Naw, as a person who’s eaten way too much fast food, it’s Taco Bell. Well, it’s some specific subset of spices often used in Latin cuisine. Just hits the “we need some extra capacity immediately” button on its way into the gut.
They only have about seven ingredients they mash together in different combinations. Surely it can’t take too long to isolate the least trustworthy one and clear the rest.
Checked the archives and no kisses were exchanged after the Joe gifting, not until the next day after they talked to Daisy, in-between which both had already had a shower that morning as well as likely brushing their teeth before bed and after waking up, so thankfully Dorothy is in the clear there. Honestly I imagine there was an offscreen exchange like “okay but seriously you need to go brush your teeth” “oh shit will my mouth become pregernant?”
Also gonna share a little joke/anecdote because this is a strip set in and talking about Taco Bell; when I was probably about 5, I was in the backseat of the car and my parents were in the front discussing what fast food to get and they both were like “Oh, yeah, Taco Bell’s a good idea”. My disgruntled 5 year old ass screwed my face up and called up to them, “[My name] don’t like Taco Bell” and they both gave me a look and laughed, cause they were my parents so they already knew I wouldn’t eat anything from Taco Bell and were planning to get me something else from somewhere else, but it became an in joke for years afterward that if anyone mentioned Taco Bell one of my parents would reply “[My name] don’t like Taco Bell”, and I’d get in on it too. It was a fun in-joke and I still do it with my dad whenever I pick him up his Doritos locos tacos supremes.
What the heck’s in that burrito then? I feel like the concept of a burrito is the antithesis of Joyce’s food philosophy. Isn’t just a bunch of “gross” stuff touching wrapped in a tortilla?
I respect it I guess. I’d say it was a waste of money but I don’t like Taco Bell so any purchase there is a waste to me. Just beans might be a convenient workaround though in a pinch.
Oh ditto, I’m not a Taco Bell fan myself either. I just get food from literally anywhere else but when you’re out and about with another person it can be difficult to try and navigate getting food from a different place. I’m not even a big bean fan so I think if I was with someone who wanted to get taco bell I’d just grab a drink and watch them eat.
I think Joyce has actually answered this before, that certain foods operate more like a method of conveyance than food itself like the bun of a hotdog, but I could be misremembering that or made it up entirely.
And that was extremely a date. And a good one. I mean, Joyce said she’d glassed someone before and she’d do it again, and I believed her. That’s quality dating right there.
Can’t argue with that, although Taco Bell is a perfectly cromulent date if you’re broke — almost everyone can get SOMETHING to eat there, and it’s not especially pricey.
When my wife and I were first dating, half of the time I’d be taking her to Burger King – reliable, within my extremely limited budget, and we were living in San Diego at the time so going to Taco Bell would have been a capital offense.
As with most fast food places, Taco Bell operates in that “good enough to pass if you’re not in the food’s home territory” space, similarly to how Popeye’s is quite good enough if you’re not actually in the American South but you’d be a fool to go to one in Georgia or Louisiana.
I’m genuinely shocked that it’s plain bean burritos she eats and not plain cheese quesadillas. To me, the latter thing is way more people’s Safe Food at Taco Bell.
Honestly my food issues have been a lifelong source of anxiety over potential relationships, so I really feel this one. Your feeling I can feel deeply.
Well, I have been in the dark. I thought tacos were hard shells. But these things seem to be variations on what I would call a wrap. But I like the idea of masa flour ones, being allergic to wheat.
I have not and will not do that, and recommend in the strongest possible terms that you do not either.
(My prediction/assumption is that the search results will include things you cannot unsee.)
As much as I do agree with Dorothy’s assessment that the drinks date should totally be viewed As A Date retroactively, I disagree with her assessment that Taco Bell is an insufficient first date for them. You’re dating Joyce “Hopeless Romantic” Brown, Dorothy, she could romanticize a first date at Blowjob Cat.
(My agreement with Joyce about the Crunchwrap depends on whether it’s a Crunchwrap Supreme or a Black Bean Crunchwrap. Crunchwrap Supremes are delicious, but I do not fuck with black beans.)
I’ve also noticed a habit where Joyce is eager to define their relationship by one method, only for Dorothy to shut it down. Dorothy doesn’t want to view Mutual Laundry Masturbation as sex and Joyce does, Dorothy doesn’t want Taco Bell to be their first date and Joyce does, Dorothy explicitly stated her desire to dress Joyce Sexy-Like but shut down Joyce’s interest in having lingerie bought for her… It really does feel like the two of them aren’t on the same page here.
Which leads me to say this: if this leads to Dorothy and Joyce realizing their romantic attraction is not the same thing as their romantic compatibility and that they want wildly different things from their relationship, leading them to break up very soon after and subsequently grapple with the fact that they torpedoed every bridge they had over a four-day fling, I will not only recant every kvetch I have ever kvetched, but I will personally draw myself buying and eating a hat.
Also I’d like to take the Taco Bell being a topic of the strip as an opprotunity to point out that the quesarito (also known as the only menu item worth a damn at that place) is back at Taco Bell
Anyone else have a Taco Bell situation with their partner? Mine I can’t kiss if he’s recently eaten a banana or deli meat. I don’t care how long ago it was I can still smell it until the mouth is clean!!
Oh joy now I have to have a tab open to understand what everyone is talking about.
Americans and their propensity to bloviate about fast food is one of the bigger annoyances as a Not American. My god do you people love talking about fast food.
Yeah but most cultures have like. Real food to brag about. I’m argentinian, for example, and we have the beast meat in the fucking world. And Dulce de Leche.
Some American food worth of bragging about is Southern BBQ as well as breakfasts. Honestly there are other meals worth bragging about in this country too but being a melting pot means sometimes the best meals to discuss are Americanized versions of meals from other countries that were brought here and evolved over time.
I like making fun of deep fried butter as much as the next person but lets not pretend like some states don’t make some amazing food either. Southern BBQ, Tex-Mex fusion, a ton of Gastronomy, Cajun Food, Soul Food.
But it’s educational. I learn so much about the weird things USAvians eat and have, in my time, found hilarity in trying to explain the weird things that UKavians eat. I might even have found a new thing to eat. Masa flour was an awesome discovery for me.
Dorothy seems to be struggling a bit with eating. Possibly Joyce isn’t eating, just holding and talking. Maybe this is a metaphor for something. Not a petit four anyway.
With how big of a buffer Willis has, I wonder if there would be a benefit to Willis doing like a binge drop of the next arc/book or two-worth of strips so readers could understand the bigger picture of what Willis is going for with the plot development that occurred over this last half-year. Because of how great the emotional fallout has been for so many characters, readers are simply too impatient to see the narrative consequences play-out at the normal daily pace.
Honestly the buffer is something that’s a big benefit for Willis as it is, because he has months of work stacked up ahead of time so if anything happens IRL, he doesn’t have to rush to any deadlines. And considering how most webcomics might update once a week, if you’re LUCKY, I think the daily pace is something that’s getting a bit… taken for granted, maybe? I mean, I’m a longtime and still current reader of Ava’s Demon and that comic has had years long hiatuses in the past.
Oh it’s no doubt something we take for granted, but I think it’s also what “allows” (for lack of a better word) for DoA to have such a relatively slow pacing narratively compared to a lot of other web-comics. Because Willis has the ability to chug out so many strips to the extent that they have such a huge buffer, DoA’s pacing naturally trends towards a decompressed pacing style, and such a style can be very frustrating for readers when its covering certain subject matter.
I get that but it also still isn’t necessarily just a DOA thing. Like Ava’s Demon, the comic I mentioned? Love it, it’s beautiful art. In-comic, however, we’ve also been on events that have happened over the course of… maybe a couple days? And the comic is 13 years old. At least DOA has had 6 months in-comic over the course of 15 years.
This is a problem with all comics and long form stories told over time in general. I read a webcomic called Grrl Power. It’s a silly comic about superheroes with lots of gags mixed with action. It’s technically still 2012 the year the comic started and the main character hasn’t even finished her first year of training.
Of how about One Piece. The most popular manga and possibly comic story in the world. In over 25 years of publication only 2 years have passed in the current story if you don’t count all the flashbacks. Ten tears of that story was also only 3 months and infamously over one year of reading was actually only one day in the manga. I think Oda may have beaten that record now though.
Sure but – and I want to stress that I know you mean nothing bad by this – the whole point of having a buffer, is to have excess labour done in case of an emergency or life event, without it causing economic stress. It’s technically entirely possible to just drop 2 months of strips at once! But, when you break it down, you’re asking a worker to dump two months of their economic livelihood on us in the span of one day, so that we can all maybe stop being whiny babies about not getting instant gratification from their labour.
You wouldn’t ask someone in any other industry, to sacrifice two full years worth of their paid vacations for your mere convenience, right? ‘Cause that’s ultimately the magnitude of this ask: “please completely devalue a huge amount of your labour, so that we might have a little bit more fun immediately.”
At the end of the day, the comic being somewhat less satisfying, to some of the audience, for a few months time, is not a valid reason for Willis to throw 2 months worth of their career into the bin just to placate some of their audience. Nobody in any industry should be doing that for anyone.
Throwatron is 100% correct. If somebody needs a 2 month stack of strips in a single delivery, they need to bookmark and take a two month break before returning.
In purely economic terms, it might make sense if the comic was seeing a big drop off in terms of views/patreon subscribers/etc and Willis thought that seeing where he was going would bring the audience back. Or at least stop the decline.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that’s the case though. Obviously, he’s got the data and we don’t, but I don’t think there’s reason to think readers are leaving in droves.
Willis has pretty explicitly said the exact opposite on their Bluesky, so I absolutely agree they don’t have any reason to go torching two months of their buffer just to appease a few people who can’t wait for the comic to chug along.
I honestly doubt the people who are complaining the most would put the money out to buy the books of extra strips anyway. The people who want the most say in your work are usually the ones engaging in it completely for free.
This is the way. Nothing I, or anyone else, have to complain and whine about would justify Willis throwing out a ton of buffer for us to read in advance. That’s not only bad business….but like, you and I know damn well it wouldn’t actually solve the real issue most of the “pacing” complaints are actually about.
Which is that we’re bored. That’s the issue. And a ton of buffer being released isn’t guaranteed to solve that – I can actually imagine pretty clearly in my minds eye 2 months of comics being dumped and having us still in the part of the story that is DoJo fluff, and not DoJo plot – so as far as I’m concerned, there’s functionally zero benefit to him doing it.
I kind of feel I’m winning on both ends. I get to enjoy the Joyce and Dorothy interactions and then I get to enjoy all the drama of people dropping in every day to inform us how much they hate it.
I think if Willis was going to drop any spoilers, it really should just be in the form of a vague statement. Definitely don’t agree with the idea of burning a huge chunk of the buffer, even as someone rather unsatisfied with the story since the tear gas wedding.
I would NEVER advocate for Willis’ work ethic in building such a huge buffer to be rewarded by having to rip a huge chunk out of it just to deal with a portion of the audience being dissatisfied.
Readers who cannot wait for the daily comic strip to play out one strip per day… probably just aren’t the target readers? Why burn his buffer and make a bunch of extra work for himself just to mollify a dozen or so readers who are impatient? Seems silly.
That ”dozen or so” is dismissive and rude, and I suspect with full intention. You have made your disdain plain as day many times before, and it’s not helping your argument any here.
You don’t know me, please do your best to bear that in mind when deciding you know how I feel when I write any particular comment.
I meant “the dozen or so who are impatient” because I don’t think “impatience” is the prevailing reason people are upset about what’s going on in the comic. Not because I’m under the mistaken impression that there are only a dozen or so people upset.
You being upset doesn’t mean I was trying to upset you. I also don’t care in the slightest what your opinion is on “my argument”… whatever you believe that to be.
“It” being any situation in which I didn’t do shit. Like this one. Stop fucking blaming me for everything that goes wrong in your life, you professional fucking victim.
Based on what Willis has said about his Patreon numbers etc, I suspect that Nymph is MUCH closer to the actuality of the situation than not — most of the readership seems to be perfectly fine with how things are going, even if there are dozens of us occasionally griping in the comments.
I think folks have made excellent points about why dropping a few months of strips in one day doesn’t make much sense.
I *do* think having the buffer so prominently displayed is making folks’ pacing problems worse.
Because, at least in my experience reading this comic, the strips in the buffer really seem to be locked in- they don’t get changed at all. Not even the alt-text. It was a big deal when Willis said that they were going to add a few strips here and there to increase Asma & Raidah’s roles and the buffer changed to reflect that, despite it being *very* clear that Willis was adding and adjusting a few strips, not throwing out months of completed ones.
At least personally, the existence of such a big buffer means I wish Willis wasn’t so tight-lipped about upcoming storylines. If Willis would be willing to say “yeah, they’re cute right now, but trust me, the other shoe is going to drop in X months’ time or so” I think folks would be more sanguine. But honestly the way they’ve been presenting folks criticizing their work, it’s making me expect more of the same going forward.
Couple of reasons: I remember a strip coming out where the alt-text was Willis talking about how they found out Kevin Conroy passed. Obviously that strip aired several months after Mr. Conroy passed.
Willis commenting about how incredulous they are that commenters think alt-text written months ago applies to a comment made the day before.
And a number of other alt-texts that only make sense if they were written alongside the comic- like “today I hit a 10 month buffer” being an example.
Good thing Dorothy put a stop to qualifying the Taco Bell date as their first one. That has proven to be a bad omen for the longevity of your relationship.
Tacos come in two/ three varieties: flour tortilla (soft shell, as Walky is eating here) and corn tortilla (can be soft or crunchy/ hard shell).
The pre-crunchy taco shells bought in a store are often considered white person tacos or less authentic/ more commercial. A corn tortilla can be fried to make it a crunchy taco.
If you’re from certain parts of Southwest America, you could also get a frybread taco! But it looks different.
I’m from certain parts of Southwest America and this is apparently very important to me.
I’m a simple bongo with simple Taco Bell needs: Crunchwrap supreme, swap the tomatoes for onions. Pair with a soft taco with avocado ranch sauce and a refresca whose caffeine count is determined by how badly my migraine needs it. Lunch: achieved.
Physically? Still a lot of pain but at least its a little less now, also less redness, more itching. Just finished my last day of Mupirocin, still got a few days left on Keflex
Mentally? agony honestly, trying my best to just get comfortably numb
Nope, I still don’t find these two cute. Not when they started off with cheating and continued with treating a whole bunch of other characters really shitty.
Joyce being “heroically gay” and missing the point of the actions she’s doing having consequences to hurt her friends and loved ones as well as possibly ruin the protest’s messaging.
(Because Bulmeria isn’t X related to the RL state, I fully believe that Joyce barely knows the country exists)
While I certainly understand the reasons for not explicitly making the protests about Gaza, I hadn’t actually considered the fundie support for Israel in order to fulfill end-times prophecy angle. Those would have been fun discussions.
He’s hinted with great deft that Joyce has…opinions on Islam with her reaction to going with Raidah to her mosque when invited. Imagine what Joyce has been raised to believe about Palestine and its government.
I say deft because Willis isn’t repeating what is probably some pretty awful opinions that Joyce will have to confront even if she’s rejected other parts of her upbringing.
*clears throat* I’m uh, I’m going to take a sustained absence from the comments. I believe I’ve forgotten the human and need to take a step back to re-calibrate.
I was half doing this already but uh just wanted to make a comment apologizing to Willis specifically. At my best of times I’ve just been an annoying whiney bongo the past few months and at worst I’ve been uh pretty fucking toxic I won’t deny.
So uh, please, honestly, everyone enjoy. I’ll see y’all again in a few weeks
Willis is giving the game away by revealing that every character that isn’t Joyce or Dorothy is an NPC that turns off scripting and stands by until they enter either of the two’s activation perimeters. /s
See also the divisive creation of the concept of “haters” who want Joyce branded with a scarlet letter etc. It’s the me sowing ha-ha this is awesome me reaping oh no! meme.
And I would argue that the negative feedback has by and large been in good faith, honest, and constructive.
Not that I am not sympathetic to today’s situation (For latecomers the hater thread, gone at time of writing this, was the first post and Willis themself responded asking why it could not have been left until later in the day), but if you write a divisive plot then foster the idea of sides amongst your community, you’re going to get sides amongst your community.
I also think it is unfair to ask there be no negativity in these comments, in the general sense. This is not something Willis has said, to be clear, but something other commentators have. If you are enjoying something seeing others dislike it isn’t fun, sure, but the attitude of if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all gets toxic real fast. Like it’s great u til something happens you don’t like and then you’re shut down.
I will admit bias, those who saw my lengthy post on “””””bulmeria””””” a few days ago will know why, but I’m still going to argue that the vast, overwhelming majority of critique here comes from fans who are expressing their various issues and complaints about something they have loved by a creator they have supported for many, many years, and want to enjoy again.
I know this is true because I’ve seen people say this, and far too often it was accompanied by a sadness that their attempts at constructive feedback was being characterised as wanting Joyce branded with a scarlet letter, or being unhappy that Dorothy wasn’t being scolded by a man.
Honestly I think it’s a pacing issue at this point. Joe has been left alone for months. Becky is finally getting some storyline but it’s still moving along bits and pieces. And I think people are getting frustrated when we keep cutting back to Joyce/Dorothy being coupley.
Considering how long the storyline has dragged on and how much heated discussion it’s brought up due to everything surrounding it, feels like we could almost do with another Halloween-esque timeskip.
Yeah, I think the storyline is fine in the broad strokes. It’s *just* the pacing that’s getting to me. So many strips that are just Dorothy and Joyce being cute. Even when it’s one like today’s which I’d probably like in other circumstances, it’s just kinda gotten old.
Today feels like them just being cute – which as you say would be fine if there hadn’t been so much of it lately.
They were also being cute yesterday though, but they were being cute in a way tied to advancing the story. They were talking about how to react to Dina and Becky splitting up, not just about them dating. A lot of the hater reaction still seemed to be just “More of them being cute”. I didn’t get that.
Best I can approximate is that because the protest/them getting together event spawned so many other threads, very few of which have actually been followed up on or has been left to dissatisfying exploration. Like Joe hasn’t been revisited, the protest response strips had to be inserted in (and people still aren’t satisfied with them), Walky has treated with indifference or light mockery. Becky is finally getting something and her plot with Dina keeps getting broken up and making baby steps of progress.
Because of all this high pressure to finally advance some of these threads, strips of ‘cute Doyce stuff’ is met with frustration because it’s a combo of both ‘this isn’t progressing the stuff we want to see’ and ‘this feels like us trying to be sold the controversial/unpopular ship’.
I think if the dust had settled on a lot of this stuff, the cutesy bits wouldn’t be having that big a response. We’ve seen a lot of cute stuff before with Danny/Sal or Becky/Dina during less big plot-filled books and they were received a lot better.
But yeah, yesterday did advance the story a little. This one is a bit more stalling, so it’s got a bit worse reception.
I had a pretty negative reaction yesterday, it had more to do with the fact that we cut away to Becky for one day before cutting back. The Becky stuff was new and seemed like it would go somewhere interesting (even if it led to Anna whom is a character I greatly dislike). Cutting back to Joyce and Dorothy guaranteed another “they’re so cute squish” strip if not multiple because that’s been the general pattern. Today’s strip could be omitted entirely and nothing happen, and I heard the preview looks like it goes back to Becky tomorrow so like… what was the point of cutting away? Cutting back?
It’s just very frustrating to read because I just want to find out what happens next.
I’ve been reading Willis comics long enough to know that one day soon he’s going to be ripping our hearts out and then I’m going to wish that I had more memories of Joyce/Dorothy enjoying each other to sustain me.
Right with you there — today’s strip is objectively good, but it takes on a lot of additional weight from the fact that DoJo have FELT like a boat anchor on the pace of events, not to mention the fact that it feels like less of “an ensemble comic with a couple focal points” and more like “they’re the main characters for real now”.
At the same time, I’m sure there are lots of people who were satisfied by how Willis chose to address the protest stuff (me not included) and just stopped talking about it. The cheating stuff is taking prominence now because it was written as lightly and non-obtrusively as possible, has gone completely unaddressed, *and* a whole bunch of paratext stuff I’m not gonna get into involving author communication. It’s in many ways a microcosm of the pacing complaint, which is itself a microcosm of the “can we get to the part of the story that’s actually interesting (read: “part I’m interested in”) please” complaint.
It’s pretty difficult to compare the different responses because one of them is directly about moral and ethical metanarrative decisions, and the other firmly about the long-standing structure of the comic getting in the way of enjoyment for a segment of the audience. The nature of the two is fundamentally different.
The more Willis doubles down an feeling hurt and lashing out on ”haters” of his perfect cinnamon rolls, the more bridges they burn.
DoA was a favorite of mine for a decade, and I hope it recovers. I’ve been frankly shocked and disappointed by what I see in Willis’ social media posts.
Yeah. Like, I wouldn’t be half as irritated with things if the pot hadn’t been deliberately stirred with polls, mocking posts, etc. like, all I wanted was better pacing and an interesting character arc for Walky (I don’t think I was ever on team “Joe will regress”). Didn’t like that the single most visible bisexual couple in the strip started by cheating, esp because the other bi couples have not been seen in like half a year—and as a bisexual person who recently was ok’d to open up their marriage to explore that [amusingly influenced by this storyline], being lumped in with others as a homophobic bigot not even by association but just because I had basic empathy for the characters… it did not feel good.
And I don’t feel bad for feeling bad for Joe and Walky. This isn’t the first time I’ve been shamed for feeling bad for people who frankly deserve better. I don’t feel bad for wanting to see something happen. I don’t feel bad for participating in the hater thread because at least I wasn’t ragging on people’s days too hard outside of it (though I’m fallible and have a temper.) I do feel bad that this has negatively affected Willis personally.
Anyways, I’ve been weaning myself off the comic by checking it later and later. I have trouble quitting a daily habit, but I got the message a while ago (probably when people suddenly started jumping on Yotomoe who has been a longtime commenter and a person in the comment section whom I’ve seen as pretty consistently respectful and enthusiastic) that I probably shouldn’t be part of the viewership anymore. Doyce isn’t my jam and the story isn’t going to shift on to any of the threads I find interesting anytime soon.
I’m pretty sure the complaints about 9 Chickweed Lane aren’t “it’s furthering the harmful stereotype that all bisexuals cheat on each other” and more “it’s turned the only gay character it has straight during Pride Week, and it’s also full of horrificly sexist and borderline paedophilic commentary and art”.
That’s very different from “college teenager cheats on her boyfriend and is not sufficiently guilty about it”.
If you look at what Willis said at the time, they were mostly talking about the cheating bi stereotype.
Hypocracy isn’t some grave sin or anything. We all do it, and even then you’re right that 9CL and DoA are very, very different comics with very different contexts for said bi cheating. It is in no way any sort of meaningful commentary on DoA’s current quality or plot to mention those posts.
Well said. I’ve been reading this comic for a very long time, and I feel like it’s rapidly gone downhill in the past several months. And Willis’ responses to criticism so far have not inspired much confidence in me that it will get better.
Well, the basic message is there, but it could be improved in so many ways. At a minimum you should throw in some antidotes about how the downfall of the comic has personally ruined your life and the lives of those you love. You could hire an editor to punch up your text and an insult artist to help you get more pointed digs at Willis.
All too often it just seems like you are recycling the same basic complaints with no new material, and I can’t tell you how disappointing this is to those of us who come here every day to read your critique of the strip. Sometimes it like you just don’t care.
Thanks for the explanation on what happened. I only read this comic when i wake up and was wondering where the thread was and why the mood was so off. I thought it was brigaded by jerks again and/or if Willis made a statement somewhere
My take on Joyce and Dorothy is I like the plot but I want it to be a disaster because I find disasters in DOA fun to read. I don’t want anyone to hate on the characters because they’re the protagonists I’ve followed for decades.
I think most people reading suspect we’re building to an even bigger personal meltdown than the Becky/Dina situation, but until that happens we’re stuck in a feedback loop of “the end of the world is taking forever. The many nonplussed reactions in-story have also not helped. I could forgive somebody not used to Willis’ style and tempo concluding that they’re taking the easy way out in the name of yuri.
There won’t be conflict with Joyce and Dorothy until the author falls out of love with them. They’re “endgame”, remember? We hurried past all the conflict to get to the cutesy lovey-dovey soft part.
“I’d workshopped different kinds of Joyce/Dorothy getting together moments, and something where Joyce, like, bodily forces herself through some kind of similar barrier to get to Dorothy, to save her, to be with her, that kind of vibe was always on my mind. And maybe that happens in some way later. Years later. Maybe a pre-timeskip moment the next time I do one of those, like for the strip’s 20th anniversary.
and whoops as i put things together, i realized it was happening here, now”
It’s an assumption. I’ve asked repeatedly and no one ever answers with any example of Willis ever saying this. Sometimes the comments get an idea in their head and start talking about it like it’s a solid fact, which gets passed on and on and on until the person you’re asking has literally no idea if it’s true or not, they just know they’re annoyed about it.
Okay? That has nothing to do with whether or not Willis considers them “endgame” or whether they’ll have conflict or not. It’s just an admission that the story moved faster than Willis originally planned.
That happens sometimes when you’re writing. Unless you can show me something that says “they are endgame and will have no conflict” then I’m sorry but you’re just repeating previous incorrect things and throwing “proof” that has nothing to do with what you said.
A little sad my pouring-my-heart-out comment got vanished alongside the thread. Ah, well. Probably for the best. A few brief shining moments, anyway. 😆
Needfuldoer’s is funny because because days of the week are also dates and every seventh day of the week is a Sunday (sundae). IntangibleMatters is funny because dates and prunes are both dinosaurs.
Does anyone else here fells drained after staying a bit too long in these comments? Like mentally exhausted and discomforted, the opposite of a serotonin boost.
I did back during the period where two halves of the commenters were straight slinging mud at each other and accusing one another of moral degeneracy for 1000 comments a day, but at this point, most of the squabbles are a lot less high stakes, so it’s easy to determine when I can glaze over an entire thread within the first 2-3 replies, and it’s easy to accept that even if I had something to add, that adding it at that time and place, wouldn’t be constructive for me or for those discussions.
Things have mostly downgraded from everybody being monstrously unfair to each other, to occasional terse dialogues between a few people who happen to have opposing-but-particular views on one granular thing; the first thing triggers me, the second thing, I can accept, through choosing not to pay attention to it.
This isn’t directed at anyone in particular, but holy crap y’all, learn to check out on comments/threads that are obviously going to enrage you, and convince you to waste a huge chunk of your energy and mental composure on squabbles that ultimately do not matter. I get everybody getting defensive when people were being called moral defectives on a daily basis; I was very inflammatory in response to that, and I don’t make any excuses for it, because to me, it was something worth being inflammatory about.
IMO (and YMMV), nothing has risen to that timbre of disagreement since. The time for people to at least try to calm down, and maybe just individually avoid the topics that are going to consistently trigger them, already started weeks ago. We had a collective moral trauma within our readership; it makes sense a lot of people are still on edge; but, quite a lot of us, are choosing daily to stay on that edge, because we don’t want to back down.
At the end of the day, if someone’s take or pattern of posting is so abhorrent to you as a reader, it’s probably more logical to accept the premise that trying to engage that person is probably a huge waste of time and energy. If it feels like someone’s takes are so alien to you, that it’s as if they aren’t reading the same comic you are? Or, if their emotional reactions are so different from yours? Trust that instinct, that maybe trying to force that dialogue, and bring that person around to your way of thinking, will just end with you feeling like you screamed at a wall for an hour, and the wall inevitably won.
None of us here are as derelict or unreasonable, as our fear and anger will try to convince us they are. Most of us are mostly reasonable, most of the time. Some people don’t get along, and that’s fine. We just need to maintain an effort to care for ourselves and our mood and our time, as opposed to feeling compelled into prodding one anothers’ worst impulses, because we all individually deserve that from and for ourselves, let alone how it affects other commenters.
I don’t see why you should either. But I wonder if I could ask a favor and get a link back to where people were posting a thousand posts a day accusing each other of moral degeneracy.
Yeah, same. Earlier in the storyline when there was a lot of “Sarah’s queerphobic!!!”, weird amounts of vitriol being slung at the brown female characters, people who cared about the cheating storyline as a proper storyline being accused of just “wanting them to be yelled at by man”, the comments honestly made me kinda sick to read, both here and on Patreon where they’re usually chiller. The amount of people slinging shit to defend their otp with their lives, they kinda crossed a line imo? Like, genuinely felt kinda unsafe to be around, as a brown woman in particular since that’s the unfortunate pattern that showed up in the comic. And ofc, irl circumstances played a part too, with the hurricane making me a little more sensitive to those things. Ngl there are some people I still side eye as probably a lil racist from the intensity of reaction to their white girls getting pushback from a black girl. So I stopped, I didn’t even look at the main site comments for days. And I honestly felt weird and guilty as shit when this ship first got canonized and the comments were complete dissonance from my own feelings. I mean I posted a whole soliloquy about how weird and broken it felt to get nothing from them, half joking and obviously hyperbolic but, y’know. When I get that dramatic it’s usually to try and express real feelings without inviting a hate dogpile. Idk. The comments feel safe to me for the first time in months, I’m sorry for other people it’s the opposite
Seconding your last sentence, I do wish other people were as comfortable in the comments as I am now. Being a black reader these last few months has been 1) weird watching the comic pit Joyce nearly exclusively against black and brown women, followed by comments both here and on Patreon getting HELLA racist real fast in response, and 2) wishing Willis would just get back to the Sal/Walky racism storylines because ironically enough, I was immensely more comfortable back then in comparison. I can only cross my fingers we are past that point in the story, but I will still be making my snide little remarks (outside of the comment section, naturally) about Joyce being the comic’s equivalent to Agenda Piece Roronoa Zoro.
Cousin thank you for this bc honestly, sometimes I wonder if I’m overinflating this stuff in my head so it feels really good to see it’s not just me. Like I fully expect the racists to rear their heads when Linda’s around and during Sal’s storylines, and they usually get shut down pretty quick. But fuuuck thos few months where dojo was getting pushback from explicitly biwoc people came out and showed their faces in a really unexpected way. And the shit was so damn uncomfortable. Like hell, Li yesterday used the metaphor of going to a bar and realizing none of your people are there anymore. That shit was like looking up from my drink and realizing the bar had an uncomfortable amount of white people giving the few brown folks around the stink eye.
No, but I tend to just not come around when I don’t want to be here, or I ignore people I don’t want to deal with. I highly recommend it! No one is paying you to be here, if it’s not making the happy chemicals I really support you finding somewhere else to be that does.
No offense but this isn’t that helpful, at least to me, because i already do all that you mention and still fell this way when i come around here. Again no offense, but i asked if anyone else fell the way i described, and since you said you don’t i woild had prefer you didn’t join in. I don’t know how to phrase this in a way that doesn’t sound mean or accusatory, i don’t want to mean it that way.
Personally, while I acknowledge that Joyce and Dorothy cheating was dumb and probably unethical, I like the ship; more importantly however, It seems like it is something in character for both of them to do. In theory, Joyce wants to be ethical, but we have already seen that attraction can get the best of her, as with Jacob. Dorothy has a history of liking Walky while simultaneously distancing herself from him when she’s overwhelmed, and doesn’t listen to him or consider how her actions will make him feel as much as she probably should.
All this is to say, there is much truth to the claim that Dorothy and Joyce are imperfect people making imperfect decisions (which is something that people may want to forget?); however, I don’t think this is bad writing on Willis’s part.
– hater containment thread was the first comment, for once
– Willis commented at some point to the tune of “oh jeez couldn’t this have been later” (I wasn’t here for this, just going off what I’ve seen in other comments)
– thread has been nuked again
I consistently get the feeling that Willis feels frustrated and hurt about how badly a lot of this has landed, and is unable or unwilling to accept the criticism.
The way he keeps taunting the unhappy readers in his social media posts really doesn’t feel healthy.
I am consistently on the side of ‘people should be allowed to express their opinions and criticisms of a work’. However, I think there’s a point where the author really doesn’t have to accept certain criticism. Like, the way the protest was handled? The lack of Muslim representation? Completely understandable and Willis has been pretty accepting of that.
Criticism about Dorothy and Joyce’s relationship however, I think that’s going to have to be accepted, by both Willis and the commenters, as an ‘agree to disagree’ thing. Certain readers don’t have to enjoy Dorothy and Joyce’s relationship. However, that doesn’t mean that Willis can no longer tell the story he wishes to tell with them just because people don’t like it. It reminds me of Last Jedi, and how people disliking that meant literally everything from that movie got thrown in the trash and replaced by the most milquetoast MacGuffin shit that was meant to make people as dissatisfied as possible.
I still rage over the bullshit that was everyone hating The Last Jedi. It was, strictly speaking, not a good movie technically (it CANNOT stand on its own, plot wise. I think that should be a basic requirement even for sequels). Rose was handled horribly [not because Rose is Rose, but Johnson made the rookie mistake of having two characters that could fulfill identical roles. Rose should’ve done what the dude that betrayed them did. She didn’t and thus had no purpose to the plot. Could’ve been C-3PO for all that was added. Girly should’ve been allowed to be important.]
But the scene with the ship kamikazing itself was breathtaking. I did genuinely love the messages in it. I loved everything involving Luke, Rey, and Kylo Ren. It was a creative movie with a bunch of good parts in it, and I love Rian Johnson as a director even if I thought he was given too much too early in his career. And it set up so many interesting plot threads.
Plot threads which were immediately thrown out or glossed over in favor of Abrams frankly boring inability to be imaginative for even a second. Can blame Disney, can blame whoever you want, but everything Abrams touches turns to ash across other properties so he’s gonna be the target of my disdain.
Agreed, like the sideline on Vegas planet where Finn the child soldier re-learns that war is bad because it negatively affects children, that was annoying. I get why Laura Dern kept Poe out of the loop but man was it a forced conflict, so much other stuff was great, though. I loved Rey being a nobody. It’s better that way. She built up her parents abandoning her because such cruelty surely needs a forgivable explanation, they totally meant to come back to her except no, they traded her for money and bounced. Except no now her dad was Palpatine’s son/clone because we can’t have a main character NOT have some important lineage! And they didn’t mean to sell and abandon her, they were saving her life all along! Hooray! I love retcons that make everything weaker and useless!
But the scene with the ship kamikazing itself was breathtaking.
Yes, at the expense of turning hyperspace into… space. The whole conceit of finding a way around Einstein was lost by someone who evidently didn’t understand it.
I get weird about this one, because the penumbra of fiction around the movies has ALWAYS had this idea that there’s a moment or two wherein hyperspace and real space are kinda meshed, especially around large gravity wells — there’s a mission in the original X-Wing flight sims that revolves around you trying to make a hyperspace jump and failing due to something in the way, but your ship definitely travels faster than it “should” for a couple of moments and you end up across the battlefield from where you were. In the dialogue it’s kinda hinted at that you survive this because of some inherent safety features of the hyperdrive, and a lot of us fans who played it had a brief moment of “hmmm” about that. There’s also a lot of an idea in the extended universe of novels that no one really understands how hyperdrives work –they’re essentially archaeotech that works even though the principles behind it are lost. So it felt less “unprecedented” for me and more “honestly, kinda weird that Holdo’s the first person to try that”
Frankly, I felt it was most more trivialized by that brief scene in Rise of Skywalker where it’s implied someone killed an ordinary Star Destroyer that way rather than a dreadnought + an absurdly bigger dreadnought having JUST enough mass shadow that the interaction happened.
I acknowledge that the Holdo Maneuver blew a bigger hole in canon than it did through the dreadnaught.
But yeah, the cinematography of that shot was well worth it.
I’ll co-sign everything Bittersweet said with the exception of Luke. Mark Hamill was disappointed with Luke’s arc and I tend to agree, I think there could have been better choices made.
I knew I was going to hate 9 from the first scene, the hyperspace “chase”. Lots of ink has been spilled talking about how Disney turned 9 into nothing but fanservice for older white guy Star Wars fans, but I’ve been ride-or-die Star Wars for 30 years and I still hated the damn movie. Because the fanservice was all *really shitty*. It threw out all sense of logic and continuity in order to make shallow callbacks. “Somehow, Palpatine has returned” really sums up the whole thing.
My favorite thing to complain about that hopefully y’all haven’t seen ten million times is that Rey should not, in any sort of consistent universe, be allowed to “accidentally a force lightning”. That stuff is supposed to be the darkest of dark side powers. It’s literally weaponized hate. She was trying to *save Chewie*, not kill whoever was on that transport.
They just don’t get it, and refuse to acknowledge how toxic their shiny new OTP (which they wrote from the ground up) actually is when you look at the entire body of work as a whole. And of course don’t forget all the plot potential that was abandoned so we could fast forward to where we are today…
Now we get cutesy soft nothing and filler (Becky’s strip the other day) while we hear both “I’m sorry about the thing I apparently did wrong” and “ahahahahaha suck it, paladins!” at the same time.
The most toxic thing about them is that yes, they both did cheat on their boyfriends when they got together. Something which has been solved by them breaking up with their boyfriends. That’s it. That’s the only toxic thing about their relationship.
Only if you completely ignore Dorothy’s possessiveness of Joyce rooted in her unaddressed post-kidnapping trauma, and the strong parent/child overtones of their dynamic. (And Dorothy’s habit of treating her partners as projects that need her to fix them.)
They are. The same. Age. I am so fucking tired of people insisting “erm Dorothy is Joyce’s mother, therefore the relationship is toxic and incest”. She is not actually her mother. I know Jennifer said she was ‘like Joyce’s mom’. That is a hyperbolic statement. It still doesn’t mean they have a PARENT/CHILD OVERTONE TO THEIR DYNAMIC.
They absolutely do have a bunch of trauma going on with their relationship, they’ve both been through a lot of things together, but them having PTSD doesn’t automatically make the relationship toxic.
It’s about their behavior, not their relative ages. If we’re going to get this hung up on semantics, pretend I wrote “codependent” or “caretaker/dependent” up there instead.
As far as we’ve seen, Dorothy always positions herself in a parental/caretaking role in her relationships. She found the life drawing class for Joyce and bought her the sketch pad. She made the optometrist appointment then physically dragged her to it. She goaded her into picking up her birth control prescription.
She did it to Walky, too. Remember their fight over his pajama jeans? How she used helping him study to dodge addressing her own problems?
What about her nightmare where she starts off riding the horse with Joyce, who then falls off, gets trapped behind the “Amber juliennes a guy” doors, and gets vaporized inside the mouth of a giant Ross head? Has she worked on what happened the night of the kidnapping, or is she just okay now because she has Joyce under supervision?
In order for a relationship to be considered so toxic that you think the author needs to address it, you need to provide examples of that. Of instances such as Ruth and Amber raising their voices at their partners. Of Ruth and Jennifer enabling each other’s self destructive alcoholism.
Dorothy being a busybody with caretaker tendencies (which is just how some people show their affection) is not inherently toxic. Neither is Dorothy’s nightmares. Yeah, she does seem happier and less stressed since she feels confident being Joyce’s girlfriend over Joe as Joyce’s partner, but until she actually acts out with controlling behavior you cannot reasonably expect Willis to write around the issues you’ve brought up here because they do not exist yet. Maybe Dorothy and Joyce will have to talk about the trauma. You’ll have to wait and see.
Also, are those things that were deliberately written into the characterization just things you know will just be ignored long term to make the OTP? Or are they potential sources of conflict within the relationship to be explored?
How do you know?
That they’re being cutesy right now riding high on new relationship energy doesn’t mean the intent is they’ll never have problems.
There’s definitely a vibe. Dorothy is the knowledgeable one who helps Joyce learn by sharing her knowledge. That’s a big part of the parent/child relationship. Just off the top of my head:
-She was the driving force behind Joyce getting glasses & BC. I think at least one time she scheduled the appointment, possibly both.
– Laundry Day was explicitly framed as a “teaching” moment.
– Going over what Joyce might enjoy during sex.
– Helping her to pick out new music- I’m thinking about how at one point Dorothy went “Your favorite music is Paramore”, as a definitive thing.
I can’t think of a time when Joyce has done the reverse for Dorothy, where she’s taken a leadership role about something she knows more about. Joyce was the lead player during #dranks, but she wasn’t educating Dorothy- they were both equally clueless.
Personally, I don’t think that part of their relationship rises to “toxic” levels- it’s well within normal relationship limits. But it’s absolutely a seed from which toxicity can bloom, and there’s *absolutely* a vibe there.
When Dorothy spoonfeeds Joyce while making airplane noises, praises her for a big productive shit on the toilet, changes her diaper, buys her kiddy toys, and sets Joyce down in a playpen while she sips wine, THEN I will accept this strange insistence that Dorothy and Joyce have a parent and child relationship. Until then, I’m just gonna look at you people funny and wonder…
no fucking way ppl be trying to say Doyce is toxic because they have a character dynamic where one is slightly more responsible than the other 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
They absolutely do get it. Joyce’s and Dorothy’s toxicity was written that way on purpose. It gives their relationship problems to overcome. After all, if you end up in a cute relationship without any major issues to blow up in your face, you get banished to a narrative nul-space of only partial existence. Just like Danny. A Danny Phantom Zone if you will.
People, a relationship that isn’t perfect isn’t immediately toxic!
Is Dotty’s assessment of her trauma even fully true, or was it just her attempt at dismissing her obvious romantic feelings towards Joyce? Because contrary to popular belief, you don’t always know what the fuck is up with your brain. Let’s see what happens if she goes talk to a therapist.
And of fucking course Dorothy teachers Joyce a lot of things! Do you remember how she was raised? Nevermind that Dorothy is an overachiever, she’s always gonna go the extra mile for anything she cares about, and that includes her partners.
The only ‘toxic’ thing about their relationship is the fact that, in the whirlwind of emotions and denial that kickstarted it, they cheated on their partners. Which isn’t a toxic part of the relationship, it’s toxic behavior towards those they cheated on.
This is an interesting take, because it doesn’t seem to be grounded in anything I’ve noticed about the comic or read on Bluesky or Patreon.
Like… Willis occasionally laughs at or mocks comments while taking an absolute fucking avalanche of abuse daily. It’s kind of ridiculous to expect them to just take the level of constant, unending, repetitive complaining that pops up every fucking day (in addition to all the shit we don’t see because it gets to Willis privately somehow) without ever saying or doing anything about it.
“The way he keeps taunting the unhappy readers in his social media posts really doesn’t feel healthy.”
This line, in particular, is hilarious. Just taking all that abuse on the chin would be healthier, would it? Nonsense, absolute nonsense.
Huuuuuge agree. Esp since a line of thought I see a LOT is ‘actually responding back to Hugely Critical Even Hugely Shitty Feedback is BULLYING’. its not. It’s Willis’ comic. I really don’t think the deal is ‘in return for reading a free comic you get to slag on it forever, endlessly’.
I agree that willis doesn’t deserve the amount of vitriol or especially targeted armchair psychology that I’ve seen only glimpses of here and through his own accounts on his blogs.
That said I think a lot of the complaints aren’t trying to he malicious. Theyre fans who feel like their criticisms aren’t being heard. Theyre being seen and read but not understood, based on how often their stances and feelings are misrepresented. I think the issue is less about taking the abuse on the chin but really, truly, addressing what people are saying rather than making passive aggressive polls or calling out the worst of the bad actors. Speaking personally I dont really wanna be a hater. I would much rather talk about the things I like in the comic than the things I don’t.
There were even multiple occasions on which Dot posted the thread and immediately followed it up with “honestly I don’t hate/kinda like this one”.
Plus multiple discussions within those threads about the justification of the thread and why it’s healthier than leaving the complains UNcontained.
I realize Willis is frustrated after months of criticism but they could have just asked Dot to please give the comment section more time in the future and still given the same explanation that having it be the first thread makes him feel like he lacks self-respect for allowing the continued existence of it (or complaints in general?). The frustration could have been spent instead on that one person who was like “if you’re upset about the criticism, try writing a story that doesn’t piss off your fans”.
I’d be able to understand that better if there was any real effort to engage with the constructive criticism. Radio silence in between dismissive/mocking social media posts is unsurprisingly not helping critics feel heard. And for that to build up to lashing out at Dot for being first even though Dot had already expressed surprise that she was first AND took an apologetic tone to the reader who already expressed dissatisfaction with it being first?
Never even mind that most of us initially expected more actual drama to come from Joyce and Dorothy cheating on their partners, only to see literally everyone that would be expected to be upset or even annoyed with them EXCEPT Raidah passively tolerating or outright condoning their actions.
Plus, both the cheating bisexual idea and the decision to ignore the drama that should come from a cheating storyline in favor of sexytimes were things Willis themselves criticized in the past. Yet nobody seems to care about the cheating, and the drama of it is being entirely swept under the rug in favor of tolerance and approval of the relationship.
So it’s hard not to feel like the constructive, respectful criticism is being actively spurned.
Because this comment section could use another grenade:
A commenter somewhere else said that making hashtagdranks their first date retroactively makes it also, retroactively, emotional cheating. I can’t recall if Dorothy had gotten together with Walky at the time, but Joyce was obviously with Joe.
Considering that immediately after said date was the first time Joyce was comfortable being more physically intimate with Joe, and how she really wanted to recreate that experience with him at the dorm party, well, that’s really interesting.
Honestly, I’d like to see that as a setup for Joyce at least considering the poly angle- it’s clear evidence that she *can* manage an intimate bond with 2 people simultaneously. That or some sort of self-reflection about how badly she treated Joe if she isn’t going for the poly approach.
Can you tell that a lack of any real self-reflection on Joyce’s part has been one of my pri.ary problems with this arc?
Honestly, the longer it isn’t dealt with the more likely it seems that it’s going to be important. Willis might come up with another way for it to be important, but it would have been so easy to either not bring it up at all or to wrap it up right after the suggestion (if all he wanted was to show how desperate Joe was to stay with her maybe?).
People really seem to think Willis has no object permanence and if something isn’t happening right now it’s never going to happen and will never be addressed and the comic is ruined because from now on it will be completely lacking in conflict of any kind and will forever be only Doyce fluff
When predicting future behavior, past behavior is one of the most important indicators. And so far the only thing we’ve seen of how DoJo is written is fluff. Characters who I as a reader interpret as being willing and able to initiate some sort of conflict have chosen to take their space and tacitly approve. Two big emotional moments (Becky finding out & Joyce coming out to Hank) had whole strips where the entirety of the content was “Joyce and Dorothy talk about how much they love each other”.
You couple that with how Willis is explicitly upset that people are complaining that DoJo is cute and what other conclusion can I draw but “yeah, that other shoe isn’t really dropping anytime soon”
And I’m sure people were complaining the same way about all the other couples this comic had having a period where they were just allowed to be a couple before the inevitable drama we all knew was coming. I’m sure I can go back to those strips and see the same discourse about people being so tired of the cutesy-couple stuff and begging Willis to move on already!
Oh, wait. I’ve been doing that. No other pairing got this much shit. And there’s a point where “b-b-b-but the cheating” just doesn’t really cut it anymore.
It’s called “sarcasm”, Rogue. Which you might have understood, had you read the last paragraph.
And you (and a lot of other people) seem to be forgetting that in-universe, this relationship has been going on for approximately 48 hours. I’m pretty sure I was annoyingly sappy for almost a month after I started dating my wife. (Well, I mean, she wasn’t my wife yet…)
The point was that every couple in the comic has had a period of grace where they were allowed happiness without repercussion and you’re here like “Uuuuugh I want this to end already”
I mean, every other couple wasn’t the sole focus of the narrative for months like DoJo has been, being honest.
I took a quick look at Book 13 Story 3- Joementum. And there’s a good number of JoJo strips. But also? We have a bunch of narratives interwoven there. We have Dorothy’s continuing crashout. We have Walky & Lucy’s breakfast with the Plastics. Becky & Dina have their moments. And I think it’s where Carla was introduced to Charlie.
But we really haven’t had much in these past arcs that isn’t about DoJo.
I more or less said “ughhh I want this to end already” when walky and Lucy got together. I think its just compounded by how much forcus its getting right now.
I feel like the cheating as depicted was nothingberger because they kissed and then immediately broke up. It’s about as ethical as things can be done in this matter. Which is not but almost cute in how it has been elevated to massive betrayal.
YES! EXACTLY! Where is the emotional devastation? Where are the crashouts and psychological breakdowns? So much noise was made about Willis being super uncomfortable with cheating, and avoiding cheating plotlines in their comics for decades, that you’d think it would have led to some incredibly painful (and good) moments, but nah. I completely get why folks would come away from this arc convinced that the cheating was a non-issue; you’d think there was no cheating at all the way it was lightly pinched over the story like black pepper on potato salad at a whites-only country club get together.
Yeah, I’m STILL utterly baffled as to why they wanted to include a cheating storyline seemingly just to tick off the box of having done so, without actually including any of the messy aftermath that COMES from cheating.
I think thats part of the frustration though. Its a nothing burger to the point it could have literally just been nothing. The way it happened you could have them both break up before the protest and nothing is different.
These aren’t real people, they are characters someone is writing. If cheating doesn’t matter then why include it? If you dont want to have a cheating plot line then dont have them cheat, if you want to have a cheating plot line then have the cheating impact something.
See, the toothlessness of the cheating arc as portrayed is kind of why I lobbed this grenade. Because it’s one *loaded* with teeth.
I’d like it to detonate and make DoJo stop and think a minute: “Boy, if that really was our first date, then we were *really* being dishonest about things with Joe & Walky”
I read Joyce and Joe not as Joyce balancing two intimate relationships at once, but as Joyce sublimating her desire for Dorothy onto her relationship with Joe. Knowing what kind of church she grew up in, she most likely still has some lingering internalized homophobia. Since she’s was unwilling to consider that she was gay, she redirected that sexual desire onto an “acceptable” object of her desire.
Now I say all of that just to say that i don’t expect polyamory to come out of it. I think they can still salvage a loving friendship out of this, but it still is going to require a lot of introspection and a long conversation with Joe about how she (however unintentionally) used him emotionally. And God only knows when it even if that talk is going to happen.
This is something that I think is only supported by a surface-level reading of the text.
If we get into metacommentary on the strip, we very quickly run into the problem that Willis has explicitly said that Joyce is Bi, not gay. That doesn’t fit with her attraction to Joe being solely sublimated desire for Dorothy.
And in a deeper reading of the text, we see consistently throughout that Joyce Has A Type when it comes to men, and their similarities to Dorothy don’t really factor into it in the slightest- solely that they’re tall and muscular. Honestly, that’s an angle that *could* have been explored- I remember Becky called Jacob “the biggest Dorothy ever” in that they’re both serious, civic-minded dorks, but Ethan and Joe really don’t fit into that personality type at all.
I’m not sure she can handle an intimate bond with 2 people simultaneously. It’s more like Joyce is laser focussed, but that laser focus is often with whatever is directly in front of her. When Joe was there it was pointed at him, and when he’s not she forgets he exists.
Joyce lacks object permanence. I’m curious what will happen when Joe and Dorothy are both in front of her at the same time.
Say, suppose that instead of a containment thread for posts about how much people hate the current arc of the comic, we just contained all the posts about how much people seem to hate each other. That’s what gets me down more than anything these days.
Anyway, I like this. It reminds me of when I was younger and I smoked. I knew this woman who hated the smell of it. She insisted that you could have cigarettes or you could have kisses, but not both. Even brushing your teeth wasn’t enough. If she could still smell it on your skin or in your hair, she wouldn’t go near you.
One does feel like there’s a LOT of hurt feelings in this comment section over and above the disagreements on plot and pacing.
Personally, I ascribe it to that moment we had for a month or two where it seemed like everyone was reacting to everyone else as though they personally endorsed the worst takes that were vaguely similar to their own — lots of accusations of immorality and homophobia and all kinds of other nonsense that really didn’t apply to the vast majority of folks.
It really does seem like some of those bruises are just starting to fade.
Zee, I was here when the comic first posted, and when I saw that the HCT was the very first comment, I just closed the tab and went to bed. I knew something like this was going to happen, but still, what a wasteland.
There’s some real “death of the author” stuff in the comments. DYW has a plan for the comic. It was clearly Dorothy and Joyce going back years. It’s not even tangentially about US foreign policy. It’s gonna be filled with hijinks. A lot of people want it to meet their needs or requirements. That’s not how any of this works. He’s writing what he wants. If enough people read it he makes a living. He’s not selling a mass market product where he needs to respond to customer demand.
Telling him he needs to do this or that to meet your requirements is not gonna work. Feel free to interpret the comic. Just remember the author is still alive and will write what they need to write. I am surprised he doesn’t nuke the comments entirely.
I don’t think you know what death of the author is. It’s a literary analysis technique of approaching a work and discarding anything about the author has stated as their intent for the work.
Reading the text but discarding authorial intent is used to look at what is there that the author might not have intended, but illustrates broader cultural ideas and norms.
For instance what does the use of a real anti-genocide protest for a faux-wedding backdrop say about how the deaths of foreigners – especially non-white foreigners – are exploited by Western writers?
What does it say that the protest was fictionalised to “Bulmeria” – a country that had previously been used for a punchline where it was implied to have been made up by Robin?
Regardless of the method of critique, any piece of art is up for criticism on its form and message.
>There’s no way it’s gonna be handled well.
Why? I get he fucked up with the protest stuff, but so far the LGBT stuff has been pretty on-point. Unless you think Joyce and Dorothy cheating is HUGELY PROBLEMATIC because bi people are never allowed to mess up, in which case I can’t help you.
Also it’s /absolutely/ gonna happen. When I do a 3rd run through the comic I’m absolutely making a collection of every time Walky is totally normal about gender and shows absolutely no trans inclinations at all.
I’m actually going to make the hottest of takes here and say that I trust Willis to handle that WAY more than I trusted them to handle the protest stuff.
I need this for so, so many reasons. I would be insufferable about it for months. But I’m gonna be honest, I don’t think that discourse will match this one. The levels of vitriol here and on Patreon have been incredibly mind boggling to witness as a long time reader. I struggle to conceptualize it getting even worse than it already has.
You underestimate the power of transmisogyny. I believe the 2 times a comment section has been completely nuked from orbit in this comic it was in regards to Carla, and she barely shows up.
Carla is a blend of “written to be annoying” and “some commenters will find her extra annoying because of transmisogyny.” I’d discount that as a one-off, but then you look at some other characters – Malaya is trans and written to be annoying, Booster is nonbinary and written to be annoying – and I start seeing a pattern that makes me pessimistic about what a trans Walky would be like in canon.
I’ll give you Carla, she is purposefully abrasive and it’s obviously something she does on purpose because she’s trans. And I love her for it!
But Malaya and Booster? Annoying?
W h a t?
Malaya was only ever ‘annoying’ to Sal, and that was because Sal was jealous. Other than that they’re kind of an average somewhat edgy teen.
And Booster is somewhat flamboyant, and has that psychology-student pseudoanalitical stuff going on, but I’ve never read them as annoying, and definitely not ‘written to be’ so.
Booster is About as silly and kinda loves watching trainwrecks as any other character, Malaya is abraisive… like sal or mike or ruth or (etc). And carlas perfect. Im with bill theyre just. Characters. Not “written to be annoying”.
What got me to actually start thinking about Walky being trans was that one strip where Carla gives him one look and tells him “You can still reach your potential”, which in her case obviously means crack that egg. And suddenly every time Walky was strangely overperformative about his gender started making sense.
Remember when the first “conflict” he got was that he wanted to buy girl pants? I’m sure that means nothing at all.
It was just pajama “jeans”, wasn’t it? I thought the issue there was that they were supposedly too slovenly (which, fwiw, is also very in character for Walky), not that they were supposedly “too girly”.
But even if I’m wrong about that, I feel like that’s well within the realm of “society deciding so-and-so is only for girls sometimes just means society is fucking stupid and judgmental, not that you’re a girl”.
The “Walky is trans” headcanon/meme is hard carried by certain repeated elements that just seem to keep coming up in Willis’s work. Lemme go find it, I sent it to some friends on Discord a month ago.
Okay, here we go. No links provided because I’m not trying to get caught by the automod, maybe someone else can provide those or correct my citations.
– Post on tumblr from user animation-recaps-by-sean featuring a series of panels from It’s Walky (?), where Walky is singing in the bathroom “Who is that girl I see, staring straight back at me~”, with him saying in the following panel “There must be a more emasculating Disney song to get stuck in my head.” Willis reblogged it onto the itswalky tumblr with the response “I think about this strip a lot.”
– DoA strip on April 24th, 2018 where Jason and Walky are drunk at Galasso’s, and Jason drunkenly states that Walky “would be very pretty if he were a girl.”
– DoA strip on November 10th, 2023, where Walky is talking with Carla who has come to bother him about Charlie’s location, and she states in response to him having a girlfriend with “Huh, the correct gender. And *you* still have time to realize your full potential”, with all the implications that carries.
– Preview panel posted on the DoA tumblr from March 2026 of Walky in front of a prominently placed “I Saw The TV Glow” movie poster in the background, a film explicitly thematically about the “egg crack”, i.e. realizing you’re trans
I know there are more, those are just the biggest ones.
Now add the two things Bill Erak mentioned above (Walky feeling conflicted about wanting to buy “girl pants”, and the post-timeskip conflict about his “girly hair”), and suddenly this begins looking like a pretty consistent pattern, huh? Just saying, we aren’t bringing this out of nowhere.
when I get a crunch wrap I order it with no sour cream, but then what else is in it? ground beef, lettuce, tomato, cheese, a corn chip…seriously Dorothy what the hell?
With all respect to the characters, I am 100% more invested in the Bulmeria fallout and Asma than any aspect of Dorothy/Joyce being cute. I also totally hope Joyce cheats on Dorothy with Joe and Vice versa (Joe would not want to be the Other Partner) by accident.
Because DRAMA and stupid decisions is why I’m here.
Wow, I had no idea Joyce (and Willis) had it THIS bad. When I dated a vegetarian I always tried to proactive brush between eating any meat and trying to kiss her, but she never showed any hesitation times that I wasn’t able to (or forgot, I’m sure there were times I forgot).
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Don’t trust Taco Bell.
It’s not so much Taco Bell, as it is the employees who don’t wash their hands, and what not.
In Dispatch, Malevolo makes a joke that Taco Bell is only the same four ingredients re-arranged.
So maybe it’s Joyce’s favorite restaurant.
I’ve heard that joke before, elsewhere.
“”Joke.”
Nah, let’s be fair, they got at least six, eight now
Naw, as a person who’s eaten way too much fast food, it’s Taco Bell. Well, it’s some specific subset of spices often used in Latin cuisine. Just hits the “we need some extra capacity immediately” button on its way into the gut.
Yeah, actually getting food poisoning, which is what you’d expect from employees not watching their hands, is far more serious.
I’ve never trusted them, I just want cheap and dependable sometimes.
“Dependable Diarrhea”, now there’s a marketing slogan.
Are you talking about Taco Bell, or Joyce and Dorothy? 🙂
Uh…? Not sure how I got top comment. My don’t trust joke is not clever enough to get top spot. I think I’ll lay low after today.
You were just on top of timing at 12:02 am. Early bird gets the Taco Bell.
Don’t trust birds.
How can you trust things that aren’t real?
… this comic and top comment made me think of the floating, talking Crunchwrap in Upload.
They only have about seven ingredients they mash together in different combinations. Surely it can’t take too long to isolate the least trustworthy one and clear the rest.
Joyce’s diet for the rest of her life is a bean burrito and mac and cheese.
Maybe plain cheese pizza.
Mind you, I think the funniest joke of all time in the strip was her swallowing the 5 dollar sushi roll without tasting it.
sadly, Headmaster Dorothy was the biggest shelfwarmer of the whole toyline
(very happy to have one of the bookmarks with this strip on it btw)
Didn’t Joyce kiss Dorothy after getting a weighted blanket from Joe? If you don’t remember Joyce was VERY grateful for the gift.
Willis specifically said Joyce brushed her teeth before the kiss lmaoooooo
Now I just feel silly.
how many times did he have people asking if she did before he had to make the comment though?
Checked the archives and no kisses were exchanged after the Joe gifting, not until the next day after they talked to Daisy, in-between which both had already had a shower that morning as well as likely brushing their teeth before bed and after waking up, so thankfully Dorothy is in the clear there. Honestly I imagine there was an offscreen exchange like “okay but seriously you need to go brush your teeth” “oh shit will my mouth become pregernant?”
They’re being cute together, billions must die
Would be even cuter if we got to see them playing footsies, rather than Joyce just claiming they are. :3
Bonus strip vote for Joyce’s Feet?
Of mouth bacteria, right? On it!
I will make an irrational complaint about them because there isn’t enough hatred.
“Joyce once wasted 5 dollars by not tasting a sushi roll Dorothy paid for! Worst relationship ever!”
I gotta admit that last panel is very relatable.
Also gonna share a little joke/anecdote because this is a strip set in and talking about Taco Bell; when I was probably about 5, I was in the backseat of the car and my parents were in the front discussing what fast food to get and they both were like “Oh, yeah, Taco Bell’s a good idea”. My disgruntled 5 year old ass screwed my face up and called up to them, “[My name] don’t like Taco Bell” and they both gave me a look and laughed, cause they were my parents so they already knew I wouldn’t eat anything from Taco Bell and were planning to get me something else from somewhere else, but it became an in joke for years afterward that if anyone mentioned Taco Bell one of my parents would reply “[My name] don’t like Taco Bell”, and I’d get in on it too. It was a fun in-joke and I still do it with my dad whenever I pick him up his Doritos locos tacos supremes.
So if the crunchwrap is gross stuff, wot de heck is JOYCE eating???
Pure bean burrito
She is eating a burrito a completely different thing,!
Maybe it’s just the tortilla lettuce and cheese. You can order that at Taco Bell. I’ve done it before.
If Joyce is anything like my autistic food aversion ass lettuce will not be anywhere near that thing.
Honestly a 100% cheese filled tortilla doesn’t sound half-bad.
They literally sell that in multiple varieties at Taco Bell.
I have very limited direct experience with Taco Bell. I think there’s been like one in my area and I don’t think it exists anymore.
That’s just a quesadilla
This is so funny, since lettuce is one of the safest foods for me. The Food Autism is so fuckin arbitrary.
Everybody is eating their own dish at the autism potluck.
BYOD to the Autism Potluck!
Tortilla filled with nothing but the smoothest, reddest hot sauce they have.
The best part of the regular burrito is the sauce so sure
Relevant strip:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/03-me-and-who-you-say-i-was-yesterday/texture/
Too bad she doesn’t have spare heads, like Kryten.
Three headed Cerberus Dorothy when?
Princess Langwidere has entered the chat.
What the heck’s in that burrito then? I feel like the concept of a burrito is the antithesis of Joyce’s food philosophy. Isn’t just a bunch of “gross” stuff touching wrapped in a tortilla?
Someone else suggested it’s just beans
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-13/02-turning-saints-into-the-sea/bounty/ From their last taco bell date
I respect it I guess. I’d say it was a waste of money but I don’t like Taco Bell so any purchase there is a waste to me. Just beans might be a convenient workaround though in a pinch.
Oh ditto, I’m not a Taco Bell fan myself either. I just get food from literally anywhere else but when you’re out and about with another person it can be difficult to try and navigate getting food from a different place. I’m not even a big bean fan so I think if I was with someone who wanted to get taco bell I’d just grab a drink and watch them eat.
It’s a uniform paste originally composed of beans and possibly cheese.
Frankly, I’m surprised that the tortilla exterior isn’t a problem.
…. no one ask Joyce why it’s not a problem.
I think Joyce has actually answered this before, that certain foods operate more like a method of conveyance than food itself like the bun of a hotdog, but I could be misremembering that or made it up entirely.
Don’t trust buns, unless their Dorothy’s.
Bread-based delivery systems for the uniform ingredients Joyce consumes appear to be fine. See also: pizza, sandwiches.
It’s Taco Bell. If Dorothy has to poop it out first, Joyce won’t be in for a long wait
I have to admit, their drinks adventure makes a much better first date than lunch at Taco Bell.
And that was extremely a date. And a good one. I mean, Joyce said she’d glassed someone before and she’d do it again, and I believed her. That’s quality dating right there.
personally i don’t want to date anyone who won’t glass somebody at the appropriate place and time
You believed her because it’s true!
Hope the HTML works! If not, it’s Ryan. She glassed Ryan.
Can’t argue with that, although Taco Bell is a perfectly cromulent date if you’re broke — almost everyone can get SOMETHING to eat there, and it’s not especially pricey.
When my wife and I were first dating, half of the time I’d be taking her to Burger King – reliable, within my extremely limited budget, and we were living in San Diego at the time so going to Taco Bell would have been a capital offense.
As with most fast food places, Taco Bell operates in that “good enough to pass if you’re not in the food’s home territory” space, similarly to how Popeye’s is quite good enough if you’re not actually in the American South but you’d be a fool to go to one in Georgia or Louisiana.
What can Joyce even eat at Taco Bell, a bean burrito?
Multiple kinds of food touching is kind of a big thing for burritos
Yes she has very literally eaten just bean burritos there
I think she could handle a cheese quesadilla.
… at least, I hope she could handle a cheese quesadilla.
I’m genuinely shocked that it’s plain bean burritos she eats and not plain cheese quesadillas. To me, the latter thing is way more people’s Safe Food at Taco Bell.
“in my experience” was a better way to say that but i’m not meant to be awake right now
I’m amazed she can stand cheese at all, but, hey, America. She grew up with cheese being everywhere.
Plain cheese quesadilla is one of my daughter’s safe foods, but from a much better Mexican place. 🙂
God i love plain quesadillas. Like in a general sense. Like a Mexican grilled cheese sandwich, you dont need anything else!
Honestly my food issues have been a lifelong source of anxiety over potential relationships, so I really feel this one. Your feeling I can feel deeply.
chew
Isn’t Taco Bell food 80 percent gross things even if you like Mexican food? My parents had some once and were not impressed.
Taco Bell is never going to be as good as actual Tex-Mex. But for fast and cheap, it’s acceptable.
It’s in the fast food realm of “it’s good enough because you’re not expecting it to be good in the first place.”
Looks up crunchwrap. My daily education about non-food food.
Well, I have been in the dark. I thought tacos were hard shells. But these things seem to be variations on what I would call a wrap. But I like the idea of masa flour ones, being allergic to wheat.
Sounds like you’re confusing tacos with taco shells. But yes, tace shells can be hard or soft, and the soft ones were the original kind.
One-ingredient-taco sounds, at same time, boring and pretty awesome.
You just need a lot of different one-ingredient tacos and you’re golden.
okay, i’ll allow it, but we’re getting dangerously close to just reinventing samosas on this train of thought
Why is that crunchwrap so tiny?
It involves a combination of economic inflation and this very comic. Google “Dumbing of Age inflation” to learn more.
I have not and will not do that, and recommend in the strongest possible terms that you do not either.
(My prediction/assumption is that the search results will include things you cannot unsee.)
Honestly there’s no good inflation content on the internet these days. That search doesn’t even yield any proper smut.
Artists found out that AI scrapers were on DeviantArt, and so they deleted all the sacred texts
Absolutely diabolical!
I salute you!
This is maybe my favorite thing you’ve ever done. Downright whimsical.
The funny thing is, it would be the same results if you just looked up “dumbing of age fanart”.
As much as I do agree with Dorothy’s assessment that the drinks date should totally be viewed As A Date retroactively, I disagree with her assessment that Taco Bell is an insufficient first date for them. You’re dating Joyce “Hopeless Romantic” Brown, Dorothy, she could romanticize a first date at Blowjob Cat.
(My agreement with Joyce about the Crunchwrap depends on whether it’s a Crunchwrap Supreme or a Black Bean Crunchwrap. Crunchwrap Supremes are delicious, but I do not fuck with black beans.)
I’ve also noticed a habit where Joyce is eager to define their relationship by one method, only for Dorothy to shut it down. Dorothy doesn’t want to view Mutual Laundry Masturbation as sex and Joyce does, Dorothy doesn’t want Taco Bell to be their first date and Joyce does, Dorothy explicitly stated her desire to dress Joyce Sexy-Like but shut down Joyce’s interest in having lingerie bought for her… It really does feel like the two of them aren’t on the same page here.
Which leads me to say this: if this leads to Dorothy and Joyce realizing their romantic attraction is not the same thing as their romantic compatibility and that they want wildly different things from their relationship, leading them to break up very soon after and subsequently grapple with the fact that they torpedoed every bridge they had over a four-day fling, I will not only recant every kvetch I have ever kvetched, but I will personally draw myself buying and eating a hat.
Also I’d like to take the Taco Bell being a topic of the strip as an opprotunity to point out that the quesarito (also known as the only menu item worth a damn at that place) is back at Taco Bell
Anyone else have a Taco Bell situation with their partner? Mine I can’t kiss if he’s recently eaten a banana or deli meat. I don’t care how long ago it was I can still smell it until the mouth is clean!!
Dorothy getting head.
There, it’s been said, you can all relax now.
Dorothy getting her cock sucked.
Second place to Joe again.
oh god thats right, need to finish the sequel drawings to Dorothy Keener’s Diminutive Hog
I know there’s a good joke about a teacup pig in this bit, but I’m too tired to work it out
I said you can all relax now.
They’re gonna finish eating and then they’re gonna go fuck in the stall, aren’t they.
Oh joy now I have to have a tab open to understand what everyone is talking about.
Americans and their propensity to bloviate about fast food is one of the bigger annoyances as a Not American. My god do you people love talking about fast food.
Oh, stuff it. Every fucking culture on Earth never shuts the fuck up about its food.
Food is being generous in some of these cases.
Okay, multiple servings of blended milk and ice cream.
indeed, this is the United States and THE CUP RUNNETH OVER
(and not in a good way 👀)
HOW are we running these cups over, when the cups are so dang big???
Yeah but most cultures have like. Real food to brag about. I’m argentinian, for example, and we have the beast meat in the fucking world. And Dulce de Leche.
what beast meat do you use?
These beings known as “cows.” Or “pigs”. Sometimes even “sheep”. I know, crazy.
(don’t tell Dina about the chickens)
Some American food worth of bragging about is Southern BBQ as well as breakfasts. Honestly there are other meals worth bragging about in this country too but being a melting pot means sometimes the best meals to discuss are Americanized versions of meals from other countries that were brought here and evolved over time.
Nobody’s even bragging though. They’re literally just admitting Taco Bell exists.
Let’s be honest – even Taco Bell isn’t bragging about Taco Bell.
I like making fun of deep fried butter as much as the next person but lets not pretend like some states don’t make some amazing food either. Southern BBQ, Tex-Mex fusion, a ton of Gastronomy, Cajun Food, Soul Food.
Stuff rules
Yeah this is low-key just. Erasing all of black people’s and immigrants’ contribution to cuisine in the US to boil it down to fast food chains
It’s kind of an equal opportunity dumbing down of cuisine though. Have you eaten in a Boston Market?
I have never been further north in the US than Atlanta (excluding Maryland) so no I’m sorry I don’t have context
But it’s educational. I learn so much about the weird things USAvians eat and have, in my time, found hilarity in trying to explain the weird things that UKavians eat. I might even have found a new thing to eat. Masa flour was an awesome discovery for me.
I would like to try some of the sandwiches that place comes up with.
never seen USAvians and i’m immediately in love
This seems like a silly comment since Taco Bell has been expanding into Europe since 2008
i’m genuinely shocked that it’s as recent as ’08
very tickled seeing your username above a comment about fast food bc every time i see it i assume its short for ‘milkshakes’
but maybe the americagoggles talking, idk
*but maybe that’s the etc. etc
im gonna go make things right with my dad
Partially Gelatinated Gum Based Non-Dairy Beverage doesn’t fit in most name fields.
ParGel-GuBaNoDa-bev. It’s no great Shakes of a name.
Dorothy seems to be struggling a bit with eating. Possibly Joyce isn’t eating, just holding and talking. Maybe this is a metaphor for something. Not a petit four anyway.
With how big of a buffer Willis has, I wonder if there would be a benefit to Willis doing like a binge drop of the next arc/book or two-worth of strips so readers could understand the bigger picture of what Willis is going for with the plot development that occurred over this last half-year. Because of how great the emotional fallout has been for so many characters, readers are simply too impatient to see the narrative consequences play-out at the normal daily pace.
Honestly the buffer is something that’s a big benefit for Willis as it is, because he has months of work stacked up ahead of time so if anything happens IRL, he doesn’t have to rush to any deadlines. And considering how most webcomics might update once a week, if you’re LUCKY, I think the daily pace is something that’s getting a bit… taken for granted, maybe? I mean, I’m a longtime and still current reader of Ava’s Demon and that comic has had years long hiatuses in the past.
Oh it’s no doubt something we take for granted, but I think it’s also what “allows” (for lack of a better word) for DoA to have such a relatively slow pacing narratively compared to a lot of other web-comics. Because Willis has the ability to chug out so many strips to the extent that they have such a huge buffer, DoA’s pacing naturally trends towards a decompressed pacing style, and such a style can be very frustrating for readers when its covering certain subject matter.
I get that but it also still isn’t necessarily just a DOA thing. Like Ava’s Demon, the comic I mentioned? Love it, it’s beautiful art. In-comic, however, we’ve also been on events that have happened over the course of… maybe a couple days? And the comic is 13 years old. At least DOA has had 6 months in-comic over the course of 15 years.
Tbf, half of those months were skipped – they didn’t even reach Halloween.
Your point stands though
You have a good point there too.
This is a problem with all comics and long form stories told over time in general. I read a webcomic called Grrl Power. It’s a silly comic about superheroes with lots of gags mixed with action. It’s technically still 2012 the year the comic started and the main character hasn’t even finished her first year of training.
Of how about One Piece. The most popular manga and possibly comic story in the world. In over 25 years of publication only 2 years have passed in the current story if you don’t count all the flashbacks. Ten tears of that story was also only 3 months and infamously over one year of reading was actually only one day in the manga. I think Oda may have beaten that record now though.
Mainstream super-hero comics: Peter Parker was in high school in 1962.
Then just take a break and come back and read it in one swoop?
Sure but – and I want to stress that I know you mean nothing bad by this – the whole point of having a buffer, is to have excess labour done in case of an emergency or life event, without it causing economic stress. It’s technically entirely possible to just drop 2 months of strips at once! But, when you break it down, you’re asking a worker to dump two months of their economic livelihood on us in the span of one day, so that we can all maybe stop being whiny babies about not getting instant gratification from their labour.
You wouldn’t ask someone in any other industry, to sacrifice two full years worth of their paid vacations for your mere convenience, right? ‘Cause that’s ultimately the magnitude of this ask: “please completely devalue a huge amount of your labour, so that we might have a little bit more fun immediately.”
At the end of the day, the comic being somewhat less satisfying, to some of the audience, for a few months time, is not a valid reason for Willis to throw 2 months worth of their career into the bin just to placate some of their audience. Nobody in any industry should be doing that for anyone.
Throwatron is 100% correct. If somebody needs a 2 month stack of strips in a single delivery, they need to bookmark and take a two month break before returning.
In purely economic terms, it might make sense if the comic was seeing a big drop off in terms of views/patreon subscribers/etc and Willis thought that seeing where he was going would bring the audience back. Or at least stop the decline.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that’s the case though. Obviously, he’s got the data and we don’t, but I don’t think there’s reason to think readers are leaving in droves.
Willis has pretty explicitly said the exact opposite on their Bluesky, so I absolutely agree they don’t have any reason to go torching two months of their buffer just to appease a few people who can’t wait for the comic to chug along.
I honestly doubt the people who are complaining the most would put the money out to buy the books of extra strips anyway. The people who want the most say in your work are usually the ones engaging in it completely for free.
I felt that last sentence in my soul. I never thought about it in that particular way, but holy shit, it’s way too true.
We should start a fund to bribe Willis to stick extra strips of Joyce and Dorothy being cute together into the buffer.
At a minimum, we should enjoy it while it lasts.
I’ve been reading Willis since before Dumbing of Age started, I’m not going to drop it over the fact I find some of the strips less cute than others.
This is the way. Nothing I, or anyone else, have to complain and whine about would justify Willis throwing out a ton of buffer for us to read in advance. That’s not only bad business….but like, you and I know damn well it wouldn’t actually solve the real issue most of the “pacing” complaints are actually about.
Which is that we’re bored. That’s the issue. And a ton of buffer being released isn’t guaranteed to solve that – I can actually imagine pretty clearly in my minds eye 2 months of comics being dumped and having us still in the part of the story that is DoJo fluff, and not DoJo plot – so as far as I’m concerned, there’s functionally zero benefit to him doing it.
Zero benefit and nothing but downsides, I should stress.
I kind of feel I’m winning on both ends. I get to enjoy the Joyce and Dorothy interactions and then I get to enjoy all the drama of people dropping in every day to inform us how much they hate it.
Hey, unironically, I’m glad you’re getting something out of all of this!
I think if Willis was going to drop any spoilers, it really should just be in the form of a vague statement. Definitely don’t agree with the idea of burning a huge chunk of the buffer, even as someone rather unsatisfied with the story since the tear gas wedding.
I would NEVER advocate for Willis’ work ethic in building such a huge buffer to be rewarded by having to rip a huge chunk out of it just to deal with a portion of the audience being dissatisfied.
Seems obviously not worth burning a very hard built buffer in a desperate bid to appease people that definitely would not work
I mean, it might work depending on what other shoe would be dropped on it. But it still wouldn’t be worth it anyway.
Readers who cannot wait for the daily comic strip to play out one strip per day… probably just aren’t the target readers? Why burn his buffer and make a bunch of extra work for himself just to mollify a dozen or so readers who are impatient? Seems silly.
That ”dozen or so” is dismissive and rude, and I suspect with full intention. You have made your disdain plain as day many times before, and it’s not helping your argument any here.
lmfao
You don’t know me, please do your best to bear that in mind when deciding you know how I feel when I write any particular comment.
I meant “the dozen or so who are impatient” because I don’t think “impatience” is the prevailing reason people are upset about what’s going on in the comic. Not because I’m under the mistaken impression that there are only a dozen or so people upset.
You being upset doesn’t mean I was trying to upset you. I also don’t care in the slightest what your opinion is on “my argument”… whatever you believe that to be.
Again, starting with lmfao tells me everything about the tone and intention of your rather long reply.
I’ll just do my best to skip over your texts from now on, like I do with Taffy. Life’s too short for intentionally rude people.
Come on Adept. With just a little bit of effort you can turn the passive-aggressive up to 10. I have faith in you.
I didn’t do shit, keep my name it of it.
*out of it, rather.
“It” being any situation in which I didn’t do shit. Like this one. Stop fucking blaming me for everything that goes wrong in your life, you professional fucking victim.
Dang kids on my lawn
Based on what Willis has said about his Patreon numbers etc, I suspect that Nymph is MUCH closer to the actuality of the situation than not — most of the readership seems to be perfectly fine with how things are going, even if there are dozens of us occasionally griping in the comments.
I think folks have made excellent points about why dropping a few months of strips in one day doesn’t make much sense.
I *do* think having the buffer so prominently displayed is making folks’ pacing problems worse.
Because, at least in my experience reading this comic, the strips in the buffer really seem to be locked in- they don’t get changed at all. Not even the alt-text. It was a big deal when Willis said that they were going to add a few strips here and there to increase Asma & Raidah’s roles and the buffer changed to reflect that, despite it being *very* clear that Willis was adding and adjusting a few strips, not throwing out months of completed ones.
At least personally, the existence of such a big buffer means I wish Willis wasn’t so tight-lipped about upcoming storylines. If Willis would be willing to say “yeah, they’re cute right now, but trust me, the other shoe is going to drop in X months’ time or so” I think folks would be more sanguine. But honestly the way they’ve been presenting folks criticizing their work, it’s making me expect more of the same going forward.
Same Rogue7, unfortunately
Agreed, being able to see how long the buffer is doesn’t bring me any benefits as a reader, only mild frustration about how slow things are right now.
Rogue 7, I’m curious why you think the alt-text is locked in. Did I miss something Willis said?
Couple of reasons: I remember a strip coming out where the alt-text was Willis talking about how they found out Kevin Conroy passed. Obviously that strip aired several months after Mr. Conroy passed.
Willis commenting about how incredulous they are that commenters think alt-text written months ago applies to a comment made the day before.
And a number of other alt-texts that only make sense if they were written alongside the comic- like “today I hit a 10 month buffer” being an example.
She said poop
Good thing Dorothy put a stop to qualifying the Taco Bell date as their first one. That has proven to be a bad omen for the longevity of your relationship.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/04-hompk/attheborder/
In that one, isn’t Walky eating a crunchy, shape holding taco? That’s what I thought a taco was…
Tacos come in two/ three varieties: flour tortilla (soft shell, as Walky is eating here) and corn tortilla (can be soft or crunchy/ hard shell).
The pre-crunchy taco shells bought in a store are often considered white person tacos or less authentic/ more commercial. A corn tortilla can be fried to make it a crunchy taco.
If you’re from certain parts of Southwest America, you could also get a frybread taco! But it looks different.
I’m from certain parts of Southwest America and this is apparently very important to me.
I didn’t even notice your name until after finishing your post, and the comedic timing I created for myself was sublime
Same here!
tacos are important! thank you for your contribution!
Today’s strip was made for you, friend.
Well I guess we know who tops now
I’m actually pretty sure that this was their first date.
We never saw it happen tho, did we?
No, though the next couple strips suggest that it did. We cut to Billie coming out of the closet after that.
As a Crunchwrap mainstayer, I gotta ask the obvious: What’s the Crunchwrap order?
[mine usually goes: Steak+Cantina Chicken+Refried beans+Three cheese Blend+Rice+Lettuce+sour cream+Red Sauce+Chipotle sauce]
I’m a simple bongo with simple Taco Bell needs: Crunchwrap supreme, swap the tomatoes for onions. Pair with a soft taco with avocado ranch sauce and a refresca whose caffeine count is determined by how badly my migraine needs it. Lunch: achieved.
If Joe could do it, so can you ^^
so goddamn tear gas powder dusting her face was NOT a deterrent, but mediocre junk food breath is too much for Joyce, I see how it is
Tear gas is one homogeneous thing!
That entirely tracks, tbh.
Oh, this one was included on the new bookmarks, wasn’t it? It’s cute.
The Hater Containment Thread has been compromised
Hater Containment Breach Warning Protocol activated
Jesus Christ give it a rest already.
The hater thread is gone, what more do you want? This isn’t even a negative comment, who cares?
It’s interesting to see the comment total stay the same when so many vanish.
I hope you’re feeling better, NGPZ. 🕯🍵🫖
Physically? Still a lot of pain but at least its a little less now, also less redness, more itching. Just finished my last day of Mupirocin, still got a few days left on Keflex
Mentally? agony honestly, trying my best to just get comfortably numb
*plays “Horse Steppin’ by Sun Araw on hacked muzak*
Wishing you mental peace and beauty in your life, NGPZ. Such a lovely song. I had never heard it before. Thank you for sharing it.
Joyce being Joyce. lol
Nope, I still don’t find these two cute. Not when they started off with cheating and continued with treating a whole bunch of other characters really shitty.
We get it.
It’s not like we expected anything to change on that front so reinstating fells redundant.
You don’t agree with other people’s opinions, we get it
But don’t stop telling us about it on our account.
Did I say I disagreed? I don’t think any of the words I said are the words you’re pretending I said. I think you just made some kind of assumption.
Reasonably sure that shepsquared was addressing Kyulen and not you, but who knows.
Nope, i can see it exactly under my own comment to taffy.
Yeah, but that’s the set up.
Joyce being “heroically gay” and missing the point of the actions she’s doing having consequences to hurt her friends and loved ones as well as possibly ruin the protest’s messaging.
(Because Bulmeria isn’t X related to the RL state, I fully believe that Joyce barely knows the country exists)
It makes it even stranger, as the protests actually being about Israel would mean an ex-fundie _has_opinions_.
While I certainly understand the reasons for not explicitly making the protests about Gaza, I hadn’t actually considered the fundie support for Israel in order to fulfill end-times prophecy angle. Those would have been fun discussions.
I feel it was a wasted opportunity, though of course the topic is extra spicy.
I can understand Willis’ hesitation.
He’s hinted with great deft that Joyce has…opinions on Islam with her reaction to going with Raidah to her mosque when invited. Imagine what Joyce has been raised to believe about Palestine and its government.
I mean, I know how I was raised to view it.
oof.
I say deft because Willis isn’t repeating what is probably some pretty awful opinions that Joyce will have to confront even if she’s rejected other parts of her upbringing.
*clears throat* I’m uh, I’m going to take a sustained absence from the comments. I believe I’ve forgotten the human and need to take a step back to re-calibrate.
I was half doing this already but uh just wanted to make a comment apologizing to Willis specifically. At my best of times I’ve just been an annoying whiney bongo the past few months and at worst I’ve been uh pretty fucking toxic I won’t deny.
So uh, please, honestly, everyone enjoy. I’ll see y’all again in a few weeks
I hope it is a restful time away and that you feel refreshed when you come back.
Take good care of YOU.🫖🍵
Yet another strip where Joe seemingly stands in his dorm room alone, waiting for Joyce to come back and finish the conversation.
Willis is giving the game away by revealing that every character that isn’t Joyce or Dorothy is an NPC that turns off scripting and stands by until they enter either of the two’s activation perimeters. /s
Oh, thank goodness you included the /s. You had me going.
I mean it’s pretty clear that Dorothy is just another NPC that happens to be prominent.
Like if you as an author have previously publicly gloated about getting into a private Facebook group for a comic to complain about a plot (about how cheating bisexuals is incredibly harmful no less), while daily ragging on said strip publicly and in the sidebar of this very page, one could make the argument of we learned it from watching you.
See also the divisive creation of the concept of “haters” who want Joyce branded with a scarlet letter etc. It’s the me sowing ha-ha this is awesome me reaping oh no! meme.
And I would argue that the negative feedback has by and large been in good faith, honest, and constructive.
Not that I am not sympathetic to today’s situation (For latecomers the hater thread, gone at time of writing this, was the first post and Willis themself responded asking why it could not have been left until later in the day), but if you write a divisive plot then foster the idea of sides amongst your community, you’re going to get sides amongst your community.
I also think it is unfair to ask there be no negativity in these comments, in the general sense. This is not something Willis has said, to be clear, but something other commentators have. If you are enjoying something seeing others dislike it isn’t fun, sure, but the attitude of if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all gets toxic real fast. Like it’s great u til something happens you don’t like and then you’re shut down.
I will admit bias, those who saw my lengthy post on “””””bulmeria””””” a few days ago will know why, but I’m still going to argue that the vast, overwhelming majority of critique here comes from fans who are expressing their various issues and complaints about something they have loved by a creator they have supported for many, many years, and want to enjoy again.
I know this is true because I’ve seen people say this, and far too often it was accompanied by a sadness that their attempts at constructive feedback was being characterised as wanting Joyce branded with a scarlet letter, or being unhappy that Dorothy wasn’t being scolded by a man.
Honestly I think it’s a pacing issue at this point. Joe has been left alone for months. Becky is finally getting some storyline but it’s still moving along bits and pieces. And I think people are getting frustrated when we keep cutting back to Joyce/Dorothy being coupley.
Considering how long the storyline has dragged on and how much heated discussion it’s brought up due to everything surrounding it, feels like we could almost do with another Halloween-esque timeskip.
Yeah, I think the storyline is fine in the broad strokes. It’s *just* the pacing that’s getting to me. So many strips that are just Dorothy and Joyce being cute. Even when it’s one like today’s which I’d probably like in other circumstances, it’s just kinda gotten old.
Today feels like them just being cute – which as you say would be fine if there hadn’t been so much of it lately.
They were also being cute yesterday though, but they were being cute in a way tied to advancing the story. They were talking about how to react to Dina and Becky splitting up, not just about them dating. A lot of the hater reaction still seemed to be just “More of them being cute”. I didn’t get that.
Best I can approximate is that because the protest/them getting together event spawned so many other threads, very few of which have actually been followed up on or has been left to dissatisfying exploration. Like Joe hasn’t been revisited, the protest response strips had to be inserted in (and people still aren’t satisfied with them), Walky has treated with indifference or light mockery. Becky is finally getting something and her plot with Dina keeps getting broken up and making baby steps of progress.
Because of all this high pressure to finally advance some of these threads, strips of ‘cute Doyce stuff’ is met with frustration because it’s a combo of both ‘this isn’t progressing the stuff we want to see’ and ‘this feels like us trying to be sold the controversial/unpopular ship’.
I think if the dust had settled on a lot of this stuff, the cutesy bits wouldn’t be having that big a response. We’ve seen a lot of cute stuff before with Danny/Sal or Becky/Dina during less big plot-filled books and they were received a lot better.
But yeah, yesterday did advance the story a little. This one is a bit more stalling, so it’s got a bit worse reception.
I had a pretty negative reaction yesterday, it had more to do with the fact that we cut away to Becky for one day before cutting back. The Becky stuff was new and seemed like it would go somewhere interesting (even if it led to Anna whom is a character I greatly dislike). Cutting back to Joyce and Dorothy guaranteed another “they’re so cute squish” strip if not multiple because that’s been the general pattern. Today’s strip could be omitted entirely and nothing happen, and I heard the preview looks like it goes back to Becky tomorrow so like… what was the point of cutting away? Cutting back?
It’s just very frustrating to read because I just want to find out what happens next.
I’ve been reading Willis comics long enough to know that one day soon he’s going to be ripping our hearts out and then I’m going to wish that I had more memories of Joyce/Dorothy enjoying each other to sustain me.
Right with you there — today’s strip is objectively good, but it takes on a lot of additional weight from the fact that DoJo have FELT like a boat anchor on the pace of events, not to mention the fact that it feels like less of “an ensemble comic with a couple focal points” and more like “they’re the main characters for real now”.
The cheating discourse overshadowing the much more questionable handling of the protest angle is a real “art imitating life” moment
At the same time, I’m sure there are lots of people who were satisfied by how Willis chose to address the protest stuff (me not included) and just stopped talking about it. The cheating stuff is taking prominence now because it was written as lightly and non-obtrusively as possible, has gone completely unaddressed, *and* a whole bunch of paratext stuff I’m not gonna get into involving author communication. It’s in many ways a microcosm of the pacing complaint, which is itself a microcosm of the “can we get to the part of the story that’s actually interesting (read: “part I’m interested in”) please” complaint.
It’s pretty difficult to compare the different responses because one of them is directly about moral and ethical metanarrative decisions, and the other firmly about the long-standing structure of the comic getting in the way of enjoyment for a segment of the audience. The nature of the two is fundamentally different.
The more Willis doubles down an feeling hurt and lashing out on ”haters” of his perfect cinnamon rolls, the more bridges they burn.
DoA was a favorite of mine for a decade, and I hope it recovers. I’ve been frankly shocked and disappointed by what I see in Willis’ social media posts.
Yeah. Like, I wouldn’t be half as irritated with things if the pot hadn’t been deliberately stirred with polls, mocking posts, etc. like, all I wanted was better pacing and an interesting character arc for Walky (I don’t think I was ever on team “Joe will regress”). Didn’t like that the single most visible bisexual couple in the strip started by cheating, esp because the other bi couples have not been seen in like half a year—and as a bisexual person who recently was ok’d to open up their marriage to explore that [amusingly influenced by this storyline], being lumped in with others as a homophobic bigot not even by association but just because I had basic empathy for the characters… it did not feel good.
And I don’t feel bad for feeling bad for Joe and Walky. This isn’t the first time I’ve been shamed for feeling bad for people who frankly deserve better. I don’t feel bad for wanting to see something happen. I don’t feel bad for participating in the hater thread because at least I wasn’t ragging on people’s days too hard outside of it (though I’m fallible and have a temper.) I do feel bad that this has negatively affected Willis personally.
Anyways, I’ve been weaning myself off the comic by checking it later and later. I have trouble quitting a daily habit, but I got the message a while ago (probably when people suddenly started jumping on Yotomoe who has been a longtime commenter and a person in the comment section whom I’ve seen as pretty consistently respectful and enthusiastic) that I probably shouldn’t be part of the viewership anymore. Doyce isn’t my jam and the story isn’t going to shift on to any of the threads I find interesting anytime soon.
On the one hand, I’m all in favor of adding a poll on whether Willis should add extra strips of Dorothy and Joyce being cute.
On the other, I’m genuinely sorry you feel that way.
I do feel like I can disagree with Yotomoe about some things without it decreasing in the slightest how much I admire him.
I often catch strays but its pretty rare I catch a stray compliment! <3
You know, Adept, between this and your other comments today, I’m reminded of an old saying –
If it seems like everyone around you is an asshole, maybe it’s you.
I’m pretty sure the complaints about 9 Chickweed Lane aren’t “it’s furthering the harmful stereotype that all bisexuals cheat on each other” and more “it’s turned the only gay character it has straight during Pride Week, and it’s also full of horrificly sexist and borderline paedophilic commentary and art”.
That’s very different from “college teenager cheats on her boyfriend and is not sufficiently guilty about it”.
If you look at what Willis said at the time, they were mostly talking about the cheating bi stereotype.
Hypocracy isn’t some grave sin or anything. We all do it, and even then you’re right that 9CL and DoA are very, very different comics with very different contexts for said bi cheating. It is in no way any sort of meaningful commentary on DoA’s current quality or plot to mention those posts.
It *is* funny though, NGL.
Well said. I’ve been reading this comic for a very long time, and I feel like it’s rapidly gone downhill in the past several months. And Willis’ responses to criticism so far have not inspired much confidence in me that it will get better.
Well, the basic message is there, but it could be improved in so many ways. At a minimum you should throw in some antidotes about how the downfall of the comic has personally ruined your life and the lives of those you love. You could hire an editor to punch up your text and an insult artist to help you get more pointed digs at Willis.
All too often it just seems like you are recycling the same basic complaints with no new material, and I can’t tell you how disappointing this is to those of us who come here every day to read your critique of the strip. Sometimes it like you just don’t care.
Thanks for the explanation on what happened. I only read this comic when i wake up and was wondering where the thread was and why the mood was so off. I thought it was brigaded by jerks again and/or if Willis made a statement somewhere
My take on Joyce and Dorothy is I like the plot but I want it to be a disaster because I find disasters in DOA fun to read. I don’t want anyone to hate on the characters because they’re the protagonists I’ve followed for decades.
I think most people reading suspect we’re building to an even bigger personal meltdown than the Becky/Dina situation, but until that happens we’re stuck in a feedback loop of “the end of the world is taking forever. The many nonplussed reactions in-story have also not helped. I could forgive somebody not used to Willis’ style and tempo concluding that they’re taking the easy way out in the name of yuri.
There won’t be conflict with Joyce and Dorothy until the author falls out of love with them. They’re “endgame”, remember? We hurried past all the conflict to get to the cutesy lovey-dovey soft part.
Is that something that’s been said explicitly or is “endgame” a common assumption?
https://www.patreon.com/posts/original-strips-134187315
“I’d workshopped different kinds of Joyce/Dorothy getting together moments, and something where Joyce, like, bodily forces herself through some kind of similar barrier to get to Dorothy, to save her, to be with her, that kind of vibe was always on my mind. And maybe that happens in some way later. Years later. Maybe a pre-timeskip moment the next time I do one of those, like for the strip’s 20th anniversary.
and whoops as i put things together, i realized it was happening here, now”
Terms not found: “endgame”
It’s an assumption. I’ve asked repeatedly and no one ever answers with any example of Willis ever saying this. Sometimes the comments get an idea in their head and start talking about it like it’s a solid fact, which gets passed on and on and on until the person you’re asking has literally no idea if it’s true or not, they just know they’re annoyed about it.
It was going to happen, it just happened a lot sooner than originally intended.
https://www.tumblr.com/dumbingofage/789056686007730176/just-out-of-curiosity-willis-how-long-has-this?source=share
Okay? That has nothing to do with whether or not Willis considers them “endgame” or whether they’ll have conflict or not. It’s just an admission that the story moved faster than Willis originally planned.
That happens sometimes when you’re writing. Unless you can show me something that says “they are endgame and will have no conflict” then I’m sorry but you’re just repeating previous incorrect things and throwing “proof” that has nothing to do with what you said.
As is well known, if you say something enough times, that makes it true.
A little sad my pouring-my-heart-out comment got vanished alongside the thread. Ah, well. Probably for the best. A few brief shining moments, anyway. 😆
Just wanted to wish everyone some wellness today.
Sadly, I don’t think I caught that one
All good! Here’s a cup of tea instead. 🍵🫖
Kvetch containment is over, kvetch metastasis has begun.
Since I started polyamory, I have not one, but two fussy eaters to accommodate. I might have a type
Why should it be a date and not a prune?
Because every seventh date is a sundae.
‘Cause there’s no man-date, for a change.
(Pun: “mandate for change”.)
Hey, no explaining the joke.
If you explain the joke, it files for a change of genre from comedy to documentary, and the paperwork is brutal.
We got ESL readers here, so puns get explained.
🙂
Fair enough, and I withdraw my objection.
Needfuldoer’s is funny because because days of the week are also dates and every seventh day of the week is a Sunday (sundae). IntangibleMatters is funny because dates and prunes are both dinosaurs.
Does anyone else here fells drained after staying a bit too long in these comments? Like mentally exhausted and discomforted, the opposite of a serotonin boost.
I did back during the period where two halves of the commenters were straight slinging mud at each other and accusing one another of moral degeneracy for 1000 comments a day, but at this point, most of the squabbles are a lot less high stakes, so it’s easy to determine when I can glaze over an entire thread within the first 2-3 replies, and it’s easy to accept that even if I had something to add, that adding it at that time and place, wouldn’t be constructive for me or for those discussions.
Things have mostly downgraded from everybody being monstrously unfair to each other, to occasional terse dialogues between a few people who happen to have opposing-but-particular views on one granular thing; the first thing triggers me, the second thing, I can accept, through choosing not to pay attention to it.
This isn’t directed at anyone in particular, but holy crap y’all, learn to check out on comments/threads that are obviously going to enrage you, and convince you to waste a huge chunk of your energy and mental composure on squabbles that ultimately do not matter. I get everybody getting defensive when people were being called moral defectives on a daily basis; I was very inflammatory in response to that, and I don’t make any excuses for it, because to me, it was something worth being inflammatory about.
IMO (and YMMV), nothing has risen to that timbre of disagreement since. The time for people to at least try to calm down, and maybe just individually avoid the topics that are going to consistently trigger them, already started weeks ago. We had a collective moral trauma within our readership; it makes sense a lot of people are still on edge; but, quite a lot of us, are choosing daily to stay on that edge, because we don’t want to back down.
At the end of the day, if someone’s take or pattern of posting is so abhorrent to you as a reader, it’s probably more logical to accept the premise that trying to engage that person is probably a huge waste of time and energy. If it feels like someone’s takes are so alien to you, that it’s as if they aren’t reading the same comic you are? Or, if their emotional reactions are so different from yours? Trust that instinct, that maybe trying to force that dialogue, and bring that person around to your way of thinking, will just end with you feeling like you screamed at a wall for an hour, and the wall inevitably won.
None of us here are as derelict or unreasonable, as our fear and anger will try to convince us they are. Most of us are mostly reasonable, most of the time. Some people don’t get along, and that’s fine. We just need to maintain an effort to care for ourselves and our mood and our time, as opposed to feeling compelled into prodding one anothers’ worst impulses, because we all individually deserve that from and for ourselves, let alone how it affects other commenters.
I really hope I don’t regret posting this later.
No reason you should
I don’t see why you should either. But I wonder if I could ask a favor and get a link back to where people were posting a thousand posts a day accusing each other of moral degeneracy.
I’d like to add them to my collection.
I may want to train an AI on them later.
Yeah, same. Earlier in the storyline when there was a lot of “Sarah’s queerphobic!!!”, weird amounts of vitriol being slung at the brown female characters, people who cared about the cheating storyline as a proper storyline being accused of just “wanting them to be yelled at by man”, the comments honestly made me kinda sick to read, both here and on Patreon where they’re usually chiller. The amount of people slinging shit to defend their otp with their lives, they kinda crossed a line imo? Like, genuinely felt kinda unsafe to be around, as a brown woman in particular since that’s the unfortunate pattern that showed up in the comic. And ofc, irl circumstances played a part too, with the hurricane making me a little more sensitive to those things. Ngl there are some people I still side eye as probably a lil racist from the intensity of reaction to their white girls getting pushback from a black girl. So I stopped, I didn’t even look at the main site comments for days. And I honestly felt weird and guilty as shit when this ship first got canonized and the comments were complete dissonance from my own feelings. I mean I posted a whole soliloquy about how weird and broken it felt to get nothing from them, half joking and obviously hyperbolic but, y’know. When I get that dramatic it’s usually to try and express real feelings without inviting a hate dogpile. Idk. The comments feel safe to me for the first time in months, I’m sorry for other people it’s the opposite
Seconding your last sentence, I do wish other people were as comfortable in the comments as I am now. Being a black reader these last few months has been 1) weird watching the comic pit Joyce nearly exclusively against black and brown women, followed by comments both here and on Patreon getting HELLA racist real fast in response, and 2) wishing Willis would just get back to the Sal/Walky racism storylines because ironically enough, I was immensely more comfortable back then in comparison. I can only cross my fingers we are past that point in the story, but I will still be making my snide little remarks (outside of the comment section, naturally) about Joyce being the comic’s equivalent to Agenda Piece Roronoa Zoro.
Cousin thank you for this bc honestly, sometimes I wonder if I’m overinflating this stuff in my head so it feels really good to see it’s not just me. Like I fully expect the racists to rear their heads when Linda’s around and during Sal’s storylines, and they usually get shut down pretty quick. But fuuuck thos few months where dojo was getting pushback from explicitly biwoc people came out and showed their faces in a really unexpected way. And the shit was so damn uncomfortable. Like hell, Li yesterday used the metaphor of going to a bar and realizing none of your people are there anymore. That shit was like looking up from my drink and realizing the bar had an uncomfortable amount of white people giving the few brown folks around the stink eye.
No, you aren’t wrong. Things got DIRE for a while there.
No, but I tend to just not come around when I don’t want to be here, or I ignore people I don’t want to deal with. I highly recommend it! No one is paying you to be here, if it’s not making the happy chemicals I really support you finding somewhere else to be that does.
No offense but this isn’t that helpful, at least to me, because i already do all that you mention and still fell this way when i come around here. Again no offense, but i asked if anyone else fell the way i described, and since you said you don’t i woild had prefer you didn’t join in. I don’t know how to phrase this in a way that doesn’t sound mean or accusatory, i don’t want to mean it that way.
I’m okay with that, it helps to pump numbers.
Just skip then and focus in interesting comments that are always awaiting interaction
I’m tired boss. Mostly, I’m tired of people being ugly to each other.
Oh hey, I saw that movie for the first time, recently. It’s pretty good.
I mean, I used to, but there’s a lot less screaming vitriol these days than there used to be.
I honestly regret making this comment. If you se yhis just report it.
Maggie is a very understanding person, based on the hovertext.
Personally, while I acknowledge that Joyce and Dorothy cheating was dumb and probably unethical, I like the ship; more importantly however, It seems like it is something in character for both of them to do. In theory, Joyce wants to be ethical, but we have already seen that attraction can get the best of her, as with Jacob. Dorothy has a history of liking Walky while simultaneously distancing herself from him when she’s overwhelmed, and doesn’t listen to him or consider how her actions will make him feel as much as she probably should.
All this is to say, there is much truth to the claim that Dorothy and Joyce are imperfect people making imperfect decisions (which is something that people may want to forget?); however, I don’t think this is bad writing on Willis’s part.
also man what the fuck did i miss in the 4 hours right after this strip dropped, holy hell
Same
As far as I can tell:
– hater containment thread was the first comment, for once
– Willis commented at some point to the tune of “oh jeez couldn’t this have been later” (I wasn’t here for this, just going off what I’ve seen in other comments)
– thread has been nuked again
I consistently get the feeling that Willis feels frustrated and hurt about how badly a lot of this has landed, and is unable or unwilling to accept the criticism.
The way he keeps taunting the unhappy readers in his social media posts really doesn’t feel healthy.
I am consistently on the side of ‘people should be allowed to express their opinions and criticisms of a work’. However, I think there’s a point where the author really doesn’t have to accept certain criticism. Like, the way the protest was handled? The lack of Muslim representation? Completely understandable and Willis has been pretty accepting of that.
Criticism about Dorothy and Joyce’s relationship however, I think that’s going to have to be accepted, by both Willis and the commenters, as an ‘agree to disagree’ thing. Certain readers don’t have to enjoy Dorothy and Joyce’s relationship. However, that doesn’t mean that Willis can no longer tell the story he wishes to tell with them just because people don’t like it. It reminds me of Last Jedi, and how people disliking that meant literally everything from that movie got thrown in the trash and replaced by the most milquetoast MacGuffin shit that was meant to make people as dissatisfied as possible.
I still rage over the bullshit that was everyone hating The Last Jedi. It was, strictly speaking, not a good movie technically (it CANNOT stand on its own, plot wise. I think that should be a basic requirement even for sequels). Rose was handled horribly [not because Rose is Rose, but Johnson made the rookie mistake of having two characters that could fulfill identical roles. Rose should’ve done what the dude that betrayed them did. She didn’t and thus had no purpose to the plot. Could’ve been C-3PO for all that was added. Girly should’ve been allowed to be important.]
But the scene with the ship kamikazing itself was breathtaking. I did genuinely love the messages in it. I loved everything involving Luke, Rey, and Kylo Ren. It was a creative movie with a bunch of good parts in it, and I love Rian Johnson as a director even if I thought he was given too much too early in his career. And it set up so many interesting plot threads.
Plot threads which were immediately thrown out or glossed over in favor of Abrams frankly boring inability to be imaginative for even a second. Can blame Disney, can blame whoever you want, but everything Abrams touches turns to ash across other properties so he’s gonna be the target of my disdain.
Agreed, like the sideline on Vegas planet where Finn the child soldier re-learns that war is bad because it negatively affects children, that was annoying. I get why Laura Dern kept Poe out of the loop but man was it a forced conflict, so much other stuff was great, though. I loved Rey being a nobody. It’s better that way. She built up her parents abandoning her because such cruelty surely needs a forgivable explanation, they totally meant to come back to her except no, they traded her for money and bounced. Except no now her dad was Palpatine’s son/clone because we can’t have a main character NOT have some important lineage! And they didn’t mean to sell and abandon her, they were saving her life all along! Hooray! I love retcons that make everything weaker and useless!
Yes, at the expense of turning hyperspace into… space. The whole conceit of finding a way around Einstein was lost by someone who evidently didn’t understand it.
I get weird about this one, because the penumbra of fiction around the movies has ALWAYS had this idea that there’s a moment or two wherein hyperspace and real space are kinda meshed, especially around large gravity wells — there’s a mission in the original X-Wing flight sims that revolves around you trying to make a hyperspace jump and failing due to something in the way, but your ship definitely travels faster than it “should” for a couple of moments and you end up across the battlefield from where you were. In the dialogue it’s kinda hinted at that you survive this because of some inherent safety features of the hyperdrive, and a lot of us fans who played it had a brief moment of “hmmm” about that. There’s also a lot of an idea in the extended universe of novels that no one really understands how hyperdrives work –they’re essentially archaeotech that works even though the principles behind it are lost. So it felt less “unprecedented” for me and more “honestly, kinda weird that Holdo’s the first person to try that”
Frankly, I felt it was most more trivialized by that brief scene in Rise of Skywalker where it’s implied someone killed an ordinary Star Destroyer that way rather than a dreadnought + an absurdly bigger dreadnought having JUST enough mass shadow that the interaction happened.
I acknowledge that the Holdo Maneuver blew a bigger hole in canon than it did through the dreadnaught.
But yeah, the cinematography of that shot was well worth it.
I’ll co-sign everything Bittersweet said with the exception of Luke. Mark Hamill was disappointed with Luke’s arc and I tend to agree, I think there could have been better choices made.
I knew I was going to hate 9 from the first scene, the hyperspace “chase”. Lots of ink has been spilled talking about how Disney turned 9 into nothing but fanservice for older white guy Star Wars fans, but I’ve been ride-or-die Star Wars for 30 years and I still hated the damn movie. Because the fanservice was all *really shitty*. It threw out all sense of logic and continuity in order to make shallow callbacks. “Somehow, Palpatine has returned” really sums up the whole thing.
My favorite thing to complain about that hopefully y’all haven’t seen ten million times is that Rey should not, in any sort of consistent universe, be allowed to “accidentally a force lightning”. That stuff is supposed to be the darkest of dark side powers. It’s literally weaponized hate. She was trying to *save Chewie*, not kill whoever was on that transport.
They just don’t get it, and refuse to acknowledge how toxic their shiny new OTP (which they wrote from the ground up) actually is when you look at the entire body of work as a whole. And of course don’t forget all the plot potential that was abandoned so we could fast forward to where we are today…
Now we get cutesy soft nothing and filler (Becky’s strip the other day) while we hear both “I’m sorry about the thing I apparently did wrong” and “ahahahahaha suck it, paladins!” at the same time.
It’s disheartening to watch.
The most toxic thing about them is that yes, they both did cheat on their boyfriends when they got together. Something which has been solved by them breaking up with their boyfriends. That’s it. That’s the only toxic thing about their relationship.
Only if you completely ignore Dorothy’s possessiveness of Joyce rooted in her unaddressed post-kidnapping trauma, and the strong parent/child overtones of their dynamic. (And Dorothy’s habit of treating her partners as projects that need her to fix them.)
https://www.dumbingofage.com/appointment-2/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/ready-to-go/
They are the same age.
Dorothy and Joyce are the same age.
Dorothy is not twenty years older than Joyce.
They are. The same. Age. I am so fucking tired of people insisting “erm Dorothy is Joyce’s mother, therefore the relationship is toxic and incest”. She is not actually her mother. I know Jennifer said she was ‘like Joyce’s mom’. That is a hyperbolic statement. It still doesn’t mean they have a PARENT/CHILD OVERTONE TO THEIR DYNAMIC.
They absolutely do have a bunch of trauma going on with their relationship, they’ve both been through a lot of things together, but them having PTSD doesn’t automatically make the relationship toxic.
It’s about their behavior, not their relative ages. If we’re going to get this hung up on semantics, pretend I wrote “codependent” or “caretaker/dependent” up there instead.
As far as we’ve seen, Dorothy always positions herself in a parental/caretaking role in her relationships. She found the life drawing class for Joyce and bought her the sketch pad. She made the optometrist appointment then physically dragged her to it. She goaded her into picking up her birth control prescription.
She did it to Walky, too. Remember their fight over his pajama jeans? How she used helping him study to dodge addressing her own problems?
What about her nightmare where she starts off riding the horse with Joyce, who then falls off, gets trapped behind the “Amber juliennes a guy” doors, and gets vaporized inside the mouth of a giant Ross head? Has she worked on what happened the night of the kidnapping, or is she just okay now because she has Joyce under supervision?
In order for a relationship to be considered so toxic that you think the author needs to address it, you need to provide examples of that. Of instances such as Ruth and Amber raising their voices at their partners. Of Ruth and Jennifer enabling each other’s self destructive alcoholism.
Dorothy being a busybody with caretaker tendencies (which is just how some people show their affection) is not inherently toxic. Neither is Dorothy’s nightmares. Yeah, she does seem happier and less stressed since she feels confident being Joyce’s girlfriend over Joe as Joyce’s partner, but until she actually acts out with controlling behavior you cannot reasonably expect Willis to write around the issues you’ve brought up here because they do not exist yet. Maybe Dorothy and Joyce will have to talk about the trauma. You’ll have to wait and see.
Also, are those things that were deliberately written into the characterization just things you know will just be ignored long term to make the OTP? Or are they potential sources of conflict within the relationship to be explored?
How do you know?
That they’re being cutesy right now riding high on new relationship energy doesn’t mean the intent is they’ll never have problems.
There’s definitely a vibe. Dorothy is the knowledgeable one who helps Joyce learn by sharing her knowledge. That’s a big part of the parent/child relationship. Just off the top of my head:
-She was the driving force behind Joyce getting glasses & BC. I think at least one time she scheduled the appointment, possibly both.
– Laundry Day was explicitly framed as a “teaching” moment.
– Going over what Joyce might enjoy during sex.
– Helping her to pick out new music- I’m thinking about how at one point Dorothy went “Your favorite music is Paramore”, as a definitive thing.
I can’t think of a time when Joyce has done the reverse for Dorothy, where she’s taken a leadership role about something she knows more about. Joyce was the lead player during #dranks, but she wasn’t educating Dorothy- they were both equally clueless.
Personally, I don’t think that part of their relationship rises to “toxic” levels- it’s well within normal relationship limits. But it’s absolutely a seed from which toxicity can bloom, and there’s *absolutely* a vibe there.
When Dorothy spoonfeeds Joyce while making airplane noises, praises her for a big productive shit on the toilet, changes her diaper, buys her kiddy toys, and sets Joyce down in a playpen while she sips wine, THEN I will accept this strange insistence that Dorothy and Joyce have a parent and child relationship. Until then, I’m just gonna look at you people funny and wonder…
In this very strip Joyce is educating Dorothy on the importance of brushing your teeth.
no fucking way ppl be trying to say Doyce is toxic because they have a character dynamic where one is slightly more responsible than the other 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
Are you new here?
I’m with Needfuldoer 100% of the way, and it saddens me that Willis absolutely refuses to hear any of it.
They absolutely do get it. Joyce’s and Dorothy’s toxicity was written that way on purpose. It gives their relationship problems to overcome. After all, if you end up in a cute relationship without any major issues to blow up in your face, you get banished to a narrative nul-space of only partial existence. Just like Danny. A Danny Phantom Zone if you will.
The problem is in calling it “toxicity”
People, a relationship that isn’t perfect isn’t immediately toxic!
Is Dotty’s assessment of her trauma even fully true, or was it just her attempt at dismissing her obvious romantic feelings towards Joyce? Because contrary to popular belief, you don’t always know what the fuck is up with your brain. Let’s see what happens if she goes talk to a therapist.
And of fucking course Dorothy teachers Joyce a lot of things! Do you remember how she was raised? Nevermind that Dorothy is an overachiever, she’s always gonna go the extra mile for anything she cares about, and that includes her partners.
The only ‘toxic’ thing about their relationship is the fact that, in the whirlwind of emotions and denial that kickstarted it, they cheated on their partners. Which isn’t a toxic part of the relationship, it’s toxic behavior towards those they cheated on.
This is an interesting take, because it doesn’t seem to be grounded in anything I’ve noticed about the comic or read on Bluesky or Patreon.
Like… Willis occasionally laughs at or mocks comments while taking an absolute fucking avalanche of abuse daily. It’s kind of ridiculous to expect them to just take the level of constant, unending, repetitive complaining that pops up every fucking day (in addition to all the shit we don’t see because it gets to Willis privately somehow) without ever saying or doing anything about it.
“The way he keeps taunting the unhappy readers in his social media posts really doesn’t feel healthy.”
This line, in particular, is hilarious. Just taking all that abuse on the chin would be healthier, would it? Nonsense, absolute nonsense.
Huuuuuge agree. Esp since a line of thought I see a LOT is ‘actually responding back to Hugely Critical Even Hugely Shitty Feedback is BULLYING’. its not. It’s Willis’ comic. I really don’t think the deal is ‘in return for reading a free comic you get to slag on it forever, endlessly’.
I agree that willis doesn’t deserve the amount of vitriol or especially targeted armchair psychology that I’ve seen only glimpses of here and through his own accounts on his blogs.
That said I think a lot of the complaints aren’t trying to he malicious. Theyre fans who feel like their criticisms aren’t being heard. Theyre being seen and read but not understood, based on how often their stances and feelings are misrepresented. I think the issue is less about taking the abuse on the chin but really, truly, addressing what people are saying rather than making passive aggressive polls or calling out the worst of the bad actors. Speaking personally I dont really wanna be a hater. I would much rather talk about the things I like in the comic than the things I don’t.
I didn’t love the implication that Dot was to blame for the “hate comments” by “reminding people to kvetch” evrey night. That felt unfair.
Was Dot banned or has she just not posted since the thread was taken down?
I dunno. I don’t THINK there was a ban. That would be beyond the pale tbh.
There were even multiple occasions on which Dot posted the thread and immediately followed it up with “honestly I don’t hate/kinda like this one”.
Plus multiple discussions within those threads about the justification of the thread and why it’s healthier than leaving the complains UNcontained.
I realize Willis is frustrated after months of criticism but they could have just asked Dot to please give the comment section more time in the future and still given the same explanation that having it be the first thread makes him feel like he lacks self-respect for allowing the continued existence of it (or complaints in general?). The frustration could have been spent instead on that one person who was like “if you’re upset about the criticism, try writing a story that doesn’t piss off your fans”.
I’d be able to understand that better if there was any real effort to engage with the constructive criticism. Radio silence in between dismissive/mocking social media posts is unsurprisingly not helping critics feel heard. And for that to build up to lashing out at Dot for being first even though Dot had already expressed surprise that she was first AND took an apologetic tone to the reader who already expressed dissatisfaction with it being first?
Never even mind that most of us initially expected more actual drama to come from Joyce and Dorothy cheating on their partners, only to see literally everyone that would be expected to be upset or even annoyed with them EXCEPT Raidah passively tolerating or outright condoning their actions.
Plus, both the cheating bisexual idea and the decision to ignore the drama that should come from a cheating storyline in favor of sexytimes were things Willis themselves criticized in the past. Yet nobody seems to care about the cheating, and the drama of it is being entirely swept under the rug in favor of tolerance and approval of the relationship.
So it’s hard not to feel like the constructive, respectful criticism is being actively spurned.
oh, I did the biggest burn ever there, but I’m okay jajaja
Because this comment section could use another grenade:
A commenter somewhere else said that making hashtagdranks their first date retroactively makes it also, retroactively, emotional cheating. I can’t recall if Dorothy had gotten together with Walky at the time, but Joyce was obviously with Joe.
Considering that immediately after said date was the first time Joyce was comfortable being more physically intimate with Joe, and how she really wanted to recreate that experience with him at the dorm party, well, that’s really interesting.
Honestly, I’d like to see that as a setup for Joyce at least considering the poly angle- it’s clear evidence that she *can* manage an intimate bond with 2 people simultaneously. That or some sort of self-reflection about how badly she treated Joe if she isn’t going for the poly approach.
Can you tell that a lack of any real self-reflection on Joyce’s part has been one of my pri.ary problems with this arc?
I will remain a poly truther till the day I die! (Or the day it gets definitively shot down in canon)
Honestly, the longer it isn’t dealt with the more likely it seems that it’s going to be important. Willis might come up with another way for it to be important, but it would have been so easy to either not bring it up at all or to wrap it up right after the suggestion (if all he wanted was to show how desperate Joe was to stay with her maybe?).
People really seem to think Willis has no object permanence and if something isn’t happening right now it’s never going to happen and will never be addressed and the comic is ruined because from now on it will be completely lacking in conflict of any kind and will forever be only Doyce fluff
When predicting future behavior, past behavior is one of the most important indicators. And so far the only thing we’ve seen of how DoJo is written is fluff. Characters who I as a reader interpret as being willing and able to initiate some sort of conflict have chosen to take their space and tacitly approve. Two big emotional moments (Becky finding out & Joyce coming out to Hank) had whole strips where the entirety of the content was “Joyce and Dorothy talk about how much they love each other”.
You couple that with how Willis is explicitly upset that people are complaining that DoJo is cute and what other conclusion can I draw but “yeah, that other shoe isn’t really dropping anytime soon”
And I’m sure people were complaining the same way about all the other couples this comic had having a period where they were just allowed to be a couple before the inevitable drama we all knew was coming. I’m sure I can go back to those strips and see the same discourse about people being so tired of the cutesy-couple stuff and begging Willis to move on already!
Oh, wait. I’ve been doing that. No other pairing got this much shit. And there’s a point where “b-b-b-but the cheating” just doesn’t really cut it anymore.
So which is it, neighbor?
Does every other couple get complaints, or does “no other pairing g[e]t this much shit”?
I can’t really respond to a post that goes both ways.
Right, Poe’s law. Read the first paragraph with an incredibly annoying sarcastic tone of voice.
It’s called “sarcasm”, Rogue. Which you might have understood, had you read the last paragraph.
And you (and a lot of other people) seem to be forgetting that in-universe, this relationship has been going on for approximately 48 hours. I’m pretty sure I was annoyingly sappy for almost a month after I started dating my wife. (Well, I mean, she wasn’t my wife yet…)
Sarcasm expressed through text is incredibly difficult to pick up on. In other news, water is wet.
So we’re working from the same set of facts- that this pairing has attracted a large number of criticisms.
I’m not really sure what you want me to *do* with that, simply because it bears absolutely no relation to the point I was making.
The point was that every couple in the comic has had a period of grace where they were allowed happiness without repercussion and you’re here like “Uuuuugh I want this to end already”
I mean, every other couple wasn’t the sole focus of the narrative for months like DoJo has been, being honest.
I took a quick look at Book 13 Story 3- Joementum. And there’s a good number of JoJo strips. But also? We have a bunch of narratives interwoven there. We have Dorothy’s continuing crashout. We have Walky & Lucy’s breakfast with the Plastics. Becky & Dina have their moments. And I think it’s where Carla was introduced to Charlie.
But we really haven’t had much in these past arcs that isn’t about DoJo.
I more or less said “ughhh I want this to end already” when walky and Lucy got together. I think its just compounded by how much forcus its getting right now.
I feel like the cheating as depicted was nothingberger because they kissed and then immediately broke up. It’s about as ethical as things can be done in this matter. Which is not but almost cute in how it has been elevated to massive betrayal.
I expect more cheating and darker!
DARKER!
YES! EXACTLY! Where is the emotional devastation? Where are the crashouts and psychological breakdowns? So much noise was made about Willis being super uncomfortable with cheating, and avoiding cheating plotlines in their comics for decades, that you’d think it would have led to some incredibly painful (and good) moments, but nah. I completely get why folks would come away from this arc convinced that the cheating was a non-issue; you’d think there was no cheating at all the way it was lightly pinched over the story like black pepper on potato salad at a whites-only country club get together.
Yeah, I’m STILL utterly baffled as to why they wanted to include a cheating storyline seemingly just to tick off the box of having done so, without actually including any of the messy aftermath that COMES from cheating.
I think thats part of the frustration though. Its a nothing burger to the point it could have literally just been nothing. The way it happened you could have them both break up before the protest and nothing is different.
These aren’t real people, they are characters someone is writing. If cheating doesn’t matter then why include it? If you dont want to have a cheating plot line then dont have them cheat, if you want to have a cheating plot line then have the cheating impact something.
See, the toothlessness of the cheating arc as portrayed is kind of why I lobbed this grenade. Because it’s one *loaded* with teeth.
I’d like it to detonate and make DoJo stop and think a minute: “Boy, if that really was our first date, then we were *really* being dishonest about things with Joe & Walky”
I read Joyce and Joe not as Joyce balancing two intimate relationships at once, but as Joyce sublimating her desire for Dorothy onto her relationship with Joe. Knowing what kind of church she grew up in, she most likely still has some lingering internalized homophobia. Since she’s was unwilling to consider that she was gay, she redirected that sexual desire onto an “acceptable” object of her desire.
Now I say all of that just to say that i don’t expect polyamory to come out of it. I think they can still salvage a loving friendship out of this, but it still is going to require a lot of introspection and a long conversation with Joe about how she (however unintentionally) used him emotionally. And God only knows when it even if that talk is going to happen.
This is something that I think is only supported by a surface-level reading of the text.
If we get into metacommentary on the strip, we very quickly run into the problem that Willis has explicitly said that Joyce is Bi, not gay. That doesn’t fit with her attraction to Joe being solely sublimated desire for Dorothy.
And in a deeper reading of the text, we see consistently throughout that Joyce Has A Type when it comes to men, and their similarities to Dorothy don’t really factor into it in the slightest- solely that they’re tall and muscular. Honestly, that’s an angle that *could* have been explored- I remember Becky called Jacob “the biggest Dorothy ever” in that they’re both serious, civic-minded dorks, but Ethan and Joe really don’t fit into that personality type at all.
I like the crunch wrap, but yeah either brush your teeth after eating it or chew some gum.
I’m not sure she can handle an intimate bond with 2 people simultaneously. It’s more like Joyce is laser focussed, but that laser focus is often with whatever is directly in front of her. When Joe was there it was pointed at him, and when he’s not she forgets he exists.
Joyce lacks object permanence. I’m curious what will happen when Joe and Dorothy are both in front of her at the same time.
Say, suppose that instead of a containment thread for posts about how much people hate the current arc of the comic, we just contained all the posts about how much people seem to hate each other. That’s what gets me down more than anything these days.
Anyway, I like this. It reminds me of when I was younger and I smoked. I knew this woman who hated the smell of it. She insisted that you could have cigarettes or you could have kisses, but not both. Even brushing your teeth wasn’t enough. If she could still smell it on your skin or in your hair, she wouldn’t go near you.
One does feel like there’s a LOT of hurt feelings in this comment section over and above the disagreements on plot and pacing.
Personally, I ascribe it to that moment we had for a month or two where it seemed like everyone was reacting to everyone else as though they personally endorsed the worst takes that were vaguely similar to their own — lots of accusations of immorality and homophobia and all kinds of other nonsense that really didn’t apply to the vast majority of folks.
It really does seem like some of those bruises are just starting to fade.
We’re closing in on “rather than a hater containment thread, we’ll be needing a lover containment thread” levels of bitterness here.
how it feels to wake up in the morning and check todays comments on dumbing of age dot com
I feel like I woke up in the post apocalypse
Zee, I was here when the comic first posted, and when I saw that the HCT was the very first comment, I just closed the tab and went to bed. I knew something like this was going to happen, but still, what a wasteland.
In my 12(?) years of reading I’ve never seen the vibe be so tangibly off
Ayyyy! I got this strip in the free bookmarks at SPX! 😀 This was a cute one.
There’s some real “death of the author” stuff in the comments. DYW has a plan for the comic. It was clearly Dorothy and Joyce going back years. It’s not even tangentially about US foreign policy. It’s gonna be filled with hijinks. A lot of people want it to meet their needs or requirements. That’s not how any of this works. He’s writing what he wants. If enough people read it he makes a living. He’s not selling a mass market product where he needs to respond to customer demand.
Telling him he needs to do this or that to meet your requirements is not gonna work. Feel free to interpret the comic. Just remember the author is still alive and will write what they need to write. I am surprised he doesn’t nuke the comments entirely.
They’re together but who knows it will last. Because DRAMA.
I don’t think you know what death of the author is. It’s a literary analysis technique of approaching a work and discarding anything about the author has stated as their intent for the work.
Reading the text but discarding authorial intent is used to look at what is there that the author might not have intended, but illustrates broader cultural ideas and norms.
For instance what does the use of a real anti-genocide protest for a faux-wedding backdrop say about how the deaths of foreigners – especially non-white foreigners – are exploited by Western writers?
What does it say that the protest was fictionalised to “Bulmeria” – a country that had previously been used for a punchline where it was implied to have been made up by Robin?
Regardless of the method of critique, any piece of art is up for criticism on its form and message.
Also, as an aside, it is explicitly about the university supporting to military contractors that are enabling a foreign genocide. If you don’t think that is about US foreign policy I’m gonna be blunt: I don’t think you are adequately equipped for any discussion about writing, criticism, or even basic literally analysis.
Yeah you can’t just…..say no to death of the author. That’s just an inherent thing the second any creative work reaches a second pair of eyes
If discourse is this bad right now, imagine when the Trans Walky reveal finally happens.
“Walky transitions” is yet another storyline I am metaphorically begging Willis not to write. There’s no way it’s gonna be handled well.
It’s a fun headcanon though.
>There’s no way it’s gonna be handled well.
Why? I get he fucked up with the protest stuff, but so far the LGBT stuff has been pretty on-point. Unless you think Joyce and Dorothy cheating is HUGELY PROBLEMATIC because bi people are never allowed to mess up, in which case I can’t help you.
Also it’s /absolutely/ gonna happen. When I do a 3rd run through the comic I’m absolutely making a collection of every time Walky is totally normal about gender and shows absolutely no trans inclinations at all.
Lmao we made functionally the same comment at the same time. It’s a sign, Willis! Pull the REAL drama tag off and give the people what they want! /s
I’m actually going to make the hottest of takes here and say that I trust Willis to handle that WAY more than I trusted them to handle the protest stuff.
I need this for so, so many reasons. I would be insufferable about it for months. But I’m gonna be honest, I don’t think that discourse will match this one. The levels of vitriol here and on Patreon have been incredibly mind boggling to witness as a long time reader. I struggle to conceptualize it getting even worse than it already has.
You underestimate the power of transmisogyny. I believe the 2 times a comment section has been completely nuked from orbit in this comic it was in regards to Carla, and she barely shows up.
You know what, you make a fair point here. And any of that would only be further heightened by transmisogynoir, so I might be tripping!
Carla is a blend of “written to be annoying” and “some commenters will find her extra annoying because of transmisogyny.” I’d discount that as a one-off, but then you look at some other characters – Malaya is trans and written to be annoying, Booster is nonbinary and written to be annoying – and I start seeing a pattern that makes me pessimistic about what a trans Walky would be like in canon.
I’ll give you Carla, she is purposefully abrasive and it’s obviously something she does on purpose because she’s trans. And I love her for it!
But Malaya and Booster? Annoying?
W h a t?
Malaya was only ever ‘annoying’ to Sal, and that was because Sal was jealous. Other than that they’re kind of an average somewhat edgy teen.
And Booster is somewhat flamboyant, and has that psychology-student pseudoanalitical stuff going on, but I’ve never read them as annoying, and definitely not ‘written to be’ so.
Booster is About as silly and kinda loves watching trainwrecks as any other character, Malaya is abraisive… like sal or mike or ruth or (etc). And carlas perfect. Im with bill theyre just. Characters. Not “written to be annoying”.
Well, I read them as written to be annoying, so we will have to disagree.
I think Walky is bi but I’m less persuaded there’s any trans promotion.
It requires us to believe that Walky is overcompensating with his performative masculinity, which I don’t think we’ve gotten any hint of.
Take note I’m open to being persuaded otherwise.
What got me to actually start thinking about Walky being trans was that one strip where Carla gives him one look and tells him “You can still reach your potential”, which in her case obviously means crack that egg. And suddenly every time Walky was strangely overperformative about his gender started making sense.
Remember when the first “conflict” he got was that he wanted to buy girl pants? I’m sure that means nothing at all.
It was just pajama “jeans”, wasn’t it? I thought the issue there was that they were supposedly too slovenly (which, fwiw, is also very in character for Walky), not that they were supposedly “too girly”.
But even if I’m wrong about that, I feel like that’s well within the realm of “society deciding so-and-so is only for girls sometimes just means society is fucking stupid and judgmental, not that you’re a girl”.
Oh and then his first ‘conflict’ after the timeskip was, you know, his hair being ‘girly’.
I’m just saying. There’s a pattern here.
Both of your comments are things I completely forgot, and we can add them to the list I just made! Looks like evidence continues to stack up.
The “Walky is trans” headcanon/meme is hard carried by certain repeated elements that just seem to keep coming up in Willis’s work. Lemme go find it, I sent it to some friends on Discord a month ago.
Okay, here we go. No links provided because I’m not trying to get caught by the automod, maybe someone else can provide those or correct my citations.
– Post on tumblr from user animation-recaps-by-sean featuring a series of panels from It’s Walky (?), where Walky is singing in the bathroom “Who is that girl I see, staring straight back at me~”, with him saying in the following panel “There must be a more emasculating Disney song to get stuck in my head.” Willis reblogged it onto the itswalky tumblr with the response “I think about this strip a lot.”
– DoA strip on April 24th, 2018 where Jason and Walky are drunk at Galasso’s, and Jason drunkenly states that Walky “would be very pretty if he were a girl.”
– DoA strip on November 10th, 2023, where Walky is talking with Carla who has come to bother him about Charlie’s location, and she states in response to him having a girlfriend with “Huh, the correct gender. And *you* still have time to realize your full potential”, with all the implications that carries.
– Preview panel posted on the DoA tumblr from March 2026 of Walky in front of a prominently placed “I Saw The TV Glow” movie poster in the background, a film explicitly thematically about the “egg crack”, i.e. realizing you’re trans
I know there are more, those are just the biggest ones.
I didn’t see that preview panel of the poster but girl I’m gonna be so normal about it.
Now add the two things Bill Erak mentioned above (Walky feeling conflicted about wanting to buy “girl pants”, and the post-timeskip conflict about his “girly hair”), and suddenly this begins looking like a pretty consistent pattern, huh? Just saying, we aren’t bringing this out of nowhere.
the lettuce TOUCHING like five other things is NOT purified by going through dorothys sweet blonde head. Noted.
when I get a crunch wrap I order it with no sour cream, but then what else is in it? ground beef, lettuce, tomato, cheese, a corn chip…seriously Dorothy what the hell?
Welp, finally found me in Joyce.
I see we got “Joyce Dorothy comic #57320 to bring the comic to a halt” still in action
With all respect to the characters, I am 100% more invested in the Bulmeria fallout and Asma than any aspect of Dorothy/Joyce being cute. I also totally hope Joyce cheats on Dorothy with Joe and Vice versa (Joe would not want to be the Other Partner) by accident.
Because DRAMA and stupid decisions is why I’m here.
More Bulmeria and cheating please.
Wow, I had no idea Joyce (and Willis) had it THIS bad. When I dated a vegetarian I always tried to proactive brush between eating any meat and trying to kiss her, but she never showed any hesitation times that I wasn’t able to (or forgot, I’m sure there were times I forgot).
I hope Bulmeria gets glassed like Reach.
Those plain bean burritos are actually pretty decent so I could picture Joyce getting that(yes I am autistic, how could you tell?)