sarah and fit into this friend group” by seducing Jacob, so despite Sarah going into her weird “I’m cheerful” phase afterwards (and then hooking up with Tony), I doubt that “closer to Sarah” lasted.
“Seducing” is a pretty harsh word, they vibed at a party, hooked up, and decided to roll with it.
Not intended to be harsh in that sense. The point being that those “getting closer to Sarah” scenes were before that and that’s not really likely to happen any more.
This is a question I truly have thoughts on. Cause she joined the friend group to blatantly get at Walky, which I always thought was a bit manipulative and now that that relationship has soured she’s not been around as much. It could mean she’s honeymooning hard like most fresh couples are, or maybe she was never really that great a friend, or maybe the friend group wasn’t that great to her?
I mean she’s with Jacob and Jacob is friends with Joe so I’m guessing whatever friendship Joyce had with Lucy is probably down the toilet very shortly
Lucy is a bit of a busybody and definitely the type to get righteously indignant about cheating on someone else’s behalf
Not unreasonable when it’s her boyfriends friend
Not to mention she might get and earful of Raidah’s take on it, too.
I dunno, busybody seems like too harsh a word. Maybe I am biased, because I think Lucy is adorable and I absolutely love that she got together with Jacob and that they are cute together.
Naw, I like Lucy, she’s sweet, but she does get up in other people’s business
calling hanging out with people because you have a crush on someone there manipulative………………..
Yeah, cause it was. She switched classes specifically to hangout with Walky. She already had friends too, she just didn’t like them (because they’re admittedly one note, background, gag characters). She spent almost all her time not actually hanging with most of the group except for the morning walk, she just followed Walky around until he asked her out. Lucy was also real in to joining Raidah’s group at one point. Y’know, those people we don’t like? (Not that Raidah even has a group anymore, lol.)
Saying manipulative is not necessarily even good or bad. Becky’s been pretty manipulative in the past too. Lucy really wanted to date Walky and be seen as a sort of popular alpha friend like what she thinks Jennifer is. She manipulated her situation to try and get both and maybe it didn’t workout by kind of did in another way? And now she’s back to mostly doing her own thing. Interesting to me that she was so eager to be a support but now that some friends actually need that support she’s nowhere to be found for them.
I don’t recall her switching classes just to hang with Walky, can you refresh me on that?
I misremembered. Technically she just switched the schedule of the class and not the class itself.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/02-look-straight-ahead/overfriendly/
Not really “switching” to pick a section of a class that has a friend in it at the start of the semester. Even if you’re crushing on him.
I feel like we’re arguing a technicality now and I’m not sure to what end because I don’t think it contradicts my point. Switching classes, switching schedules, applying to a different section? To me there’s not really a difference when my point is that Lucy is more than willing to manipulate people and circumstances to her benefit. Another example is her trying to manipulate the Walkertons into liking her with a fake girlfriend scheme multiple people warned her wouldn’t work including her then boyfriend, Walky.
Is it wrong to point these things out because Lucy is chipper and pleasant?
For me it’s about the framing of Lucy’s actions. Switching a class to align specifically with Walky sounds borderline stalkerish whereas choosing a class time that matches friends and lets you walk to class with them is far more reasonable and normal. Lucy is a smart young woman who does understand people well enough to people please and get results but I feel like your description of her in your comments here are very uncharitable readings of her character. God forbid a girl want her boyfriend’s parents to like her. The scheme, which Walky helped think up, was very stupid yes. Like Walky, Lucy seemed to think she could treat the situation like a sitcom plot.
Switching between classes or even sections mid-semester is a much more drastic action than picking a section a friend is in when choosing classes for the next semester.
And if we’re going to frame that as manipulative, how about Joyce choosing an entire non-required class because Dorothy was taking it?
@thejeff. Yeah. I’d say that was manipulative. In fact considering where we are with Joyce and Dorothy that was probably even foreshadowing.
@Doopyboop I mean…I kinda don’t know where the line is on this. I feel like Lucy’s actions are no better or worse than any other character really. I thought I was being fairly objective. I was wrong.
Alright. If we’re at “wanting to do things with friends is manipulative”, I’m not sure what else to say.
I’m sorry I was kind of trolling with that last response. I just think it’s kind of funny in hindsight that you can recontextualize a lot of previous Joyce and Dorothy behavior. Wanting to hang with friends isn’t manipulative. I’ll leave it at that.
@Sirksome: FTR I think the word “manipulative” is just. Going to keep hitting a lot of folks as SUPER negative.
Whether you mean it that way or not, it’s going to keep sounding to a lot of people like you’re saying Lucy is a bad person who employed devious methods to get into Walky’s pants.
Oh, also:
“She already had friends too, she just didn’t like them (because they’re admittedly one note, background, gag characters)”
This is decidedly untrue. The Forest quad were not Lucy’s friends.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-8/02-this-is-the-way-that-we-love/zaph/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-9-comic/02-but-the-sun-still-shines/differentbetter/
I know folks complain about Forest quad’s characterization, but it’s nevertheless pretty clear that they’ve got short attention spans and gravitate towards the new and shiny. They dropped Lucy for Billie when she showed up, and if Lucy was less than touched by their renewed interest in how “cool” she seemed when she was in a bad mood after she dumped Walky, well, I don’t blame her for assuming it wouldn’t last.
I’m not sure what tone you meant to use for “what is Lucy doing now besides Jacob” but “Lucy is nowhere to be found when friends need support” seems like a very uncharitable read for her given the way the comic cuts to a few characters at a time.
It’s not. The first comment was just kinda tongue and cheek since she hasn’t really been around since hooking up with Jake.
But uh when did we start being generous with our character reads? Dorothy and Joyce have been getting flayed for weeks for living in sin and making that everyone else’s problem.
I don’t think Lucy is above being criticized at least.
At the very least, Lucy knows everyone involved and hasn’t been *shown* to talk to anyone about it.
It’s possible that Lucy has comforted comforted everyone who feels some type of way about Joyce and Dorothy and it’s possible she can’t be bothered.
So criticism of her behavior is possible, but I don’t think it’s warranted, yet, at least in regards to the fallout from Joyce and Dorothy.
I think it’s been only days since Lucy got with Jacob. She did come to that party despite freshly dumping Walky, so there’s that.
She’s probably more Becky’s friend than anyone elses at this point by virtue of them both going to church together and even supporting Becky’s attempt to reconvert Joyce. Most of her friends before she joined the story kinda…dumped her to idolise Jennifer and Hell, even Sarah straight up told Lucy that nobody in the friend group actually liked her/was her friend and only hung out with her because she was attatched to Walky.
I just realized that Asma was talking about Alice the other day.
Looking forward to the Asma-Jennifer duel over Alice!
This had not occurred to me until now, but now that you’ve brought it up… I’m gonna make a popcorn run. What flavor do y’all want?
Battery acid, please.
Yum, spicy!
Store said they’re out of battery acid. 😩
oh for real? i thought it was Sal for some reason
Lucy: …were you recording my TMI reaction face for TikTok?
Joyce, Lucy isn’t that kind of shipper, she prefers her slash traditional, M/M!
I mean, just because she likes M/M doesn’t mean it’s the only kinda slash she likes. No reasons she couldn’t be into both!
She called Joyce “a bisexual version of me”, so there’s a reason right there.
As an aroace person, I can confirm that it’s possible to ship people without being personally attracted to them.
Maybe it works differently, though? I’ve no basis for comparison.
There are waaaaaaaay too many lesbians who aren’t attracted to men at all nonetheless deep into M/M slash (including erotica) for “must feature people I’m attracted to” to be a requirement for shipping.
☝️This. I’m cishet as it gets, but I think George and Lance from She-Ra are heckin’ adorable.
I admit, I really wanted Joyce to tell Dorothy she wants to be in a poly relationship and maybe after she sleeps with Joe.
I want that drama.
I don’t think it’s happening until or unless Joyce sleeps with Joe again. We can comfortably rely on Joyce to go about it in the worst possible way.
That’s reassuring.
Whew.
I can’t tell if it’s better with or without context.
Without
Your wife has my exact sense of humor. Good going willis.
Okay, they can still be funny. Thank goodness.
For me they been funny the entire time. It’s because i am Willis favorite.
Cringe comedy at its finest.
This makes me sad. Ask Willis if they would consider having multiple favorites. XD
Even if Lucy was a close friend to Joyce, you do not just tell people that right away. There needs to be at least some kind of segue into the conversation first.
Honestly, my policy is that the only person who needs to know that kind of information is the doctor when they ask about it. That is not something I would ever share with friends, even if they wanted to know.
Two rules for life: tell the cops nothing, tell the EMT everything.
By the time there’s an EMT there usually isn’t time for everything.
Hurt by the information? No
Weirded out by the information? Yes
Inb4 a hundred comments furious at Joyce for sexual harassment
I can’t just keep saying “Don’t trust Joyce and Dorothy” despite every other strip proving that. Ya’ll definitely get it by now. Don’t trust smartphones I guess? Don’t trust randomly solicited sexual information?
Don’t trust the partitions in the student union building.
Don’t trust girlfriends who do not stop you from sharing details of your sexual escapades with other people unprompted
Look, Dorothy only knows one way to shut Joyce up and currently it’s counter-productive.
Not trusting smartphones is unironically good advice.
Eh, I’m fine with not trusting Lucy… to be an interesting character in her own right.
Hi Lucy!
This is how Lucy learns that Joyce has been hiding the fact that she’s Dorothy’s mother.
I’m wheeze laughing
Joyce, respectfully: STFU
Joyce: “We weren’t performing!”
Also Joyce: “We need to tell everyone.”
I’m gonna tell every Person of Color and Indiana University about my girlfriend Dorothy wearing a Salmon suit.
You’re gonna be wearing a salmon suit?
That’s a good one, Dorothy!~
This might have been a lot funnier without the Asma strips – not that they should be cut, but going from Joyce not saying anything about Dorothy to Agatha and saying “should we even be apologizing to Asma” to insisting she get to tell someone that she had sex (in a very weird way).
At least the Asma strips clearly established that Joyce refuses to have any emotion about this other than pride.
As an ex-fundie myself… I suspect the shame reflex is going to kick in not too long after the afterglow wears off. But then, maybe Joyce has made more progress on that front than I have. 😅
I’d welcome it. Anything but more of this.
Yes, isn’t it terrible when someone falls in love and God doesn’t punish them for daring to do so?
Awful, just awful. If only Joyce was miserable, like she deserves.
Me when I’m in an “interpreting other people as uncharitably as possible” contest and my competition is these two:
And good for her!
Yeah, you can see the seams of where the Asma stuff was inserted. I just hope it means we really do get bowling in the comic.
“Why is this white girl telling me about her sex life unprompted??”
former friend group (soon)
Oh no
Welp I just choked on my diet coke, thanks Willis..
*voice of that politician at 1:27*
https://youtu.be/3eG0y_nb5IA?si=AItg-4wFPVK10NVv
We did it gang!
*voice of that politician at 1:27*
https://youtu.be/3eG0y_nb5IA?si=AItg-4wFPVK10NVv
We did it Joyce!
There are two posts, one tells the truth and one tells a lie
Totally not an accidental double post
Getting laid has unlocked a new form… Gremlin Joyce!!
I don’t know where else to ask about it, so…
In the recent Questionable Content, do you think Jeff is teeing up a storyline with Elliot and Clinton’s Mom? I was going to make a joke about it happening now that he’s single and she likes young buff guys … But then they outwardly acknowledged it. Do you think it’s possible?
I think she was way too much Mom Sense to do something like that.
(Too much Mom Sense to do that nonsense.)
Yeah, plus she has met Elliot in person and was aware that he and Clinton were dating. We already had the gag about her finding him attractive, establishing she knew it was inappropriate. It would be very out of character for her to both pursue and actually go through with it.
Feels more like a one-sided thing than anything, Elliot doesn’t seem to have shown any attraction to her at all.
(I kinda want him to meet another tall buff soft boy that will guide him through therapy. Smol/tall is cute but most of the couples in QC are already that.)
I want Brun to come back.
I want Yelling Bird to come back. ☹️
shipping them with thanksgiving turkeys
I also want Brun to come back. She’s hot.
The men Aurelia sleeps with tend to be pretty happy to have no strings attached casual sex without asking too much of her emotionally. They show up for her booty calls and leave with big smiles on their faces but don’t actually seem to show up anywhere else in her personal life.
While Elliot fits the mold physically I don’t think on an emotional level he’s actually capable of the kind of sexual encounter she’s looking for.
The only thing that Aurelia will offer Elliot is to be a mom, if it would help him cope. Maybe she’ll provide the exactly right encouragement to find an effective therapist.
I had the idea that if Elliot can’t work past the anxiety to go to a therapist, Pintsize will befriend Elliot, and be surprisingly effective at talking him through his anxiety attacks.
Of course, Pintsize’s gremlin shenanigans will nonetheless lead to both of them being chased down the street by an enraged invisible emu.
I never considered this match up, but dang, that might be incredibly entertaining (and be a chance fir Pintsize to show off his secret wholesome side he only brings out once in a blue moon.)
Honestly the biggest stretch here is saying Lucy is in the friend group
Hey, she keeps insisting that she is. So now she gets to reap the ‘benefits’.
This is what you wanted, Lucy! Bask in it! Bask, I say!
I know the comic’s called “DUMBing Of Age”, but damn Joyce there’s a limit to it y’know???
Apparently not.
Dorothy: “Whoa, whoa, I just took out her appendix. …Okay, we fucked.”
This just made me think of Hedonist Bot from Futurama. “Surgery? During
an operamy yuri shipping? How wonderfully decadent.”I like to imagine that during the timeskip, there was a day when Joyce pretended to switch bodies with Dorothy (Dorothy wasn’t onboard with this) so that I can imagine them having the dialogue from Community.
Joyce: “Guys I need to apologize for my behavior today. When I switched bodies with Dorothy…”
Dorothy: “Nope!”
Joyce: “I thought I would know what it would be like to have Dorothy inside of me.”
Dorothy: “That did not happen.”
Joyce: “But as it turns out, having Dorothy inside of me…”
Dorothy: “Nope again.”
Joyce: “…only brought out the worst in me. Which is to say, having Dorothy inside of me…”
Dorothy: “No one was inside of anyone!”
Joyce: “…was wrong…to have Dorothy inside of me.”
Can definitely feel how this was originally supposed to be the immediate follow-up to the October 27th strip instead of the Asma ones.
Seconded. I’m once again very glad for the addition of those strips, because they do a lot to break up the monotony of kissing and bragging on repeat. Without the addition of Asma’s subplot, we kind of… Don’t have a plot right now? It’s just Joyce and Dorothy wandering around and hooking up in various locations.
Wait wait wait hold on a second.
Joyce and Dorothy are bringing their dirty laundry down the stairs. Joyce suggests talking to Asma. They do so. Now they are washing the laundry.
Doesn’t that imply they had the sex sheets still with them during the Asma conversation? They literally made Asma look at the dirty laundry from their hook-up?
I feel like Asma’s speech makes a lot more sense when you realize she’s literally looking at the gross sex-stained bedsheets these two random women she doesn’t even know have brought before her for some ungodly reason.
Not going to go back and look it up, but I thought they set the laundry down when they first started talking to Asma.
Yeah, I’d missed it. Man, that’s such a weirdly passive-aggressive thing for them to do and neither Joyce nor Dorothy (nor Willis?) even thought about it. “Hello, Muslim woman who’s name I think is Asthma. I am here to apologize for being too publicly into my girlfriend. I have brought a box of sheets moistened with my sexual juices, please ignore that”.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-16/01-not-so-smooth-criminals/centered/
The laundry is set down behind them during the conversation.
I really don’t think it’s that weird to speak to somebody on your way to do some laundry though. In a dorm like this, where everybody’s using the same laundry room, you’re gonna see some dirty sheets from time to time.
Yeah, but the very specific context of “bringing my dirty sheets from sex with girlfriend to apologize to woman I don’t know very well for kissing my girlfriend” makes it kind of weird. Not, like “Cancel Joyce” weird, just…that’s very huh if you think about it.
Fun fact: Sheets with lady juice on them don’t glow like a radioactive ghoul in Fallout. Nor are they generally so strong-smelling that they can be detected by the average human nose at any distance (unless one or more of the ladies involved has a medical condition). As far as Asma should be aware, these two weirdos stopped to talk to her on their way to the laundry room, and that’s as far as that goes.
I will second this. Sex has a noticeable odor (or several, really), but you get that smell concentrated enough to be noticeable by having sex in a small room with the door and windows shut. Unless Asma gets a lot closer to the laundry, she’s not going to be smelling anything.
It also seems just. So incredibly unlikely that they crumpled up the sheets in such a way that the stained parts of them are visible to passersby rather than being, you know, tucked away and hidden?
Thank you! I’ve been a little weirded out by the comment section over the last week-ish being so obsessed with the sheets and how they must just be totally obviously stained with a giant red letter (S for Sapphic, maybe?) that anyone and everyone will know what they’ve been up to.
Some commenters will find the weirdest things to focus on. Even if they don’t make any sense in ANY reality.
Whatever to keep on hating on Joyce and Dorothy.
wow
Like, they all use the same shower rooms too. It’s just been a fact of their living situation that sometimes you’re going to see people coming and going from the shower.
Like, it’s cute that Joyce still feels some need to hide the evidence of what she did there. Still got a bit of that fundamentalist brain. But literally every time at this college dorm that anybody’s gotten their sheets dirty for any reason they’ve had to walk them through the halls like this. It’s a normal part of their daily existence.
They specifically talked to Asma because she’s on the way to the laundry room. She is situated between the laundry room and the dorm rooms where Joyce lives, such that everybody who lives there must walk past Asma’s desk every time they make this trip.
Is the laundry room not in the basement?
I thought it was.
It is. They probably detoured slightly to talk to Asma, by leaving the stairwell (which probably lets out onto the lobby for fire safety reasons) and then approaching the desk, then went back in and down. Still, once the decision had been made, however badly, to talk to Asma about this, the route they took makes more sense than going to the laundry, first.
From memory one of them mentioned that they didn’t shower yet either, so its weird all around.
Oh god they smell like BO and teargas and coochie 🤢
It’s sort of metaphorically weird, but you really can’t tell by looking at a laundry bag that it’s full of “gross sex-stained bedsheets”.
Yeah, like we, the readers, saw the laundry basket. It was completely unremarkable.
I don’t know what ESM is imagining Asma saw here but it’s not what was in the panel.
Personally, I’m assuming the thought is that if you have to wash the sheets immediately after having sex, that you must have had some fluids that needed to be dealt with, and many of the fluids involved in sex can have distinctive smells.
But in this case it’s just as likely that the “distinctive smells” if anything are “tear gas residue”, or equally that Joyce is just that fastidious about it.
Which do you think is more likely for someone who can’t stand to have foods mixed/touching?
The face of shock and horror she made when she discovered women even make sex fluids in the first place is memed on to this day.
Willis used it to censor the naughty bits in his slipshine advertisments as recently as like a week ago.
I need a link to that, not for disagreement reasons, for enjoyment reasons
https://www.tumblr.com/itswalky/797966614648799232/my-favorite-slipshine-comic-tradition-is-using-the
Here you go
Everybody is acting like Joyce is being excessive in this strip, but I feel like this 100% is how my college friends were when they had a new significant other. And I was the “early comic Joyce” friend that they thought couldn’t handle hearing the more explicit details! This seems like absolutely normal college student behavior.
Yeah, I mean Lucy may not have walked up to people and told ’em (that we saw, she really might’ve with some of the people in her dorm) that she banged Jacob but she REALLY was not shy with who was aware either.
That’s interesting, because among my college friends (in the late 1990s), even the fraternity guys, usually didn’t get this graphic! IMHO there’s a vast difference in politeness level between “Dudes, I totally fucked so-and-so!” and any further discussion of actual mechanics or acts.
I will say, I don’t think “Dorothy was inside me” is actually graphic?
Probably especially because of the Scrubs reference.
Ah, I expect at least part of my OWN opinion of “that’s over the ‘oversharing’ line” is that I don’t catch Scrubs references, as I never watched it.
There’s a musical episode and JD and Turk do a song where JD has the line “you’re the only man who’s ever been inside me” and Turk rushes to clarify that he’s talking about surgery (and JD insists there’s no need to clarify).
It’s Guy Love Between Two Guys (song title), and one of the pieces of media Willis has specifically referenced while talking about the trope of super-long-running-joke-where-two-characters-are-deeply-in-love-but-also-straight-so-they-never-get-together.
Maybe it’s the asexuality but my response to that information would be a (light) shove to teh face with a resounding “eww, gross”
Once you get more descriptive than just “had sex” without prior permission, that’s TMI territory
yo agreed
Idk I’m also ace but I’m pretty sure I’ve never shoved anyone’s face away or said “ew gross” to anyone IRL even when they were oversharing with me.
I’ve definitely also had friends say more graphic things than this by a lot without specifically making sure it was okay first? Kind of depends on everyone’s senses of humor and stuff. Especially when we were teenagers and just kind of fumbling around, trying to figure out what kinds of sexual behavior were “normal”.
Like. One of my friends once told me that one of HIS friends told HIM that he’d had a sex dream about me. I was not thrilled by that disclosure and I was in fact quite uncomfortable but I also didn’t shove him or tell him that was gross. I just froze up lol.
Like. You’re entitled to your own boundaries, they’re no more universal than mine. I’m not trying to say you’re weird for feeling the way you do. And that last example is something where maybe I should have said something instead of freezing up! But when I tried to think of the sorts of things that were actually said to me in high school, that was the first one to pop into my mind.
And for all that some commenters have tried to draw very hard lines between high school behavior and college behavior, there’s definitely overlap, especially among college freshman.
From my memories, guys tended to be more just the boast of “Dudes, I totally fucked so-and-so!”, while women among themselves would go into more explicit detail.
I am, somewhat obviously, less likely to be privy to that.
I tend to agree. If I were Joyce’s friend, I’d high-five her and ask for details. But I hear the youth are getting prudish these days.
I don’t think its de facto ‘prudish’ to not wanna hear about fingers in someone else’s cooch unprompted when you’re just trying to read.
(Yes yes her actual words were a little less graphic. I maintain my stance that it doesn’t make you a prude by default to not wanna hear that shit outta nowhere.)
“Really? … Weird.”
– lots and lots of people when someone manages to explain to them that “oversharing” is a thing, and not everyone wants to hear about their Special Interest, whether that’s trains or Transformers or all the sex they’re having lately
Okay but Lucy and Joyce are not friends so it’s kinda weird still.
I think that they’re not friends would be news to Joyce.
It might or might not be how Lucy feels — she seemed to get along great with Becky, and the two of them even texted each other about how to handle it after Joyce dropped the “atheist” bomb — but I think Joyce thinks of everyone in the main cast as her friend (except Walky, possibly).
The situation is actually quite funny.
Joyce is not being *points around* a horrible person, that some commenters keep on claiming that she is.
Slightly less gay than the things Joyce typically says about Dorothy.
Does it make it more or less if she’s being intentionally gay?
Something I’ve been wondering for a while now: Was Joyce ever truly attracted to Joe, or was she even deeper in comphet than we thought? We’ve only seen her engage in m/f sex acts for his pleasure (the handjob, the proactive apology blowjob) and the night they came the closest to full PIV sex she requested just fingering, something Dorothy could’ve also done with her. Obviously some of that apprehension has to come from her trauma, but it also kinda looks like Dorothy wasn’t the only one in this relationship using a guy as a vector.
The comphet thing has come up a few times, but I really don’t think that’s the case. Sometimes you just don’t want a cock inside your body, and that doesn’t have to mean you’d only ever want it if you could have your tongue in another woman.
I’m partial to the theory that conservative fundie conditioning makes one SPECIFICALLY have brainworms about PIV sex and the possibility of pregnancy being the thing that is REALLY off the table for “good girls” (see also: “hussy pills”), and thus her hesitance with Joe is more about that than about resisting comphet.
I’m pretty sure she was attracted to Joe, and also Ethan (when she thought he was straight). At least, I dont see any sign of revulsion, and she DOES have excitement (and temptation, in fall semester) about the opposite sex. And she definitely liked Jacob.
Shes shown subtle, possibly subconscious attraction to women, too, so I think Bi or Pan fit her well. I feel sure that the excitement here isn’t because it’s a woman, but because its DOROTHY, and shes with someone she actually loves, and not just someone who is cute and she likes and wants to see where it leads.
Didn’t joe finger her? There was a drawing of it in the nsfw Patreon.
We have repeatedly seen Joyce loudly exclaim about various aspects of Joe that she found physically attractive, including his face, just as we’ve seen her loudly exclaim about various aspects of various women that she’s found physically attractive.
Joyce has always been bisexual, and biromantic.
She confirmed in the slipshine that she’s basically a flowing river every time she’s near Joe or Dorothy. So, she does like-like at least one guy.
As AG observed (aloud) to Amber a while back (in a recently linked strip where Joyce was gleefully talking about how she and Joe were going to have All The Sex), “That girl is hornt.” And now she’s no longer repressing any of it.
Oh wow yeah that’s about as clear as it gets
Willis keeps drawing her in the bi colors for a reason y’all. Go back to when they first got together. The only thing keeping her wild lust in check was her deep fundie shame around PiV sex. She was (is) so, so attracted to him. And Jacob. There was no comphet need to go after Jacob like she did, she just wanted him
…Like….Sal probably wouldn’t be hurt or offended. Might also not give a shit.
I mean, Dorothy broke up with Walky to be with Joyce, so even if Sal wouldn’t mind their relationship, she probably wouldn’t want to hear about it the relationship that caused her twin to spiral (even more).
At this point I kinda feel bad for anyone who interacts with Joyce, with how shitty she’s behaving towards other characters in this storyline. And anyone who interacts with Dorothy too, since she keeps enabling this bad behavior.
Hey, Joyce actually tried, briefly, to head off the Asma convo. She failed, yes, but their bad socializing isn’t all on her, with Dorothy just ‘enabling’.
Joyce telling Walky’s Ex that she’s sleeping with his newest Ex already.
Yeah. I mean, things between Walky and Lucy didn’t end amicably, but it also didn’t end BADLY enough for Lucy to maybe take schadenfreude satisfaction from a “HAH! I knew he was a terrible partner” direction. As it is, this just comes off as being kinda weird and creepy from Joyce. >.>
Walky’s ex who he left to be back with the partner he had before her.
Except that Lucy left him and he got back together with Dorothy as a rebound from Lucy.
Lucy left Walky, and then Dorothy immediately swooped in to take him back.
And before that she was trying to get him to break up with Lucy to get back with herself.
[looks at the dividing wall between us]
“Is… is Dorothy with us now?”
….. I resonate with this cringe.
Joyce, please stop. This is beginning to get obnoxious.
But have you considered, that she should be more obnoxious? Because it personally makes me happy? 😃
I want everyone involved in this comic to be worse thank you! Like has Dorothy ever considered being more cruel and more rude?
Yes! This unironically!
”Begenning to”? I’ve been sick of it for so long.
Beginning?
Joyce has *already* gloated in an uncalled for way at Walky, and I think Dorothy not calling her on it is a factor in why some of us are not really enjoying these two together (yes, gaslighters, that sort very moderate pushback is all we meant by “consequences”, nobody was saying they should be branded with scarlet letters and run off campus). Telling her not to make it worse is a step in the right direction, I guess, but I’ll need there to be more (and FFS tell Dorothy about the poly stuff, Joyce).
Thinking about things as they stand…
For Walky, it was never a question that Joyce was in love with Dorothy. He had called it from the get go, and Joyce undermining their relationship constantly in the name of “friendship” always had him snarking. It was him in doubt that Dorothy would blow up their relationship to be with Joyce (which she did.
There is no buffer now for Joyce and Dorothy’s relationship. There’s no Walky in the way, there’s no Joe having what he doesn’t deserve (I’m only describing the lads the way Dorothy and Joyce described them at different times). There’s just them—and they’ll have to eventually deal with that when the honeymoon phase is over.
Well. Maybe. I can see Joe immediately ready to help Joyce deal through this relationship.
One thing that I’m interested in seeing, after things die down in who knows how many real world months, is the new dynamic Dorothy will have with Joe and Joyce will have with Walky.
Because Joe and Walky aren’t going to suddenly appear less, and, outside of some new important characters showing up, they’re all four going to be around each other due to their friend group and classes.
Dorothy thought very poorly of Joe, but Joe has changed, he was good with and for Joyce, and helped he helped them realize their feelings; also he never cheated, giving him the moral and ethical high ground in that regard.
How is Dorothy going to reconcile that?
As for Joyce, she and Walky have an antagonistic relationship with each other, but they do and have hung out with each other, they’ve given advice to each other, they are friends, and she even called him family around the time Becky first showed up.
Almost every single person they’re close to, the other is close to.
Because of that and their shared class (do they share more than one anymore?) they often eat together.
But that almost HAS to change, especially considering how cruel Joyce was about laughing in his face.
Is she planning on keeping that same energy every time she sees him?
Is she going to think she went a step too far and give a halfhearted not-apology?
And let’s not forget that Walky and Becky share several character traits and dynamics with Joyce (that’s probably part of the reason they ended up friends despite themselves), and since Joyce probably won’t be getting her Becky fix in the near future, will she end up getting closer to Walky despite everything?
Will this situation end the friendship they had or will it end up deepening it?
I think Joyce and Walky might actually come to an understanding eventually oddly. Walky may even treat it as a sort of, ‘well, it *IS* what I would have done if the shoe was on the other foot’. Now that the matter of Dorothy’s heart feels settled for both of them, Joyce and Walky might even go to vitriolic best buds territory.
I am not sure the same could be said for Dorothy and Joe, but I can’t put my finger on why. Maybe it’s because they’re differently wired? Or at least Dorothy doesn’t seem wired for that. As you pointed out, Walky, Joyce, and Becky all share a few traits (big Labrador energy at times including). Dotty and Joe though? We might get some politeness at most?
Actually.
It’s funny, I kinda want to see how Dorothy would handle competition. She for the longest time in universe had Walky (consciously) and Joyce (subconsciously) fighting over her. I’m not sure how she would handle Joe as an ever present threat even if a polycule takes place.
I hope they don’t. I really hope Walky learns to stand up for himself a bit.
But then, I don’t think Walky would have done the same if the shoe was on the other foot. Sure, he teases her and goes too far sometimes, but that was just mean and aimed directly at his moment of loss.
Same
Make no mistake—I want the same, but my line of thinking is it’s Dorothy he needs to put his foot down on from here on. I think he would have done the same because you just stated it—he goes too far sometimes. That is their adversarial relationship.
But Dorothy just let it happen. That’s kind of been the M.O.. She would chastise Walky getting on Joyce, but not really the other way around. That final moment was indicative of how it always was.
Look, even if you just fully excise all the many times he “teased” Joyce about being attracted to Dorothy, even though that made her visibly uncomfortable every single time, there’s still this strip where he was obnoxious about it enough for Sal to feel compelled to remind him that it’s shitty to do this sort of thing to a survivor of sexual assault:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/foranybody/
I guess you can just call that “goes too far sometimes”. But it was ALSO very much sometimes deliberately mean:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/qualities/
In the next strip, Dorothy tells him, “Come on, stop harassing Joyce,” and he retorts: “Or what? Or you’ll break up with me?”
Because he was Upset to have been dumped (understandably). And taking it out on Joyce (less so, in this particular moment).
Like, Joyce has also been antagonistic to him, this is not a situation where she never said an unkind word to or about him until the Looney Tunes “I stole your girlfriend haha” scene, but it’s also very much not the case that “Walky only ever teased Joyce and was never actually mean to her”.
(And I really, really do think “Walky spent months calling Joyce a lesbian and specifically making fun of her for being attracted to Dorothy while Joyce spluttered and protested” is extremely relevant to “Joyce then gloated after ‘winning’ Dorothy away from him”. I do not think you can just ignore that context.)
I think of this moment whenever someone says Joyce laughing at Walky was too cruel or crossed some sort of line in their toxic rivalry.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/04-time-keeps-on-slippin/halfway/
I mean 1. That’s at like at the start of the comic.
and 2. Context matters. One can argue that cheating on him and stealing his girlfriend is a way that Joyce is directly wronging him. While Walky dating Dorothy is just…a thing they’re doing. Walky’s still being a complete jerkass here but it’s like the difference between laughing at someone getting kicked in the stomach and kicking someone in the stomach and then laughing at them.
Like this may be just how I feel but I think a big difference between Walky’s teasing and Joyce’s is that Walky’s teasing often mocks her conservative fundie upbringing. Like in the second strip here, Walky mentioning Joyce wanting to have sex with Jacob is challenging her unwillinglyness to acknowledge her own blatantly obvious sexual attraction. He’s mocking the programming that we can all agree wasn’t healthy for her mindset.
Joyce, alternatively, mostly mocks walky by reinforcing his own anxieties about not being good enough, not being wanted and failure. Now walky puts on a strong front but its’s pretty obvious he has pretty low self-esteem. Especially when he’s struggling at school. Walky’s actual problems are his inability to dedicate himself to something and his tendency to half-ass things. But I feel more often Joyce’s insults kinda just reinforce his anxieties while challenging his world view.
Which makes Joyce come across meaner, to me.
@Yotomoe: the second strip I linked was from 2018.
Also it’s not “Walky dating Dorothy” that was “wronging” Joyce, it’s that he alternately teased and harassed her for months about being attracted to Dorothy while also occasionally literally rubbing the fact that he was dating Dorothy in Joyce’s face.
Also the 2018 strip is not about her attraction to Dorothy at all, it’s about Jacob, and is, as I mentioned, Walky borderline sexually harassing Joyce about how much she wants to have sex with Jacob, and he’s pretty explicitly going farther than he usually does because Dorothy dumped him, so no one can make him leave Joyce alone.
Historians will say The War for Dorothy’s smooches had no casualties. Just two college students being high key levels of toxic at each other to focus their sexual tension on Dorothy and ignore any awkward sexual tension they had with each other.
I don’t know. Seems seems a bit much to spend ten thousand years gloating that you have Dorothy and she doesn’t, only to turn around and declare it’s punching below the belt to gloat now that she’s stolen your girl.
“But I’m insecure, actually” then maybe those in glass houses shouldn’t be throwing stones in the first place.
@Yotomoe 2: your second comment makes some points that I think are fair enough, but Walky definitely was not making fun of Joyce’s fundie programming in any kind of Socratic Effort to Help Her in the 2018 sequence. Read the strip right after the one I linked, he was definitely just being mean on purpose.
I agree that the fact that Walky’s targets on Joyce are often her fundie programming does make it feel different for us as readers who didn’t undergo that kind of programming, but I would also gently push back on the idea that that makes it less personally painful for his target. Even if Walky thinks of it as making fun of Joyce’s parents’ efforts to brainwash her, that’s still an area of trauma that Joyce was struggling to get past, and one that Walky has no experience with.
Like. Walky does not mean it this way, but isn’t the joke there kind of “haha, your parents really messed you up and you were stupid to listen to them”?
BUT ALSO: I don’t think Walky gives worse than he gets! I don’t think Joyce is his victim. I think they’re just on a pretty similar level with each other. They’ve both had moments of crossing the line on the Mean Event Horizon.
@Li
my first comment was responding to Sirksome’s comment not yours.
But yeah I’m not saying Walky is blameless. I think one thing that also makes it hit wrong is that Walky’s…usually seen as a jerk? Like you said, Dorothy chastises him. Sal chastises him. When Walky oversteps people will often call him out. In the laughing scene Dorothy just kinda…lets her do that to him. And there’s never even a giggling “wow that was kinda mean” from her.
Now there’s plenty of times when Walky says messed up stuff and DOESN’T get punished for it, but I definitely feel like the laughing rubbed people the wrong way partially cuz it’s treated by the narrative as a fair thing for Joyce to do. Y’know. After his girlfriend just cheated on him.
@ Yoto I mean I just think it’s recency bias more than anything. Joyce hasn’t exactly been likable for this recent story. I don’t really like her much these days and would prefer Walky. I just don’t like the idea one has done worse than the other when they’ve both been jerks to each other from the start. I don’t think there’s a line where you can argue Joyce went too far for laughing at Walky. I also think Dorothy is more to blame for cheating on Walky than Joyce is for laughing at him.
Like it’s fine if you prefer Walky and relate and sympathize with him more.
@Yotomoe: so here I think is the main thing? If I may.
The timing was terrible.
It’s not just recency bias, although that doesn’t help (human brains just work that way). It’s not JUST that Walky has at least had a couple of people point out that he was crossing a line when Joyce hasn’t yet had that pointed out to her.
It’s also that that strip happened when folks were still holding their breath in hopes that at least ONE boyfriend would actually be upset with the girls for cheating on him.
So whether or not it is actually, on paper, worse than Walky poking Joyce in this particular sore spot for months matters less than the fact that we got that strip, and a moment where it felt like the narrative intent was at least “well what did you expect Joyce to do?” if not actively laughing at Walky with Joyce, at a moment when a lot of readers were very specifically hoping Walky would flip both girls the double bird.
Some sort of powerful anti-catharsis.
(The narrative has also been “on Walky’s side” a lot when making fun of Joyce’s fundie beliefs happens. Not always! But often there’s enough cringing-at-Willis’s-past-self going on that we are at least encouraged to agree with Walky that the things he’s making fun of deserve mockery. It’s always been more rare for Willis to actually take Joyce’s brittle religious beliefs and how it would feel for to have them mocked more seriously.
Which I think is just another point in your favor. If we put the work in to imagine things from Joyce’s perspective, it’s pretty easy to be like, “Wow, does she even like Walky? Does she consider him a friend?” …but that was often not the perspective the comic presented. It’s much more frequently been presented as just kind of a “siblings bickering” thing.
With the “haha I stole your girlfriend” comic, meanwhile, we were similarly not encouraged to consider things from Walky’s perspective, at exactly a moment when many people had been hoping to see righteous anger from him.)
I don’t know if this matters or makes a difference to anyone, but I went back through the archives with the Joyce+Walky tags and the Walky+Dorothy tags looking for times Walky mocked Joyce for her feelings towards Dorothy.
Other than him saying he wanted to side eye her for her desire to view Dorothy’s flood of sexy (apology) selfies, he has said anything to her about her liking Dorothy since before the timeskip (which is when I stopped, so I don’t know the exact last time).
Regardless, he hasn’t mocked her like that in weeks and possibly months.
As for him saying something to Dorothy, I got tired of looking so only got as far as karaoke, but other than when she brought up Joyce watching them have sex, he didn’t say anything.
Yes it was an extremely common thing before the timeskip. Once Walky was no longer dating Dorothy, he (mostly) stopped specifically antagonizing Joyce about this, but again he was still antagonizing her about other sexual things (see: above link to the Jacob sequence), and he did still think it was hilarious — when Lucy originally described Joyce as a kind of bisexual version of herself, Walky laughed super hard and told her he loved her.
Joyce snatching Dorothy and proclaiming she won to Walky was PEAK comedy.
fact!
*headshake* Extroverts. I don’t get it.
I want that last panel as a poster.
Lucy is just weirded out, because she assumes it’s vore.
Why would you put that frightening image in my poor innocent brain? XD
So she has a huge stomach behind the chair? *Softly cries*
If you look up TMI in the dictionary you will find a picture of Joyce.
I just noticed the final panel of “LIVE JOCELYNE REACTION” got changed BACK to the two just kissing more. Did that change then reversion get brought up somewhere?
I for one am very glad it got changed back to the kiss. That’s the kind of strip I didn’t want interrupted for a joke.
Thanks for the heads-up about this! I love that strip and I think it’s a lot better when it’s just focused on the two of them. Also more true to character.
oh thank god!
It was perfect with just them keeping on kissing. It felt way more realistic than the “added” joke… because some commenters felt …whatever.
it’s nice to know Lucy is capable of making That Face
Is Lucy part of the friend group? I feel like she was only a fringe friend, someone who is friends with your friend, so you hang out sometimes and are polite to each other, but never hang out when that friend isn’t around.
Yeah, that’s what Sarah said. Lucy was absolutely determined to prove her wrong, and I guess she succeeded?
At least in this very specific situation.
Sometimes, the monkey’s paw plays the long game.
She got acknowledged as part of the group by Sarah, which is pretty much as legitimizing as you’re ever gonna get.
Ooh, I forgot that part.
At least she wasn’t eating
Well, Joyce, you failed. Telling Lucy the way you did caused her physical pain.
It could have much worse, Lucy could have been drinking soda 😛
Was the Hater Containment Thread just completely deleted?
No, it’s still up there.
Oh I think I accidentally reported the OP and it’s in awaiting moderation limbo. Oops.
Just one accidental report doesn’t send something to moderation, i thought?
I think its 5 reports sends something to moderation
well that sucks. I was talking to people in there.
Yeesh. I had a conversation a few days ago about having seen the “let people enjoy things” mindset being about “if I have to see any negative reception of the media I like, it ruins everything”, and not just people jumping into comment threads to tell others why they’re wrong for liking stuff.
Not sure what came up later that needed to be reported, but that makes it sound like most of the reports were just reporting the entire thread for existing rather than actually going after a problem.
It is specifically the op that is awaiting moderation so yes that’s what happened
well, fuck you for trying to be courteous, i guess.
Guess now we just have to be haters all over the comments instead.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I mean, there were complaints on both “sides” about the existence of the thread.
I for one appreciated it a lot.
@Li Yeah, between the “I refuse to be confined by this thread” and “I never want to see any negativity ever”, both “sides” have their share of people with some wild takes on what an essentially unmoderated discussion SHOULD be.
I suspect that the review-bombing of the hater thread is going to be ultimately counterproductive for everyone, frankly.
Yeah… 😞
Right, I mean, that’s what the hater containment thread was SUPPOSED to be for: “I don’t like this, and I’m being blatant about that” goes here, “I like this, unapologetically” gets the entire rest of the section, split with “let’s discuss the positives and negatives of this”
Too late to make TWO threads every day?
Hater Corner and Positivity Corner??
No one has to stick to either, but you go to one when you just wanna talk amongst yourselves…?
(I still think Dot could’ve called it The Cool Kids’ Table, but there probably would’ve been some whining about that, too.)
Honestly, I think it was never going to work specifically because you can’t really shrink or hide threads around here.
My kingdom for a “collapse/expand” button for sure.
Hmmmmmm.
I bet I could rig something up with Grease/Tampermonkey. Folks would have to willingly install the browser extension, and it probably wouldn’t work on mobile, but.
@Big z: and also doomed to fail because, as seen, you can obliterate the whole chain by just getting a few reports on the top level.
I very much thought the threshold was 10, not 5, but it’s been a while since Willis specified.
@Donovan
I suspect at least part of it was accidental. I’d be hard-pressed to name five people in the daily discussions that I’d suspect of being petty/asshole enough to push that button.
I mean, I could probably name three I wouldn’t put it past, but it’s a rare day I see more than one of them comment at a time.
@big z
That’s fair. Still kind of a critical, keystone weakness, though.
Looks like
Man that the hell?
How does a ship start as awful as this one did and STILL manages to get worse every strip?
The Hater Containment Thread Will Return In Avengers Doomsday
I said it before. Nothing will stop me hating. I’m in this for the love of the game. I hate because I was born to it. I *will* call this Styrofoam ship boring and no force or god on earth or heaven can stop me.
Hear, hear.
I also suspect that the kind of folks who report-bombed the hater thread will a) not find it as easy to report-bomb the dislike going back to being diffuse and b) will attract the attention of actual moderators to adjust things if we start seeing an essentially arbitrary smattering of reporting throughout the discussion.
we don’t even know if it was deleted by Willis himself or flagged out of existence,
even if it was the latter,
people who read the comments (and thus report) do not always write them, and if I’m being real here, the people who don’t write them probably outnumber us
heck if Willis were any webcomic author, he would have also burned his comments section down, but still needs an easy way to do sensitivity checks by people who read this comic but don’t use social media.
At the same time though, he knows the kind of *ahem* problematic dynamics that go on down here, hence adding the “report comment” feature to mitigate at least the very worse of it
all in all like I said before, it’s not like we can treat the comments like the center of the universe, and honestly for many reasons this is actually a GOOD thing
Yeah sometimes i think we give this place a bit too much importance that it’s actually warranted.
I honestly cannot imagine Willis specifically nuking the kind of relatively anodyne haters that the hater thread gathered, when it comes to that. Just doesn’t seem like the kind of person they are.
yeah yo right
see down below my realization,
ironically I think what happened is that the haters trying to reply to it hit “report” by accident on their way in too many times XD
Joyce will defeat Robert Downy Jr by oversharing about her sex life
THAT would be a battle for the ages.
I’m not entirely sure “oversharing about her sex life” is a weapon that has any chance to work against Tony Stark, of all people.
Well, yeah, I was envisioning more a contest of which of them could overshare more about their respective sex lives.
Oh, Joyce would immediately lose. This is not a woman that can take it anywhere near the levels she wants to dish it out.
Summed up in one of his own movies. “Let’s face it, this is not the worst thing you’ve caught me doing.”
Makes me wonder with DoA character could throw down in that department. Joe seems to be an obvious answer. He’s changing his ways but he probably has plenty of stories from before his tone shift. Roz, perhaps? Mike would probably revel in such a challenge, but he’s obviously no longer available.
Mike would’ve won, but not by playing. Instead, he would’ve undermined Tony’s self-confidence by pointing out how pathetic such oversharing would be.
Then he’d tell Tony about that time with Mrs. Stark and the nickel.
Perhaps the hater containment thread should start taking over *other* threads when it gets deleted. Just thinking out loud here.
No, I’m not an asshole.
So exactly what kind of behaviour do you think creating a thread on someone’s own website every single day specifically for toxic bile aimed at them and their creation is?
If you think that the things that were said on that thread came anywhere NEAR “toxic bile”, your life was more sheltered than Joyce’s pre-comic.
Dude, I cut my teeth on Usenet.
Not very well, clearly.
Toxic bile is when i call joyce whitebread
I think Willis being a grown adult who’s been creating content for years is more than likely okay with it, because part of making a creation that gets popular is understanding that there will be things you make that people won’t like and that’s okay. There’s not one thing in this world that is universally loved.
It’s not like people are calling for Willis’ head on a pike. Calling it toxic bile or assholish is pushing it.
Could we compromise with “his figgin placed on a spike”?
Not threatening any content creators, but I’ve always loved that phrase.
A small short-crust pastry containing raisins? You want to deny Willis his snack?
No, no, we’re gonna use the pike to get it up to Willis’ window the next time he’s at a hotel on tour.
Bile’s gonna be there whether I make the thread or not, so if I can make a space to contain it so folks can scroll on past and engage in positivity or constructive discussion elsewhere then yeah, I’m gonna fuckin’ do it. You’re welcome.
Wah, wah, a lady who’s been reading Willis’ work since she was in middle school is saying some not nice things about the current state of the comic and curating a space for others to complain so the rest of the commentariat doesn’t have to engage with cathartic negativity if they don’t want to, someone call the fucking feds.
You’re clearly the worst. When you die, they’re gonna have to kick Blaine out of hell because you’re filled with so much pure evil there won’t be any room left for him.
if I may add, I think we’re all forgetting something here,
For all we know, all or most of the reports were accidentally made when people were trying to reply to it to begin with!
I mean think about it, if the purpose was to get a bunch of people to reply to the same thread, what are the chances that many of them would hit “report” by accident? 😅
I think this is the most likely outcome
I remember when the report button was first added the replies were flooded with “oops didnt mean to report your comment”
It still comes up from time to time
Hell, I would go so far as to say that I suspect many of the denizens of the “hater” thread are assiduous about reporting the ACTUAL toxic bile (i.e., racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc) when it does show up.
I have made it explicitly clear to various bigots in the thread that they are not welcome in it
and that’s how you know you’ve got a good marriage Willis
How would folks feel about a Positivity Corner Thread or something similar? In the spirit of Yotomoe’s original Joyce/Dorothy positivity thread.
The Hater Containment Thread was and is a good place for likeminded folks to talk amongst themselves about their complaints! I for one think it would both feel more fair to the haters and foster similar discussion on the “””other side””” to also have a thread for positivity where you can gush if you wanna and know that you’re gonna get replies from other folks who feel similarly.
One “rule” (since nothing is actually enforceable for us non-mods, lol) would be no poking the bear. If your comment is “I LOVE JOYCE/DOROTHY AND ANYONE WHO FEELS DIFFERENTLY IS [string of mean words],” I regret to inform you that hating the haters isn’t actually positivity.
I don’t know if this is positivity but I do in general like the potential shake up that’s happening because of Joyce and Dorothy becoming a couple. It feels like a new status quo is developing or at least the potential for one if Willis follows through. Characters might be doing different things by the time this settles down.
It’s not “ship” positivity but the hater thread doesn’t entirely restrict itself to anti-shipping either!
You can borrow my broom to nudge people violating the spirit of the thread.
It would make ME feel better anyway, I am always disappointed when I see what I THINK is a positive comment I could maybe reply to for a bit of pleasant discussion and then that hairpin left turn into flipping off “the haters”. :/
On top of everything else it feels like a dead giveaway that they aren’t actually regular readers and aren’t gonna become regular commenters. It’s not even worth the energy to try to explain that most of the negative commenters are chill and reasonable and don’t deserve to be flipped off, because they’re not even gonna read any of the replies to their comment.
These folks THINK they’re chucking a metaphorical live grenade into a den of homophobes and running away cackling, when instead they’re playing ding-dong ditch in the middle of the day when all the adults are at work.
Feliz de los Muertos / Finados
a yeaaah!
Feliz Dia De Los Muertos to you as well! 🕯
wow panel 5 is perf
https://www.tumblr.com/dumbingofage/799129032250834944/once-more-i-present-another-absurd-hastily-done?source=share
Perfection
Okay, now THAT is one of the funniest things I’ve seen today.
LMAO XD
Phrasing, Joyce.
still waiting for her to collapse into herself?
Joyce didn’t even think of that other guy. Y’know. Hat.
To be fair: Joe’s roommate and Dorothy’s ex.
Ohhh, right, the inciting incident of the comic. I genuinely forgot they were together.
She still owes Ruth one breakup. Joyce stole the hell out of that last one.