The adventures of the world’s greatest villain who, after defeating his superheroic nemesis, decides that he’s the only one left to defend the world.
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
The Golden Boar
Magnolia Porter Siddell
A young woman joins a group of summoners who call forth Guardian Beasts to protect their isolated magical island. Unfortunately, her Guardian Beast is nothing like she'd imagined, and he's about to change her life, and everything she thought she knew about herself...
Nerf Now!!
Josué Pereira
A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
Freakshow
Scotty
A festival of broken people, blood flows in the center ring. Come one and come all, to the greatest show in all of Paris.
Blindsprings
Kadi Fedoruk
Tamaura, wrested into a world 300 years in the future, must find a way to save the magic fading from her country.
Sleepless Domain
Mary Cagle (Cube Watermelon)
In a world where magical girls and their battles are commonplace, loss has become all too common as well.
Barbarous
Ananth Hirsh, Yuko Ota
A crummy wizard and an anxious monster have to get over themselves and bring order to an apartment building full of misfits.
Not Drunk Enough
Tess Stone
Logan Ibarra is possibly the unluckiest repairman in the world. A late night job should not have landed him in the middle of a mad scientist's squabble, but he soon finds himself surrounded by monsters and further madness with little tools to get out.
Sister Claire
Yamino
In the troubled aftermath of a great war between Witches and her fellow Nuns, novice Sister Claire just wants a purpose.
Peritale
Mari Costa
A fairy godmother with no magic tries her best to successfully fulfill a Fairytale and win the respect of her peers.
ARISE, YE SKELETON KING
Brian Clevinger, Escher Cattle, Lee Black
A troupe of wandering "adventurers" down to their last silver "acquire" a map only to find the real treasure was the fiend they dug up along the way.
Saint for Rent
Ru Xu
Saint Halliday runs an inn for Time Travelers. Unfortunately, he seems to attract other supernatural "guests," too.
Three Panel Soul
Matt Boyd, Ian McConville
It's a pretty rigid format but we keep the content loose, you know?
The Weave
Rennie Kingsley
A young woman pursued by bad luck is witness to the murder of the Fairy Queen of Summer. Can she get to the bottom of this mystery?
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Ozzie the Vampire
Eric Lide
Ozzie and her best friend Kimmy are your average everyday normal art students – except one is an immortal vampire with superpowers and the other possesses a magic talking grimoire. Also they have to save their town from a demonic invasion.
Angel's Orchard
Harry Bogosian
After the events in Demon's Mirror, Gerda has accepted her role as a Demon Hunter, and Cezar has traveled back to the Demon City. Demons have existed alongside humans for millennia, so things begin to return to normal. But an impossibly powerful Relic has been taken by one of the Demon Masters, and a silent war enters its final stages.
Empowered
Adam Warren
A sexy superhero comedy (except when it isn't) about the never-ending struggles of a plucky but very unlucky young superheroine.
Sakana
Mad Rupert
Our heroes must navigate a hazardous dating scene, overcome personal anxieties, and wrangle unruly seafood in order to find love, peace of mind, and a paycheck.
Nigh Heaven & Hell
Scotty
Heather Vodihn is on a simple mission: find her father. However she becomes entangled with two strangers with mysterious powers being stalked by a group with bizarre demands. Heather must learn to trust her new traveling companions, even if she is untrustworthy herself.
Monster's Garden
Ash G.
Champion pit fighter Kilo Monster was content to spend the rest of his days tending to his quiet garden alone... until he met a curious robot girl and her human family.
Darkling Bright
Chris Hazelton
Kieran Bright is a college student home for the summer and roped into an online reunion with his old neighborhood friends in the most recent update of their favorite childhood MMORPG.
At least, he was, and that was the idea...
Join Kieran and his friends as they are pulled into another reality that may or may not be real and are forced to confront their own identities, the nature of simulated universes and reality itself.
The Messenger
indui
In a ruin-abound town cursed with bad luck, Kai and Kalla--a young boy and a fledgling dragonbird spirit--take on a quest in hopes the reward will solve all of their problems.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Novae
KaiJu
A historical romance with a touch magic and a dash of astronomy. It chronicles the romantic adventures of Sulvain, a sweet tempered necromancer and Raziol, a passionate 17th century astronomer.
Heroes of Thantopolis
Izzy Strontium Hall
A living boy fights to save the City of the Dead.
Stand Still, Stay Silent
Minna Sundberg
A few generations after the end of the world, a small, poorly financed research crew is sent out to rediscover whatever is left of the forbidden old world in the south.
BOOKMARK Click "Tag Page" to bookmark a page. When you return to the site, click "Goto Tag" to continue where you left off.
BUFFER WATCH
Comics are currently drawn and uploaded through:
standing up for something she believes in and ensuring jocelyn has someone in her corner. she doesn’t want to be a capital-L Leader, she hasn’t in ages. she wants to do good
There are tons of examples of unjustified police shootings.
I’m not aware of any from snipers at protests. I’m not even aware of any justified shootings from snipers at protests. There certainly weren’t any shots fired at the IU protest this is based on.
Police violence at protests tends to be using supposedly non-lethal weapons – misused rubber bullets, tear gas canisters fired at people or just good old beatings with batons.
Willis took this almost line by line from what happened at “pro-Palestinian” protest at IU a little over a year ago. The school administration and the state police significantly overreacted – it’s not clear why (unlike if this happened this year, in which case they arguably could have been afraid of retribution by the Trump administration if they didn’t). 55 people (students, faculty, and protesters who were neither) were arrested, none were charged. There were no significant injuries.
The commentariat seems to be expecting this to turn out like anti-war demonstrations on campuses sometimes did in the 60s and early 70s, with many injuries and some deaths, notably at Kent State and Jackson State. If Willis actually goes that far, he is dishonoring the names of those back then. I don’t think he will, but if this does end significantly worse than the actual IU event did, I’ll be disappointed in him tugging heartstrings to just play to the readers. It’s not like this was a made up event – it’s conceivable that I’d give him more slack if it was. But so far it is just a replay of the news, albeit with these characters.
True, but: there’s the dangling thread of Lester out there. I can see him putting a round in someone off-protest (Mary Mary Mary please please Mary) and going down for it, and if it’s some right-wing freak left recovering in hospital (Mary Mary Mary please please Mary) then that would absolutely track with the contemporary right’s delight in celebrating their martyrs.
Which means we’d be stuck with the consequences forever. Ugh.
something about part of what you said doesn’t sit right… ” did the right thing” I personally wont attribute any “right things” to Blaine. if hell exists, he’s there. ~<3
I don’t think it was out of a desire to protect Amber. He follows it up with something along the lines of “no way, but if you think you can use it to arrest her, go for it.”
That was not about protecting Amber. It was denial about his daughter’s capabilities. Amazi-Girl helped beat him, but it’s impossible for his failure daughter to beat him, therefore his daughter can’t be Amazi-Girl.
One could help that she gets lumped in by the cops as a protester and gets arrested, beaten, and/or shipped off to jail. And has a “But I didn’t think they’d eat MY face” moment.
Do we really need a redemption arc for Mary? IRL, not everyone gets redeemed. Some people just stay assholes their whole lives. Seems like Mary could be a representative of that.
If you weren’t familiar with Mary’s Walkyverse character, she’s initially presented as “A meaner version of Joyce who feels bad that being mean makes people not like her” and her potentially being redeemed is up in the air, even as she gets more aggressive. Then her wacky blackmail plot semi-accidentally gets Ruth to attempt to kill herself. Afterwards, Jennifer is like “Okay your mean shenanigans have crossed a line into actually being evil, but I’m winning to move on if you’re willing to stop now. We’ll call it even. Choo choo, all aboard the redemption arc train last chance” and Mary doubles down and pitches a plan to blame it all on Carla. This gets her punched in the face and exiled and is “officially” the point where “Mary learns to be a better person” is stricken from the list of possibilities for her. This is her arc. She’s a foil to Joyce, both having to choose being changing for her friends or sticking to her religion. Joyce went one way, she went the other and was ultimately completely and utterly defeated as a result.
The problem is that Mary WAS a Walkyverse character so she’s part of the “main cast” even though her arc is completely and satisfyingly resolved in such a way that explicitly shuts the door on her ever changing. That’s why every time she’s appeared since she’s had a completely new gimmick. She’s dating Peter Paul, then she’s homophobic Galasso who’s so inept that Becky/Dina enjoy hanging out with her, then she’s trying to seduce Joyce into being a TERF and now she’s a nazi and probably next arc she’ll be a juggler or something. She can’t be interesting. She can’t be threatening. She can’t even really be defeated because it would undercut her big climatic ultimate defeat in the blackmail arc and seem weak by comparison. She really doesn’t have a role in a the comic any more and should ride off into the sunset in shame and be replaced with a new “homophobic asshole” that Willis can actually do a storyline with.
Not “felt bad” in the sense of feeling guilty, literally just “Wow it sucks that people here aren’t bigoted”, and for that I’m mostly going off her being sad in panel three here and being surprised/confused/upset that people were mad at her about the blackmail thing. I realize that’s only two examples it’s fully 5% of her appearances up to that point; she’s a very minor character who barely appears with a simple little mini-arc. “Mary is a jerk, but that makes people not like her which makes her sad. Will this make her stop being a jerk? No, she’ll just aim her jerkishness at Carla and Ruth because she thinks they’re acceptable targets and now she is getting punched in the face as she deserves.”. And it’s a nice little mini-arc for a very minor character. Dumbing of Age is about flawed people trying to be better. Mary refuses to be better so she’s punched in the face and kicked out of the group. It’s a big dramatic statement of the themes of the comic. Fix your hearts or die. It’s good! I like the storyline where the nazi gets punched in the face and it’s not even the worst thing that happens to her. I wish we had more like it, where villains were defeated in a really emotionally satisfying way.
At the same time, there is something to consider : it is unlikely Willis will make another protest in this webcomic, and here it’s by taking “protest” generally (ie, gathering, slight riot, and so on), so showing more serious state violence would be covering all those cases. Sure, that would be a lot compared to last year protests, *but* Dorothy mentionned “they changed the law overnight” which happened this year, meaning it could also be about the LA uprising, where there has been wounded.
oh, i don’t know, the girl who is thin, blonde, pretty, and also fairly famous for organizing an escape from a kidnapper standing in front of the police is absolutely camera ready
Thank you, now “Rizz up” is what I’m always going to hear during the post-credit ending of Transformers One. I would be mad, but honestly, I think it works better. The reasoning behind the name Deception always seemed very forced for a revolutionary movement, but the naming is amazing when you instead imply Megatron is running some sort of evil pick-up artist seminar.
And sure all the references to Optimus in that speech now make their relationship seem pretty gay, but come on, it was already bursting at the bolts with homoerotism to begin with. Its not changing anything there.
**points at what Nymph said*
This.
Also, “dating” someone does not mean “exclusively dating” someone. If you don’t discuss being exclusive, you are not exclusive.
No one in this damn comic has ever, to my knowledge, set a single relationship boundary. Ever.
1) Both Joyce and Dorothy have at least referred to it those terms. Joyce telling Joe that doing laundry with Dorothy wasn’t cheating because they weren’t together yet. Dorothy saying they “can’t” because they’re with Joe and Walky respectively.
We haven’t seen them explicitly discuss boundaries with their partners, but it’s clear they acknowledge them.
2) I get that it sucks for poly people to have to deal with these cultural assumptions, but they do exist and just relying on “we didn’t discuss being exclusive, so …” sucks. Talk about it. Communication is necessary to make poly relationships work (any relationships, but even more so.) Otherwise, what’s the outcome? Just tell the partner you care about that it’s a shame that they’re hurt, but you didn’t break any explicit rules so you don’t have to care?
1) Cultural assumptions are a thing. Dating more than one person makes you a slut. Similar BS. Just because they say things doesn’t mean they talked about them.
2) Well that’s a fucky way to do that. Typically, those of us on the poly side of things are MORE likely to immediately discuss expectations than those who simply follow cultural norms.
1) So they think it would be cheating, but since they haven’t talked about it, it would be fine for them to do it anyway. While thinking it would be cheating and expecting their partners to think it would be cheating.
2) Yes, that’s kind of my point. Poly people are more likely to discuss expectations. Which is good. Do that.
Not doing that and relying on ‘but we didn’t explicitly say we were exclusive’ to excuse sex with someone else when your partner is hurt by it is not only a fucky way to do it, but the exact situation Joyce and Dorothy would be in if they went ahead on the grounds you’re suggesting.
Counterpoint for #2: monogamous people should get comfortable with actually starting the conversation and stating their expectations and needs.
The argument here is that Joyce should ask clearly, even though she technically has broached this topic with Joe and Joe gave her the opposite signal, and that Joe has no obligation to tell her anything without being asked?
I think what Joyce is doing right now is wrong, but it does rely on my having some knowledge that I don’t think Joyce necessarily does.
“Starting to drag” is hard to judge for a webcomic…something that takes weeks the first time through will take minutes the next time you read it, and all of a sudden what was too slow can be over so fast.
There’s a Paramore song that was earlier in the strip called “All I Wanted” with the lyrics: “I could follow you to the beginning, just to relive the start.
Maybe then, we’d remember to slow down at all of our favorite parts.” which is pretty close AND topical.
“Dorothy, there was specifically a line of dialogue about how we were *almost* outside of the fence and then we stopped to talk for a few strips. Are we charging into or out of the protest now?”
Alright. Consider: Dorothy kills several officers and somehow gets away with it. Kicks a man clean in half. Evades suspicion by exuding white-girl pheromones. Total non-issue, going forward.
Those police boots look a lot closer than they did before in the last panel, are they going to pursue? Someone running back inside in defiance like that might unfortunately make them rescind the “grace” period early i’d imagine
Nah, girlfriend is white and that’s what really matters to Linda. She’ll probably praise him for “showing some political ambition” and start pushing him that way instead of toward pre-med.
Girlfriend’s in jail for protesting against the university that employs their good family friend and gets them nice sports tickets, Linda might not be sweet on Dorothy either afterwards lol
There’s a ROTC building close enough that it is probably being watched and any random fire would be put out, but there’s a ROTC supply building across campus. She could calmly, angrily, organizedly not be near that ROTC supply building when a fluke electrical fire breaks out there.
Hells yeah Dorothy, go punch a cop, if you’re about to be a victim of police brutality get some shots in!
I’d call her a Baby Bernie Sanders but I actually dislike him (for personal reasons, not policy-related ones) and I like Dorothy a lot. Baby Jill Stein? It’s been years since I’ve checked on her, she hasn’t done anything outright abhorrent yet has she? Either way, I like actual political involvement from Dorothy.
Granted, it still feels weird and out of left field, but like, I can vibe with the strip in a vacuum.
[Also, I do not actually want Dorothy to turn this protest into a riot. I mean, I kind of want it because I have the political views of what they apparently call an “accelerant” and that’s the way I like my media messy, but I lack enough experience with dangerous protests to know when that sort of this is called for, if ever. I just lack the emotional bandwidth to like type out something well-thought-out today.]
I suspect my dislike for Bernie is for entirely different reasons than many people here. I dislike him because he’s too far to the right. Despite his claims of being a socialist, he never actually advocates for socialism, and in fact his calling himself that has caused a lot of Americans to have misconceptions about what socialism actually means. Bernie is not a socialist, he’s an old-fashioned liberal.
I don’t agree with Stein on everything, but at least she’s left of Bernie, and unlike him she’s been out there protesting against genocide and fascism for many years.
I would love a link with evidence of this? I don’t particularly care for Jill Stein because I don’t believe in voting third party at the presidential level until we have a lot of third party support in congress and senate (and lower levels of political positions) first, but a quick google said she was pro-Palestine before it was cool and calling for a boycott of Israel over the apartheid as early as her 2012 campaign (maybe before) so I’m just confused what you mean? There are certainly plenty of OTHER genocides, so if you could just point me to which one she supported, I’d be grateful.
Mmm, not exactly, unless I’m missing something in my search. She was saying that the war on Gaza was going to continue under either party, which was true. She was essentially saying both dominant parties are equivalent to Nazis for their support of genocide. It was a bad and naive take on her part to say there was no “lesser evil” (tell that to people being illegally deported, or many others). But I couldn’t find her actively supporting Trump or saying he was preferred. There’s a terrible dude quoted at the end of the article (Grenell) who says that, but he’s not affiliated with Stein.
There is evidence that Russia boosted ads about her but that’s nothing new. Their entire MO is to fuel division and dissent, they don’t care who they back as long as it serves in breaking down unity. I haven’t found anything saying she wanted Trump to win. Or that she supported genocide (as Ray said), the opposite so far.
However I’m easily seated by authoritative reliable sources, so hit me up with links. Not afraid to be wrong.
2016, she said better Trump than Hillary because she thought they’d do all the same things but HRC would be more dangerous and get more of it done. And now we have a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, and her campaign literally got more votes in several key swing states than HRC needed, so.
like idk about her intentions, I’m not a mind-reader, but she did very much say better Trump than Hillary in 2016, herself, with her own mouth. That’s just true. I think it is self-evidently the case that she was very wrong and critically underestimated Trump, both then and in 2024, and that the damage his presidencies did to the US Supreme Court alone are going to exact a heavy toll on all of us for generations after Trump and Stein are both dead, but of course YMMV.
If you hang out with ultranationalist imperialists who are actually waging an actual war of conquest that they started, what exactly does that make you…?
no US democrat is an actual socialist, the most the party would ever support that even remotely resembles that is a welfare state, and even that’s stretching it :/
yeah and Jill Stein or not, the democrat party ain’t gonna save us on account of the party being run by complacent cowards who are directly complicit in this mess (-_-)
And why did that change? Was it just that Dems got tired of being popular?
Nah, it was that LBJ signed onto Civil Rights legislation and the white working class that loved the New Deal and the Great Society saw that black folks were going to get part of it too and said “Fuck that.”
Welfare was popular until it could be painted as something that took from hard-working (white) real Americans and gave to black people.
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was very apt to call them out for wanting “socialism for the rich and white, rustic free market capitalism for the poor and people of color”, given that suburbia, highways facilitating White Flight, among many other things would have NEVER happened without government subsidized credit they would otherwise consider “”welfare””
things only continued to go downhill from the democratic party’s repeated and ultimately misguided attempts to “reach across the aisle”, which didn’t really mean reaching out to vulnerable minorities but winning over conservatives and white so-called “centrists”
because you can really only do so by appealing to THEIR standards of Politeness And Courtesy™, and those standards are deliberately designed to strip away any and all anti-establishment parts of discourse. To get these kinda white folk to even listen, you have to continuously water down the message, and if you want to stay in the conversation, you’ll eventually become a centrist yourself
and when enough leftists fall for it and do that, that’s when the right appeals to “”being reasonable””, i.e. using centrists to misrepresent the left to the undecided public, thereby making actual leftists seem more extremist, and that’s how the right wing keeps on winning (-_-)
Problem is that the Dems haven’t had a solid majority coalition since LBJ broke the old Labor+segregationist South one. They need to keep the margin they lose white voters by low enough for other demographics to make up the difference and that involves not scaring off too much of the “I’m not racist, but …” kind of white racist. Which limits what they can do, when any program that helps vulnerable minorities, even as a side effect, can be painted as a giveaway to “them”.
They need some “conservative and white so-called centrist” voters, since vulnerable minorities and non-bigoted white people aren’t a functional majority* in this country. That sucks, but it’s the hand we’re playing.
Which isn’t to say Dems haven’t made some major screw-ups, but they’re walking a narrow line with a real disadvantage that can’t simply be overcome by promising or even enacting better policies. The real problem is us. The real problem is the voters.
*Possibly a numerical majority, but explicit gerrymandering (as Li says) and implicit state and rural/urban divides shift the balance towards the GOP.
Quick PSA: If you’re ever at a protest that you didn’t plan, LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE WHO DID PLAN IT. If they tell you to leave, LEAVE. Dorothy is committing a textbook “white person’s first time at a protest” mistake, namely, making it about her by trying to be a hero, and probably making things worse for everyone in the process.
They might not have been, like, primary organizers, but they were probably at least there for the planning sessions. They have a plan. And nothing about how Dorothy’s been conducting herself up to now indicates that she knows how to act at a protest; frankly, I’m a little worried she’s about to punch a cop.
Yes. Those about to be arrested know it. They have planned for it and have lawyers lined up. They know what to expect. They know how to behave to minimize risks. They attended training sessions. They likely have a roster. That’s why Joss wanted them gone. Dorothy is endangering the prepared protesters. And they won’t trust her.
They’re best friends. There’s nothing they’ve done here in Mary’s view that’s even near the line. We know the overtones, but there’s nothing explicit to snitch on.
If they’d kissed or something, then there would be.
Mary could make up something, but she always could have done that.
Joe and Mary have been in three pages together (technically four, but one of those doesn’t count, since they weren’t actually in the same place) and have exchanged zero words so far. I doubt Joe would believe anything from someone he’s only ever seen in passing and about whom he has heard only bad things, most likely.
Official numbers have been disputed and never confirmed but some say she beat up up to six campus riot police officers on that day before they subdued her
it would be funny (in a sad way) if Dorothy is escalating- like running up to punch a counterprotestor or a cop or something- because that kinda proves Asma right, it’s super a cop move to sneak into the protest, then escalate it so the riot cops can justify firing.
I assume she’s actually running in there and somehow blocking Joyce out, similar to when Amber locked her (Dorothy) into the residence hall to fight roofie guy.
Dorothy would be really mad if she goes jail, and it turns into a reality check. But now that you talked about it, I’m worried more about Asma than others.
First off goddamn thank you for this arc you have no idea how bad I needed to see this.
Second off, when our encampment got raided, we had people alert the rest of campus to get eyes on us. People ran the like 2 miles to the base of campus in the middle of the night to support us. We were holding the line and I could see people’s flashlights as they were stumbling down in the dark.
One girl who was in the wagon with us after we got arrested wasn’t part of the encampment at all but jumped in as she saw the police closing in on us. Joyce and Dorothy reminded me of her in this scene.
As scary as it was I am still full of so much love for everyone who was there.
If you’re reading this you are not alone! We will do this together!
I know she said “it makes me angry” last strip but like… that seemed to me to be her thoughts about the situation, not something significant about her. Maybe I’m missing something.
I think it’s because whenever Joyce has been angry in this comic it’s usually been very significant. I wouldn’t consider her an angry person BUT that she HAS used her anger very efficiently and effectively when she feels it. The following strips are just some examples off the top of my head.
Yes, and I also forgot how infuriating the people in the comments were. People over there supporting John’s gaslighting with their “I like her cute and sexy, not angry” and “she’s ruining everything by having an emotional reaction to being gaslit right now”. Ugh.
An infuriating demonstration of how well those tactics of John’s work. Even commenters here were falling for the “she’s angry, therefore hysterical, therefore wrong.”
Well, yeah, her anger detached her uterus and made it bounce around her insides at random, forcing her to say incorrect things. That’s just basic anatomy.
Welp, it went where I was afraid it was going to. Peace out, y’all. Guess the fictional country was a necessity, otherwise the cognitive dissonance involved would be too much.
Secular girl with, iirc, one Jewish grandparent. Sure, that’s enough for the antisemites, but we don’t have to treat that as reality. Israel isn’t even her country.
Honestly I interpreted this to mean her dad’s parents are both Catholic and Jewish (as opposed to one of them being each), but only Willis can tell us for sure.
There are also different ways of being non-religious, and considering that Willis almost had Joe and Dorothy meet in Hebrew school…
Idk, I think they’ve been backtracking on their Jewish characters all being 100% secular. Joe and his dad tried to share Jewish holiday celebrations with Amber, for example.
Though he also comments that her going to hebrew school would have been a bigger retcon than her knowing him that long, because we already knew she’d been raised irreligiously.
And even secular Jews often do holidays as cultural traditions, much like secular families from Christian traditions still do religious holidays, just non-religiously. I was raised atheist, but we still did family Christmases and even made Easter eggs – we just didn’t go the church ceremonies about them.
That’s a fair point about Willis’s note, but I stand by my assertion that the idea still shows them considering walking back the overwhelmingly disconnected-from-being-Jewish writing of their Jewish characters? They wanted to have Dorothy go to Hebrew school, and then they decided they couldn’t.
Also I’m going to respectfully disagree with them on it being a retcon, because I don’t think Dorothy going to Hebrew school would have had to be raising her in a specific religion: I think it would have been giving her the opportunity to feel more deeply connected to her grandparent(s). And it also doesn’t need to have been the only type of religious education they gave her the opportunity to seek out. Raising someone irreligiously isn’t the same thing as raising them as an atheist.
(Never mind that I think my Jewish mutuals and friends have pretty consistently explained secular Judaism as being different from a secular culturally Christian person — you can still practice Judaism very meaningfully without believing in anything supernatural. This is also true of some other religions.)
Yeah, I’d also say for secular people who engage in culturally Christian holidays in the US, it’s a different situation because like… it’s the cultural norm. Engaging the the mainstream holiday is going to be a different experience than engaging in a minority holiday.
I think Dorothy’s parents would be open to letting her try Hebrew school, and I could see her liking it enough to go for a while– young Dorothy might have enjoyed things like language learning and history lessons. A Jewish neighbor I grew up with said that her Hebrew school taught her to question and agrue, which I’m not sure Dorothy would have wanted from hers at the time, but I imagine there’s a lot of variation.
Yumi, I tried to add that first part like five times and couldn’t make it brief enough orz. Thank you for bringing it up, because yeah, it’s just very different. Also, I don’t think there’s anything remotely like “Santa Claus” for most religious holidays, i.e. a version of the holiday with a kid-friendly mascot that’s entirely divorced from its religious significance.
But while the mainstream/cultural norm thing is true, there’s also a thing where minority groups go to lengths to keep cultural practices going, even apart from religion. Which could apply.
All of which ties in complicated ways to being Jewish being both an ethnicity and a religion. Though I think your point about “secular Judaism” undercuts the original argument that Willis is backtracking on the Jewish characters being 100% secular Jewish.
@thejeff sorry I could have been clearer, other was modifying religious not holidays. What I meant was Christianity is unusual if not unique in having these fully divorced versions of its holidays.
And no, it does not, it points to a limitation of language, which is why my second comment called it 100%-disconnected-from-their-Jewishness. Because again you can be “secular” in Christian terms of not believing God exists while still being “religious” in terms of practicing Judaism. Christianity is not unique in putting all its emphasis on faith (accept Jesus as your personal savior and you’re Christian), but it is different from Judaism, which puts all its emphasis on behavior.
Plenty of actively atheistic Jewish folks still practice. Being an athiest would not necessarily conflict with Dorothy going to temple, etc.
This is, again, hard to express because of the strongly Christian culture we’re both steeped in, where “secular Jewish person” conjures an image of someone who is only ethnically Jewish, and can’t have wanted to go to Hebrew School, can’t possibly keep kosher, etc etc, because “secular Christian” means something very different.
And again I don’t want to say that one or the other model is more common? I don’t have enough knowledge for that. But I do know it’s how, say, Japan operates, with its populace that mostly identifies as both Buddhist and Shinto, with its Shinto weddings and its Buddhist funerals, etc.
Because Judaism has different standards for what counts as being religiously Jewish than Christianity does, Willis could absolutely have Dorothy attend Hebrew school without making her ever have been any less committed to atheism, or her parents any less committed to raising her irreligiously.
I think different people mean different things by “secular Judaism”, some of which come from the expectations formed by their experiences with “secular Christianity”, but it very much doesn’t have to just be someone who celebrates the big Jewish holidays for the sake of their kids fitting in, or because they seem like fun, the way it often is for secular Christians.
Remind me of my friend that just HATES the way a lot of people completely missed the point about the omelas story that like, the kid didn’t exist until it was clear the spectator just would not accept the fact a real Utopia could actually be real without dome kind of dsrk secret so the narrator give them one even if it doesn’t make any sense.
For one thing, the grim dark secret is absolutely foreshadowed earlier in the story, when LeGuin makes a point of noting that the one thing that can be absolutely certain about the magnificent city is that it has no guilt, which she then follows up on by pointing out that to care for the child would be to let guilt into the city.
Although guilt is unpleasant and, by itself, not necessarily productive, the idea of an entire society completely free of guilt does not actually sound utopian to me. Not even little guilts? Does no one even hurt their loved ones by accident in this city? It’s an unsettling detail and it sets the stage.
For another thing, if there is no child, then what is the point of the end of the story? Why does the focus shift to the people who walk away from Omelas? Why does the narrator say that these people are even more incredible to imagine than the city itself?
No. I think it’s true that the child doesn’t exist, in the same sense that the city of Omelas itself also doesn’t exist — LeGuin asks us to imagine a utopia, and encourages us to fill in the details of that utopia so that it most appeals to us personally, with the only exceptions being that the city shouldn’t be religious in an organized way, and that there is no guilt within its walls — and yes, there are notes along the way of a general criticism of grimdark fantasy (this story is the source of her famous quote about evil being boring), but the child in the city is at least as real as the city itself.
The narrator is still engaging, or attempting to engage, the reader(s) in a thought experiment. LeGuin was making a point about utopias being difficult to believe in, but “there is no child, the city is perfect,” does not seem to me to have been the intended thrust of the story.
(Part of the thought experiment is definitely the haunting awareness that many of us live, in whatever comfort we live, similarly at the expense of an underclass, and that it’s difficult to imagine even a city doing such minimal (comparatively) harm as Omelas, much less a city (read: society) better enough to be worth walking away from Omelas for. The challenge, as with many such stories by many such authors, is to start imagining, so that you might one day hope to actually be able to achieve it.)
Like yes that is one of the themes present in the story, but it’s certainly not the whole point — or even the main point, IMHO. If it were, I think the ending of the story would be very different.
If you like! Your post got me to seek out the story to read it, which I hadn’t previously done — and I think that’s just a good thing regardless.
I have similar feelings of frustration about Machiavelli’s The Prince, which I think is obviously satire rather than a sincere document… but there’s a big debate about that, actually! One side may be right, but I would be more than happy enough if my strong opinion on the matter got someone else to actually read it instead of just assuming it’s sincere… but also instead of just taking my word for it, you know?
Critical thinking is a muscle. We use it or we lose it.
” I do get the point of the child existing, because there are many ways to interpret the story. I just chose the most radical, because I believe the story demands radicalism, and utopianism, and walking away from the lie that someone has to suffer for others to be happy. ”
“Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.”
(Description of the child.)
“Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible?”
“I also think there’s a key factor missing in all retellings of Omelas: While it was first published on its own, it was republished in the Wind’s Twelve Quarters. The story right after is “The Day Before the Revolution”, about a founder of the anarchist socialist nation in “The Dispossessed”. LeGuin herself describes the founder as “one of those that walked away from Omelas”.
“So the child is a lie like the city is a lie. Perhaps. But I refuse to say that the story is pointless if it does not have a suffering child to absolve us of the sin of wanting more”
The thing about the, “The failure of the story is the inability to imagine a utopia without suffering” is that it actually feeds the matter of the story’s Trolly problem. Because since the readers can’t imagine a utopia without suffering, they’re part of the problem but absolutely someone who now must decide whether they’d live there or not if there was suffering.
@Namadas: yes, again, I fully understood their argument. I did notice those lines. I just think the entire thing is couched as a hypothetical repeatedly, and that Omelas doesn’t exist at all, so the child not existing doesn’t stand out meaningfully for me.
I don’t think the story is pointless without a child…? That sounds like a misunderstanding of my argument.
What I was trying to say is just that the last part of the story, which I don’t think would make sense to include, if the intended takeaway was first and foremost “free your mind from the false belief that stories are only valuable if they’re dark”, instead of “force yourself to confront the idea that no amount of suffering can be acceptable, for anyone — no matter how commonly accepted, there are other people rejecting that idea already, and you should join them”.
Also, that last bit about the other stories doesn’t invalidate my interpretation at all — first of all — rather, I think it strengthens the argument for my interpretation…? In a world where LeGuin meant for Omelas to be a true utopia where there is no suffering, why would anyone actually leave?
It’s an interesting perspective, but I would find the story much less engaging and impactful if I viewed that as the entire point. But I think some of the impact of the story comes from different meanings people find in it, and I could see it as one.
(My general stance is more in-line with Li’s, I think, along with leading to discussion that many would like to identify with the ones who walk away (or do more), and yet we (general we) often accept the suffering of others–as long as it’s at a distance– for much lesser benefit.)
I don’t really think she cared about invalidating your interpretation or your argument much at all, she just likes to talk about these stuff and i gve her an excuse for it. Just like yiu are adamant about how you read it, she is about how she does it. I personally only care to the extend it is important gor her.
No no, I support this. This is a good thing. Much like Joyce, she needs to commit to risky behaviors, experience consequences, and realize it’s not the end of the world. If she gets arrested and stands her ground saying “I stand with what the protesters were doing. They’re right. I’m not compromising my beliefs,” then she’s finally become who Dorothy is, and now she can start to recenter herself.
As someone who recently suffered at the hands of police (I called them because I was being robbed, they didn’t stop the robbers or like my tone and so tackled me and broke a few vases with my head, giving me brain damage), I think I shall have to wait to keep reading this if police are involved. Also, sadly, killed my love of Nathan Fillian and the Rookie.
Thank you for the sentiment and I do mean that sincerely. I, ironically, know I’m lucky. I survived the surgery and had someone willing to take me in while I do physical therapy.
It’s terrifying. This comic gets that. A bit too well, I think.
Yall ever been so unwilling to come out of the closet, you’d rather put yourself in danger of arrest and throw away everything you’ve worked your whole life for? Yeah, me too.
We have done this experiment one billion times and it has worked great all one billion times.
Jon Munitz@jonmunitz.bsky.social ⋅ 9h
Germany gave people €1,200/month no strings attached.
They kept working, slept better, switched to better jobs, and even gave more to others.
Turns out, when people aren’t drowning, they swim further.
#UBI doesn’t kill ambition, it frees it.
once again, my self-appointed task of commenting on a daily artistic medium over the course of decades that sometimes throws repeats at me puts me in the position of pierre menard accidentally writing the quixote
Oh my GOD
Those stickers we saw on Dammit Open earlier this month? With the super early G1 artwork of non-finalised Autobots? And that one little weirdo in the corner with the VW chest who looked like a shit Bumblebee?
It's fucking MUFFY
Chris McFeely@chrismcfeely.bsky.social ⋅ 6h
WE DONE IT AGAIN!! Another long-lost TF document unearthed at last and brought to you at TFNation! Come Muffy-diving with me and Jim as we take you on a detailed look through writer Jeffrey Scott's WILDLY different early-1984 pitch for the original G1 cartoon!!
WE DONE IT AGAIN!! Another long-lost TF document unearthed at last and brought to you at TFNation! Come Muffy-diving with me and Jim as we take you on a detailed look through writer Jeffrey Scott's WILDLY different early-1984 pitch for the original G1 cartoon!!
TFNation@tfnationltd.bsky.social ⋅ 6h
This is a BIG one...
TRANSFORMERS NONE: THE CARTOON THAT NEVER WAS
TFNation 2025
Saturday Night Clubcon 9th August 2025
Sorenson & McFeely
Lost media
Pre-recorded script reading
Special guest cast
Details below!
tfnation.com/blog/20...
#TFNation #Transformers
Reposting links when it's not ass o'clock but if bigots can yell at visa and mastercard then so can we. This is a nightmare timeline for nsfw creators and creators as a whole, so if you're someone who enjoys my work or anyone else's we need all hands on deck if we want any shot at all
instead of vowing to take itch down with your justified anger, redirect that anger at the institutions who are directly responsible for strong arming every single platform that sells adult and/or queer art:
Iantos@iantos.bsky.social ⋅ 19h
Maybe we could find out.
Mastercard (US): 1-800-627-8372
Mastercard (Int.): +1-636-722-7111
Visa (US + Can): 1 800 847 2911
Visa (AUS): 1 800 125 440
PayPal: +44-0203-901-7000
Real discussion:
CNN: Hey Dave it's CNN. Could you come on to talk about the death of Hulk Hogan
Me: Hulk Hogan was a racist scab and a liar. He hated unions, Black people, and the truth and that's why he loved Donald Trump. What time do you want me?
CNN: Great! Well.... so we'll keep looking
wow of all times NOW she decides to go gangsta
…right into range of armed police without so much as a plan
(0-0)
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
*plays “Apocalypshit” by Molotov on hacked muzak*
what is she planning to do tho , i don’t think there’d be a ‘leader’ unless she gets on top of a tall thing and shouts directions at everyone or so
standing up for something she believes in and ensuring jocelyn has someone in her corner. she doesn’t want to be a capital-L Leader, she hasn’t in ages. she wants to do good
meanwhile me yelling at them like Barbosa “JUST KISS!” ~<3
LEEROOOOY JENKIIIINS!
DOOOOROTHYYYY KEEENERRR!
NOOOOOOOO REGREEEEEEEETS!
TOO SOOOON TO TEEEEELLLL!
KHAAAAAAAAAAAAÀAAAAN!
Get in their FAAAAAAAAAACE!
It’s a FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE!
I LIKE YELLLLLIIIIIIIIIING!
E X P E LLLLLLLL E D!
FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/face/
…A reference?
I was worried everyone had forgot FAAAACE
Dorothy, in the lock-up and eating a bucket of KFC she got somehow: “At least I have chicken”
Joyce: Ew, they mixed original with crispy!
do people actually eat original?
Yep, some of us do.
I’m old enough to remember when KFC was legit the best restaurant fried chicken around.
Emphasis on “was.”
Welp, this isn’t going to end well.
On a scale of 1-10 how bad do we think this is?
well let’s see,
there’s armed police, a sniper, and Mary
what do you thinK???? X-X
Depends, will the sniper shoot Mary? What about if I offer him cash?
dammit I really REALLY hope that happens
if not?
*guzzles redbull, cracks knuckles and opens up GameMaker*
I will also take Mary getting arrested. Even if Dorothy or Joyce got arrested, Mary’s arrest is worth at least 1.5x that in wonderful points
Jocelyne, Leslie, and Dorothy in a cell (holding pen, more likely) together could be a hell of a time.
With Mary too, though? Ew.
getting arrested isn’t fun for anyone, but i particularly worry about jocelyne; pigs don’t exactly have a great track record with trans women
mary would have too much ‘narc’ energy if not be a suckup or start quoting bible verse
It seems unlikely they’d arrest Mary, since she’s on their side.
Specifically, her foot seems to be on Joyce’s side of the fence.
They’re going to shoot first and ask questions later, including questions like “oh, are you actually theoretically on our side”.
But the leopards would never eat her face!
Considering her sign’s been swapped without her noticing, they make think she’s making fun of them…
i think it’d be more ‘making fun of others’ if it said “YOUR” face is a but versus carla writing it as ‘my’ XD
The sniper isn’t going to shoot anyone that isn’t themselves shooting.
O sweet summer child…. https://www.apnews.com/44c0ffa874663b4f1ea8f890a7c304d0
There are tons of examples of unjustified police shootings.
I’m not aware of any from snipers at protests. I’m not even aware of any justified shootings from snipers at protests. There certainly weren’t any shots fired at the IU protest this is based on.
Police violence at protests tends to be using supposedly non-lethal weapons – misused rubber bullets, tear gas canisters fired at people or just good old beatings with batons.
Well, that seems naive.
You’re probably too young to remember “4 Dead In Ohio” by CSN&Y
So bricks are getting thrown. Things’ll be alright, I think.
Not well, I think. 9. Possibly even 10.
Depends on how nasty the cops decide to be towards the protesters.
Willis took this almost line by line from what happened at “pro-Palestinian” protest at IU a little over a year ago. The school administration and the state police significantly overreacted – it’s not clear why (unlike if this happened this year, in which case they arguably could have been afraid of retribution by the Trump administration if they didn’t). 55 people (students, faculty, and protesters who were neither) were arrested, none were charged. There were no significant injuries.
The commentariat seems to be expecting this to turn out like anti-war demonstrations on campuses sometimes did in the 60s and early 70s, with many injuries and some deaths, notably at Kent State and Jackson State. If Willis actually goes that far, he is dishonoring the names of those back then. I don’t think he will, but if this does end significantly worse than the actual IU event did, I’ll be disappointed in him tugging heartstrings to just play to the readers. It’s not like this was a made up event – it’s conceivable that I’d give him more slack if it was. But so far it is just a replay of the news, albeit with these characters.
True, but: there’s the dangling thread of Lester out there. I can see him putting a round in someone off-protest (Mary Mary Mary please please Mary) and going down for it, and if it’s some right-wing freak left recovering in hospital (Mary Mary Mary please please Mary) then that would absolutely track with the contemporary right’s delight in celebrating their martyrs.
Which means we’d be stuck with the consequences forever. Ugh.
Lester?
Ah yes. Lester the cop who knows who Amazi-Girl is. Who shot Blaine.
Blaine actually did the right thing and deflected Lester’s question about Amazi-Girl being Amber before he died.
Something like
“So your daughter turned out to be Amazi-Girl.”
After a beat
“She wishes. She could never pull off something like that.”
Huh. Gotta point there.
something about part of what you said doesn’t sit right… ” did the right thing” I personally wont attribute any “right things” to Blaine. if hell exists, he’s there. ~<3
I don’t think it was out of a desire to protect Amber. He follows it up with something along the lines of “no way, but if you think you can use it to arrest her, go for it.”
That was not about protecting Amber. It was denial about his daughter’s capabilities. Amazi-Girl helped beat him, but it’s impossible for his failure daughter to beat him, therefore his daughter can’t be Amazi-Girl.
The consequences could be Mary beginning to realize, too, because I feel like her character is going nowhere.
One could help that she gets lumped in by the cops as a protester and gets arrested, beaten, and/or shipped off to jail. And has a “But I didn’t think they’d eat MY face” moment.
Do we really need a redemption arc for Mary? IRL, not everyone gets redeemed. Some people just stay assholes their whole lives. Seems like Mary could be a representative of that.
If you weren’t familiar with Mary’s Walkyverse character, she’s initially presented as “A meaner version of Joyce who feels bad that being mean makes people not like her” and her potentially being redeemed is up in the air, even as she gets more aggressive. Then her wacky blackmail plot semi-accidentally gets Ruth to attempt to kill herself. Afterwards, Jennifer is like “Okay your mean shenanigans have crossed a line into actually being evil, but I’m winning to move on if you’re willing to stop now. We’ll call it even. Choo choo, all aboard the redemption arc train last chance” and Mary doubles down and pitches a plan to blame it all on Carla. This gets her punched in the face and exiled and is “officially” the point where “Mary learns to be a better person” is stricken from the list of possibilities for her. This is her arc. She’s a foil to Joyce, both having to choose being changing for her friends or sticking to her religion. Joyce went one way, she went the other and was ultimately completely and utterly defeated as a result.
The problem is that Mary WAS a Walkyverse character so she’s part of the “main cast” even though her arc is completely and satisfyingly resolved in such a way that explicitly shuts the door on her ever changing. That’s why every time she’s appeared since she’s had a completely new gimmick. She’s dating Peter Paul, then she’s homophobic Galasso who’s so inept that Becky/Dina enjoy hanging out with her, then she’s trying to seduce Joyce into being a TERF and now she’s a nazi and probably next arc she’ll be a juggler or something. She can’t be interesting. She can’t be threatening. She can’t even really be defeated because it would undercut her big climatic ultimate defeat in the blackmail arc and seem weak by comparison. She really doesn’t have a role in a the comic any more and should ride off into the sunset in shame and be replaced with a new “homophobic asshole” that Willis can actually do a storyline with.
I seriously would like to see dome dtrips showing your repeated claim that “Mary fell bad being mean make people not like her”.
Not “felt bad” in the sense of feeling guilty, literally just “Wow it sucks that people here aren’t bigoted”, and for that I’m mostly going off her being sad in panel three here and being surprised/confused/upset that people were mad at her about the blackmail thing. I realize that’s only two examples it’s fully 5% of her appearances up to that point; she’s a very minor character who barely appears with a simple little mini-arc. “Mary is a jerk, but that makes people not like her which makes her sad. Will this make her stop being a jerk? No, she’ll just aim her jerkishness at Carla and Ruth because she thinks they’re acceptable targets and now she is getting punched in the face as she deserves.”. And it’s a nice little mini-arc for a very minor character. Dumbing of Age is about flawed people trying to be better. Mary refuses to be better so she’s punched in the face and kicked out of the group. It’s a big dramatic statement of the themes of the comic. Fix your hearts or die. It’s good! I like the storyline where the nazi gets punched in the face and it’s not even the worst thing that happens to her. I wish we had more like it, where villains were defeated in a really emotionally satisfying way.
I would call that indignant rather than sad
Yeah i gotta agree, those are just 2 very far apart instances that could be interpreted tgat wat if you like. I don’t really.
At the same time, there is something to consider : it is unlikely Willis will make another protest in this webcomic, and here it’s by taking “protest” generally (ie, gathering, slight riot, and so on), so showing more serious state violence would be covering all those cases. Sure, that would be a lot compared to last year protests, *but* Dorothy mentionned “they changed the law overnight” which happened this year, meaning it could also be about the LA uprising, where there has been wounded.
IU changed the rules overnight to ban encampments, leading to clearing the protest there. Exactly what we’re seeing here.
It’s possible he’ll take this farther, but I wouldn’t expect it.
Some arrests are likely and that should be enough to provoke some drama in the cast.
Why would that dishonor the names of those who died at the hands of the state back then?
Like a 3, maybe a 4 at most. They’ll be fine.
oh, i don’t know, the girl who is thin, blonde, pretty, and also fairly famous for organizing an escape from a kidnapper standing in front of the police is absolutely camera ready
Why oh why did we wish for this ship.
Damn you David “Monkey’s Paw” Willis.
That’s this entire comic.
Finally some political backbone from Dorothy. Proud to share a name with her for once.
The alt text XD Willis lives in a hell of his own design.
Which appendage is Walky though?
The rizzening! Let it consume you. Feel it. Embrace it. Draw power from its cup and your own will runneth over. RIZZ it up! Rizz it up! Rizz it UP!
Let it be known that I was asking for this a few days ago and my wish was granted.
Thank you, now “Rizz up” is what I’m always going to hear during the post-credit ending of Transformers One. I would be mad, but honestly, I think it works better. The reasoning behind the name Deception always seemed very forced for a revolutionary movement, but the naming is amazing when you instead imply Megatron is running some sort of evil pick-up artist seminar.
And sure all the references to Optimus in that speech now make their relationship seem pretty gay, but come on, it was already bursting at the bolts with homoerotism to begin with. Its not changing anything there.
I mean if you really think about it the Decepticons are always doing that if you squint at it.
@hovertext: I have more thoughts about Walky being (currently) tagged?
Same
Either that’s a mistake or he’s also barely visible in the background somewhere.
A foot, hopefully stepping on Mary’s
dang, Willis fixed it
I think he’s the shoes under the DOROTHY! bubble in the last panel.
Counter protest has free pizza
Look, the man’s on record as being willing to suck dick for pizza but I doubt he’d go so far as to protest in favor of genocide for pizza.
Absolutely not. Walky has standards. He’s not going to protest in favor of genocide for a couple slices of free pizza.
(you’d have to throw in a case of nachitos and a pallet of 50-piece mcnuggets, at the very least, before he’d think about it)
Dorothy’s about to return some lemons.
And burn some houses down with the lemons.
Now the question is, will Joyce run in after her?
I feel like that’d deduct cool points.
Like just, the over all vibe I mean. Not ‘deducting them from Joyce’
Depends: Does her love for Dorothy override her fear of food that touches (or snipers)?
She has thirty minutes. She just just kind of casually stroll in after her.
We don’t know how long they’ve spent already. Plus the cops may have been lying about the thirty minutes and decide to go in early.
That gate is awfully close to being closed. Seems it’s in the process of being closed up, what with Dorothy’s speed in re-entering.
Looks like Dorothy is about to disappear over the horizon
I mean, it closed earlier. They reopened the gate to let them out. There is literally nothing stopping Joyce from following her back in.
Well, I knew they weren’t gonna kiss so SOMEbody was getting busted…
that’s first step for a presidential
Incredible avatar for this comment.
Rest in peace President Dorothy
Witness the birth of Activist Dorothy
an absolutely beautiful transformation ;-;
*plays “My Innermost Apocalypse” by Danny Baranowsky on hacked muzak*
It’s a bad decision. But I’m just glad something is finally happening because the “will they won’t they” thing feels like it’s starting to drag.
Right? Are they cheating or not, just pull the band aide off so we can deal with the fallout.
What I think will happen is that the police will charge in before Joyce can follow Dorothy, leading to more trauma.
At this point, they could fuck on the ground while everyone watched and I wouldn’t consider it cheating.
It would still be cheating, regardless.
Not for Taffy, it wouldn’t!
No.
Specifically, they wouldn’t be cheating on Taffy.
Cheating is actually a line people get to decide for themselves, not a universal definition.
**points at what Nymph said*
This.
Also, “dating” someone does not mean “exclusively dating” someone. If you don’t discuss being exclusive, you are not exclusive.
No one in this damn comic has ever, to my knowledge, set a single relationship boundary. Ever.
yeah, any notion of exclusivity being The Default is white Christian privilege :/
and of course, this is a Red State and the cup runneth over 9-9
1) Both Joyce and Dorothy have at least referred to it those terms. Joyce telling Joe that doing laundry with Dorothy wasn’t cheating because they weren’t together yet. Dorothy saying they “can’t” because they’re with Joe and Walky respectively.
We haven’t seen them explicitly discuss boundaries with their partners, but it’s clear they acknowledge them.
2) I get that it sucks for poly people to have to deal with these cultural assumptions, but they do exist and just relying on “we didn’t discuss being exclusive, so …” sucks. Talk about it. Communication is necessary to make poly relationships work (any relationships, but even more so.) Otherwise, what’s the outcome? Just tell the partner you care about that it’s a shame that they’re hurt, but you didn’t break any explicit rules so you don’t have to care?
1) Cultural assumptions are a thing. Dating more than one person makes you a slut. Similar BS. Just because they say things doesn’t mean they talked about them.
2) Well that’s a fucky way to do that. Typically, those of us on the poly side of things are MORE likely to immediately discuss expectations than those who simply follow cultural norms.
1) So they think it would be cheating, but since they haven’t talked about it, it would be fine for them to do it anyway. While thinking it would be cheating and expecting their partners to think it would be cheating.
2) Yes, that’s kind of my point. Poly people are more likely to discuss expectations. Which is good. Do that.
Not doing that and relying on ‘but we didn’t explicitly say we were exclusive’ to excuse sex with someone else when your partner is hurt by it is not only a fucky way to do it, but the exact situation Joyce and Dorothy would be in if they went ahead on the grounds you’re suggesting.
Counterpoint for #2: monogamous people should get comfortable with actually starting the conversation and stating their expectations and needs.
The argument here is that Joyce should ask clearly, even though she technically has broached this topic with Joe and Joe gave her the opposite signal, and that Joe has no obligation to tell her anything without being asked?
I think what Joyce is doing right now is wrong, but it does rely on my having some knowledge that I don’t think Joyce necessarily does.
I don’t believe you. I demand a Patreon (or Slipperyshine) depiction. Plus your “Taffy Reacts” video.
“Starting to drag” is hard to judge for a webcomic…something that takes weeks the first time through will take minutes the next time you read it, and all of a sudden what was too slow can be over so fast.
“What was too slow can be over so fast”
There’s a song in there…
There’s a Paramore song that was earlier in the strip called “All I Wanted” with the lyrics: “I could follow you to the beginning, just to relive the start.
Maybe then, we’d remember to slow down at all of our favorite parts.” which is pretty close AND topical.
Ah jeez.
No, Dorothy! This is not how these things go! It’s the RIOT POLICE that are supposed to start the riot!
I’m sure the cops will start it soon enough.
*sighhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh*
Joyce, you’re going after her, aren’t you…
Act with integrity. No regrets
Fuck, if it turns out that this strip was foreshadowing this whole time, then: goddamn, well played.
It goes way waaaay deeper than that….
Oh thank god im not the only person who gets nervous this specific way.
… wait, is there a difference between integrity and stupidity? Because I’m not seeing it here…
Walky is in this strip?? Where’s Walky?!
Next to Waldo, I assume.
“Dorothy, wait! We still were inside the fence last strip and it didn’t show us leaving! Dorothy you’re running away from the protest! Dorothy no!”
that was my thought, honestly. It looks to me like she’s leaving.
“Dorothy, there was specifically a line of dialogue about how we were *almost* outside of the fence and then we stopped to talk for a few strips. Are we charging into or out of the protest now?”
Alright. Consider: Dorothy kills several officers and somehow gets away with it. Kicks a man clean in half. Evades suspicion by exuding white-girl pheromones. Total non-issue, going forward.
She slinks away into a cloud of Bath and Bodyworks body mist emanating from her pores like a squid fleeing combat.
A baton whiffs through black cherry merlot. A second swing is stopped cold, and yanked in. The man is never seen again.
Black cherry merlot, lol.
lol!!!!!
Thanks for that image.
Kicks a man in half? Damn, she’s killing cops and people?
She’ll kick you apart! SHE’LL KICK YOU APART!
Those police boots look a lot closer than they did before in the last panel, are they going to pursue? Someone running back inside in defiance like that might unfortunately make them rescind the “grace” period early i’d imagine
Hmmm, some interesting possibilities for storylines some up, if Walky really is there (as the tag suggests)
He could join Dorothy. And if he does, he is sort of related to the dean (in a very indirect way), so this could cause all sorts of issues.
Linda starts really treating Walky like Sal after he gets arrested with his girlfriend.
Nah, girlfriend is white and that’s what really matters to Linda. She’ll probably praise him for “showing some political ambition” and start pushing him that way instead of toward pre-med.
Girlfriend’s in jail for protesting against the university that employs their good family friend and gets them nice sports tickets, Linda might not be sweet on Dorothy either afterwards lol
There’s a ROTC building close enough that it is probably being watched and any random fire would be put out, but there’s a ROTC supply building across campus. She could calmly, angrily, organizedly not be near that ROTC supply building when a fluke electrical fire breaks out there.
Hells yeah Dorothy, go punch a cop, if you’re about to be a victim of police brutality get some shots in!
I’d call her a Baby Bernie Sanders but I actually dislike him (for personal reasons, not policy-related ones) and I like Dorothy a lot. Baby Jill Stein? It’s been years since I’ve checked on her, she hasn’t done anything outright abhorrent yet has she? Either way, I like actual political involvement from Dorothy.
Granted, it still feels weird and out of left field, but like, I can vibe with the strip in a vacuum.
[Also, I do not actually want Dorothy to turn this protest into a riot. I mean, I kind of want it because I have the political views of what they apparently call an “accelerant” and that’s the way I like my media messy, but I lack enough experience with dangerous protests to know when that sort of this is called for, if ever. I just lack the emotional bandwidth to like type out something well-thought-out today.]
“[Jill Stein] hasn’t done anything outright abhorrent yet has she?”
oh
oh dear
baby shield your eyes, you don’t want to look
Maybe Baby Elizabeth Warren, but with a touch more warzone. I think that’d fit her.
I suspect my dislike for Bernie is for entirely different reasons than many people here. I dislike him because he’s too far to the right. Despite his claims of being a socialist, he never actually advocates for socialism, and in fact his calling himself that has caused a lot of Americans to have misconceptions about what socialism actually means. Bernie is not a socialist, he’s an old-fashioned liberal.
I don’t agree with Stein on everything, but at least she’s left of Bernie, and unlike him she’s been out there protesting against genocide and fascism for many years.
Stein is a genocide apologist.
Like, literally.
I’ve seen no evidence of that. I’ve seen plenty of her speaking out and protesting against genocide.
I would love a link with evidence of this? I don’t particularly care for Jill Stein because I don’t believe in voting third party at the presidential level until we have a lot of third party support in congress and senate (and lower levels of political positions) first, but a quick google said she was pro-Palestine before it was cool and calling for a boycott of Israel over the apartheid as early as her 2012 campaign (maybe before) so I’m just confused what you mean? There are certainly plenty of OTHER genocides, so if you could just point me to which one she supported, I’d be grateful.
Jill Stein is a Nazi, bro.
Where did you get that idea? I’ve seen nothing to indicate that she’s a Nazi anywhere.
Jill Stein has twice run as a Decoy Candidate. Her campaign has not hid this fact. She wanted Trump to win.
That’s not even remotely true. Some of y’all love the say the most ridiculous nonsense I’ve heard about Stein.
Stein’s people have specifically said that Trump would be better than Harris.
I can say things that are not true too. Black is white, up is down, the moon is made of cheese.
Sh. We’re trying to keep that quiet about the moon.
Mmm, not exactly, unless I’m missing something in my search. She was saying that the war on Gaza was going to continue under either party, which was true. She was essentially saying both dominant parties are equivalent to Nazis for their support of genocide. It was a bad and naive take on her part to say there was no “lesser evil” (tell that to people being illegally deported, or many others). But I couldn’t find her actively supporting Trump or saying he was preferred. There’s a terrible dude quoted at the end of the article (Grenell) who says that, but he’s not affiliated with Stein.
There is evidence that Russia boosted ads about her but that’s nothing new. Their entire MO is to fuel division and dissent, they don’t care who they back as long as it serves in breaking down unity. I haven’t found anything saying she wanted Trump to win. Or that she supported genocide (as Ray said), the opposite so far.
However I’m easily seated by authoritative reliable sources, so hit me up with links. Not afraid to be wrong.
2016, she said better Trump than Hillary because she thought they’d do all the same things but HRC would be more dangerous and get more of it done. And now we have a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, and her campaign literally got more votes in several key swing states than HRC needed, so.
like idk about her intentions, I’m not a mind-reader, but she did very much say better Trump than Hillary in 2016, herself, with her own mouth. That’s just true. I think it is self-evidently the case that she was very wrong and critically underestimated Trump, both then and in 2024, and that the damage his presidencies did to the US Supreme Court alone are going to exact a heavy toll on all of us for generations after Trump and Stein are both dead, but of course YMMV.
She’s also a Putin apologist who defended the invasion of Ukraine.
She’s also an Assad fan who defended a Kurdish (among other groups) genocide
If you hang out with ultranationalist imperialists who are actually waging an actual war of conquest that they started, what exactly does that make you…?
These days? A politician.
no US democrat is an actual socialist, the most the party would ever support that even remotely resembles that is a welfare state, and even that’s stretching it :/
Maybe decades ago they might have supported something close to a welfare state, but these days they don’t support even that.
yeah and Jill Stein or not, the democrat party ain’t gonna save us on account of the party being run by complacent cowards who are directly complicit in this mess (-_-)
And why did that change? Was it just that Dems got tired of being popular?
Nah, it was that LBJ signed onto Civil Rights legislation and the white working class that loved the New Deal and the Great Society saw that black folks were going to get part of it too and said “Fuck that.”
Welfare was popular until it could be painted as something that took from hard-working (white) real Americans and gave to black people.
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was very apt to call them out for wanting “socialism for the rich and white, rustic free market capitalism for the poor and people of color”, given that suburbia, highways facilitating White Flight, among many other things would have NEVER happened without government subsidized credit they would otherwise consider “”welfare””
things only continued to go downhill from the democratic party’s repeated and ultimately misguided attempts to “reach across the aisle”, which didn’t really mean reaching out to vulnerable minorities but winning over conservatives and white so-called “centrists”
because you can really only do so by appealing to THEIR standards of Politeness And Courtesy™, and those standards are deliberately designed to strip away any and all anti-establishment parts of discourse. To get these kinda white folk to even listen, you have to continuously water down the message, and if you want to stay in the conversation, you’ll eventually become a centrist yourself
and when enough leftists fall for it and do that, that’s when the right appeals to “”being reasonable””, i.e. using centrists to misrepresent the left to the undecided public, thereby making actual leftists seem more extremist, and that’s how the right wing keeps on winning (-_-)
I mean the right wing keeps winning via jerrymandering.
Problem is that the Dems haven’t had a solid majority coalition since LBJ broke the old Labor+segregationist South one. They need to keep the margin they lose white voters by low enough for other demographics to make up the difference and that involves not scaring off too much of the “I’m not racist, but …” kind of white racist. Which limits what they can do, when any program that helps vulnerable minorities, even as a side effect, can be painted as a giveaway to “them”.
They need some “conservative and white so-called centrist” voters, since vulnerable minorities and non-bigoted white people aren’t a functional majority* in this country. That sucks, but it’s the hand we’re playing.
Which isn’t to say Dems haven’t made some major screw-ups, but they’re walking a narrow line with a real disadvantage that can’t simply be overcome by promising or even enacting better policies. The real problem is us. The real problem is the voters.
*Possibly a numerical majority, but explicit gerrymandering (as Li says) and implicit state and rural/urban divides shift the balance towards the GOP.
Tone of voice aside, he’d fit pretty neatly into Europe’s parties that bear the name “Social-Democratic”.
Wait, Mary is there?
Oh boy what horrid thing is she going to say tomorrow…
Something bigoted about how she’s too white and Christian to go to jail and the cops should deport all the liberal commies instead? Sigh…
Didn’t you see Buttface there in yesterday’s strip?
Wait a minute, that’s why Jocelyn smiled like that…
Dorothy’s confidence and determination in the last panel… wow
I barely notice the Walky tag.
Dorothy… good luck.
You’re going to need it.
very relieved to have preview panels rn
Quick PSA: If you’re ever at a protest that you didn’t plan, LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE WHO DID PLAN IT. If they tell you to leave, LEAVE. Dorothy is committing a textbook “white person’s first time at a protest” mistake, namely, making it about her by trying to be a hero, and probably making things worse for everyone in the process.
Thank you, I wish I’d thought to share that.
Do we have any evidence that Joceleyne or Asma planned the protest?
I agree that Joyce should absolutely not be inside that fence, but I think Dorothy knows what she might be getting into and how to act.
If you can’t find the people who planned it, at least listen to people you know who seem to have more protest experience.
They might not have been, like, primary organizers, but they were probably at least there for the planning sessions. They have a plan. And nothing about how Dorothy’s been conducting herself up to now indicates that she knows how to act at a protest; frankly, I’m a little worried she’s about to punch a cop.
Yes. Those about to be arrested know it. They have planned for it and have lawyers lined up. They know what to expect. They know how to behave to minimize risks. They attended training sessions. They likely have a roster. That’s why Joss wanted them gone. Dorothy is endangering the prepared protesters. And they won’t trust her.
Training sessions and a roster? I didn’t know people went that far.
I swear to God, Willis. You better not Chekhov’s sniper Dorothy. If you’re gonna Chekhov’s sniper anyone, it better be Mary.
I got that reference. We’d all like to not be that reference.
Chekhov looks like a gun name, like Kalashnikov
Walky is in the tags because he Carmen Sandiago’d the bridge that was there two strips ago. “It’s symbolic!”, he said, as police arrested him.
GO FUCK THEM UP.
Oh, come on, Dorothy, you call that a dramatic gesture?
You’ve gotta kiss your girl first!
I’M SAYING! Amateur hour here honestly
I love Dorothy looking at Joyce with love for her anger in panel 3.
Look who’s leaving her “best friend” behind and she helplessly watches her being taken away
Note: this isn’t a criticism of the character but an observation of a role reversal
Humorous twist: Asma and the other protestors assume that Dorothy is a police plant there to start a riot.
And then they kill her and use her blood as war paint.
I may be an atheist but I will legit pray to Satan if it means that’ll happen to MARY D:<
This is an anti-war protest. They would have to use her blood as peace paint.
i’d assume jocelyne wil stand up for her/with her lol
I am afraid of what Mary is gonna tell Joe :/
Why would Joe believe anything Mary says? Is it just because she’s hot?
How would Mary know to tell Joe anything and why would Joe believe her?
She knows Joe and Joyce are together, and she wouldn’t be telling Joe something unbelievable.
Like it wouldn’t be them having a heart to heart, it would be a barb if anything.
They’re best friends. There’s nothing they’ve done here in Mary’s view that’s even near the line. We know the overtones, but there’s nothing explicit to snitch on.
If they’d kissed or something, then there would be.
Mary could make up something, but she always could have done that.
Joe and Mary have been in three pages together (technically four, but one of those doesn’t count, since they weren’t actually in the same place) and have exchanged zero words so far. I doubt Joe would believe anything from someone he’s only ever seen in passing and about whom he has heard only bad things, most likely.
Mary: FROM THIRTY FEET AWAY I SAW DOROTHY AND JOYCE HANGING OUT TOGETHER TALKING!! LESBIAAAANNNNNNNNSSSSSSS
I don’t think there’s much for Mary to tell.
Official numbers have been disputed and never confirmed but some say she beat up up to six campus riot police officers on that day before they subdued her
*R#*)^R#*^R*P&#T*OP@&#RT*OP!!!!
Dammit, Dorothy! Now it’s going to be _you_ being carted off while Joyce is helpless but to watch you go.
No fair making Joyce share your nightmare!
Also, if Dorothy gets severely injured/killed, it will _break_ Joyce. Especially just after learning Dorothy passed on Yale for her.
And then Dorothy gets shot, goes into a coma, and when she wakes up she’s in the Roomies comic.
Have epiphanies somewhere safe.
Dangerous Epiphanies are prolly a good high if not a good band name lol
“I LOVE you…..r stupid anger”. Fixed it
ALso, now I am thinking Joyce banging on the closed fences meme style.
“LET ME IIIIIIIN LET ME IIIIIIN!!!”
I watched too much squid games my first though was Dorothy ditch Joyce into protest side not otherwise
it would be funny (in a sad way) if Dorothy is escalating- like running up to punch a counterprotestor or a cop or something- because that kinda proves Asma right, it’s super a cop move to sneak into the protest, then escalate it so the riot cops can justify firing.
I assume she’s actually running in there and somehow blocking Joyce out, similar to when Amber locked her (Dorothy) into the residence hall to fight roofie guy.
I take solace in knowing I’m not the only one who thought (thinks?) she’s running in, not out
(I now feel even more solace knowing I was right)
Dorothy would be really mad if she goes jail, and it turns into a reality check. But now that you talked about it, I’m worried more about Asma than others.
long time reader first time commenter! Hi!
First off goddamn thank you for this arc you have no idea how bad I needed to see this.
Second off, when our encampment got raided, we had people alert the rest of campus to get eyes on us. People ran the like 2 miles to the base of campus in the middle of the night to support us. We were holding the line and I could see people’s flashlights as they were stumbling down in the dark.
One girl who was in the wagon with us after we got arrested wasn’t part of the encampment at all but jumped in as she saw the police closing in on us. Joyce and Dorothy reminded me of her in this scene.
As scary as it was I am still full of so much love for everyone who was there.
If you’re reading this you are not alone! We will do this together!
♥️ thanks for your activism.
Dorothy goes to do something crazy and Joyce kisses her to short-circuit her brain and prevent her from doing said thing
Noooooooooo….
C’mon we didn’t need the trauma. :,(
please tell me she’s running at Mary!!!!
Hit her with a low tackle!!!
I think the alttext means that’s Mary’s foot outside the fence by Joyce
Now it’s Dorothy’s turn to disappear over the horizon!
Righteous wrath fits right into Dorothy’s personality.
Something something no regrets!
“It’s never given me or anyone else anything, ever…not in my entire seventeen years of experience”
Joyce doesn’t strike me as an angry person at all? I don’t get this dialogue.
I know she said “it makes me angry” last strip but like… that seemed to me to be her thoughts about the situation, not something significant about her. Maybe I’m missing something.
I think it’s because whenever Joyce has been angry in this comic it’s usually been very significant. I wouldn’t consider her an angry person BUT that she HAS used her anger very efficiently and effectively when she feels it. The following strips are just some examples off the top of my head.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/smash/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/language/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/strength-2/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/03-when-god-closes-the-door/angry-3/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/03-when-god-closes-the-door/frame/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/03-when-it-crumbles/dangerous-2/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/03-trystin-in-the-wind/frosty/
I forgot how infuriating John was. I remembered that he was unlikeable, but rereading those strips… Sheesh.
Yes, and I also forgot how infuriating the people in the comments were. People over there supporting John’s gaslighting with their “I like her cute and sexy, not angry” and “she’s ruining everything by having an emotional reaction to being gaslit right now”. Ugh.
An infuriating demonstration of how well those tactics of John’s work. Even commenters here were falling for the “she’s angry, therefore hysterical, therefore wrong.”
Well, yeah, her anger detached her uterus and made it bounce around her insides at random, forcing her to say incorrect things. That’s just basic anatomy.
I’m also tired of listening to Sinatra
Despite all my rage, I’m still just a Dot in a cage
Welp, that’s it I guess.
This is not going to end well.
Welp, it went where I was afraid it was going to. Peace out, y’all. Guess the fictional country was a necessity, otherwise the cognitive dissonance involved would be too much.
See you tomorrow.
Because it’s apparently terrible for a secular Jewish girl to protest atrocities, even when obfuscated.
“My country, right or wrong” is a vicious, poisonous creed.
Secular girl with, iirc, one Jewish grandparent. Sure, that’s enough for the antisemites, but we don’t have to treat that as reality. Israel isn’t even her country.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/catholic/
Honestly I interpreted this to mean her dad’s parents are both Catholic and Jewish (as opposed to one of them being each), but only Willis can tell us for sure.
There are also different ways of being non-religious, and considering that Willis almost had Joe and Dorothy meet in Hebrew school…
Idk, I think they’ve been backtracking on their Jewish characters all being 100% secular. Joe and his dad tried to share Jewish holiday celebrations with Amber, for example.
Though he also comments that her going to hebrew school would have been a bigger retcon than her knowing him that long, because we already knew she’d been raised irreligiously.
And even secular Jews often do holidays as cultural traditions, much like secular families from Christian traditions still do religious holidays, just non-religiously. I was raised atheist, but we still did family Christmases and even made Easter eggs – we just didn’t go the church ceremonies about them.
That’s a fair point about Willis’s note, but I stand by my assertion that the idea still shows them considering walking back the overwhelmingly disconnected-from-being-Jewish writing of their Jewish characters? They wanted to have Dorothy go to Hebrew school, and then they decided they couldn’t.
Also I’m going to respectfully disagree with them on it being a retcon, because I don’t think Dorothy going to Hebrew school would have had to be raising her in a specific religion: I think it would have been giving her the opportunity to feel more deeply connected to her grandparent(s). And it also doesn’t need to have been the only type of religious education they gave her the opportunity to seek out. Raising someone irreligiously isn’t the same thing as raising them as an atheist.
(Never mind that I think my Jewish mutuals and friends have pretty consistently explained secular Judaism as being different from a secular culturally Christian person — you can still practice Judaism very meaningfully without believing in anything supernatural. This is also true of some other religions.)
Yeah, I’d also say for secular people who engage in culturally Christian holidays in the US, it’s a different situation because like… it’s the cultural norm. Engaging the the mainstream holiday is going to be a different experience than engaging in a minority holiday.
I think Dorothy’s parents would be open to letting her try Hebrew school, and I could see her liking it enough to go for a while– young Dorothy might have enjoyed things like language learning and history lessons. A Jewish neighbor I grew up with said that her Hebrew school taught her to question and agrue, which I’m not sure Dorothy would have wanted from hers at the time, but I imagine there’s a lot of variation.
Yumi, I tried to add that first part like five times and couldn’t make it brief enough orz. Thank you for bringing it up, because yeah, it’s just very different. Also, I don’t think there’s anything remotely like “Santa Claus” for most religious holidays, i.e. a version of the holiday with a kid-friendly mascot that’s entirely divorced from its religious significance.
Easter eggs were the other thing I came up with.
But while the mainstream/cultural norm thing is true, there’s also a thing where minority groups go to lengths to keep cultural practices going, even apart from religion. Which could apply.
All of which ties in complicated ways to being Jewish being both an ethnicity and a religion. Though I think your point about “secular Judaism” undercuts the original argument that Willis is backtracking on the Jewish characters being 100% secular Jewish.
@thejeff sorry I could have been clearer, other was modifying religious not holidays. What I meant was Christianity is unusual if not unique in having these fully divorced versions of its holidays.
And no, it does not, it points to a limitation of language, which is why my second comment called it 100%-disconnected-from-their-Jewishness. Because again you can be “secular” in Christian terms of not believing God exists while still being “religious” in terms of practicing Judaism. Christianity is not unique in putting all its emphasis on faith (accept Jesus as your personal savior and you’re Christian), but it is different from Judaism, which puts all its emphasis on behavior.
Plenty of actively atheistic Jewish folks still practice. Being an athiest would not necessarily conflict with Dorothy going to temple, etc.
This is, again, hard to express because of the strongly Christian culture we’re both steeped in, where “secular Jewish person” conjures an image of someone who is only ethnically Jewish, and can’t have wanted to go to Hebrew School, can’t possibly keep kosher, etc etc, because “secular Christian” means something very different.
And again I don’t want to say that one or the other model is more common? I don’t have enough knowledge for that. But I do know it’s how, say, Japan operates, with its populace that mostly identifies as both Buddhist and Shinto, with its Shinto weddings and its Buddhist funerals, etc.
Massive TL;DR:
Because Judaism has different standards for what counts as being religiously Jewish than Christianity does, Willis could absolutely have Dorothy attend Hebrew school without making her ever have been any less committed to atheism, or her parents any less committed to raising her irreligiously.
I think different people mean different things by “secular Judaism”, some of which come from the expectations formed by their experiences with “secular Christianity”, but it very much doesn’t have to just be someone who celebrates the big Jewish holidays for the sake of their kids fitting in, or because they seem like fun, the way it often is for secular Christians.
I’m…pretty sure Dorothy isn’t secular Jewish???? JOE is, though.
See ya tonight.
There are lots of Jewish people who think that Israel doing genocide is bad. Sorry if that information upsets you.
yes, and I’m one of them
Yeah, this is what I tried to say.
called it a few days ago that only one of them would get out
High five for you.
This sounds snarky but was genuine lmao sorry.
Who says Joyce isn’t going back in after her?
Dumbing of Age Book 15: Damnit Marry Get Your Foot Out of There So I Don’t Gotta Tag You
Abstract representation of part of the fandom: “C’mon, Dorothy, make an ill-advised but dramatically fraught decision about your love for Joyce.”
Monkey’s Paw: *curls a finger*
I chortled
i did not know i could chortle
I regret nothing, the monkey paw has no power here. (to be revised a few strips from now)
At last! Someone who will fight for us! We need someone like that to be President someday!
She got my vote!
I was just chatting with my spouse about the three Omelas stories. Le Guin in 1974. Those who walk away…. Jemisen in 2016 Those who stay and fight. And the current award winning. Let’s kill the kid. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Don%27t_We_Just_Kill_the_Kid_In_the_Omelas_Hole
Dorothy is in the second phase.
Thank you! Here’s the link to the Jemisen story:
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-ones-who-stay-and-fight/
Remind me of my friend that just HATES the way a lot of people completely missed the point about the omelas story that like, the kid didn’t exist until it was clear the spectator just would not accept the fact a real Utopia could actually be real without dome kind of dsrk secret so the narrator give them one even if it doesn’t make any sense.
Hmmmm. I don’t think your friend is correct.
For one thing, the grim dark secret is absolutely foreshadowed earlier in the story, when LeGuin makes a point of noting that the one thing that can be absolutely certain about the magnificent city is that it has no guilt, which she then follows up on by pointing out that to care for the child would be to let guilt into the city.
Although guilt is unpleasant and, by itself, not necessarily productive, the idea of an entire society completely free of guilt does not actually sound utopian to me. Not even little guilts? Does no one even hurt their loved ones by accident in this city? It’s an unsettling detail and it sets the stage.
For another thing, if there is no child, then what is the point of the end of the story? Why does the focus shift to the people who walk away from Omelas? Why does the narrator say that these people are even more incredible to imagine than the city itself?
No. I think it’s true that the child doesn’t exist, in the same sense that the city of Omelas itself also doesn’t exist — LeGuin asks us to imagine a utopia, and encourages us to fill in the details of that utopia so that it most appeals to us personally, with the only exceptions being that the city shouldn’t be religious in an organized way, and that there is no guilt within its walls — and yes, there are notes along the way of a general criticism of grimdark fantasy (this story is the source of her famous quote about evil being boring), but the child in the city is at least as real as the city itself.
The narrator is still engaging, or attempting to engage, the reader(s) in a thought experiment. LeGuin was making a point about utopias being difficult to believe in, but “there is no child, the city is perfect,” does not seem to me to have been the intended thrust of the story.
(Part of the thought experiment is definitely the haunting awareness that many of us live, in whatever comfort we live, similarly at the expense of an underclass, and that it’s difficult to imagine even a city doing such minimal (comparatively) harm as Omelas, much less a city (read: society) better enough to be worth walking away from Omelas for. The challenge, as with many such stories by many such authors, is to start imagining, so that you might one day hope to actually be able to achieve it.)
I have no thought or opinion on the matter because i never read it, i just trust my friend because i think they are pretty smart (and i might be not describing their thoughts correctly because i am not) here is one of their post about it if that helps:
https://www.tumblr.com/aspiringwarriorlibrarian/651859360123928576/banging-head-the-entire-point-of-omelas-is?source=share
I understand their objection, but I politely disagree. I would also encourage everyone to read the story for themselves, it’s only four pages.
Like yes that is one of the themes present in the story, but it’s certainly not the whole point — or even the main point, IMHO. If it were, I think the ending of the story would be very different.
I showed her this interaction and she got some stuff to day to clsrify her position if you fel like reading.it.
If you like! Your post got me to seek out the story to read it, which I hadn’t previously done — and I think that’s just a good thing regardless.
I have similar feelings of frustration about Machiavelli’s The Prince, which I think is obviously satire rather than a sincere document… but there’s a big debate about that, actually! One side may be right, but I would be more than happy enough if my strong opinion on the matter got someone else to actually read it instead of just assuming it’s sincere… but also instead of just taking my word for it, you know?
Critical thinking is a muscle. We use it or we lose it.
” I do get the point of the child existing, because there are many ways to interpret the story. I just chose the most radical, because I believe the story demands radicalism, and utopianism, and walking away from the lie that someone has to suffer for others to be happy. ”
“Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.”
(Description of the child.)
“Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible?”
“I also think there’s a key factor missing in all retellings of Omelas: While it was first published on its own, it was republished in the Wind’s Twelve Quarters. The story right after is “The Day Before the Revolution”, about a founder of the anarchist socialist nation in “The Dispossessed”. LeGuin herself describes the founder as “one of those that walked away from Omelas”.
“So the child is a lie like the city is a lie. Perhaps. But I refuse to say that the story is pointless if it does not have a suffering child to absolve us of the sin of wanting more”
That is what dhe wrote
The thing about the, “The failure of the story is the inability to imagine a utopia without suffering” is that it actually feeds the matter of the story’s Trolly problem. Because since the readers can’t imagine a utopia without suffering, they’re part of the problem but absolutely someone who now must decide whether they’d live there or not if there was suffering.
I don’t really follow.
@Namadas: yes, again, I fully understood their argument. I did notice those lines. I just think the entire thing is couched as a hypothetical repeatedly, and that Omelas doesn’t exist at all, so the child not existing doesn’t stand out meaningfully for me.
I don’t think the story is pointless without a child…? That sounds like a misunderstanding of my argument.
What I was trying to say is just that the last part of the story, which I don’t think would make sense to include, if the intended takeaway was first and foremost “free your mind from the false belief that stories are only valuable if they’re dark”, instead of “force yourself to confront the idea that no amount of suffering can be acceptable, for anyone — no matter how commonly accepted, there are other people rejecting that idea already, and you should join them”.
Also, that last bit about the other stories doesn’t invalidate my interpretation at all — first of all — rather, I think it strengthens the argument for my interpretation…? In a world where LeGuin meant for Omelas to be a true utopia where there is no suffering, why would anyone actually leave?
Ugh, typos. “Also that last bit about the other stories doesn’t invalidate my interpretation at all — rather, I think it strengthens it”.
Please pretend I successfully deleted “first of all”, because I meant to. :/
It’s an interesting perspective, but I would find the story much less engaging and impactful if I viewed that as the entire point. But I think some of the impact of the story comes from different meanings people find in it, and I could see it as one.
(My general stance is more in-line with Li’s, I think, along with leading to discussion that many would like to identify with the ones who walk away (or do more), and yet we (general we) often accept the suffering of others–as long as it’s at a distance– for much lesser benefit.)
I don’t really think she cared about invalidating your interpretation or your argument much at all, she just likes to talk about these stuff and i gve her an excuse for it. Just like yiu are adamant about how you read it, she is about how she does it. I personally only care to the extend it is important gor her.
Heh, okay. Tone is hard online, and this is also being passed through a third person (you), so I thought otherwise, but that’s okay.
Also seriously pass my thanks on to your friend? Even though I disagree, I’m happy they got me to read the story and think about it more
No no, I support this. This is a good thing. Much like Joyce, she needs to commit to risky behaviors, experience consequences, and realize it’s not the end of the world. If she gets arrested and stands her ground saying “I stand with what the protesters were doing. They’re right. I’m not compromising my beliefs,” then she’s finally become who Dorothy is, and now she can start to recenter herself.
Oh thank god Mike already got shot so that shooting another character would be redundant, and so Dorothy is DEFINITELY safe.
….right?? *laughingnervously.gif*
Mike died from fall damage. Blaine was the one who got shot.
oops lol
Nah Mike is in witness protection from alleged Korean organized crime figures
Ooh, is out political activist baby becoming radicalised?
Well, I was half-right.
Dorothy is like Mon Mothma in andor in that she’s a centrist who’s struggling but still trying as she walks down a radical path
I mean, if Dorothy just goes back to Jocelyne and also gets arrested like, that’s probably fine as long as Joyce doesn’t get arrested with them.
I’m just worried for Dorothy that she’s feeling a lot of things right now and being emotional is not what you wanna be around armed police!
Dorothy has called Joyce’s anger a “tool for kindness” before right? Is that just me am I hallucinating? Does anyone remember when that was?
As someone who recently suffered at the hands of police (I called them because I was being robbed, they didn’t stop the robbers or like my tone and so tackled me and broke a few vases with my head, giving me brain damage), I think I shall have to wait to keep reading this if police are involved. Also, sadly, killed my love of Nathan Fillian and the Rookie.
I’m so sorry for your treatment.
Thank you for the sentiment and I do mean that sincerely. I, ironically, know I’m lucky. I survived the surgery and had someone willing to take me in while I do physical therapy.
It’s terrifying. This comic gets that. A bit too well, I think.
Boy Dorothy is seriously reacting to Asma’s cop remark.
Dorothy: I am not a cop!
Yall ever been so unwilling to come out of the closet, you’d rather put yourself in danger of arrest and throw away everything you’ve worked your whole life for? Yeah, me too.