I mean, to be fair, much like Joyce he kinda had his worldview shattered, in some ways, by direct evidence to the contrary of the views and opinions he’s held for as long as he can remember. That sort of thing tends to spur sudden and dramatic growth, even in real people, even if it’s the sort of thing that’s more common in fiction. You pretty much either double down on the delusion, or you immediately start working on bettering yourself.
I went to college in my hometown, and even lived at home still. It still happened to me too, though probably to a lesser extent than it would’ve if I’d gone out of state or something. I even went to a Christian college, but it was a different denomination that’s less… culty than my family’s, so if was still a culture shock.
Leaving Mormonism taught me how strong that umbrella can be, especially if your conditioning makes the first step away from orthodoxy feel like an inevitable spiral into mortal destruction and an afterlife isolated with your regrets. It can become an OCD-level anxiety.
College changed my tolerance level. Getting my family through the recession changed my politics away from arch-conservativism. Seeing how official Mormon homophobia affected friends of mine made me realize I never wanted to be the asshole they required me to be.
In spite of all this, admitting my doubts to my wife and uprooting the first strands of Mormonism that wove through both of our lives felt like stepping off the cliff and going towards oblivion. It took time and actual experience before I could accept that I wasn’t too weak to be Mormon, but that Mormonism was too limiting for a happy, healthy life.
Dorothy’s cliff isn’t religious in nature, but she’s spent her whole life reinforcing her perfectionism. Her natural talents made it possible in the vacuum of childhood, but now she’s facing a lack of control in ways that are so much bigger than academic.
Thanks for sharing your story. When I was in college, a close friend of mine (knew her since middle school, we were at the same college) became Mormon. I do not have a favorable view of the religion, but I wanted to be supportive. We were still close for a while– she converted our freshman year, and we roomed together sophomore year– and she seemed pretty much the same, but there some things I questioned.
She went on a mission (she was just placed in the Atlanta area) after junior year, and I did have further issue with that– missionary work is not something I agree with. I didn’t say this to her, but I did pull back a bit. I didn’t immediately reach out for an address to write her at, for example. I did eventually, but we really drifted apart after that. And at some point, she just stopped responding to my messages altogether (which were about wishing her well– she got married! she had a baby!– and asking if she was safe when something was happening in the area she lived in). Sometimes I just sum it up as “we went to college, she became Mormon, and I got queerer.”
Sometimes, especially when I hear stories about people’s experiences of it, I wonder if I should have been more vocally opposed to Mormonism when she was first getting interested. But I don’t know that would have actually helped anything.
Honestly, I think he’s only really changed a little bit. I think he’s become more aware of other people AS people, that they have their own experiences, feelings, and points of view, and maybe he’s gotten a little bit more courage than he previously had, but is otherwise the same person he’s always been. However, that little bit of change makes a HUGE difference, in the way he interacts with otehr people, and the way he sees things.
I’d say that like most people, he had both aspects in him all the time.
He just chose to let the caring one out, and is discovering that it can also be the real him.
I feel like the impact of the result of the change is more important than how big the internal shift actually was. Like, yeah, he’s just getting his head out of his own butt and seeing women as people now and as such is applying aspects of his personality that he always had but they just didn’t get to see, but the end result *is* a fairly drastic shift in behavior and observable personality.
Yeah, like… I get that Dorothy is struggling a lot and that this breakdown was a long time coming, but Joe fundamentally has nothing to do with the things she’s miserable over (except maybe Joyce but we’re not there yet). Taking it all out on him is not the most super. Again, I cannot stress enough, I am not blaming her for being here at the moment, just that Joe has for once not earned the ire coming his way. He’s being really cool about it, considering.
I wouldn’t say “not once”, she is, in a lot of ways, cashing some old cheques here, a lot of resentment built up over knowing the person he *used* to be.
Him handling it the way he is will be a lot more proof for her that he’s not that person anymore though. The old Joe would have gotten very defensive in this situation, now he’s just letting her get it all out.
I’d argue that’s driving her insane because it’s just more proof that she no longer has any constants in her life. If Joe has made such change to his persona then Dorothy has no real grasp on people at all.
Joe out of the blue decided Dorothy was into Joyce and decided to walk in and start pushing her about it and is now mocking her about it. This is completely a situation he started, so he totally deserves whatever come his way.
Granted, if Joyce wasn’t such a self-centered piece of garbage, she might have noticed one of her best friends is having a nervous breakdown and maybe mentioned it to Joe.
What? Everyone is being like “Joe handled this so well” and “Joe doesn’t deserve to get yelled at”. Joe literally walked in on someone who doesn’t like him and started this whole thing, and he’s being really awful to Dorothy about it.
One could argue that Joe, who despite his sex pest past, is adept at picking up on signs of attraction and emotional states, has noticed Dorothy’s spiral and knows her well enough to know that’s she’s doing what she always does and masks. As such, he has decided to gently but firmly, and a little bluntly, Push Dorothy on this cause it’s just gonna get worse if she doesn’t address it.
I’m not sure this is out of the blue, actually. Given, yanno, everything.
And teenagers (especially autistic teenagers) are allowed to not be very good at assessing the world and the mental states of other people yet. Since, remember, these are college students. They’re still learning how to function.
(also they live in a comic, so some exaggeration is to be expected.)
Oh yeah. Honestly, props to Dorothy for really actually feeling this shit and expressing it instead of continuing to bottle and ignore and try to act the right way, but Joe is facilitating it with a lot of care and understanding, more than most people his age, and a lot more than many adults ever get.
Like, he’s taking no shit, but also not adding to the shitpile. He’s really demonstrating what it means to hold space. Not easy to do if someone you care about is splitting, melting down, or otherwise spinning out.
I feel like Joe getting busted for his black book, and deciding to own up to it, plus some other more minor things, jump started his maturity. Nothing like getting called on your bullshit to make you wonder if you can go on without it.
Joyce directly confronting him about her “zero” rating was a big one. I say confronting, but she really just…. genuinely asked him what she meant to him. Being treated like a *person* was rare for Joe then and it definitely did a lot.
Even if in the short term he tried to hide from it by immediately jumping into Malaya’s bedsheets.
Plus the “Sorry you’re angry” text. That’s probably always going to stick with me, and I don’t have the best memory. For months now (in universe), Joyce has given Joe the space to be imperfectly human. It’s helped with him seeing himself as lovable and complex. Also him falling for her while she was being messy with Jacob. That’s got to have had some impact on him learning to be okay with himself.
All this to say, I absolutely agree, here have more moments of JoJoyce growth.
And I don’t know, but this feels like the emphasis is the wrong way around something. If Joe wasn’t treated like a person, it’s because he did everything he could to discourage it. He didn’t treat women like people
I feel like people don’t appreciate enough that Joe was always different than the stereotypical slutty dude who just wants to bang chicks. It’s been pretty well established that his refusal to try and have serious relationships was a reactionary response to witnessing his father’s constant infidelity, having internalized a belief that he would be just like his father, seemingly hypnotizing women with his good looks and charm and then always losing self control and hurting those women terribly. In a backwards, roundabout way, Joe’s entire man slut persona was him desperately attempting to remain ethical and honest towards women despite believing himself *inherently, genetically* incapable of doing so. And when Joe immediately fessed up about the “do list” when it was revealed and didn’t try to argue in his defense or get mad at people for being mad at him, and instead decided to openly mea culpa and attempt reparations in donuts, a part of that was that he was genuinely horrified that he had hurt so many people so badly, and that he genuinely wanted to be liked by all those women he kept at emotional arm’s length. In a twisted way, Joe has spent his entire adolescence fixated on how to behave as morally as possible, so this shift in philosophy and outward behavior comes to him a lot more naturally than it would come to someone who was carelessly promiscuous in pursuit of as much sex as possible.
I agree, mostly, but I think we’re too quick to jump onto this two-dimensional picture of “stereotypical slutty dude” to begin with. A lot of the young men I’ve known to act like this did it in similar ways and for similar reasons, due to insecurity over their place in the world, the expectations of patriarchy on their shoulders or from their fathers and older brothers, etc. Then you have those who are wilfully abusive or more than happy to just exploit advantages to their own ends and the like. Still dangerous and careless at best, actively malicious at worst – but also still more three-dimensional than they’re generally painted.
god I love how cute this is SO MUCH. Like. I am not even insisting that this become poly but if this were the way all mono people handled romantic tangles,,,,
This. I think he’s legit concerned for his girlfriend’s best friend. Or his friend for that matter. She hasn’t been okay for a while, and I think that he’s legit out to help her, while at the same time finding out if she’s into Joyce.
Joe has gone through some things that have made him grow up pretty fast, so I think he’s the right person to handle this particular situation, though I have been wrong before.
That’s right! I forgot that they DO know each other through Danny! So he could be legit out trying to help her while at the same time getting to the bottom of what exactly is up with her and Joyce.
most likely that, yeah, but it could also be that her current therapist might just not be a good fit. iirc the biggest piece of advice that we’ve seen Dorothy’s therapist give in-text was “it’s best to reconstrue upsets tragedies as victories in personal growth”, which imo might not be the best thing to imprint on a tightly-wound, self punishing, type a student who was recently kidnapped and visibly saw a man die violently in front of her.
and while we don’t know if this was the result of Dorothy misconstruing something much more nuanced on the therapist’s end, if there’s something that i’ve had to learn the hard way last year, it’s that no therapy is much better than bad/ineffective therapy.
IIRC Dorothy did openly admit that she hides things (or lies?) to her therapist just in case there’s an exposé later. She’s in therapy but has been self-sabotaging it the whole time.
I feel like this is a good time to remind people that Dorothy was a really evil villain in the Walkyverse, and her villainy was motivated by disappointment with how her life turned out and looking back in regret at what she might have had and lost.
Get the seemingly dumb hunk with a history of mildly edgy comments who can bro it up voted in, possibly on a Republican ticket. The first day, his political advisors try to distract, manipulate, and control him, like they did with Trump. But OH NO! To their dismay they quickly realise the not-so-dumb hunk is actually a SECRET SLEEPER AGENT OF WOKENESS!!! His first executive order is that all Mardi Gras parades MUST hand out beads on basis of gender identity! And that is when we wokies shall rule ‘Tis a flawless, airtight political plan!
Another thing that MAGAts just can’t do is grok what it actually means to be woke.
It’s kind of funny, though, because “based and redpilled” is basically their own warped, misshapen, assbackwards version of being “woke,” even if they don’t realize it.
Black people? Jews? Woke. Gay? Trans? Woke. The Hurricane turbocharged six cylinder engine that replaced the Hemi in the Dodge trucks? That engine is WOKE! Garfield comics? WOKE! Cody Rhodes winning the WWE title? Woke!
Woke is the new “Communism!”, all the narcissistic goose stepping of the red scare and McCarthyism, double the stupidity.
In any other context I would agree with you, but making a voluntary act like handing out beads mandatory like Marianne says sounds like treating people like things, and that is where all evil starts.
My take on it is that pronouns are like names and titles. If Dr. Robert Smith asks you to call him Dr. Smith because he is proud of his title, then the polite thing to do is to use that title. You can choose not to use the title, but you would risk offending Dr. Smith with all the consequences that entails. Pronouns are exactly the same thing: You can choose to be an asshole about it, but don’t be surprised if that leads to the people you insulted not liking you. Alternatively you can just not interact with people who insist on being called Doctor or insist on anything else you don’t want to call them. Nobody is going to force you to be friends. And there are plenty of ways to sidestep using a title you don’t want to use on the rare occasions where you do have to interact.
I just don’t see how living in a woke society can be an issue for a non-woke non-asshole.
Aaaand I just realized that this sounds like I am reducing wokeness to just gender issues, which wasn’t my point, I just got stuck on something I’m thinking about.
The underlying principle of wokeness is being aware of the systemic nature of societal problems. In this case living in a woke society as a non-woke non-asshole you would be surrounded with people who disagree with you about where problems come from. OK, so disagree with people. You’re allowed to disagree. You can even have discussions about it! What you can’t do is use violence to resolve your disagreement. But since you’re a non-asshole in addition to being non-woke you would already agree that you don’t bring violence into a discussion, so that shouldn’t be a problem for you.
But it’s not just about using violence. Nor is it just about using pronouns, even if we’re just talking about trans people.
It’s about less extreme pressures, like company policies or about teaching acceptance in schools. If you’re interacting with your hypothetical Dr. Smith as part of your job, the consequences of not addressing him as the social protocol requires go beyond just not being friends. This is rare, because trans people are rare and rarer still because the pressure is more often put on them to conform and accept and discrimination keeps them from having the social clout to enforce consequences.
Refusing to use the right pronouns is far more akin to the social use of slurs for marginalized groups than something as innocuous as not wanting to always use a title like “Doctor” for someone who’s proud of it. It’s a way of signalling your own bigotry and power over them as part of the dominant majority and allowing to go socially unchecked is a serious threat to the marginalized group.
Also even the trans part of wokeness goes so far beyond pronouns – trans people face widespread discrimination. Coming out often risks losing both jobs and family support. In the US, they’ve just been banned from serving in the military.
You make some good points. I am trying to put down a way of looking at woke that achieves two things at once: Be accepted by the average normal guy as common sense while also creating a set of social rules that make trans people safer (and everyone else of course, but we should focus on the weakest group when trying to make the world better)
The way to make trans people safer is to get the average normal guy to be less transphobic not for people to tiptoe around his prejudices.
Remember the gay marriage fights? Proposing civil unions or other half measures didn’t make the opposition okay with it. They fought those too and took any ground offered as a win.
The problem with wokeness is that you don’t actually have to be woke to repeat the observations woke people have made without understanding them or having the same motivations in looking at the world honestly and wanting to tell what you see. My experience is that most people who get accused of being “woke” aren’t really aware of the world at all, they’re just parroting stuff that they know has become popular among other people of the same political alignment. And then it becomes a game of telephone, as the message gets more and more distorted with each telling by people who never saw the elephant for themselves.
What I’ve seen that game of telephone more with is people saying things against “wokeness,” even though many of these people wouldn’t express that stance, at least in the spaces we’ve interacted in. That misinformation about litter boxes being put in schools for kids who identify as cats? I had a coworker saying that happened at a school his friend worked at. And he had probably been told by a friend that it was from *their* friend, but he condensed it down, which makes it seem more credible…even though it was just lies.
Fascism is explicitly right wing.
The left can have authoritarianism, but not fascism.
Beyond that, while that’s theoretically true, the right wing version is currently resurgent around the world and especially in the US, while left wing authoritarianism is basically non-existent at the moment in terms of political power, but is still portrayed as at least as serious a threat to your freedom right here and now. There is social pressure to use the right pronouns for trans people and that is proof of left wing fascism. This is false equivalency bullshit.
In my Unitarian Universalist church, when we tried to come back from covid lockdown, we suddenly had a witch hunt for secret white supremacists that tore the congregation apart with finger-pointing accusations. It resulted in most of the people leaving while the people who were doing the most accusing seized control of the board and the church’s considerable finances. They then elected a church president who lived over a thousand miles away and had her run the church over the internet, projecting her face up on a big screen in the sanctuary, and one of her first “sermons” (because the minister had walked out as well) was to give a speech about how all white people are always white supremacists because we are born into white supremacy whether we accept it or not, and it’s not something you can choose to be or not be. It destroyed what was supposed to be a safe space for marginalized people by creating such a hostile atmosphere that nobody ever felt safe from being trampled beneath the struggle for power. So that’s my concept of current day left wing authoritarianism.
okay like, this church president you speak of was for reals conflating benefitting from white privilege with being white supremacist, the whole fuckin point is to recognize that the whole “racist/non-racist” binary isn’t useful anymore
honest to satan she sounds like an IRL Brian Griffin, adopting good politics for all the wrong reasons
it also doesn’t help that much of these kinda US folk got most of their exposure to progressive ideas in the form of caricatures spread by the conservative media machine, which of course includes projection of their “blame and punish” mentality and are hardly representative of the real thing (-_-)
Surely you can see the difference between something that happened in a single isolated church and something that is currently occupying all branches of our government.
You’re replying to someone who said it’s basically non-existent at the moment in terms of political power, not someone who claimed it was impossible.
(Also that would not be the type of left-wing authoritarianism I’d use as an example. I’d instead talk about the strain of punitive bloodthirstiness that runs through leftist spaces — folks who claim to support prison abolition but also want rapists to be killed on sight, for example — or the undercurrent of “why couldn’t Joe Biden just unilaterally force his policies through”, which was about 1/2 latent authoritarianism and 1/2 being young and ignorant and not understanding how our government is supposed to function.)
@Li: There is a frightening strand of authoritarianism on the online anti-Democratic left (To the extent it’s not bots or agents). It still has little actual political power, functioning mostly to disrupt and discourage any actual action.
Part of it I think comes from cynicism about our government. Justified to an extent, but not as far as it goes. If you already think it’s all corrupt and rigged, why not want Biden to blackmail Democratic Senators to get his way?
We need to talk to our kids (e.g., Gen Alpha) about this and make sure they understand what they’re asking for when they say these things, but for sure there is currently a total lack of systemic power behind leftist authoritarianism.
Which is actually kind of funny because — if the authorities DON’T want us to “stay woke”, are they saying they want us to stay asleep? Weren’t the right-wingers also fond of saying,
“Wake up, sheeple!”? (See, e.g.: https://m.xkcd.com/1013/ )
I fail to see the difference in tone or intention… we all want to walk through life alert and awake to respond to whatever may come.
yeah “woke” has been used by black brothas to refer to awareness of social and political issues affectin us since the 1930s.
after it was used on Black Twitter and the BLM movement gained momentum in the 2010s, it started to be used more and more by white allies, and then it was used by more of the English-speaking leftists to refer to awareness of social issues affecting vulnerable minorities in general (queers, trans, etc) and not just black folk in particular.
To update the punchline to a joke the late, great Isaac Asimov told after the Catholic Kennedy was elected, “We’ve had a Jewish president in Israel for seventy years. It doesn’t help.”
It’s a matter of time and candidate. I think Clinton would have won in 2008. There was a huge backlash against Bush and the country wasn’t quite as polarized.
Obama was also a phenomenal campaigner, so he might have had a chance in a different cycle, though I’m less sure of that.
I appreciate that you believe that, but I just don’t. I would be happy to live in a world where I thought a woman had a shot at becoming president of the USA, but at the moment (imo) we’re not there yet. The voters had an amazing candidate up this time, and because she wasn’t perfect they decided they’d rather let the orange nightmare have a second go at things. I wish that was surprising to me, but it isn’t.
Not surprising and I’m not saying there isn’t a huge amount of prejudice to overcome. As much as I liked Harris, she wasn’t the brilliant natural charismatic campaigner that Obama was. And this wasn’t a year with all the political winds in the Democratic direction.
Both being black and being a woman definitely count against you in any kind of a close national race, but I don’t think it’s insurmountable in the right circumstances. Nor do I think Obama’s win shows it’s much easier for black man than for a white woman. That I think is down to political circumstances and the candidate.
I mean even then let’s face it — a woman getting elected wouldn’t have meant jack about how sexist our country would still be afterwards, anymore than a black president meant an end to racism here
but of course that don’t stop white folk like Linda from goin “LOOKIE! VOTE FOR OBAMA! NOT RACIST™”, and the whole ordeal about his election being indicative of our country being “post-racial” when really, we’ve set such a consistently low bar for racism for so long that racists in other countries use us to feel better about themselves
it gotta be understood more than ever that the electoral college being treated as THE center of the political universe and electoral outcomes being treated as a reliable weather bell for actual social progress is inevitably still a tool of systemic bigotry — election of a representative candidate is a game which always favors the everyman, and majorly incentivizes attempts to win over bigoted white men and disingenuous donors over the vulnerable people they’re actually bigoted against,
facts about issues which affect us are ultimately useless in the framework of hour-long televised political “”debates”” which once more put oblivious white folk and their “traditions” at the center of the universe with this ever-lasting beam-struggle of sustained screaming which draws attention away from people who actually need help 9-9
we vote for who we vote for to mitigate damage, misguided emphasis on our broke-ass government as THE center of progressive politics is inevitably saying, “the majority of the meaningful power we have is because institutions overly favoring white Christian men let us have it”
i reckon half the reason we in this mess is because US leftists never let themselves have any real plan for resisting fascism other than “never lose a game of electoral college”
Maybe I’m weird, but I tend to prefer voting for candidates based on the policies they support and their political records, not based on whether they’re black or white, men or women, gay or straight, etc. Sometimes that means I vote a white man, and other times that means I vote for a Latina woman. But policies and political record seem far more important when deciding who to vote for to me.
@Kyulen: you are responding to a strawman. No one said “I want to elect a woman and I don’t care what her policies are.”
@NGPZ: I cannot believe I’m still encountering “it doesn’t matter who the president is” right now? Are you serious?
Yes, electing Hillary or Harris would not have eliminated sexism over night, and yes there would likely have been another cultural backlash from whiny crybaby republicans, but come on. Please. Now of all times, I would think we could all agree the country would be less of a raging dumpster fire if we had elected even the most boring, centrist, unimpressive Democrat in the fuckin’ world.
Please actually look into what the Biden administration did with its four years, because despite the unending obstruction of Republicans controlling both House & Senate, IT WAS A LOT, and we lost a LOT because too many voters stayed home in 2024.
Voting isn’t the be-all, end-all. There are other avenues for change. But I promise we can in fact do both at once, and an exhausted hungry desperate population will not somehow be stronger and more capable of political change.
Conservative billionaires currently own most of our media, and they’re not interested in reporting on what Democrats do right, so you’ll have to put in some legwork to find the information yourself, but Joe Biden didn’t spend four years doing nothing, and it helps nobody to act like he did.
We will be infinitely more screwed if we can’t mobilize in the midterms to take back control of the House & Senate.
If you think Trump and his allies are emboldened right now, just wait until they no longer have to worry about losing Congress.
“weird” only on account that we’re a nation run by six-year-olds brought up to venerate ignorance, obedience and militarism, and for the most part can’t be bothered to think too deeply about anything besides football and furniture prices (-_-)
the United States is the Florida of the world in just about every sense you can think of
Harris didn’t perform well, but she was dealt a bad hand. Biden and his team delusionally stuck it out for way too long, and also at the eleventh hour got dogwalked into funding a genocide.
Those are difficult things to overcome, even if you don’t have Wormtongue whispering in your ear saying “Stop calling Republicans Weird and campaign with the Cheneys”
also @Li, “it doesn’t matter who the president is” is not at all the point I was making at all, I literally said we vote for who we vote for to mitigate damageprecisely because it does matter who’s voted into office, you’re attacking a strawman yourself here XD
if you’re a leftist, you have an antagonistic relationship with our government no matter who’s in power. For vulnerable minorities like ourselves, voting means being coerced into playing a game where you pick whichever oblivious privileged jerk you can extract more from and whose election will result in the least number of us suffering and DYING
elections are HARDLY the time “politics” happens, it also happens on the streets, in the community and by mutually supporting each other. No matter who’s voted into office, we still gotta organize, build local community, and build strength in masses to make real progress happen
a vote is important to reduce the harm that’s done by our racist government, but it becomes nigh pointless and counterproductive when it winds up being our allies’ entire fucking PRAXIS 9-9
I was talking about how hard it is for a WILDLY qualified woman to be voted into the same office a moron was voted into twice BECAUSE she is a woman and a person of color. I did not, at any point, suggest people should vote for her for her gender or ethnicity alone. This election was between an incredibly talented, intelligent, and skilled politician… and a literal nazi. And people chose the nazi, or they didn't vote at all, or they voted third party in a country where that is just never going to work (third party movements need to be from the ground up in the US, not from the president down. Get them in local, then state, then national government FIRST then start talking presidency ffs).
I was saying she faced additional hurdles due to sexism and racism. Thanks though.
@Nymph: I’d argue 3rd party movements as such need to be inside party movements. Still ground up, but as a takeover from within one of the existing parties, rather than to establish a 3rd major competing party.
Basically the template the Tea Party used to take over the GOP before morphing into MAGA. Though of course it was easier for them, given they were basically astroturfed by billionaires from the start.
OK, I feel compelled to point out that less than half the popular vote went to Trump. He only won because a slightly smaller half voted for Harris. They were within about 1% of each other. More than half voted against Trump, but they were divided so the majority lost.
I’m not even convinced our mistake wasn’t getting Biden OUT of the race. “Did Biden drop out” was one of the biggest Google terms on Election Day. I think we may have critically overestimated how tuned-in the average American was to… literally anything, and that Biden’s debate performance wasn’t the devastating blow a lot of analysts thought it was.
Biden was physically incapable of campaigning, he needed to go. For as middling and unimpressive as Harris ended up being, I’m convinced Biden would have done worse, significantly worse
… I hate the fact that he’d likely win if he tried. XD He’s a tall, conventionally attractive white male so he automatically passes a lot of the unconscious biases people have, and even the ones who may not agree with his heritage or his politics will likely still go “Eh, he can’t be worse than .” Especially if said rival turns out to be a minority, which includes Dorothy. :/
no arguing the stupidity of racism (any racism is too much racism, fucking pointless thing to believe) that has erupted into the mainstream, his being jewish is one thing and i may be misremembering walkyverse but i thought he had mixed heritage as well as being jewish. also his skin tone in the comic to me is more tanned by heritage than tan by uv rays, but i could absolutely see him in a tanning bed if that is the case. not that how he is considered a minority matters, all that does is his growth as a person entertains us
I think he’s just supposed to be a bit olive-skinned. Given that “white” is a moving target without a coherent definition, whether someone thinks Joe is white probably varies by the area and decade. Certainly being Jewish is a form of conditional whiteness at best, since the vast majority of white supremacists don’t consider Jewish people white regardless of skin tone.
i think he’s intended to be white but i’ve also always read him as mixed. specifically wasian but definitely mixed. and thus he will remain such in my heart
i’m sure there’s poly groups that don’t necessarily having them all like each other versus just an ‘open relationship’. makes me think of that parks&rec meme like “this is my boyfriend, x, and his boyfriend”
I’ve been referring to it as “polymer chain”. My OTP(olymer chain) is Joe/Joyce/Dorothy/Walky/Amber, where no one is actually with anyone except the adjacent links in the chain.
Because Dorothy knew Joe too well when he was too young and stupid, Joyce and Walky are antagonistic siblings and it’s totally inconceivable that they could ever be together in any possible universe, Dorothy appears to only be gay for Joyce, Walky might be willing to go down on Joe for free pizza, but Joe probably wouldn’t go for it, no matter how much Amber tries to use her mind powers to make it happen, Amber appears to be entirely straight, and any time it looks like something might happen between Amber and Joe, she feels compelled to say something memey about “stepbro” and they both end up laughing too hard for it to go anywhere.
Joe’s said before she’s the best thing that ever happened to him, so when Dorothy lets slip a moment of honesty — “you got everything” — he’s like, yeah, yeah I did. She’s amazing.
I feel like next strip is Dorothy smacking him. I know he’s not trying to be mean but in her current state that’s gotta feel like he’s twisting the knife
I was thinking the opposite. I was thinking she was finally gonna reach that cathartic bottom of the barrel and cry, leading him to comfort her and probably other non-sexual therapeutic shenanigans.
I kind of hope she does break down and cry. Sometimes you need a good cathartic cry.
Oh Dorothy. I feel terrible for her, even if I think this is a terrible way to go about this. I know how awful it feels to see people you hate or who have treated you horribly get everything you’ve ever wanted. But this isn’t a healthy way to express it.
Also, maybe Joe is open to the polycule? I still think with Dorothy it’s a terrible idea (and this is a bad place to drop it), but I no longer understand what he’s doing in the last panel. It doesn’t read like malice or even prodding, I just don’t get it.
(It’s sweet and I love him saying it about Joyce and I love them together so much, it’s just reacting like that to the panel immediately before it that gives me pause because he’s usually more socially adept than to twist a knife like that.)
My read is that he’s still trying to get Dorothy to actually admit out loud what she feels so they can all move forward. For all of the INCREDIBLE homosexuality Dorothy’s got clearly on display here, she still hasn’t come right out and said “Yes, I have feelings for Joyce”. And, as Joe points out, she probably does need to do that. She needs to be honest, and say what she means, so Joe is trying to prod her into that. More of a “And by ‘everything’ you mean ‘Joyce’, right?” kind of retort than an attempt to rub it in her face.
I think it might be a read. As in, Joe thinks that when Dorothy says “Everything” she means Joyce (and maybe happiness in general), so Joe seems to be, knowingly or not, confirming that Dorothy is jealous of Joe because he is dating Joyce.
(Asside: my ideal situation is now Amazi-Dorothy-Walky-Amber polycule.)
I’m honestly feeling Dorothy/Amber at the moment. Partly for “I can fix her/make her worse” and partly cos I think it’d be really funny for Walky and Danny to both have to see their exes together. Plus double glasses.
He’s agreeing with the root cause of her feelings (Joyce) instead of arguing back at the things she’s saying in anger (About him and her own self image).
I think taking him just being genuine with Dorothy and listening to her in this moment as Being Open to the Polycule is a bit of a stretch.
As it stands, the poly dynamic right now would be pretty hierarchical and I don’t think that’d be healthy for anyone involved. But Joe’s response certainly leaves the door open.
Joe asked Joyce at least once if she was into Dottie and seemed at least resigned to let that happen if it meant Joyce would be happy. I think it would break him though.
I feel like Joe could perfectly well live with Joyce/Dorothy. Like, there’s the side where he’s lived his entire previous life not pursuing monogamous relationships at all, and has displayed zero inclinations towards monogamy period, and then there’s the side where he’s probably, yknow. Into lesbians, as a concept.
he is being a friend to her, his purpose in the final panel is to allow the negative emotions to dissipate and prompt her with a positive emotional hook latch onto, she is spiraling and he is feeding the counter flow.
Oh my… I thought Dorothy sounded a little mean last strip. But it’s official.
She’s got lots of resentments towards Joe. All built up until he, funnily enough–makes her unload. Interesting that she ended being this archetype.
Feeling like someone else didn’t have to “work” hard or “try” while YOU did so much all the time. Everything just falls into their lap while nothing seems to go right for you.
“I’m saying you’re what’s wrong with America, Simpson. You coast through life, you do as little as possible, and you leech off of decent, hardworking people like me. Heh, if you lived in any other country in the world, you’d have starved to death long ago. You’re a fraud, a total fraud.” – Frank Grimes
Sorry, couldn’t resist. Dorothy in Panel 3, in particular, reminded me so much of him… Let’s hope things end up better for her than for him.
Damn, so proud of Joe. Because, despite “oh being a better person is not hard” he appears to have deconstructed himself over and over again to get rid of the misogyny and brainworms of his past to be with Joyce. You sacrifice your honour and replace it with shame to the person you were and if it may still affect you with other people. To say he never `tried` is not true, but he doesn’t care, the conversation is not about him and he’s focussed on helping Dotty through this.
This is the main reason I get annoyed with the commenters who minimize old Joe being a problem. Let the boy have his character growth. Acknowledge that he has put the work in to change.
This is the rare time where we need to gate keep. If you minimize my man’s character growth by saying he was never that bad to start with, you are a FAKE JOE FAN
I am a FAKE JOE FAN. He was rude, crude, socially unacceptable, careless and thoughtless, but that’s as far as I’ll go. And he’s come a long way since then.
I mean the public acknowledgement/apology that it was his list was the bigger part, the donuts were just the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down
You make a good point. I need to exand my List.
Scum gets mocked.
Nazis get punched.
Rapists get stabbed.
Slavers die.
Now hang on, putting Nazis below rapists makes me uncomfortable.
Dammit. That means I have been going too easy on Nazis all my life
Fuck you for making me self-reflect. This is all your fault and not my fault at all. /deflect
I don’t really think Joe has made sacrifices, and certainly not in the way Dorothy currently means it (sacrificing something he truly wanted).
I also don’t think having made sacrifices is necessary for one to be worthy of love, and I think it’s terribly sad that, on some level, Dorothy must.
(Note: I think Joe would sacrifice things for Joyce; in particular, this sequence makes me think he’d step aside (and sacrifice his chance to date Joyce) if he thought she’d be happier with someone else.) (But I don’t think he’s going to have to test that hypothesis.)
Yeah. Actively choosing to make sacrifices towards goals you care about absolutely *can* be a part of a meaningful life. But it isn’t an absolute requirement. No one forced Dorothy down this path but herself.
I would agree with that. I imagine Dorothy would also agree with it. Even at her most frustrated, I don’t think she actually blames Joyce for her decision to stay at IU, for example. Intellectually, she knows better than that.
She’s just also miserable and pent-up and it’s all kinda coming out in a rush.
Yeah. Other people have mentioned it’s not the right response, but I think it actually is. Dorothy is unloading all of her very real feelings the same way a fighter jet sheds chaff.
Hmmm, I’m not sure that I agree that she’s actually trying to avoid it at this point — I think she’s just exploding messily… but that’s an interesting read. Certainly Joe is staying on target.
It’s an honestly perfect depiction of denial. On some level, deep down, you know perfectly well what the truth is. But you have every excuse in the book thrown in the way, starting with “I can’t be” and “I’m better than that” and “I am too self aware for that” until we land on “IT’S NOT FUCKING FAIR THAT YOU GET HER AND I DON’T!” And Joe isn’t judging or upset, because he’s been there. He knows what it’s like to have a stubborn sense of self you can’t let go of.
I think, to Dorothy, Joe has everything he wants because, well, he’s never really expressed a strong desire for anything *but* female companionship. I honestly don’t even remember if we know his major or not, like he had no aspirations we knew about beyond getting laid, initially.
I’d say he also has Danny, but I mean, Danny is Dorothy’s friend, too, even if there’s obviously some baggage, so that’s not really tipping the scale.
Yes, he was considering going into cooking/hospitality relatively recently because he found cooking for Joyce and making her happy through that really special, but iirc got told that cooking for his girlfriend and cooking as a career are two very different things.
I don’t know if he’s said anything about the idea since or followed up on it in any way.
Right I remember now, but I don’t think it was really that much of a plot point, he had one conversation about it with Danny, but it didn’t really go anywhere because Danny pointed out their school doesn’t have a culinary program so if he was serious about it he’d probably have to transfer to somewhere else, and Joe’s response was like “no I can’t leave here, everything I love is here” which really connects to today’s strip in an interesting way.
The funny thing is Joe kind of *didn’t* want to have sex with a lot of sexy ladies.
Joe wanted a loving relationship, but instead threw himself into shallow hookups because it was the closest thing to a normal relationship he allowed himself to have. then hid behind revenge of the nerds quotes.
There is also nothing wrong with wanting to have sex with a bunch of sexy ladies. Joe just discovered he wanted something more. An actual human connection, trust and affection (with a sexy lady, let’s not kid ourselves here).
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have sex with a bunch of sexy ladies. There is something wrong with only interacting with said ladies as object to get sex out of. Joe didn’t just discover he wanted more. He realized that despite his intentions, he was still being harmful.
Stopping that was first. Going for Joyce came later.
Joe can want multiple conflicting things. A recovering addict wants to stay sober, but also really wants more of whatever they’re addicted to. A new vegetarian may really want a steak done just right but also wants to not be part of causing animal suffering. Lots of people want conflicting things.
I low key don’t like this response. I know Dorothy is in a bad spot right now but ‘everything’ being scaled down to basic survival instead of ‘actual happiness’ while possibly necessary for some people in her situation is not possible or necessary for ambitious people. All that does is break their spirit in a way that is difficult to fix later and she’s already pretty damn close to her spirit being broken. I definitely think scaling down is necessary but ‘survival’ is just way too far given the type of person she is…
He also gets to be a hetero cis man in America. Which as someone pointed out earlier, makes him imminently more likely to win a Presidency than Dorothy on a fundamentally default level. Given how long and hard she’s been working towards that goal, she has to have internalized that frustration for awhile by now.
Passing grades. Getting good grades is Dorothy’s life’s work. Joe doesn’t care enough to even figure what major he’s going to declare, and he’s doing better than she is
Yes. We really don’t know much about High School Joe. Could be he was like Walky: good enough to get good-enough grades and content with “good enough.”
Dorothy may be just as good, or better, but she’s the kind of person who always wants to squeeze the last drop of juice from the orange. She works hard all the time because to achieve perfection is impossibly difficult.
Dorothy represses all of her jealous urges into working harder to get what she wants. Someone without that impulse and with no higher ambitions coasted through high school and college purely fixated on sex and immediate gratification. Dorothy has spent the entire year of college taking care of in her highest and lowest points.
And after all her hard work, Joe gets her.
She is extremely, extremely jealous and Joe’s gentle prodding of her defense mechanisms — entirely the correct decision, because Dorothy doesn’t express her bad impulses — has led to her exploding “THAT’S NOT FUCKING FAIR!” and tbh she’s not entirely wrong. It’s just that Dorothy did this to herself in her pursuit of a silly dream, and she doesn’t want to admit that.
Damn, I have never been as glued to a dumbing of Age storyline as this. Props to Willis on the build up and execution of the Dorothy crash out, it’s been excellent.
It’s worth remembering that Dorothy has a VERY limited view of Joe’s journey compared to us as readers, so to her, a lot of it does probably look very effortless. It wasn’t, of course, but she wasn’t there for that, she only saw some of his lowest moments, like when he became very boorish for a period, even compared to where he was when he initially got to college.
I am glad Joe’s a very gracious dude about this, but I mean, he’s no stranger to self-loathing, and isn’t going to be quick to rise to his own defense in these circumstances, regardless.
The problem is she never fucking asked
If she even bothered to talk with Joyce about her boyfriend and why she’s with him, let alone with the man himself, she probably wouldn’t even be in this circumstance in the first place
Yeah, but. And I’m saying this after several comments about how much I like new Joe under this strip.
Why would she? She’s known him for years as a vapid, vaguely chauvinistic meathead. What reason does she have to actually believe that he’s changed so significantly in under six months?
It’s not like Joe himself has really sat her down and said to her “Hey I had several big realisations about myself because of Joyce specifically and that’s why I fell in love with her.”
I’m not saying Dorothy is in the right here but. Well she’s not in the wrong either. This isn’t a situation that has such simple black and white morality and I don’t think it really justifies getting angry at either of the characters involved either.
Her not really talking to Joyce about Joe has a lot of less then stellar connotations for how Dottie sees Joyce. there could be a lot to unpack there.
But in the effort to give Dottie *some* benefit of the doubt, I’m chalking it up to her being unable to bring herself to bring up how content Joyce is to climb Mount Joe instead of the Dottie Valley.
Yeah Dorothy is badly trying to avoid confessing her feelings to Joyce or to even herself, asking Joyce what she sees in Joe would ask a bit more emotional impartiality from her than is reasonable to ask from anyone ever.
There’s actually very little to unpack: Dorothy infantalizes Joyce in their friendship. Dorothy got so used to playing the guiding hand for Joyce when she was barreling through all her social mishaps that her character regression from fall to spring semester means that now Joyce is simply supposed to listen to her.
Right, but we just got through a massive slog about the washing machine, and if we bring up that *Dottie herself* infantlizes Joyce, the comments section would explode.
But Joyce also never talked about why she liked Joe. When Dorothy first asked about them, all she got was a “I don’t like his butt” denial, which understandably didn’t reassure her about their deep emotional connection.
Joyce was being very, like, tsun about Joe, but the timing of it was bad! Dorothy seemingly coming around on this relationship was 100% something she made a choice to do based on nothing but losing faith in her own judgment. “I was wrong, you two are fine, and who am I to judge, it’s not like I’ve been making good choices myself” was the vibe, some of which Dorothy said explicitly out loud,
I just think it’s noticeable that Dorothy first tells Joyce she’s not in any position to be telling her what to do, and then in the following strip asks Joyce to green-light her own decision (though she doesn’t give Joyce enough information to make an informed judgment).
I think we are meant to take from it that Dorothy is giving up at least in part because she’s lost faith in her own judgment, rather than because Joe has proven himself a good partner to her.
Sorry, I just don’t think it’s other people’s job to check in with “guy who has been a fucking terrible person for all the years I’ve known him” just in case he’s actually improving this time. Nor is it fair to say that Dorothy’s in the wrong for taking years of past history and making understandable assumptions right now, before she’s seen much evidence of his changes.
Also, pretty sure she’d still have fallen for Joyce and be unwilling to admit it regardless. So this situation would still be happening.
It is, actually. Joyce has spent far more time with Joe than Dorothy since school started, so the ball is in Dorothy’s court to find out why her best friend is into her ex’s raging mysogynistic bestie. It wasn’t until Joe’s character growth was shoved into Dorothy’s face that she went “I’ve been wrong about this,” and we can see here that even with that happening she still snapped back to “Joe sucks.”
remove the context of joyce from the conversation and yes dottie has no reason to check in on joe unless danny asked her to, but with her best friend entering a relationship with (someone who while having been terrible with women, was still a firm friend to his friends not that that excuses the misogyny it doesnt change that he was a good friend) and you have a situation where if she wants to remain a good friend to joyce then yes it behooves her to at least check in with what he has become.
I think it is an important note that behavior to the oppisite sex aside joe has not been shown to have bullying tendancies or to be greedy. yes his past behavior to women is appaling and atrocious, terrible and disgusting. but he isnt going to slam the door in the face of a stranger in need or actively work to undermine someones self esteem. at least i never got that vibe from him. (as someone whos graduation year book quote was “mssg to the junior high, welcome to the worst fucking years of your fucking lives” due to the bullying i had gone through i feel pretty good about picking out those tendancies)
“has not been shown to have bullying behavior” doesn’t actually jive with Dorothy’s account of what happened. Calling someone a lesbian, repeatedly, because they didn’t want to fuck you actually is bullying. However, I also didn’t say he was a bully, I said he had been a bad person. And I stand by that. He was misogynistic and gross.
I don’t think Dorothy was responsible for reaching out to figure him out after he was shitty for years to her. And I’m not super likely to alter that opinion. If a person goes through growth and wants others to know, it’s on them to show it. No one owes them another chance or forgiveness, even if they really did change.
“someone who while having been terrible with women”
“not that that excuses the misogyny”
“behavior to the oppisite sex aside”
“his past behavior to women is appaling and atrocious, terrible and disgusting”
That’s all bullying. It’s just bullying women specifically, so some people feel like it doesn’t count – but it super does.
Furthermore:
“he isnt going to … actively work to undermine someones self esteem”
Then what would you call the Do List? The public list where he rated women by how fuckable they were or were not? The one he handed out like candy? That’s exactly the kind of thing that can undermine someone’s self-esteem.
absoutely it is bullying, as mysogyny is bullying by definition, and i did not mean to minimize that and for that i apologize. i was trying to reference the ability to be many things at once. to women he was terrible and still has a lot of work to do, and it may never be enough to truely redeem him. i have known men to be an absolute ass, seemingly irredeemable ass, but then give his kidney(figuratively) the moment anyone needed their aid. it doesnt excuse the behavior as i said elsewhere about racism still applies any bullying is too much bullying. we all have contradictions in our natures and behavior, it is what makes us human. it has been said by others that once joe was made aware of the actual damage he did with the list, he has been remorseful.
i think a part of this is it feels as though by not trying to confirm if joes growth is real, it feels as letting down a friend, to me if my bestie was starting a relationship with someone who i knew to be previously horrible to people in any wayl, i would raise it with the friend first, but unless instructed not to by them i would be checking in on the romantic partner to see if they have actually changed. i guess i am just projecting how i would act in such a situation. but that is based on the life i’ve lived and that experience is unique to me, and i have know way to know yours and no right to judge it, just disagree.
and again apologies for minimizing the bullying aspect of the mysogyny, was not my intent
Yep, as an autistic person i also like to distinguish all my different traits and not just be a muddled up person. I like having distinct labels for everything i am, not just umbrella terms. Because it feels neater and i like that.
it seems kinda cold of Joe to see Dorothy make that face in panel 4 and react with a smile about how much likes his girlfriend. read the room, Joyce might truly be everything to you, but that’s not what needs to be said right now.
I don’t think he’s being cold. I think he’s making a somewhat pained smile, taking her lashing out and being gracious about it. Like, I think he does legitimately want to help her here, and I think on some level, that’s only making it harder for her because it’d be easier if she could hate him.
His taking that “Gave up nothing” line on the chin is an INCREDIBLE feat of empathy and grace from joe.
Before Joyce, he had given up *any* real chance at a fulfilling relationship so that he would never hurt anyone the way his father hurt people. He was willing the be alone and suffer for his entire life, only dipping into unfulfilling-in-the-long-term sexual hook ups while hiding himself for the greater good of the people around him.
Joe 100% knows the pitfalls of “Being a martyr for the ‘truth'” and he’s only gotten better by facing those choices and choosing to walk away from them.
And: validating the very feelings she’s (evidently) terrified of admitting.
It’s a damn good effort, and even if Dorothy’s eventual realisation is “no, I’m no into her, it’s just that my attempts at supporting a friend went way off track” (feels unlikely, but you do… uh… whoever you want, Dorothy, and good luck), she was given excellent space and support (under fire!) to figure that out.
Joyce is everything to Dorothy, is the relevant part. When Dorothy says she gave up a lot, Joyce is one of the things she gave up, and Joe is making sure that doesn’t get missed during this discussion. (Also he’s not qualified to unpack…everything else)
That’s not at all what’s happening in this strip. Joe is acknowledging that Joyce feels like everything to Dorothy. And that he understands, because he’s in love with her too.
Because, really, what else has Dorothy lost that Joe has gained? The Presidency? He has no urge to be President. Yale? He’s not going to Yale. Danny? Well, maybe, but Dorothy doesn’t seem like she wants him back anyway.
He’s gained peace and a better emotional state, seemingly without giving up much. He certainly hasn’t repudiated the list or any of his other previous conduct, except maybe in private to Joyce. That means a lot when everything is falling around you and you don’t have nearly enough fingers to plug all the holes in the dam and someone else just doesn’t even have to bother.
It may not be fair to Joe, but fairness doesn’t exist.
Yeah, I think “cold” is the opposite of what is going on here. Joe is doing his best to be emotionally supportive of Dorothy and give her the space to admit to the thing out loud. Or, yknow, deny it as ridiculous, because /Joe is the one saying it/.
Reiterating: I don’t think Joe’s here or letting Dorothy take this out on him because he mistakenly thinks he and Dorothy are friends. I think he’s here out of pure, undiluted empathy, because he knows all too well what she’s going through right now.
It’s really admirable, he knows Dorothy enough to know she’s repressing something, and is letting her get it out. Then when she admits it, he just agrees, yeah, she is great isn’t she. It totally diffuses her rage because he’s not jealous or petty or treating her like a conquest, he’s sincerely checking in on one of Joyce’s friends.
Yeeeeuuuup. Just. He’s known her a really long time. He knows where they stand. I think he thinks she’s a good person, and has a pretty honest view of who he’s been. He doesn’t need to think she LIKES him to want to be there for her.
“Both Joe and Dorothy are pretty hard on themselves.”
Which is another reason he’s exactly who she needed to talk to about this if she was ever going to get anywhere with it. Joe understands the hurricane of hurt and feelings that come along with earth-shattering realizations and needs you don’t want to have.
Not because Joyce would have lacked compassion for Dorothy’s full spiral if she knew it was happening, but because Joyce has no regrets, and no lingering confusion, about her own, otherwise-similar, shattered worldview.
Joe, meanwhile, has been almost exactly where Dorothy is right now, and he knows it, and he is being exactly the sort of person he himself could have used back then, and it’s very chef’s kiss.
Yeah honestly I think Joe would, if asked, probably agree with Dorothys stance on him. That’s something I like about him; he doesn’t make excuses for himself, he’s just very aware when someones kind of using being mad at him to deflect from something else. (See him recognizing Joyce pressuring him about carla being on his do list or not when what she was upset about was not being confided to by her sister).
I agree with the SMALL caveat that “I thought it was funny when I was 15” is a liiiiiittle bit of a deflection (and doesn’t own up to the fact that he was still doing it before the timeskip) — BUT. But. I also think deflection was what was called for in that moment so that he could stay on target.
I suspect he might give Dorothy a real apology in a few minutes. Especially if he makes the connection that calling her a lesbian a whole bunch through her formative teen years miiiight have contributed to any mental block she might have had about her sexuality.
Also, let’s be very clear, Dorothy should also apologize to Joe here. I don’t think she owes him an apology for not having been privy to his recent character arc, but I do think she’s still said some unkind things here (and might say some more, depending on how well Joe’s last panel goes over) that she will regret once she’s done breaking down.
This isn’t necessarily a counterchant for “throuple” but I would love to see a hug and a friendship here regardless of anything else, the more I think about it the more I think they’d be really good for each other.
Yeah i def think he doesn’t put a pin correctly in ‘and that sucked of me’, but I think gets a contextual ‘yeah i was a dumb teen saying a dumb joke, this is not the same thing as that’. Interested to see how it’ll develop.
Anyway: “the undisputed champion of being honest with myself” is definitely a reference to this strip, where Dorothy lamented not being able to buy into the idea that she could be the president and still be a good person.
(From 2025, I kind of want to take her by the lapels and shake her, but. It’s definitely what she’s talking about.)
“My whole life […] is a junkyard trail of things I’ve given up in the service of honesty. Things I know I can’t have. Things I thought I did have.”
This one’s about Yale. And Walky. I don’t think it’s about Danny, because I don’t think she’s ever really regretted breaking up with him the way she regretted breaking up with Walky.
“And you— You never tried, never sacrificed— And you got everything.”
This isn’t completely fair, of course. We, the readers, know that Joe has been trying pretty hard. Dorothy… really doesn’t. A point of friction that has been present ever since Joe started courting Joyce is that Dorothy has not been privy to any of Joe’s character development, and Joyce has… honestly never made much of a case for Joe.
When Dorothy seemingly came around on Joe/Joyce, it wasn’t because of some dramatic gesture. Joe still hadn’t proven he’d changed. She just… happened to see them together, and… having lost all faith in her own judgment, told Joyce that she was wrong to have ever tried to keep them apart. (In fact, Dorothy had lost SO much faith in her own judgment that she tried to get Joyce to green light her own (Dorothy’s own) choices.)
I found her blank stare a little opaque even at the time, and I’m sure I wasn’t alone there, but I also think a lot of us were just relieved that she wasn’t going to be hounding Joe anymore.
“you are my enemy!”
“I am no ones enemy!”
“YOU are My friend, i dont care if you don’t think you are, I will treat you as a friend regardless of how you feel about it” this is joe here.
we all can be friends to each other with out being friends.
I know! Charles Phipps has been immensely clear on that point! I still don’t agree, I think he previously viewed Dorothy as an acquaintance, someone he was associated with through Danny first and then through Joyce! I think in the early strips he often seemed amused by her misfortune! I do not think he thought they were friends!
I could be wrong, of course, but I think this whole sequence is just basic human compassion (plus a heaping dose of empathy, because he’s been here), and that Joe does not need to have always viewed Dorothy as a friend for him to be extending a hand.
Anyway, I think Dorothy’s red panel is… partly about Joe as she’s known him for the last five or so years of her life, ever since she started dating Danny and they became friend-of-a-friends with each other. I would bet that Joe has spent a lot of that time… well, being Wicked-the-musical-and-now-movie!Fiyero. Dancing through his life, reveling in being shallow and hedonistic, taking easy classes instead of ones that challenged him, and avoiding relationships.
We, the readers, know that this comparison is extremely apt, because Wicked!Fiyero, too, had hidden depths: he wasn’t actually shallow, and his life, while easy, was also empty and unsatisfying. Just like Joe, he was yearning for something more complicated — something more real — and only avoiding it out of fear.
In Joe’s case, not even fear of getting hurt himself, so much as fear of hurting someone else. Because Joe doesn’t self-identify with his mother, who got cheated on: he self-identifies with his father, the cheater.
But. That turmoil isn’t something Dorothy ever got to see. It’s something Joe was unwilling to even really let Danny see. So what Dorothy saw was:
– handsome, popular guy
– who gets ALL the girls
– whose major is still undeclared
– who, as far as Dorothy knows, has never given up anything for Joye, much less anything he really wanted
It’s not fair of Dorothy to feel like Joyce owes her anything for not going to Yale, and Dorothy knows that. I think she even knows that Joyce wouldn’t want this sacrifice, and it’s also not entirely for Joyce.
(Or, at least, I believe Dorothy when she tells Becky that she ALSO wouldn’t feel right getting into Yale because of her revised admission essay where she talks up her role in the kidnapping.) (I wonder if she’d feel better about it, though, if she didn’t ALSO feel like she’d failed there because she wasn’t able to personally stop Blaine from kidnapping Joyce.)
Like. I think SOME of Dorothy’s feelings would be the same here even if she weren’t in love with Joyce.
She’d still feel like she’s been entirely replaced in Joyce’s life. Once, Joyce would have done almost anything to spend time with her, and now she keeps feeling… taken for granted, or forgotten about entirely.
Even if her feelings for Joyce were completely platonic, I think that would still sting.
And I’m sure it doesn’t especially help that Joyce keeps telling her “I love you”.
I personally would have preferred for Dorothy’s feelings to have been platonic, I think that would have made for a better storyline for a variety of reasons I’m not gonna get into, but I am probably in the vanishingly small minority on that and unless Willis pulls a massive (and mean-spirited at this point) swerve I think we’re past that being an option lmao
I mean, I think we passed the point of no return back in 2021, when Willis used Daisy to lampshade that never seriously addressing all the subtextual jokes he’d made about Dorothy and Joyce over the years would feel queerbait-y.
As I said on like, the first page of this sequence, I think this all started as a joke. A combination of how funny it was to have Joyce say suggestive stuff, especially suggestive gay stuff, by accident — and a loving homage to Parks & Recreation. But at some point, Willis decided to take it more seriously.
Given the specific direction things have gone (where Dorothy is at least the instigator here, if not alone in feeling this way), I’d guess that it evolved organically from how Dorothy reacted in Willis’s head to the idea of Joe+Joyce.
But ofc I cannot speak for them on the subject, I can only speculate.
I would have agreed at the time. We may yet discover that Joyce reciprocates, too, in which case that comic will have been foreshadowing.
Right now I just think it was meta and that the imperfect fit might not matter in the end, because I can’t decide whether I think this is building up Joyce’s reaction because it’s going to be big, or in order to better subvert our expectations, and I am choosing the option that is less likely to crush me emotionally in a few days. 🥲
I mean, gosh, of course they aren’t. There’s been a VERY loud anti-Joyce/Dorothy contingent since forever, some of which are very polite and some of which are less so, just as there’s been an anti-Joyce/Joe contingent.
Jokes about this being what “everyone” in the readership wants are either jokes or, well, coming from people who aren’t regular comment-readers.
One of the small benefits of being a churchgoer is that every so often the preacher reminds me that the ancient Greeks recognized (at least) four very distinct emotions that all get lumped together in English as “love”.
Another way you could have been reminded: getting into the Yuri on Ice!! fandom, hah.
Note: platonic love is super duper valid, but if Dorothy is longing for something else, it can be its own twisted knife in the moment to keep hearing the words you want, but not in the way you want them.
See also: it was totally valid for Becky to need a bit of a Joyce Break after she got rejected.
Jeez that archive dive hurt. All the recontextualized dialogue.
Anyway. Let’s talk a little bit about Joe. His part here is pretty simple.
“Do you want to know what my suggestion is, Dorothy?”
She says no. He plows ahead, I would bet in part because he doesn’t think she has any idea what he’s going to say. (And I imagine he was right.)
He urges her to be honest with herself.
And then he lets her rant.
Because I don’t think he was under any illusion about the two of them being friends, I don’t imagine her rant hurts him. But I do think that last panel is because he does, again, empathize.
He empathizes more than Dorothy imagines he can with the idea of having lived a life you completely regret, where your every decision now feels like a mistake.
He’s just also on the other side of that feeling, so thoroughly on the other side that it doesn’t even hurt to be reminded: just a faint, nostalgic ache.
All of Dorothy’s flailing here must be VERY familiar, and I bet Joe wishes he’d had someone to talk to about it sooner.
So. He is trying to be that person for Dorothy now.
And I for one think it’s sweeter, given that he and Dorothy have never really been friends.
I suspect Joe isn’t getting hurt as much as he would be out of context, because he understands /why/ Dorothy is saying those things and reads it as not being literally about him. Like, it’s targeted at him, and he’s aware of his own previous behavior that triggered it, but to a large degree it’s “insert Joyce’s boyfriend here”. Hence the last line.
I think so, too. I almost said as much, that I don’t think the red panel is about JOE as much as it’s about Dorothy, but I got sidetracked because I can definitely see why he might actually seem to her like someone who hasn’t had it rough. I think he PRESENTS himself as an uncomplicated dude who lives life on his own terms without stressing about it too much.
We also know that he’s a child of divorce, that he worries he’s doomed to become his father, that he’s especially afraid of hurting Joyce — not, perhaps, by ever cheating on her, but in the very specific way that she’s potentially vulnerable to by being, like Liz, a very sheltered young woman who is trying to take total control of her sexual autonomy but still… muddling through.
(This fear isn’t even completely unfounded, either! Take Liz out of the equation, and you’ve still got the way Joyce reacted to realizing Joe hadn’t been drinking, and the way she keeps talking about sex as something Joe is going to “do to” her, which Dorothy later called her out on, but which, as far as we know, is still how Joyce feels most comfortable articulating her desires.)
…so like, yes and no. I agree that Dorothy is in so much pain here that she would probably feel like any partner Joyce had must have sacrificed and struggled less than she herself has. I almost wondered, actually, if there might also be some resentment about Walky bleeding through.
Dorothy is desperately tired of other people viewing her as perfect, brilliant, and without struggle — someone who couldn’t possibly need help, because gosh, she’s Dorothy. The balm of Walky’s early belief in her, which once made her so happy because it was such a stark contrast to Danny hoping she’d just give up on her dreams — well, it’s become something of a tarpit as Dorothy has continued her slow-mo crash and burn while mostly the people who love her remain convinced that “she’s busy, and for her, busy is good”… as Walky said earlier today when Joe asked whete she was.
But ALSO I do think from Dorothy’s vantage point, Joe probably does seem to be living an easy life.
Something I hope she’ll be disabused of soon! Joe deserves to have more actual friends who know what’s going on with him, too.
Coming back to this: sorry, I was a little cranky. I was up late and the world continues to be a mess!!
My counter argument to this strip is that Dorothy herself has talked about Joe being someone she had to put up with for Danny’s sake, and that she thought one good thing about breaking up with Danny would be never having to see Joe again.
But I am so, so hopeful they’ll be friends after this, I think they’d be good for each other. Dorothy could use someone in her life who has never put her on a pedestal, and Joe could definitely use someone in HIS life who he can talk to about his fears re: Joyce, because Amber hasn’t been the best sounding board.
Which, might be a bit much to ask of Dorothy right away, but…
I mean, really I think they will at least BECOME friends after this conversation, but goodness am I tired of re-explaining why I don’t think Joe thinks they were friends. It’s totally fine that other people think differently! Let’s go about our days, lol.
I did not say that Joe thinks they were friends. “X and Y are friends” is not at all the same thing as “X is (or has chosen to become) Y’s friend.” I can befriend someone who hates me and continues to do so — in fact, my religion explicitly calls on me to do this.
Okay, because the other people who have been arguing this have definitely been saying “Joe thought Dorothy was his friend, and had no idea she disliked him so much”, so that is what I was responding to, you feel me?
He already seemed to be aware of the situation and that is why he is here, yes, seeing Dorothy break like that hurts, but in part it is necessary, because if he had kept it for longer, it would have been much worse in the future.
My mum also confuses ‘things that are hard and painful to think and feel’ with ‘things that are true and honest’.
That honesty must always be bitter and cruel, and never relieving or comforting.
Poor Dotty.
ahh yeah this is exactly my thought too here… like, dorothy didn’t give up things that brought her joy because she was being “honest with herself.” she decided that being happy is low-priority and has sabotaged said happiness for the sake of her ambitions… & now she doesn’t have those to fall back on anymore. the realization that she’s just like everyone else is too much for her… so sad
i am so glad that this relationship is getting some screen time & development… it’ll be ok dots. you can be human and fallible and still be happy. things just gotta get a little bit worse until they can get better <3
They might become friends after this, mind you. I just don’t think they were friends in high school, or in the first semester of college. Pretty much every conversation Dorothy had with Joe for years in real time involved at least one epic eye roll from her.
For whatever it’s worth – I really enjoy your deep thoughts about the characters and the story, but I do think it was easier to read when it was all a single large comment and not dozens of smaller ones all pockmarked out of order in other threads.
Not telling you how to live, I just know you broke it up today because you were worried about a single large post yesterday and these are my feelings on that!
Yeah, at the very least I should have edited it all as one thing. It would’ve taken longer to get through the spam filter but obviously to my benefit, given the double post.
Somehow, Joe remains the exact right person to be here for this conversation. This don’t make him think any less of Dorothy; to him she’s always the overachieving wound up too tight pretty good person she’s always been. She’s just also, like. A human.
And end of the day, they share something important.
Yeah honestly. I like that hes not like ‘i HAVE changed, where you haven’t seen!’. He’s like. Yeah, fair, ive been rough, so back to what we were actually talking about.
Like. Who else besides him would get it to this degree (besides becky which Nope Nope Nope). He ALSO didn’t mean to fall in love with joyce. He never wanted to fall in love with anyone. He wanted to keep being someone nobody ever expected anything better of. Just like Dorothy wanted to keep being someone nobody ever expected worse of. For both of them, having non platonic feelings about joyce means/meant changing.
I’m very fond of both of them; and also admittedly love a narrative parallel.
I’m starting to think that maybe Joe in high school found Dorothy to be a person he liked and admired (aside from rejecting his advances). Perhaps in spite of himself.
Okay, that I could get behind. It would recontextualize a lot of Joe’s remarks into the “clumsily pulling pigtails” category, which doesn’t make them more fun for Dorothy but does make them cuter to me. I am weak to a maladjusted failed tsundere courtship, though.
Such a good anguished face in panel 4. I love the extra details you include too; they go great with the way the panel is diving deeper into how Dorothy feels.
IMO, the actual “undisputed champion of being honest with [herself]” wouldn’t need other people – especially ones she considers to be terrible – to [i]make[/i] her confront and examine these things.
You know you’re an undisputed champion of being honest with yourself when you’re certain you’re always honest with yourself. No need to periodically examine what you think and why you think it, unprompted by anyone else.
I was looking through old strips for a different strip and I found this. I find the text in the fourth panel interesting but it probably just me overthinking it due to her recent denial.
Hmmm some kind of diagnosis is definitely possible for her, but I don’t know which it would be. Would be nice if hard to detect and/or a-typical issues would get some representation.
Ever since Dorothy first refused the possibility of being autistic because “I understand people”, I’ve been on the theory that she more than likely is autistic, actually. Joyce has the excuse that she was homeschooled, but I feel Dorothy also makes for the perfect poster child for “autistic girl who isn’t diagnosed because of she’s a girl”. She worked hard in school, does all the right things ™, makes good grades, has all the right extra-curriculars, and that means she can’t POSSIBLY be autistic, right?
Just ignore moments where Dorothy has misread or misunderstood social cues entirely (the Halloween arc), or struggled with her own emotions to the point of seeming to have a difficult time identifying her own emotions, conducting her life by a very regimented and specific schedule…
I also wanna expand by saying “Joyce has the excuse that she was homeschooled”, what I mean is along with being homeschooled making her more sheltered and probably impacting her ability to read social cues already, there’s also the fact that her mother was her teacher, and uh… not to be rude, but I doubt Carol knows anything about autism. Or if she does, it’s certainly not anything kind, understanding, or compassionate.
“Do you know what it’s like to find out you are in love with Joyce Brown, and have to give up on that love because you know she can’t reciprocate it?” Camera pan to the right on Becky, slack-jawed wildly gesturing at everything.
I’m really curious to see what Becky’s reaction to this will be if she ever finds out about it.
She’s never really been able to fully shed her possessiveness of Joyce or her perception of Dorothy as a rival for her affections, unless there’s some strips I’m forgetting where she really does manage to do that for good.
Both reacting negatively and diving back into bad patterns, or showing real maturity about the situation, could be really fun development for her character.
I expect a “Hah! I knew you were a rival!” followed by some strutting, then going in a straight line to her girlfriend while saying “good thing I got over Joyce a while ago!” Maybe even going so far as skating backwards while flipping double birds. Meanwhile, the OG backwards skater is conflicted at the copycat stealing her schtick while also appreciating the compliment that is being copied.
I kinda feel like Becky would react positively. Dorothy would get some points with her for being into ladies, and the shared experience of falling hard for the same girl who’s just not into you could be bonding. And the “Oh, we both wanted something neither of us got” could relieve some of the rival aspect to her as well.
That’s all assuming Joyce rejects Dorothy, of course. If Joyce was like, “Well, maybe…” Becky would probably explode.
I’m imagining it like a pharmaceutical ad. “Hi, I’m Becky, you may know me from such hits as ‘Robin DeSanto’s social media’, and I’m here to talk about Joyce-inol”
I think that, as Dorothy herself said to Ruth, she expected going to two different colleges to end their high school romance. She was, and is, 18 after all, and breaking up with people sucks, even under the most ideal circumstances. (It’s still stressful even if you really want to do it, and Dorothy still cared about Danny and didn’t want to hurt him.)
(She also felt increasingly guilty and worried about Danny’s academic future, because she — correctly — doubted that he had a real plan for himself, and thought he would just be all the more heartbroken after she transferred out of IU to go to Yale.)
Where Danny managed to piss her off is a few strips later down the line, when he thoughtlessly dismisses Dorothy’s concerns for him by suggesting she might change her mind about going to Yale.
I think that we, the readers, were meant to recognize that Dorothy, by virtue of having dated Danny for years, knew him better than we did, and was correctly picking up on something in Danny’s tone or body language that wasn’t just romantic idealism (“maybe you’ll stay because you love me”) but was instead dismissal (“wanting to go to Yale is silly, wanting to be president is silly, you’ll come around on this eventually if I just wait”), and that that in turn reflected a fundamental lack of respect for and faith in both her goals and her ability to achieve them.
1.) “when you’re president or whatever”
2.) (when his girlfriend is radiating digust) “see? It’s like we read each other’s minds”
Even before the next page, where he directly says maybe she’ll change her mind about leaving, Danny has demonstrated a profound inability to pick up on any of Dorothy’s cues, to the point where he cannot possibly be listening to her, and it’s this dynamic that proceeds their breakup.
In fact, every strip featuring the two of them prior to this one has that same dynamic, to the point where even Joe is trying to drop hints to Danny and Danny still isn’t getting it, because as sweet as Danny is capable of being, he was much more invested in the imaginary romance that was happening in his own mind than he was in his actual girlfriend.
TL;DR: Dorothy didn’t dump Danny because she hated that he followed her to IU, she dumped him because he wasn’t a good partner to her.
To add to this not about Dorothy dumping Danny, it should be noted the first time she and Walky had sex was preceeded by him loudly claiming that Dorothy was gonna be the future president of America, she was genuinely touched that he seemed to wholeheartedly believe that she could do it.
I think she’s reversed on that somewhat (she’s clearly emotionally exhausted by how many people in her life have been telling her she’ll be fine and she’s got this “because she’s Dorothy”, when she has been desperately lost and in need of help instead of dismissive platitudes), but Walky believing in her was 1000% an antidote to Danny’s painful misstep and that moment is probably where she fell in love.
He’s refusing to let Dorothy pin this on him. Which is driving Dorothy insane because he’s proving he’s a mature decent person when she needs him to be scum to feel superior.
He’s reading the room very well. And he’s giving Dorothy every opening to dig into her emotions and be honest about them.
Like, he’s setting her up to go “THIS IS NOT ABOUT JOYCE!!!” and feel righteous about whatever other issues she has, if he’s wrong. And also he’s setting her up to NOT do that and keep talking about Joyce and also feel fine about staying, well, on-topic, since Joe’s the one who keeps bringing her up.
I don’t get some comments being annoyed or almost angry at Joe in this moment. He is basically allowing himself to be the focal point of so much confusion, anger, vitriol, and fear because he wants two things.
1. He wants Dorothy to be honest with HERSELF, and not for the betterment of those around her. He is in a unique position to know that Dorothy is hiding a huge element of herself and that it isn’t healthy… and he is willing to let her verbally attack HIM to come to that realization.
2. He wants one of Joyce’s most important and cherished friends to be OK.
Twisting the knife? That 5th panel is him telling Dorothy what she is terrified to even think right now. Yeah she’s wonderful, yes you love her. She does feel like everything and understands both how amazing that is AND how terrifying that is.
Joe is doing a killer job at being the rock against which Dorothy’s storm can finally crash. She been needing to blow all that steam for a loooooong time and Joe is just there like “It’s ‘aight. I’m here.”.
You know what, Dorothy is really reminding of Pearl from Steven Universe right now. So I’ll add “Strong in the real way” to queue at the muzak.
That’s wayyyyyy way way more fitting that it should be lol.
Sheltered girl from an ultraconservative family finally gets to see the world, she befriends a bunch of queer folks and burns her bridges and her ultraconservative family are so normal about it that they attempt to destroy her and her friends. They survive All That and after having a way too long situationship with her bestie she ends up with The Guy, which the bestie is also being very normal about! Oh god I hope DOA doesn’t end with Joyce leaving behind a special kid with a terrible destiny/inheritance!
This extremely reductive comparison has been made for purely comedic purposes.
…are you sure about that? Garnet, the well of endless sweet tranquility?
I love Sarah, but her defining traits are “cynicism” and “righteous anger”. Only recently have we started to see what she looks like when she’s happy and content.
What do Garnet and Sarah have in common, apart from Garnet being the tallest gem?
Yep! Running away from a bunch of things you want but tell yourself you can’t have is a trauma response bby not self-critical honesty. If it was one thing and she had tried as hard as she could to achieve it, that’d be different, but she’s barely into the trying things out phase of her life and giving up on them by the handful. That’s (a very gentle and non-physical kind of) self-harm imo.
Aren’t crushes sort of normal for their age? I have a hard time judging “normal” in that regard because I never had a crush, but from what I have read and heard from other people they seem fairly common, especially in teenagers.
I had a fiance, my ex propose to me to run off together, and a man who I eventually left my fiance for (which was a Terrible Decision, the fiance was kind to me and the new guy was Not) at that age, 3 people being interested in you at once really isn’t unrealistic at any age.
Then again, I had been in several love triangles before then and fwiu that’s apparently not a common experience, so maybe I don’t actually know lol.
That doesn’t happen to everyone, but it is also in no way unusually high. I’m sorry you had to find out from a character that you don’t happen to be attracted to.
Inaccuracies or sarcasm, or sillyness, or an unwillingness to catastrophize and pathologize normal human behavior. All enthusiastically disapproved of here.
Then again, at least it’s not the Questionable Content fandom. Half of them despise everything about the comic before and after 2009, while the other half can’t stand it if you make up a character called Rice Phillip to put in the middle of an otherwise-normal list of characters you like.
And Walky had three girlfriends in six months–with the implicaiton that other women find him sexually attractive as well–I dont see you complaining about that.
Ah hah. There it is. Up until this point, I genuinely had a lot of trouble seeing how Dumbiverse Dorothy was related to Walkyverse Dorothy. I mean, don’t get me wrong, both are obviously high achievers with a high risk of burnout, but something about their essences felt very different.
This right here, though, I feel is the core of Walkyverse Dorothy’s tragic arc. How she kept trying so damn hard to get what – or rather who – she wanted, to the point of becoming a villain and her ultimate role in the grand finale, but she couldn’t have them from the beginning so she was destined to fail.
What’s that? I think I hear Linkin Park playing in the background…
Reading it all definitely helped to keep me occupied during the pandemic. It is definitely nuts (in a good way, and sometimes in an “oh jeez that was DARK” way).
Plus now I understand all of the jokes and Easter eggs referring to the Walkyverse, which is very fun.
I mean, there’s some important context here, where Dorothy was being manipulated and eventually outright possessed by a villain who convinced her that the person she loved was in serious genuine danger.
But I know there are folks who really do see IW!Dorothy as a villain despite that, so like, YMMV.
I was searching through the archives for a strip but I couldn’t find it. It was of Joyce sensing something wrong with Joyce telepathically and then at the end Joyce is like oh shes fine she found a piece of candy or something.
I wonder if Dorothy will leave the university now, for move to the other one that accepted her. Probably, now that she understands her feelings for Joyce, see her and Joe will be a torture.
Bob, Joe is handling this so well. A while back, I was frustrated with his redemption. But now, I get it. He is genuinely becoming a better person, and his kindness here puts a big smile on my face.
Dorothy; I’m so sorry, but if Joyce turned down Becky, it was never going to work. There doesn’t appear to be an ounce of alphabet soup in Joyce, so any fantasy of that was never going to be.
You got to get your jollies on with her at the same time while also educating her about her sexual response. Mark it as a sneaky bisexual W and move on.
It’s a little different when the gay woman with a crush is like a sister to you, and also comes with a lot of the same intertwined baggage of leaving toxic Christianity that Joyce is dealing with. Dorothy is a bit of a different kettle of fish. And there have been hints that Joyce is also experiencing some latent bisexuality surfacing, but is far less aware of it. Not that I think she’d cheat on Joe with Dotty, and she’s still a long way away from wrapping her brain around a polycule, but it doesn’t seem utterly out of the question.
Agreed, just because Joyce didn’t have an attraction to Becky doesn’t mean she can’t be attracted to women at all. I can see Joyce viewing it that way, but the fact is that no matter what your orientation, it usually doesn’t mean you’re 100% attracted to everyone of whatever gender you prefer.
For example, I’ve noticed I gravitate towards women with short hair. Someone like Becky would absolutely be my style. However, Joyce has had many moments and hints with characters such as Sal, Jennifer, and Dorothy that mark her as not straight to me. I mean, she may have been a bit tipsy, but also… you can’t really tell your female friend “oh yeah I’ve considered watching you have sex with your boyfriend. Don’t worry, I imagine I’d cover my eyes so I can only see you” and not be at least SOME sort of alphabet soup…
Just to gush a bit more about pretty women, one time my coworker (who had a side thing trying to get into politics) came to work in a lovely white pants suit and she looked so amazing. Absolutely pretty, she was ROCKING the look. Ladies in suits purty.
The bit where Dorothy wards off a drunk guy because “we have boyfriends” and Joyce is like wait you do??? And Dorothy says no, and Joyce says GOOD, I’m tougher than Walky.
How? Billie who is an amoral ball of delusion and selfishness, and Dorothy who desperately tries to do good and put others before herself? That would be a burning trashcan.
If you want to be fair, Joe sacrificed any deeper human connections he might have for most of his life, any trust he might have built with people (including Dorothy.) And he had to do that just to survive his parents’ divorce which taught him close relationships aren’t safe. But yeah we know how it looks to Dorothy. I do worry she’s going to feel like a heel later when she catches up on what Joe has been up to while she had him written off as a libido on legs with no internal life.
Ugh. I don’t feel like this is any kind of actual confession by Dorothy that she’s gay for Joyce in anything but the moment, but it’s hard to articulate why.
I keep going back to that scene with Radiah where Radiah offhandedly comments about how all presidents are war criminals. The next strip is Dorothy cursing herself at how she’s too honest to delude herself into thinking Radiah’s wrong.
Except… she says she already KNEW all presidents, even Carter, did war crimes. And that hadn’t affected her until someone ELSE pointed it out to her face. That’s not radical self-honesty, that’s just “being easy to manipulate and also being good at rationalizing being manipulated.”
I feel like something similar is happening with Joyce — she feels like she SHOULD be gay for Joyce for some reason, so she’s trying to be, but it’s just boiling over into bad feels instead.
I reread part of the archives and I think this is long coming, I think this is one of the most emblematic strips. And it is hard to see Dorothy being tortured after.
If you’re starting from a basis that Dorothy is easily influenced/manipulated, then I think the more convincing argument is that Dorothy feels like she “should” be straight because she’s been teased (unkindly) about being gay since at least 15 and through into college.
Bad feels can come from other places. Like every guilty feeling she mentioned last strip. And maybe because admitting her feelings towards Joyce retroactively concedes correctness to everyone who teased her. Maybe, I’m just spitballing.
I don’t feel like Joe playing the part of Raidah here. His role is closer is that of Jocelyne from when she and Dorothy had a heart to heart a while ago. He’s engaging with Dorothy honestly and in good faith.
“Retroactively conceding correctness” is exactly what she did with Radiah, though.
And I’m not comparing Joe to Radiah in any kind of way (I’m a Joe stan, and I think Radiah is easily tied with Mary for “the worst”) other than as a source of external observation of Dorothy that Dorothy can glom on to as an alternative to ACTUALLY engaging honestly with her own internal knowledge and desires.
Thank you for this explanation, that helped a lot. I practiced the motion several more times with my own hand and found the initial position of my hand and how relaxed I was overall and whether I was trying to snap as loud as possible or in time to music or as an expressive gesture all impacted what position my fingers came to rest in, and my index finger could finish both extended and not extended and it still felt natural. Waving my hand around expressively and snapping as emotional punctuation was way more likely to result in a fully extended index finger, so I understand why Willis drew the gesture that way now.
I’m really appreciating that the 3rd and 4th panes were drawn from Joe’s point of view. He’s really a lot taller than Dorothy (and most of the people he hangs out with), and that means her face had to be drawn from a different perspective.
I do think it’s unfortunate that almost every time Dorothy tries to embrace doing something selfish or impulsive she’s made to feel guilty or immediately called out on it. Like what are the odds that her first title pic which was supposed to be a for fun thing with Joyce, gets seen by Joe, her boyfriend, and he comes to confront her about it? Unlucky. It reminds me of her trying to seduce Walky while he was with Lucy and he immediately rejected her and said “You’re better than this.”
Like everyone else gets away with their bullshit most of the time but not Dorothy. It’s kinda sad.
We’ve literally seen Dina commit theft on a whim and get away with it. That was a joke though so we’ll disqualify that one. Walky threw a toy at Dorothy and they started dating. Carla regularly pies people in the face. Joe’s whole gimmick before his character development was casual hook ups. He was even in a sex tape. Ruth still has her job despite her past of abusing her power. Jason is still around. Like there are countless examples to me. It’s not a criticism it’s just the story being told of kids acting dumb.
But if you’re stating that specifically no one has sent explicit photos to a friend then I guess yeah no one’s gotten away with that yet. Cause this is kind of the first example we’ve seen of it. But I feel like almost every character has acted impulsively or selfishly at least once.
The key difference here is that none of those were involved in much deeper storylines about said action. Joyce doesn’t get away with most of the stuff she does either. Sarah also a contender who is punished for being selfish quite regularly.
Joe literally had it pointed out to him by Joyce that his Do-list was harmful in a tangible way, in terms of ‘getting away with things’
Like, most of those aren’t really equivalent to the selfish thing Dorothy tried to do, most of them aren’t really selfish at all. I was gonna make an exception for Ruth, but really she didn’t get away with it either, she was gonna get punished, only reason she wasn’t was because her grandpa interfered and that was bad for her! She didn’t want the job.! Just seem like a lot of false equivalence.
Also Jason did not fucking get away with it! He lost his position and started working at galazos and could had got deported until Ruth got him a position under Robin, those seem like damn consequences to me!
I feel like you’ve misunderstood my original point and part of that is my fault for using a few bad examples in my response. “Getting away with their bullshit” doesn’t imply facing no consequences for their actions. It means they’re allowed to be themselves, even their negative traits without being confronted about. Everyone expects Ruth to be a bully, or Jennifer to be a narcissist, or Jason to be a tool. The narrative and the characters don’t fight them for behaving badly. They get away with their bullshit and deal with the consequences later.
With Dorothy we never get to the consequence part because stuff like this happens. Joyce hasn’t even seen the tit pic yet and Joe is already here. She can’t cheat with Walky because he’ll just say she’s better than that and then get dumped by Lucy. I even think that’s part of the reason Dorothy thinks Joe hasn’t sacrificed anything. Dorothy will give up her ideals to keep to the standard her peers expect of her. All it takes is Raidah saying “Being president might be bad actually.” And she’ll drop her entire life goal. No one told Joe fronting as a misogynist fuck boy might be beneath you. He gets to do that. Learn his lesson. And then date Joyce.
My bad for not articulating my response properly. I kinda didn’t even think my original post was that controversial. Sometimes the responses get away from me.
I don’t think this version of “Joe confronting her” is ultimately that confrontational. It’s Dorothy that’s angry at herself. So far, Joe has had a pretty light tough. Almost supportive.
And someone did tell Joe that fronting as a misogynist fuck boy was beneath him; Joyce.
Dorothy’s bullshit is holding herself to unrealistic standards. She believes herself to be absolutely extraordinary, and to some extent keeps people around her who buy into that bullshit. Joyce and especially Walky. Walky is kind of to Dorothy what Becky was to Joyce. The piety police [in this case figuratively].
your original post wasn’t controversial, I can see the way you’re reading it. by the time the comment section gets this large, it’s like blood in the water.
Like, Joyce has explicitly worried (during the mac-and-cheese-with-no-pepper sequence) that her friendship with Dorothy is too one-sided, with Dorothy doing too much for her and her not doing anything for Dorothy, but I think we’ve seen a fair bit of “if I’m not helping people, I’m not worthy of their (platonic or otherwise) love” from Dorothy’s self-talk.
I kind of feel like “getting laid” is a fairly more achievable dream than “be president of the United states” so it’s note really fair to compare their efforts and respective sense of loss…
Not gonna lie, that’s a bit incel-like coming from Dorothy. Complaining about all the sacrifices she made, sacrifices that SHE HERSELF CHOSE TO MAKE, and being unhappy about where it led her. Meanwhile lamenting that others who didn’t make the same sacrifices seem to be in a better position than she is, at least from her point of view.
It all kinda reeks a bit of entitlement and jealousy. Like she believes that her sacrifices means that she deserves for things to go her way. And that people who didn’t make the same sacrifices – people who are lower than her – don’t deserve to be ahead of her.
Problem is that the world doesn’t work like that. The world doesn’t care who deserves what. The world gives to those who are willing to take, and it doesn’t give to those who aren’t. That’s all there is. It doesn’t judge morality or whether or not someone deserves something. That’s for people to decide and judge after the fact. If you take what you need then you will have what you need. If you don’t then you’ll be left without. It’s as simple as that.
Sounds to me like Dorothy needs to spend less time sacrificing and more time thinking about what she actually needs and wants out of life. Maybe this whole “president” plan isn’t working out for her as much as she thought it would…
I’m pretty sure she’s just frustrated at the imbalance in outcomes, not being entitled. Jealous, sure. Not sure your personal moral philosophy really plays into it, either. That part’s a little strange.
Topic of discussion: “Is Joyce Dorothy’s first female friend?”
I don’t think the comic ever said as much, and even if it had, Joyce’s newness to everything would probably have overshadowed it, the same way it’s caused so many of us to just sort of vaguely assume Dorothy is a lot more worldly than Joyce, while my archive-bingeing kept demonstrating the opposite.
(There’s a lot in the early comic of Joyce assuming Dorothy knew more than her about a given topic, and Dorothy quietly correcting that assumption, e.g. this strip.) (She is more sexually experienced, for sure, but that seems to be about it.)
Anyway, Joyce of course had Becky growing up; Jennifer had Alice; Sal had Marcie; I swear I’m trying to think of examples where there were no confused romantic feelings involved, and just coming up empty. Most of the other girls in the cast we either explicitly know had trouble making friends (Lucy and Dina and Amber, for example) or can infer would have been anti-social by choice (Ruth, Sarah, Malaya with the obvious gender asterisk)…
And then there’s Dorothy, who I think has a LOT more trouble making friends than she usually gets credit for (the whole Dorothy vs. Roz RA storyline definitely drew attention to this, but most of us were, I think, distracted at the time by what it did or didn’t say about her political chops), whose peer group when she first arrived at IU was made up of “my boyfriend and my boyfriend’s best friend”, and whose peer group since then has been made up of Joyce’s friends.
Like, I think we can all agree that Sarah has friends this year mostly by virtue of Joyce attaching to her like a remora — the not-atypical “introvert gets adopted by an extrovert” path for gaining friends. But Dorothy’s very much the same, and her post-Danny boyfriend is even a boy she met in part because he and Joyce were already friends…
And yeah. Suddenly I just wondered. Is Dorothy one of those girls who has only ever had close male friends, and most of those by virtue of hanging out with the friend groups of her boyfriends? Is that maybe part of why it’s been so hard for her to figure out what she’s feeling here?
This is a good question, and I think it’s been floated around before. I can’t recall her ever mentioning any girls she used to hang out with, or even that she ever did hang out with any girls. Same with Joe and Danny. Now, it might be different in Indiana, but around here there’s a persistent culture of teenage girls fucking hating each other, especially aimed at the smart ones because they’re assumed to think they’re above everyone else. Dorothy’s a smart, organized woman, so just based on my lived experience, it’s easy to imagine her not being especially well-liked by her female classmates. Only a thought.
I think she was friendless until Danny honestly. Her pre-comic persona that she walked in with was one where she *read* a lot of how things worked, but had zero actual experience with anything in a social sphere. She was book smart but people dumb, expecting things to work out in various ways because that’s what she read bout.
Her entire idea of becoming president gets torpedo’ed in a heartbeat after someone points out that you’re going to have to make some less then lily-white choices and the world isn’t so easily fixed.
She “put up with” Joe because Danny was her only human friend. Danny was probably her boyfriend because that’s what you do when you’re socially inept, your nerd friend thinks you’re pretty, and you’re worried about losing your only friend.
It’s probably why she couldn’t bring herself to say anything when he got into the same school she did.
Her tossing him away once she’s “ready” to step into the world and start her hero’s journey is ALSO something she probably read in a book.
Well, we know how Danny became her boyfriend, she showed up to a Halloween party dressed as Velma and he asked her out.
I don’t really think that’s a fair assessment of her and Danny’s breakup, though. My take is in the replies up here. Which, of course, you’re free to disagree with, but I’m already leaving a zillion comments ’round these parts without repeating myself, lol.
Throuple truthers, please consider that doing so would put Joyce in a polycule with Walky. I’m not saying this is proof that it can’t happen I’m saying that if it DOES happen it’s gonna lead to something very very funny.
Me if I ever see Tony Hawk: Hey you’re Tony Hawk the famous skateboarder. That’s right I recognise you. Won’t be able to get any content out of this will you, you piece of shit
How to read all 28 issues of my Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane run on Marvel Unlimited:
1: The first four issues were published as the miniseries "Mary Jane."
www.marvel.com/comics/serie...
today in #9chickweedlane i learned we have to be shown children learning and relearning what sex is, for Reasons, even though they already clearly know and have prepared nuanced questions about it!
also that Gran must hate, if she's still alive, how Old Juliette is the same but with gray hair
one of my favorite things is when a commenter explodes WHEN DO THESE CHARACTERS GET THERAPY but directed towards a character who canonically has a regular therapist
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btw if you're one of those rando bluesky weirdos who doesn't know me but sees me in the wild being sarcastic and don't know i'm being sarcastic because you haven't taken like 30 seconds to, like, maybe look at my user profile or something, keep walking, you're not going to score internet points here
Here's an entertaining cite at the bottom of the first page
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
JUST IN: Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan moves to dismiss federal criminal case against her for allegedly helping immigrant hide from ICE. Her lawyers say she's protected by official acts & judicial immunity and 10th Amendment. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore.
theonion.com/you-can...
It's not a new argument, of course, but Chesterton dismissed it effectively in 1908.
"You will hear everlastingly... this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man."
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com ⋅ 3d
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 1d
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 3d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 12d
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Props to Joe for handling this so well.
The amount he’s changed as a person in such a short time (I think it’s been… Less than six months in universe??) is genuinely very admirable.
It’s still friggin’ January. Less than 3 weeks into the spring semester and we’re already at … this point.
I mean, to be fair, much like Joyce he kinda had his worldview shattered, in some ways, by direct evidence to the contrary of the views and opinions he’s held for as long as he can remember. That sort of thing tends to spur sudden and dramatic growth, even in real people, even if it’s the sort of thing that’s more common in fiction. You pretty much either double down on the delusion, or you immediately start working on bettering yourself.
That’s kind of a theme for many of us who go to college and get out from under that umbrella.
I always wondered if it was the same for people who stayed in their hometown, or if that specifically comes from being exposed to new cultures.
I went to college in my hometown, and even lived at home still. It still happened to me too, though probably to a lesser extent than it would’ve if I’d gone out of state or something. I even went to a Christian college, but it was a different denomination that’s less… culty than my family’s, so if was still a culture shock.
Leaving Mormonism taught me how strong that umbrella can be, especially if your conditioning makes the first step away from orthodoxy feel like an inevitable spiral into mortal destruction and an afterlife isolated with your regrets. It can become an OCD-level anxiety.
College changed my tolerance level. Getting my family through the recession changed my politics away from arch-conservativism. Seeing how official Mormon homophobia affected friends of mine made me realize I never wanted to be the asshole they required me to be.
In spite of all this, admitting my doubts to my wife and uprooting the first strands of Mormonism that wove through both of our lives felt like stepping off the cliff and going towards oblivion. It took time and actual experience before I could accept that I wasn’t too weak to be Mormon, but that Mormonism was too limiting for a happy, healthy life.
Dorothy’s cliff isn’t religious in nature, but she’s spent her whole life reinforcing her perfectionism. Her natural talents made it possible in the vacuum of childhood, but now she’s facing a lack of control in ways that are so much bigger than academic.
Thanks for sharing your story. When I was in college, a close friend of mine (knew her since middle school, we were at the same college) became Mormon. I do not have a favorable view of the religion, but I wanted to be supportive. We were still close for a while– she converted our freshman year, and we roomed together sophomore year– and she seemed pretty much the same, but there some things I questioned.
She went on a mission (she was just placed in the Atlanta area) after junior year, and I did have further issue with that– missionary work is not something I agree with. I didn’t say this to her, but I did pull back a bit. I didn’t immediately reach out for an address to write her at, for example. I did eventually, but we really drifted apart after that. And at some point, she just stopped responding to my messages altogether (which were about wishing her well– she got married! she had a baby!– and asking if she was safe when something was happening in the area she lived in). Sometimes I just sum it up as “we went to college, she became Mormon, and I got queerer.”
Sometimes, especially when I hear stories about people’s experiences of it, I wonder if I should have been more vocally opposed to Mormonism when she was first getting interested. But I don’t know that would have actually helped anything.
Honestly, I think he’s only really changed a little bit. I think he’s become more aware of other people AS people, that they have their own experiences, feelings, and points of view, and maybe he’s gotten a little bit more courage than he previously had, but is otherwise the same person he’s always been. However, that little bit of change makes a HUGE difference, in the way he interacts with otehr people, and the way he sees things.
I’d say that like most people, he had both aspects in him all the time.
He just chose to let the caring one out, and is discovering that it can also be the real him.
I feel like the impact of the result of the change is more important than how big the internal shift actually was. Like, yeah, he’s just getting his head out of his own butt and seeing women as people now and as such is applying aspects of his personality that he always had but they just didn’t get to see, but the end result *is* a fairly drastic shift in behavior and observable personality.
Yeah, like… I get that Dorothy is struggling a lot and that this breakdown was a long time coming, but Joe fundamentally has nothing to do with the things she’s miserable over (except maybe Joyce but we’re not there yet). Taking it all out on him is not the most super. Again, I cannot stress enough, I am not blaming her for being here at the moment, just that Joe has for once not earned the ire coming his way. He’s being really cool about it, considering.
I wouldn’t say “not once”, she is, in a lot of ways, cashing some old cheques here, a lot of resentment built up over knowing the person he *used* to be.
Him handling it the way he is will be a lot more proof for her that he’s not that person anymore though. The old Joe would have gotten very defensive in this situation, now he’s just letting her get it all out.
I’d argue that’s driving her insane because it’s just more proof that she no longer has any constants in her life. If Joe has made such change to his persona then Dorothy has no real grasp on people at all.
*Plays “Javert’s Suicide” on hacked Muzak*
Not suggesting she’ll try that, but it feels like the same sort of total worldview collapse moment
When you’ve known someone for a long time it can be hard to see who they are instead of who they used to be.
Joe out of the blue decided Dorothy was into Joyce and decided to walk in and start pushing her about it and is now mocking her about it. This is completely a situation he started, so he totally deserves whatever come his way.
Granted, if Joyce wasn’t such a self-centered piece of garbage, she might have noticed one of her best friends is having a nervous breakdown and maybe mentioned it to Joe.
Huh?
It’s interesting getting a peek at what this comic is like in other universes.
Or how it translated in other skulls….
What? Everyone is being like “Joe handled this so well” and “Joe doesn’t deserve to get yelled at”. Joe literally walked in on someone who doesn’t like him and started this whole thing, and he’s being really awful to Dorothy about it.
Willis has been hinting at Dorothy being into Joyce for a WHILE now tho
I think you need to re-read some things.
You’re the kind of person who calls Goku a wife abuser huh.
holy crap that grav is too powerful
One could argue that Joe, who despite his sex pest past, is adept at picking up on signs of attraction and emotional states, has noticed Dorothy’s spiral and knows her well enough to know that’s she’s doing what she always does and masks. As such, he has decided to gently but firmly, and a little bluntly, Push Dorothy on this cause it’s just gonna get worse if she doesn’t address it.
I’m not sure this is out of the blue, actually. Given, yanno, everything.
And teenagers (especially autistic teenagers) are allowed to not be very good at assessing the world and the mental states of other people yet. Since, remember, these are college students. They’re still learning how to function.
(also they live in a comic, so some exaggeration is to be expected.)
I like that she’s having it ‘at’ Joe. He can handle it, as we’ve seen, and has enough history to give her some useful perspective.
Oh yeah. Honestly, props to Dorothy for really actually feeling this shit and expressing it instead of continuing to bottle and ignore and try to act the right way, but Joe is facilitating it with a lot of care and understanding, more than most people his age, and a lot more than many adults ever get.
Like, he’s taking no shit, but also not adding to the shitpile. He’s really demonstrating what it means to hold space. Not easy to do if someone you care about is splitting, melting down, or otherwise spinning out.
I feel like Joe getting busted for his black book, and deciding to own up to it, plus some other more minor things, jump started his maturity. Nothing like getting called on your bullshit to make you wonder if you can go on without it.
Joyce directly confronting him about her “zero” rating was a big one. I say confronting, but she really just…. genuinely asked him what she meant to him. Being treated like a *person* was rare for Joe then and it definitely did a lot.
Even if in the short term he tried to hide from it by immediately jumping into Malaya’s bedsheets.
Plus the “Sorry you’re angry” text. That’s probably always going to stick with me, and I don’t have the best memory. For months now (in universe), Joyce has given Joe the space to be imperfectly human. It’s helped with him seeing himself as lovable and complex. Also him falling for her while she was being messy with Jacob. That’s got to have had some impact on him learning to be okay with himself.
All this to say, I absolutely agree, here have more moments of JoJoyce growth.
Not just that, but Joyce telling him about Ryan.
And I don’t know, but this feels like the emphasis is the wrong way around something. If Joe wasn’t treated like a person, it’s because he did everything he could to discourage it. He didn’t treat women like people
I feel like people don’t appreciate enough that Joe was always different than the stereotypical slutty dude who just wants to bang chicks. It’s been pretty well established that his refusal to try and have serious relationships was a reactionary response to witnessing his father’s constant infidelity, having internalized a belief that he would be just like his father, seemingly hypnotizing women with his good looks and charm and then always losing self control and hurting those women terribly. In a backwards, roundabout way, Joe’s entire man slut persona was him desperately attempting to remain ethical and honest towards women despite believing himself *inherently, genetically* incapable of doing so. And when Joe immediately fessed up about the “do list” when it was revealed and didn’t try to argue in his defense or get mad at people for being mad at him, and instead decided to openly mea culpa and attempt reparations in donuts, a part of that was that he was genuinely horrified that he had hurt so many people so badly, and that he genuinely wanted to be liked by all those women he kept at emotional arm’s length. In a twisted way, Joe has spent his entire adolescence fixated on how to behave as morally as possible, so this shift in philosophy and outward behavior comes to him a lot more naturally than it would come to someone who was carelessly promiscuous in pursuit of as much sex as possible.
I agree, mostly, but I think we’re too quick to jump onto this two-dimensional picture of “stereotypical slutty dude” to begin with. A lot of the young men I’ve known to act like this did it in similar ways and for similar reasons, due to insecurity over their place in the world, the expectations of patriarchy on their shoulders or from their fathers and older brothers, etc. Then you have those who are wilfully abusive or more than happy to just exploit advantages to their own ends and the like. Still dangerous and careless at best, actively malicious at worst – but also still more three-dimensional than they’re generally painted.
Dorothy is getting all of this out, and that’s good, but she’s continuing to act like she’s above reality itself.
She’s very clearly tearing into the version of Joe that exists in her head.
god I love how cute this is SO MUCH. Like. I am not even insisting that this become poly but if this were the way all mono people handled romantic tangles,,,,
Gotta respect Joe’s patience at least.
Oddly patient. I’m wondering if he started this with something in mind. Waiting for the shoe to drop.
I think he’s concerned about her, and his goal is to help her.
This. I think he’s legit concerned for his girlfriend’s best friend. Or his friend for that matter. She hasn’t been okay for a while, and I think that he’s legit out to help her, while at the same time finding out if she’s into Joyce.
Joe has gone through some things that have made him grow up pretty fast, so I think he’s the right person to handle this particular situation, though I have been wrong before.
Girlfriend’s best friend and best friend’s ex-girlfriend! That and he’s known her for years.
“Whose best whatnow?”
– Becky, probably.
That’s right! I forgot that they DO know each other through Danny! So he could be legit out trying to help her while at the same time getting to the bottom of what exactly is up with her and Joyce.
Yes. The Keener crashout is developing nicely.
i wonder if she’s seen that counselor/therapist since the las time it was brought up
Gonna go out on a limb and say “no”
most likely that, yeah, but it could also be that her current therapist might just not be a good fit. iirc the biggest piece of advice that we’ve seen Dorothy’s therapist give in-text was “it’s best to reconstrue upsets tragedies as victories in personal growth”, which imo might not be the best thing to imprint on a tightly-wound, self punishing, type a student who was recently kidnapped and visibly saw a man die violently in front of her.
and while we don’t know if this was the result of Dorothy misconstruing something much more nuanced on the therapist’s end, if there’s something that i’ve had to learn the hard way last year, it’s that no therapy is much better than bad/ineffective therapy.
*upsetting tragedies
Good catch.
IIRC Dorothy did openly admit that she hides things (or lies?) to her therapist just in case there’s an exposé later. She’s in therapy but has been self-sabotaging it the whole time.
I feel like this is a good time to remind people that Dorothy was a really evil villain in the Walkyverse, and her villainy was motivated by disappointment with how her life turned out and looking back in regret at what she might have had and lost.
Joe, now would NOT be a good time to announce your presidential campaign.
::rolling on the floor laughing my fucking ass off::
did . . . did you just fully spell out ROFLMAO? that . . . that’s incredible I haven’t seen that in years
ROFLMFAO, even.
::so hard I get carpet burns::
No reason to let it go to waste.
Hell this is the first time I’ve actually genuinely seen someone use ROFL, that things an artifact
Sad to say he’d probably get farther at it than Dorothy if he tried.
Get the seemingly dumb hunk with a history of mildly edgy comments who can bro it up voted in, possibly on a Republican ticket. The first day, his political advisors try to distract, manipulate, and control him, like they did with Trump. But OH NO! To their dismay they quickly realise the not-so-dumb hunk is actually a SECRET SLEEPER AGENT OF WOKENESS!!! His first executive order is that all Mardi Gras parades MUST hand out beads on basis of gender identity! And that is when we wokies shall rule
‘Tis a flawless, airtight political plan!
Woke is just shorthand for treating other people like human beings. That’s something MAGA just can’t do.
Another thing that MAGAts just can’t do is grok what it actually means to be woke.
It’s kind of funny, though, because “based and redpilled” is basically their own warped, misshapen, assbackwards version of being “woke,” even if they don’t realize it.
Sure they can. Woke means anything they hate.
Black people? Jews? Woke. Gay? Trans? Woke. The Hurricane turbocharged six cylinder engine that replaced the Hemi in the Dodge trucks? That engine is WOKE! Garfield comics? WOKE! Cody Rhodes winning the WWE title? Woke!
Woke is the new “Communism!”, all the narcissistic goose stepping of the red scare and McCarthyism, double the stupidity.
this ^ Thank you
In any other context I would agree with you, but making a voluntary act like handing out beads mandatory like Marianne says sounds like treating people like things, and that is where all evil starts.
My take on it is that pronouns are like names and titles. If Dr. Robert Smith asks you to call him Dr. Smith because he is proud of his title, then the polite thing to do is to use that title. You can choose not to use the title, but you would risk offending Dr. Smith with all the consequences that entails. Pronouns are exactly the same thing: You can choose to be an asshole about it, but don’t be surprised if that leads to the people you insulted not liking you. Alternatively you can just not interact with people who insist on being called Doctor or insist on anything else you don’t want to call them. Nobody is going to force you to be friends. And there are plenty of ways to sidestep using a title you don’t want to use on the rare occasions where you do have to interact.
I just don’t see how living in a woke society can be an issue for a non-woke non-asshole.
Aaaand I just realized that this sounds like I am reducing wokeness to just gender issues, which wasn’t my point, I just got stuck on something I’m thinking about.
The underlying principle of wokeness is being aware of the systemic nature of societal problems. In this case living in a woke society as a non-woke non-asshole you would be surrounded with people who disagree with you about where problems come from. OK, so disagree with people. You’re allowed to disagree. You can even have discussions about it! What you can’t do is use violence to resolve your disagreement. But since you’re a non-asshole in addition to being non-woke you would already agree that you don’t bring violence into a discussion, so that shouldn’t be a problem for you.
And now I have said woke too much and it is starting to annoy me.
It’s okay. Time to smell the flowers.
But it’s not just about using violence. Nor is it just about using pronouns, even if we’re just talking about trans people.
It’s about less extreme pressures, like company policies or about teaching acceptance in schools. If you’re interacting with your hypothetical Dr. Smith as part of your job, the consequences of not addressing him as the social protocol requires go beyond just not being friends. This is rare, because trans people are rare and rarer still because the pressure is more often put on them to conform and accept and discrimination keeps them from having the social clout to enforce consequences.
Refusing to use the right pronouns is far more akin to the social use of slurs for marginalized groups than something as innocuous as not wanting to always use a title like “Doctor” for someone who’s proud of it. It’s a way of signalling your own bigotry and power over them as part of the dominant majority and allowing to go socially unchecked is a serious threat to the marginalized group.
Also even the trans part of wokeness goes so far beyond pronouns – trans people face widespread discrimination. Coming out often risks losing both jobs and family support. In the US, they’ve just been banned from serving in the military.
You make some good points. I am trying to put down a way of looking at woke that achieves two things at once: Be accepted by the average normal guy as common sense while also creating a set of social rules that make trans people safer (and everyone else of course, but we should focus on the weakest group when trying to make the world better)
Have you consider that maybe you are not qualified to try to do that?
The way to make trans people safer is to get the average normal guy to be less transphobic not for people to tiptoe around his prejudices.
Remember the gay marriage fights? Proposing civil unions or other half measures didn’t make the opposition okay with it. They fought those too and took any ground offered as a win.
The problem with wokeness is that you don’t actually have to be woke to repeat the observations woke people have made without understanding them or having the same motivations in looking at the world honestly and wanting to tell what you see. My experience is that most people who get accused of being “woke” aren’t really aware of the world at all, they’re just parroting stuff that they know has become popular among other people of the same political alignment. And then it becomes a game of telephone, as the message gets more and more distorted with each telling by people who never saw the elephant for themselves.
I guess.
But even that faux wokeness is better than the opposite.
What I’ve seen that game of telephone more with is people saying things against “wokeness,” even though many of these people wouldn’t express that stance, at least in the spaces we’ve interacted in. That misinformation about litter boxes being put in schools for kids who identify as cats? I had a coworker saying that happened at a school his friend worked at. And he had probably been told by a friend that it was from *their* friend, but he condensed it down, which makes it seem more credible…even though it was just lies.
When the truth about the kitty litter in schools is even more terrifying.
It’s for little kids who have to pee when the school’s locked down for shootings (or shooting drills.)
Indeed, there’s fascism of the right and fascism of the left. The thing to do is to sell your idea, not to force it.
Fascism is explicitly right wing.
The left can have authoritarianism, but not fascism.
Beyond that, while that’s theoretically true, the right wing version is currently resurgent around the world and especially in the US, while left wing authoritarianism is basically non-existent at the moment in terms of political power, but is still portrayed as at least as serious a threat to your freedom right here and now. There is social pressure to use the right pronouns for trans people and that is proof of left wing fascism. This is false equivalency bullshit.
In my Unitarian Universalist church, when we tried to come back from covid lockdown, we suddenly had a witch hunt for secret white supremacists that tore the congregation apart with finger-pointing accusations. It resulted in most of the people leaving while the people who were doing the most accusing seized control of the board and the church’s considerable finances. They then elected a church president who lived over a thousand miles away and had her run the church over the internet, projecting her face up on a big screen in the sanctuary, and one of her first “sermons” (because the minister had walked out as well) was to give a speech about how all white people are always white supremacists because we are born into white supremacy whether we accept it or not, and it’s not something you can choose to be or not be. It destroyed what was supposed to be a safe space for marginalized people by creating such a hostile atmosphere that nobody ever felt safe from being trampled beneath the struggle for power. So that’s my concept of current day left wing authoritarianism.
okay like, this church president you speak of was for reals conflating benefitting from white privilege with being white supremacist, the whole fuckin point is to recognize that the whole “racist/non-racist” binary isn’t useful anymore
honest to satan she sounds like an IRL Brian Griffin, adopting good politics for all the wrong reasons
it also doesn’t help that much of these kinda US folk got most of their exposure to progressive ideas in the form of caricatures spread by the conservative media machine, which of course includes projection of their “blame and punish” mentality and are hardly representative of the real thing (-_-)
@Strain of Thought:
Surely you can see the difference between something that happened in a single isolated church and something that is currently occupying all branches of our government.
You’re replying to someone who said it’s basically non-existent at the moment in terms of political power, not someone who claimed it was impossible.
(Also that would not be the type of left-wing authoritarianism I’d use as an example. I’d instead talk about the strain of punitive bloodthirstiness that runs through leftist spaces — folks who claim to support prison abolition but also want rapists to be killed on sight, for example — or the undercurrent of “why couldn’t Joe Biden just unilaterally force his policies through”, which was about 1/2 latent authoritarianism and 1/2 being young and ignorant and not understanding how our government is supposed to function.)
@Li: There is a frightening strand of authoritarianism on the online anti-Democratic left (To the extent it’s not bots or agents). It still has little actual political power, functioning mostly to disrupt and discourage any actual action.
Part of it I think comes from cynicism about our government. Justified to an extent, but not as far as it goes. If you already think it’s all corrupt and rigged, why not want Biden to blackmail Democratic Senators to get his way?
Oh for sure.
We need to talk to our kids (e.g., Gen Alpha) about this and make sure they understand what they’re asking for when they say these things, but for sure there is currently a total lack of systemic power behind leftist authoritarianism.
This point fells very convoluted and confusing.
My understanding is that the original meaning of “stay woke” was, “keep your eyes open, especially to avoid lynch mobs and murderous cops”.
(Massive trigger warning for racially charged language and discussions of racial and sexual violence:)
https://www.snopes.com/articles/464795/origins-term-stay-woke/
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/blues-guitarist-invented-the-phrase-woke/
Which is actually kind of funny because — if the authorities DON’T want us to “stay woke”, are they saying they want us to stay asleep? Weren’t the right-wingers also fond of saying,
“Wake up, sheeple!”? (See, e.g.: https://m.xkcd.com/1013/ )
I fail to see the difference in tone or intention… we all want to walk through life alert and awake to respond to whatever may come.
yeah “woke” has been used by black brothas to refer to awareness of social and political issues affectin us since the 1930s.
after it was used on Black Twitter and the BLM movement gained momentum in the 2010s, it started to be used more and more by white allies, and then it was used by more of the English-speaking leftists to refer to awareness of social issues affecting vulnerable minorities in general (queers, trans, etc) and not just black folk in particular.
Joe would quite definitely be in favor of all the abortion and contraceptive rights.
Secret Keener agent. She just tells him what to do.
Honestly we probably need someone else to Jimmy Carter it to get any type of progressive.
You never know…Joe is Jewish.
what does that mean??
Probably that the US wouldn’t elect a Jewish president anytime soon. (Which, yeah, it wouldn’t.)
To update the punchline to a joke the late, great Isaac Asimov told after the Catholic Kennedy was elected, “We’ve had a Jewish president in Israel for seventy years. It doesn’t help.”
He was a great writer.
He was also a serial groper and sexual harasser, at the least.
It’s sad how many great artists’ work is sullied by their personal conduct. Makes me sad. Makes it much harder to enjoy popular culture.
See, e.g.:
https://lithub.com/what-to-make-of-isaac-asimov-sci-fi-giant-and-dirty-old-man/
Eh, they elected a Black one which is probably a bigger hurdle for them.
But never a woman, heavens forfend.
It’s a matter of time and candidate. I think Clinton would have won in 2008. There was a huge backlash against Bush and the country wasn’t quite as polarized.
Obama was also a phenomenal campaigner, so he might have had a chance in a different cycle, though I’m less sure of that.
I appreciate that you believe that, but I just don’t. I would be happy to live in a world where I thought a woman had a shot at becoming president of the USA, but at the moment (imo) we’re not there yet. The voters had an amazing candidate up this time, and because she wasn’t perfect they decided they’d rather let the orange nightmare have a second go at things. I wish that was surprising to me, but it isn’t.
Not surprising and I’m not saying there isn’t a huge amount of prejudice to overcome. As much as I liked Harris, she wasn’t the brilliant natural charismatic campaigner that Obama was. And this wasn’t a year with all the political winds in the Democratic direction.
Both being black and being a woman definitely count against you in any kind of a close national race, but I don’t think it’s insurmountable in the right circumstances. Nor do I think Obama’s win shows it’s much easier for black man than for a white woman. That I think is down to political circumstances and the candidate.
I mean even then let’s face it — a woman getting elected wouldn’t have meant jack about how sexist our country would still be afterwards, anymore than a black president meant an end to racism here
but of course that don’t stop white folk like Linda from goin “LOOKIE! VOTE FOR OBAMA! NOT RACIST™”, and the whole ordeal about his election being indicative of our country being “post-racial” when really, we’ve set such a consistently low bar for racism for so long that racists in other countries use us to feel better about themselves
it gotta be understood more than ever that the electoral college being treated as THE center of the political universe and electoral outcomes being treated as a reliable weather bell for actual social progress is inevitably still a tool of systemic bigotry — election of a representative candidate is a game which always favors the everyman, and majorly incentivizes attempts to win over bigoted white men and disingenuous donors over the vulnerable people they’re actually bigoted against,
facts about issues which affect us are ultimately useless in the framework of hour-long televised political “”debates”” which once more put oblivious white folk and their “traditions” at the center of the universe with this ever-lasting beam-struggle of sustained screaming which draws attention away from people who actually need help 9-9
we vote for who we vote for to mitigate damage, misguided emphasis on our broke-ass government as THE center of progressive politics is inevitably saying, “the majority of the meaningful power we have is because institutions overly favoring white Christian men let us have it”
i reckon half the reason we in this mess is because US leftists never let themselves have any real plan for resisting fascism other than “never lose a game of electoral college”
Maybe I’m weird, but I tend to prefer voting for candidates based on the policies they support and their political records, not based on whether they’re black or white, men or women, gay or straight, etc. Sometimes that means I vote a white man, and other times that means I vote for a Latina woman. But policies and political record seem far more important when deciding who to vote for to me.
@Kyulen: you are responding to a strawman. No one said “I want to elect a woman and I don’t care what her policies are.”
@NGPZ: I cannot believe I’m still encountering “it doesn’t matter who the president is” right now? Are you serious?
Yes, electing Hillary or Harris would not have eliminated sexism over night, and yes there would likely have been another cultural backlash from whiny crybaby republicans, but come on. Please. Now of all times, I would think we could all agree the country would be less of a raging dumpster fire if we had elected even the most boring, centrist, unimpressive Democrat in the fuckin’ world.
Please actually look into what the Biden administration did with its four years, because despite the unending obstruction of Republicans controlling both House & Senate, IT WAS A LOT, and we lost a LOT because too many voters stayed home in 2024.
Voting isn’t the be-all, end-all. There are other avenues for change. But I promise we can in fact do both at once, and an exhausted hungry desperate population will not somehow be stronger and more capable of political change.
Conservative billionaires currently own most of our media, and they’re not interested in reporting on what Democrats do right, so you’ll have to put in some legwork to find the information yourself, but Joe Biden didn’t spend four years doing nothing, and it helps nobody to act like he did.
We will be infinitely more screwed if we can’t mobilize in the midterms to take back control of the House & Senate.
If you think Trump and his allies are emboldened right now, just wait until they no longer have to worry about losing Congress.
“weird” only on account that we’re a nation run by six-year-olds brought up to venerate ignorance, obedience and militarism, and for the most part can’t be bothered to think too deeply about anything besides football and furniture prices (-_-)
the United States is the Florida of the world in just about every sense you can think of
Harris didn’t perform well, but she was dealt a bad hand. Biden and his team delusionally stuck it out for way too long, and also at the eleventh hour got dogwalked into funding a genocide.
Those are difficult things to overcome, even if you don’t have Wormtongue whispering in your ear saying “Stop calling Republicans Weird and campaign with the Cheneys”
that was a reply to @Kyulen BTW
also @Li, “it doesn’t matter who the president is” is not at all the point I was making at all, I literally said we vote for who we vote for to mitigate damageprecisely because it does matter who’s voted into office, you’re attacking a strawman yourself here XD
if you’re a leftist, you have an antagonistic relationship with our government no matter who’s in power. For vulnerable minorities like ourselves, voting means being coerced into playing a game where you pick whichever oblivious privileged jerk you can extract more from and whose election will result in the least number of us suffering and DYING
elections are HARDLY the time “politics” happens, it also happens on the streets, in the community and by mutually supporting each other. No matter who’s voted into office, we still gotta organize, build local community, and build strength in masses to make real progress happen
a vote is important to reduce the harm that’s done by our racist government, but it becomes nigh pointless and counterproductive when it winds up being our allies’ entire fucking PRAXIS 9-9
@Kyulen, please don’t put words in my mouth <3
I was talking about how hard it is for a WILDLY qualified woman to be voted into the same office a moron was voted into twice BECAUSE she is a woman and a person of color. I did not, at any point, suggest people should vote for her for her gender or ethnicity alone. This election was between an incredibly talented, intelligent, and skilled politician… and a literal nazi. And people chose the nazi, or they didn't vote at all, or they voted third party in a country where that is just never going to work (third party movements need to be from the ground up in the US, not from the president down. Get them in local, then state, then national government FIRST then start talking presidency ffs).
I was saying she faced additional hurdles due to sexism and racism. Thanks though.
@Nymph: I’d argue 3rd party movements as such need to be inside party movements. Still ground up, but as a takeover from within one of the existing parties, rather than to establish a 3rd major competing party.
Basically the template the Tea Party used to take over the GOP before morphing into MAGA. Though of course it was easier for them, given they were basically astroturfed by billionaires from the start.
OK, I feel compelled to point out that less than half the popular vote went to Trump. He only won because a slightly smaller half voted for Harris. They were within about 1% of each other. More than half voted against Trump, but they were divided so the majority lost.
I’m not even convinced our mistake wasn’t getting Biden OUT of the race. “Did Biden drop out” was one of the biggest Google terms on Election Day. I think we may have critically overestimated how tuned-in the average American was to… literally anything, and that Biden’s debate performance wasn’t the devastating blow a lot of analysts thought it was.
Biden was physically incapable of campaigning, he needed to go. For as middling and unimpressive as Harris ended up being, I’m convinced Biden would have done worse, significantly worse
Well, since we have no Control Group America to compare it to, we’ll never know.
Well, I’ll do my part for the best candidate, but I only have one vote.
Nah, it’s actually that he got tapped for the VP. Don’t gotta earn anything that way.
I kinda hope/half expect we get some kinda flashforward at some point that shows someone like, “other rachel” becoming president or so
… I hate the fact that he’d likely win if he tried. XD He’s a tall, conventionally attractive white male so he automatically passes a lot of the unconscious biases people have, and even the ones who may not agree with his heritage or his politics will likely still go “Eh, he can’t be worse than .” Especially if said rival turns out to be a minority, which includes Dorothy. :/
correct me if wrong but isnt joe mixed race?
He is not mixed race, but he’s Jewish, and antisemitism is very much on the rise. Joe ain’t getting elected anytime soon either.
no arguing the stupidity of racism (any racism is too much racism, fucking pointless thing to believe) that has erupted into the mainstream, his being jewish is one thing and i may be misremembering walkyverse but i thought he had mixed heritage as well as being jewish. also his skin tone in the comic to me is more tanned by heritage than tan by uv rays, but i could absolutely see him in a tanning bed if that is the case. not that how he is considered a minority matters, all that does is his growth as a person entertains us
I think he’s just supposed to be a bit olive-skinned. Given that “white” is a moving target without a coherent definition, whether someone thinks Joe is white probably varies by the area and decade. Certainly being Jewish is a form of conditional whiteness at best, since the vast majority of white supremacists don’t consider Jewish people white regardless of skin tone.
i think he’s intended to be white but i’ve also always read him as mixed. specifically wasian but definitely mixed. and thus he will remain such in my heart
Give me the throuple
giiiiiiiiiiiive
Dorothy would have to be attracted to him in the slightest and all the boys and girls she like are shorttanks.
i’m sure there’s poly groups that don’t necessarily having them all like each other versus just an ‘open relationship’. makes me think of that parks&rec meme like “this is my boyfriend, x, and his boyfriend”
You have discovered the distinction between “poly triangle” and “poly V”
Waiting to see where Joe is going with this.
Yes. This is most of them, in fact.
Dorothy and Joe don’t have to date they can both date Joyce
And Walky is sad and lonely once again in bachelor mode. Noo Walky
unless Dorothy dates both Joyce and Walky lmao. A foursome!!!!
That’s not a foursome, that’s just a… well, a line sort of polycule.
I’ve been referring to it as “polymer chain”. My OTP(olymer chain) is Joe/Joyce/Dorothy/Walky/Amber, where no one is actually with anyone except the adjacent links in the chain.
Because Dorothy knew Joe too well when he was too young and stupid, Joyce and Walky are antagonistic siblings and it’s totally inconceivable that they could ever be together in any possible universe, Dorothy appears to only be gay for Joyce, Walky might be willing to go down on Joe for free pizza, but Joe probably wouldn’t go for it, no matter how much Amber tries to use her mind powers to make it happen, Amber appears to be entirely straight, and any time it looks like something might happen between Amber and Joe, she feels compelled to say something memey about “stepbro” and they both end up laughing too hard for it to go anywhere.
It would just mean that both Joe and Walky are mature enough to share. Probably a lot to ask from literal teenagers, but not impossible.
Hinge arrangement dude
Joyce has done remarkably well adjusting her worldviews in the past few months but I don’t think she is prepared there.
begging for it.
I’m sure she does, but I feel like Dorothy is expressing other, more worrying feelings right now, Joe.
Maybe yeah, but that is the crux of the conversation and the easier thing to untangle right now.
I do like how Joe’s reaction seems to be. “I don’t blame you, I love her too.”
Oh. … oh crap now that last panel is sweet and sad ;-;
Yeah. Everything else aside, he genuinely gets it. Or sure seems to. So how could he be mad, right? He knows.
Joe’s said before she’s the best thing that ever happened to him, so when Dorothy lets slip a moment of honesty — “you got everything” — he’s like, yeah, yeah I did. She’s amazing.
yeah Dorothy, just let it all out 🥲
*plays “Close To You” by The Carpenters on hacked muzak*
Oh damn. Good on Joe for not balking at “you never tried”: that can be discussed later
That last line is EVERYTHING.
The joke was not intended, but now that I’ve noticed it we’re going to pretend it totally was.
His face as he says it is so cute.
Oh she’s going to do murder to him
I’m imagining an Aggretsuki style break away for a metal karaoke scene
Which ends up with her getting black out drunk and waking up in Billie’s bed
Not even Dottie deserves Billie.
Notice me senpai Joyce
I feel like next strip is Dorothy smacking him. I know he’s not trying to be mean but in her current state that’s gotta feel like he’s twisting the knife
I don’t think Dorothy has shown a particular lean toward violence?
Walkyverse Dorothy was a villain, remember? A really scary one.
No, I don’t remember that because I never read Walkyverse? And I don’t think that counts as this version of Dorothy having a lean towards violence.
…who mostly used emotional manipulation instead of violence, so I’m not sure what your point is here.
Who was being manipulated and sometimes directly controlled by Head Alien……….
I was thinking the opposite. I was thinking she was finally gonna reach that cathartic bottom of the barrel and cry, leading him to comfort her and probably other non-sexual therapeutic shenanigans.
I kind of hope she does break down and cry. Sometimes you need a good cathartic cry.
damn straight
+1
Oh Dorothy. I feel terrible for her, even if I think this is a terrible way to go about this. I know how awful it feels to see people you hate or who have treated you horribly get everything you’ve ever wanted. But this isn’t a healthy way to express it.
Also, maybe Joe is open to the polycule? I still think with Dorothy it’s a terrible idea (and this is a bad place to drop it), but I no longer understand what he’s doing in the last panel. It doesn’t read like malice or even prodding, I just don’t get it.
(It’s sweet and I love him saying it about Joyce and I love them together so much, it’s just reacting like that to the panel immediately before it that gives me pause because he’s usually more socially adept than to twist a knife like that.)
My read is that he’s still trying to get Dorothy to actually admit out loud what she feels so they can all move forward. For all of the INCREDIBLE homosexuality Dorothy’s got clearly on display here, she still hasn’t come right out and said “Yes, I have feelings for Joyce”. And, as Joe points out, she probably does need to do that. She needs to be honest, and say what she means, so Joe is trying to prod her into that. More of a “And by ‘everything’ you mean ‘Joyce’, right?” kind of retort than an attempt to rub it in her face.
I think it might be a read. As in, Joe thinks that when Dorothy says “Everything” she means Joyce (and maybe happiness in general), so Joe seems to be, knowingly or not, confirming that Dorothy is jealous of Joe because he is dating Joyce.
(Asside: my ideal situation is now Amazi-Dorothy-Walky-Amber polycule.)
If we’re tossing realism aside, I’m going with Joe-Joyce-Dorothy-Walky-Amber.
But I’ll settle for Jennifer/Ruth.
I’m honestly feeling Dorothy/Amber at the moment. Partly for “I can fix her/make her worse” and partly cos I think it’d be really funny for Walky and Danny to both have to see their exes together. Plus double glasses.
He’s agreeing with the root cause of her feelings (Joyce) instead of arguing back at the things she’s saying in anger (About him and her own self image).
I think taking him just being genuine with Dorothy and listening to her in this moment as Being Open to the Polycule is a bit of a stretch.
As it stands, the poly dynamic right now would be pretty hierarchical and I don’t think that’d be healthy for anyone involved. But Joe’s response certainly leaves the door open.
Joe asked Joyce at least once if she was into Dottie and seemed at least resigned to let that happen if it meant Joyce would be happy. I think it would break him though.
I feel like Joe could perfectly well live with Joyce/Dorothy. Like, there’s the side where he’s lived his entire previous life not pursuing monogamous relationships at all, and has displayed zero inclinations towards monogamy period, and then there’s the side where he’s probably, yknow. Into lesbians, as a concept.
When was that?
I’d be very surprised if Dorothy went with it. Joyce I could see being, “No! Wait…that’s possible? Well, if it’s with Dorothy….”
he is being a friend to her, his purpose in the final panel is to allow the negative emotions to dissipate and prompt her with a positive emotional hook latch onto, she is spiraling and he is feeding the counter flow.
Oh my… I thought Dorothy sounded a little mean last strip. But it’s official.
She’s got lots of resentments towards Joe. All built up until he, funnily enough–makes her unload. Interesting that she ended being this archetype.
Feeling like someone else didn’t have to “work” hard or “try” while YOU did so much all the time. Everything just falls into their lap while nothing seems to go right for you.
Joe’s rolling with this well, too.
Joe who had his horrific home life with a father and mother who hated one another.
Joe who has been made a social pariah.
Joe who has no ability to express safe romantic feelings.
Dorothy only sees the macho douchebag.
“I’m saying you’re what’s wrong with America, Simpson. You coast through life, you do as little as possible, and you leech off of decent, hardworking people like me. Heh, if you lived in any other country in the world, you’d have starved to death long ago. You’re a fraud, a total fraud.” – Frank Grimes
Sorry, couldn’t resist. Dorothy in Panel 3, in particular, reminded me so much of him… Let’s hope things end up better for her than for him.
Damn, so proud of Joe. Because, despite “oh being a better person is not hard” he appears to have deconstructed himself over and over again to get rid of the misogyny and brainworms of his past to be with Joyce. You sacrifice your honour and replace it with shame to the person you were and if it may still affect you with other people. To say he never `tried` is not true, but he doesn’t care, the conversation is not about him and he’s focussed on helping Dotty through this.
Also awwwww
This is the main reason I get annoyed with the commenters who minimize old Joe being a problem. Let the boy have his character growth. Acknowledge that he has put the work in to change.
This is the rare time where we need to gate keep. If you minimize my man’s character growth by saying he was never that bad to start with, you are a FAKE
JOE 
FAN 
I am a FAKE JOE FAN. He was rude, crude, socially unacceptable, careless and thoughtless, but that’s as far as I’ll go. And he’s come a long way since then.
+1
Joe’s made sacrifices. He bought all the women donuts that one time.
I mean the public acknowledgement/apology that it was his list was the bigger part, the donuts were just the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down
Words cannot contain how hard I chuckled at this.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a supervillain origin story.
It’s definitely better than a rapist friend of yours getting stabbed like the current supervillain decided to go with.
It’s always okay to stab a rapist. It’s never okay to dress up like a dipshit and harass random people about it.
You make a good point. I need to exand my List.
Scum gets mocked.
Nazis get punched.
Rapists get stabbed.
Slavers die.
Now hang on, putting Nazis below rapists makes me uncomfortable.
Dammit. That means I have been going too easy on Nazis all my life
Fuck you for making me self-reflect. This is all your fault and not my fault at all. /deflect
But Nazis appear above rapists and below scum in your list..?
I think they meant in regards to the severity of the response. Punching is less/lower stakes than stabbing.
Yeah, what Nymph said. I should have worded that better.
I don’t really think Joe has made sacrifices, and certainly not in the way Dorothy currently means it (sacrificing something he truly wanted).
I also don’t think having made sacrifices is necessary for one to be worthy of love, and I think it’s terribly sad that, on some level, Dorothy must.
(Note: I think Joe would sacrifice things for Joyce; in particular, this sequence makes me think he’d step aside (and sacrifice his chance to date Joyce) if he thought she’d be happier with someone else.) (But I don’t think he’s going to have to test that hypothesis.)
Cool, love that that was a reply to THIS instead of a reply to @Sirksome, lol.
Yeah. Actively choosing to make sacrifices towards goals you care about absolutely *can* be a part of a meaningful life. But it isn’t an absolute requirement. No one forced Dorothy down this path but herself.
I would agree with that. I imagine Dorothy would also agree with it. Even at her most frustrated, I don’t think she actually blames Joyce for her decision to stay at IU, for example. Intellectually, she knows better than that.
She’s just also miserable and pent-up and it’s all kinda coming out in a rush.
I appreciate how much Joe is not letting Dorothy use her panic to avoid confronting the one thing she doesn’t want to be honest about
Yeah. Other people have mentioned it’s not the right response, but I think it actually is. Dorothy is unloading all of her very real feelings the same way a fighter jet sheds chaff.
The truth has always been the best lie.
“The truth is an excuse for a lack of imagination.”
That’s the best way to put it, distract Joe with anything important and true so I can not think about my feelings for Joyce
it’s also a reminder that they both love joyce and festering feelings of jealousy, while understandable, will only hurt joyce
Hmmm, I’m not sure that I agree that she’s actually trying to avoid it at this point — I think she’s just exploding messily… but that’s an interesting read. Certainly Joe is staying on target.
It’s an honestly perfect depiction of denial. On some level, deep down, you know perfectly well what the truth is. But you have every excuse in the book thrown in the way, starting with “I can’t be” and “I’m better than that” and “I am too self aware for that” until we land on “IT’S NOT FUCKING FAIR THAT YOU GET HER AND I DON’T!” And Joe isn’t judging or upset, because he’s been there. He knows what it’s like to have a stubborn sense of self you can’t let go of.
And you know the denial is intense cause we’re getting red panels
I don’t know if I must say: it’s the start of her healing, or the born of a new villain .
This would be an inclusive “or”.
What does Joe have besides Joyce? Is there other stuff too or is Dorothy really just that transparent about Joyce?
he has a willingness to be better. mainly so he can feel like he “deserves” Joyce, yes, but improvement is improvement
He’s looks pretty lucky to me…
I think, to Dorothy, Joe has everything he wants because, well, he’s never really expressed a strong desire for anything *but* female companionship. I honestly don’t even remember if we know his major or not, like he had no aspirations we knew about beyond getting laid, initially.
I’d say he also has Danny, but I mean, Danny is Dorothy’s friend, too, even if there’s obviously some baggage, so that’s not really tipping the scale.
I could be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure his major is still undeclared.
Yes, he was considering going into cooking/hospitality relatively recently because he found cooking for Joyce and making her happy through that really special, but iirc got told that cooking for his girlfriend and cooking as a career are two very different things.
I don’t know if he’s said anything about the idea since or followed up on it in any way.
Right I remember now, but I don’t think it was really that much of a plot point, he had one conversation about it with Danny, but it didn’t really go anywhere because Danny pointed out their school doesn’t have a culinary program so if he was serious about it he’d probably have to transfer to somewhere else, and Joe’s response was like “no I can’t leave here, everything I love is here” which really connects to today’s strip in an interesting way.
Joe wanted to have sex with a bunch of sexy ladies and he fully succeeded at that.
Dorothy wanted to be president and crashed and burned on that goal like…six months into uni?
Dorothy needs to scale back her idea of “everything” to be, like, “get some chicken nuggets” and try taking baby steps from there
The funny thing is Joe kind of *didn’t* want to have sex with a lot of sexy ladies.
Joe wanted a loving relationship, but instead threw himself into shallow hookups because it was the closest thing to a normal relationship he allowed himself to have. then hid behind revenge of the nerds quotes.
I mean, he loudly and frequently said that sexy lady hookups was what he wanted so I can’t blame Dorothy for accepting that at face value
There is also nothing wrong with wanting to have sex with a bunch of sexy ladies. Joe just discovered he wanted something more. An actual human connection, trust and affection (with a sexy lady, let’s not kid ourselves here).
I think he was surprised to find that he’d already developed a connection with a woman in spite of all his efforts, and liked it.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have sex with a bunch of sexy ladies. There is something wrong with only interacting with said ladies as object to get sex out of. Joe didn’t just discover he wanted more. He realized that despite his intentions, he was still being harmful.
Stopping that was first. Going for Joyce came later.
Joe can want multiple conflicting things. A recovering addict wants to stay sober, but also really wants more of whatever they’re addicted to. A new vegetarian may really want a steak done just right but also wants to not be part of causing animal suffering. Lots of people want conflicting things.
Obviously Dorothy should resolve to sleep with a lot of sexy ladies. It’s a more achievable goal.
Yes! Yes she should!
I low key don’t like this response. I know Dorothy is in a bad spot right now but ‘everything’ being scaled down to basic survival instead of ‘actual happiness’ while possibly necessary for some people in her situation is not possible or necessary for ambitious people. All that does is break their spirit in a way that is difficult to fix later and she’s already pretty damn close to her spirit being broken. I definitely think scaling down is necessary but ‘survival’ is just way too far given the type of person she is…
It’s a light-hearted joke about a cartoon character, not actual life advice
He also gets to be a hetero cis man in America. Which as someone pointed out earlier, makes him imminently more likely to win a Presidency than Dorothy on a fundamentally default level. Given how long and hard she’s been working towards that goal, she has to have internalized that frustration for awhile by now.
Passing grades. Getting good grades is Dorothy’s life’s work. Joe doesn’t care enough to even figure what major he’s going to declare, and he’s doing better than she is
Yes. We really don’t know much about High School Joe. Could be he was like Walky: good enough to get good-enough grades and content with “good enough.”
Dorothy may be just as good, or better, but she’s the kind of person who always wants to squeeze the last drop of juice from the orange. She works hard all the time because to achieve perfection is impossibly difficult.
Dorothy represses all of her jealous urges into working harder to get what she wants. Someone without that impulse and with no higher ambitions coasted through high school and college purely fixated on sex and immediate gratification. Dorothy has spent the entire year of college taking care of in her highest and lowest points.
And after all her hard work, Joe gets her.
She is extremely, extremely jealous and Joe’s gentle prodding of her defense mechanisms — entirely the correct decision, because Dorothy doesn’t express her bad impulses — has led to her exploding “THAT’S NOT FUCKING FAIR!” and tbh she’s not entirely wrong. It’s just that Dorothy did this to herself in her pursuit of a silly dream, and she doesn’t want to admit that.
He only changed his whole outlook on life and his relationship with women.
Damn, I have never been as glued to a dumbing of Age storyline as this. Props to Willis on the build up and execution of the Dorothy crash out, it’s been excellent.
It’s worth remembering that Dorothy has a VERY limited view of Joe’s journey compared to us as readers, so to her, a lot of it does probably look very effortless. It wasn’t, of course, but she wasn’t there for that, she only saw some of his lowest moments, like when he became very boorish for a period, even compared to where he was when he initially got to college.
I am glad Joe’s a very gracious dude about this, but I mean, he’s no stranger to self-loathing, and isn’t going to be quick to rise to his own defense in these circumstances, regardless.
The problem is she never fucking asked
If she even bothered to talk with Joyce about her boyfriend and why she’s with him, let alone with the man himself, she probably wouldn’t even be in this circumstance in the first place
Yeah, but. And I’m saying this after several comments about how much I like new Joe under this strip.
Why would she? She’s known him for years as a vapid, vaguely chauvinistic meathead. What reason does she have to actually believe that he’s changed so significantly in under six months?
It’s not like Joe himself has really sat her down and said to her “Hey I had several big realisations about myself because of Joyce specifically and that’s why I fell in love with her.”
I’m not saying Dorothy is in the right here but. Well she’s not in the wrong either. This isn’t a situation that has such simple black and white morality and I don’t think it really justifies getting angry at either of the characters involved either.
Yeah, she’d kinda have to know to ask in the first place, not to mention being inclined to do so.
Her not really talking to Joyce about Joe has a lot of less then stellar connotations for how Dottie sees Joyce. there could be a lot to unpack there.
But in the effort to give Dottie *some* benefit of the doubt, I’m chalking it up to her being unable to bring herself to bring up how content Joyce is to climb Mount Joe instead of the Dottie Valley.
Yeah Dorothy is badly trying to avoid confessing her feelings to Joyce or to even herself, asking Joyce what she sees in Joe would ask a bit more emotional impartiality from her than is reasonable to ask from anyone ever.
There’s actually very little to unpack: Dorothy infantalizes Joyce in their friendship. Dorothy got so used to playing the guiding hand for Joyce when she was barreling through all her social mishaps that her character regression from fall to spring semester means that now Joyce is simply supposed to listen to her.
Right, but we just got through a massive slog about the washing machine, and if we bring up that *Dottie herself* infantlizes Joyce, the comments section would explode.
When she did talk with Joyce, she never really explained anything.
“Joe is bad.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because he’s bad.”
Ugh!
But Joyce also never talked about why she liked Joe. When Dorothy first asked about them, all she got was a “I don’t like his butt” denial, which understandably didn’t reassure her about their deep emotional connection.
She never gave Joyce a chance. Every time the subject was broached Dorothy reduced it to “You’re horny and don’t know better.”
Yeah, Dorothy was definitely the one reducing it to horniness.
From the very start, this was Joyce.
This.
Joyce was being very, like, tsun about Joe, but the timing of it was bad! Dorothy seemingly coming around on this relationship was 100% something she made a choice to do based on nothing but losing faith in her own judgment. “I was wrong, you two are fine, and who am I to judge, it’s not like I’ve been making good choices myself” was the vibe, some of which Dorothy said explicitly out loud,
Somewhat, but she also saw them interacting more. I think she overheard a bit of that conversation when Joyce was up in the tree and that helped.
Though her own bad choices certainly helped.
That’s totally possible!
I just think it’s noticeable that Dorothy first tells Joyce she’s not in any position to be telling her what to do, and then in the following strip asks Joyce to green-light her own decision (though she doesn’t give Joyce enough information to make an informed judgment).
I think we are meant to take from it that Dorothy is giving up at least in part because she’s lost faith in her own judgment, rather than because Joe has proven himself a good partner to her.
Sorry, I just don’t think it’s other people’s job to check in with “guy who has been a fucking terrible person for all the years I’ve known him” just in case he’s actually improving this time. Nor is it fair to say that Dorothy’s in the wrong for taking years of past history and making understandable assumptions right now, before she’s seen much evidence of his changes.
Also, pretty sure she’d still have fallen for Joyce and be unwilling to admit it regardless. So this situation would still be happening.
It is, actually. Joyce has spent far more time with Joe than Dorothy since school started, so the ball is in Dorothy’s court to find out why her best friend is into her ex’s raging mysogynistic bestie. It wasn’t until Joe’s character growth was shoved into Dorothy’s face that she went “I’ve been wrong about this,” and we can see here that even with that happening she still snapped back to “Joe sucks.”
This is Dorothy’s problem, not Joe’s.
Weird, I still don’t think it is! Oh well.
remove the context of joyce from the conversation and yes dottie has no reason to check in on joe unless danny asked her to, but with her best friend entering a relationship with (someone who while having been terrible with women, was still a firm friend to his friends not that that excuses the misogyny it doesnt change that he was a good friend) and you have a situation where if she wants to remain a good friend to joyce then yes it behooves her to at least check in with what he has become.
I think it is an important note that behavior to the oppisite sex aside joe has not been shown to have bullying tendancies or to be greedy. yes his past behavior to women is appaling and atrocious, terrible and disgusting. but he isnt going to slam the door in the face of a stranger in need or actively work to undermine someones self esteem. at least i never got that vibe from him. (as someone whos graduation year book quote was “mssg to the junior high, welcome to the worst fucking years of your fucking lives” due to the bullying i had gone through i feel pretty good about picking out those tendancies)
“has not been shown to have bullying behavior” doesn’t actually jive with Dorothy’s account of what happened. Calling someone a lesbian, repeatedly, because they didn’t want to fuck you actually is bullying. However, I also didn’t say he was a bully, I said he had been a bad person. And I stand by that. He was misogynistic and gross.
I don’t think Dorothy was responsible for reaching out to figure him out after he was shitty for years to her. And I’m not super likely to alter that opinion. If a person goes through growth and wants others to know, it’s on them to show it. No one owes them another chance or forgiveness, even if they really did change.
And personal opinion here, but:
“someone who while having been terrible with women”
“not that that excuses the misogyny”
“behavior to the oppisite sex aside”
“his past behavior to women is appaling and atrocious, terrible and disgusting”
That’s all bullying. It’s just bullying women specifically, so some people feel like it doesn’t count – but it super does.
Furthermore:
“he isnt going to … actively work to undermine someones self esteem”
Then what would you call the Do List? The public list where he rated women by how fuckable they were or were not? The one he handed out like candy? That’s exactly the kind of thing that can undermine someone’s self-esteem.
Poor Other Rachel.
absoutely it is bullying, as mysogyny is bullying by definition, and i did not mean to minimize that and for that i apologize. i was trying to reference the ability to be many things at once. to women he was terrible and still has a lot of work to do, and it may never be enough to truely redeem him. i have known men to be an absolute ass, seemingly irredeemable ass, but then give his kidney(figuratively) the moment anyone needed their aid. it doesnt excuse the behavior as i said elsewhere about racism still applies any bullying is too much bullying. we all have contradictions in our natures and behavior, it is what makes us human. it has been said by others that once joe was made aware of the actual damage he did with the list, he has been remorseful.
i think a part of this is it feels as though by not trying to confirm if joes growth is real, it feels as letting down a friend, to me if my bestie was starting a relationship with someone who i knew to be previously horrible to people in any wayl, i would raise it with the friend first, but unless instructed not to by them i would be checking in on the romantic partner to see if they have actually changed. i guess i am just projecting how i would act in such a situation. but that is based on the life i’ve lived and that experience is unique to me, and i have know way to know yours and no right to judge it, just disagree.
and again apologies for minimizing the bullying aspect of the mysogyny, was not my intent
Of course she never asked, who wants to ask their crush why they love their new partner?
This is Dorothy’s own fault for skimming the archives instead of reading every strip
:-]
Joyce NEVER feels like everything.
….
I mean, if anyone ever asked her “what do you want on your order”, the LAST thing she’d feel like saying is “everything”.
womp womp
“I want every topping but each of them has to be placed in a separate container.”
Again: rijstafel.
Joyce is everything…neatly separated into compartments, nothing touching different things.
I see what you did here
Yep, as an autistic person i also like to distinguish all my different traits and not just be a muddled up person. I like having distinct labels for everything i am, not just umbrella terms. Because it feels neater and i like that.
it seems kinda cold of Joe to see Dorothy make that face in panel 4 and react with a smile about how much likes his girlfriend. read the room, Joyce might truly be everything to you, but that’s not what needs to be said right now.
I don’t think he’s being cold. I think he’s making a somewhat pained smile, taking her lashing out and being gracious about it. Like, I think he does legitimately want to help her here, and I think on some level, that’s only making it harder for her because it’d be easier if she could hate him.
I think you’re really misreading the intent of both the author and the character here.
He’s acknowledging and agreeing with the root cause of her outburst, showing her compassion and understanding.
The old Joe would have gotten hung up on her implication he hasn’t tried to be better and started arguing with her, which would be far, far worse.
His taking that “Gave up nothing” line on the chin is an INCREDIBLE feat of empathy and grace from joe.
Before Joyce, he had given up *any* real chance at a fulfilling relationship so that he would never hurt anyone the way his father hurt people. He was willing the be alone and suffer for his entire life, only dipping into unfulfilling-in-the-long-term sexual hook ups while hiding himself for the greater good of the people around him.
Joe 100% knows the pitfalls of “Being a martyr for the ‘truth'” and he’s only gotten better by facing those choices and choosing to walk away from them.
And: validating the very feelings she’s (evidently) terrified of admitting.
It’s a damn good effort, and even if Dorothy’s eventual realisation is “no, I’m no into her, it’s just that my attempts at supporting a friend went way off track” (feels unlikely, but you do… uh… whoever you want, Dorothy, and good luck), she was given excellent space and support (under fire!) to figure that out.
Dorothy/Amber Ala Clark Kent and Lois Lane when
I haven’t been particularly interested in this ship until Right Now. That sounds fucking perfect.
Joyce is everything to Dorothy, is the relevant part. When Dorothy says she gave up a lot, Joyce is one of the things she gave up, and Joe is making sure that doesn’t get missed during this discussion. (Also he’s not qualified to unpack…everything else)
She also gave up going to Harvard, and a very big motivator for that was her friendship with Joyce.
She also gave up Danny and Walky lest we forget. She’s gotten Walky back, but only because of happenstance and utter failures in other relationships.
Whoops, I said Harvard, but apparently it was Yale she applied to. My English was is showing.
As is my autocorrect.
Eh. All those big-shot hoity toity colleges are the same anyway.
Unless you actually go to one of them, yeah.
A+ icon, love the fan edit vibes.
That’s not at all what’s happening in this strip. Joe is acknowledging that Joyce feels like everything to Dorothy. And that he understands, because he’s in love with her too.
Because, really, what else has Dorothy lost that Joe has gained? The Presidency? He has no urge to be President. Yale? He’s not going to Yale. Danny? Well, maybe, but Dorothy doesn’t seem like she wants him back anyway.
He’s gained peace and a better emotional state, seemingly without giving up much. He certainly hasn’t repudiated the list or any of his other previous conduct, except maybe in private to Joyce. That means a lot when everything is falling around you and you don’t have nearly enough fingers to plug all the holes in the dam and someone else just doesn’t even have to bother.
It may not be fair to Joe, but fairness doesn’t exist.
He’s definitely repudiated the list. That’s what the whole apology donuts thing was about.
Yeah, I think “cold” is the opposite of what is going on here. Joe is doing his best to be emotionally supportive of Dorothy and give her the space to admit to the thing out loud. Or, yknow, deny it as ridiculous, because /Joe is the one saying it/.
I read empathy and sympathy in that smile, and acknowledging how he understands feeling jealous over Joyce.
I mean, it’s possible he’s wrong and Dorothy isn’t on about that, but at this point it seems unlikely.
100% it is what need to be said, she is spiraling and he is offering a positive nugget to grab onto as a buoy.
uh oh, the red panel
yup, there it is.
Study session being productive. Not the study she intended, though.
Reiterating: I don’t think Joe’s here or letting Dorothy take this out on him because he mistakenly thinks he and Dorothy are friends. I think he’s here out of pure, undiluted empathy, because he knows all too well what she’s going through right now.
Also, ow. Ow, ow, ow. My queer little heart.
Joe’s patience here is incredible.
It’s really admirable, he knows Dorothy enough to know she’s repressing something, and is letting her get it out. Then when she admits it, he just agrees, yeah, she is great isn’t she. It totally diffuses her rage because he’s not jealous or petty or treating her like a conquest, he’s sincerely checking in on one of Joyce’s friends.
Yeeeeuuuup. Just. He’s known her a really long time. He knows where they stand. I think he thinks she’s a good person, and has a pretty honest view of who he’s been. He doesn’t need to think she LIKES him to want to be there for her.
Yeah.
Also, I don’t think Joe thinks Dorothy is being as unfair to him as a portion of the readership does.
Both Joe and Dorothy are pretty hard on themselves.
“Both Joe and Dorothy are pretty hard on themselves.”
Which is another reason he’s exactly who she needed to talk to about this if she was ever going to get anywhere with it. Joe understands the hurricane of hurt and feelings that come along with earth-shattering realizations and needs you don’t want to have.
Yeah. One of the strips I found in my archive dive was Dorothy asking Joyce how she handled finding out she was wrong about everything, and Joyce was… unhelpful about it: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/03-trystin-in-the-wind/burny/
Not because Joyce would have lacked compassion for Dorothy’s full spiral if she knew it was happening, but because Joyce has no regrets, and no lingering confusion, about her own, otherwise-similar, shattered worldview.
Joe, meanwhile, has been almost exactly where Dorothy is right now, and he knows it, and he is being exactly the sort of person he himself could have used back then, and it’s very chef’s kiss.
Act with integrity. No regrets.
I still can’t get over Dorothy’s finger in that strip.
It is indeed a very suggestive little finger-rub.
Yeah honestly I think Joe would, if asked, probably agree with Dorothys stance on him. That’s something I like about him; he doesn’t make excuses for himself, he’s just very aware when someones kind of using being mad at him to deflect from something else. (See him recognizing Joyce pressuring him about carla being on his do list or not when what she was upset about was not being confided to by her sister).
I agree with the SMALL caveat that “I thought it was funny when I was 15” is a liiiiiittle bit of a deflection (and doesn’t own up to the fact that he was still doing it before the timeskip) — BUT. But. I also think deflection was what was called for in that moment so that he could stay on target.
I suspect he might give Dorothy a real apology in a few minutes. Especially if he makes the connection that calling her a lesbian a whole bunch through her formative teen years miiiight have contributed to any mental block she might have had about her sexuality.
Also, let’s be very clear, Dorothy should also apologize to Joe here. I don’t think she owes him an apology for not having been privy to his recent character arc, but I do think she’s still said some unkind things here (and might say some more, depending on how well Joe’s last panel goes over) that she will regret once she’s done breaking down.
I for one would love to see these two hug.
A hug would be nice
Hug! Hug! Hug!
This isn’t necessarily a counterchant for “throuple” but I would love to see a hug and a friendship here regardless of anything else, the more I think about it the more I think they’d be really good for each other.
Yeah i def think he doesn’t put a pin correctly in ‘and that sucked of me’, but I think gets a contextual ‘yeah i was a dumb teen saying a dumb joke, this is not the same thing as that’. Interested to see how it’ll develop.
For sure, for sure.
Looking forward to more strips between these two.
If it had been a one time comment at 15, I think ‘yeah i was a dumb teen saying a dumb joke’ would be appropriate.
But it wasn’t. It was ongoing. He was still making dumb jokes about it last semester.
Well, shoot, I meant that second comment to be a reply to myself, lol. Oh well.
Anyway: “the undisputed champion of being honest with myself” is definitely a reference to this strip, where Dorothy lamented not being able to buy into the idea that she could be the president and still be a good person.
(From 2025, I kind of want to take her by the lapels and shake her, but. It’s definitely what she’s talking about.)
“My whole life […] is a junkyard trail of things I’ve given up in the service of honesty. Things I know I can’t have. Things I thought I did have.”
This one’s about Yale. And Walky. I don’t think it’s about Danny, because I don’t think she’s ever really regretted breaking up with him the way she regretted breaking up with Walky.
“And you— You never tried, never sacrificed— And you got everything.”
This isn’t completely fair, of course. We, the readers, know that Joe has been trying pretty hard. Dorothy… really doesn’t. A point of friction that has been present ever since Joe started courting Joyce is that Dorothy has not been privy to any of Joe’s character development, and Joyce has… honestly never made much of a case for Joe.
When Dorothy seemingly came around on Joe/Joyce, it wasn’t because of some dramatic gesture. Joe still hadn’t proven he’d changed. She just… happened to see them together, and… having lost all faith in her own judgment, told Joyce that she was wrong to have ever tried to keep them apart. (In fact, Dorothy had lost SO much faith in her own judgment that she tried to get Joyce to green light her own (Dorothy’s own) choices.)
I found her blank stare a little opaque even at the time, and I’m sure I wasn’t alone there, but I also think a lot of us were just relieved that she wasn’t going to be hounding Joe anymore.
I mean Joe still thinks Dorothy is his friend.
He’s got her back whether she wants him to or not.
You keep saying this, but I just don’t see any evidence for it in their previous conversations.
As I said below, I think they might BECOME friends after this conversation, but I don’t think they were already.
Joe thinks HE is DOROTHY’s friend. It doesn’t have to be reciprocal.
THIS!
“you are my enemy!”
“I am no ones enemy!”
“YOU are My friend, i dont care if you don’t think you are, I will treat you as a friend regardless of how you feel about it” this is joe here.
we all can be friends to each other with out being friends.
love to all
I know! Charles Phipps has been immensely clear on that point! I still don’t agree, I think he previously viewed Dorothy as an acquaintance, someone he was associated with through Danny first and then through Joyce! I think in the early strips he often seemed amused by her misfortune! I do not think he thought they were friends!
I could be wrong, of course, but I think this whole sequence is just basic human compassion (plus a heaping dose of empathy, because he’s been here), and that Joe does not need to have always viewed Dorothy as a friend for him to be extending a hand.
Anyway, I think Dorothy’s red panel is… partly about Joe as she’s known him for the last five or so years of her life, ever since she started dating Danny and they became friend-of-a-friends with each other. I would bet that Joe has spent a lot of that time… well, being Wicked-the-musical-and-now-movie!Fiyero. Dancing through his life, reveling in being shallow and hedonistic, taking easy classes instead of ones that challenged him, and avoiding relationships.
We, the readers, know that this comparison is extremely apt, because Wicked!Fiyero, too, had hidden depths: he wasn’t actually shallow, and his life, while easy, was also empty and unsatisfying. Just like Joe, he was yearning for something more complicated — something more real — and only avoiding it out of fear.
In Joe’s case, not even fear of getting hurt himself, so much as fear of hurting someone else. Because Joe doesn’t self-identify with his mother, who got cheated on: he self-identifies with his father, the cheater.
But. That turmoil isn’t something Dorothy ever got to see. It’s something Joe was unwilling to even really let Danny see. So what Dorothy saw was:
– handsome, popular guy
– who gets ALL the girls
– whose major is still undeclared
– who, as far as Dorothy knows, has never given up anything for Joye, much less anything he really wanted
(like going to Yale)
It’s not fair of Dorothy to feel like Joyce owes her anything for not going to Yale, and Dorothy knows that. I think she even knows that Joyce wouldn’t want this sacrifice, and it’s also not entirely for Joyce.
(Or, at least, I believe Dorothy when she tells Becky that she ALSO wouldn’t feel right getting into Yale because of her revised admission essay where she talks up her role in the kidnapping.) (I wonder if she’d feel better about it, though, if she didn’t ALSO feel like she’d failed there because she wasn’t able to personally stop Blaine from kidnapping Joyce.)
But still. It must sting, how often her attempts to be there for Joyce or even just hang out with Joyce, and to keep having it turn into Joyce-and-also-Joe.
Even their daring night out drinking, where Joyce said THIS and then told Dorothy she loves her, still culminated in Joyce climbing into Joe’s bed at the end of the night.
Like. I think SOME of Dorothy’s feelings would be the same here even if she weren’t in love with Joyce.
She’d still feel like she’s been entirely replaced in Joyce’s life. Once, Joyce would have done almost anything to spend time with her, and now she keeps feeling… taken for granted, or forgotten about entirely.
Even if her feelings for Joyce were completely platonic, I think that would still sting.
And I’m sure it doesn’t especially help that Joyce keeps telling her “I love you”.
Or saying stuff like this.
I personally would have preferred for Dorothy’s feelings to have been platonic, I think that would have made for a better storyline for a variety of reasons I’m not gonna get into, but I am probably in the vanishingly small minority on that and unless Willis pulls a massive (and mean-spirited at this point) swerve I think we’re past that being an option lmao
I mean, I think we passed the point of no return back in 2021, when Willis used Daisy to lampshade that never seriously addressing all the subtextual jokes he’d made about Dorothy and Joyce over the years would feel queerbait-y.
As I said on like, the first page of this sequence, I think this all started as a joke. A combination of how funny it was to have Joyce say suggestive stuff, especially suggestive gay stuff, by accident — and a loving homage to Parks & Recreation. But at some point, Willis decided to take it more seriously.
Given the specific direction things have gone (where Dorothy is at least the instigator here, if not alone in feeling this way), I’d guess that it evolved organically from how Dorothy reacted in Willis’s head to the idea of Joe+Joyce.
But ofc I cannot speak for them on the subject, I can only speculate.
Eh that one felt more about *Joyce’s* repressed/unresolved feelings than anything about Dorothy.
I would have agreed at the time. We may yet discover that Joyce reciprocates, too, in which case that comic will have been foreshadowing.
Right now I just think it was meta and that the imperfect fit might not matter in the end, because I can’t decide whether I think this is building up Joyce’s reaction because it’s going to be big, or in order to better subvert our expectations, and I am choosing the option that is less likely to crush me emotionally in a few days. 🥲
You’re not alone in this.
I mean, gosh, of course they aren’t. There’s been a VERY loud anti-Joyce/Dorothy contingent since forever, some of which are very polite and some of which are less so, just as there’s been an anti-Joyce/Joe contingent.
Jokes about this being what “everyone” in the readership wants are either jokes or, well, coming from people who aren’t regular comment-readers.
something something “hatesink”
It’s not fair of Dorothy to feel like Joyce owes her anything for not going to Yale, and Dorothy knows that. I think she even knows that Joyce wouldn’t want this sacrifice, and it’s also not entirely for Joyce.
(Or, at least, I believe Dorothy when she tells Becky that she ALSO wouldn’t feel right getting into Yale because of her revised admission essay where she talks up her role in the kidnapping.) (I wonder if she’d feel better about it, though, if she didn’t ALSO feel like she’d failed there because she wasn’t able to personally stop Blaine from kidnapping Joyce.)
But still. It must sting, how often her attempts to be there for Joyce or even just hang out with Joyce, and to keep having it turn into Joyce-and-also-Joe.
Even their daring night out drinking, where Joyce said THIS and then told Dorothy she loves her, still culminated in Joyce climbing into Joe’s bed at the end of the night.
pls delete this, Willis, if you see it! Broken link destroyed my point sjflksjd
One of the small benefits of being a churchgoer is that every so often the preacher reminds me that the ancient Greeks recognized (at least) four very distinct emotions that all get lumped together in English as “love”.
Another way you could have been reminded: getting into the Yuri on Ice!! fandom, hah.
Note: platonic love is super duper valid, but if Dorothy is longing for something else, it can be its own twisted knife in the moment to keep hearing the words you want, but not in the way you want them.
See also: it was totally valid for Becky to need a bit of a Joyce Break after she got rejected.
Jeez that archive dive hurt. All the recontextualized dialogue.
Anyway. Let’s talk a little bit about Joe. His part here is pretty simple.
“Do you want to know what my suggestion is, Dorothy?”
She says no. He plows ahead, I would bet in part because he doesn’t think she has any idea what he’s going to say. (And I imagine he was right.)
He urges her to be honest with herself.
And then he lets her rant.
Because I don’t think he was under any illusion about the two of them being friends, I don’t imagine her rant hurts him. But I do think that last panel is because he does, again, empathize.
He empathizes more than Dorothy imagines he can with the idea of having lived a life you completely regret, where your every decision now feels like a mistake.
He’s just also on the other side of that feeling, so thoroughly on the other side that it doesn’t even hurt to be reminded: just a faint, nostalgic ache.
All of Dorothy’s flailing here must be VERY familiar, and I bet Joe wishes he’d had someone to talk to about it sooner.
So. He is trying to be that person for Dorothy now.
And I for one think it’s sweeter, given that he and Dorothy have never really been friends.
He also knows that Dorothy is important to Joyce.
I suspect Joe isn’t getting hurt as much as he would be out of context, because he understands /why/ Dorothy is saying those things and reads it as not being literally about him. Like, it’s targeted at him, and he’s aware of his own previous behavior that triggered it, but to a large degree it’s “insert Joyce’s boyfriend here”. Hence the last line.
I think so, too. I almost said as much, that I don’t think the red panel is about JOE as much as it’s about Dorothy, but I got sidetracked because I can definitely see why he might actually seem to her like someone who hasn’t had it rough. I think he PRESENTS himself as an uncomplicated dude who lives life on his own terms without stressing about it too much.
We also know that he’s a child of divorce, that he worries he’s doomed to become his father, that he’s especially afraid of hurting Joyce — not, perhaps, by ever cheating on her, but in the very specific way that she’s potentially vulnerable to by being, like Liz, a very sheltered young woman who is trying to take total control of her sexual autonomy but still… muddling through.
(This fear isn’t even completely unfounded, either! Take Liz out of the equation, and you’ve still got the way Joyce reacted to realizing Joe hadn’t been drinking, and the way she keeps talking about sex as something Joe is going to “do to” her, which Dorothy later called her out on, but which, as far as we know, is still how Joyce feels most comfortable articulating her desires.)
…so like, yes and no. I agree that Dorothy is in so much pain here that she would probably feel like any partner Joyce had must have sacrificed and struggled less than she herself has. I almost wondered, actually, if there might also be some resentment about Walky bleeding through.
Dorothy is desperately tired of other people viewing her as perfect, brilliant, and without struggle — someone who couldn’t possibly need help, because gosh, she’s Dorothy. The balm of Walky’s early belief in her, which once made her so happy because it was such a stark contrast to Danny hoping she’d just give up on her dreams — well, it’s become something of a tarpit as Dorothy has continued her slow-mo crash and burn while mostly the people who love her remain convinced that “she’s busy, and for her, busy is good”… as Walky said earlier today when Joe asked whete she was.
But ALSO I do think from Dorothy’s vantage point, Joe probably does seem to be living an easy life.
Something I hope she’ll be disabused of soon! Joe deserves to have more actual friends who know what’s going on with him, too.
“Joe, it’s me, Dorothy, your friend.”
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/05-media-rumble/know/
Sure, it’s been complicated, even hostile, but not non-existent.
“Joe, it’s me, the ex-girlfriend of your friend. You know me.”
Yeah, I can’t imagine why she would’ve wanted to simplify that at all.
Coming back to this: sorry, I was a little cranky. I was up late and the world continues to be a mess!!
My counter argument to this strip is that Dorothy herself has talked about Joe being someone she had to put up with for Danny’s sake, and that she thought one good thing about breaking up with Danny would be never having to see Joe again.
But I am so, so hopeful they’ll be friends after this, I think they’d be good for each other. Dorothy could use someone in her life who has never put her on a pedestal, and Joe could definitely use someone in HIS life who he can talk to about his fears re: Joyce, because Amber hasn’t been the best sounding board.
Which, might be a bit much to ask of Dorothy right away, but…
Joe has decided to be Dorothy’s friend. Dorothy is not Joe’s friend, but he accepts that because history and whatnot.
Agree to disagree.
I mean, really I think they will at least BECOME friends after this conversation, but goodness am I tired of re-explaining why I don’t think Joe thinks they were friends. It’s totally fine that other people think differently! Let’s go about our days, lol.
I did not say that Joe thinks they were friends. “X and Y are friends” is not at all the same thing as “X is (or has chosen to become) Y’s friend.” I can befriend someone who hates me and continues to do so — in fact, my religion explicitly calls on me to do this.
Okay, because the other people who have been arguing this have definitely been saying “Joe thought Dorothy was his friend, and had no idea she disliked him so much”, so that is what I was responding to, you feel me?
I love how upset she is about being gay for Joyce. It’s prime drama.
It’s delightful
Dorothy is thinking about Joyce:
Also thinking about Joyce: 🤬
Excellent gravitar, Taffy, as always.
Red panel RED PANEL
There must be balance in the universe. Amber/A-G red-panellation has decreased. Thus another character’s must increase. Balance shall continue.
All of that has been building pressure for a long while, and needed to be release and I think Joe was the best one to do it at this precise moment.
He already seemed to be aware of the situation and that is why he is here, yes, seeing Dorothy break like that hurts, but in part it is necessary, because if he had kept it for longer, it would have been much worse in the future.
My mum also confuses ‘things that are hard and painful to think and feel’ with ‘things that are true and honest’.
That honesty must always be bitter and cruel, and never relieving or comforting.
Poor Dotty.
ooh this is a very good way to put it.
Agreed. Crucial distinction!
ahh yeah this is exactly my thought too here… like, dorothy didn’t give up things that brought her joy because she was being “honest with herself.” she decided that being happy is low-priority and has sabotaged said happiness for the sake of her ambitions… & now she doesn’t have those to fall back on anymore. the realization that she’s just like everyone else is too much for her… so sad
“masochistic epistemology”
The belief that whatever hurts must be true.
Damn.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/04-for-me-it-was-tuesday/your-details/
To be fair, Joyce did say this about honesty very recently, and I imagine Dorothy took it to heart.
i am so glad that this relationship is getting some screen time & development… it’ll be ok dots. you can be human and fallible and still be happy. things just gotta get a little bit worse until they can get better <3
…goddammit, that last line got me tearing up.
They might become friends after this, mind you. I just don’t think they were friends in high school, or in the first semester of college. Pretty much every conversation Dorothy had with Joe for years in real time involved at least one epic eye roll from her.
Like this one, or this one, or this one, or… I could go on, but that’s already enough links to get this comment auto-moderated.
For whatever it’s worth – I really enjoy your deep thoughts about the characters and the story, but I do think it was easier to read when it was all a single large comment and not dozens of smaller ones all pockmarked out of order in other threads.
Not telling you how to live, I just know you broke it up today because you were worried about a single large post yesterday and these are my feelings on that!
Fff.
Yeah, at the very least I should have edited it all as one thing. It would’ve taken longer to get through the spam filter but obviously to my benefit, given the double post.
Somehow, Joe remains the exact right person to be here for this conversation. This don’t make him think any less of Dorothy; to him she’s always the overachieving wound up too tight pretty good person she’s always been. She’s just also, like. A human.
And end of the day, they share something important.
They both love Joyce.
We, the readers, have been aware of Joe’s development and he is aware of Dorothy’s distrust of him.
And therefore, it is better to clarify and uproot the problem and prevent it from growing.
And as always, encouraging comments to Dorothy, rare to see, always welcome.
Yeah honestly. I like that hes not like ‘i HAVE changed, where you haven’t seen!’. He’s like. Yeah, fair, ive been rough, so back to what we were actually talking about.
Like. Who else besides him would get it to this degree (besides becky which Nope Nope Nope). He ALSO didn’t mean to fall in love with joyce. He never wanted to fall in love with anyone. He wanted to keep being someone nobody ever expected anything better of. Just like Dorothy wanted to keep being someone nobody ever expected worse of. For both of them, having non platonic feelings about joyce means/meant changing.
I’m very fond of both of them; and also admittedly love a narrative parallel.
I’m starting to think that maybe Joe in high school found Dorothy to be a person he liked and admired (aside from rejecting his advances). Perhaps in spite of himself.
An early crush where Dorothy showed that she was exactly as smart and challenging to Joe’s shitty worldview as Joyce is?
Okay, that I could get behind. It would recontextualize a lot of Joe’s remarks into the “clumsily pulling pigtails” category, which doesn’t make them more fun for Dorothy but does make them cuter to me. I am weak to a maladjusted failed tsundere courtship, though.
In fiction, anyway!
I chose the word “person” very carefully to avoid implying that this was necessarily romantic.
Such a good anguished face in panel 4. I love the extra details you include too; they go great with the way the panel is diving deeper into how Dorothy feels.
G’awwww.
IMO, the actual “undisputed champion of being honest with [herself]” wouldn’t need other people – especially ones she considers to be terrible – to [i]make[/i] her confront and examine these things.
dang tags.
That is some bisexual rage
You know you’re an undisputed champion of being honest with yourself when you’re certain you’re always honest with yourself. No need to periodically examine what you think and why you think it, unprompted by anyone else.
Joe’s response is better.
Another reminder of how pointless Raidah is.
I think at this point we already know something, Raidah was created to be hated and see karma show no mercy.
That strip is an important reminder that Raidah hurt her because she is Joyce’s friend.
And remember that Raidah is horrible and I hope that Sarah and Tony continue moving forward together
I love how Raidah’s master plan is just to be mean to peopple and she thinks that’s some sort of Xanatos Gambit.
Look at this Joyce, isn’t she nice
Look at this Joyce (it’s worth looking twice)
Wouldn’t you say Joe’s the guy, the guy who has everything?
I was looking through old strips for a different strip and I found this. I find the text in the fourth panel interesting but it probably just me overthinking it due to her recent denial.
Hmmm some kind of diagnosis is definitely possible for her, but I don’t know which it would be. Would be nice if hard to detect and/or a-typical issues would get some representation.
Dorothy is most definitely autistic. She’s just also… underinformed on the implications of that.
Ever since Dorothy first refused the possibility of being autistic because “I understand people”, I’ve been on the theory that she more than likely is autistic, actually. Joyce has the excuse that she was homeschooled, but I feel Dorothy also makes for the perfect poster child for “autistic girl who isn’t diagnosed because of she’s a girl”. She worked hard in school, does all the right things ™, makes good grades, has all the right extra-curriculars, and that means she can’t POSSIBLY be autistic, right?
Just ignore moments where Dorothy has misread or misunderstood social cues entirely (the Halloween arc), or struggled with her own emotions to the point of seeming to have a difficult time identifying her own emotions, conducting her life by a very regimented and specific schedule…
I also wanna expand by saying “Joyce has the excuse that she was homeschooled”, what I mean is along with being homeschooled making her more sheltered and probably impacting her ability to read social cues already, there’s also the fact that her mother was her teacher, and uh… not to be rude, but I doubt Carol knows anything about autism. Or if she does, it’s certainly not anything kind, understanding, or compassionate.
“Do you know what it’s like to find out you are in love with Joyce Brown, and have to give up on that love because you know she can’t reciprocate it?” Camera pan to the right on Becky, slack-jawed wildly gesturing at everything.
I’m really curious to see what Becky’s reaction to this will be if she ever finds out about it.
She’s never really been able to fully shed her possessiveness of Joyce or her perception of Dorothy as a rival for her affections, unless there’s some strips I’m forgetting where she really does manage to do that for good.
Both reacting negatively and diving back into bad patterns, or showing real maturity about the situation, could be really fun development for her character.
I expect a “Hah! I knew you were a rival!” followed by some strutting, then going in a straight line to her girlfriend while saying “good thing I got over Joyce a while ago!” Maybe even going so far as skating backwards while flipping double birds. Meanwhile, the OG backwards skater is conflicted at the copycat stealing her schtick while also appreciating the compliment that is being copied.
I kinda feel like Becky would react positively. Dorothy would get some points with her for being into ladies, and the shared experience of falling hard for the same girl who’s just not into you could be bonding. And the “Oh, we both wanted something neither of us got” could relieve some of the rival aspect to her as well.
That’s all assuming Joyce rejects Dorothy, of course. If Joyce was like, “Well, maybe…” Becky would probably explode.
This could potentially make them friends! Shared heartbreak and all that.
I’m imagining it like a pharmaceutical ad. “Hi, I’m Becky, you may know me from such hits as ‘Robin DeSanto’s social media’, and I’m here to talk about Joyce-inol”
those were some awfully sweet last words, joe. RIP
Well I’m still not convinced Dorothy could be into Joyce.
Maybe some heart eyes or a nosebleed next time they meet?
The two of them could be 69ing in Playboy bunny suits and it wouldn’t be enough evidence for some folks.
Eh, I’m still holding out for a queerplatonic resolution.
As pals who are gals maybe they want to 69 in playboy bunny suits, for the bonding experience
Platonically fisting your lady-shaped friends until they scream, as a completely straight binding experience.
*Bonding, ffs
Binding is also platonic I hear!
I think you’re right, but we should get to see them do this. Just to make sure.
Oh. She hated that Danny followed her to school because she was going to drop him for Yale.
And then she dropped Yale… partly for Joyce.
Yeah, she just never liked Danny that much.
But it turned out she liked Joyce that much.
I’d feel worse for Danny if it hadn’t worked out so well for him to be dumped
I don’t think she hated it.
I think that, as Dorothy herself said to Ruth, she expected going to two different colleges to end their high school romance. She was, and is, 18 after all, and breaking up with people sucks, even under the most ideal circumstances. (It’s still stressful even if you really want to do it, and Dorothy still cared about Danny and didn’t want to hurt him.)
(She also felt increasingly guilty and worried about Danny’s academic future, because she — correctly — doubted that he had a real plan for himself, and thought he would just be all the more heartbroken after she transferred out of IU to go to Yale.)
Where Danny managed to piss her off is a few strips later down the line, when he thoughtlessly dismisses Dorothy’s concerns for him by suggesting she might change her mind about going to Yale.
I think that we, the readers, were meant to recognize that Dorothy, by virtue of having dated Danny for years, knew him better than we did, and was correctly picking up on something in Danny’s tone or body language that wasn’t just romantic idealism (“maybe you’ll stay because you love me”) but was instead dismissal (“wanting to go to Yale is silly, wanting to be president is silly, you’ll come around on this eventually if I just wait”), and that that in turn reflected a fundamental lack of respect for and faith in both her goals and her ability to achieve them.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/worry/
imho, the keys here are:
1.) “when you’re president or whatever”
2.) (when his girlfriend is radiating digust) “see? It’s like we read each other’s minds”
Even before the next page, where he directly says maybe she’ll change her mind about leaving, Danny has demonstrated a profound inability to pick up on any of Dorothy’s cues, to the point where he cannot possibly be listening to her, and it’s this dynamic that proceeds their breakup.
In fact, every strip featuring the two of them prior to this one has that same dynamic, to the point where even Joe is trying to drop hints to Danny and Danny still isn’t getting it, because as sweet as Danny is capable of being, he was much more invested in the imaginary romance that was happening in his own mind than he was in his actual girlfriend.
TL;DR: Dorothy didn’t dump Danny because she hated that he followed her to IU, she dumped him because he wasn’t a good partner to her.
To add to this not about Dorothy dumping Danny, it should be noted the first time she and Walky had sex was preceeded by him loudly claiming that Dorothy was gonna be the future president of America, she was genuinely touched that he seemed to wholeheartedly believe that she could do it.
Yep!
I think she’s reversed on that somewhat (she’s clearly emotionally exhausted by how many people in her life have been telling her she’ll be fine and she’s got this “because she’s Dorothy”, when she has been desperately lost and in need of help instead of dismissive platitudes), but Walky believing in her was 1000% an antidote to Danny’s painful misstep and that moment is probably where she fell in love.
Goddamn Joe read the room. The room is LITERALLY TURNING RED, and you went and said that?
I mean he is.
He’s refusing to let Dorothy pin this on him. Which is driving Dorothy insane because he’s proving he’s a mature decent person when she needs him to be scum to feel superior.
He’s reading the room very well. And he’s giving Dorothy every opening to dig into her emotions and be honest about them.
Like, he’s setting her up to go “THIS IS NOT ABOUT JOYCE!!!” and feel righteous about whatever other issues she has, if he’s wrong. And also he’s setting her up to NOT do that and keep talking about Joyce and also feel fine about staying, well, on-topic, since Joe’s the one who keeps bringing her up.
This last panel is like a hinge closing.
Not clear.
This strip is like a hinge becoming attached to a door and a frame.
I don’t get some comments being annoyed or almost angry at Joe in this moment. He is basically allowing himself to be the focal point of so much confusion, anger, vitriol, and fear because he wants two things.
1. He wants Dorothy to be honest with HERSELF, and not for the betterment of those around her. He is in a unique position to know that Dorothy is hiding a huge element of herself and that it isn’t healthy… and he is willing to let her verbally attack HIM to come to that realization.
2. He wants one of Joyce’s most important and cherished friends to be OK.
Twisting the knife? That 5th panel is him telling Dorothy what she is terrified to even think right now. Yeah she’s wonderful, yes you love her. She does feel like everything and understands both how amazing that is AND how terrifying that is.
Joe is doing a killer job at being the rock against which Dorothy’s storm can finally crash. She been needing to blow all that steam for a loooooong time and Joe is just there like “It’s ‘aight. I’m here.”.
You know what, Dorothy is really reminding of Pearl from Steven Universe right now. So I’ll add “Strong in the real way” to queue at the muzak.
That would make Joyce Rose Quartz.
Which would be hella unfair to Joyce. #IYKYK
That’s wayyyyyy way way more fitting that it should be lol.
Sheltered girl from an ultraconservative family finally gets to see the world, she befriends a bunch of queer folks and burns her bridges and her ultraconservative family are so normal about it that they attempt to destroy her and her friends. They survive All That and after having a way too long situationship with her bestie she ends up with The Guy, which the bestie is also being very normal about! Oh god I hope DOA doesn’t end with Joyce leaving behind a special kid with a terrible destiny/inheritance!
This extremely reductive comparison has been made for purely comedic purposes.
Ok ok so Dorothy is Pearl. Joyce is Rose. Joe is Greg then? Becky is…Amethyst??? That doesn’t really work. And who’s Steven?
If we’re really following comparisons Becky is the most pearl like of the cast
Nah… Becky’s clearly Amethyst. Uninhibited, slightly reckless, frequently inappropriate.
The problem with that is that if Becky’s Amethyst, she and Dina can’t be Garnet.
Wait, what am I thinking? Sarah is clearly Garnet.
…are you sure about that? Garnet, the well of endless sweet tranquility?
I love Sarah, but her defining traits are “cynicism” and “righteous anger”. Only recently have we started to see what she looks like when she’s happy and content.
What do Garnet and Sarah have in common, apart from Garnet being the tallest gem?
Same voice actor.
Pff
IMO, Becky is Volleyball (Rose’s first pearl). Not a perfect one to one but close enough.
FFFF YEAH. DEF THOUGHT OF THIS TOO
“She made me feel like I was _everything”_ and the perfectionism and service and jealousy?? Oh, Dorothy …
oh my god this is so real. that song fits so well it’s hilarious.
luckily for Dorothy, Joyce has yet to die in childbirth leaving her to raise her child.
Yes! That outburst reminds me so much of Pearl’s interactions with Greg.
I will add, “It’s Over Isn’t It?”
With a supremely honorable mention for “Independent Together.”
One could argue that that’s not “self-honesty”, that’s “abandon rather than deal with.”
Yep! Running away from a bunch of things you want but tell yourself you can’t have is a trauma response bby not self-critical honesty. If it was one thing and she had tried as hard as she could to achieve it, that’d be different, but she’s barely into the trying things out phase of her life and giving up on them by the handful. That’s (a very gentle and non-physical kind of) self-harm imo.
Lol Joyce is the annoying, plucky, lovable hero that everyone falls in love with. How annoying lol. I am decidedly not into Joyce even a little bit.
There are at most two people in love with her right now, and considering how big the cast of this comic is, that is not that much.
3 people have been in love with her. That is SO MANY PEOPLE considering their age.
Is it really that unrealistic? I’ve seen it happen to multiple people by that age, me included
Two current, one past tense, one in a literal different timeline.
Aren’t crushes sort of normal for their age? I have a hard time judging “normal” in that regard because I never had a crush, but from what I have read and heard from other people they seem fairly common, especially in teenagers.
I had a fiance, my ex propose to me to run off together, and a man who I eventually left my fiance for (which was a Terrible Decision, the fiance was kind to me and the new guy was Not) at that age, 3 people being interested in you at once really isn’t unrealistic at any age.
Then again, I had been in several love triangles before then and fwiu that’s apparently not a common experience, so maybe I don’t actually know lol.
That doesn’t happen to everyone, but it is also in no way unusually high. I’m sorry you had to find out from a character that you don’t happen to be attracted to.
The exaggeration is off the charts, folks.
Exaggeration is how people talk in casual settings. Is this the comments section of a webcomic or a session of the UN general assembly?
The second one, based on how people react to even the slightest inaccuracy ’round these parts. Or maybe a particularly dry wiki.
Inaccuracies or sarcasm, or sillyness, or an unwillingness to catastrophize and pathologize normal human behavior. All enthusiastically disapproved of here.
Then again, at least it’s not the Questionable Content fandom. Half of them despise everything about the comic before and after 2009, while the other half can’t stand it if you make up a character called Rice Phillip to put in the middle of an otherwise-normal list of characters you like.
I have never engaged with the QC fandom, but I love the comic lol (so I’ll probably continue to steer clear of the fandom at large)
More for the rest of us then. I adore her.
And Walky had three girlfriends in six months–with the implicaiton that other women find him sexually attractive as well–I dont see you complaining about that.
Yes, despite her being utterly toxic and just…a really awful person. Its…really kinda frustrating.
You’re wrong.
Speak for yourself, she’s my crush 🥰
Dorothy giving mentally ill people suffering from burnout some good representation, appreciate it.
Well this revelation change the tone of laundryroom h*nd holding with Joyce.
It was not for Joyce it was for her.
Ah hah. There it is. Up until this point, I genuinely had a lot of trouble seeing how Dumbiverse Dorothy was related to Walkyverse Dorothy. I mean, don’t get me wrong, both are obviously high achievers with a high risk of burnout, but something about their essences felt very different.
This right here, though, I feel is the core of Walkyverse Dorothy’s tragic arc. How she kept trying so damn hard to get what – or rather who – she wanted, to the point of becoming a villain and her ultimate role in the grand finale, but she couldn’t have them from the beginning so she was destined to fail.
What’s that? I think I hear Linkin Park playing in the background…
Someday I gonna finish the walkyverse comics because that sounds nuts.
Reading it all definitely helped to keep me occupied during the pandemic. It is definitely nuts (in a good way, and sometimes in an “oh jeez that was DARK” way).
Plus now I understand all of the jokes and Easter eggs referring to the Walkyverse, which is very fun.
I mean, there’s some important context here, where Dorothy was being manipulated and eventually outright possessed by a villain who convinced her that the person she loved was in serious genuine danger.
But I know there are folks who really do see IW!Dorothy as a villain despite that, so like, YMMV.
Me, too, but I’m holding out for paper copy.
She’s (Joyce) everything.
She’s just Dorothy.
“Joyce, I’m sure I would be extremely lucky to date you.”
“Are you sure? I am a friggin’ mess!”
I was searching through the archives for a strip but I couldn’t find it. It was of Joyce sensing something wrong with Joyce telepathically and then at the end Joyce is like oh shes fine she found a piece of candy or something.
No exclamation points in what Dorothy is saying. She’s not even yelling. She’s just despondent.
Well spotted.
Ya know I don’t say this a lot about Joe, but I’m really proud of him
Next panel, couple hours later with Dorothy dragging away Joe’s body to the incinerator
I wonder if Dorothy will leave the university now, for move to the other one that accepted her. Probably, now that she understands her feelings for Joyce, see her and Joe will be a torture.
Yo, does anyone know how to format the link-through words in these comments? The post comment thing keeps eating my attempts
That’s gonna be “a href”.
Rats, I should have double checked the URL. Here’s the thingy I always use.
Close enough welcome back Greg Universe and Pearl
Oh. That’s why Steven’s “why don’t you talk to each other” popped into my head.
Bob, Joe is handling this so well. A while back, I was frustrated with his redemption. But now, I get it. He is genuinely becoming a better person, and his kindness here puts a big smile on my face.
Vackert.
She sure is a lot ^^u
OH NO!
A Red panel!
Dorothy; I’m so sorry, but if Joyce turned down Becky, it was never going to work. There doesn’t appear to be an ounce of alphabet soup in Joyce, so any fantasy of that was never going to be.
You got to get your jollies on with her at the same time while also educating her about her sexual response. Mark it as a sneaky bisexual W and move on.
It’s a little different when the gay woman with a crush is like a sister to you, and also comes with a lot of the same intertwined baggage of leaving toxic Christianity that Joyce is dealing with. Dorothy is a bit of a different kettle of fish. And there have been hints that Joyce is also experiencing some latent bisexuality surfacing, but is far less aware of it. Not that I think she’d cheat on Joe with Dotty, and she’s still a long way away from wrapping her brain around a polycule, but it doesn’t seem utterly out of the question.
Agreed, just because Joyce didn’t have an attraction to Becky doesn’t mean she can’t be attracted to women at all. I can see Joyce viewing it that way, but the fact is that no matter what your orientation, it usually doesn’t mean you’re 100% attracted to everyone of whatever gender you prefer.
For example, I’ve noticed I gravitate towards women with short hair. Someone like Becky would absolutely be my style. However, Joyce has had many moments and hints with characters such as Sal, Jennifer, and Dorothy that mark her as not straight to me. I mean, she may have been a bit tipsy, but also… you can’t really tell your female friend “oh yeah I’ve considered watching you have sex with your boyfriend. Don’t worry, I imagine I’d cover my eyes so I can only see you” and not be at least SOME sort of alphabet soup…
Just to gush a bit more about pretty women, one time my coworker (who had a side thing trying to get into politics) came to work in a lovely white pants suit and she looked so amazing. Absolutely pretty, she was ROCKING the look. Ladies in suits purty.
The bit where Dorothy wards off a drunk guy because “we have boyfriends” and Joyce is like wait you do??? And Dorothy says no, and Joyce says GOOD, I’m tougher than Walky.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/03-trystin-in-the-wind/frosty/
Also, like, this last panel:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/04-for-me-it-was-tuesday/iloveyous/
I am. Fully bracing for Joyce not reciprocating, but that line is an extremely classic type of bi experience, especially among afab people.
You know what would be a fun couple?
Jennifer/Billie and Dorothy.
How? Billie who is an amoral ball of delusion and selfishness, and Dorothy who desperately tries to do good and put others before herself? That would be a burning trashcan.
Oh, they’re it saying it would be HEALTHY, just fun to watch.
It = not, stupid autocowrecked
Yeah, that sounds like fun!
One fan’s burning trash can is another fan’s treasure!
And often the fan for whom it is a treasure agrees that it’s also a burning trash can.
Joe, impervious to external attacks, weak to internal attacks
Oh, Dorothy. I get it, but that’s not true.
Joe, good on you.
Boy, do I relate to Dotty right now.
If you want to be fair, Joe sacrificed any deeper human connections he might have for most of his life, any trust he might have built with people (including Dorothy.) And he had to do that just to survive his parents’ divorce which taught him close relationships aren’t safe. But yeah we know how it looks to Dorothy. I do worry she’s going to feel like a heel later when she catches up on what Joe has been up to while she had him written off as a libido on legs with no internal life.
That’s pure love on Joe’s face right there
The closet door is open, Dorothy, please step out of it.
Man, he’s GOOD at verbal parrying.
I feel like Booster should be taking notes on this psychological disarmament. Cutting right through to the core of what she’s saying!
Ugh. I don’t feel like this is any kind of actual confession by Dorothy that she’s gay for Joyce in anything but the moment, but it’s hard to articulate why.
I keep going back to that scene with Radiah where Radiah offhandedly comments about how all presidents are war criminals. The next strip is Dorothy cursing herself at how she’s too honest to delude herself into thinking Radiah’s wrong.
Except… she says she already KNEW all presidents, even Carter, did war crimes. And that hadn’t affected her until someone ELSE pointed it out to her face. That’s not radical self-honesty, that’s just “being easy to manipulate and also being good at rationalizing being manipulated.”
I feel like something similar is happening with Joyce — she feels like she SHOULD be gay for Joyce for some reason, so she’s trying to be, but it’s just boiling over into bad feels instead.
I reread part of the archives and I think this is long coming, I think this is one of the most emblematic strips. And it is hard to see Dorothy being tortured after.
I, don’t think that make any sense.
Dumbing of Age Book 16: I Am The Undisputed Champion of Being Honest With Myself.
If you’re starting from a basis that Dorothy is easily influenced/manipulated, then I think the more convincing argument is that Dorothy feels like she “should” be straight because she’s been teased (unkindly) about being gay since at least 15 and through into college.
Bad feels can come from other places. Like every guilty feeling she mentioned last strip. And maybe because admitting her feelings towards Joyce retroactively concedes correctness to everyone who teased her. Maybe, I’m just spitballing.
I don’t feel like Joe playing the part of Raidah here. His role is closer is that of Jocelyne from when she and Dorothy had a heart to heart a while ago. He’s engaging with Dorothy honestly and in good faith.
Oops, meant to reply to Big Z above. Sorry.
Heh! No prob.
“Retroactively conceding correctness” is exactly what she did with Radiah, though.
And I’m not comparing Joe to Radiah in any kind of way (I’m a Joe stan, and I think Radiah is easily tied with Mary for “the worst”) other than as a source of external observation of Dorothy that Dorothy can glom on to as an alternative to ACTUALLY engaging honestly with her own internal knowledge and desires.
It’s a minor art thing but did Dorothy just snap her index finger instead of her middle finger? It looks wrong to me.
I snap that way sometimes.
But upon review it looks to me like she actually did snap her middle finger. Hence the motion lined.
If you snap your middle finger, but leave your index finger slightly extended it looks just like that. It’s drawn post snap.
Thank you for this explanation, that helped a lot. I practiced the motion several more times with my own hand and found the initial position of my hand and how relaxed I was overall and whether I was trying to snap as loud as possible or in time to music or as an expressive gesture all impacted what position my fingers came to rest in, and my index finger could finish both extended and not extended and it still felt natural. Waving my hand around expressively and snapping as emotional punctuation was way more likely to result in a fully extended index finger, so I understand why Willis drew the gesture that way now.
I’m really appreciating that the 3rd and 4th panes were drawn from Joe’s point of view. He’s really a lot taller than Dorothy (and most of the people he hangs out with), and that means her face had to be drawn from a different perspective.
I do think it’s unfortunate that almost every time Dorothy tries to embrace doing something selfish or impulsive she’s made to feel guilty or immediately called out on it. Like what are the odds that her first title pic which was supposed to be a for fun thing with Joyce, gets seen by Joe, her boyfriend, and he comes to confront her about it? Unlucky. It reminds me of her trying to seduce Walky while he was with Lucy and he immediately rejected her and said “You’re better than this.”
Like everyone else gets away with their bullshit most of the time but not Dorothy. It’s kinda sad.
Not really? I can’t really remember many times characters had done things like Dorothy had and “gotten away with it”.
We’ve literally seen Dina commit theft on a whim and get away with it. That was a joke though so we’ll disqualify that one. Walky threw a toy at Dorothy and they started dating. Carla regularly pies people in the face. Joe’s whole gimmick before his character development was casual hook ups. He was even in a sex tape. Ruth still has her job despite her past of abusing her power. Jason is still around. Like there are countless examples to me. It’s not a criticism it’s just the story being told of kids acting dumb.
But if you’re stating that specifically no one has sent explicit photos to a friend then I guess yeah no one’s gotten away with that yet. Cause this is kind of the first example we’ve seen of it. But I feel like almost every character has acted impulsively or selfishly at least once.
The key difference here is that none of those were involved in much deeper storylines about said action. Joyce doesn’t get away with most of the stuff she does either. Sarah also a contender who is punished for being selfish quite regularly.
Joe literally had it pointed out to him by Joyce that his Do-list was harmful in a tangible way, in terms of ‘getting away with things’
Like, most of those aren’t really equivalent to the selfish thing Dorothy tried to do, most of them aren’t really selfish at all. I was gonna make an exception for Ruth, but really she didn’t get away with it either, she was gonna get punished, only reason she wasn’t was because her grandpa interfered and that was bad for her! She didn’t want the job.! Just seem like a lot of false equivalence.
Also Jason did not fucking get away with it! He lost his position and started working at galazos and could had got deported until Ruth got him a position under Robin, those seem like damn consequences to me!
I feel like you’ve misunderstood my original point and part of that is my fault for using a few bad examples in my response. “Getting away with their bullshit” doesn’t imply facing no consequences for their actions. It means they’re allowed to be themselves, even their negative traits without being confronted about. Everyone expects Ruth to be a bully, or Jennifer to be a narcissist, or Jason to be a tool. The narrative and the characters don’t fight them for behaving badly. They get away with their bullshit and deal with the consequences later.
With Dorothy we never get to the consequence part because stuff like this happens. Joyce hasn’t even seen the tit pic yet and Joe is already here. She can’t cheat with Walky because he’ll just say she’s better than that and then get dumped by Lucy. I even think that’s part of the reason Dorothy thinks Joe hasn’t sacrificed anything. Dorothy will give up her ideals to keep to the standard her peers expect of her. All it takes is Raidah saying “Being president might be bad actually.” And she’ll drop her entire life goal. No one told Joe fronting as a misogynist fuck boy might be beneath you. He gets to do that. Learn his lesson. And then date Joyce.
My bad for not articulating my response properly. I kinda didn’t even think my original post was that controversial. Sometimes the responses get away from me.
I don’t think this version of “Joe confronting her” is ultimately that confrontational. It’s Dorothy that’s angry at herself. So far, Joe has had a pretty light tough. Almost supportive.
And someone did tell Joe that fronting as a misogynist fuck boy was beneath him; Joyce.
Dorothy’s bullshit is holding herself to unrealistic standards. She believes herself to be absolutely extraordinary, and to some extent keeps people around her who buy into that bullshit. Joyce and especially Walky. Walky is kind of to Dorothy what Becky was to Joyce. The piety police [in this case figuratively].
your original post wasn’t controversial, I can see the way you’re reading it. by the time the comment section gets this large, it’s like blood in the water.
I’m not sure Dorothy actually believes she is extraordinary, so much as believing she needs to be.
Needs to be extraordinary in order to be worth anything.
She didn’t come by from her parents, of course, but some of us are more than capable of doing it to ourselves without any outside help!
Like, Joyce has explicitly worried (during the mac-and-cheese-with-no-pepper sequence) that her friendship with Dorothy is too one-sided, with Dorothy doing too much for her and her not doing anything for Dorothy, but I think we’ve seen a fair bit of “if I’m not helping people, I’m not worthy of their (platonic or otherwise) love” from Dorothy’s self-talk.
I still don’t really think that perspective makes sense but I don’t fell up to arguing about it.
There is an easy solution for this. Throuple.
I feel like some blues are in order. Here’s “Death Letter Blues” by Son House.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=NdgrQoZHnNY
dot’s problematic definition of “try” moves to center stage
Thank you Taffy for the link to actually do this
Behold, Everything.
Aww, she’s a cutie! You drew this?
Yep! I did one of Sarah a while back too. Sometimes the fanartisms possess me. I still really love how Sarah turned out.
These are really good! I love seeing other people’s interpretations of these characters.
Aaahhh!! I love this.
Your art is super cute
yo! this is fantastic! ^^ <3
Very nice. Thank you for sharing these.
I love Joe so much! Really didn’t think I’d say that at the start of this comic.
world sucks, bro
I kind of feel like “getting laid” is a fairly more achievable dream than “be president of the United states” so it’s note really fair to compare their efforts and respective sense of loss…
Not gonna lie, that’s a bit incel-like coming from Dorothy. Complaining about all the sacrifices she made, sacrifices that SHE HERSELF CHOSE TO MAKE, and being unhappy about where it led her. Meanwhile lamenting that others who didn’t make the same sacrifices seem to be in a better position than she is, at least from her point of view.
It all kinda reeks a bit of entitlement and jealousy. Like she believes that her sacrifices means that she deserves for things to go her way. And that people who didn’t make the same sacrifices – people who are lower than her – don’t deserve to be ahead of her.
Problem is that the world doesn’t work like that. The world doesn’t care who deserves what. The world gives to those who are willing to take, and it doesn’t give to those who aren’t. That’s all there is. It doesn’t judge morality or whether or not someone deserves something. That’s for people to decide and judge after the fact. If you take what you need then you will have what you need. If you don’t then you’ll be left without. It’s as simple as that.
Sounds to me like Dorothy needs to spend less time sacrificing and more time thinking about what she actually needs and wants out of life. Maybe this whole “president” plan isn’t working out for her as much as she thought it would…
awe that’s a cute opinion, did a YouTuber give it to you? (-_-)
I’m pretty sure she’s just frustrated at the imbalance in outcomes, not being entitled. Jealous, sure. Not sure your personal moral philosophy really plays into it, either. That part’s a little strange.
Yiiiiiiiiiiiikes buddy.
Feel like you’ve not been paying much attention to Dorothy’s arc.
It is very much not “as simple as that”.
OKAY, I’M HERE WITH ANOTHER COMMENT.
Topic of discussion: “Is Joyce Dorothy’s first female friend?”
I don’t think the comic ever said as much, and even if it had, Joyce’s newness to everything would probably have overshadowed it, the same way it’s caused so many of us to just sort of vaguely assume Dorothy is a lot more worldly than Joyce, while my archive-bingeing kept demonstrating the opposite.
(There’s a lot in the early comic of Joyce assuming Dorothy knew more than her about a given topic, and Dorothy quietly correcting that assumption, e.g. this strip.) (She is more sexually experienced, for sure, but that seems to be about it.)
Anyway, Joyce of course had Becky growing up; Jennifer had Alice; Sal had Marcie; I swear I’m trying to think of examples where there were no confused romantic feelings involved, and just coming up empty. Most of the other girls in the cast we either explicitly know had trouble making friends (Lucy and Dina and Amber, for example) or can infer would have been anti-social by choice (Ruth, Sarah, Malaya with the obvious gender asterisk)…
And then there’s Dorothy, who I think has a LOT more trouble making friends than she usually gets credit for (the whole Dorothy vs. Roz RA storyline definitely drew attention to this, but most of us were, I think, distracted at the time by what it did or didn’t say about her political chops), whose peer group when she first arrived at IU was made up of “my boyfriend and my boyfriend’s best friend”, and whose peer group since then has been made up of Joyce’s friends.
Like, I think we can all agree that Sarah has friends this year mostly by virtue of Joyce attaching to her like a remora — the not-atypical “introvert gets adopted by an extrovert” path for gaining friends. But Dorothy’s very much the same, and her post-Danny boyfriend is even a boy she met in part because he and Joyce were already friends…
And yeah. Suddenly I just wondered. Is Dorothy one of those girls who has only ever had close male friends, and most of those by virtue of hanging out with the friend groups of her boyfriends? Is that maybe part of why it’s been so hard for her to figure out what she’s feeling here?
This is a good question, and I think it’s been floated around before. I can’t recall her ever mentioning any girls she used to hang out with, or even that she ever did hang out with any girls. Same with Joe and Danny. Now, it might be different in Indiana, but around here there’s a persistent culture of teenage girls fucking hating each other, especially aimed at the smart ones because they’re assumed to think they’re above everyone else. Dorothy’s a smart, organized woman, so just based on my lived experience, it’s easy to imagine her not being especially well-liked by her female classmates. Only a thought.
I think she was friendless until Danny honestly. Her pre-comic persona that she walked in with was one where she *read* a lot of how things worked, but had zero actual experience with anything in a social sphere. She was book smart but people dumb, expecting things to work out in various ways because that’s what she read bout.
Her entire idea of becoming president gets torpedo’ed in a heartbeat after someone points out that you’re going to have to make some less then lily-white choices and the world isn’t so easily fixed.
She “put up with” Joe because Danny was her only human friend. Danny was probably her boyfriend because that’s what you do when you’re socially inept, your nerd friend thinks you’re pretty, and you’re worried about losing your only friend.
It’s probably why she couldn’t bring herself to say anything when he got into the same school she did.
Her tossing him away once she’s “ready” to step into the world and start her hero’s journey is ALSO something she probably read in a book.
Well, we know how Danny became her boyfriend, she showed up to a Halloween party dressed as Velma and he asked her out.
I don’t really think that’s a fair assessment of her and Danny’s breakup, though. My take is in the replies up here. Which, of course, you’re free to disagree with, but I’m already leaving a zillion comments ’round these parts without repeating myself, lol.
Also completely possible, though Dorothy doesn’t have any of the hostility towards other girls that I think I’d expect in that situation. :|a
YES!!!
This is really making me want to do a re-read.
it’s a very worthwhile if also time-consuming endeavor!
Throuple truthers, please consider that doing so would put Joyce in a polycule with Walky. I’m not saying this is proof that it can’t happen I’m saying that if it DOES happen it’s gonna lead to something very very funny.
Walky and Joyce? That’s just ridiculous and could never happen.
I absolutely love joe. he is a sweet pea