but wait. do they really want to get closer to god?
(we had a local radio staition i the early oughts that was licensed for christian rock, freq107, they took that to mean any rock/ metal /alternative music that had the god in it, including the NIN entire discigraphy!, best station the city had till they got cracked down on and had to stick to music that actually claimed to be christian rock, they were off the air a year later)
If there’s one thing literature has taught me, it’s not just the point but the middle as well, sometimes even the ring. And not just the dexter but the sinister as well.
That would either be either “Dinah-Moe-Humm”, “Wind Up Working In A Gas Station” or the never released “Swallow My Pride”…in this context, I am presuming that you are implying the 1st one…
The foreshadowing…
Joyce was always going to fuck the gay poindexter. The only question was which gay poindexter.
Also, @Birion: I usually go with ring and middle, actually. The pointer is good for precision and speed, but lacks the power for the really good stuff.
Yes, it’s so cute. She just filled with pure happiness to be lustful and to inspire lust. It’s great revenge on her horrible mother and the fundie upbringing, “living well.”
I don’t know why y’all are surprised. It’s a comic.
When the comic builds up to consequences, the funniest option is to yank them away – only to drop them when we least expect it.
It happened with Joe too. Lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth only for Joe to completely defuse the situation, his calm reaction being the joke (an unexpected result contrary to expectation). Willis built up the expectation to make the reversal land harder. It’s a basic writing technique.
Now he’s doing it again. I don’t think he’ll repeat the joke, but since he’s using the same sort of buildup, I’m guessing he’s going for another ironic contrast as the payoff. I can think of a few Becky reactions that would qualify, so I guess we’ll see.
Except that only works when it’s unexpected. When you telegraph yanking away the consequences and do it repeatedly, it falls flat. Which is a problem a lot of us have with this arc.
That said, I do fully expect the buildup around them being scared to tell Becky means she won’t react badly.
When it comes down it to, the whole situation only really had five potential consequences of this whole event:
1) Joe gets hurt – Resolved in an expected way. Joe is fine with the situation. Overall, handled well (if only because Joe has grown a lot).
2) Walky gets hurt – Resolved through punchline. Walky walks down the path of self-destruction. Overall, handled very badly (seriously Dorothy…).
3) Joyce’s family – On hold, but referred to repeatedly. Foreboding newspaper situation threatens future problems.
4) Friend’s opinions – Several catered to. Sal doesn’t care. Jennifer has opinions. Presumedly more to come.
5) Becky’s feelings – Delayed and delayed. Possibly setting us up for a punchline though I’d argue that since the Walky part of it had this kind of setup, revealing what’s happening to Becky may actually be bad.
So 4/5 were catered to one way or another, with the last one clearly being intentionally delayed. I’m sure there’s other issues that cropped up (such as Amazi-Girl’s injuries and the fears those who protested are feeling, but i’d argue these are tangent to the relationship in question here).
What are people actually expecting here in terms of consequences? A fight? Fists flying? Death? Lot of shoutiness? Someone running away in tears? Declarations of revenge? One of the other billions of cliches you get in shittier writing/daytime television?
Consequences are happening. Just turns out things ain’t simple and instantaneous. They’ve been publicly outed. The whole thing is fueling Walky’s self-destruction while he gets treated like a joke. You can be damn sure Joyce’s mum is going to have opinions on this. Dorothy is doing all of this while she knows Amber is recuperating and that certainly fuels her self-worth issues. And probably some other stuff.
I get that people don’t like how these two got together, but please don’t insist that there haven’t been consequences just because they aren’t the consequences you wanted.
I think Joyce’s family is gonna be a big deal, but I don’t think it counts as a consequence in this situation. Joyce’s mom would flip out if she saw DoJo kissing in any context. The choices that DoJo made, of getting together the way they did at the time they did with the relationships they had, is irrelevant. The only way Joyce could prevent her mom from crashing out would be to 1. never publicly post anything about her non-straight relationships, or 2. never come out of the closet at all.
Getting together the way they did, the time they did, is precicely why there is a picture of them on the front page of their college news paper meaning they have no control over when and how this news comes to te attention of anyone in their family.
I dunno, can you imagine a when and how that results in Mrs. Brown being normal about it? It’s gonna happen sooner because it was at the protest, but it would’ve happened some day, and it would be just as terrible then.
What were we expecting? There’s no need to be overly dramatic about it. No death. No beatings. No dramatic declarations of revenge.
One of the boys involved to be upset about being cheated on? Kind of like Sarah was, but on their own behalf and thus not quickly defused by Joe.
Yes, still very cute. They are just cartoon freshmen who dated boys for a few days. Some people are overreacting so bizarrely, as if they were real people breaking up 20 year marriages with kids and houses.
i don’t think it is particularly accurate or charitable to assume that cheating on their boyfriends to begin with has to be the reason for someone to be unnerved, uncomfortable, or worried by their displays of affection given the circumstances. this level of dismissiveness towards expressing discomfort towards casual inconsiderate or unkind behavior in a narrative is weird, actually. yes, some people have been entirely too bigoted regarding this storyline. but that does not appear to be the case here.
I understand this is a comic n all but despite it’s occassional fantastical elements to dismiss them as “just cartoon freshmen” feels reductive as hell with the story that’s been told with them up to this point.
Like them cheating isn’t some final like punchline and people are incredibly invested in these characters collective story so ofcourse people are going to care when two of the leading characters cheat on the two characters that didn’t even believe they were capible of love until they had met them, only for the narritive tension to suddenly screech to a halt as our two core leads spend their morning just casually wandering around after only trying to get ahead of the news of them very publicly cheating once, before then seemingly giving up instead of just talking to their friends in any meaningful, and in Joyce’s case not even considering how this could affect their friends at all.
What is there to clear up exactly? The way I read it, regardless of any potential poly development Joe pitched, it was pretty clear Joyce chose Dorothy. They broke up. Joe even admitted he doesn’t think he can compete with Dorothy and just wants a fraction of Joyce’s love and attention. Any potential poly conversation as stated should be for later, but Joyce doesn’t even know if she wants that. I think the problem is that the breakup kind of ended to cleanly so it feels ambiguous but Joe’s expression in the final panel of that strip isn’t the face of a man confident he still has a girlfriend and Joyce is very clearly operating under no assumption she’s still with Joe.
Feel bad for Joe. I do, but Joyce and Dorothy can probably be cute and fuck as free and clear as two bi chicks can when one is deathly afraid of her gay roommate finding out. Turns out that’s not much.
Joyce’s nervous “yeah” when Dorothy referred to Joe as her ex implies Joyce is very much of the opinion she didn’t break up with him yet. Don’t deny the implication is that’s probably the route she’s heading down but she didn’t actually do it (more importantly doesn’t think she did).
Which could mean anything from “Am I still with him?” to “Saying ex-boyfriend feels weird cause it just happened.” or literally anything else. Not saying Joyce won’t consider Joe’s proposal, it’s even very likely she still has feelings for him and would like to date him and Dorothy, but she’s broke up with him. That’s what happened. She said it when they left the paper.
I kinda just don’t like in this story where we’re already being exceptionally critical of the circumstances around these two dating we’re also finding reasons to undercut the developments when they actually make them.
I only think it’s very messed up that Joe’s created a situation where he’s likely clinging to hope while Joyce wants to fuck her gf without giving him a second thought. He’s maybe too good for her in this scenario.
That’s a valid interpretation. I cant see the part where she says they broke up. She says “we informed our boys” which I read as purposely dodging what actually happened.
I’d argue that we still don’t know if Joyce considers them broken up (or more accurately there’s two opposite interpretations).
I agree that current story keeps undercutting their development. I would prefer some clarification.
His whole issue was: “My father is a cheating horndog so I will be too and I will never deserve a serious relationship”
First he dealt with this by pursuing casual hookups exclusively and by adopting an objectifying misogynistic attitude. The misogyny was a problem, but it was addressed in the comic. He was condemned, faced consequences, repented, and chose to act differently.
He still thinks poorly of himself though, which explains why he doesn’t seem to think at all about himself. Joyce cheats on him and he goes “I just want you to have what you want”.
At some point I hope he realizes that he is a good person and doesn’t need to keep dragging himself for his Father’s actions.
He said he wanted to keep his place in Joyce’s heart, and I think he meant he would like his relationship with Joyce to stay as much as possible the same.
So he already thinks of himself, just not enough (maybe he should have followed when Joyce left). I also think he sincerely isn’t jealous, or thought about it and saw/thought it was a bit silly.
Or at least it would be coherent. He did look sad, but it would be logical too if it was out of fear…
What consequences? He treated women like crap, and managed to get caught in a public way. He had his little list go viral, leading a lot of women to feel really bad and probably suffer all sorts of bullying and abuse. He had what appeared to be extremely eager and very consensual sex with Penny, and then got her fired and thrown out for it. And the consequences for him were…that he felt a lot of self pity? And decided to be a “better guy” because…he’s really hot for Joyce. But to Dorothy he’s condescending and mean and either A) rubbing it in her face that he’s with Joyce and she’s not or B) actively trying to push her to be interested in Joyce. And he’s a real condescending ass to Rachel for her being so ridiculous as to not realize that like, a week ago, in private he started to be a better person. I still consider Joe an utter piece of crap. To change my opinion, I’d have to see him being a better person even when its not based on getting the date he wants.
It’s interesting how we can walk away with such different takes on Joe and Rachel’s gym convo. He’s being considerate at first because he knows his list was awful and fucked up, so lots of people dislike him, so he avoids stimulating their ire. Rachel continues to deny change is possible, (which is kinda the other shoe style of commentary to booster’s recurring line about revealing who we’ve actually always been underneath).
Also, it’s the second semester. All of the list shit was before the winter vacation. It’s been a little bit longer than just a few days. I think his change actually started happening before the winter vacation but it really was showing even from his very first appearances this semester.
In what world is cutting the conversation short and telling Joe “we’ll talk later” a clean breakup? In my book, there’s no official status on the two of them yet. And, as Strawb pointed out, Joyce is aware of that.
My guess is she’s pushing those thoughts aside and she’ll break down once she and Dorothy actually attempt to have sex.
The part where she said we have to break up because “I kissed Dorothy and plan on doing it again.” Or the part where she said. “I can’t date two people cause I’m not a hussy.” Just because Joe wants to still date Joyce and Joyce will talk to him doesn’t mean she didn’t say those things. That’s how agency works.
I don’t know how much more clear you can get here. Undercutting it with a joke and Joe’s general “You don’t have to break up with me.” argument don’t take away pretty solid decisions Joyce made. This feels like the Lucy situation where just because the last words a couple says during a break up aren’t “I officially declare we are broken up.” it means it didn’t happen, when the truth is communication is just messy sometimes.
I didn’t overlook the punchline. I directly mentioned it. “Undercutting with a joke.” But even taking it as literal in that moment Joyce realizing she is in fact a hussy doesn’t instantly invalidate her statement that she can’t date both of them. But I give up here. If people directly saying they broke up doesn’t constitute a break up I guess Joyce is still cheating. Dorothy is too, she never technically completely broke up with Walky. I can accept the status quo that there will be general baseline of filthy cheater status for the entirety of Joyce and Dorothy’s relationship. Good for them.
I’d say that whether or not they’re actually broken up, Joyce is no longer cheating on Joe. She’s made it clear that whatever happens she’s going to be with Dorothy and Joe’s accepted that. The options are poly with the three of them or just Dorothy and Joyce. Either way, cheating on Joe isn’t a possibility.
If she is actually considering the poly option, she really needs to talk to Dorothy about it rather than leaving Dorothy under the impression she’s made a clean break.
You say “undercutting it with a joke” but that line is only a joke for the audience. Joyce doesn’t know she’s in a comic where her dialogue can be seen as funny. There’s no reason to believe she wasn’t serious there.
Yes. You are correct. Joyce realizing she was in fact a hussy means her relationship with Joe is still in play and she’s eager to cheat on him with Dorothy in hopes of a poly route. Every interaction so far between them has been shameless hussy behavior.
It is impossible for Joyce to cheat on Joe with Dorothy because he has explicitly endorsed her being with Dorothy. It isn’t cheating if it isn’t against the rules.
To me that is ‘Hey, our current relation is broken up. I’m with Dorothy.’ Joe offers a poly relation, and Joyce says she will consider it. But that doesn’t mean that Joyce is being unfaithful here. Until such a time that she and Dorothy agree to go Poly, Joyce is with Doroty and not with Joyce.
It’d be considerate to Joe not to leave him hanging too long, but there is nothing ‘wrong’ to me, even in a ‘horny college Freshmen’ sense about Joyce and Dorothy to fully act like girlfriends with everything involved in it.
yes, exactly my feelings. i WANT them to be cute, but Joyce is withholding information, which means Dorothy isn’t fully consenting to what she’s in.
Joyce didn’t *really definitely* break up with Joe (she just baaaasically left him on read in a reallife conversation), but Dorothy thinks she did, that the Joe chapter is closed. That’s not informed consent.
Joyce needs to either *definitely* end things with Joe (including refusing his poly offer), or come clean to Dorothy that she’s considering it.
I think as long as she doesn’t do anything with Joe before informing Dorothy of the situation, she’s not doing anything wrong at this point. It’s more or less fine for her to do whatever with Dorothy now, and then, at whatever point afterwards, either tell Joe ‘no’ without necessarily ever informing Dorothy it was a possibility (or how close she was to considering a yes), or bring up the possibility with Dorothy of getting back together under some poly arrangement. I don’t think merely the fact that the offer is open or even that Joyce is considering it is the kind of thing that must be disclosed or somehow impairs informed consent. It’s mildly shitty, but not even cheating levels of shitty let alone consent issues level of shitty.
The only thing I don’t like in that context is how insistent she was on closing off the possibility of Dorothy doing the same with Walky. “I win you lose” isn’t very poly of you, Joyce.
(Would either Walky or Dorothy go for it? Probably not. But that’s none of Joyce’s business, at least not in the scenario where she and Dorothy aren’t in a monogamous relationship)
Well, almost. Maybe it would be more like “Pounded in the Caboodle by the Rejection of Fundamentalist Veneration of Chastity”. It would involve Joyce wearing a size six strap-on, I suspect.
⭐Not everyone in the comment section speaks English as a first language.
⭐Even if they did, you understood what they meant and this isn’t a class.
⭐That’s actually one of the most common punctuation mistakes in the language, and is frequently made by native speakers. So it’s not THAT easy I guess.
⭐It might be a typo or autocorrect.
I get correcting spellings of names or the use of incorrect pronouns for people with stated pronouns, but nitpicking grammar and punctuation in an informal forum seems muchy. Your last sentence also just seems rude, but that might be a tone-misread.
I dunno I suck at Japanese and if I made an error with Japanese grammar I would be thankful for the help. There’s nothing wrong with correcting people unless you’re being purposely malicious about it. Learning is fun and also constant.
This error is also overwhelmingly not a matter of not knowing the rule. It’s basically a typo. A matter of typing too quickly and not stopping to remember that “No, its is an exception to the normal way you make possessives.”
Also, I think it’s a dumb rule and one that will probably fade away over the next few decades if we keep doing as much casual typing as people are doing today.
Interestingly, I would argue that “its” is in no way shape or form an exception. It lines up with our normal possessive-ing of pronouns in English (hers, his, theirs, etc.).
Obviously ” ‘s ” is how we make nouns possessive by and large. And the confusion is understandable and 99% of the time not worth calling out.
But also I doubt it’s going away. Because there are absolutely use cases I can think of when the apostrophe does matter for understanding. Admittedly, they’re a bit contrived- “I eat special pizza. It’s gluten-free nature means it doesn’t trigger my IBS”. Obviously, putting the apostrophe there doesn’t *actually* mean one is going to misunderstand the sentence, but it’s an example of what’s called a “garden path” sentence. A more prominent one would be “The old man the boat”- a perfectly acceptable sentence- “a specific group of elderly people crew a sailing vessel”. But since it’s far more common to see the phrase “the old man” followed by a verb, readers get confused for a second before going “oh, they’re using “old” as a noun and “man” as a verb”. And it’s the same with my “its gluten-free nature” bit. If there’s no apostrophe there, the impact of the garden-path is lessened becaues the reader isn’t expecting “it is gluten-free” to be the reading- they know it’s the possessive.
TL;DR- the difference between “it’s” and “its” is not, I would argue, an exception, and because said difference is syntactically relevant, the differentiation will continue.
True, but that sort of ambiguity exists for a great many homophones and we still generally follow the rules for spelling those words. I’m still going to correct my students if they write “The son is yellow”, for example.
And as I said below, hers, his, theirs, etc, don’t actually follow the same rules.
“hers”, for example, is only used without a following noun. Otherwise “her” is the possessive. “That was her tail.” “The tail was hers.” Same for yours and theirs. This isn’t anywhere near as common – enough that I had to stop and think where/how these would be used.
His is already formed differently – it’s not adding an “s” to “hi”.
I think correcting people grammar or spelling it’s only worthwhile doing in a place like this if it actively make it difficult to understand what you said. In a case like this, where no meaning is lost, it is pointless and just done for the sake of being condescending. And you can felt that way if you want but a lot of people don’t like it when other correct them in minor mistakes.
For me I always say, “I correct people because I want to do it before someone meaner does it”. Insomuch that some jackass will use their incorrect spelling to invalidate their argument or make them feel stupid. I genuinely feel like it SHOULD be fine to correct people on small things without insinuating they’re dumb. I fuck up all the time. Ain’t like I’m perfect at language.
That said I’d probably not correct a mistake as minor as “It’s” instead of “Its” unless they did it over and over.
Also I’ll admit some grammar stuff does trigger me a bit. I get a twinge whenever I hear some use “whenever” to refer to one specific moment in time and not a recurring event. I feel the “um actually” rise up in me.
My roommate does this to me with me saying “anyways” instead of “anyway” as a segue. 😛
It’s a very stupid rule. Its, yours, hers, ours, theirs, all of them are freakish standouts that don’t deserve the special treatment they get. The only reason anyone still spells them without an apostrophe is peer pressure and cowardice.
As an English teacher, I don’t actually care about bad grammar because the purpose of communication is understanding and an apostrophe usually doesn’t impact that in the slightest.
But its and it’s are still two different things and I’ve never seen anyone use an apostrophe in “hers” or “yours”.
“It’s ” is a contraction of “it is”, which separates it from “its”, the posessive form of “it”. In general, English uses the “-s” for posessives, with the apostrophe being used to avoid changing the pronunciation of the noun.
English has rules. We can and should avoid correcting violations of those rules- 90% of the time it’s not worth potentially making someone feel bad- but that’s different from trying to pretend those rules don’t exist or changing them at a whim.
You seem to think I don’t understand how the words work, for some reason. I understand them fine, and I understand the rules equally fine. I still think they’re stupid, which is also “different from trying to pretend those rules don’t exist or changing them at a whim”. Where did you even get that part from?
That’s not pretending the rule “You’re supposed to spell those possessive pronouns with no apostrophe” doesn’t exist, and it’s not changing the rule on a whim. We’re all succumbing to peer pressure (which is being applied by people like you) and we’re all cowards for following the rule just to avoid people like you getting on our cases and making up misbehaviors from whole cloth for the sake of scolding us. (“Us” being every single person who’s ever spelled “its” without an apostrophe, of course.)
So this is one of those rare times where I’m going to make an appeal to my own authority. As I said before, I’m an English teacher. I have a Master’s degree in TESL and to get it I had to take a whole bunch of classes on linguistics. That doesn’t mean I can’t be wrong or that you shouldn’t argue with what I’m saying, but I do want to bring up that I *absolutely* know what I’m talking about here. (And also explain why I’m word vomiting about it LMAO)
I can’t really think of any good reason to put an apostrophe before the s of the English possessive pronouns. It works for “yours, ours, hers, and its”, but it would probably leave “his” out in the cold because I suspect the vast majority of people would say it “highs”. You’d also need to have another exception for “mine” unless you want to go with “my’s”.
And interestingly, that *still* wouldn’t make the case for completely replacing “its” with “it’s”, because “its” is used a lot more as an adjective than a pronoun. If I say “this is my cat. Over there is its litter box.”, I’m not actually using “its” as a possessive pronoun like “yours”. Instead, it does the job of a possessive modifier like “your” (Such as if I’m a train conductor and I say “Here is your ticket, sir”)
Also, the rules change. Not on a whim, but with usage. The rules are descriptions of what people do.
As for “hers” or “yours”, those are used for the possessive in much more limited circumstances. Normally, to use the original example here, it would simply be “her own tail” or “your own tail”. I can only think of examples like “that’s hers”, which isn’t really the same usage.
I think that’s everybody who’s got a random avatar in circulation currently, plus Alice and Raidah who I was too lazy to try to find good icons for while the site was behaving badly.
It probably needs more green arrows, but I think I got most of the major ones.
I didn’t do it on purpose, but I enjoy how Ruth is looking away from Jason and towards Billie, who’s eye-flirting back. I also enjoy Agatha’s huge grin as she hangs out by herself, unconnected to any of the drama.
Also, I’m reminded: Even though they have random avatars, I left out Blowjob Cat because they are sad and lonely with no one to give blowjobs to, and Fuckface because all the green arrows pointing at him would have made the chart unreadable.
The unfortuante irony of blowjob cat may be that they just want a deep commited relationship with no blowjobs required but no one will ever see that because of the name
This is such a great strip. What a relief there isn’t someone supposedly important to the main character waiting for a resolution to an incredibly important relationship altering conversation he wanted to have. If that was the case, that would definitely taint this strip. But fortunately it is not the case.
She tried to break up with him. He’s the one who is begging or demanding a very weird thing. If he wants to be a third wheel he should be prepared for this. I admire his tenacity and confidence, and his chutzpah.
He’s not begging or demanding and its not that weird of a thing? He’s very clearly stating this is an option if you want it, but only if you want it. And speaking as a poly person, its not weird to be happy to date someone non-exclusively
Joyce and Joe have communicated and at least know the state of play.
The problematic bit is Dorothy is still in the dark that Joyce hasn’t broken up with her boyfriend and maybe doesn’t want to. Dorothy might be ok with that. But she might not be. Until Joyce and Dorothy talk it out, Dorothy thinks Joyce is exclusive with her, and as that’s not the case, right now it’s Dorothy getting cheated on.
“A very weird thing” being a relationship structure that many, many people engage in and feel happy and fulfilled by? Christ, what a blatantly polyphobic sentiment.
I’m pretty sure a thing that was normal in the fifties (dating more than one person at a time) isn’t weird. It used to be that the assumption was no exclusivity until exclusivity was specifically agreed upon. It was called ‘going steady’. It seems like a comparatively recent thing where one date equals ‘you’re basically married now’.
This is not a thing that was normal in the fifties. These are not people going “We’re not in a serious relationship, just casually going on dates with multiple people.”
The proposal from Joe is basically “Going steady with both of us”.
And no, there’s no recent thing “where one date equals ‘you’re basically married now’.”
That “very weird thing” Joe suggested, without begging or demanding a single thing, is how I live my life. I’m sorry it seems weird to you that love can be an infinite and varied thing. That sounds like a really limited life, and I really do feel sorry for you.
Good thing Joyce and Dorothy are so good at communicating with others. It would suck if at least one of them still hadn’t properly ended her relationship with her boyfriend, or talked about his proposal for a poly relationship with her new girlfriend.
Technically neither of them has properly broken up with her boyfriend. Joyce has not responded to the poly proposal, and Dorothy never broke up with Walky, she just allowed Joyce to mock him and smiled about it.
I figure that Joe should understand that his question is not one where a decision should be made quickly or rashly, and Joyce has been quite clear that she will be having a relation with Dorothy while she works through her own feelings on the matter, as well as let Dorothy go through her feelings on the matter. In the meantime, it would be completely unfair for Joe to expect that the two of them are going to halt developing their own relationship.
It’s even for Joe a bad idea. because in order for Joyce and Dorothy to figure out whether they can have a relationship that includes Joe, they need to figure out their own relationship as well.
You’re right, but Joyce also did not give Joe an answer or express the fact that she needs time to think. He’s been left in limbo. Joyce is free to do what she will, but she has objectively failed to communicate with Joe in a meaningful capacity and left him mid-conversation. It’s not like she went “Thank you for letting me know how you feel Joe, can I have some time to think about it and get back to you?” She went “Uhhhhh” and ran out of the room to do… Something, I guess?
Joyce putting together her Frankensteined-together Fundamentalist Christian Home Schooled Lesbian Inclusive Model of Sex is pretty on-brand, I gotta admit.
I like this comment, because this storyline got brought forward by five years and is now definitely happening, and you’re still already tired of the waiting.
Sounds like Joyce and Dorothy are gonna have to talk with each other about what their definitions of sex are. They both need to get better at communicating in general.
hm. Dorothy really needs it not to have been sex. Maybe so she doesn’t have to think about her wanting to have been Joyce’s first. She was expecting to see Joyce’s o-face, was surprised being asked to leave, and was frustrated afterwards.
I took it as Dorothy didnt want to be Joyce’s first because to her mind, her and Joyce kissing while having boyfriends is kinda cheating, but her and Joyce having sex while having boyfriends is no-grey-area-about-it cheating.
True, but they DID have boyfriends when Joyce suggested it (and Dorothy agreed) on the morning of the protest. They were only blocked by other people existing.
I actually more or less take her at face value here. I would not consider that to be sex. I would be pretty annoyed at somebody thinking it was. It was queer and it was interesting and it involved sexuality but it was not sex. No one in the situation at the time considered it to be sex. And on top of that Dorothy seems attached to an ordered universe where things are what she expects them to be and behave how they’re supposed to, so redefining something important like that in a way that deliberately misunderstands her intent is probably bonus annoying.
Remember Dorothy’s someday I will date someone who isn’t a virgin comment? I do not think the idea of being someone’s first matters to her.
I do think the idea of fucking Joyce to prove it appears to be a very hot proposition. Or maybe just the idea of fucking Joyce in general. But I think the idea of fucking someone so into you they overcome their shame about it is probably hot in general. It seems like it would be hot in general.
Like, it’s screwed up of Joyce not to inform about developments with Joe but as things stand? *Dorothy* is currently at the strongest risk to be hurt right now.
And that is an interesting possibility that had not occurred to me before. Which I must say… is quite tenable.
Not accounting for Becky because we’re still not sure how that’s gonna go and it’d be just our luck to be 3 for 3 with having none of the expected parties lose their shit.
Yep, it’s been happening from around 12:00-2:00am EST for me for a few days now. Doesn’t seem to happen any other time though. Maybe that’s when the site gets the most traffic?
They’re the plain Oatmeal of DOA couples.
Not Taboo enough to be interesting, not Hot enough to be titillating, and not really cute enough to be heartwarming.
Kinda same tbh, Joyce is just kinda horny as all hell while in the background where’s not even on a climb of narritive tension anymore, the moment’s passed and I feel like we should be tense that the friendgroup’s entire dynamic should be balancing on a knife’s edge right now but instead it’s just been these two casually pacing around like it’s no big deal flirting out in the open while occassionally a friend of theirs sees them but coincidentally doesn’t have the time to stick around
Kinda gives off the vibe that Joyce just straight up doesn’t give a shit about how this would affect her friends at all, not even enough to want to get ahead of the narritive before they read about them in the school paper
The latter paragraph is exactly what I was thinking. This story arc has really made Joyce act like a bad person, which is why it feels so jarring to me.
And the thing is, she’s done stuff like this before. The bit with Jacob stands out in my mind, but in that case as soon as the situation hit a gap, Jacob IMMEDIATELY slammed her with chastisement and consequences because he realized it was wrong. This story line is waiting for Joyce to acknowledge it herself, and she’s just NOT.
It suggests that without somebody to “Hold her leash” (pardon the expression), Joyce doesn’t know right from wrong. It was ‘God’ before, then it was Dorothy or her other friends. But now there’s really only Sarah willing to stand up and say she’s wrong and that’s not enough.
I feel like Joyce lacks the ability to self-regulate.
And because she has been acting like a bad person, I like her less and don’t care about her story as much.
I keep hoping that the comic will switch focus for a good long while. Focus on other people and ignore Joyce and Dorothy. We can revisit them in a couple of weeks when there is actually something interesting happening.
Joyce has finally become the horny monster we were promised we would eventually see about a decade ago! The crash is as inevitable here as it was in the other universe, might as well enjoy the high while it lasts. Makes the inevitable more narratively satisfying.
Also, to me it seems obvious that Joyce is using her newly unleashed horny powers to distract her brain from guilt, like, you know, we saw her do literally the night before. Obviously Joyce cares about how this will affect Becky. She cares so much she is seeking any pleasing route away from thinking about it, lest it overwhelm or completely disable her ability to function. Ahhhh I love this arc so much it’s so many character traits coming home to roost in a perfect storm of bad decisions that are all completely understandable in context with what we’ve been shown before.
I just don’t see the inevitable as narratively satisfying. The narratively satisfying crash can only come from like five places (Walky, Joe, Dorothy herself, Joyce herself, or a family member), and it’s clearly not going to be 4/5 of those options. I just don’t see Becky melting down as narratively satisfying. I get her issues, I just don’t think that Dorothy and Joyce should give a damn when it comes to a private relationship. Joe and Walky’s reaction should’ve been given a damn about because their feelings on the issue could’ve been really interesting (and might still be, but it’s for OUR eyes only and not for the other characters), Joyce’s parents can devastate her if they want to be evil.
But it’s not Becky’s business, Becky’s trauma REALLY doesn’t matter here. It matters in that it’ll be an explosive response maybe and I guess that’s finally something happening, but if, in real life, you had a friend that exploded on you for discovering your sexuality and not being attracted to them then you would have every right to tell them to piss off regardless of their trauma. And that’s where I’m at.
I honestly think Becky is gonna be okay with it. Maybe Joyce will freak out anyway because it’s not the reaction she expected? There’s gotta be some trace of a guilty conscience there. Maybe Sarah will instigate Joyce’s crash-out somehow…
Joyce is a character where almost any significant change in her behavior or lifestyle has been met with resistance and/or self doubt. We get to see explicitly her flip out and work through every change in her life, from needing to wear glasses, to having to be convinced to use birth control to slowly becoming more comfortable with her sexuality in her relationship with Joe. It was such a big milestone just for her to lie in bed topless with him. But then we started speeding up. She gave him a handjob in the lounge, She gave him a blowie in the room. Now she’s just casually talking about Fucking like she’s some sorta Billie. It feels like too much too fast. I feel like it’s weird that nobody’s talking about this change. Most of all Joyce herself. She’s been pretty introspective as of late but now it feels like we’re skipping past and speedrunning some of what should be significant milestones of her character, in favor of giving lesbian fan service to the people who really like this ship. (and just to clarify I’m using fan service in the normal definition, not the big titty anime way)
Joyce’s actions in this arc are entirely consistent with how she’s always acted. She’s nice, she’s horny, and she does whatever she wants. It’s just that normally “whatever Joyce wants” is a good thing so we don’t really notice it.
Honestly, the more the two of them stress out about Becky, the more likely it seems to me that Becky’s reaction will mainly be “about time you two realized it” and “welcome to the club”
Yeah, but don’t forget that Becky’s initial revelation to Joyce that she was a lesbian was through her kissing Joyce, and then being devastated that Joyce didn’t reciprocate her feelings.
How would Becky feel knowing that not only is Joyce now also into girls, but apparently she wasn’t good enough to be Joyce’s girlfriend?
At this point, I think she’s pretty firmly grounded in her relationship with Dina. Her “rivalry” with Dorothy is more of a joke than anything. She’ll probably be fine with it. Joyce might still feel like she’s betrayed Becky somehow, and maybe she’ll realize that she is feeling guilty about what happened, despite the lack of consequences.
Becky will, at minimum, get custom t-shirts made. At maximum, huge party along the lines of Dina’s Birthday Bash back when Becky was still DeSanto’s consultant.
I wanted to say it’s remarkable how boring these 2 have to be for me to go “ohhh my goddd get on with it then” about the prospect of gay sex but reflecting on overall DoA couples I might just not care for the way Willis writes relationships. I think Ruth/Billie was a high point that hasn’t been reached since. And parts of the build-up I usually like – I randomly reread Joe’s confession recently (banger honestly) and Sal opening up to Danny over time was really good, as is a lot of the Dorothy/Joyce stuff (I love pining! Pining rules!). I’m just not sure that the actual relationships since then have been very compelling to me.
… I will say that Ruth/Jason gets a pass. There’s no prospect of it being a great romance or anything, they’re just chilling. He literally doesn’t care she’s hung up on her ex. She’s mean to him. What more could I want from a background relationship that I frankly want to get broken up eventually anyways bc I’m rooting for Ruth & Jennifer still
I guess Becky and Dina get a pass too they’re just sort of an institution… Though I do wish Dina would get more to do as a character outside of her role as Becky’s girlfriend.
Danny’s in a similar spot. He’s been sort of stagnant for a while now, because he’s just been doing well what with being himself and having a cool girlfriend, which is nice but also. Very boring. Can he say something really insensitive and destroy a relationship again, that was fun
Honestly, there have been moments I’ve liked in Joyce and Dorothy’s relationship, just like there have been moments I’ve liked in the other relationships in DoA.
The problem I have is that DoJo’s getting a lot more time without a corresponding increase in such moments… essentially, it feels like one of those animes that outran the source material and is trying to pad it out with filler.
Well, also that it often seems like one of those “will they or won’t they” plots, except that the answer’s already been made clear, so there’s no tension.
Still, I’m happy for the people who find it cute enough that all of this works for them. Just wish I could be one of them…
While Joyce is generally aware that poly / ethically non-monogamous relationships exist, she certainly didn’t picture that for herself (or ethically / non-cheating get together with Dorothy), so until Dot or Beck ask her how things went with Joe, it’s the furthest thing from her mind. Right now she’s living her new hyperfixation – sexing up the Dorothy.
It’s pretty typical of Joyce to only focus on the thing in front of her. She should tell Dorothy and it’s not fair to her that she hasn’t, but it’s not in her mind right now.
I don’t think she should. neither she nor Dorothy are in the place emotionally to make a considered thought about that. They were in the middle of establishing the nature of their relationship when Joe put that offer on the table. Joyce made it clear that Dorothy is the one she’s with now. Joe’s just going to have to wait. Dorothy is already super stressed about the Becky situation. Now is not the time to bring up a poly situation. Not fair to Dorothy. Not fair to Joe. Not fair to herself.
In a sense I guess, but she’s going to have to pretty soon, right?
Shouldn’t Dorothy know if Joyce is actually thinking about staying with Joe in some kind of poly thing before settling too much into this new relationship?
No. Joyce isn’t sure she actually wants that. Heck, if Joyce has a Big Think and decides ‘no, I’m not a poly person’ she can tell Joe ‘no, sorry, it’s not happening’ and it’s fine for that to just not come up with Dorothy.
Joyce is not in a romantic relation with Joe right now. She is solely in a romantic relation with Dorothy, and she can do all the things that are part of that, including physical intimacy.
It is difficult for Joe of course. He’s kind of at loose ends. But Joyce has made it clear that the relation with Dorothy has priority, and right now, that means Joe’s question is in the ‘To Do’ list until Joyce and Dorothy have figured themselves out enough that Joyce can take the mental bandwidth to actually figure out ‘Hey… do I want this’?
And when she figures out ‘Hey, Yes, I want this’ it is completely fair for Joyce to wait for Dorothy to be in an emotional state that she can give the notion a fair consideration. Which I will very much note Dorothy is not in right now.
It would be a horrible idea for Joyce to bring up the Joe suggestion right now. Like I said, not fair to anyone invovled. it would stress out an already stressed and panicking Dorothy further, it would mean Joe’s chances are actually very small since Dorothy is not in a place where she can seriously consider him, and it’s not fair to Joyce since she has to put this big emotional job on top of all the other stuff she needs to handle.
It is. Because right now, nothing happened. Joe made an offer to Joyce that Joyce isn’t even sure she wants to propose to Dorothy. She is not dating Joe, she is not going to kiss Joe or do anything romantic with him. Again, if Joyce decides that her own answer is ‘no, I don’t want to go Poly’ she is completely justified in just not telling Dorothy at all. You are not obliged to tell your partner every time someone made a romantic pass at you. You’re just obliged to not actually take them up on it without discussing and getting consent for your partner.
And ‘we’ll talk later, promise’ is not taking him up on it.
Technically, she has yet to break up with Joe. She was in the process of doing so until Joe put the idea of dating both him and Dorothy on the table, and she was then interrupted by the whole Becky situation.
Also, a lot more has happened between Joyce and Joe than between Joyce and Dorothy. Yes, Joyce and Dorothy have kissed, but she’s also kissed Joe, and the two have done a lot more sexual things together.
To suddenly snub Joe in favour of Dorothy would be unfair to Joe, and to leave Dorothy in the dark about the potential throuple is unfair to Dorothy, the least Joyce can do is bring Dorothy up to date with the situation as it currently stands and then decide from there how they should proceed.
I’m sorry, I categorically disagree that Joyce is under no obligation to tell Dorothy. You’re right that nothing has happened but Dorothy would want to know Joe proposed that. Because even if Joyce doesn’t want that, Dorothy would want to know what Joyce wants in that regard. Having sex with Dorothy and then hitting her with that information would make her feel like Joyce sat on it so that the information wouldn’t jeopardize her chances of getting into Dorothy’s pants.
I suppose it’s a subjective matter. I would not feel slighted if an SO left something like that to themselves while they figure out what to do with it and we’ve got other fish to fry, and I wouldn’t feel it would taint any physical affection happening in the meantime either. But others might. And I can’t really say ‘you’re wrong to feel that way’.
I suppose the one whose opinion matters about it is Dorothy. If it turns out she actually would have insisted to get that information as soon as it was there, then, yeah, Joyce done goofed. if Dorothy is just happy that she didn’t have to deal with that emotional harrowing while she was still handling Becky, yay Joyce did well.
But I feel people are making it an ‘Objective Big Deal’, and fully expecting Consequences to Ensue. And the only correct answer of how big a deal it is is ‘however big a deal Dorothy feels like making of it.
If it was some uninvolved person who made a pass at me, then I agree, it’s not necessarily important to bring it up immediately, even if I was considering suggesting a poly thing based on it.
But this isn’t some random uninvolved person and it wasn’t out of nowhere. It was part of their joint agreement to dump the boyfriends and get together. Which Joyce now maybe thinking she doesn’t have to.
Also, if Dorothy is really in such a fragile state that she can’t have that conversation, maybe this isn’t a great time to have sex with her for the first time. (Or, go further with sex than they’ve done before, if you want to take Joyce’s pov.)
Why does someone have to lose? They can agree to have a differing definition of sex and of the meaning of a specific situation. Joyce cares about her first sexual experience and who it was with (even if that’s informed by fundie thinking, she can still think it matters when her first sex with Dorothy was), and that scene was more meaningful for Joyce than for Dorothy. It doesn’t have to carry the same meaning for Dorothy, because it was not necessarily designed to be sex between them (even if they subconsciously wanted to), and because Dorothy doesn’t put meaning on first times as much (or not anymore, her first time has been a while and is no longer relevant).
It’s very weird to me that there are people in the comments who are insistent that Joe and Joyce are definitely basically broken up and that it’s all over but the crying. Do you honestly think Willis would have Joe bring up the possibility of polyamory, then spend multiple strips addressing it as a serious possibility, and then do nothing with that? The writing is on the wall that these three are going to make a go of it as a hinge relationship. Whether it’s successful or not is another thing entirely, but that’s where the road is headed.
Wish we were less meandering on our way there, though.
Only one of the three people involved expressed any interest in polyamory at all, and even they felt like they were brining it up as a consolation prize rather than something they positively wanted. Not “I was willing to try monogamy for you, but if you’re no longer interested in that, I’d honestly be more comfortable with something more open”, but “I hope you’ll keep dating me” too”.
Was Joyce’s “I’m not a hussy” vestiges of her upbringing temporarily preventing her from acknowledging what she truly wants? Or was she just using language she was familiar with to clumsily describe her own lack of personal interest in polyamory when the idea was hastily presented to her with no warning?
Personally, I don’t see the polycule option working out. I don’t even see evidence that Joyce is really considering it to the point where she even needs to discuss it with Dorothy. And while Joyce cares about and is attracted to Joe, she’s also made it as clear as she can that she chose Dorothy. The inevitable breakup was just interrupted by reasonable concerns about being publicly outed before she was ready, and will be concluded later.
If handled well, the strip can still reinforce that polyamory would be a completely valid option if all people are enthusiastically onboard, while eventually determining that these specific people are not all onboard.
To me Joyce was very clearly having a kneejerk reaction to a possibility to something she had not considered. Narratively, it’s boring to bring poly up as a possibility and start discussing it if nothing is going to come of it. It’s laying cards on the table that you don’t actually intend to play. It’s weak.
And of course I don’t think poly is going to work out. It’s going to crash and burn. And I’m looking forward to seeing it when it happens. It’d certainly be far more entertaining than watching this graham cracker ass couple and their happy snuggly monogamy.
It is pretty funny that a few strips ago people were like “Joyce your definition of sex can be your own, no one has to dictate that for you”.
Now we’re at Dorothy being all “That wasn’t sex and that moment was only important to you because of fundie nonsense” and I guess Joyce is just rolling with it.
Who knows, this could(eventually, somewhere down the line) end up fun and toxic after all.
Uh-huh. That’s definitely what’s happening here. Just Dorothy “correcting” Joyce on whether or not they’ve had sex and telling her it would be stipid to consider the laundry incident sex.
Definitely no nervousness from Dorothy around the idea of having sex with Joyce, and she’s definitely calling Joyce’s definition of sex stupid, not the part where on some level Joyce wanted to give her her virginity.
This is definitely also the last conversation either of them are ever going to have about what counts as sex. Topic closed! Joyce “loses” and gives up on having a definition of sex that includes what Becky and Dina do, as well as what she and Dorothy are going to be doing.
Also tbqh, whichever part Dorothy is talking about, I still wish she had been gentler about her phrasing. But I do think she’s high anxiety right now and probably not at her best in terms of kind phrasing, so. I get it?
My first time was awkward and mortifying in a hotel room with an ex I stayed with far longer than I should have because I didn’t believe I was ever going to get anything better. Caring about who you lose your virginity to is incredibly overrated.
I disagree with Dorothy here. While veneration of chastity is a fundie thing, you don’t have to venerate the idea of chastity to recognize that it’s better for one’s first time to be a fun, intimate, safe experience in order to easier pave the way for a future healthy sex life.
But that’s not the point here. Joyce had – after realizing that sex isn’t just PIV – a good first experience with Joe. So whichever was the first that counted, it *was* an intimate, fun and safe experience.
So, her arguing that Dorothy was first is more likely to be fundie thinking than “i want this to be my first because it means my first time was great“. The scenes with Joe seem to have been fun and safe as well.
Yeah her wanting her first time to be with Dorothy is very blatantly fundie thinking lol. Joyce’s mindset is that Dorothy is her true love so obviously it’s important that her first time have been with her.
Is that fundie thinking or rom com thinking?
Cause I’m not sure the fundies would be okay with having your first time with your True Love, then your second and a bunch more times with someone else.
Having your first be with someone you like isn’t inherently fundie. Wanting to share a personal milestone with someone important to you is normal for almost any activity.
My thoughts on this whole arc are that its alot of tease.
“They kissed think of all the drama!”
– their boyfriends are going to be upset and drama! , except there isnt
– Joe is going to explore the idea of a poly relationship with a fundie Christian, except they dont
– the newspaper story is going to have family consequences for Joyce, except it doesnt
– Becky is going to have this big reaction, except they dont see her
– Joyce has suddenly got way more explicitly horny so now her and Dorothy are going to have sex ….. till something interrupts that
Like I get it can be interesting to set up dominoes, and I get that in comic it hasn’t been that much time. But as a reading experience it feels like alot of “could happen” and eventually one or more of those things needs to actually happen.
Honestly, I am really not looking forward to the Becky interaction because I expect it is just going to be a whole lot of nothing.
a) Becky is fine with it.
Boring but considering Walky and Joe it is also in-line with the story so far.
b) Becky is fine with Joyce/Dorothy but chastises them for the cheating.
Basically Sarah’s response, but like with Sarah I doubt this will last more than a couple of days. They’ve told their boyfriends at this point so there isn’t really anything for them to change.
C) Becky has an inappropriate reaction due to her past feelings for Joyce. This would actually be DRAMA, but it isn’t Drama that I am excited to see. It would do nothing except harm Becky/Dina, a relationship I actually care about, and make me think worse of Becky.
The correct ending to all of those except the very first is “yet”.
See, this sort of thing is why I keep repeating the time frame. The Big Smooch happened yesterday afternoon, Joyce ran out of Joe’s room in a futile attempt to stuff the newspaper back into the printing press maybe half an hour ago, and the situation is still playing out. Yes, it’s playing out way too slowly for your tastes – but the whole thing is still ongoing, not all settled out.
To clarify: I’m pretty convinced that it’s not “the actual mechanics” that Joyce is worried about, but a continuing feeling that it all has to Mean Something in the “Whatever You Do for Love is Correct” internal Hallmark Movie that Joyce is using as a guide to how to navigate all this dating/sex stuff.
Yeah. It matters to Joyce that Dorothy was her first, because Dorothy is her True Love, so all her most significant intimate moments should belong to Dorothy.
Of all the change and development Joyce has had, her view of love and relationships remains rooted in a fundamentally conservative and traditionalist place, and it’s something that has to be challenged and pruned. Another reason I’m in favor of poly with Joe and Dorothy.
I think an alternative explanation is that Joyce wasn’t so much worried about penetrative sex, but rather (with or or without realizing) gravitated towards a type of sex that she could more easily imagine having with Dorothy.
The more it gets brushed aside, the harder the consequences of Joyce’s actions are gunna come crashing in. I’ll get the popcorn, but for now we enjoy this gay calmness
I don’t remember how long I’ve been reading this comic or how many times I’ve re-binged it, but I’m currently simultaneously reading daily and at the point where Blaine gets his shit wrecked by Amber at the AAA.
Just wanted to say the idea of catching back up to this storyline is giving me chills. I can’t wait to experience it in full-speed for the first time.
David, I really appreciate your work. The number of times I’ve seen exact reflections of myself in so many characters in the cast is insane. Thanks so much for all you do.
I’m just gonna say. As someone who’s never experienced those emotions the amount of horny going on here makes this whole arc so alien to me.
*Intellectually*, I have to accept that multitudes of people agreeing that ‘horny makes you do dumb things’ means that yeah, that is a thing. But I just cannot relate at all.
Anyway I hope Sal and Danny are playing a nice game of poker somewhere. Sal calls Danny lame for not even trying to cheat and he surprises her with a sleight-of-hand card trick. They have a nice bonding moment.
I find that poll from a couple weeks ago more and more interesting the longer this goes on. It actually made me reflect on my feelings of interpreting media based on personal bias and how much I treat fictional characters as I would real people.
I hadn’t really thought about it, but yeah, poll, I do think this relationship is slightly doomed because of its origin story. If this were Billie and Ruth, or Danny and Sal, or Becky and Dina, this dialog would be a bunch of fun. As it is, it’s just… foreboding and slightly uncomfortable, for some reason.
I think for a story to work the audience needs to be invested in the stakes. The problem is the story thus far has actively pushed me away from both the Dorothy/Joyce relationship and from them as characters.
This relationship is more doomed by origin story than Billie and Ruth? The one that started with bullying, nonconsensual kissing, and a frigging suicide pact?
I think it’s silly to think of any relationship as doomed by its origin story, but Dorothy and Joyce are not the same people as Billie and Ruth anyway. I can think of a lot of tension points between these two that could cause things to collapse. Billie and Ruth were codependent, but they were able to tough it out and were approaching something healthy when Ruth pulled the plug. What Dorothy and Joyce have, romantically, feels more brittle based on vibes alone. It’s not a condemnation of them, their relationship has a lot more potential to reach a much healthier place much sooner, but I can see a lot of rough waters they’ll have to sail through, and I’m not as confident in their ability to survive it intact than I would have with Billie and Ruth.
It’s definitely not more doomed than Ruth/Billie by origin.
At the same time “a semester and a half of trying to figure out this was even what they wanted”, “fundie programming to overcome” + “trauma and a refusal to actually discuss with her therapist” respectively, “they both think this got started by cheating on their respective boyfriends”, and “despite being best friends, having a hard time communicating well enough to agree on what do next, let alone stuff like ‘did we have sex yet and does that matter?'”. Yeah, that’s incredibly fraught with peril for a couple of dumb kids.
Doomed as a reader (“am I invested in this story? Do I agree that these conclusions feel earned and valid?”) not as a character (“are these people a good pair for one another?”).
…though I’m not sure these two (“repression breaking and immediate excitement”) are a good pair for one another in the way that Dotty and Walky (“being honest and accepted AND meeting in the middle”) or Joyce and Joe (same as Dotty and Walky, trying to be more than you used to be) seemed to be.
I think they’re fine for each other if supremely unexciting to me personally. Like it’s certainly a couple that can exist and there’s nothing immediately objectionable about it, cheating aside. The disconnect, for myself and I suspect others, is that this perfectly fine couple is being treated by the narrative as one of the most important relationships in the strip, on par with Billie/Ruth or Dina/Becky.
Thinking about Joyce not necessarily having fundie brain, just being romantic.
It’s a point, but now I’m thinking that maybe some of thinking is also part of mindset of people that hate divorce, people of much partners, etc…
Where are they going? Back to Joyce’s room? And at a chill walk? The previous strip made me think Dorothy was going to run out of the room and Joyce would have to chase her, but Dorothy’s pose in the first panel here says leisurely stroll… but they DID leave her (and Becky’s) room…
I get that they were nominally looking for Becky, and Becky wasn’t there, but I don’t understand where they’re off to now.
(I still think the conversation in this strip is cute in places, and the places where it’s not interest me, but I am genuinely confused about what’s next on their agenda.
They’re gonna run into more people, so it won’t matter terribly much, but I wish we knew where they were going, and I wish it didn’t feel a bit jarring after the previous strip.)
(And this isn’t just reluctance to admit I might be wrong about the last couple of strips? I’m mostly fine with being wrong! I don’t think Dorothy’s anxiety has completely vanished, either; I think it’s part of why it’s important to her that the laundry room NOT have been sex…
…but that first panel, and the question of where they’re going now, still remains for me. If Dorothy had made a run for it, it wouldn’t matter where she was headed because she’d just be running away, but since the art communicates a more sedate pace, the question of where they’re going becomes more pressing.
I’ll also admit to frustration that the story hasn’t really acknowledged that Joyce running out on Joe was for a “crisis” that completely fizzled out. Because it’s a really bad look for Joyce that she promised to come back and talk to her boyfriend after resolving an issue so that they could continue what is a pretty darn important conversation, to then subsequently break that promise once it’s clear that the resolution has passed. And the narrative is kind of blowing past that.
See, I can defend that, because I do think that going to find Dorothy, explaining the situation, and agreeing on a plan of action were all important, even if the plan of action wound up being “hide all the newspapers in our dorm and then give up once we’ve talked to Daisy”.
But Joyce is definitely doing some sorta object permanence thing where it KIND OF SEEMS like she’s forgotten she left Joe waiting…
They might be about to run directly into him? Which would be fun — he’d have every reason to think Joyce had at LEAST told Dorothy about his offer, right? Meanwhile Dorothy would have every reason to think Joyce had broken up with him.
But I’d still wanna know where these two think they’re going right now, heh.
Well, what’s next on their agenda is easy: They’re currently transitioning from Step 4 (half-ass whatever they were doing) into Step 1 (get so horny they forgot what they were doing).
I think Dorothy’s next checklist item was technically apologize to Asma for being bad at protesting???? And then after that it’s solving systemic problems with our government.
(I remember your cycle though, and that’s where they are in it for sure.)
Oh, to me the previous strip read as Dorothy running back into the room in panic, not out of it. The light from the door seems to be coming from behind her.
This doesn’t make the leisurely stroll make that much more sense, though. Or answer where they’re going. Amber’s, I guess??
Yeah, I meant more like: I could understand the previous energy turning INTO “Dorothy fled the room and Joyce chased her”, not that I thought she was in the process of fleeing the room yesterday, but the leisurely stroll makes it clear that’s not at all what is supposed to have happened, so ??
Ah, my bad! I misread.
Anyways, I think the last panel from yesterday might just be a “heightened for the punchline” type beat – within canon but not to be taken that seriously. (If that’s the case, it’s not Willis best work in that regard, because the scene change feels a little jarring.)
I wish your chase idea had been right…
Also, heh, thanks. It would just make a lot of sense to me and would still have carried these two out into the hallway which is PRESUMABLY being done so that they can run into someone. IDK, maybe tomorrow one of them will say something and I’ll be like OH okay that’s an obvious reason for them to have left Dorothy/Becky’s room in retrospect!
(Joyce doesn’t even need a reason, she’s obviously JUST following Doeothy and trusting that Dorothy knows what she’s doing right now, the rare moment in-strip where I’ll agree that’s what’s happening haha, but Doeothy needs a reason!)
FTR: My current wishlist person for them to run into is Joe.
Also frankly rereading my own comment that is what it sounds like I meant, but I definitely wasn’t actually expecting them to run out yesterday, SO I just misspoke! 🤣
Joyce: I *slurping noises* sorry had to blow Joe real quick, I just *really soft clapping noises* sorry had to give Joe a quick handy, really wanted you to be my first Dorothy. All this time.
Joyce, getting absolutely wrecked by Joe, doggy-style: “It’s really important to me that *erotic yodeling sounds* my first time is *donkey-like braying* is with *construction site noises* you, Dorothy.
Sexy times but the logistics. In Dorothy’s room with Becky hovering out of frame. In Joyce’s room where Sarah might turn a hose on them. Plus a cascade of explanations and consequences awaiting them. The path of true love.
The “weird purity thing” aspect of it is deciding you need to decide whether it was technically sex before you know if it was the first time you did something or not, IMHO.
Right. It can be an important thing, a precious moment between them, but for Joyce it has to be sex because then she lost her virginity to her True Love. And like it’s fine if that’s her definition, but she’s insisting upon it against Dorothy’s wishes because of her own skewed attitude towards love and relationships.
I think Dorothy is probably right that it’s a significant part of why Joyce specifically wants to “give” Dorothy her virginity, and I think being retroactively awarded one (1) Joyce Virginity is making Dorothy feel a lot of things all at once. Some of which are anxiety.
Which in turn is resulting in pretty insensitive phrasing on her part…
I’m still finding myself very confused about Joyce and her attitude towards intimacy.
Webcomic Time is particularly unhelpful here. If we look at things only based on the amount of time that’s passed in-universe, it’s absolutely *wild* how quickly Joyce has moved.
But where is her head at? Is she completely comfortable with any and all intimacy barring “A home run”? Is she comfortable doing anything and everything specifically with Dorothy?
So far the text is not giving any hints that her behavior is performative the way that it was in the runup to the JoJo date. Now, obviously hindsight is 20/20- I can’t say that I saw the performance for what it was at the time- and I obviously don’t want to discount that Joyce might hesitate when the rubber meets the road so to speak.
But if it *isn’t* a performance, if no more story is really given over to Joyce being hesitant- in favor of Dorothy “fucking the fundie out of her”, I *really* wish we could have seen into her head and understood why those hangups have suddenly disappeared.
I think to a certain degree she’s putting on the same performance here. She clearly likes how flustered she can make Dorothy, but when it’s time to actually take action I have to wonder how confident she’d still be.
Don’t remember the exact quote, but there was a line some time back along the lines of “someday, that girl is going to snap and suck like a billion dicks.”
Like I said… yesterday?, I think Joyce, due to her upbringing, has major and very specific hangups about a penis going into her vagina, but it was only yesterday morning that she began to even consider that other things could possibly count as “sex”. Thus she swerves off at the last moment when getting Joe’s dick is imminent, but giving him a handy or a bj or getting fingerbanged by him, or absolutely anything she can do with Dorothy are fine. They’re “sex” by her new definition where she really wants Dorothy to be the first person she had sex with, but not by her old fundie definition where the only s*x is a husband putting his man-dangle into his wife’s kapoodle on their wedding night for the sole purpose of filling God’s quiver.
(Just waiting for the next time Joyce and Joe are about to do the deed, and Joyce goes, “Wait! I don’t think I’m ready for this. How about you put it in my b-hole instead?”)
some of y’all really need to learn the difference between handling something poorly and doing something wrong. almost every character in this strip has rebounded from a previous relationship within days, if not hours, and usually with someone they had kind of a thing with for a while. and that’s fine, it’s not a betrayal, no one is harmed, it’s part of the learning process of how to handle a breakup. but being unskilled at breaking up and bad at expressing yourself isn’t a sin or a crime and it’s not even unethical.
like, take a step back and what’s even happening here. two women who have been flirting for six months kissed during an extremely heightened moment and broke up with their boyfriends the next day. people are treating this like it was an affair that went on for months, but the breakup happening pretty much the instant both of them accepted the other one was on the table.
Not just two women who have been flirting with each other their entire adult lives, but two deeply closeted women who had every reason to discount each other as viable romantic partners until literally placed in a life-or-death situation.
I could understand it somewhat if the criticism was that the plot was a tiny bit contrived in placing Joyce and Dorothy in the exact situation that would make cheating on their boyfriends maximally forgivable. But the fact that half the fandom has overlooked all of that and are treating them like inhuman monsters who deserve to be abandoned by all of their friends makes me wonder if there’s some huge generational divide I’m too old to understand. Has the concept of being closeted become so outdated that people are no longer able to extend even the tiniest bit of grace to people going through a late orientation awakening?
it’s impossible to ignore that this life-or-death situation is one that they ran into, willingly, against the advice of literally everyone around them.
It feels like saying that they were in a life-or-death situation because they were in a parked car on the train tracks when the train is coming and we just witnessed them deliberately stop the car there despite nothing being wrong. They could have just…not done that.
My favorite bit is how the post really dives into Joyce and Dorothy’s innuendo and historical buildup as super important (which, to be clear, it is!), but completely ignores all of Dorothy/Walky and Joyce/Joe’s interactions beyond “they been dating a few days”.
I didn’t read the old comics, but I’ve heard enough to speculate that this is a new, more realistic take on anti-Joyce
This was me once, a switch flipped after I realized “either there is no hell or I’m already going, might as well have fun”. She may go wild for a while. If she’s like I was at that age, that registers as “well if I’m not good by [programmed puritanical definitions], then I guess I better embrace being evil and bad”. She may have thrown away her shitty moral compass without realizing she still kind of needs functional one to not get hurt/hurt others while wandering in these sexy, evil woods.
(But damn is she ever going to have some awesome sex on the way)
Also to be clear, I don’t think she’s made huge fuck-ups yet because I am not a puritan (see above) who think she’s ruined as a person for screwing up (and around) at 18 years old
I mean, with both Blaine and Toedad exiting stage right several books back, I am not sure there is anyone else left who deserves to be deleted from the cast list like that.
Related to the very strange ongoing reaction to this arc, Ive invented a new game! hit the random button until you find a strip with Joyce doing something 100% absolutely Really Fucking Gay. So far my records six random strips!
I love it specifically because my girlfriend is also a generally very sweet and polite autistic nerd girl who has mastered the Tactical Horniness Nuke and it bluescreens me *just like that*. absolutely nailed the facial expression in that last panel
Tactical Horniness Nuke… with your permission, I’m gonna have to remember that one. That is the perfect description for what we all just witnessed here.
Dorothy: “I got this for my birthday. I thought it was just a joke. But now I think it may be useful.” (Takes out an enormous strap-on and begins fumbling with buckles)
Joyce: “….”
There is something to be said for the first time you do /anything/ noteworthy being special, especially when the something can have a lot of emotional weight. So although the way chastity and virginity and “purity” get treated is a whole lot of bullshit, someone’s first time having sex can still be very special once we shake all the bullshit off. Or it can be nothing-in-particular, of course.
Your first time having sex can be a special and memorable event, there’s no denying that, but fixating on it being with the “right” person is absolutely engaging in regressive thinking.
I’m still reeling from the comment I read a few days ago in which someone claimed that Joyce gave “enthusiastic consent” during the laundry fiasco. In what fucking world is someone repeatedly saying “I do not do this thing” “I am unsure if I want to do this” “I am very uncomfortable” translate into enthusiastic consent?? if anything it’ nearly the opposite.
Now, I am not going to claim that Dorothy sexually assaulted Joyce, it’s not as bad as that extreme, but what she did was dubious at best. And now that this storyline is clearly saying that it was sex and not just assisted masturbation (or at least in Joyce’s heart it is); that makes it worse.
I really hope we can all agree that a sexual encounter where one person is repeatedly hesitant and the other continues anyway is walking a dangerous line. “Hesitant person ended up liking it anyway” is something that might happen, I know for a fact that in real life some encounters ended like that. But we cannot ignore that it can also go the other way very easily and very quickly.
“Hesitant person ended up liking it anyway” does not retroactively make it enthusiastic consent.
People really like to minimize that what Dorothy did there was kind of scummy, even though Dorothy being willing to do something kind of scummy makes her more interesting lol. It’s a dubious situation that adds some texture to her character.
People at the time “really liked” to say it was literally sexual assault.
A lot of people found the sequence extremely triggering and the comment section became completely radio active with all the folks having trauma responses and basically taking that out on each other.
I’m just… not terribly surprised some folks have gone all the way out the other side?
It was a terrible time to be in the comments, no matter which “side” you were on.
(And I do mean “all the people having trauma responses”. Because some of the people claiming that Joyce wasn’t consenting were also functionally saying she was incapable of consent because of all the power Dorothy had over her, and that was ALSO triggering for other commenters.
Like, there were triggered people on both sides, is what I’m saying. There was a lot of nastiness on both sides. It sucked.)
Oh yeah, I remember that era making the worst of the sicko/paladin fights look like playground slapfights by comparison. I got BLASTED and accused of homophobia for taking a position essentially similar to what Dot just said above.
Predatory Lesbian Stereotype, I bet. Which… you know, is a real thing, and I do understand being hypersensitive to it, but……… yeah.
Everyone was extremely on edge and hostile and the longer it went on, the worse it got.
Which makes me REALLY hope we aren’t going to revisit the issue, even though yeah, Dorothy WAS, on-paper, canonically, motivated by some dubious things.
Was she trying to molest Joyce? No. Her attraction to Joyce was way too buried for her to have been trying to do that. But she literally said out loud with her mouth that she hoped it would lead Joyce to stop being interested in Joe, and she also muttered (still out loud with her mouth) that she wanted to prove to Roz that she wasn’t sex-negative, and she also approached Joyce in the first place after being very visibly bitter and miserable about having talked Walky into dating Lucy, so…
Joyce processed the whole thing as being very loving, and I do think that once things got started, Dorothy was clearly feeling a lot of affection for Joyce. I do think she at least thought the “stop Joyce from being interested in Joe” motivation was benevolent…
And all of that is interesting and complicated and potentially ripe for character conflict — but the dubcon aspect was so traumatic for so many people.
So, yeah. I really do hope we aren’t going to revisit that story beat too much, just for the sake of the comments.
I don’t think the storyline is clearly saying it was sex. Joyce has decided it was sex (and seems quite happy with that). Dorothy isn’t accepting that definition.
I really don’t see Joyce deciding after the fact that it really was her first sex with her beloved Dorothy makes it worse. She’s making the decision to call it sex well after she was clearly happy with it.
First two panels especially relevant, but so is the last one.
Joyce isn’t just some random person. She is a recovering fundamentalist Christian, and, like many of them — perhaps especially women, but certainly not only women (Willis has talked about feeling some of this themself)… it’s been more than just a little bit difficult for her to give enthusiastic consent.
Which is what I think Willis intended that storyline to be about: absolutely complicated by Dorothy’s motivations, which were dubious at the time and retroactively more so, for sure, but…
I don’t think enthusiastic consent, from Joyce, would have looked any different than what we got. Because of her hangups, that was as close as she could get, and she didn’t experience what happened next as anything even a little bit bad.
All of which is, you know, unfortunate. As I mentioned above, the storyline was really triggering for a lot of people. I doubt Willis anticipated that? Could be wrong. If it were me, and I had anticipated that specific reaction, I know I would’ve felt the need to put a content warning on that storyline.
Also? Really don’t like the (presumably unintentional) implication of “Joyce deciding it was sex makes it worse”. Rape is not sex, and all sexual assault is horrific, so.
ALSO I THINK THESE TWO ARE REALLY CUTE AND HAVE GREAT CHEMISTRY.
I respect folks who disagree but yeah, them being Canon is all my DoA Christmases come at once and I am still riding high off it, other commentary aside.
Man being on the Patreon has really fucked up my sense of time, even worse than it already was. I forgot what today’s page was and saw it like “damn we’re still on this? Hasn’t it been like three days?”
First one was a Presbyterian girl from Iowa. Bonafide upright citizen type. She brought out the cuffs on the first date.
Thought it was an isolated thing. She was just into that stuff or maybe exploring. Then I became a FWB to a Mormon chick….my junk still shrinks from PTSD when hearing hymns.
Okay so this right here. This is why I don’t think Joyce will take Joe up on his offer, or if she does it just won’t work out. Cause the feelings Joyce has for Dorothy very clearly vastly eclipse whatever she feels for Joe. I mean with him when it comes to sex she’s nervous, yet with Dorothy she just flat out says “Guess you’re gonna have to fuck it out of me.” in this page. Like she is NOT that sexually confident with Joe AT ALL. Plus if you look at when she was thinking about what she would say to him in breaking up, she brought up how she likes who SHE is when she’s with him. And how he makes HER feel important. So the top two things she could think of that made her sad about the break up were things Joe made her feel about herself. Nothing that she liked about HIM.
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>:3
*plays “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails on hacked muzak*
Bloodhound Gang’s “The Bad Touch” swells in the background.
You and me baby ain’t nothin but mammals, so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel…
An excellent music choice on this day.
aahhhh she wants to feel dorothy from the inside!
but wait. do they really want to get closer to god?
(we had a local radio staition i the early oughts that was licensed for christian rock, freq107, they took that to mean any rock/ metal /alternative music that had the god in it, including the NIN entire discigraphy!, best station the city had till they got cracked down on and had to stick to music that actually claimed to be christian rock, they were off the air a year later)
I’m imagining a reworked version of “I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair”…
YOU FUCK THAT POINDEXTER JOYCE, YOU FUCK THAT POINDEXTER GOOD AND HARD
If there’s one thing literature has taught me, it’s not just the point but the middle as well, sometimes even the ring. And not just the dexter but the sinister as well.
Even the thumb has its place.
Zappa had something to say about that as well
That would either be either “Dinah-Moe-Humm”, “Wind Up Working In A Gas Station” or the never released “Swallow My Pride”…in this context, I am presuming that you are implying the 1st one…
The foreshadowing…
Joyce was always going to fuck the gay poindexter. The only question was which gay poindexter.
Also, @Birion: I usually go with ring and middle, actually. The pointer is good for precision and speed, but lacks the power for the really good stuff.
Climbers know this as well.
Now this, *this* should be delightful.
Andale, toro! Andale!
That smile. Perfection.
I love how much of an utter happy horndog Joyce is becoming here, it’s utterly adorable xD
Joyce isn’t being a horndog, per se. She’s being a seductress. Dorothy, on the other hand….
Yes, it’s so cute. She just filled with pure happiness to be lustful and to inspire lust. It’s great revenge on her horrible mother and the fundie upbringing, “living well.”
Gee Wilikers!!
Gee Willis-kers?
And we’re back to doing this, eh?
How many comics until we pretend there will be consequences until Willis edges us again. Any takers?
Which will happen first, we pretend there’s consequences, or Dorothy issues Joyce another command?
Consequences for what?
I don’t know why y’all are surprised. It’s a comic.
When the comic builds up to consequences, the funniest option is to yank them away – only to drop them when we least expect it.
It happened with Joe too. Lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth only for Joe to completely defuse the situation, his calm reaction being the joke (an unexpected result contrary to expectation). Willis built up the expectation to make the reversal land harder. It’s a basic writing technique.
Now he’s doing it again. I don’t think he’ll repeat the joke, but since he’s using the same sort of buildup, I’m guessing he’s going for another ironic contrast as the payoff. I can think of a few Becky reactions that would qualify, so I guess we’ll see.
Except that only works when it’s unexpected. When you telegraph yanking away the consequences and do it repeatedly, it falls flat. Which is a problem a lot of us have with this arc.
That said, I do fully expect the buildup around them being scared to tell Becky means she won’t react badly.
If Becky is totally cool with it after all this build-up it will be *amazing*, though.
I guess. Isn’t it kind of the expected result now though?
When it comes down it to, the whole situation only really had five potential consequences of this whole event:
1) Joe gets hurt – Resolved in an expected way. Joe is fine with the situation. Overall, handled well (if only because Joe has grown a lot).
2) Walky gets hurt – Resolved through punchline. Walky walks down the path of self-destruction. Overall, handled very badly (seriously Dorothy…).
3) Joyce’s family – On hold, but referred to repeatedly. Foreboding newspaper situation threatens future problems.
4) Friend’s opinions – Several catered to. Sal doesn’t care. Jennifer has opinions. Presumedly more to come.
5) Becky’s feelings – Delayed and delayed. Possibly setting us up for a punchline though I’d argue that since the Walky part of it had this kind of setup, revealing what’s happening to Becky may actually be bad.
So 4/5 were catered to one way or another, with the last one clearly being intentionally delayed. I’m sure there’s other issues that cropped up (such as Amazi-Girl’s injuries and the fears those who protested are feeling, but i’d argue these are tangent to the relationship in question here).
What are people actually expecting here in terms of consequences? A fight? Fists flying? Death? Lot of shoutiness? Someone running away in tears? Declarations of revenge? One of the other billions of cliches you get in shittier writing/daytime television?
Consequences are happening. Just turns out things ain’t simple and instantaneous. They’ve been publicly outed. The whole thing is fueling Walky’s self-destruction while he gets treated like a joke. You can be damn sure Joyce’s mum is going to have opinions on this. Dorothy is doing all of this while she knows Amber is recuperating and that certainly fuels her self-worth issues. And probably some other stuff.
I get that people don’t like how these two got together, but please don’t insist that there haven’t been consequences just because they aren’t the consequences you wanted.
I think Joyce’s family is gonna be a big deal, but I don’t think it counts as a consequence in this situation. Joyce’s mom would flip out if she saw DoJo kissing in any context. The choices that DoJo made, of getting together the way they did at the time they did with the relationships they had, is irrelevant. The only way Joyce could prevent her mom from crashing out would be to 1. never publicly post anything about her non-straight relationships, or 2. never come out of the closet at all.
Getting together the way they did, the time they did, is precicely why there is a picture of them on the front page of their college news paper meaning they have no control over when and how this news comes to te attention of anyone in their family.
I dunno, can you imagine a when and how that results in Mrs. Brown being normal about it? It’s gonna happen sooner because it was at the protest, but it would’ve happened some day, and it would be just as terrible then.
I mean the other possibility was that they never see each other again. Once Joyce isn’t at the university anymore Carol doesn’t know where she lives.
What were we expecting? There’s no need to be overly dramatic about it. No death. No beatings. No dramatic declarations of revenge.
One of the boys involved to be upset about being cheated on? Kind of like Sarah was, but on their own behalf and thus not quickly defused by Joe.
Pretty sure Walky’s upset right now. It’s just his coping mechanism is broken.
Yet another strip that might be kinda cute if they had cleared the whole poly thing up already??
Still cute.
Yes, still very cute. They are just cartoon freshmen who dated boys for a few days. Some people are overreacting so bizarrely, as if they were real people breaking up 20 year marriages with kids and houses.
i don’t think it is particularly accurate or charitable to assume that cheating on their boyfriends to begin with has to be the reason for someone to be unnerved, uncomfortable, or worried by their displays of affection given the circumstances. this level of dismissiveness towards expressing discomfort towards casual inconsiderate or unkind behavior in a narrative is weird, actually. yes, some people have been entirely too bigoted regarding this storyline. but that does not appear to be the case here.
I understand this is a comic n all but despite it’s occassional fantastical elements to dismiss them as “just cartoon freshmen” feels reductive as hell with the story that’s been told with them up to this point.
Like them cheating isn’t some final like punchline and people are incredibly invested in these characters collective story so ofcourse people are going to care when two of the leading characters cheat on the two characters that didn’t even believe they were capible of love until they had met them, only for the narritive tension to suddenly screech to a halt as our two core leads spend their morning just casually wandering around after only trying to get ahead of the news of them very publicly cheating once, before then seemingly giving up instead of just talking to their friends in any meaningful, and in Joyce’s case not even considering how this could affect their friends at all.
Well said.
So why should we get invested in this relationship?
I’m gonna give it 6 months of their time before I take it seriously.
Some of us may be dead by then.
Still cute. Just barely started exploring.
What is there to clear up exactly? The way I read it, regardless of any potential poly development Joe pitched, it was pretty clear Joyce chose Dorothy. They broke up. Joe even admitted he doesn’t think he can compete with Dorothy and just wants a fraction of Joyce’s love and attention. Any potential poly conversation as stated should be for later, but Joyce doesn’t even know if she wants that. I think the problem is that the breakup kind of ended to cleanly so it feels ambiguous but Joe’s expression in the final panel of that strip isn’t the face of a man confident he still has a girlfriend and Joyce is very clearly operating under no assumption she’s still with Joe.
Feel bad for Joe. I do, but Joyce and Dorothy can probably be cute and fuck as free and clear as two bi chicks can when one is deathly afraid of her gay roommate finding out. Turns out that’s not much.
Joyce’s nervous “yeah” when Dorothy referred to Joe as her ex implies Joyce is very much of the opinion she didn’t break up with him yet. Don’t deny the implication is that’s probably the route she’s heading down but she didn’t actually do it (more importantly doesn’t think she did).
That’s putting a lot on a “Yehh?”
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-16/01-not-so-smooth-criminals/splash/
Which could mean anything from “Am I still with him?” to “Saying ex-boyfriend feels weird cause it just happened.” or literally anything else. Not saying Joyce won’t consider Joe’s proposal, it’s even very likely she still has feelings for him and would like to date him and Dorothy, but she’s broke up with him. That’s what happened. She said it when they left the paper.
I kinda just don’t like in this story where we’re already being exceptionally critical of the circumstances around these two dating we’re also finding reasons to undercut the developments when they actually make them.
I only think it’s very messed up that Joe’s created a situation where he’s likely clinging to hope while Joyce wants to fuck her gf without giving him a second thought. He’s maybe too good for her in this scenario.
That’s a valid interpretation. I cant see the part where she says they broke up. She says “we informed our boys” which I read as purposely dodging what actually happened.
I’d argue that we still don’t know if Joyce considers them broken up (or more accurately there’s two opposite interpretations).
I agree that current story keeps undercutting their development. I would prefer some clarification.
I would argue that based on everything she’s said and done, Joyce very much does NOT consider herself and Joe broken up.
I subscribe to this take.
Joe is 100% too good for her.
His whole issue was: “My father is a cheating horndog so I will be too and I will never deserve a serious relationship”
First he dealt with this by pursuing casual hookups exclusively and by adopting an objectifying misogynistic attitude. The misogyny was a problem, but it was addressed in the comic. He was condemned, faced consequences, repented, and chose to act differently.
He still thinks poorly of himself though, which explains why he doesn’t seem to think at all about himself. Joyce cheats on him and he goes “I just want you to have what you want”.
At some point I hope he realizes that he is a good person and doesn’t need to keep dragging himself for his Father’s actions.
He said he wanted to keep his place in Joyce’s heart, and I think he meant he would like his relationship with Joyce to stay as much as possible the same.
So he already thinks of himself, just not enough (maybe he should have followed when Joyce left). I also think he sincerely isn’t jealous, or thought about it and saw/thought it was a bit silly.
Or at least it would be coherent. He did look sad, but it would be logical too if it was out of fear…
What consequences? He treated women like crap, and managed to get caught in a public way. He had his little list go viral, leading a lot of women to feel really bad and probably suffer all sorts of bullying and abuse. He had what appeared to be extremely eager and very consensual sex with Penny, and then got her fired and thrown out for it. And the consequences for him were…that he felt a lot of self pity? And decided to be a “better guy” because…he’s really hot for Joyce. But to Dorothy he’s condescending and mean and either A) rubbing it in her face that he’s with Joyce and she’s not or B) actively trying to push her to be interested in Joyce. And he’s a real condescending ass to Rachel for her being so ridiculous as to not realize that like, a week ago, in private he started to be a better person. I still consider Joe an utter piece of crap. To change my opinion, I’d have to see him being a better person even when its not based on getting the date he wants.
It’s interesting how we can walk away with such different takes on Joe and Rachel’s gym convo. He’s being considerate at first because he knows his list was awful and fucked up, so lots of people dislike him, so he avoids stimulating their ire. Rachel continues to deny change is possible, (which is kinda the other shoe style of commentary to booster’s recurring line about revealing who we’ve actually always been underneath).
Also, it’s the second semester. All of the list shit was before the winter vacation. It’s been a little bit longer than just a few days. I think his change actually started happening before the winter vacation but it really was showing even from his very first appearances this semester.
In what world is cutting the conversation short and telling Joe “we’ll talk later” a clean breakup? In my book, there’s no official status on the two of them yet. And, as Strawb pointed out, Joyce is aware of that.
My guess is she’s pushing those thoughts aside and she’ll break down once she and Dorothy actually attempt to have sex.
The part where she said we have to break up because “I kissed Dorothy and plan on doing it again.” Or the part where she said. “I can’t date two people cause I’m not a hussy.” Just because Joe wants to still date Joyce and Joyce will talk to him doesn’t mean she didn’t say those things. That’s how agency works.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-16/01-not-so-smooth-criminals/endorse/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-16/01-not-so-smooth-criminals/dateboth/
I don’t know how much more clear you can get here. Undercutting it with a joke and Joe’s general “You don’t have to break up with me.” argument don’t take away pretty solid decisions Joyce made. This feels like the Lucy situation where just because the last words a couple says during a break up aren’t “I officially declare we are broken up.” it means it didn’t happen, when the truth is communication is just messy sometimes.
That just means the possibility of polyamory hadn’t crossed her mind yet.
Two panels later she says she is a hussy. I’m a bit lost on how you managed to overlook the final panel, the punchline, or a strip you’re linking to.
Reality can be messy, too. Messy communication can cover up cases when reality is clear, but it can also simply reflect messy reality.
I didn’t overlook the punchline. I directly mentioned it. “Undercutting with a joke.” But even taking it as literal in that moment Joyce realizing she is in fact a hussy doesn’t instantly invalidate her statement that she can’t date both of them. But I give up here. If people directly saying they broke up doesn’t constitute a break up I guess Joyce is still cheating. Dorothy is too, she never technically completely broke up with Walky. I can accept the status quo that there will be general baseline of filthy cheater status for the entirety of Joyce and Dorothy’s relationship. Good for them.
I’d say that whether or not they’re actually broken up, Joyce is no longer cheating on Joe. She’s made it clear that whatever happens she’s going to be with Dorothy and Joe’s accepted that. The options are poly with the three of them or just Dorothy and Joyce. Either way, cheating on Joe isn’t a possibility.
If she is actually considering the poly option, she really needs to talk to Dorothy about it rather than leaving Dorothy under the impression she’s made a clean break.
You say “undercutting it with a joke” but that line is only a joke for the audience. Joyce doesn’t know she’s in a comic where her dialogue can be seen as funny. There’s no reason to believe she wasn’t serious there.
Some of us make jokes for the audience, whether the audience is really there or not.
Or maybe it’s an internal audience. Anyway, people are complicated.
Yes. You are correct. Joyce realizing she was in fact a hussy means her relationship with Joe is still in play and she’s eager to cheat on him with Dorothy in hopes of a poly route. Every interaction so far between them has been shameless hussy behavior.
It is impossible for Joyce to cheat on Joe with Dorothy because he has explicitly endorsed her being with Dorothy. It isn’t cheating if it isn’t against the rules.
To me that is ‘Hey, our current relation is broken up. I’m with Dorothy.’ Joe offers a poly relation, and Joyce says she will consider it. But that doesn’t mean that Joyce is being unfaithful here. Until such a time that she and Dorothy agree to go Poly, Joyce is with Doroty and not with Joyce.
It’d be considerate to Joe not to leave him hanging too long, but there is nothing ‘wrong’ to me, even in a ‘horny college Freshmen’ sense about Joyce and Dorothy to fully act like girlfriends with everything involved in it.
Joyce is with Dorothy and not with Joe that is of course.
yes, exactly my feelings. i WANT them to be cute, but Joyce is withholding information, which means Dorothy isn’t fully consenting to what she’s in.
Joyce didn’t *really definitely* break up with Joe (she just baaaasically left him on read in a reallife conversation), but Dorothy thinks she did, that the Joe chapter is closed. That’s not informed consent.
Joyce needs to either *definitely* end things with Joe (including refusing his poly offer), or come clean to Dorothy that she’s considering it.
I think as long as she doesn’t do anything with Joe before informing Dorothy of the situation, she’s not doing anything wrong at this point. It’s more or less fine for her to do whatever with Dorothy now, and then, at whatever point afterwards, either tell Joe ‘no’ without necessarily ever informing Dorothy it was a possibility (or how close she was to considering a yes), or bring up the possibility with Dorothy of getting back together under some poly arrangement. I don’t think merely the fact that the offer is open or even that Joyce is considering it is the kind of thing that must be disclosed or somehow impairs informed consent. It’s mildly shitty, but not even cheating levels of shitty let alone consent issues level of shitty.
The only thing I don’t like in that context is how insistent she was on closing off the possibility of Dorothy doing the same with Walky. “I win you lose” isn’t very poly of you, Joyce.
(Would either Walky or Dorothy go for it? Probably not. But that’s none of Joyce’s business, at least not in the scenario where she and Dorothy aren’t in a monogamous relationship)
Dorothy Fucks the Homeschooled Fundamentalist Veneration of Chastity Mindset Out of Joyce: A Dumbing of Age Pornographique
That just sounds like a Chuck Tingle DoA crossover fanfic
Well, almost. Maybe it would be more like “Pounded in the Caboodle by the Rejection of Fundamentalist Veneration of Chastity”. It would involve Joyce wearing a size six strap-on, I suspect.
I enjoyed this comment tremendously, thank you.
*gets out wallet
Okay maybe the sickos have a point
one of us! one of us!
Yes! Ha, ha, ha! Yes!
So, just playing the hits:
Dorothy. You fuck that girl, right now.
Or I mean soon in any case because you should probably catch Becky before she remembers newspapers still exist.
Confident Joyce is a thing of beauty
do we have a chart already for all the characters here like how Robin had one in Shortpacked? I’m getting confused over all the relationships again.
Picture a snake smooching it’s own tail.
* its. Its own tail. Not it is own tail. No possessive pronouns take apostrophes. It’s a very easy rule.
⭐Not everyone in the comment section speaks English as a first language.
⭐Even if they did, you understood what they meant and this isn’t a class.
⭐That’s actually one of the most common punctuation mistakes in the language, and is frequently made by native speakers. So it’s not THAT easy I guess.
⭐It might be a typo or autocorrect.
I get correcting spellings of names or the use of incorrect pronouns for people with stated pronouns, but nitpicking grammar and punctuation in an informal forum seems muchy. Your last sentence also just seems rude, but that might be a tone-misread.
And some people had hit their dry herb vape really hard not long before posting.
Way to call me out like that XD
I dunno I suck at Japanese and if I made an error with Japanese grammar I would be thankful for the help. There’s nothing wrong with correcting people unless you’re being purposely malicious about it. Learning is fun and also constant.
That said the last line did read as being a dick. Don’t shame people for not knowing things. Not knowing things is default stage of being.
This error is also overwhelmingly not a matter of not knowing the rule. It’s basically a typo. A matter of typing too quickly and not stopping to remember that “No, its is an exception to the normal way you make possessives.”
Also, I think it’s a dumb rule and one that will probably fade away over the next few decades if we keep doing as much casual typing as people are doing today.
Interestingly, I would argue that “its” is in no way shape or form an exception. It lines up with our normal possessive-ing of pronouns in English (hers, his, theirs, etc.).
Obviously ” ‘s ” is how we make nouns possessive by and large. And the confusion is understandable and 99% of the time not worth calling out.
But also I doubt it’s going away. Because there are absolutely use cases I can think of when the apostrophe does matter for understanding. Admittedly, they’re a bit contrived- “I eat special pizza. It’s gluten-free nature means it doesn’t trigger my IBS”. Obviously, putting the apostrophe there doesn’t *actually* mean one is going to misunderstand the sentence, but it’s an example of what’s called a “garden path” sentence. A more prominent one would be “The old man the boat”- a perfectly acceptable sentence- “a specific group of elderly people crew a sailing vessel”. But since it’s far more common to see the phrase “the old man” followed by a verb, readers get confused for a second before going “oh, they’re using “old” as a noun and “man” as a verb”. And it’s the same with my “its gluten-free nature” bit. If there’s no apostrophe there, the impact of the garden-path is lessened becaues the reader isn’t expecting “it is gluten-free” to be the reading- they know it’s the possessive.
TL;DR- the difference between “it’s” and “its” is not, I would argue, an exception, and because said difference is syntactically relevant, the differentiation will continue.
Can you tell I do this for a living?
The thing about it making a difference in some cases is that there’s no difference in pronunciation, so the problem already exists in usage.
True, but that sort of ambiguity exists for a great many homophones and we still generally follow the rules for spelling those words. I’m still going to correct my students if they write “The son is yellow”, for example.
And as I said below, hers, his, theirs, etc, don’t actually follow the same rules.
“hers”, for example, is only used without a following noun. Otherwise “her” is the possessive. “That was her tail.” “The tail was hers.” Same for yours and theirs. This isn’t anywhere near as common – enough that I had to stop and think where/how these would be used.
His is already formed differently – it’s not adding an “s” to “hi”.
I think correcting people grammar or spelling it’s only worthwhile doing in a place like this if it actively make it difficult to understand what you said. In a case like this, where no meaning is lost, it is pointless and just done for the sake of being condescending. And you can felt that way if you want but a lot of people don’t like it when other correct them in minor mistakes.
For me I always say, “I correct people because I want to do it before someone meaner does it”. Insomuch that some jackass will use their incorrect spelling to invalidate their argument or make them feel stupid. I genuinely feel like it SHOULD be fine to correct people on small things without insinuating they’re dumb. I fuck up all the time. Ain’t like I’m perfect at language.
That said I’d probably not correct a mistake as minor as “It’s” instead of “Its” unless they did it over and over.
Also I’ll admit some grammar stuff does trigger me a bit. I get a twinge whenever I hear some use “whenever” to refer to one specific moment in time and not a recurring event. I feel the “um actually” rise up in me.
My roommate does this to me with me saying “anyways” instead of “anyway” as a segue. 😛
It’s a very stupid rule. Its, yours, hers, ours, theirs, all of them are freakish standouts that don’t deserve the special treatment they get. The only reason anyone still spells them without an apostrophe is peer pressure and cowardice.
….no.
As an English teacher, I don’t actually care about bad grammar because the purpose of communication is understanding and an apostrophe usually doesn’t impact that in the slightest.
But its and it’s are still two different things and I’ve never seen anyone use an apostrophe in “hers” or “yours”.
“It’s ” is a contraction of “it is”, which separates it from “its”, the posessive form of “it”. In general, English uses the “-s” for posessives, with the apostrophe being used to avoid changing the pronunciation of the noun.
English has rules. We can and should avoid correcting violations of those rules- 90% of the time it’s not worth potentially making someone feel bad- but that’s different from trying to pretend those rules don’t exist or changing them at a whim.
You seem to think I don’t understand how the words work, for some reason. I understand them fine, and I understand the rules equally fine. I still think they’re stupid, which is also “different from trying to pretend those rules don’t exist or changing them at a whim”. Where did you even get that part from?
The part where you said that the only reason “yours, hers, ours, theirs” are “still spell[ed] without an apostrophe is peer pressure and cowardice”
That’s not pretending the rule “You’re supposed to spell those possessive pronouns with no apostrophe” doesn’t exist, and it’s not changing the rule on a whim. We’re all succumbing to peer pressure (which is being applied by people like you) and we’re all cowards for following the rule just to avoid people like you getting on our cases and making up misbehaviors from whole cloth for the sake of scolding us. (“Us” being every single person who’s ever spelled “its” without an apostrophe, of course.)
So this is one of those rare times where I’m going to make an appeal to my own authority. As I said before, I’m an English teacher. I have a Master’s degree in TESL and to get it I had to take a whole bunch of classes on linguistics. That doesn’t mean I can’t be wrong or that you shouldn’t argue with what I’m saying, but I do want to bring up that I *absolutely* know what I’m talking about here. (And also explain why I’m word vomiting about it LMAO)
I can’t really think of any good reason to put an apostrophe before the s of the English possessive pronouns. It works for “yours, ours, hers, and its”, but it would probably leave “his” out in the cold because I suspect the vast majority of people would say it “highs”. You’d also need to have another exception for “mine” unless you want to go with “my’s”.
And interestingly, that *still* wouldn’t make the case for completely replacing “its” with “it’s”, because “its” is used a lot more as an adjective than a pronoun. If I say “this is my cat. Over there is its litter box.”, I’m not actually using “its” as a possessive pronoun like “yours”. Instead, it does the job of a possessive modifier like “your” (Such as if I’m a train conductor and I say “Here is your ticket, sir”)
Damn, they got you good at that school.
Also, the rules change. Not on a whim, but with usage. The rules are descriptions of what people do.
As for “hers” or “yours”, those are used for the possessive in much more limited circumstances. Normally, to use the original example here, it would simply be “her own tail” or “your own tail”. I can only think of examples like “that’s hers”, which isn’t really the same usage.
And yet it doesn’t matter in the slightest
Here, I slapped this together last nightl: http://www.ci-n.com/~jcampbel/smoochychart.php
I think that’s everybody who’s got a random avatar in circulation currently, plus Alice and Raidah who I was too lazy to try to find good icons for while the site was behaving badly.
It probably needs more green arrows, but I think I got most of the major ones.
I didn’t do it on purpose, but I enjoy how Ruth is looking away from Jason and towards Billie, who’s eye-flirting back. I also enjoy Agatha’s huge grin as she hangs out by herself, unconnected to any of the drama.
Wait Booster has/had a crush on Amber? Is that a thing?
They’re into hot people who are fucked up in the head.
Also, I’m reminded: Even though they have random avatars, I left out Blowjob Cat because they are sad and lonely with no one to give blowjobs to, and Fuckface because all the green arrows pointing at him would have made the chart unreadable.
The unfortuante irony of blowjob cat may be that they just want a deep commited relationship with no blowjobs required but no one will ever see that because of the name
Okay, got proper icons for Alice and Raidah now.
Isn’t Marcie and Malaya backwards? Also, I dead ass forgot Lucy had any siblings.
Also joe and amber are fully siblings now, by action and law if not by blood.
Oh, right, it’s been so long since we’ve seen them that I forgot what their deal was. … Man, the strip I was vaguely misremembering was ten years ago.
Lyle had 8 appearances like three years ago. If he weren’t in the random avatar rotation, I wouldn’t have even bothered putting him in.
And if there’s anything that the Internet has taught me, it’s that step-siblings don’t count for smoochy chart purposes.
This is such a great strip. What a relief there isn’t someone supposedly important to the main character waiting for a resolution to an incredibly important relationship altering conversation he wanted to have. If that was the case, that would definitely taint this strip. But fortunately it is not the case.
She tried to break up with him. He’s the one who is begging or demanding a very weird thing. If he wants to be a third wheel he should be prepared for this. I admire his tenacity and confidence, and his chutzpah.
He’s not begging or demanding and its not that weird of a thing? He’s very clearly stating this is an option if you want it, but only if you want it. And speaking as a poly person, its not weird to be happy to date someone non-exclusively
Joyce and Joe have communicated and at least know the state of play.
The problematic bit is Dorothy is still in the dark that Joyce hasn’t broken up with her boyfriend and maybe doesn’t want to. Dorothy might be ok with that. But she might not be. Until Joyce and Dorothy talk it out, Dorothy thinks Joyce is exclusive with her, and as that’s not the case, right now it’s Dorothy getting cheated on.
“A very weird thing” being a relationship structure that many, many people engage in and feel happy and fulfilled by? Christ, what a blatantly polyphobic sentiment.
I’m getting used to it. Trying to, anyway.
I’m pretty sure a thing that was normal in the fifties (dating more than one person at a time) isn’t weird. It used to be that the assumption was no exclusivity until exclusivity was specifically agreed upon. It was called ‘going steady’. It seems like a comparatively recent thing where one date equals ‘you’re basically married now’.
This is not a thing that was normal in the fifties. These are not people going “We’re not in a serious relationship, just casually going on dates with multiple people.”
The proposal from Joe is basically “Going steady with both of us”.
And no, there’s no recent thing “where one date equals ‘you’re basically married now’.”
Yikes, Vanessa.
That “very weird thing” Joe suggested, without begging or demanding a single thing, is how I live my life. I’m sorry it seems weird to you that love can be an infinite and varied thing. That sounds like a really limited life, and I really do feel sorry for you.
Good thing Joyce and Dorothy are so good at communicating with others. It would suck if at least one of them still hadn’t properly ended her relationship with her boyfriend, or talked about his proposal for a poly relationship with her new girlfriend.
Technically neither of them has properly broken up with her boyfriend. Joyce has not responded to the poly proposal, and Dorothy never broke up with Walky, she just allowed Joyce to mock him and smiled about it.
I figure that Joe should understand that his question is not one where a decision should be made quickly or rashly, and Joyce has been quite clear that she will be having a relation with Dorothy while she works through her own feelings on the matter, as well as let Dorothy go through her feelings on the matter. In the meantime, it would be completely unfair for Joe to expect that the two of them are going to halt developing their own relationship.
It’s even for Joe a bad idea. because in order for Joyce and Dorothy to figure out whether they can have a relationship that includes Joe, they need to figure out their own relationship as well.
You’re right, but Joyce also did not give Joe an answer or express the fact that she needs time to think. He’s been left in limbo. Joyce is free to do what she will, but she has objectively failed to communicate with Joe in a meaningful capacity and left him mid-conversation. It’s not like she went “Thank you for letting me know how you feel Joe, can I have some time to think about it and get back to you?” She went “Uhhhhh” and ran out of the room to do… Something, I guess?
1.5x FUCK
Joyce putting together her Frankensteined-together Fundamentalist Christian Home Schooled Lesbian Inclusive Model of Sex is pretty on-brand, I gotta admit.
Country girls make do
My very first. Hmmm, not a happy thought for me. So I’m glad not to have that in my head.
My slipshine dreams are coming true, and just in time for me to afford it.
Semi-relatedly I need to find someone who loves me as much as Joyce loves Dorothy.
I think many (not quite most) of us need to find such a someone.
Oh, wouldn’t that be nice?
At this point I’d be fine with someone who loves me less.
oh my god.
please jam it in
At least making that first time feel special isn’t too weird – We as a species do like to make our firsts feel important, after all
I’m getting a little tired of this “Will they or won’t they?”.
Oh they will; it’s just a matter of hormones, and time.
What part of this is will they won’t they? I think it’s an unambiguous “they will”
Just putting this where I meant to the first time:
We passed that at the kiss. Now we’re at “When will they? And how often?”
And, most importantly, “How loud?”
I like this comment, because this storyline got brought forward by five years and is now definitely happening, and you’re still already tired of the waiting.
HOT DAMN Joyce
but you’re also basically saying that you expect your other first time to still be with Joe. Not bad not bad.
I think it’s more that if laundry time doesn’t count some of her other stuff with Joe still would and she wants Dorothy to have been first.
We passed that at the kiss. Now we’re at “When will they? And how often?”
And apparently instead of replying to @Marvelman I instead reported them any typed this in the new comment box.
Excellent work. I support you.
Don’t trust the veneration of chastity.
Sound advice.
The Veneration of Chastity v. The Temptation of Dorothy
aight, who will interrupt them, if ever…
I’m expecting Becky to show up while they are enjoying the afterglow, and pillow-talk. That’s the best/worst case scenario depending on whom you ask.
I am actively rooting against them
Maybe root harder?
Joyce and Dorothy may well start rutting against each other
This read oddly to me thanks to the Australian animal in your name. So, I guess you’re rooting against them rooting?
At this point, you’re rooting agaisnt hormones or something. They are literally enabling each other.
Sounds like Joyce and Dorothy are gonna have to talk with each other about what their definitions of sex are. They both need to get better at communicating in general.
Alternately they could just fuck all out like crazy and remove all doubt
squish splorch scream
“yep, that’s definitely sex”
I did not guess that Joyce would be such a brat but y’know what it fits.
I’m sensing she goes brat only when Dorothy tries to be in-charge (so cute). Of the two, Joyce is definitely the leader.
hm. Dorothy really needs it not to have been sex. Maybe so she doesn’t have to think about her wanting to have been Joyce’s first. She was expecting to see Joyce’s o-face, was surprised being asked to leave, and was frustrated afterwards.
I took it as Dorothy didnt want to be Joyce’s first because to her mind, her and Joyce kissing while having boyfriends is kinda cheating, but her and Joyce having sex while having boyfriends is no-grey-area-about-it cheating.
They didn’t have boyfriends when they did laundry.
True, but they DID have boyfriends when Joyce suggested it (and Dorothy agreed) on the morning of the protest. They were only blocked by other people existing.
So Opinion’s… er… opinion is accurate.
a compounding reason. Dorothy’s uncomfortable with all the boundaries she’s crossed, so she needs them not to be boundaries.
Ah my mistake timeline is a bit hard to keep track of sometimes.
I actually more or less take her at face value here. I would not consider that to be sex. I would be pretty annoyed at somebody thinking it was. It was queer and it was interesting and it involved sexuality but it was not sex. No one in the situation at the time considered it to be sex. And on top of that Dorothy seems attached to an ordered universe where things are what she expects them to be and behave how they’re supposed to, so redefining something important like that in a way that deliberately misunderstands her intent is probably bonus annoying.
Remember Dorothy’s someday I will date someone who isn’t a virgin comment? I do not think the idea of being someone’s first matters to her.
I do think the idea of fucking Joyce to prove it appears to be a very hot proposition. Or maybe just the idea of fucking Joyce in general. But I think the idea of fucking someone so into you they overcome their shame about it is probably hot in general. It seems like it would be hot in general.
Joy is a menace
“it’s ok, my firs ttime was with Joe” — Dorothy
þess gremlin answer!
This is why she pulls hotties, Jennifer
You know what…? This is fine.
Like, it’s screwed up of Joyce not to inform about developments with Joe but as things stand? *Dorothy* is currently at the strongest risk to be hurt right now.
And that is an interesting possibility that had not occurred to me before. Which I must say… is quite tenable.
Not accounting for Becky because we’re still not sure how that’s gonna go and it’d be just our luck to be 3 for 3 with having none of the expected parties lose their shit.
Very cute, Joyce, but we’re in the age of liquid love. Yada yada whatever Bauman has said.
they succumbed to the lustwolves
Flawless callback.
The master of seduction is back at it again.
Direct, happy, open seduction is powerful stuff.
it’s like being macked on by paddington bear
i hope they start but its awkward and sucks as neither of them know anything about pussy2pussy sex and give up to go sit on the washing machines
Alternative possibility: the thing that finally gets them to talk to Becky, after all this procrastination? They need advice on how to do it.
Not sure what would be confusing about sapphic sex, or why they would give up, but dream your dreams I guess.
Like, joe fingered her just a few days ago, i am pretty sure she have some ideas
No, hold on, let’s hear her out…
That is the sexiest thing ever said in this comic, how did Joyce get so good at smooth talk like that lol.
Is the site lagging out for anyone else? Seems it either takes five minutes to load or just errors out.
I’m not sure if this comment will make it through the loading problems, but yeah. Been happening for at least half an hour for me.
Yep, it’s been happening from around 12:00-2:00am EST for me for a few days now. Doesn’t seem to happen any other time though. Maybe that’s when the site gets the most traffic?
Man I’d normally find this hot but I just don’t vibe with how Joyce has been acting this arc.
They are still really, really dull compared to every other couple in this strip.
They’re the plain Oatmeal of DOA couples.
Not Taboo enough to be interesting, not Hot enough to be titillating, and not really cute enough to be heartwarming.
Kinda same tbh, Joyce is just kinda horny as all hell while in the background where’s not even on a climb of narritive tension anymore, the moment’s passed and I feel like we should be tense that the friendgroup’s entire dynamic should be balancing on a knife’s edge right now but instead it’s just been these two casually pacing around like it’s no big deal flirting out in the open while occassionally a friend of theirs sees them but coincidentally doesn’t have the time to stick around
Kinda gives off the vibe that Joyce just straight up doesn’t give a shit about how this would affect her friends at all, not even enough to want to get ahead of the narritive before they read about them in the school paper
The latter paragraph is exactly what I was thinking. This story arc has really made Joyce act like a bad person, which is why it feels so jarring to me.
And the thing is, she’s done stuff like this before. The bit with Jacob stands out in my mind, but in that case as soon as the situation hit a gap, Jacob IMMEDIATELY slammed her with chastisement and consequences because he realized it was wrong. This story line is waiting for Joyce to acknowledge it herself, and she’s just NOT.
It suggests that without somebody to “Hold her leash” (pardon the expression), Joyce doesn’t know right from wrong. It was ‘God’ before, then it was Dorothy or her other friends. But now there’s really only Sarah willing to stand up and say she’s wrong and that’s not enough.
I feel like Joyce lacks the ability to self-regulate.
And because she has been acting like a bad person, I like her less and don’t care about her story as much.
I keep hoping that the comic will switch focus for a good long while. Focus on other people and ignore Joyce and Dorothy. We can revisit them in a couple of weeks when there is actually something interesting happening.
yeah, I wonder if Joyce might have some sort of personality disorder like BPD
Joyce has finally become the horny monster we were promised we would eventually see about a decade ago! The crash is as inevitable here as it was in the other universe, might as well enjoy the high while it lasts. Makes the inevitable more narratively satisfying.
Also, to me it seems obvious that Joyce is using her newly unleashed horny powers to distract her brain from guilt, like, you know, we saw her do literally the night before. Obviously Joyce cares about how this will affect Becky. She cares so much she is seeking any pleasing route away from thinking about it, lest it overwhelm or completely disable her ability to function. Ahhhh I love this arc so much it’s so many character traits coming home to roost in a perfect storm of bad decisions that are all completely understandable in context with what we’ve been shown before.
I just don’t see the inevitable as narratively satisfying. The narratively satisfying crash can only come from like five places (Walky, Joe, Dorothy herself, Joyce herself, or a family member), and it’s clearly not going to be 4/5 of those options. I just don’t see Becky melting down as narratively satisfying. I get her issues, I just don’t think that Dorothy and Joyce should give a damn when it comes to a private relationship. Joe and Walky’s reaction should’ve been given a damn about because their feelings on the issue could’ve been really interesting (and might still be, but it’s for OUR eyes only and not for the other characters), Joyce’s parents can devastate her if they want to be evil.
But it’s not Becky’s business, Becky’s trauma REALLY doesn’t matter here. It matters in that it’ll be an explosive response maybe and I guess that’s finally something happening, but if, in real life, you had a friend that exploded on you for discovering your sexuality and not being attracted to them then you would have every right to tell them to piss off regardless of their trauma. And that’s where I’m at.
I honestly think Becky is gonna be okay with it. Maybe Joyce will freak out anyway because it’s not the reaction she expected? There’s gotta be some trace of a guilty conscience there. Maybe Sarah will instigate Joyce’s crash-out somehow…
Joyce is a character where almost any significant change in her behavior or lifestyle has been met with resistance and/or self doubt. We get to see explicitly her flip out and work through every change in her life, from needing to wear glasses, to having to be convinced to use birth control to slowly becoming more comfortable with her sexuality in her relationship with Joe. It was such a big milestone just for her to lie in bed topless with him. But then we started speeding up. She gave him a handjob in the lounge, She gave him a blowie in the room. Now she’s just casually talking about Fucking like she’s some sorta Billie. It feels like too much too fast. I feel like it’s weird that nobody’s talking about this change. Most of all Joyce herself. She’s been pretty introspective as of late but now it feels like we’re skipping past and speedrunning some of what should be significant milestones of her character, in favor of giving lesbian fan service to the people who really like this ship. (and just to clarify I’m using fan service in the normal definition, not the big titty anime way)
Joyce’s actions in this arc are entirely consistent with how she’s always acted. She’s nice, she’s horny, and she does whatever she wants. It’s just that normally “whatever Joyce wants” is a good thing so we don’t really notice it.
I disagree. Insomuch that those attributes are vague enough that the apply to half the cast.
Dorothy is only now beginnig to realize what she has unleashed
Dot caught in headlights.
Honestly, the more the two of them stress out about Becky, the more likely it seems to me that Becky’s reaction will mainly be “about time you two realized it” and “welcome to the club”
Yeah, but don’t forget that Becky’s initial revelation to Joyce that she was a lesbian was through her kissing Joyce, and then being devastated that Joyce didn’t reciprocate her feelings.
How would Becky feel knowing that not only is Joyce now also into girls, but apparently she wasn’t good enough to be Joyce’s girlfriend?
At this point, I think she’s pretty firmly grounded in her relationship with Dina. Her “rivalry” with Dorothy is more of a joke than anything. She’ll probably be fine with it. Joyce might still feel like she’s betrayed Becky somehow, and maybe she’ll realize that she is feeling guilty about what happened, despite the lack of consequences.
Becky will, at minimum, get custom t-shirts made. At maximum, huge party along the lines of Dina’s Birthday Bash back when Becky was still DeSanto’s consultant.
site loading issues will continue until morale improve
I waited ten minutes for the site to upload so I could ask in the comment section whether I was the only one having this problem.
Glad it’s not just me.
sex, rationalism AND homework? it’s a miracle dorothy is still dressed
Gee Dorothy just because i dont belive in friends in high places now does not mean hanky panky is just evening activity for me
Ok I’ll give them that one
Holy shit Joyce does get mad pull, that one was crazy
Thank god for patreon previews
Ugh, guess I’ll have to go Patreon again.
OH, WAIT: I already have it! 😀
This is sad. Good for Joyce and Dorothy I suppose, but sad for Walky and Joe.
I wanted to say it’s remarkable how boring these 2 have to be for me to go “ohhh my goddd get on with it then” about the prospect of gay sex but reflecting on overall DoA couples I might just not care for the way Willis writes relationships. I think Ruth/Billie was a high point that hasn’t been reached since. And parts of the build-up I usually like – I randomly reread Joe’s confession recently (banger honestly) and Sal opening up to Danny over time was really good, as is a lot of the Dorothy/Joyce stuff (I love pining! Pining rules!). I’m just not sure that the actual relationships since then have been very compelling to me.
… I will say that Ruth/Jason gets a pass. There’s no prospect of it being a great romance or anything, they’re just chilling. He literally doesn’t care she’s hung up on her ex. She’s mean to him. What more could I want from a background relationship that I frankly want to get broken up eventually anyways bc I’m rooting for Ruth & Jennifer still
I guess Becky and Dina get a pass too they’re just sort of an institution… Though I do wish Dina would get more to do as a character outside of her role as Becky’s girlfriend.
Danny’s in a similar spot. He’s been sort of stagnant for a while now, because he’s just been doing well what with being himself and having a cool girlfriend, which is nice but also. Very boring. Can he say something really insensitive and destroy a relationship again, that was fun
i want more of the Danny-Ethan pairing…!
You. You get it
+1
Honestly, there have been moments I’ve liked in Joyce and Dorothy’s relationship, just like there have been moments I’ve liked in the other relationships in DoA.
The problem I have is that DoJo’s getting a lot more time without a corresponding increase in such moments… essentially, it feels like one of those animes that outran the source material and is trying to pad it out with filler.
Well, also that it often seems like one of those “will they or won’t they” plots, except that the answer’s already been made clear, so there’s no tension.
Still, I’m happy for the people who find it cute enough that all of this works for them. Just wish I could be one of them…
Honestly I would have appreciated more “will they won’t they” before jumping straight into “will.”
“will they won’t they” can work fine before they jump straight into “will”. Not quite so well after, though.
Joyce, as happy as we are for your enthusiastic consent to have sex with Dorothy, shouldn’t you wait and tell her about the whole Joe situation first?
While Joyce is generally aware that poly / ethically non-monogamous relationships exist, she certainly didn’t picture that for herself (or ethically / non-cheating get together with Dorothy), so until Dot or Beck ask her how things went with Joe, it’s the furthest thing from her mind. Right now she’s living her new hyperfixation – sexing up the Dorothy.
It’s pretty typical of Joyce to only focus on the thing in front of her. She should tell Dorothy and it’s not fair to her that she hasn’t, but it’s not in her mind right now.
I don’t think she should. neither she nor Dorothy are in the place emotionally to make a considered thought about that. They were in the middle of establishing the nature of their relationship when Joe put that offer on the table. Joyce made it clear that Dorothy is the one she’s with now. Joe’s just going to have to wait. Dorothy is already super stressed about the Becky situation. Now is not the time to bring up a poly situation. Not fair to Dorothy. Not fair to Joe. Not fair to herself.
In a sense I guess, but she’s going to have to pretty soon, right?
Shouldn’t Dorothy know if Joyce is actually thinking about staying with Joe in some kind of poly thing before settling too much into this new relationship?
Certainly before they’re actually physically intimate, which Dorothy is clearly freaking out about as it is.
No. Joyce isn’t sure she actually wants that. Heck, if Joyce has a Big Think and decides ‘no, I’m not a poly person’ she can tell Joe ‘no, sorry, it’s not happening’ and it’s fine for that to just not come up with Dorothy.
Joyce is not in a romantic relation with Joe right now. She is solely in a romantic relation with Dorothy, and she can do all the things that are part of that, including physical intimacy.
It is difficult for Joe of course. He’s kind of at loose ends. But Joyce has made it clear that the relation with Dorothy has priority, and right now, that means Joe’s question is in the ‘To Do’ list until Joyce and Dorothy have figured themselves out enough that Joyce can take the mental bandwidth to actually figure out ‘Hey… do I want this’?
And when she figures out ‘Hey, Yes, I want this’ it is completely fair for Joyce to wait for Dorothy to be in an emotional state that she can give the notion a fair consideration. Which I will very much note Dorothy is not in right now.
It would be a horrible idea for Joyce to bring up the Joe suggestion right now. Like I said, not fair to anyone invovled. it would stress out an already stressed and panicking Dorothy further, it would mean Joe’s chances are actually very small since Dorothy is not in a place where she can seriously consider him, and it’s not fair to Joyce since she has to put this big emotional job on top of all the other stuff she needs to handle.
It’s just going to have to wait for its turn.
It’s not fair to Dorothy to keep her in the dark.
It is. Because right now, nothing happened. Joe made an offer to Joyce that Joyce isn’t even sure she wants to propose to Dorothy. She is not dating Joe, she is not going to kiss Joe or do anything romantic with him. Again, if Joyce decides that her own answer is ‘no, I don’t want to go Poly’ she is completely justified in just not telling Dorothy at all. You are not obliged to tell your partner every time someone made a romantic pass at you. You’re just obliged to not actually take them up on it without discussing and getting consent for your partner.
And ‘we’ll talk later, promise’ is not taking him up on it.
I would avoid stating so definitively that Joyce is not stating Joe when she does not seem confident of that herself.
Technically, she has yet to break up with Joe. She was in the process of doing so until Joe put the idea of dating both him and Dorothy on the table, and she was then interrupted by the whole Becky situation.
Also, a lot more has happened between Joyce and Joe than between Joyce and Dorothy. Yes, Joyce and Dorothy have kissed, but she’s also kissed Joe, and the two have done a lot more sexual things together.
To suddenly snub Joe in favour of Dorothy would be unfair to Joe, and to leave Dorothy in the dark about the potential throuple is unfair to Dorothy, the least Joyce can do is bring Dorothy up to date with the situation as it currently stands and then decide from there how they should proceed.
I’m sorry, I categorically disagree that Joyce is under no obligation to tell Dorothy. You’re right that nothing has happened but Dorothy would want to know Joe proposed that. Because even if Joyce doesn’t want that, Dorothy would want to know what Joyce wants in that regard. Having sex with Dorothy and then hitting her with that information would make her feel like Joyce sat on it so that the information wouldn’t jeopardize her chances of getting into Dorothy’s pants.
I suppose it’s a subjective matter. I would not feel slighted if an SO left something like that to themselves while they figure out what to do with it and we’ve got other fish to fry, and I wouldn’t feel it would taint any physical affection happening in the meantime either. But others might. And I can’t really say ‘you’re wrong to feel that way’.
I suppose the one whose opinion matters about it is Dorothy. If it turns out she actually would have insisted to get that information as soon as it was there, then, yeah, Joyce done goofed. if Dorothy is just happy that she didn’t have to deal with that emotional harrowing while she was still handling Becky, yay Joyce did well.
But I feel people are making it an ‘Objective Big Deal’, and fully expecting Consequences to Ensue. And the only correct answer of how big a deal it is is ‘however big a deal Dorothy feels like making of it.
You’re absolutely right, but people are just determined to find any excuse they can for why Joyce & Dorothy are bad people who shouldn’t be together.
That is absolutely not a fair characterization of what I’m saying and you know it.
Minimizing the positions of others to make yourself feel good is far beneath you.
If it was some uninvolved person who made a pass at me, then I agree, it’s not necessarily important to bring it up immediately, even if I was considering suggesting a poly thing based on it.
But this isn’t some random uninvolved person and it wasn’t out of nowhere. It was part of their joint agreement to dump the boyfriends and get together. Which Joyce now maybe thinking she doesn’t have to.
Also, if Dorothy is really in such a fragile state that she can’t have that conversation, maybe this isn’t a great time to have sex with her for the first time. (Or, go further with sex than they’ve done before, if you want to take Joyce’s pov.)
Right, this exactly. The parameters of their relationship are potentially subject to change and Dorothy deserves to be made aware of that.
Dorothy, your struggle is real. We see you. You’re valid.
But you’re gonna lose. Jus’ sayin’.
Why does someone have to lose? They can agree to have a differing definition of sex and of the meaning of a specific situation. Joyce cares about her first sexual experience and who it was with (even if that’s informed by fundie thinking, she can still think it matters when her first sex with Dorothy was), and that scene was more meaningful for Joyce than for Dorothy. It doesn’t have to carry the same meaning for Dorothy, because it was not necessarily designed to be sex between them (even if they subconsciously wanted to), and because Dorothy doesn’t put meaning on first times as much (or not anymore, her first time has been a while and is no longer relevant).
That was such an awesome exchange all around!
But first award def goes to Joyce!
😀
It’s very weird to me that there are people in the comments who are insistent that Joe and Joyce are definitely basically broken up and that it’s all over but the crying. Do you honestly think Willis would have Joe bring up the possibility of polyamory, then spend multiple strips addressing it as a serious possibility, and then do nothing with that? The writing is on the wall that these three are going to make a go of it as a hinge relationship. Whether it’s successful or not is another thing entirely, but that’s where the road is headed.
Wish we were less meandering on our way there, though.
I don’t think they will.
Bit out of lack of interest from joyce and Joe, but from a lack of interest from Dorothy.
I genuinely cannot see her happily sharing joyce with Joe, who she’s really not fond of at all
Dorothy is definitely the tension point, but I can see her going along with it for a while out of guilt, before it all collapses in on itself.
Only one of the three people involved expressed any interest in polyamory at all, and even they felt like they were brining it up as a consolation prize rather than something they positively wanted. Not “I was willing to try monogamy for you, but if you’re no longer interested in that, I’d honestly be more comfortable with something more open”, but “I hope you’ll keep dating me” too”.
Was Joyce’s “I’m not a hussy” vestiges of her upbringing temporarily preventing her from acknowledging what she truly wants? Or was she just using language she was familiar with to clumsily describe her own lack of personal interest in polyamory when the idea was hastily presented to her with no warning?
Personally, I don’t see the polycule option working out. I don’t even see evidence that Joyce is really considering it to the point where she even needs to discuss it with Dorothy. And while Joyce cares about and is attracted to Joe, she’s also made it as clear as she can that she chose Dorothy. The inevitable breakup was just interrupted by reasonable concerns about being publicly outed before she was ready, and will be concluded later.
If handled well, the strip can still reinforce that polyamory would be a completely valid option if all people are enthusiastically onboard, while eventually determining that these specific people are not all onboard.
To me Joyce was very clearly having a kneejerk reaction to a possibility to something she had not considered. Narratively, it’s boring to bring poly up as a possibility and start discussing it if nothing is going to come of it. It’s laying cards on the table that you don’t actually intend to play. It’s weak.
And of course I don’t think poly is going to work out. It’s going to crash and burn. And I’m looking forward to seeing it when it happens. It’d certainly be far more entertaining than watching this graham cracker ass couple and their happy snuggly monogamy.
It is pretty funny that a few strips ago people were like “Joyce your definition of sex can be your own, no one has to dictate that for you”.
Now we’re at Dorothy being all “That wasn’t sex and that moment was only important to you because of fundie nonsense” and I guess Joyce is just rolling with it.
Who knows, this could(eventually, somewhere down the line) end up fun and toxic after all.
Uh-huh. That’s definitely what’s happening here. Just Dorothy “correcting” Joyce on whether or not they’ve had sex and telling her it would be stipid to consider the laundry incident sex.
Definitely no nervousness from Dorothy around the idea of having sex with Joyce, and she’s definitely calling Joyce’s definition of sex stupid, not the part where on some level Joyce wanted to give her her virginity.
This is definitely also the last conversation either of them are ever going to have about what counts as sex. Topic closed! Joyce “loses” and gives up on having a definition of sex that includes what Becky and Dina do, as well as what she and Dorothy are going to be doing.
Or, you know, maybe none of that.
Key word is maybe.
Maybe!
Also tbqh, whichever part Dorothy is talking about, I still wish she had been gentler about her phrasing. But I do think she’s high anxiety right now and probably not at her best in terms of kind phrasing, so. I get it?
My first time was awkward and mortifying in a hotel room with an ex I stayed with far longer than I should have because I didn’t believe I was ever going to get anything better. Caring about who you lose your virginity to is incredibly overrated.
I may or may not still have my virginity depending on your definition but I definitely still care about it.
I was forged in the fires of Vriskourse and smelted agains the anvil of Act 6. Your puny paladins and pacing concerns mean nothing to me.
WE ARE NOT THE SAME
I too endured the endless fires of Act 6, but it only raised in me a desire to never wait that long for plot to happen ever again.
You hear that, Willis? You have approximately three years to make something actually happen in this strip!
Okay, I feckin laughed. Best comment today
*shaking head in European*
I still can’t quite believe Dorothy’s parents’ health insurance doesn’t cover orthodontics. How does Dorothy even eat?
I disagree with Dorothy here. While veneration of chastity is a fundie thing, you don’t have to venerate the idea of chastity to recognize that it’s better for one’s first time to be a fun, intimate, safe experience in order to easier pave the way for a future healthy sex life.
But that’s not the point here. Joyce had – after realizing that sex isn’t just PIV – a good first experience with Joe. So whichever was the first that counted, it *was* an intimate, fun and safe experience.
So, her arguing that Dorothy was first is more likely to be fundie thinking than “i want this to be my first because it means my first time was great“. The scenes with Joe seem to have been fun and safe as well.
Yeah her wanting her first time to be with Dorothy is very blatantly fundie thinking lol. Joyce’s mindset is that Dorothy is her true love so obviously it’s important that her first time have been with her.
Is that fundie thinking or rom com thinking?
Cause I’m not sure the fundies would be okay with having your first time with your True Love, then your second and a bunch more times with someone else.
Bit of column A and bit of column B.
Having your first be with someone you like isn’t inherently fundie. Wanting to share a personal milestone with someone important to you is normal for almost any activity.
My thoughts on this whole arc are that its alot of tease.
“They kissed think of all the drama!”
– their boyfriends are going to be upset and drama! , except there isnt
– Joe is going to explore the idea of a poly relationship with a fundie Christian, except they dont
– the newspaper story is going to have family consequences for Joyce, except it doesnt
– Becky is going to have this big reaction, except they dont see her
– Joyce has suddenly got way more explicitly horny so now her and Dorothy are going to have sex ….. till something interrupts that
Like I get it can be interesting to set up dominoes, and I get that in comic it hasn’t been that much time. But as a reading experience it feels like alot of “could happen” and eventually one or more of those things needs to actually happen.
Honestly, I am really not looking forward to the Becky interaction because I expect it is just going to be a whole lot of nothing.
a) Becky is fine with it.
Boring but considering Walky and Joe it is also in-line with the story so far.
b) Becky is fine with Joyce/Dorothy but chastises them for the cheating.
Basically Sarah’s response, but like with Sarah I doubt this will last more than a couple of days. They’ve told their boyfriends at this point so there isn’t really anything for them to change.
C) Becky has an inappropriate reaction due to her past feelings for Joyce. This would actually be DRAMA, but it isn’t Drama that I am excited to see. It would do nothing except harm Becky/Dina, a relationship I actually care about, and make me think worse of Becky.
I’m pretty sure we’re not at eventually yet
The correct ending to all of those except the very first is “yet”.
See, this sort of thing is why I keep repeating the time frame. The Big Smooch happened yesterday afternoon, Joyce ran out of Joe’s room in a futile attempt to stuff the newspaper back into the printing press maybe half an hour ago, and the situation is still playing out. Yes, it’s playing out way too slowly for your tastes – but the whole thing is still ongoing, not all settled out.
This seems like a really weird variant of my yesterday-thought that Joyce is just as worried about this as she was about PIV with Joe.
This also has some very strange implications for poly stocks.
To clarify: I’m pretty convinced that it’s not “the actual mechanics” that Joyce is worried about, but a continuing feeling that it all has to Mean Something in the “Whatever You Do for Love is Correct” internal Hallmark Movie that Joyce is using as a guide to how to navigate all this dating/sex stuff.
Yeah. It matters to Joyce that Dorothy was her first, because Dorothy is her True Love, so all her most significant intimate moments should belong to Dorothy.
Of all the change and development Joyce has had, her view of love and relationships remains rooted in a fundamentally conservative and traditionalist place, and it’s something that has to be challenged and pruned. Another reason I’m in favor of poly with Joe and Dorothy.
I think an alternative explanation is that Joyce wasn’t so much worried about penetrative sex, but rather (with or or without realizing) gravitated towards a type of sex that she could more easily imagine having with Dorothy.
That’s a reading I’ve considered, although I’d hope Joyce understands at this point that women can have penetrative sex with each other.
We are working on that technology!
The technology already exists? It’s called a strap-on or, for some very lucky women, a penis.
Damn. Gotta get me one of those.
I hear they make them for men these days too!
Can confirm, although some of the aftermarket options look interesting.
You should prolly bring up the whole “btw Joe wants to still be with me even if I’m with you and I never actually gave an answer to that question”
I can’t shake the bad feeling that this is a landmine we’re going to see before long. 😕
Joe: *suddenly looks up* Something wonderful is happening.
So stinking cute. I love doing that to my boyfriend, it’s super effective.
The more it gets brushed aside, the harder the consequences of Joyce’s actions are gunna come crashing in. I’ll get the popcorn, but for now we enjoy this gay calmness
That girl is hornt and it’s a whole new revelation to her
I don’t remember how long I’ve been reading this comic or how many times I’ve re-binged it, but I’m currently simultaneously reading daily and at the point where Blaine gets his shit wrecked by Amber at the AAA.
Just wanted to say the idea of catching back up to this storyline is giving me chills. I can’t wait to experience it in full-speed for the first time.
David, I really appreciate your work. The number of times I’ve seen exact reflections of myself in so many characters in the cast is insane. Thanks so much for all you do.
I’m just gonna say. As someone who’s never experienced those emotions the amount of horny going on here makes this whole arc so alien to me.
*Intellectually*, I have to accept that multitudes of people agreeing that ‘horny makes you do dumb things’ means that yeah, that is a thing. But I just cannot relate at all.
Anyway I hope Sal and Danny are playing a nice game of poker somewhere. Sal calls Danny lame for not even trying to cheat and he surprises her with a sleight-of-hand card trick. They have a nice bonding moment.
Danny reveals she’s been learning close-up magic and Sal is furious about how turned on she is by it.
Bless
Y’know, I have the exact opposite issue as you, in that I am HIGHLY horny-motivated and I’ve STILL never been quite as stupid as these two dweebs.
Wow just right for the
clitjugular, huh?I find that poll from a couple weeks ago more and more interesting the longer this goes on. It actually made me reflect on my feelings of interpreting media based on personal bias and how much I treat fictional characters as I would real people.
I hadn’t really thought about it, but yeah, poll, I do think this relationship is slightly doomed because of its origin story. If this were Billie and Ruth, or Danny and Sal, or Becky and Dina, this dialog would be a bunch of fun. As it is, it’s just… foreboding and slightly uncomfortable, for some reason.
I think for a story to work the audience needs to be invested in the stakes. The problem is the story thus far has actively pushed me away from both the Dorothy/Joyce relationship and from them as characters.
This relationship is more doomed by origin story than Billie and Ruth? The one that started with bullying, nonconsensual kissing, and a frigging suicide pact?
I think it’s silly to think of any relationship as doomed by its origin story, but Dorothy and Joyce are not the same people as Billie and Ruth anyway. I can think of a lot of tension points between these two that could cause things to collapse. Billie and Ruth were codependent, but they were able to tough it out and were approaching something healthy when Ruth pulled the plug. What Dorothy and Joyce have, romantically, feels more brittle based on vibes alone. It’s not a condemnation of them, their relationship has a lot more potential to reach a much healthier place much sooner, but I can see a lot of rough waters they’ll have to sail through, and I’m not as confident in their ability to survive it intact than I would have with Billie and Ruth.
It’s definitely not more doomed than Ruth/Billie by origin.
At the same time “a semester and a half of trying to figure out this was even what they wanted”, “fundie programming to overcome” + “trauma and a refusal to actually discuss with her therapist” respectively, “they both think this got started by cheating on their respective boyfriends”, and “despite being best friends, having a hard time communicating well enough to agree on what do next, let alone stuff like ‘did we have sex yet and does that matter?'”. Yeah, that’s incredibly fraught with peril for a couple of dumb kids.
Yeah kinda. Because Billie and Ruth really matched each other’s freak, as it were.
Doomed as a reader (“am I invested in this story? Do I agree that these conclusions feel earned and valid?”) not as a character (“are these people a good pair for one another?”).
…though I’m not sure these two (“repression breaking and immediate excitement”) are a good pair for one another in the way that Dotty and Walky (“being honest and accepted AND meeting in the middle”) or Joyce and Joe (same as Dotty and Walky, trying to be more than you used to be) seemed to be.
I think they’re fine for each other if supremely unexciting to me personally. Like it’s certainly a couple that can exist and there’s nothing immediately objectionable about it, cheating aside. The disconnect, for myself and I suspect others, is that this perfectly fine couple is being treated by the narrative as one of the most important relationships in the strip, on par with Billie/Ruth or Dina/Becky.
Thinking about Joyce not necessarily having fundie brain, just being romantic.
It’s a point, but now I’m thinking that maybe some of thinking is also part of mindset of people that hate divorce, people of much partners, etc…
If You Did Me, by O.J(oyce) Brown.
Okay, now it’s a bit yo-yo-y for me.
Where are they going? Back to Joyce’s room? And at a chill walk? The previous strip made me think Dorothy was going to run out of the room and Joyce would have to chase her, but Dorothy’s pose in the first panel here says leisurely stroll… but they DID leave her (and Becky’s) room…
I get that they were nominally looking for Becky, and Becky wasn’t there, but I don’t understand where they’re off to now.
(I still think the conversation in this strip is cute in places, and the places where it’s not interest me, but I am genuinely confused about what’s next on their agenda.
They’re gonna run into more people, so it won’t matter terribly much, but I wish we knew where they were going, and I wish it didn’t feel a bit jarring after the previous strip.)
(And this isn’t just reluctance to admit I might be wrong about the last couple of strips? I’m mostly fine with being wrong! I don’t think Dorothy’s anxiety has completely vanished, either; I think it’s part of why it’s important to her that the laundry room NOT have been sex…
…but that first panel, and the question of where they’re going now, still remains for me. If Dorothy had made a run for it, it wouldn’t matter where she was headed because she’d just be running away, but since the art communicates a more sedate pace, the question of where they’re going becomes more pressing.
If that makes sense, heh.)
I’m with you on the confusion.
I’ll also admit to frustration that the story hasn’t really acknowledged that Joyce running out on Joe was for a “crisis” that completely fizzled out. Because it’s a really bad look for Joyce that she promised to come back and talk to her boyfriend after resolving an issue so that they could continue what is a pretty darn important conversation, to then subsequently break that promise once it’s clear that the resolution has passed. And the narrative is kind of blowing past that.
I assume the big emergency is to show everyone on campus wearing a salmon suit. And so its urgent she do this but not urgent she do it urgently.
Snort
See, I can defend that, because I do think that going to find Dorothy, explaining the situation, and agreeing on a plan of action were all important, even if the plan of action wound up being “hide all the newspapers in our dorm and then give up once we’ve talked to Daisy”.
But Joyce is definitely doing some sorta object permanence thing where it KIND OF SEEMS like she’s forgotten she left Joe waiting…
They might be about to run directly into him? Which would be fun — he’d have every reason to think Joyce had at LEAST told Dorothy about his offer, right? Meanwhile Dorothy would have every reason to think Joyce had broken up with him.
But I’d still wanna know where these two think they’re going right now, heh.
Well, what’s next on their agenda is easy: They’re currently transitioning from Step 4 (half-ass whatever they were doing) into Step 1 (get so horny they forgot what they were doing).
I think Dorothy’s next checklist item was technically apologize to Asma for being bad at protesting???? And then after that it’s solving systemic problems with our government.
(I remember your cycle though, and that’s where they are in it for sure.)
It does kind of feel like they’re just wandering around randomly.
Taking a tour of all the people in their life who might laugh about this?
Which makes sense in terms of things to show but less sense in terms of things for them to seek out, heh.
Oh, to me the previous strip read as Dorothy running back into the room in panic, not out of it. The light from the door seems to be coming from behind her.
This doesn’t make the leisurely stroll make that much more sense, though. Or answer where they’re going. Amber’s, I guess??
Amber is next door!
Right, they even share a bathroom. I forgot about that. Yeah idk then. Just wandering the halls…
Yeah, I meant more like: I could understand the previous energy turning INTO “Dorothy fled the room and Joyce chased her”, not that I thought she was in the process of fleeing the room yesterday, but the leisurely stroll makes it clear that’s not at all what is supposed to have happened, so ??
Ah, my bad! I misread.
Anyways, I think the last panel from yesterday might just be a “heightened for the punchline” type beat – within canon but not to be taken that seriously. (If that’s the case, it’s not Willis best work in that regard, because the scene change feels a little jarring.)
I wish your chase idea had been right…
❤️ you’re good
Also, heh, thanks. It would just make a lot of sense to me and would still have carried these two out into the hallway which is PRESUMABLY being done so that they can run into someone. IDK, maybe tomorrow one of them will say something and I’ll be like OH okay that’s an obvious reason for them to have left Dorothy/Becky’s room in retrospect!
(Joyce doesn’t even need a reason, she’s obviously JUST following Doeothy and trusting that Dorothy knows what she’s doing right now, the rare moment in-strip where I’ll agree that’s what’s happening haha, but Doeothy needs a reason!)
FTR: My current wishlist person for them to run into is Joe.
Also frankly rereading my own comment that is what it sounds like I meant, but I definitely wasn’t actually expecting them to run out yesterday, SO I just misspoke! 🤣
Jennifer Billie wonders how Joyce can bag all of the hotties.
This.
This is how.
Joyce: I *slurping noises* sorry had to blow Joe real quick, I just *really soft clapping noises* sorry had to give Joe a quick handy, really wanted you to be my first Dorothy. All this time.
No you see it’s definitely internally consistent because Dorothy is Joyce’s true love
Joyce, getting absolutely wrecked by Joe, doggy-style: “It’s really important to me that *erotic yodeling sounds* my first time is *donkey-like braying* is with *construction site noises* you, Dorothy.
Sexy times but the logistics. In Dorothy’s room with Becky hovering out of frame. In Joyce’s room where Sarah might turn a hose on them. Plus a cascade of explanations and consequences awaiting them. The path of true love.
Joyce is just the best. Love these two.
It’s okay to cherish the first time you did something, it doesn’t have to be a weird purity thing.
The “weird purity thing” aspect of it is deciding you need to decide whether it was technically sex before you know if it was the first time you did something or not, IMHO.
Like, Joyce can just decide that laundry time was an important first without litigating whether Dorothy agrees it was technically sex or not!
Right. It can be an important thing, a precious moment between them, but for Joyce it has to be sex because then she lost her virginity to her True Love. And like it’s fine if that’s her definition, but she’s insisting upon it against Dorothy’s wishes because of her own skewed attitude towards love and relationships.
People can!
I think Dorothy is probably right that it’s a significant part of why Joyce specifically wants to “give” Dorothy her virginity, and I think being retroactively awarded one (1) Joyce Virginity is making Dorothy feel a lot of things all at once. Some of which are anxiety.
Which in turn is resulting in pretty insensitive phrasing on her part…
But that’s just a guess.
Joyce is really out here dropping tactical horniness nukes on Dorothy isn’t she
alright. they grew on me; this dynamic is fun now. lovveee joyce being dottys chaos agent here.
I’m still finding myself very confused about Joyce and her attitude towards intimacy.
Webcomic Time is particularly unhelpful here. If we look at things only based on the amount of time that’s passed in-universe, it’s absolutely *wild* how quickly Joyce has moved.
But where is her head at? Is she completely comfortable with any and all intimacy barring “A home run”? Is she comfortable doing anything and everything specifically with Dorothy?
So far the text is not giving any hints that her behavior is performative the way that it was in the runup to the JoJo date. Now, obviously hindsight is 20/20- I can’t say that I saw the performance for what it was at the time- and I obviously don’t want to discount that Joyce might hesitate when the rubber meets the road so to speak.
But if it *isn’t* a performance, if no more story is really given over to Joyce being hesitant- in favor of Dorothy “fucking the fundie out of her”, I *really* wish we could have seen into her head and understood why those hangups have suddenly disappeared.
I think to a certain degree she’s putting on the same performance here. She clearly likes how flustered she can make Dorothy, but when it’s time to actually take action I have to wonder how confident she’d still be.
Honestly, her blushing when Dorothy’s back is turned would go a long way towards making it clear she’s still performing.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/02-ill-leave-you-a-phantom/nojesusland/
Precedent!
Don’t remember the exact quote, but there was a line some time back along the lines of “someday, that girl is going to snap and suck like a billion dicks.”
You’re watching the fracture lines forming.
One down, 999,999,999 to go!
With her it will be probably more like one dick a billion times. Bruce Lee would fear her.
Like I said… yesterday?, I think Joyce, due to her upbringing, has major and very specific hangups about a penis going into her vagina, but it was only yesterday morning that she began to even consider that other things could possibly count as “sex”. Thus she swerves off at the last moment when getting Joe’s dick is imminent, but giving him a handy or a bj or getting fingerbanged by him, or absolutely anything she can do with Dorothy are fine. They’re “sex” by her new definition where she really wants Dorothy to be the first person she had sex with, but not by her old fundie definition where the only s*x is a husband putting his man-dangle into his wife’s kapoodle on their wedding night for the sole purpose of filling God’s quiver.
(Just waiting for the next time Joyce and Joe are about to do the deed, and Joyce goes, “Wait! I don’t think I’m ready for this. How about you put it in my b-hole instead?”)
Also, this sequence of strips, potentially relevant: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-15/01-love-dares-you-to-change/smexy/
I think Joyce is confused about joyces attitude to intimacy, shits tough
some of y’all really need to learn the difference between handling something poorly and doing something wrong. almost every character in this strip has rebounded from a previous relationship within days, if not hours, and usually with someone they had kind of a thing with for a while. and that’s fine, it’s not a betrayal, no one is harmed, it’s part of the learning process of how to handle a breakup. but being unskilled at breaking up and bad at expressing yourself isn’t a sin or a crime and it’s not even unethical.
like, take a step back and what’s even happening here. two women who have been flirting for six months kissed during an extremely heightened moment and broke up with their boyfriends the next day. people are treating this like it was an affair that went on for months, but the breakup happening pretty much the instant both of them accepted the other one was on the table.
On the table, on the floor, on the bed, in the showers, wherever. :>
Not just two women who have been flirting with each other their entire adult lives, but two deeply closeted women who had every reason to discount each other as viable romantic partners until literally placed in a life-or-death situation.
I could understand it somewhat if the criticism was that the plot was a tiny bit contrived in placing Joyce and Dorothy in the exact situation that would make cheating on their boyfriends maximally forgivable. But the fact that half the fandom has overlooked all of that and are treating them like inhuman monsters who deserve to be abandoned by all of their friends makes me wonder if there’s some huge generational divide I’m too old to understand. Has the concept of being closeted become so outdated that people are no longer able to extend even the tiniest bit of grace to people going through a late orientation awakening?
it’s impossible to ignore that this life-or-death situation is one that they ran into, willingly, against the advice of literally everyone around them.
It feels like saying that they were in a life-or-death situation because they were in a parked car on the train tracks when the train is coming and we just witnessed them deliberately stop the car there despite nothing being wrong. They could have just…not done that.
“no one is harmed” we’re making a huge exception here to discount Joe’s feelings I guess
And Walky’s lol
My favorite bit is how the post really dives into Joyce and Dorothy’s innuendo and historical buildup as super important (which, to be clear, it is!), but completely ignores all of Dorothy/Walky and Joyce/Joe’s interactions beyond “they been dating a few days”.
Let’s goooo
I didn’t read the old comics, but I’ve heard enough to speculate that this is a new, more realistic take on anti-Joyce
This was me once, a switch flipped after I realized “either there is no hell or I’m already going, might as well have fun”. She may go wild for a while. If she’s like I was at that age, that registers as “well if I’m not good by [programmed puritanical definitions], then I guess I better embrace being evil and bad”. She may have thrown away her shitty moral compass without realizing she still kind of needs functional one to not get hurt/hurt others while wandering in these sexy, evil woods.
(But damn is she ever going to have some awesome sex on the way)
Nah this is closer to baseline Joyce after doing it with Walky a few times.
Also to be clear, I don’t think she’s made huge fuck-ups yet because I am not a puritan (see above) who think she’s ruined as a person for screwing up (and around) at 18 years old
When is somebody getting murdered?
I don’t know but I hope Asher does it
Asher already personally walked into Blaine’s hospital room and shot him in the face and recorded it for TikTok. He got his turn and he wasted it.
He should do it again on livestream
It’s what he deserves.
I mean, with both Blaine and Toedad exiting stage right several books back, I am not sure there is anyone else left who deserves to be deleted from the cast list like that.
Good. Someone dying who doesn’t deserve it, that’s drama right there.
Related to the very strange ongoing reaction to this arc, Ive invented a new game! hit the random button until you find a strip with Joyce doing something 100% absolutely Really Fucking Gay. So far my records six random strips!
Made it two strips.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/03-faz-is-great/sacklunch/
Wow, I had no memory of that strip even existing.
Ooh that’s a good one, too.
Had an absolute godrun so I’m capping it at 32 cuz that’s one over how high you can count in binary on one hand
Also it feels like a relevant strip:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/05-saturdays-all-right-for-slighting/leisure/
I went three strips before getting a Joyce, but it wasn’t gay. Then, on the fifth try, I got https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/03-the-butterflies-fly-away/painful-2/
She’s only in the first panel, but that one panel… Yeah.
Okay, I went two more strips, and got this adorable scene of Joyce and Dotty being adorably domestic. 🥰
11 but I got the best one https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/03-answers-in-hennessy/curiosity/
just another instance of joyce brown fucking pulling
This is part of why Joyce pulls. If I had a partner throw this line at me, I’d go weak in the knees!
OMG, their faces in that last panel! That Joyce grin, and Dorothy biting her lip… They ARE adorable together…
This strip so why Dorothy is my current favourite character in doa
Shes such a beautiful mess
These silly sophomore sapphire and their wacky hijinks give me life.
ahahaha I love it
I love it specifically because my girlfriend is also a generally very sweet and polite autistic nerd girl who has mastered the Tactical Horniness Nuke and it bluescreens me *just like that*. absolutely nailed the facial expression in that last panel
Tactical Horniness Nuke… with your permission, I’m gonna have to remember that one. That is the perfect description for what we all just witnessed here.
Dorothy: “I got this for my birthday. I thought it was just a joke. But now I think it may be useful.” (Takes out an enormous strap-on and begins fumbling with buckles)
Joyce: “….”
Joe got it for her and she misinterpreted it as another lesbian joke when he actually got it for her for this exact purpose
Which is really impressive, because her last birthday was before either of them even met Joyce.
Joe is the kwisatz haderach, but only for sexy things. 😁
Gawd dayum, Joyce came out swinging in the hottest way possible. 😲
There is something to be said for the first time you do /anything/ noteworthy being special, especially when the something can have a lot of emotional weight. So although the way chastity and virginity and “purity” get treated is a whole lot of bullshit, someone’s first time having sex can still be very special once we shake all the bullshit off. Or it can be nothing-in-particular, of course.
Your first time having sex can be a special and memorable event, there’s no denying that, but fixating on it being with the “right” person is absolutely engaging in regressive thinking.
Also, I’m not sure it really does work that way when you decide it was your first time retroactively.
Goddamn Joyce, you’re so gung-ho for this, I don’t think Dorothy will survive!
On an unrelated note, is it me or is the site crashing around update time more often?
I will simply point out that she was that gung ho about sex with Joe as well. And for the same reason, I suspect.
Joyce reminding me a lot of myself when I had my first sexual relationship
I’m still reeling from the comment I read a few days ago in which someone claimed that Joyce gave “enthusiastic consent” during the laundry fiasco. In what fucking world is someone repeatedly saying “I do not do this thing” “I am unsure if I want to do this” “I am very uncomfortable” translate into enthusiastic consent?? if anything it’ nearly the opposite.
Now, I am not going to claim that Dorothy sexually assaulted Joyce, it’s not as bad as that extreme, but what she did was dubious at best. And now that this storyline is clearly saying that it was sex and not just assisted masturbation (or at least in Joyce’s heart it is); that makes it worse.
I really hope we can all agree that a sexual encounter where one person is repeatedly hesitant and the other continues anyway is walking a dangerous line. “Hesitant person ended up liking it anyway” is something that might happen, I know for a fact that in real life some encounters ended like that. But we cannot ignore that it can also go the other way very easily and very quickly.
“Hesitant person ended up liking it anyway” does not retroactively make it enthusiastic consent.
People really like to minimize that what Dorothy did there was kind of scummy, even though Dorothy being willing to do something kind of scummy makes her more interesting lol. It’s a dubious situation that adds some texture to her character.
People at the time “really liked” to say it was literally sexual assault.
A lot of people found the sequence extremely triggering and the comment section became completely radio active with all the folks having trauma responses and basically taking that out on each other.
I’m just… not terribly surprised some folks have gone all the way out the other side?
It was a terrible time to be in the comments, no matter which “side” you were on.
(And I do mean “all the people having trauma responses”. Because some of the people claiming that Joyce wasn’t consenting were also functionally saying she was incapable of consent because of all the power Dorothy had over her, and that was ALSO triggering for other commenters.
Like, there were triggered people on both sides, is what I’m saying. There was a lot of nastiness on both sides. It sucked.)
Oh yeah, I remember that era making the worst of the sicko/paladin fights look like playground slapfights by comparison. I got BLASTED and accused of homophobia for taking a position essentially similar to what Dot just said above.
Predatory Lesbian Stereotype, I bet. Which… you know, is a real thing, and I do understand being hypersensitive to it, but……… yeah.
Everyone was extremely on edge and hostile and the longer it went on, the worse it got.
Which makes me REALLY hope we aren’t going to revisit the issue, even though yeah, Dorothy WAS, on-paper, canonically, motivated by some dubious things.
Was she trying to molest Joyce? No. Her attraction to Joyce was way too buried for her to have been trying to do that. But she literally said out loud with her mouth that she hoped it would lead Joyce to stop being interested in Joe, and she also muttered (still out loud with her mouth) that she wanted to prove to Roz that she wasn’t sex-negative, and she also approached Joyce in the first place after being very visibly bitter and miserable about having talked Walky into dating Lucy, so…
Joyce processed the whole thing as being very loving, and I do think that once things got started, Dorothy was clearly feeling a lot of affection for Joyce. I do think she at least thought the “stop Joyce from being interested in Joe” motivation was benevolent…
And all of that is interesting and complicated and potentially ripe for character conflict — but the dubcon aspect was so traumatic for so many people.
So, yeah. I really do hope we aren’t going to revisit that story beat too much, just for the sake of the comments.
I don’t think the storyline is clearly saying it was sex. Joyce has decided it was sex (and seems quite happy with that). Dorothy isn’t accepting that definition.
I really don’t see Joyce deciding after the fact that it really was her first sex with her beloved Dorothy makes it worse. She’s making the decision to call it sex well after she was clearly happy with it.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-15/01-love-dares-you-to-change/curating-2/
First two panels especially relevant, but so is the last one.
Joyce isn’t just some random person. She is a recovering fundamentalist Christian, and, like many of them — perhaps especially women, but certainly not only women (Willis has talked about feeling some of this themself)… it’s been more than just a little bit difficult for her to give enthusiastic consent.
Which is what I think Willis intended that storyline to be about: absolutely complicated by Dorothy’s motivations, which were dubious at the time and retroactively more so, for sure, but…
I don’t think enthusiastic consent, from Joyce, would have looked any different than what we got. Because of her hangups, that was as close as she could get, and she didn’t experience what happened next as anything even a little bit bad.
All of which is, you know, unfortunate. As I mentioned above, the storyline was really triggering for a lot of people. I doubt Willis anticipated that? Could be wrong. If it were me, and I had anticipated that specific reaction, I know I would’ve felt the need to put a content warning on that storyline.
But that’s what I think was meant to be going on.
Also? Really don’t like the (presumably unintentional) implication of “Joyce deciding it was sex makes it worse”. Rape is not sex, and all sexual assault is horrific, so.
Poor Dorothy looks like Joyce suggested they start choking each other.
https://bsky.app/profile/damnyouwillis.bsky.social/post/3lyftufjzis2n
At least they never getvtheir comments posted.
ALSO I THINK THESE TWO ARE REALLY CUTE AND HAVE GREAT CHEMISTRY.
I respect folks who disagree but yeah, them being Canon is all my DoA Christmases come at once and I am still riding high off it, other commentary aside.
Man being on the Patreon has really fucked up my sense of time, even worse than it already was. I forgot what today’s page was and saw it like “damn we’re still on this? Hasn’t it been like three days?”
OMG, Dottie is about to have her first Fundie and it’s gonna get weird!
I speak from experience.
To quote a College Humor sketch, ain’t nothing like years of repression finally letting loose.
I remember that. They have no idea.
First one was a Presbyterian girl from Iowa. Bonafide upright citizen type. She brought out the cuffs on the first date.
Thought it was an isolated thing. She was just into that stuff or maybe exploring. Then I became a FWB to a Mormon chick….my junk still shrinks from PTSD when hearing hymns.
Okay so this right here. This is why I don’t think Joyce will take Joe up on his offer, or if she does it just won’t work out. Cause the feelings Joyce has for Dorothy very clearly vastly eclipse whatever she feels for Joe. I mean with him when it comes to sex she’s nervous, yet with Dorothy she just flat out says “Guess you’re gonna have to fuck it out of me.” in this page. Like she is NOT that sexually confident with Joe AT ALL. Plus if you look at when she was thinking about what she would say to him in breaking up, she brought up how she likes who SHE is when she’s with him. And how he makes HER feel important. So the top two things she could think of that made her sad about the break up were things Joe made her feel about herself. Nothing that she liked about HIM.
Over 400 comments in the first 70 minutes? Wow, I guess a LOT of people are sad about how slow the site is loading.
*waits*
Oh, now it loaded I see the issue. Well this is going to be a normal comment section.