You know, it is surprising how far I had to scroll down to find a thread just talking about Alice in general in which to place my love for her and not one specifically talking about her making out with Asma.
I mean, I kinda hope it happens, but damn, the entire chat just jumped on that instantly. Makes a girl proud. *proud tears*
Everybody was Kung Fu kissing (huh!)
Those girls were fast as lightning (ha!)
In fact, it was a little bit frightening (huh!)
But they did it with expert timing
After pondering it a minute trying to work out her meaning, I thought she meant she just heard good reviews about Joyce and now wants to kiss her, too.
Or as front desk person at a college dorm full of horny people she’s heard a lot of gossip and probably had front row seats for more than one heavy make out session that people couldn’t wait until they were in their dorm room to start.
Maybe just the concept of it. although i can understand the appeal of something warm but id def make my partner rinse with mouthwash or something first
She might not be bothered to remember Joyce and Dorothy’s names, but she does have a front row seat to a lot of school gossip just working the front desk.
I believe they meant it as “Alice will be so upset that she missed out on SO MUCH gossip that took place while she and Jennifer weren’t on speaking terms”
I particularly enjoy how she’s doesn’t seem to remotely judgemental about it. She’s just delighting in the gossip without showing any hint of negativity.
I think that category is broad enough to encompass every human on the planet. Humans suck, but they can always improve themselves … it is however agonizingly hard.
She’s not even gossiping really, she’s ingesting gossip. She would have to tell other people for it to be her engaging in the act of gossiping. It’s at worst the sin of watching Jerry Springer.
I think one of us is confused about which she anon is referring to. Asma and Raidah are ingesting gossip and at worst engaging in the sin of watching Jerry Springer.
Alice is one audience full of people chanting her name of hosting an episode of Jerry Springer. And I’m not knocking Alice here, as far as I know she has no idea what’s going on between Raidah and the people she’s gossiping about or one would hope she wouldn’t give Raidah ammo.
No she’s actively spreading shit, and living for it. This is the second time she has told someone that didn’t otherwise know that Joyce and Dorothy had sex last week.
Well to be fair to alice, *she* at least probably hasn’t met asma before so as to know her name in the first place before now. she doesn’t even live in this hall
Dated? I’m not so sure. They were best friends, they def kissed slept together on at least one occasion, def made out a lot more too. But Billie came to college thinking she was basically straight and that bisexual is only a porn category.
Pretty sure you’re missing the joke, for which Jennifer thinking she’s straight despite how her and Alice “def kissed slept together on at least one occasion, def made out a lot more too.” is the punchline.
Which makes her initial appearance in the comic of telling Billie that Billie was just TOO DRAMATIC for her… rather a BS front, doesn’t it? Billie’s not too dramatic, because Alice obviously LOVES drama. Billie *hurt Alice’s feelings,* and Alice hadn’t gotten over it yet, was what was really going on.
I am glad she’s over it now, because she appears to be fucking DELIGHTFUL!
(Also, I am sorry, I accidentally hit the report button instead of the reply button by accident… hopefully it doesn’t affect anything, it was just a mistake!)
There’s a **vast** difference between low stakes “who’s frenching who” drama and “Almost got us killed because you drove drunk ‘saving’ me at prom and nearly killed us both, then refused to admit you loved me while we were recovering in the hospital.” drama.
Yeah, Joyce did say something like “I think I may have had sex with my best friend”, and like, there were no details. Joyce was talking about the laundry room incident, which was pretty much sex.
I think she overheard Joyce establishing her own personal definition of sex, and then realizing that it was so broad as to accidentally include doing laundry with Dorothy. Which in hindsight was definitely sexual but most folks would probably define that as “mutual masturbation” or a variant thereof, not sex.
I hereby declare that sex is when six people who love one another very much give everyone else an orgasm while eating chocolate cake in space.
Which makes me a virgin. And probably most of you too.
Other than finding that many people I love like that problematic (I’m demisexual) your definition of sex does sound fun though! Truly, the cake-eaters are living it up.
It’s fine, because we all get to make our own definition, and Im not even being sarcastic.
So if you want to skip the orgasms and have key lime instead, then for you I suppose “sex is when someone, alone or in company, enjoys cake so much they want a second piece even though they are not hungry”. I do insist on the space part though, otherwise I’ll soon be having so much sex at every turn I’ll officially be a hussy too.
Dorothy will pull a Bill Clinton “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” and Joyce will A) say yes they did on the washing machines, and B) not know who Bill Clinton is because she’s too young to have been alive in the 90s, which is funny to think about because when the strip started she would have been born in the early 90s.
Thank you Alice for your well timed explanation of the romantic entanglements at play. And for establishing the exact timeline cuz I have been having trouble keeping track of Comic Book Time
As I noted above, her timeline is actually off, through no fault of her own. Yesterday (which was Saturday), Alice heard Joyce say she had sex with her best friend a week ago; however the incident she was referring to actually took place ten days earlier, on the previous Wednesday (so eleven days ago now). Joe and Joyce got together ten days ago, on Thursday after the laundry incident. Lucy dumped Walky last Sunday, so a week ago now, and Walky and Dorothy got back together on Tuesday — five days ago. Joyce and Dorothy went on their dranks date on Monday between those events, and Joyce crawled into bed with Joe that night.
…is Alice a villain. ‘Cause she’s… kind of making things worse for everybody. (Note before anyone comments on this: I’m finding myself liking Alice, too. That’s why I’m worried.)
Thank the gods I can agree with you for a change. (I never comment to yours but well you can read in.) ALICE DESERVES ALL THE TEA AND DESERVES TO ENJOY EVERY DROP!
She’s not making things worse for anyone. All she’s doing is highlighting the events that happened. Each and every one of them dug their own graves, she’s just showing where the holes are.
I don’t think he’s directly told her he doesn’t like that, pretty sure he only commented that it was odd, if anything. He may have even said he doesn’t mind? I’d be interested to see if Raidah would listen if HE told her to call him Walky.
I mean, it’s clearly all going to bounce back to the relationships. That’s part of the story, it compounds the stress, moves up the timelines, etc. We’ve already had the start of that bounceback from the newspaper cover page existing.
How? How does this interfere with Joe’s poly suggestion?
Even Walky’s already been told what’s up. I guess we could have Raidah try yo use the cheating to manipulate Walky to make him more angry with Dorothy/Joyce?
I can see that as a possibility, actually, especially in the absence of him and Dorothy being unable to have a mature conversation about what happened… because Joyce swooped in and yanked her away.
Walky’s been a pretty solid no-sell on Raidah’s attempts to manipulate him though, so I’m on the fence about how responsive he’d be to that though if he’s in a more vulnerable spot than he came across last time we saw him… maybe.
That’s how it goes in DOA. Danny/Amazi-Girl was also only a few days. Billie/Ruth lasting a month or two is I think the longest relationship in the strip?
And Joyce and Joe only dated for like a week, 2 tops lol.
Im pretty sure the only long lasting relationship in the show so far is Becky and Dina, and thats been like 4 months (depending on how long the time skip was, hard to keep track).
I cannot decide whether Walky and Riff would get along or not. Walky is basically just Torg with marginally less trauma and significantly less competency at this point, so they should, but idk.
Hasn’t Walky been through enough already? Reminder: Raidah referred to him as “that stunted man-child” behind his back after inviting him to breakfast.
At this point Joyce just needs to spongebob style shout “I’M A HUSSY AND I’M PROUD” because she’s about to be getting a loooot of comments and its time to own the title XDD
Not to excited about a potential “everyone gossips about Dorothy and Joyce/they become social pariahs to most of the school” arc ngl, not a trope I tend to be a fan of, I’ll try and remain optimistic though, also it’s funny how much alice talks like a dumbing of age fan
I don’t think a social pariah arc is that realistic. Becky didn’t become a local celebrity for that time her dad tried to shoot up the school, and nobody really seems to talk about that time all the comic’s protagonists were kidnapped. The only characters who are realistically going to shun Dorothy and Joyce are the characters who are functionally already shunning them, like Mary and Raidah and Asma. So, no real changes.
Oh please, this is COLLEGE who isn’t sleeping around like mad right in there. At that very moment there’s probably someone who giving head to a line up made of the members of the football team who weren’t booted off the team for being incels like Paul.
Yeah I feel like it’s more likely people are gonna high five them for making out on the cover of the newspaper.
There are probably a few dozen people, maybe, that know the two of them were in separate relationships. There are about to be hundreds or thousands of people that know them for the protest makeout sesh.
Alice Might as well be the stand in for every new reader just catching up…or who have skipped the last 12 years of strips and just started reading this year.
Gossip dishing, outside perspective, this is amazing.
Imagine if Alice and Booster got talking. And wait, doesn’t she live in the other hall? Is she just hanging out in this lobby mornings because that’s where all the good chaos occurs?
I think about the Joyce/Jacob kiss all the time because making Jacob go from a perfect and kind dreamboat to “principled hypocrite” in one fell swoop is singlehandedly was SUCH a good way to reinterpret, improve and ideate on his character flaws from shortpacked. Arguably might be one of my favorite chapters in this comic tbh.
After the lunch with Jacob’s brother, Jacob kissed Joyce but also denied the possibility of them getting together. He then proceeded to break up with Raidah immediately afterwards.
Joyce is getting heat right now in this very comic. Raidah 100% blames her even though Jacob was equally responsible for the kiss and the lies and solely responsible for the following breakup. He’s even developed a bit of a pattern of falling for vibes considering how things went down between Sarah and Lucy. It’s just interesting to me he seems to escape any consequences for his behavior.
Given that Raidah knows Joyce had been aiming for that well before Jacob was even aware, much less took any action, I’m not surprised Raidah’s at least as upset at her.
I also completely forgot about this. I’m scrolling through the strips from that era and none of it rings a bell. Fuckin’ Drew showed up in Dumbing of Age?? I have no memory of this. Wild.
Alice timeline is wrong. Right?
I think Joyce has been dating Joe at least 2 weeks.
I think it’s Sunday and Joyce slept with Joe a week ago, right?
Alice you are such a gossip.
Raidah, you literally saw Jacob and Lucy together a week ago. ( Is Raidah mixed up or Willis forget. ) Like you definitely clocked your ex with Lucy. Ironically also caused by your interference.
Each storyline is basically a day. Joyce and Joe did some finger style action like… two days ago? They’ve been dating for like ten days I think. As for Raidah, she didn’t even remember Lucy’s name so she probably didn’t recognize her when she was with Jacob (or at least didn’t remember she had been with Walky).
I don’t think that’s why she’s doing that. I think she’s doing it to pry people away from Joyce bit by bit. If you get someone to reject a nickname they’ve always gone by, it is indeed a bit alienating for their other friend who are used to calling them by that nickname.
(Also her two other friends both went by nicknames all the time and she didn’t object.)
She cloaks it as “being more mature” with Jennifer/Billie specifically because that is a thing SHE used to always respond to in a positive way: Jennifer wanted to believe she’d evolved, outgrown Ruth, etc, so that’s the carrot Raidah is used to using with her, and we also see it as a bit of a stick when Jennifer objects to Walky joining their group.
(There’s a lot of “come on Jennifer don’t be like that, be mature” dripping from their interactions in that scene, and Jennifer’s last objection to Raidah that “David” isn’t his name gets back, “It is when he inevitably needs to present as professional for job interviews.”
Also, in front of Walky, she asserts that he “answers to it”, which of course causes Walky to say it keeps confusing him for a beat before he remembers she’s talking to him.)
I think it’d be interesting to see him actually push back and whether she’d stop or not, in part because I’m not completely sold on the idea that she has a specific interest in him beyond just prying more people off Joyce’s friend group, and I’d like to be proven wrong because that would be interesting!
I also think it would’ve been interesting to see Lucy run into Raidah when she was in full “don’t give a fuck” mode right after she broke up with Walky; Forrest Quad responded to her new energy… I think Raidah has written her off as kind of a non-entity, which probably makes the idea of her as the person who’s now with Jacob even stranger.
Also honestly the reminder that Dorothy and Walky have only been back together for three days is timely and contextualizing. And makes a lot of the discourse here very funny, in retrospect
It feels like there was some sort of lightswitch on Alice’s personality when Jennifer was napping, but the version of her that hears some strangers talking about “Joyce and Dorothy” and excitedly jumps into the conversation is pretty entertaining
Being fsir, we had only seen Alice when she was angry with Billie or on flashbacks until that point so we didn’t actually know what her current personalized was.
The lightswitch feeling can have an explanation. Obviously there’s months of Alice ruminating between the first and second encounter, and then Joyce cast the “accelerated reconciliation” spell off screen between lunch and Jennifer waking from her nap.
We’re gonna see an entire Evil Opposites Team form at this point, with most of the “Evil” being normal amounts of rationality, relationship stability, not generating gossip, and noticing things around them.
Raidah did an exhausting amount of work vouching for him and getting him into the headquarters, work he repaid by drinking all the soda she bought and claiming he “didn’t know” she liked that flavor:
God, it would be, and it’d be all weighted to one side 🤣
Like absent Sal being hurt I think Walky would be down to clown, conceptually—if breaking from Sal was ugly it’d be different, but in a vacuum he’d be like “ooh, rail me, Twinkie McHatboy” and all smirks at Danny.
Danny, on the other hand, in that same vacuum, would immediately assume he had been sent to Hell, sent directly to Hell, and that he was being tormented, personally, by the Devil. Like, Satan his own self. He would have a breakdown on the first date.
Oh my god, Alice is me. I am Alice. This is literally me when I hear something juicy about a fandom or friend group I’m not in. Literally just “bongo, what happened?” and an eye emoji. XD
I uh…feel like Walky falling in with Raidah is becoming increasingly more likely.
AND GET ASMA A PARTNER! IF SHE WANTS ONE! ASMA DESERVES ONLY GOOD!
Well…Walky and Raidah do have things in common now.
They both were do their part being in a committed relationship that they were both committed to only for Joyce’s home wrecker antics to fuck that up for them.
Also I definitely think Sarah hates Walky, I mean she often puts up a act likes she hates everybody but unlike everybody else in her circle of friends I can’t recall a single time when she ever said one nice thing about Walky.
The only reason I don’t see her and Walky being close is Radah’s nasty habit of making it feel like hanging out with her is a job event and not actually socializing.
I love Alice. I love Alice so goddamn much, she’s so cute and so excited to fish and talk tea, she’s fucking amazing. Just the best. I need her to meet Becky and Booster and become instant best friends with both.
ALSO. ALSO.
Check that minor hesitation about Walky. Raidah, babe, have you caught FEELINGS?? Dare I hope that you have?! Because I don’t ship you and Walky but if you got together I’d be tickled pink, or even if you just clashed with Amber on that front! The potential complication! And if real feelings are involved, RAIDAH GETTING VULNERABLE?? Oh, that’s the Juice, baby! They’d the drama sauce!!
It make me think what if Walky somehow managed to make Raidah relax and don’t care si much about influence and social climbing. (Extremely unlikely but one dares to dream)
Oh my GOD that would be so messy and heartbreaking. I hope Willis goes for it. Humanized relaxed penitent Raidah vs. Amber’s last best hope for real romantic love aaaaaaaaaa
I like to imagine they were oldschool vaudeville comedians who performed in that same theater before Scooter’s uncle bought it and brought in a frog-and-bear variety show instead.
Here me out, Alice… and Booster. This is now the thing I want the most in the entire strip, and 100% of the time until now I’ve just wanted more Carla.
Speaking of linking people to places: I opened the hyperlink your name links to, and man. I can’t believe this thing is still being updated. Wasn’t it started like years ago now? But also. Joyce has been in 2000 strips as of now????? Holy shit.
I did the initial count during Freshman Family Weekend, which was… oh cheese, 12 years ago now. I’d made a comment that Billie said “fuck” more than everyone else in the comic put together, and then got curious whether that was actually true, so I went through and counted. (The archives were much smaller then.) It turned out it wasn’t, but only barely, and it had been true like two weeks earlier. It was Naomi’s cluster F-bomb that put “everyone else” over the top. There are so many other characters on the scoreboard now that it’s not even close anymore, but that’s why there’s still an “everyone else” bar in the graph. Though I’ve been thinking about removing that, because all it’s doing now is breaking the margins.
I swapped out the static HTML for a PHP backend a while back, so keeping it up is just a matter of a few minutes maybe a couple times a month to add the info and update everyone’s appearance counts when a new f-bomb drops. The appearance counts are the time-consuming part, and get more so every time a new character gets on the scoreboard.
Appearance counts may not be strictly accurate, especially for the main characters. They’re based on the strips that come up in a tag search, but they’re manually adjusted because I try not to count strips like the recent ones where Dorothy and Joyce are tagged because they’re in the newspaper photo, but they’re not actually there. And there were a few posts early on where characters were tagged, but that weren’t actually comics — con announcements and whatnot. I may not have gotten all of those, though.
raidahs stilll mad about that, tho i guess understandbly it did happen “sooner” to her than it did to us tho i wonder if we’ll end up with her being with someone who’s jacob’s opposite
or too ‘rizzless’ (as the kids say ) to be able to kiss anyone else
You aren’t, but I tend not to leave bad reviews of characters I’m not deeply invested in. Kinda seems rude to the folks who are having fun. Comic updates literally every day, if I don’t have strong feelings about something I can wait a few days and something I enjoy more will be happening, NBD. This is mostly how I feel about Alice and Charlie. To be fair, it used to be how I felt about Dina but I quite like her now, so if I wait long enough I may enjoy them more once they have more depth.
Raidah’s sex fantasies involve Walky becoming overcome with lust after she talks to him about successfully (don’t ask how, it’s a fantasy) suing Joyce and all of her family that still talks to her for emotional damages, and they have sex on top of Raidah’s powerful oak lawyer desk, and she calls out “DAVID!” in the throes of passion, and he says “oh, yes, say my real first name! Respect my potential!”
Hmm, Raidah in a blazer and skirt with tights and secret lacy black underwear, high heels of course, celebrating the downfall of a nemesis… 🤔 This will require consideration, before I form an opinion.
I’m talkin’ that really stereotypical “evil hot lawyer” look, too. Like, “shows up in a movie and you immediately know all of her lines and inflections” type shit, complete with the plot-irrelevant scene where she’s doing blatant dominatrix shit to the office gofer, gets interrupted by an Important Phone Call™ featuring Incriminating Evidence™, rushes out cackling and just leaves the guy blindfolded.
Y’know, like in all those movies where that happens.
…So Raidah not going to be thrilled to learn Jennifer/Billy is with Alice not Asher now. Her entire social network plan has gone up in smoke in the span of a few days.
Of other people kissing, I think, since she starts by saying she didn’t.
She had the student newspaper on her desk a minute ago, so my headcanon is that the Terminally Horny Editor(TM) started her tenure by including a dedicated column, at this point you can get full reviews of anyone by digging through the archives
I think it’s the more simple answer that she is referring to the kiss photo. That seemed pretty clear cut to so it surprise that it confuses so many. Normally i am the one not understanding anything
I don’t think she’s referencing the frontpage kiss itself so much as real life, where some people who presumably know her name have talked about it being enjoyable.
Obviously, my headcanon is meant to be silly and not a real explanation.
Or like I said above working the front desk at a college full of horny young college students has heard a lot of gossip about who’s kissing who, how good they are at it, and had a front row seat for multiple make out sessions that people started before getting back to their dorm room.
I’m choosing to assume that she means kissing Joyce specifically. It just happens that the last few people past her desk were Ethan, Becky, Jacob, Joe, and Dorothy. Ethan only gave her one star, and Becky gave her four stars and a “she coulda kissed back more” review, but everyone else gave her five stars.
You wanna now the most funniest thing is? 14 ago around this same time there was a story line going on about Joe and Roz being in a sex scandal that Joyce and some others gave them shit about.
Can we make this a regular thing? Like once per book, Alice and two other minor characters have a scene Greek chorus’ing the hot goss of ongoing events
…I forgot how SHORT a time it’s been. Ya know what, I think it’s probably fair that Walky didn’t have much of a reaction to getting dumped again given it was under half a week since they got back together.
It’s very funny to me that there are two people who seem upset that Dorothy cheated on Walky, and one is Dorothy, and the other is just someone reading about it XD
Kinda love this strip. One chaotic conversation that develops three characters at once and show the debris field from the previous event. Good writing.
Has Dave ever talked much about the fact that he’s not the least bit shy about the characters saying “fuck” but insists on the bongo/hussy silliness as far as name-calling words (or, tangential but even worse, “weenus”, the literal most cringe-inducing word I’ve ever heard)? I just don’t buy that a grown-ass college student would not say a meaner word under even the level of justified frustration Raidah is at in this moment, to say nothing of the truly dangerous circumstances that have happened in this comic. It takes me out of it every time.
I think you are cringing at the word “weenus,” and because of that you’re seeing a pattern that isn’t there. “Bongo” is just a comment section thing, I don’t remember ever seeing it in the comic itself. “Fuck” isn’t the only swear used, the characters drop the whole range of profane artillery. And none of the life-or-death situations in the comic featured one character calling another a hussy.
Bongo has been in the comic as a metajoke but its uncensored counterpart has as well. To address Lee’s main point, I don’t really think Raidah calling Joyce a hussy is a problem here? It serves a comedic function to call back to the language Joyce used to refer to herself, and that function wouldn’t be fulfilled by Raidah calling her a skank, slut, whore, conga, what have you what have you.
Oh, I like that. “A parallel to Joyce using ‘hussy’ on herself” makes it seem a little better since I actually can believe Joyce actually using that word.
There was an incident in the comments a while back involving Roz that led Willis to the conclusion that they could not trust us to use the B-word responsibly. However it’s still used in the comic occasionally. I had a complaint at one point that there was a strip that I couldn’t link in the comments anymore because the URL was getting munged by the bongo censor, but Willis kindly went back and changed the strip URL to be censor-friendly.
Otherwise, most of the cringy pseudo-swears come from Joyce, Walky, or occasionally Becky, who all have immature vocabulary issues for various reasons, even if they’ve all gotten onto the F-bomb scoreboard now. (I just had a vision in my head of Joyce, with Joe for the first time, crying, “Yes! Yes! Fuck my kapoodle!”) The other characters are not afraid to talk like grown-ups. Sarah even dropped the c-word once, though it was mostly obscured.
I have to agree that the hussy thing is bit weird, because I don’t think anyone has used that word unironically in real life since someone’s grandmother in 1957. I can see Joyce using because of growing up in an ultra-repressed environment, but Raidah doesn’t seem particularly repressed. I would definitely have expected her to use less Victorian language.
She seems to think herself as better than other people though, like she chastised one of her old friends for using the R-word at Dina. I can kind of imagine that she’d refuse to use words like “slut” and “whore”.
Is it just me, or is Alice’s facial expression just about three notches more intense than everyone else’s in the scene when she appears? (complimentary)
I don’t think it’s foreshadowing a vendetta. I think it’s just an open vendetta. No subtlety, no hinting. We know and I’m pretty sure even Joyce knows Raidah doesn’t like her.
Also, I’m going to take a wild guess and say Asma is into Alice. It’s the least sarcastic thing we’ve ever heard from her (out of maybe three or four conversations, mind you). In fact, it’s even showing a bit of… interest. And also, it’s instant fan-favourite Alice. Only Sal could pull as effortlessly. And apparently Joyce, for whatever reason.
Don’t do it Asma, you don’t want anyone to know your name, you don’t want to French anyone with a name, you don’t want to get sucked into this whirlwind, the way of the side character is the path of safety! You get in on this nonsense and the next thing you know you’ll be held at gunpoint by a supervillain who’s sleeping with your best friend and related to the superhero trying to save you or some other such shenanigans! Stay in the background Asma, stay in the background!
I was thinking about commenting on it too, especially since ‘hussy’ is such a Joyce word, but I’d never expect it from Raidah. Like it’s not out of character or anything, but it’s the sort of almost-anachronistic phrase Joyce had programmed in.
To be fair, Raidah has a very reasonable grudge against Joyce specifically, while her dislike for Dorothy is only splash damage because she’s friends with Joyce and Sarah.
It’s Raidah. Grudges form her entire worldview. She recently shattered Dorothy’s ego, in front of an appreciative audience, so her narcissistic tendencies are well sated in regards to her.
Plot Twist: Raidah hates Dorothy because she comes from the future where Dot got 90% of humanity killed by listening to Robin’s advice as a political science teacher.
This would imply Raidah dislikes people because she knows how they doom the future in her timeline. Her attempts to dissolve the relationships of the main cast are part of her efforts to prevent Judgement Day.
Yeah, but you think it was jennifer’s idea to revert to Jennifer? I guarantee you that came from Raidah. And Walky wasn’t just in this strip, it started here:
Alice was present for Joyce vaguely talking about the time Dorothy taught her about off-label uses for laundry appliances. It was during the scene where several cast groupings ran into each other going to breakfast, and Dorothy was awkwardly failing to avoid Joyce. “You’ve met” and “Beeswax” are the strips (others linked further up.)
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🥤
*plays “Filthy/Gorgeous” by Scissor Sisters on hacked muzak*
When you don’t actually know who any of the people involved ARE, but are still thirsty for gossip anyway.
Asma/Alice calling it now
Alice: “I never trust review scores, I need first-hand experience.”
(Later: the front desk of the dorm now has a mysterious 5-star review on Yelp.)
Where do I sign my name to make this canon?
You know, it is surprising how far I had to scroll down to find a thread just talking about Alice in general in which to place my love for her and not one specifically talking about her making out with Asma.
I mean, I kinda hope it happens, but damn, the entire chat just jumped on that instantly. Makes a girl proud. *proud tears*
yeeeees lets set the Alisma ship a sailing! ^-^ <3
Asmice? eh, whichever works XD
Asmalice. Which starts sounding like something if the s is sibilant, and that’s got a neat energy to it.
It is a really uncharacteristically flirty response by Asma tbf.
Asmalice
I’m putting my support with _this_ one!
Wow, I only had to read a single extra comment to not repeat what had already been said. 😅 You definitely got my agreement.
Asmalice all day, and twice on Moondays!
asmalice it is!
The reason will be Alice being the first to remember her name.
and then alice and asma made out, just to be sure
And then to complete the gossip chain, Joyce runs in and kisses Alice also. (Just as Jennifer is walking up)
…I’m FOR it!
AAA (Alice And Asma) Approved
so everyone is kissing everyone? sweet
♫♫Everybody was kiss-fu fighting♫♫
♫♫They all found that ver-y exciting!♫♫
♫♫Like DYNAMITE igniting!♫♫
♫♫That light the late night♫♫
♫♫So ya can know ya left from ya right!♫♫
Everybody was Kung Fu kissing (huh!)
Those girls were fast as lightning (ha!)
In fact, it was a little bit frightening (huh!)
But they did it with expert timing
“Cos everyone is humpin’ everyone
At my …college”
I think Alice and Asma should kiss right now to further complicated this love dodecahedron.
You know what, I hope so too.
Media could use more Islamic Sapphics.
And just more Sapphics of color in general if I’m being honest.
How are there reviews if she hasnt frenched anyone?
Perhaps she listens to a podcast by a movie critic.
Maybe Asma has never kissed anyone but DESK GIRL has.
Because this is a superhero comic disguised as a college drama.
“My package hasn’t arrived yet?”
“We’d better send out the Desk Girl signal!”
Hmm – Asma and Desk Girl have never appeared in the same scene!
I think she’s talking about good reviews for the concept of frenching.
I assume she meant good reviews of herself. Good reviews in spite of the fact there was no frenching involved.
It seems unlikely, I know.
After pondering it a minute trying to work out her meaning, I thought she meant she just heard good reviews about Joyce and now wants to kiss her, too.
Better. Let’s go with that.
I think she means the act of Frenching has good reviews, like a restaurant she’s never been to but is meaning to try.
Or perhaps she has the concept of a plan for Frenching?
Or as front desk person at a college dorm full of horny people she’s heard a lot of gossip and probably had front row seats for more than one heavy make out session that people couldn’t wait until they were in their dorm room to start.
There was that time she had to break up Billie and Ruth with a broom.
Maybe just the concept of it. although i can understand the appeal of something warm but id def make my partner rinse with mouthwash or something first
She has heard great reviews of frenching in general. She hasn’t had the chance herself, apparently, but is doing research.
For Science!
She might not be bothered to remember Joyce and Dorothy’s names, but she does have a front row seat to a lot of school gossip just working the front desk.
If someone asks me if they were at the protest, I won’t remember their names either.
True, though i think this is more a jab about how they havent been bothered to learn her name over an entire term, why should she remember theirs
She hasn’t been doing the things, but it does sound good?
IT CONTINUES TO STILL BE HAPPENING
Alice is always there to catch you up on the hot goss. You can’t be mad at her look at that face she is so happy
She’ll be horrified at how much she missed not being with Jennifer.
I don’t get the relevancy of that to my comment. Nor i do i understand what you mean.
I think there’s an implied ‘gossip’ (or ‘goss’) between ‘much’ and ‘she’
I believe they meant it as “Alice will be so upset that she missed out on SO MUCH gossip that took place while she and Jennifer weren’t on speaking terms”
Ok thanks
they are likely referring to all the mess that alice missed when she wasnt speaking to jennifer
probably bc jen also likes drama and stuff liek that strip with her and asher with “inject it directly into my veins”
Birds of a feather gossip together.
That goss was too hot for even Alice.
I am absolutely here for Alice being here for this.
I particularly enjoy how she’s doesn’t seem to remotely judgemental about it. She’s just delighting in the gossip without showing any hint of negativity.
“Not My Circus, not MY clowns, but I am down for the show!”
EXACTLY! I’m very enjoying Alice’s gleeful ramping consumption of the gossip.
Don’t trust reviews unless done by peers.
Science got all of its high scores because of that.
FOR SCIENCE!
…Starting to see why she and Billifer are friends.
I fuckin love Alice.
She is rocketing toward my new favorite character. She has a few yet to pass, but she’s getting there.
I don’t think she’ll ever surpass Dina for me, but she’s definitely making a good effort.
She actually remembered Walky’s name as Walky instead of as Wally this time
So what I’m seeing here is Billifer just isn’t attracted to someone who doesn’t have (or is trying to fix) some sort of personality defect?
I mean, why would you be?
DRAMA.
I think that category is broad enough to encompass every human on the planet. Humans suck, but they can always improve themselves … it is however agonizingly hard.
Let me then narrow it down to negative defects (self-destructive codependency, being a shameless drama goblin, mob ties)…
defect? i mean she’s gossiping a bit but it’s not as if she’s spreading malicious rumors or anything
She’s not even gossiping really, she’s ingesting gossip. She would have to tell other people for it to be her engaging in the act of gossiping. It’s at worst the sin of watching Jerry Springer.
I think one of us is confused about which she anon is referring to. Asma and Raidah are ingesting gossip and at worst engaging in the sin of watching Jerry Springer.
Alice is one audience full of people chanting her name of hosting an episode of Jerry Springer. And I’m not knocking Alice here, as far as I know she has no idea what’s going on between Raidah and the people she’s gossiping about or one would hope she wouldn’t give Raidah ammo.
No she’s actively spreading shit, and living for it. This is the second time she has told someone that didn’t otherwise know that Joyce and Dorothy had sex last week.
okay yeah this sealed it. i need to see more of Alice. i mean she’s a drama waterspout but like in a fun way
I like Alice. Alice is fun.
Also, here’s hoping people start remembering, Asia’s name.
ASMA! Fucking autocorrect.
The autocorrect just had to get in on the joke.
I mean… it was very thematically appropriate 😂
I thought this was just a top-tier bit, RIP
Yeah, you probably could have pretended this was a deliberate joke and not a mistake and nobody would have noticed.
I certainly have never done that before.
Perfect post for autocorrect to fuck you on.
Epic autocorrect FTW!
No no, it works here.
Autocorrect trolled you hard, hahahaha!
Well to be fair to alice, *she* at least probably hasn’t met asma before so as to know her name in the first place before now. she doesn’t even live in this hall
should’ve committed to the bit 8D;
LOL maybe well get an asma and alice spinoff too
I dunno, I don’t think Asma deserves the T Hawk treatment. XD
Alice is my new favorite character
Confirmed, Alice loves mess
She dated Billie for (significant amount of time), this was already confirmed.
oooh, good point well made
Dated? I’m not so sure. They were best friends, they def kissed slept together on at least one occasion, def made out a lot more too. But Billie came to college thinking she was basically straight and that bisexual is only a porn category.
what is friendship but dating?
don’t think too hard about that one or you might end up like me struggling to distinguish romantic and platonic feelings
Billie still thinks that she’s basically straight even after she and Ruth actually properly start dating, so I don’t think that’s a sign of how intense the relationship was
Pretty sure you’re missing the joke, for which Jennifer thinking she’s straight despite how her and Alice “def kissed slept together on at least one occasion, def made out a lot more too.” is the punchline.
Just cause Billie didn’t date Alice doesn’t mean Alice didn’t date Billie.
She’s too tall for a gremlin, though. Chaos high elf.
Maybe she’s a gremlin in the same way Carrot is a dwarf.
Okay, but as a Warhammer fan, may I introduce you to the concept of… Chaos Dwarves?
Which makes her initial appearance in the comic of telling Billie that Billie was just TOO DRAMATIC for her… rather a BS front, doesn’t it? Billie’s not too dramatic, because Alice obviously LOVES drama. Billie *hurt Alice’s feelings,* and Alice hadn’t gotten over it yet, was what was really going on.
I am glad she’s over it now, because she appears to be fucking DELIGHTFUL!
(Also, I am sorry, I accidentally hit the report button instead of the reply button by accident… hopefully it doesn’t affect anything, it was just a mistake!)
There’s a **vast** difference between low stakes “who’s frenching who” drama and “Almost got us killed because you drove drunk ‘saving’ me at prom and nearly killed us both, then refused to admit you loved me while we were recovering in the hospital.” drama.
Not to mention the whole “using my crush to dragg me along to parties to get drunk and fuck boys” thing. The bad decisions didn’t start at prom.
Where did Alice get the idea Joyce & Dorothy had sex?
I think Joyce told Billifer?
Yeah, Joyce did say something like “I think I may have had sex with my best friend”, and like, there were no details. Joyce was talking about the laundry room incident, which was pretty much sex.
Found the page, she told Alice too. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/youvemet/
Followed up later with explicit realization: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/beeswax/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/beeswax/
Jennifer can’t remember or notice shit unless its horny.
Fair and valid. My memory is pretty crap too when it’s not something I’m actually interested in. 😝
I think she overheard Joyce establishing her own personal definition of sex, and then realizing that it was so broad as to accidentally include doing laundry with Dorothy. Which in hindsight was definitely sexual but most folks would probably define that as “mutual masturbation” or a variant thereof, not sex.
Alice overheard and took it at face value.
Yeah, Alice does not have the full context here, which might be a problem depending on how many people she tells.
My experience with mutual masturbation is that it’s definitely sex.
I hereby declare that sex is when six people who love one another very much give everyone else an orgasm while eating chocolate cake in space.
Which makes me a virgin. And probably most of you too.
And all three of my children virgin births!
Other than finding that many people I love like that problematic (I’m demisexual) your definition of sex does sound fun though! Truly, the cake-eaters are living it up.
It’s fine, because we all get to make our own definition, and Im not even being sarcastic.
So if you want to skip the orgasms and have key lime instead, then for you I suppose “sex is when someone, alone or in company, enjoys cake so much they want a second piece even though they are not hungry”. I do insist on the space part though, otherwise I’ll soon be having so much sex at every turn I’ll officially be a hussy too.
Dorothy will pull a Bill Clinton “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” and Joyce will A) say yes they did on the washing machines, and B) not know who Bill Clinton is because she’s too young to have been alive in the 90s, which is funny to think about because when the strip started she would have been born in the early 90s.
Nothing mutual about it. Individual masturbation shortly after holding hands. Didn’t Joyce even tell Dorothy to leave?
She was there when Joyce told Billie she might have had sex with her best friend a week ago, and then put the pieces together in the strip HueSatLight linked above.
(Her timeline is off through no fault of her own; the laundry incident was actually ten days before those strips, but I guess Joyce was rounding off.)
“Rounding off”
is that what we’re calling it now huh
Yeah, they’re a couple of rounders.
Lady weapons! Round, engulfing weapons!
It’s the Glamazon way! Fling that throwing anus!
Thank you Alice for your well timed explanation of the romantic entanglements at play. And for establishing the exact timeline cuz I have been having trouble keeping track of Comic Book Time
Alice is working on an aspiring career as a D&D tavern NPC who gives out quest hook rumors
“I’ve heard tell of a voracious creature that stalks the city by night. If you get caught outside, she’ll french you too!”
I’m intrigued, tell me more >:3
*sprints out of the tavern into the night*
“Oh no I’m all alone! I hope no voracious creature comes out of the ominous fog and comes frenches me!”
Where does this, uh… dangerous beast hunt? You know, so I can avoid it.
As I noted above, her timeline is actually off, through no fault of her own. Yesterday (which was Saturday), Alice heard Joyce say she had sex with her best friend a week ago; however the incident she was referring to actually took place ten days earlier, on the previous Wednesday (so eleven days ago now). Joe and Joyce got together ten days ago, on Thursday after the laundry incident. Lucy dumped Walky last Sunday, so a week ago now, and Walky and Dorothy got back together on Tuesday — five days ago. Joyce and Dorothy went on their dranks date on Monday between those events, and Joyce crawled into bed with Joe that night.
Do you have notes, or are you actually able to keep track without checking? In which case, hats off to you
Hell, I’d be hats off even if it was with notes. My RPG campaigns have less documentation.
This is great. I love this scene.
Alice is drinking up that tea like no one’s business.
How good are dem reviews? 4 or 5 stars?
well Joyce won’t do you, or her, or even her, so there’s that
Oh my god I love Alice’s giant goober smile whenever she smells gossip
It’s not just that she loves to gossip. It’s that she is so clearly having the Time. Of. Her. Life. and is not even trying to hide it. Delightful!
12/10, I adore her. Please give us more of the chaotic gossip goblin.
Oh now OTHER people are calling Joyce a hussy, it’s so over for her.
It’s all jover.
I don’t like that word, but it IS correct that every Joyce relationship has started or ended with a lie.
Asma you’re a treasure.
Raidah, you need to divorce yourself from these toxic people.
Save yourself from the awfulness of Dorothy, Joyce, and Sarah. You’re just too good for them!
🙂
I need Raidah to call Joyce a hussy to her face so bad
Lol omg it was only 3 days ago 🤣🤣
“Hi, I’m here to point out how incredibly messed up the timeline is!”
And we haven’t even brought in time travel yet.
…is Alice a villain. ‘Cause she’s… kind of making things worse for everybody. (Note before anyone comments on this: I’m finding myself liking Alice, too. That’s why I’m worried.)
She’s worse than a villain… she’s a wild card.
Chaos. Gremlin part to be determined.
She just likes piping hot tea, and is that such a crime?
lol
Thank the gods I can agree with you for a change. (I never comment to yours but well you can read in.) ALICE DESERVES ALL THE TEA AND DESERVES TO ENJOY EVERY DROP!
Alice can be the evil wrestling promoter for the next storyline in the DOA Federation.
Alice is here to make this cheating plot ACTUALLY messy and I am HERE FOR IT.
Alice and Billie were thick as thieves back in the day and it’s about time we learned why that was.
I don’t think she’s a villain, I just think she’s chaotic neutral and loves mess
We need to get her and Amber in the same room. Alice can spur amber to action and amber can fuel alice with fanfic tropes
@stormtideLeviathan
“I think that would be extraordinarily dangerous.”
https://youtu.be/fjRgoKGjZ78
Heck, just imagine Alice and Booster hanging out. They would feed off of each other like wind and fire.
I absolutely NEED this to happen
She may be an antagonist, or an obstacle, but I think she lacks the intentionality of a villain.
Alice watches with drink in hand, rapt attention, and poor grasp of the finer details. She’s the embodiment of the comments section.
She’s not making things worse for anyone. All she’s doing is highlighting the events that happened. Each and every one of them dug their own graves, she’s just showing where the holes are.
Asma you gotta share with us some of those reviews we’re all curious
Must also note Raidah’s continued refusal to call Walky by the name he goes by.
I don’t think he’s directly told her he doesn’t like that, pretty sure he only commented that it was odd, if anything. He may have even said he doesn’t mind? I’d be interested to see if Raidah would listen if HE told her to call him Walky.
I feel like the parallel to Linda refusing to call her kids by their chosen names can’t be coincidental.
There. There it is. There’s the fucking messy. There is the fucking messy. Holy god, this is better than I had hoped for.
I’m still annoyed that all the mess is happening external to the actual relationships involved.
So far. 🙂
I mean, it’s clearly all going to bounce back to the relationships. That’s part of the story, it compounds the stress, moves up the timelines, etc. We’ve already had the start of that bounceback from the newspaper cover page existing.
How? How does this interfere with Joe’s poly suggestion?
Even Walky’s already been told what’s up. I guess we could have Raidah try yo use the cheating to manipulate Walky to make him more angry with Dorothy/Joyce?
I can see that as a possibility, actually, especially in the absence of him and Dorothy being unable to have a mature conversation about what happened… because Joyce swooped in and yanked her away.
Walky’s been a pretty solid no-sell on Raidah’s attempts to manipulate him though, so I’m on the fence about how responsive he’d be to that though if he’s in a more vulnerable spot than he came across last time we saw him… maybe.
It’s all over place, like a tide of water filled with dirty little secrets floating the whole campus.
But are any of them actually secret? Except maybe from Becky.
They won’t be for long now Alice is here
You know hearing it like this makes the entire past week I guess of events seem like not that big a deal.
Huh, I forgot that in-universe it has only been three days since Walky and Dorothy got back together.
The timeline for all these relationships is so short.
That’s how it goes in DOA. Danny/Amazi-Girl was also only a few days. Billie/Ruth lasting a month or two is I think the longest relationship in the strip?
Oh no Becky and Dina
Even if they broke up right now Becky / Dina have at this point a basically insurmountable lead absent another massive timeskip.
I mean it has been literally two decades since I was in college but… yeah based on what I recall that sounds pretty standard.
Webcomic time is wild
And Joyce and Joe only dated for like a week, 2 tops lol.
Im pretty sure the only long lasting relationship in the show so far is Becky and Dina, and thats been like 4 months (depending on how long the time skip was, hard to keep track).
Joyce and Joe are not broken up
True, but Joyce and Joe have been at least flirting since like Becky’s party before the kidnapping, so it’s made their relationship feel longer imo
Ruth and Billie was maybe 2 months? Early in semester to Halloween.
Raidah needs to date Walky now.
She can just go up and announce they are and he’ll agree.
Walky Riffington
I cannot decide whether Walky and Riff would get along or not. Walky is basically just Torg with marginally less trauma and significantly less competency at this point, so they should, but idk.
She’ll announce to everyone present she’s dating David now, and he won’t deny, not realizing she meant him
Hasn’t Walky been through enough already? Reminder: Raidah referred to him as “that stunted man-child” behind his back after inviting him to breakfast.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/04-dont-stop-billie-ving/pretended/
Yes, but she has similar opinions about everyone.
In any case, she would only date him for his connections. Or, the caramel abbs.
At this point Joyce just needs to spongebob style shout “I’M A HUSSY AND I’M PROUD” because she’s about to be getting a loooot of comments and its time to own the title XDD
Alice is the glue that binds the narrative together. Gossip glue.
Oooh yes, a reminder that Joyce had an orgasm in the laundry room. Reddit chuds have an obsessive hate for that one.
Let’s be fair here. Getting reddit chuds to obsessively hate something is incredibly easy.
So do people here, don’t give those other cockfuckers attention for free.
Read that as “cookiefuckers” and was about to protest that that’s not what they are for.
Carry on then
They can be if you’re not a coward about it.
Yeast infection yeast infection yeast infection
Sugar doesn’t go there it bad it bad
Sugar free cookies and/or monostat.
They do? It seems p normal behavior for 18-19 year olds, finally free of their parents , to go unhinged and unshackled.
Maybe Raidah should sleep with Walky now. Really come full circle, pun intended.
Woo NOW we’re seeing kindling!
Love the wink to the audience. Put in the context of real life, these people’s shenanigans are abso-fucking-lutely exhausting to consider.
Alice is just here for the gossip, isn’t she?
aren’t we all lol
Not to excited about a potential “everyone gossips about Dorothy and Joyce/they become social pariahs to most of the school” arc ngl, not a trope I tend to be a fan of, I’ll try and remain optimistic though, also it’s funny how much alice talks like a dumbing of age fan
I don’t think a social pariah arc is that realistic. Becky didn’t become a local celebrity for that time her dad tried to shoot up the school, and nobody really seems to talk about that time all the comic’s protagonists were kidnapped. The only characters who are realistically going to shun Dorothy and Joyce are the characters who are functionally already shunning them, like Mary and Raidah and Asma. So, no real changes.
Oh please, this is COLLEGE who isn’t sleeping around like mad right in there. At that very moment there’s probably someone who giving head to a line up made of the members of the football team who weren’t booted off the team for being incels like Paul.
Plus this is the same college that had Roz become a celebrity by posting a sex tape of her and Joe.
Or to quote Charles, everybody should just get in a big fuck pile and get it over with.
Yeah I feel like it’s more likely people are gonna high five them for making out on the cover of the newspaper.
There are probably a few dozen people, maybe, that know the two of them were in separate relationships. There are about to be hundreds or thousands of people that know them for the protest makeout sesh.
Good reviews… about the concept of french kissing she means?
Meredith to Asma, last week: “Have you heard about making out? It’s pretty rad. something you’d be … interested .. in?”
The algorithm sending Asma reviews and smooching tutorials. “Based on your search/purchasing history, here’s something you might like.”
Alice Might as well be the stand in for every new reader just catching up…or who have skipped the last 12 years of strips and just started reading this year.
Ohhhh so HERE’S the complicating factor
Gossip dishing, outside perspective, this is amazing.
Imagine if Alice and Booster got talking. And wait, doesn’t she live in the other hall? Is she just hanging out in this lobby mornings because that’s where all the good chaos occurs?
when in the fuck did joyce kiss jacob. have i completely forgotten about this plot beat or is raidah just being a freak again.
It was more like Jacob kissing HER, but that was after she lied to his family about being his girlfriend and was already plotting to snatch him up: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/rushed/
Mistakingly reported myself
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/rushed/
I think about the Joyce/Jacob kiss all the time because making Jacob go from a perfect and kind dreamboat to “principled hypocrite” in one fell swoop is singlehandedly was SUCH a good way to reinterpret, improve and ideate on his character flaws from shortpacked. Arguably might be one of my favorite chapters in this comic tbh.
answer: i completely forgot about that plot beat. lmao.
After the lunch with Jacob’s brother, Jacob kissed Joyce but also denied the possibility of them getting together. He then proceeded to break up with Raidah immediately afterwards.
I don’t think Jacob gets enough heat for this.
I don’t think Joyce or Sarah got enough heat considering it was Sarah’s goal to hook her up with Jacob and Joyce knew he was dating Radiah
Joyce is getting heat right now in this very comic. Raidah 100% blames her even though Jacob was equally responsible for the kiss and the lies and solely responsible for the following breakup. He’s even developed a bit of a pattern of falling for vibes considering how things went down between Sarah and Lucy. It’s just interesting to me he seems to escape any consequences for his behavior.
Men usually do, at least when there’s a convenient woman to blame things on.
Given that Raidah knows Joyce had been aiming for that well before Jacob was even aware, much less took any action, I’m not surprised Raidah’s at least as upset at her.
She’s both mistaken and at the same time not really wrong about Joyce, which is how some really damaging rumors are going to get started.
Raidah’s implied promise of payback doesn’t even require her to be malign at this point.
She’s not 100% accurate just 90% accurate.
At this rate she doesn’t really haft to do anything Joyce is destroying herself.
I also completely forgot about this. I’m scrolling through the strips from that era and none of it rings a bell. Fuckin’ Drew showed up in Dumbing of Age?? I have no memory of this. Wild.
When, indeed.
Well now Alice just needs to run upstairs and make sure Mary’s all caught up…
If Alice even knows Mary, it’s likely to be from Jennifer telling her about her, which isn’t going to paint a picture of anyone she wants to talk to.
Alice timeline is wrong. Right?
I think Joyce has been dating Joe at least 2 weeks.
I think it’s Sunday and Joyce slept with Joe a week ago, right?
Alice you are such a gossip.
Raidah, you literally saw Jacob and Lucy together a week ago. ( Is Raidah mixed up or Willis forget. ) Like you definitely clocked your ex with Lucy. Ironically also caused by your interference.
Each storyline is basically a day. Joyce and Joe did some finger style action like… two days ago? They’ve been dating for like ten days I think. As for Raidah, she didn’t even remember Lucy’s name so she probably didn’t recognize her when she was with Jacob (or at least didn’t remember she had been with Walky).
And we see here that she doesn’t remember her name and probably doesn’t remenber her face because she only focused on Walky
She doesn’t seem to remember Walky’s name, either…
She dies she just refuses ti his nickname instead of his real name because of her maturity obsession
I don’t think that’s why she’s doing that. I think she’s doing it to pry people away from Joyce bit by bit. If you get someone to reject a nickname they’ve always gone by, it is indeed a bit alienating for their other friend who are used to calling them by that nickname.
(Also her two other friends both went by nicknames all the time and she didn’t object.)
Yeah see: Billie.
I do think Raidah also does it because “Walky” doesn’t fit the box she wants to fit him in, though.
Yep.
She cloaks it as “being more mature” with Jennifer/Billie specifically because that is a thing SHE used to always respond to in a positive way: Jennifer wanted to believe she’d evolved, outgrown Ruth, etc, so that’s the carrot Raidah is used to using with her, and we also see it as a bit of a stick when Jennifer objects to Walky joining their group.
(There’s a lot of “come on Jennifer don’t be like that, be mature” dripping from their interactions in that scene, and Jennifer’s last objection to Raidah that “David” isn’t his name gets back, “It is when he inevitably needs to present as professional for job interviews.”
Also, in front of Walky, she asserts that he “answers to it”, which of course causes Walky to say it keeps confusing him for a beat before he remembers she’s talking to him.)
I think it’d be interesting to see him actually push back and whether she’d stop or not, in part because I’m not completely sold on the idea that she has a specific interest in him beyond just prying more people off Joyce’s friend group, and I’d like to be proven wrong because that would be interesting!
I also think it would’ve been interesting to see Lucy run into Raidah when she was in full “don’t give a fuck” mode right after she broke up with Walky; Forrest Quad responded to her new energy… I think Raidah has written her off as kind of a non-entity, which probably makes the idea of her as the person who’s now with Jacob even stranger.
Her interest in Walky is that he has connections to the Dean.
Maybe. Or maybe partly. That might itself be partly cover for messing with Joyce.
It may not have been immediately obvious they were more-than-friends and/or just plain didn’t recognize her, and also Raidah was immediately distracted by Sarah daring to have something positive in her life: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/03-me-and-who-you-say-i-was-yesterday/thatsnew/
Also honestly the reminder that Dorothy and Walky have only been back together for three days is timely and contextualizing. And makes a lot of the discourse here very funny, in retrospect
And like 11 days for Joyce and Joe.
It feels like there was some sort of lightswitch on Alice’s personality when Jennifer was napping, but the version of her that hears some strangers talking about “Joyce and Dorothy” and excitedly jumps into the conversation is pretty entertaining
Being fsir, we had only seen Alice when she was angry with Billie or on flashbacks until that point so we didn’t actually know what her current personalized was.
Prior to her and Jen mending fences we’d only really seen Alice under pressure, which isn’t a great judge of someone’s character
The lightswitch feeling can have an explanation. Obviously there’s months of Alice ruminating between the first and second encounter, and then Joyce cast the “accelerated reconciliation” spell off screen between lunch and Jennifer waking from her nap.
It didn’t happen off screen? We literally see her advocate fro Jennifer on the strip and then Alice went looking for her.
There is definitely a switch, but prior to Joyce convincing her to give Billie another shot we’d basically never seen her with her guard down.
Like I think if we’d seen Lucy run into Alice last semester, she’d have acted very similarly to this. This is who she is when her brain isn’t BSoDing.
Ha! Forget everyone else.
*Alice* is catapult shit to the stratosphere. Maybe we’ll actually get some real proper mess if her gossipy blabber ends up taking flight.
It’s always unsettling to have characters pop up and remind you that the last six months of comics was actually only two days
Alice is helping! Thanks, Alice! 😀
Shoot yer shot, Asma. Shoot yer shot.
I would laugh so hard if *Asma* ends up catching Walky on the rebound.
At this rate, Dorothy’s gonna have to erase Alice’s memories! She knows too much!
And if she finds that Joe proposed a poly situation, she’s going to be over the moon! God, what a funny strip.
Dang, Alice is messy as hell.
We’re gonna see an entire Evil Opposites Team form at this point, with most of the “Evil” being normal amounts of rationality, relationship stability, not generating gossip, and noticing things around them.
EVIL OPPOSITION ROLL CALL!
Mary: In the name of fascism! And anime! And fascist anime! And—*is hit with a brick*
Raidah: It’s not EVIL opposition! It’s righteous, just opposition to the immoral and privileged and—!
Carl: For my ex girlfriend and probably my latent racism!
Raidah: …
Alice: Ooh! For the sake of a more accurate smoochy-fucky flowchart! 😄
Raidah: 🤦🏽♀️
Carl? Has he been here this whole time? Did he just sneak into the headquarters?
Raidah did an exhausting amount of work vouching for him and getting him into the headquarters, work he repaid by drinking all the soda she bought and claiming he “didn’t know” she liked that flavor:
ngl I actually did have to look Carl up just now to make sure I wasn’t imagining him
so he’s either the Legion of DOAm’s Danny for that, or their nega-Walky for being slighted by him. Their… Danky? No wait that’s a ship. A cursed ship.
God, it would be, and it’d be all weighted to one side 🤣
Like absent Sal being hurt I think Walky would be down to clown, conceptually—if breaking from Sal was ugly it’d be different, but in a vacuum he’d be like “ooh, rail me, Twinkie McHatboy” and all smirks at Danny.
Danny, on the other hand, in that same vacuum, would immediately assume he had been sent to Hell, sent directly to Hell, and that he was being tormented, personally, by the Devil. Like, Satan his own self. He would have a breakdown on the first date.
at least Alice is having a great time
Her smile! Her enjoyment of life! Her excited demeanor!
Oh my god, Alice is me. I am Alice. This is literally me when I hear something juicy about a fandom or friend group I’m not in. Literally just “bongo, what happened?” and an eye emoji. XD
I uh…feel like Walky falling in with Raidah is becoming increasingly more likely.
AND GET ASMA A PARTNER! IF SHE WANTS ONE! ASMA DESERVES ONLY GOOD!
I, like Alice, am so curious what Asma means by good reviews! Asma, babe, elaborate please! Please I beg!
Well…Walky and Raidah do have things in common now.
They both were do their part being in a committed relationship that they were both committed to only for Joyce’s home wrecker antics to fuck that up for them.
Also I definitely think Sarah hates Walky, I mean she often puts up a act likes she hates everybody but unlike everybody else in her circle of friends I can’t recall a single time when she ever said one nice thing about Walky.
The only reason I don’t see her and Walky being close is Radah’s nasty habit of making it feel like hanging out with her is a job event and not actually socializing.
Reminder that Raidah called Walky a “stunted man-child” behind his back.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/04-dont-stop-billie-ving/pretended/
Walky would go. “Yeah, that’s fair.”
Me too! I have no drama in my own life, which is how I like it, but I LOVE hearing about other people’s drama
Alice delivering that exposition
Dang, Alice hasn’t been here for very long yet but she is already learning so much good stuff! Hooray for college!
I love Alice. I love Alice so goddamn much, she’s so cute and so excited to fish and talk tea, she’s fucking amazing. Just the best. I need her to meet Becky and Booster and become instant best friends with both.
ALSO. ALSO.
Check that minor hesitation about Walky. Raidah, babe, have you caught FEELINGS?? Dare I hope that you have?! Because I don’t ship you and Walky but if you got together I’d be tickled pink, or even if you just clashed with Amber on that front! The potential complication! And if real feelings are involved, RAIDAH GETTING VULNERABLE?? Oh, that’s the Juice, baby! They’d the drama sauce!!
It make me think what if Walky somehow managed to make Raidah relax and don’t care si much about influence and social climbing. (Extremely unlikely but one dares to dream)
Oh my GOD that would be so messy and heartbreaking. I hope Willis goes for it. Humanized relaxed penitent Raidah vs. Amber’s last best hope for real romantic love aaaaaaaaaa
idk if this is an odd thing to say, but I consistently enjoy your comments
If Walky and Raidah get together I want that shit to be endgame. No half-measures.
Raidah/Walky is actually extremely fucking good and now I’m mad
Yeah, great relationships always start with one party viciously insulting the other behind their back.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/04-dont-stop-billie-ving/pretended/
Entertaining relationships on the other hand…
Yes… YES… YES to all of this!
Opposite of a cursed couple I am now shipping Booster+Alice who I don’t think we’ve seen together. Ultimate DoA power couple!
It never work, she is not fucked up in the head enough. Yhat is like an pheromones for Booster.
its not too late tho
They could form a deep bond over being the actual and only in-universe DOA fandom.
Wait which one is sickos and which one is relationship paladin (haha I know)
doesn’t mean they can’t be friends or partners. or besties lol.
Gonna be like when Statler met Waldorf.
I like to imagine they were oldschool vaudeville comedians who performed in that same theater before Scooter’s uncle bought it and brought in a frog-and-bear variety show instead.
Their getting together would create a singularity that would engulf the whole DoA universe, leaving them both outside… peeping in
Here me out, Alice… and Booster. This is now the thing I want the most in the entire strip, and 100% of the time until now I’ve just wanted more Carla.
Booster psychoanalyzing Billiefer while Alice watches and eats popcorn
Be cathartic for her maybe 8D;
Someone needs to point Alice at dumbingofage.com. There’s so much archive she needs to read!
Speaking of linking people to places: I opened the hyperlink your name links to, and man. I can’t believe this thing is still being updated. Wasn’t it started like years ago now? But also. Joyce has been in 2000 strips as of now????? Holy shit.
Ten years are 3652 days, so I’m actually a bit surprised it’s not more.
I did the initial count during Freshman Family Weekend, which was… oh cheese, 12 years ago now. I’d made a comment that Billie said “fuck” more than everyone else in the comic put together, and then got curious whether that was actually true, so I went through and counted. (The archives were much smaller then.) It turned out it wasn’t, but only barely, and it had been true like two weeks earlier. It was Naomi’s cluster F-bomb that put “everyone else” over the top. There are so many other characters on the scoreboard now that it’s not even close anymore, but that’s why there’s still an “everyone else” bar in the graph. Though I’ve been thinking about removing that, because all it’s doing now is breaking the margins.
I swapped out the static HTML for a PHP backend a while back, so keeping it up is just a matter of a few minutes maybe a couple times a month to add the info and update everyone’s appearance counts when a new f-bomb drops. The appearance counts are the time-consuming part, and get more so every time a new character gets on the scoreboard.
Appearance counts may not be strictly accurate, especially for the main characters. They’re based on the strips that come up in a tag search, but they’re manually adjusted because I try not to count strips like the recent ones where Dorothy and Joyce are tagged because they’re in the newspaper photo, but they’re not actually there. And there were a few posts early on where characters were tagged, but that weren’t actually comics — con announcements and whatnot. I may not have gotten all of those, though.
Damn ✨ I love Alice’s unstoppable lust for drama ^_^ 💖
Starting to think her soft drink cup is just full of popcorn
I just love her apparent lust XD
raidahs stilll mad about that, tho i guess understandbly it did happen “sooner” to her than it did to us tho i wonder if we’ll end up with her being with someone who’s jacob’s opposite
or too ‘rizzless’ (as the kids say ) to be able to kiss anyone else
raidah’s rizz is ohio, fam, no cap fr fr
If someone facilitated the breakup of me and my extremely hot and kind partner in the way Joyce did I would nurture a grudge for years
technically sarah faciliated it? at least , i’d prolly be more mad at sarah than joyce in that situation even if joyce wasn’t blameless
that said if lucy weren’t dating him i wonder if raidah would’ve given him another chance
ilu Alice
No! Stop, Alice, stop!! You were so cool before! You were out-cooling Sal! And now you’re just another little chaos goblin. So sad. 🙁
I’m apparently alone in my opinion 🙁 oh well
I think so, yes.
If it gives you solace, I really think she needs to learn to keep her mouth shut.
But I’m happy for her she’s enjoying the show!
In real life she’d be awful. As a cartoon character advancing the drama and messy, she’s funny.
All my favorite webcomics gave this in common.
You aren’t, but I tend not to leave bad reviews of characters I’m not deeply invested in. Kinda seems rude to the folks who are having fun. Comic updates literally every day, if I don’t have strong feelings about something I can wait a few days and something I enjoy more will be happening, NBD. This is mostly how I feel about Alice and Charlie. To be fair, it used to be how I felt about Dina but I quite like her now, so if I wait long enough I may enjoy them more once they have more depth.
To be clear, I was trying to criticize Alice herself, not the writing (and in a tongue-in-cheek way, though I guess that didn’t really come across).
And she’s still calling him David. Weirdo.
Raidah’s sex fantasies involve Walky becoming overcome with lust after she talks to him about successfully (don’t ask how, it’s a fantasy) suing Joyce and all of her family that still talks to her for emotional damages, and they have sex on top of Raidah’s powerful oak lawyer desk, and she calls out “DAVID!” in the throes of passion, and he says “oh, yes, say my real first name! Respect my potential!”
…that’s unironically a little hot.
This actually got a laugh out of me.
Hmm, Raidah in a blazer and skirt with tights and secret lacy black underwear, high heels of course, celebrating the downfall of a nemesis… 🤔 This will require consideration, before I form an opinion.
Speaking as a lesbian I don’t have to consider anything give that shit to me NOW
I’m talkin’ that really stereotypical “evil hot lawyer” look, too. Like, “shows up in a movie and you immediately know all of her lines and inflections” type shit, complete with the plot-irrelevant scene where she’s doing blatant dominatrix shit to the office gofer, gets interrupted by an Important Phone Call™ featuring Incriminating Evidence™, rushes out cackling and just leaves the guy blindfolded.
Y’know, like in all those movies where that happens.
Why the fuck are you making this hotter knowing that I’ll never get to see it
I’ve never once had an answer prepared for that question. I was only clarifying the outfit, I can’t turn off the paintbrush.
“I can’t turn off the paintbrush.” I love this wording.
…So Raidah not going to be thrilled to learn Jennifer/Billy is with Alice not Asher now. Her entire social network plan has gone up in smoke in the span of a few days.
She already knows Asher is dating Ethan, though.
“So what did Bilie and Alice see in each other” has been the funniest question this comic has answered in a while.
Asma has heard good reviews of french kissing? good reviews of herself? I’m lost
Of other people kissing, I think, since she starts by saying she didn’t.
She had the student newspaper on her desk a minute ago, so my headcanon is that the Terminally Horny Editor(TM) started her tenure by including a dedicated column, at this point you can get full reviews of anyone by digging through the archives
I think it’s the more simple answer that she is referring to the kiss photo. That seemed pretty clear cut to so it surprise that it confuses so many. Normally i am the one not understanding anything
I don’t think she’s referencing the frontpage kiss itself so much as real life, where some people who presumably know her name have talked about it being enjoyable.
Obviously, my headcanon is meant to be silly and not a real explanation.
Or like I said above working the front desk at a college full of horny young college students has heard a lot of gossip about who’s kissing who, how good they are at it, and had a front row seat for multiple make out sessions that people started before getting back to their dorm room.
I’m choosing to assume that she means kissing Joyce specifically. It just happens that the last few people past her desk were Ethan, Becky, Jacob, Joe, and Dorothy. Ethan only gave her one star, and Becky gave her four stars and a “she coulda kissed back more” review, but everyone else gave her five stars.
I had forgotten about that whole Jacob deal. And that Raidah was dating him at the time.
Probs said before but dang the glowup since 2014 Alice is crazy
She’s so hot
She REALLY is OML
Alice is easily the hottest.
hey, off topic but accidentally tabbed through to your channel and your music bobs. it’s been fun to just casually browse through
That’s very kind of you to say, thank you.
After Jennifer accepted helping, Alice’s smile get more radiant.
It’s a huge proof that, healing yourself also helps to heal people next to you. I’m adoring each time Alice appear.
You wanna now the most funniest thing is? 14 ago around this same time there was a story line going on about Joe and Roz being in a sex scandal that Joyce and some others gave them shit about.
People thought booster was the Sicko rep but it’s actually Alice
Can we make this a regular thing? Like once per book, Alice and two other minor characters have a scene Greek chorus’ing the hot goss of ongoing events
Honestly, Alice seems really well-suited for it.
I like it. Modern storytelling needs more Greek chorus type stuff.
Maybe put them on that theatre/opera balcony like those two old muppet guys.
And we can title it the “Go ask Alice.” section.
I for one approve of this!
At last
also, raidah just jealous that joyce pulls, actually
Joyce looks Raidah dead and the eye and just whispers, “skill issue.”
…I forgot how SHORT a time it’s been. Ya know what, I think it’s probably fair that Walky didn’t have much of a reaction to getting dumped again given it was under half a week since they got back together.
Finally, a character with the right attitude!
It’s very funny to me that there are two people who seem upset that Dorothy cheated on Walky, and one is Dorothy, and the other is just someone reading about it XD
Kinda love this strip. One chaotic conversation that develops three characters at once and show the debris field from the previous event. Good writing.
Thank you, Alice, for bringing us all up to speed.
Also, love that second-panel hair.
The energy of these 3 has grown on me. I hope they become genuine friends.
Has Dave ever talked much about the fact that he’s not the least bit shy about the characters saying “fuck” but insists on the bongo/hussy silliness as far as name-calling words (or, tangential but even worse, “weenus”, the literal most cringe-inducing word I’ve ever heard)? I just don’t buy that a grown-ass college student would not say a meaner word under even the level of justified frustration Raidah is at in this moment, to say nothing of the truly dangerous circumstances that have happened in this comic. It takes me out of it every time.
I think you are cringing at the word “weenus,” and because of that you’re seeing a pattern that isn’t there. “Bongo” is just a comment section thing, I don’t remember ever seeing it in the comic itself. “Fuck” isn’t the only swear used, the characters drop the whole range of profane artillery. And none of the life-or-death situations in the comic featured one character calling another a hussy.
Bongo has been in the comic as a metajoke but its uncensored counterpart has as well. To address Lee’s main point, I don’t really think Raidah calling Joyce a hussy is a problem here? It serves a comedic function to call back to the language Joyce used to refer to herself, and that function wouldn’t be fulfilled by Raidah calling her a skank, slut, whore, conga, what have you what have you.
Oh this is how I learn the c word is also censored. That Willis, always three moves ahead…
Oh, I like that. “A parallel to Joyce using ‘hussy’ on herself” makes it seem a little better since I actually can believe Joyce actually using that word.
Joyce did once express an ambition to be an ‘alpha bongo’ like Billie, much to Ruth’s confusion.
There was an incident in the comments a while back involving Roz that led Willis to the conclusion that they could not trust us to use the B-word responsibly. However it’s still used in the comic occasionally. I had a complaint at one point that there was a strip that I couldn’t link in the comments anymore because the URL was getting munged by the bongo censor, but Willis kindly went back and changed the strip URL to be censor-friendly.
Otherwise, most of the cringy pseudo-swears come from Joyce, Walky, or occasionally Becky, who all have immature vocabulary issues for various reasons, even if they’ve all gotten onto the F-bomb scoreboard now. (I just had a vision in my head of Joyce, with Joe for the first time, crying, “Yes! Yes! Fuck my kapoodle!”) The other characters are not afraid to talk like grown-ups. Sarah even dropped the c-word once, though it was mostly obscured.
I have to agree that the hussy thing is bit weird, because I don’t think anyone has used that word unironically in real life since someone’s grandmother in 1957. I can see Joyce using because of growing up in an ultra-repressed environment, but Raidah doesn’t seem particularly repressed. I would definitely have expected her to use less Victorian language.
She seems to think herself as better than other people though, like she chastised one of her old friends for using the R-word at Dina. I can kind of imagine that she’d refuse to use words like “slut” and “whore”.
Is it just me, or is Alice’s facial expression just about three notches more intense than everyone else’s in the scene when she appears? (complimentary)
Seems like most of Raidah’s statements centers around how she blames Joyce for Jacob breaking up with her. Foreshadowing some vendetta?
I don’t think it’s foreshadowing a vendetta. I think it’s just an open vendetta. No subtlety, no hinting. We know and I’m pretty sure even Joyce knows Raidah doesn’t like her.
Okay, how Billie and Alice wound up together makes total sense now.
If Joyce is DYW, then Alice is the comments section. It’s chaos gremlins all the way down.
Ok I have not been a fan of a lot of this arc, but I’m 100% here for Alice.
“Good reviews”! 😀
Oh no, Alice. You’re a natural disaster. You will cause… a lot. A lot of a lot.
Also, I’m going to take a wild guess and say Asma is into Alice. It’s the least sarcastic thing we’ve ever heard from her (out of maybe three or four conversations, mind you). In fact, it’s even showing a bit of… interest. And also, it’s instant fan-favourite Alice. Only Sal could pull as effortlessly. And apparently Joyce, for whatever reason.
Well, Alice is a from a different dorm, so actually has an excuse for not knowing Asma’s name.
I’m wondering if Raidah knew Asma’s name before the last panel…
The way she repeats it when Asma says it makes me think not.
Since I doubt Raidah would think someone who has to work at the front desk can do much for her career advancement, I’d say probably not.
that’s what happens when over a decade of comic covers only a few in universe months
good strip. i like that alice has 🥹 eyes in this one for some reason.
Don’t do it Asma, you don’t want anyone to know your name, you don’t want to French anyone with a name, you don’t want to get sucked into this whirlwind, the way of the side character is the path of safety! You get in on this nonsense and the next thing you know you’ll be held at gunpoint by a supervillain who’s sleeping with your best friend and related to the superhero trying to save you or some other such shenanigans! Stay in the background Asma, stay in the background!
Raidah, the person she doesn’t like, called her a “hussy.” That’s honestly fucking fantastic.
I was thinking about commenting on it too, especially since ‘hussy’ is such a Joyce word, but I’d never expect it from Raidah. Like it’s not out of character or anything, but it’s the sort of almost-anachronistic phrase Joyce had programmed in.
NEW SHIP UNLOCKED! ASMA & ALICE! Fight me, you cowards!
I’ll only fight if we can’t toss Jennifer Billingsworth into the ring
It’s not a dealbteaker, so welcome aboard, First Mate Mym! “Ohhhh, what do what do we do with a drunken sailor…” 🎶
*dealbreaker
AYE AYE 🫡
Honestly I’d ship Alice and basically anyone at this point, she’s been consistently great every time she appears.
I see alice loves gossip
Alice gets Jennifer back in Raidah’s good graces!
Alice: Dorothy got back together with some guy even though she was having sex with Joyce a week before then.
Raidah: That makes the hussy… JOYCE! Because clearly Dorothy belongs with a guy. I’m very intelligent.
To be fair, Raidah has a very reasonable grudge against Joyce specifically, while her dislike for Dorothy is only splash damage because she’s friends with Joyce and Sarah.
It’s Raidah. Grudges form her entire worldview. She recently shattered Dorothy’s ego, in front of an appreciative audience, so her narcissistic tendencies are well sated in regards to her.
Alice is quickly making her way up my list of favorite characters.
ditto
https://bsky.app/profile/damnyouwillis.bsky.social/post/3lxmw73fw7k2g
It is honestly shocking that hiy lasted this long reading this comic
I just want to know when we’re actually going to get some Joyce gay lesbian sexbanging. All we’ve had so far is a bit of smooching.
She’s got a few fires she needs to put out right now, OK?
oh, okay
now I get why Alice and Billie were so close back in high school
Gossip Girls Gaggle
Plot Twist: Raidah hates Dorothy because she comes from the future where Dot got 90% of humanity killed by listening to Robin’s advice as a political science teacher.
This would imply Raidah dislikes people because she knows how they doom the future in her timeline. Her attempts to dissolve the relationships of the main cast are part of her efforts to prevent Judgement Day.
I love it.
*Terminator theme plays*
On August 31st, 2025, Zoomer became self-aware.
The way Raidah refuses to call anybody by their chosen names pisses me off *so much*.
Joyce… Jacob… Asma…
It’s really just Walky in this strip and Jennifer (who is going by that name at this point) that she refuses to call by their nicknames, I think?
And Lucy I think she just legitimately forgot.
Yeah, but you think it was jennifer’s idea to revert to Jennifer? I guarantee you that came from Raidah. And Walky wasn’t just in this strip, it started here:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/04-dont-stop-billie-ving/breakfast-2/
Y’know, it’s kind of subtle, but I’m getting the feeling that Alice is a gossip.
Did I miss a panel???? Dorothy and Joyce did the do???
Alice was present for Joyce vaguely talking about the time Dorothy taught her about off-label uses for laundry appliances. It was during the scene where several cast groupings ran into each other going to breakfast, and Dorothy was awkwardly failing to avoid Joyce. “You’ve met” and “Beeswax” are the strips (others linked further up.)
I’m thinking this girl and Becky would be a dangerous combination and i am eager to see them hang.