Joyce: “You know Joe, I figure there’s a high chance you’ve fantasized about exactly this occurring, so let’s take it as a valuable lesson in being careful what you wish for.”
I laughed and then immediately felt terrible. Joe has been making so much progress and I wanna see him happy. But this is framework for crashing and whoring 🙁
Joyce and Dorothy better save the Universe with the power of love, is all I’m saying.
it’s called dumbing of age for a reason. I honestly can’t say i expected willis to touch on this possible arc but now that its happening i’m so glad he did but also terrified.
This is the kind of reaction we NEEDED to see from Joyce. The realization that her actions have very real consequences that are going to seriously damage people she cares about, people who have cared for and supported her at every point.
This is going to be messy, and I hope it’s SUPER uncomfortable for Joyce. It needs to be to reinforce that it was wrong.
As much as this whole arc is miserable to read because it feels like a high speed trail collision between two different character arcs that were going in opposite directions, I feel some confusion in response to the statement “it was wrong”. Like… the kissing can definitely be framed as cheating, if the characters want to decide that it is cheating. But I don’t think the actual kissing, the part Joyce had willful control over, is the part which is devastating to Joe. That part that is devastating to Joe is that Joyce carried on an intense emotional relationship with Dorothy for many months that preceded her relationship with him and that she has been apparently totally in denial about the romantic aspect of all this time. But that doesn’t feel like a moral failing deserving of punishment to me? That just feels like being a dumb young adult with a lack of self awareness and way too much mental baggage about discounting the possibility of queer romance.
I mean, Joyce could still choose not to break of with Joe at this point. But I don’t think either of them will be served by staying in a relationship together if Joyce is now constantly aware of her desire for Dorothy and pining for her all the time.
To put this in other terms: Yes, it should be super uncomfortable for Joyce, but that’s not because it’s a punishment for misdeeds. It should be super uncomfortable for her because she’s a decent person and decent people should be able to tell when they are ripping someone else’s heart out. That discomfort comes from *within*. That is not some external moral force punishing Joyce, that is Joyce’s own conscience making her feel bad because she agrees with it.
Or- and this just occurred to me- do you mean instead that it needs to be uncomfortable in the sense that convenient and contrived narrative events should not clean up the mess Joyce is making so she doesn’t need to make herself feel bad? Like Joe being stoic about the breakup, and then falling backwards into another ideal relationship immediately, so that Joyce doesn’t have to see him unhappy and feel guilty. The kind of story twist that creates the impression for the reader that life situations like this will just work out on their own, so that we need not worry about inadvertent consequences on others of our lack of awareness or forethought in making major life decisions, or that some people never get their happy ending and that’s not okay?
The problem with this IS, Joe/ Sarah was a great Ship in roomies.
And he’s more Sarah’s type, now and physically.
And it would suck narratively for Willis to casually rip up all the new ships he’s got the audience emotionally invested in ( again) prematurely.
Joyce / Dorothy ought to be amazing, it’s just unsatisfying to prematurely rip up Joe Joyce. ( Another month or two to climax would be fine),
And Sarah just found happiness for once. Of course temporary but it’s reads better to let it develop and deepen before ripping it to shreds.
Like let Leslie mess up and sleep with Conquest. Or a 3some with Robin.
Danny with Sayid. Spread this messiness around instead of musical chairs.
100% agree. I’m uncomfortable with people calling what she’s done with Dorothy “wrong” (if, indeed they’re talking in moral terms condemning her actions). This is hard. This is life. She’s a good person who doesn’t want to hurt others, and she went into this situation with Joe in good faith, but she has to be true to herself now with the self-knowledge she has now. Making the right choices for herself means she can’t just make everyone happy at her own expense.
Maybe Joyce and Dorothy will crash and burn; maybe Joe would’ve been a good future for her. Maybe she’ll always regret whatever path she doesn’t follow here. That doesn’t make her “wrong” then… she doesn’t have access to Willis’ buffer to know how this all goes in the future.
This whole storyline is really hitting close to home for me. I remember the doomed realization that I had been in a relationship that wasn’t right for me, and I’d been there for too long and I was going to have to end it, even in that meant hurting people I cared about. The pit-in-the-stomach feeling of going to go have the awful, inevitable conversation. It sucks hard. You could say I was a bad person. Even if I thought it was for a good reason. Even if I look back, understanding how precious a thing trust is and understanding the pain that breaking it can cause, and coming out on the other side of that with a clarity about who I was and a real understanding of the power individuals have and the responsibility we have to each other. I think it’s how someone grows up. At least, that’s what I tell myself.
For whatever it may be worth, I’m not angry at Joyce for breaking up with Joe. That’s the mature, adult thing to do. What I’m mad at her for are her actions this story line.
By her OWN ADMISSION, sex is ‘somebody you love making you orgasm’, which she then immediately realized qualified to Dorothy. The next thing she did was demand they go do it again. By her own admission, that is cheating. She’s dating one individual while having sex with another without prior consent/permission from the person she’s dating.
And she can’t even hide behind the excuse that she was afraid Joe would judge her. Joe has been nothing but patient, supportive and understanding of her various hang ups. It’s one thing to make mistakes while in a relationship due to ignorance and hormones. Joyce acknowledged that something would make her unfaithful while she was in a stable state of mind and then INSTANTLY went to do it and didn’t give it a second thought all day.
That is why I say this needs to be painful for her, because that kind of behavior is NOT ok.
@Lumino Yeah okay that’s 100% valid. Joyce was definitely *attempting* to cheat, by a definition she had just made up herself, in a flurry of horny realization. She absolutely needed to slam on the brakes at that point and have a serious talk with Dorothy about both of their feelings before she made any more major decisions, and instead it turned into a gag about “let’s go do laundry” that was mercifully aborted with another smash cut gag before it had a chance to get any more horrifying. That incident had slipped my mind as well. The girl is not okay.
A lot of people seem to have forgotten that Joyce defined sex that way, and shortly after she went with Dorothy to the laundry room fully intending to do a thing she considers sex, while still dating Joe. And that only got stopped because a bunch of other students were in the room when they got there. She’s already tried to cheat on Joe once before the big kiss at the protest.
It’s the weirdest thing though and it’s really hard to get a feel for her mental state then, since right before suggesting that, she said that what she’d almost done the night before was just “surplus misdirected horny”.
Was she still in denial somehow? Or just knowingly lying?
I mean something can be wrong and an understandable mistake at the same time. My last partner cheated on me at the end of our relationship when he could have just broken up with me. I get what happened and I forgave him (it was a situation that ended when they kissed once, not like a month’s long secret relationship) but he still did something wrong. I don’t think it’s wrong (hardy har) to point that out.
I really appreciate your analysis here…but it does bring me to question something that seems…kind of assumed, either one way or another, by most of the commentors:
If the issue is that Joyce is romantically (and clearly, vocally physically/sexually) attracted to Joe…
…and Joyce is also romantically (although it’s not as clear to me about physically/sexually, probably due to being somewhere in the ace/demi zone [and very het] myself) attracted to Dorothy…
Which of those two is the “wrong” attraction? Which is the “cheating”? Who has “first claim” on Joyce’s affection (to be “cheated against”), if either?
In both cases, it seems pretty clear that Joyce was dealing with all kinds of layers of repression about her attraction(s)…are some of those more “excusing/excusable” than others? Does her sexual repression give her more/less license to make mistakes under partial ignorance than her romantic-orientation repression?
To be clear, I have absolutely no answers here myself. Just…a lot of questions and curiosity. Also to be clear, I can absolutely understand the argument (while believing it’s by no means universal) that Joyce kissing Dorothy could constitute cheating. But the emotional/attraction stuff seems…much less potentially clear cut.
This wAs to luminos “This is the kind of reaction we NEEDED to see from Joyce. The realization that her actions have very real consequences that are going to seriously damage people she cares about, people who have cared for and supported her at every point. “
Y’all are projecting a lot of your own biased judgement on the morality of what’s happening, and allowing a puritanical skewing of a social construct dictate your response and judgement of Joyce and Dorothy. Hoping for someone’s misery, especially when their “crime” is having LOVE for people, is just a disgusting layer of icing on a religiously judgemental cake.
Yeah, Joe and Walky may be hurt, or they may be chill, but also, neither of them can give Joyce or Dorothy what Joyce and Dorothy give each other. They all love differently, and that doesn’t meant any of them are doing it wrong. Lastly, I don’t recall any of them having conversations stipulating that they were exclusive, but even if they had Joyce and Dorothy are heading back to Joe and Walky directly to disclose what happened and how their feelings aren’t fitting within that box.
Life is messy, and this will be too, but they aren’t being horrible people. Don’t let residual christian extremism bait you into relishing hatred. It’s not a good look.
Which, yes, anyone who’s simultaneously being viciously judgmental about other commenters and asserting that what we like in fiction must reflect our real-life morals, while ALSO loudly fantasizing about awful things happening to fictional characters… by their own logic, that’s bad!
But by our logic, where it’s fine to hope for fictional mess and tears, it needs to also be fine to hope for fictional comeuppance and misery.
Yes, some of the things people have said they hope happen to Joyce and Dorothy kind of creep me out, too. Especially when it comes from someone who’s been insisting that I view Joe and Walky as real people with feelings instead of characters.
But isn’t the whole point of “our side” that… it’s okay to want creepy stuff in fiction? And that whether or not something creeps us out isn’t a solid basis for morality?
The standard should still be “does this harm real people”, and the answer should still be “feeling creeped out isn’t a form of harm”.
If you want to make out with someone besides your partner, you either need their approval first or you need to break up. It’s not just a moral puritanical thing, it’s a socially responsible thing.
In Classic Greek society, that’s not much of an indicator. Aristotle tutored Alexander III, who had three great loves, none of them women, but quite definitely got married.
pretty much as long as you were not the one being penetrated it really didn’t matter, hell married sex was expected to be with the woman face down so she looked more masculine.
There have been more than a few comments from Walky along these lines, really. I think he especially noticed Asher is hot, maybe also Jacob (though he might also have just been feeling super intimidated by Lucy’s rebound “upgrade”). Part of me expects that SOME of his reaction to Dorothy’s bi awakening — perhaps one of the comedy beats that Walky especially is prone to in the middle of tense moments — will involve some sort of “oh is that a thing we’re supposed to announce? Me too, then. ‘Cept without the cheating on you part.”
Something I’ve often brought up myself when people point out Dorothy’s dislike of Joe. I just think it would be funny to increase the degree to which the friendship’s smoochy chart is an ouroboros. And it’s a good opportunity for Walky to explore his almost as obvious as Joyce’s was bisexuality. Not sure about Joe being down for it though which is why it’s mostly a joke when I bring up Joe and Walky.
Now, Walky, Ethan, Asher might have some legs . . .
Weren’t Joe and Walky married at one point? I mean, not literally, but during their Gender Studies class they were assigned as a married couple and apparently did pretty good in balancing their marital duties. In fact, their assigned marriage was probably the most stable relationship Walky was ever in in this series.
I was unsure about Team Poly but this strip has pretty convincingly persuaded me that, if she can find the words to vocalize it, joyce might be interested in it. I don’t know if Joe would be as well, given the circumstances. The sticking point, though, is that Dorothy absolutely would not be open to it. She is far too possessive of Joyce for that, and Joe is the last person she would want to be sharing Joyce’s affections with.
The first time I attempted to date anyone, it was because a bi woman I knew had just gotten engaged to a man and she wanted to date another woman first, something she’d never done before either.
It appealed to me specifically because I was very very nervous and new at this whole thing, and the whole scenario took the pressure off in some ways.
It didn’t work out! But I can imagine Dorothy doing the same sort of mental math where she thinks maybe having Joyce also date someone else who already makes her happy(?) might make this first-time-with-another-woman scenario less intimidating.)
I’m okay with heartbreak and confusion and miscommunication in the meantime but GOSH do I want the poly at least someday with these three. I’ve felt like they give Joyce different things, both good, and I reallly liked what I saw as the start of a Joe-Dorothy friendship in their last conversation…
Mess and chaos and miscommunications and all of that but… ultimately happy??? Maybe? Please?
Yeah I… Don’t think it’s likely (“Sorry Joe” phrasing and all that) but I do want it as an outcome when there are glimmers of it seeming plausible. In particular because this specific set of thoughts… Is one of the things that good polyamory is about as a very intensely bonding hinge person? Is finding the people who make you better and help you grow as a person and manage your dumbass brain. I dunno. I don’t expect it but I would really really like it.
That said I’m trying not to build up strong investment in something unlikely and get it crushed again. Right now that means I operate from a place of pretty extreme hedging and uncertainty.
Pretty easy to justify it becoming Poly narratively, just it would be toxic and miserable, which I guess would make for good DRAMA
Joe feels hurt but he goes back to blaming himself and feeling unworthy. He still loves Joyce and thinks “I can’t blame her considering what I’ve done“. He agrees to Poly as a way to keep his relationship with Joyce, since it is pretty clear that if it were a choice Joyce would choose Dorothy.
Dorothy isn’t keep about “sharing” Joyce, but she already worked on coming to terms with the Joe/Joyce relationship. She feels guilty about cheating and so agrees to Polyamory as “the least she can do”.
Joyce kind of wants polyamory, but only because it lets her keep her relationship with Joe. Yes she loves and cares for both Joe and Dorothy, but if she had been with just Dorothy she wouldn’t have felt compelled to seek a relationship with Joe. She would be happy just as friends.
But when she goes the poly route instead she quickly learns that it is a heck of a lot of work, and she doesn’t have the chops to do it well. She doesn’t manage communicating openly and honestly with both Dorothy and Joe very well, and the relationships end up imploding. The bridges are burned and we move on to an arc where Joyce and Dorothy try to heal their relationship.
Assuming of course that Joe is actually fully down and open to a polycule, which many people aren’t. Having casual hookups in the past doesn’t mean he is open to that in a more committed relationship.
If he is just saying yes because he thinks its the only way he can stay together with Joyce then that doesn’t lead to a happy relationship.
Well, it would be a solution to the fact that both Joyce and Dorothy have feelings for multiple people, who feel the same way about them. It would not be a solution to their current state of breaking agreements, not communicating, and not being up front and honest with their partners about what they want.
And “oh we can just be poly!” to resolve an affair after the fact isn’t cool. If Joe and Joyce switched places for this arc, the comments would crucify him for making the suggestion.
“The comments would credit Joe if” imma stop you there, the comments have pretty much never crucified Joe for anything. At best there have been deep divides with some of us mad at him, some of us defending him.
Hi! You can be poly and not approve of cheating/want your relationships to be happy and healthy. A history of having cheating trauma is actually common enough in polyamorous circles.
… you think open dating multiple people is simple?
Oh my goodness, no. It is very complicated.
That’s why I’m hoping for it. Anyone who thinks that poly will RESOLVE this is out of their mind.
What poly would do is make things more interesting. More complicated. More chaotic.
Well, how could it not be simple? Dating one person requires at least some degree of balancing that person’s emotional and mental satisfaction with you, and all dating two people requires is doing exactly that but twice at the same time.
1. I personally don’t want a polycule because I think it will be “easy, proper, or a solution”. I want it to be messy, and I want them to have to figure it out or explode.
2. Poly relationships do require extra work. Agreed. That’s why it’ll be fun to watch them struggle through it.
I’d been trying to figure out how best to describe how I’m hoping things would go with their relationship, but clearly it was wasted effort; Nymph and Taffy have summarized it perfectly.
Yes, agreed, this is what I want! Also it would piss off a lot of people who hate DoA for being “woke” or whatever they call it this week, and that would be funny
My problem is that I’d love poly rep in the main cast, but I just hate hate hate the trope of “I cheated, but I’m going to make it all right by retroactively opening the relationship!”
I would have been tentatively okay with a “team poly” resolution right up until those two idiots kissed first, kissed second, etc. and thought about their actions around twenty-third or so.
Is that a trope? Man some folks keep saying they’re sick of seeing a thing in media that I’ve never seen and it makes me feel like I’m watching the wrong media entirely!
For the record, “trope” when it’s used to talk about a pattern IS fiction-specific. But I get why frequenting stuff like r/AITA might make it feel appropriate for the surreal parasocial situation, too.
(I’m thinking also of about a week ago when multiple people said they were sick of the “sapphic media trope” of two women finding love by cheating on a good man, and I asked where that’s commonly happening, and someone made a reference to Friends. Which bewildered me on two levels, because first of all since when is that show “sapphic media”, didn’t they have a minor lesbian character briefly, and second, are we pretending Ross is a good man??)
Haha! I mean, I too have had an exasperated reaction for a moment to something that is super common in Reddit stories on the YouTube channel RSlash. “Not this again!”
It feels a little bit like watching reality TV. And you also have the knowledge that some of the stories are completely made up for clicks, while most others are fictionalized to some degree to make the poster look better… and sometimes the same poster comes back with other stories…
I genuinely think it kind of blurs a line where the stories might involve real people, but they’re certainly not people you or I know, and there’s more distance in some ways than even folks get when they follow celebrity gossip,
I can absolutely understand starting to use words like trope, storyline, theme…
I also would fucking hate this idea in real life. I would never suggest to people who had broken their partner’s trust to try polyamory, but this isn’t real life. I’m tired of people comparing the crowd’s wants/interests for a fictional story to what they’d want/be interested in IRL.
In story: yay cheating! yay messy poly! yay dumb-bongo-juice bisexuals
It’s been noted on previous comics’ threads that there’s definitely a contingent among the “relationship paladin” side who are actually on the “hate this IRL so much that it ruins the story when fictional people do it, too” place. Reasonable people can disagree about the types of mess they like in fiction, I think.
Sure, and I didn’t say they couldn’t. Feel free to read through what I said again just to check.
What I did say was that “I’m tired of people comparing the crowd’s wants/interests for a fictional story to what they’d want/be interested in IRL” In other words, I’m bored with people being upset at those who are enjoying this drama and treating it like a real life moral failing.
Literally, there have been people in the comments saying anyone who enjoys a cheating storyline are actually immoral.
I really don’t mind people disliking this story for whatever reasons they have. I just personally don’t dislike it and I want it to be messy af.
Yeah, I think I got to the point where I’m consciously filtering out most of the “if you like/dislike X you’re a bad person” posters. These threads feel like they’re 50% shit-stirring by weight.
Sometimes that leads me to say semi-obvious things just to make conversation with people who aren’t that. =P
You want media with polyamorous characters? Here’s some books for you. https://lcmawson.com/psst-free-story-here/ I linked to her free starter books collection but all of the series have more books in them. Somewhere around above 90% of her protagonists are either autistic, adhd or both, either bisexual or lesbian, and end up in a polyamourous relationship.
Her biggest series is the snow-verse with currently – well somewhere over 40 books. Hard to keep count when I’m keeping track of the number of books in various omnibus editions and short story collections available as separate books and at least one of the collections also included in one of the omnibus editions. Sounds like a lot of reading but they’re mostly novella length rather than full novel length. The series is urban fantasy and at the start the spinoffs can be difficult to keep track of chronologically because she wrote three separate spinoffs (four if you count the single book that’s a different characters perspective on one of the main books – five if you count the books she wrote before the main series that also connect to it) of the main series taking place during the same time period with the characters interacting. Once those intertwined series are done she’s stuck to sequels following new characters in the same universe that are just one series at a time because that was a bit of a nightmare for her as well as readers. There’s a guide I can locate if anyone needs it.
There’s also a space opera series and a steampunk trilogy, and a newer series focusing on vampires that I’m 99% sure is it’s own separate universe.
That’s fine, we can disagree. I don’t want them to make the cheating alright by retroactively opening the relationship. I want them to have hard conversations about how much that sucked and decide to try polyamory and then CONTINUE to have hard conversations, be messy, struggle with it, etc.
I don’t want it to be an easy path. I want real poly rep with REAL struggles that people in polycules have (including conversations about jealousy, hierarchies, and different ways to show love to different people in your life). I fucking want to see Joe feel compersion when he sees Dorothy and Joyce together, relaxing and loving each other.
Totally fair that you want less complicated rep, but I super don’t.
I mean, I would even like complicated rep, I just kinda feel like the cheating puts it in on a wrong foot for me.
There does remain an outside chance that Joyce had thought she more or less had permission from what Joe said in that one strip, that’d be about the only place where I think I’d be okay with a poly situation showing up (whether it be nice or messy, to be clear — I only dislike a specific messy origin story for it. 😀 )
Totally fair! I just don’t think, even if it comes from cheating, that it necessarily has to “make it all right by retroactively opening the relationship”. They can open the relationship now and still treat what happened previously with the understanding that it sucked and was not alright.
That seems to me like it’d require more maturity than our protagonists have been demonstrating, but oddly I’d kinda be in favor of our two sapphic lovebirds pumping the brakes and actually doing some more serious thinking instead of acting.
It would require more maturity for it to go well, yes. Definitely. They have exactly the right amount of maturity for it to start off messy and a bad idea, plus room to grow – which is what most narratives are about. An arc of character growth and change, and the catalysts for causing that.
At no point did I say “Everybody bangs,” because it is a ridiculous way of solving the situation that would never actually work.
I merely said that there is a small chance that Joe would accept sharing Joyce with Dorothy. My comment only had 2 points: Joe may, or may not be interested in sharing Joyce as a significant other with Dorothy.
It won’t be that simple because even if Joe agrees to it there is still Walky, and Becky to consider; not that Becky is in the relationship, but she might have some unresolved issues.
No, no. *EVERYBODY* bangs. As in the whole cast. Anyone with the slightest sexual interest in anyone else, that is reciprocated, bangs. Words like the c word and the f word and the m word become awful swears. It is all normalised, like talking to one another.
Or perhaps the other way round. Talking to someone other than your monogamous partner, to whom, and only to whom, you show fidelity is cheating…
If Dorothy wAs ok with it ( I think she won’t be , that’s why she was acting out )
If Joyce was ok with Joe having anyone else
( she will be crazy jealous which will bother Dorothy more )
If Becky was OK with it ( nope)
If dina was OK with Becky being jealous ( nope)
If Willis was OK with it. ( I wonder if this was a post election break all ships reaction)
And if Coloring Book Jesus was OK with it ( nope)
Isn’t it time for someone to get abducted by Aliens yet?
To be fair it really doesn’t MATTER to the relationship what Becky thinks of it..it’s not her girlfriend and she doesn’t ACTUALLY get a say in if Dorothy and Joyce date.
This. Joyce is expecting that every bit of what’s happened will be shocking news. Joe is already pretty clued in. He’s also way more scared of being unfaithful than he is of being cheated on. There’s a fair possibility that he doesn’t see this as a reason that the relationship has to end – at which point, Joyce is left with the decision of acutely, knowingly hurting him by ending it, or making use of her newfound knowledge of what a polycule is.
Right. It was Amanda, Grace, and the girl with the Veronica Lake hairstyle who’s not on the Cast page. I don’t know that Agatha has bumped ugly with anyone, but I do know my memory seems to be fading.
The protagonist of the webcomic Girl Genius is Agatha Heterodyne. Often called by other characters “the Heterodyne” since she’s the only one of her family around.
I went through all her 57 tagged appearances and we don’t know a ton about her!
– Very sunny
– Practicing Mormon (at least as of fall semester)
– Not homophobic (on top of today, gave out an “awwww” on learning of Ruth and Billie’s relationship)
A lot of her lines are just the everywoman in the corridor.
Wow hey, she’s doing the think the impatient babies have been scream-crying about while they roll around on the floor in a pile of Bibles they ripped apart with their teeth.
One of the best tracks in the entire game, right there. I’ve been groovin’ out to it when I’m walking home from game nights. I’m usually still a little bit stoned after a session, and the streets are obscenely dark in places, so it keeps me from yiiking out. Nobody’s gonna fuck with the “guy” disco dancing down the sidewalk at midnight, carrying large black case. (It’s just my guitar, but it’s been mistaken for a gun case before and if that keeps people from jumpin’ my queer ass, I’m not gonna go announcing what’s in there.)
As one of the folks who raised the possibility that maybe Joyce isn’t in love with Joe as one of three possible theories — I at no point said “she has no feelings for Joe”. 🙂
No, but others definitely have. Using everything from the fact that the kiss between her and Dorothy happened and the fact that she hasn’t been in a panic spiral about Joe ever since the kiss as evidence that she doesn’t care about him and never did.
I mean, she definitely has feelings for Joe, she just chose to disregard him. And the natural consequence when you treat people like shit is that they don’t want to hang out with you anymore.
not impossible. Breaking up can lead to making bad conclusions and if you made a lot of self improvement only to have it blow up in your face regression is a high possibility. Especially since it’s been established that Dorothy does NOT like Joe and is very suspicious of his intentions Joe may interpret it as Dorothy convinced Joyce that he was bad and to toss him aside. It wouldn’t be true but when you get hurt that way rational thought isn’t always the first item on the menu.
Dorothy’s antagonism with Joe is another thing I am curious to see if it will change or not? Like how much if it was exacerbated by Dorothy’s repressed feelings (and then later thinking that they will never be reciprocated), and how much will or will not remain now.
Ehhh… its fine if he goes back to being a playboy, so long as he stays away from the misogeny.
We see from Liz that in his actual hookups he cares about consent and the wellbeing of his partners.
The main reason why he (maybe) shouldn’t go back to just having more casual hookups is that it seemed like it was bad for his own self-esteem, reinforcing his perception that he is unworthy of deep love.
This is a pretty good launchpad for the next phase of Joe’s arc. Can he stick to his new principles after getting pantsed by the universe? If I had to predict, I’d say he’s gonna try and go back to being a philanderer, only to realize he can’t because he’s just not that person anymore.
I wonder if Joyce will actually seriously consider polyamory, or is she likely still too steadfastly monogamous to be willing to consider it (or perhaps she assumes Joe is too steadfastly monogamous for her to even consider the chance he’d be okay with it)?
Her heart is in the right place but I could set my clock to Joyce putting her foot in her mouth. We’ll see how she does in this highly volatile and emotionally-charged situation!
I don’t think I realized whose reaction I wanted to see first and foremost until this. So Joe is first. That’s actually satisfying.
Anyway, I see we have a sense of awareness of the gravitas of this situation. It’s about time. They were awfully casual about everything, even with being worried about Becky and Dorothy being a coward about Walky.
Based on this… it also looks like poly isn’t in the cards or at least Joyce doesn’t appear to be interested.
Well, we’ve only heard two attempts at coming up with what to say to Joe. No one knows what’s going to come out of her mouth once she’s actually there. Especially not her.
This just makes me sad. I feel bad for Joe. He’s done all the work, yes, but even before that, he was actually a good friend to Joyce and to Danny. He’s always been sensitive and people don’t see it because they don’t look too hard at his facade. And hearing Joyce say this stuff, knowing that he made her feel this way and it still wasn’t enough, just…fucking oof.
I think Joyce is in a place right now where she has equally strong feelings for two people and she feels pulled in two directions at once. For a little while she’s been operating under Well Dorothy Is My One True Love Now mode, but now as she’s walking off to face the music and vocalizing how she feels about Joe, doubt comes in.
I don’t necessarily think it will go this route, but I do wonder if Joyce’s religious trauma upbringing may have resulted in her having a permanent specific complex about penis-in-vagina sex?
Willis went that route with Leslie Bean in Shortpacked. I don’t know if they would use that same exact trauma for a second character, even if this is a different universe.
I’m thinking about way back at the beginning, when Joyce said she could swing with Sal if she didn’t have to touch anything below the neck. Is that going to come back when Dorothy takes her top off?
I actually paused and considered the word choice there for those reasons, but went with “enough” because I think it’s how Joe is likely to feel. The way he thinks about Joyce and what he thinks she deserves, plus his own self-loathing, makes me fairly certain he’s going to think, great, I did my absolute best and I still fell short of what this perfect woman needs. So yeah it’s not fundamentally about that, but I think it’s where we’re headed with regards to Joe.
[Flashbacks to How I Met Your Mother and Barney immediately loosing all his character growth because if being in a real relationship with Robin didn’t work then it was never going to work with anyone]
Though it only lasted a few minutes in the show because then he had a daughter. (Ughughugh, thinking about the HIMYM finale…) (Even though I actually just watched it two weeks ago as I finished up a series rewatch.)
Yeah, this is painful to watch and not just for Joe: this seems to be breaking Joyce’s heart too, hurting him like this. I wonder if she can really go through with it?
Joe deserves better than this. He’s been doing a lot to become a much better person than he was at the beginning of this comic. I hope he can find someone who won’t cheat on him in the future.
i have never encountered a person being invited to participate in a pool regarding themselves taking an action that until this point had been a subconscious thing. having been the subject of a lot exclusionary bullshit and rumour in school and workplaces, to be invinted into a pool regarding when i would do something would cause me to cut those people from my life, and question why i ever involved them in my life. i havenever understood why someone would think it funny, now if one of the 2 had sneakily participated in the pool because they were not as closeted as they were presenting just to take everyone money sure fucking hilarious, bit of a trope, but both of these girls feelings were so far buried that this doesnt work.
Headcanon: for the last 2 months or so, most of the women’s half of Read Hall has utterly convinced that Joyce is secretly cheating on Joe with Dorothy, but nobody’s told Joe in all that time because they see it as his comeuppance for being a horrible misogynist.
My money is on this going poorly and then at some point Joe finds himself in a strip with Rachel again and he’s like “See, you were wrong. People do change. They get worse”
The time lapse there was weird because the protest stuff was midday, and by the time they were back at their dorm, it was like 8pm and they had talked about nothing. But viewing it as a ten to thirty minute (pausing at places and taking a round about way, maybe) giddy run makes a lot more sense in multiple ways.
But you cannot see which hand is which, on the clock, because the top is not in panel. So lunch time-ish or evening, or the clock always shows that time because the battery is stuffed?
We also do not know if it is dark or light out when Asma gets back. So, all in all, I would say we know very little about how long the interval between escaping the kettling and the getting back was, other than it was light when they escaped and dark when Joyce and Dorothy got back.
If it were lunch time by the clock, that would still mean that Joyce and Dorothy ran for hours. The more likely reasoning about the clock not being accurate, rather than all this nitpicking, would be that Willis didn’t really think about it. And it really doesn’t matter because for the light to change as much as it did, it would have been longer than getting back to the dorm should have taken. Time lapse was still weird.
To me it looks closer to 8pm, but it could be meant to be 7pm. Or not meant to be anything. Alice and Billie could have been having a late lunch as their second meal of the day– it does look like they hung out all day. At the time, it seemed like an early (or right at 12pm) lunch, since they met up in the morning to go get food at Read.
With how the pacing of events seemed to be, it seems like there are hours between seeing Joyce and Dorothy. Which is fine, and the comic often moves at jumps throughout the day to keep things going. Usually it seems less “Hey what happened in those hours where you were running around holding hands” though. (Also, Dorothy and Joyce *could have* been running off into the sunset… missed opportunity imo. Also we could get some pretty colors from things that weren’t tear gas.)
Yet still Zero signs the really regret their decisions.
It’s not that I think there wouldn’t be consequences at least for Joyce and Joe’s relationship, but rather that I kinda dislike Joyce and Dorothy now.
And they don’t come across as cute when they are acting with so little regard for others. It’s like how I don’t think Amber stabbing Sal was “cool” or “heroic”.
No, it wasn’t. Which is a good thing because if it had been framed as cool or heroic then the story would be treating it as basically OK. Maybe something with consequences, but not actually bad.
I’ve kind of been feeling the same way about the Dorothy/Joyce relationship. It seems like there has been a lot of emphasis on it being “cute”, “New Relationship Feelings”, or Dramatic and Fearless declarations of love. If Joyce/Dorothy felt any regret, it was less important than kisses.
Even now it seems like while Joyce wants to protect Joe’s feelings, I don’t see her actually regretting her decision.
Also, thank you Agatha for your input.
(Personal note, one of my closest friends from high school, who I remained really close to the first two years of college– roomed together sophomore year– no longer talks to me, and while I don’t know why (because of the not talking to me part), I imagine that part of it is we went to college and she became Mormon and I got queerer. So it does make me happy to see the Mormon character here with Happy Gay Facts.)
This is what I was referring to the other day when I said “we’ve already HAD Joyce do a big freak out over maybe being bi”. She decided she wasn’t, because her attraction to men felt different than her attraction to women, which is an incredibly common reason for bi people to stay in denial when younger.
Math-lady-dot-gifing about whether Jacob’s observation that Danny and Joe are “a little married, huh” early on is enough for Danny to feel like Walky dating Joe is once again going after one of his exes.
“How about we just don’t be monogamous?”
“Uh…”
“Look, you wanna explore your wants and needs, fine. I also know I can’t grow a vagina. So we can compromise by me being the boyfriend and Dorothy can be the girlfriend. I am fine with that.”
Paraphrase a conversation I said to a girlfriend/friend/whatever when she said she wanted to ask out a friend of ours who had recently become single. I encouraged her, caught in that “I want her to be happy even if it is not with me; I hope she and I can stay together; and our friend also being bi and seemingly attracted to both of us maybe do some kind of thruple situation?”
That’s not what AGV/Ruby is talking about — there’s been a vocal segment of the commenters for months now, talking about how Joe is going to be so broken by this conversation that he backslides on his entire character arc and starts mistreating women.
Joe’s not an idiot. He had to see this as a possible consequence of encouraging Dorothy to embrace her feelings for Joyce. I seriously doubt this is going to take him by surprise, and I’m almost positive that he’s not going to backslide.
Not directly related to today’s strip, but in reaction to some commenters who say they were surprised of Dorothy turning out to actually be in love with Joyce:
A little issue I had about the comic for a little while was that It felt to me like Joyce was starting to have a “Main protagonist” syndrome: i.e. everyone stopping everything they were doing at the drop of an hat for Joyce the moment she was facing some problems, even when they had realistically more important priorities. And it only looked to me that they were doing that for no other reason that Joyce is the Main Protagonist and she need help, so now the plot is about her.
In retrospect, I realise now that “Everyone” was actually mainly Dorothy (and to a lesser degree, Sarah, but mostly because she is her roomate and she kinda developed a big-sis affection toward Joyce). And seeing that Dorothy actually had romantic feeling toward Joyce recontextualise a lot of what I used to see as an issue.
Yeah, there are things Dorothy has done for Joyce that wouldn’t make sense for a friend she has known for less than a year, (or would at least be unusual), but for someone you might actually be in love with? Yeah, it all fit perfectly.
So it turns out my “issues” were just foreshadowing I never picked on (I never do).
I think you were on to something though. It felt like for awhile every character was talking about Joyce constantly. Even Lucy, Billie and Walky in the other quad having discussions about her. Ruth too. That was all a long time ago though.
With multi-year webcomics it’s always hard to know what is clever foreshadowing and what is the artist making it all up as they go and the retroactive foreshadowing being a pleasant coincidence
insert the brooklyn 99 meme “i have only known this dog for 5 minutes, but i would kill everyone in this room and then myself for this dog”
sometimes you meet someone and just click, even platonically (which my spell check is having a siezure over), one of my closest friends we spent the night we met in a perkins (literally there from 11pm to 7 am, would’ve killed for him that morning) 22years later we watched Sinners in my back yard on a projector this past sat) it can happen and i hope all you here get to enjoy such a connection.
The only thing I don’t like about Joyce and Dorothy is that I have to destroy this entire plot I have daydream for months.
– When Dorothy leaves to go to Yale.
– It’s Year Two of college.
– New colleagues to the same floor where Joyce lives. A hindi, someone from eastern Europe, and of course, one from Brazil. And finally one that are missing.
– The missing one is from Korea. And she is a giant girl. (you will say that it sounds like Bubbles from QC, but it’s just a coincidence).
– One month after, Joyce find her, walking to IU. They soon befriend each other. Instant connection. Joyce doesn’t know, but the first 3 girls are looking for this new girl.
– In the end of the day, they are reunited, by surprise. The big girl embraces the other 3 girls, because they are like sisters, that made a promise to stay together in College, and they thought that korean girl were lost forever. And Joyce suddenly is involved in this friendship.
– Yes, the big girl starts to have feelings about Joyce, and history goes on…
But, sadly, Willis finally setup Joyce and Dorothy to stay together. And now I have to drop my entire storyline I have written in my mind for months! Damn you, Willis!
That’s all. You can keep going with Dorothy and Joyce.
Anyway, about the comic itself: I don’t see how this will not turn ugly. Things are going to get worse before they get better.
A lo of people are going to be miserable and this isn’t something that will be easily solved. I am not even sure it can actually be solved. There are rifts that cn be so bad they can never be fixed back. But at least they are taking the honest past.
Ironically enough, I think that Becky is the one who will actually take and roll with it the best. (at least I hope so. The last thing I want is this new development also creating a hurtful rift between Becky and Dina)
Surely Joyce won’t wimp out and then do something even worse to avoid telling him though- right, viewers? Because is obviously where everyone comes clean and tells the truth. Pay no attention to the title of the next storyline shshshhh
Oh look, Joyce is sad and sympathetic about breaking Joe’s heart, the thing everybody complained about that she wasn’t for the last couple days. It’s almost like she just needed two fucking minutes to come down off the high of realizing she’s in love with somebody so that she could process the negatives that come with that feeling.
Yeah, no. If she didn’t feel even a smidge sad at this point, when she was walking to do the deed, then we’d have to wonder when she turned sociopath.
I’m not sure about others, but I never said that she didn’t care about Joe. She just doesn’t really care about him as much as Joe cares about her. Or Dorothy cares about Walky. It wasn’t a relationship that was going to last, anyways.
I wouldn’t be surprised if on that panel, with the crumpled lip, was the first moment that she *really thought* about how this might affect him, and empathized with that pain.
That’s kind of my point. She’s been wrapped up in the realization of her love for Dotty and while she was aware, in concept, that this involved breaking up with Joe, she’s been avoiding thinking about it because she knows it’s gonna hurt. To listen to some of the commenters for the last few days, Joyce was clearly a character-assassinated robot shell of her former self who didn’t care about Joe’s feelings at all.
Yeah, I think she’s been subconsciously putting off the part where she has to deal with this emotionally. She knows this part is gonna suck for Joe and for her, and she’s trying to be brave about it now by going to Joe first because she can tell Dorothy’s gonna handle it even worse than her, but I really think she just wanted to spend a little longer in the version of the world where neither Dorothy nor Joe are hurt yet by the fact that she wanted it to work with Joe but just loves Dorothy more. I think she’s mostly afraid of hurting him and losing him as a friend. I think she’s been distantly aware for a while that this is gonna be the Bad Part, even if it was also inevitable.
“Look, Joe. You’ve been absolutely wonderful to me, and you’ve done nothing to deserve this. But the fact is, earlier today, I kissed someone else. *I* kissed *them.* I really like you, and I wish that things had worked out differently, but I know it’s impossible for me to commit myself to you when my heart’s somewhere else. You deserve better.”
Simple. Straightforward. Acknowledge what happened. Apologize. Make it clear that it was not their fault, that they were wonderful, and that they deserve someone who won’t cheat on them. And that’s harsh, but it’s also true.
The only thing missing here, I think, is an explicit acknowledgement of the betrayal’s moral element. This confession and apology does contain all of the facts, but it’s missing (I think) an explicit statement of ‘I have transgressed-I regret it and I’m very sorry, but at the same time I can’t wish I hadn’t. You deserve better.’
I haven’t spoken much on it but I think I’ll talk about about my feelings on Jorothy.
Personally, I have a hard time seeing it only because Dorothy has always felt like Joyce’s school “mom” so I can’t say I ever saw them romantically. In the same way it feels weird shipping Sarah and Joyce. Cuz Sarah seems so sister-coded to me. Dorothy’s in a similar boat, though I will admit that recently that dynamic feels like it’s changed somewhat.
The other issue is that Joe and Joyce has been an unexpected but incredibly enjoyable dynamic for me. Like an all time highlight of the comic has been their slowly budding relationship and growth of both their characters. So I’m feeling a bit like I’m having the rug pulled and that this was all setup to get this other couple together. Especially since I was worried Joyce would basically feel no conflict over the cheating. Glad that’s not the case at least!
The downside is I feel like because this relationship is Sapphic there’s a chance any gripes I have with it will be dismissed as me being heteronormative in favor of Joeyce. Which I don’t feel is the case (I say think cuz we all have subconscious biases). I feel like Joe is being reduced to just “the man in the way” of this lesbian couple when I feel like his dynamic with Joyce was SO much more than that. I wasn’t a very big fan of Walky and Lucy in favor of Amber/Walky. But I also wasn’t under the impression that their coupling would last since there wasn’t a lotta fanfare with it. Unlike this relationship which based on the framing is probably endgame (If there is such a thing). I’m not too big on yucking somebody’s yum. If Jorothy is your fave then far be it from me to ruin it for anybody. But man, outside the slim slim chance this goes the Polyamory route I feel like it just sorta built me up only to tear me down and what’s worse feel like I’m being regressive for not being super jazzed about the new couple. But like always, I’ll wait and see how it plays out.
I agree with you. I was rooting for Joyrothy to happen eventually, but the speed with which it occurred and the circumstances surrounding it make me not like it anymore. Plus I don’t really want it at the EXPENSE of Joece. I do think it’s great personal drama to conflict with Joe having grown for Joyce, but other than that… yeah I’m not a fan.
The whole concept of this ship being endgame has poisoned it for me a bit as well like… it takes the wind out of the sails of not knowing what’ll happen next. Maybe they’d break up or date other people, but they’ll get back together in the end. I really wish it had stayed a drawn-out slow burn, feels like digging into a bag of candy you were saving to eat bit by bit over a long time, and instead binging the whole thing in one night and not liking the taste anymore.
Yeah the endgame thing is weird for me too. They’re in college. I guess some people met their life partners in college, but I can’t relate to that. I can relate to *thinking* I met my life partner as a young adult multiple times, and being mistaken.
I dunno, I know this isn’t super common but a bunch of folks I know met their life partners as kids and got together in high school or college. This is the case for me with both of mine. My parents met in college, I think my mom was my dad’s first girlfriend. None of the referenced people were in like small towns or anything.
Anyway. I don’t know what the dating scene looks like when you don’t just date your friends but marrying someone you started dating in college seems really normal to me. Not universal by any means, but not weird.
Either way, I’m typically much more interested in watching people navigate the problems that actually exist with in a relationship than watching a lot of getting together and breaking up and will they won’t they and all that. Despite not liking this ship in particular, having a sense of whether something is intended to last tends to increase my enjoyment of it, not decrease it, since it makes it easier to take the narrative for what it is intended to be.
This is fiction. In one sense, “endgame” just means lasts throughout the comic.
In another, it would be weird narratively to build up a relationship and then end the comic with a note saying “Yeah, they broke up a couple years later and both wound up marrying different people we haven’t met.” Even if that would be more realistic.
Eh, for what it’s worth while I don’t agree with some of your points, I don’t think anybody that frequents these comment sections is going to accuse *you* of all people of being heteronormative or regressive.
I too was rooting for Joe and Joyce, and I’m kinda disappointed that’s probably not gonna continue now. The idea of a poly relationship seems unlikely to me, and while I like gay couples I can’t bring myself to like Joyce and Dorothy as a couple since they started with cheating. At this point I’m just waiting to see if there will be any negative consequences for those two cheating.
Like I said on a previous strip, we are talking about two girls who were holding hands while masturbating beforehand (and at a point where they were still single).
We have only ourselves to blame to have emotionally invested ourself in the separate hetero relationship that emerged afterwards.
Honestly I wasn’t a fan of that either. Less the masturbation itself and more the framing of it. Prior to that strip Joyce had been mad at everyone micromanaging her life and then Dorothy shows up and INSISTS she masturbate right now because she’s only attracted to Joe because she’s repressed and horny. That really rubbed me the wrong way.
That sequence squicked some people, and was actively triggering for others, and I will never try to tell anyone how to feel about it.
I will say: I think Joyce’s total mood shift was talked about, but not really fully acknowledged. A lot of people talked about how it didn’t make sense, but I don’t think I saw a ton of “oh, right, she’s got, like, PMDD.” Hard mood swings are kind of part of the diagnosis, though, and I feel like we could have assumed she was in pain earlier when she was shouting at people, and the pain had passed and brought her back into a more Joyce-typical level of “yay! Dorothy had come to visit me!” by the time Dorothy showed up.
Willis could’ve helped us out by having Dorothy be surprised by the change, but I also think Dorothy was in a very specific mode, where she wasn’t in the right state of mind to have been expecting a frostier reception — she was still too much in her own head over Roz and Jennifer’s criticisms of the way in which she was helping (or not helping) Joyce, as well as regret over Walky being with Lucy, and extremely confused and confusing feelings over Joyce’s mutual attraction to Joe.
So neither girl commented on the change, which made it feel stranger to readers than I think it was meant to, and some readers started to feel like Joyce just goes along with anything Dorothy asks of her — even though we’ve definitely seen Joyce ignore Dorothy’s advice and opinions, and we’d even seen her tell Dorothy to fuck off earlier — and that added to the sense that some folks had of Dorothy as the Mom Friend, plus Roz’s accusations that she was being sex-negative, plus Dorothy’s untrue (but not, in-universe, wholly unfair) view of Joe…
It all came together in a big mess that I think really soured the scene versus what Willis had intended it to be, which was largely positive, with only a BIT of a shadow cast by Dorothy’s unclear mental state (that this was obviously somehow a reaction to her bitterness wrt Walky, that she muttered a retort to Roz while explaining what they were going to do…) — but becamr something where a bunch of readers were at the very least calling Joyce’s consent into question.
I think the framing is absolutely my issue. And it’s sorta something this arc suffers from to. Willis’ eyes get bigger than his stomach when it comes to the shipping and he jumps right to the critical moment without taking the surrounding scenario into account.
“I want Joyce and Dorothy to have an intimate moment in a laj dry room, but instead of it happening organically, say they’re already in the laundry room and Joyce and Dorothy start discussing masturbation or something, Dorothy instead comes to Joyce’s dorm room with the explicit purpose to have her masturbate in a laundry room (which…the publicness of that could easily squick people out so having her TAKE Joyce there rather than them already being there feels a bit…weird.) And Dorothy has to have a “motivation” for that scene that isn’t explicitly “I just wanna watch Joyce cum” cuz that would be more inherently sexual and might give the game away. So she is doing it as a “preventative measure” against Joyce feeling attraction to Joe. Which…is kinda ew. Like even if it’s a lie Dorothy is telling herself it’s a pretty regressive view of both sex and honestly, Joyce as an autonomous being. It’s like telling someone “you’re just confused.” And what’s worse Dorothy vocalizes this mission statement to Joyce and Joyce just goes ” Oh ok”. There’s a reason people claim it feels very “porn-y”. Everyone involved basically is written in such a way to bring us to the sexy parts, at the risk of feeling rushed and uncomfortable. I can’t say taking Joyce’s personality shift into account really helps that much for me.
I hear you for sure. I think a lot of us have that feeling of a rug pulled out from under us given how subtly Joe/Joyce was built up for such an incredibly long time.
Okay, first of all: you’re fine!! I read through this whole comment for a specific eye to any kinda queerphobia because you said you were worried about it, and I don’t think there’s any in here.
Like, I don’t actually see the “Dorothy is kinda Joyce’s mom” angle, but I know myself, and I would definitely be icked out if I saw it! So I have full sympathy to people for whom the ship is just kind of, irrevocably poisoned by that.
Second of all: fully valid to have gotten really invested in Joe/Joyce! I think they’ve been cute, too, aside from a few moments that made me cringe a bit. And we know Willis also shipped them, and didn’t want to cut them off at the knee, and already pushed this storyline back several times in part to spend more time with Joe/Joyce.
(I’m still hoping for poly, but it’s in an “eventually” way at this point. I like all three of the dynamics between them, and I would like to see Dorothy and Joe develop an actual friendship, unlike when she spent years dating Danny and the two of them never really clicked.)
Third of all: I completely get worrying that you’d get kinda lambasted for just… not wanting the two girls to get together, but for what it’s worth, while I have definitely seen a few people painting with much too broad a brush and saying everyone who’s not on board just, like, hates lesbians…
…it’s moooostly that there have been some very queerphobic takes in the comments.
Sometimes more subtle, like the much higher proportion of “Dorothy’s just horny for Joyce” “Dorothy just wants to fuck Joyce” “everyone who ships this just wants Dorothy and Joyce to fuck”-type comments from people, pretty much the instant they stopped being able to argue that Dorothy was just confused and not really bi.
Sometimes with an appeal to completely imaginary society-wide trends: “why can’t two girls just be friends, what happened to platonic relationships!”
(Even if we just consider DoA, this is actually the ONLY strong platonic friendship between two people of the same gender that’s turned into a romance. Sal/Marcie and Joyce/Becky both ended with rejection; Becky/Dina spoke for like five minutes before romantic interest became clear; Jennifer/Ruth was more of an “enemies to lovers” trajectory; and even for Danny/Ethan, which never became an actual romance, their interest in one another was established before they’d actually spent enough time together to be considered a strong platonic friendship.)
Sometimes by complaining that “it just doesn’t make sense” for Joyce and/or Dorothy to be bi, so Willis is just “forcing an agenda” (sometimes even using the word “agenda”).
And then there’s the stuff that’s definitely also getting posted but not making it through the moderation filter, or comments that have actually been deleted.
These comments are not in the majority! But they’re definitely happening, and those of us who see them are getting rankled.
So: if you see someone complaining about queerphobes getting pressed over this development, please know that you’re not queerphobic just for not shipping something!! Those people aren’t, or shouldn’t be, talking about you.
Yeah, the “it’s just doesn’t make sense” comments in regards to Dorothy and Joyce being bi and having feelings for each other don’t hold much water, and do typically have a queerphobic underlying vibe to them.
I (and I imagine others in good faith) just wish the when and how of Dorothy and Joyce getting together had been different/done differently.
Yeah, this basically describes my feelings about the current relationship forecast, both on how invested I was in Joe and Joyce’s relationship and the specific when and how of Dorothy and Joyce acting their feelings played out kinda souring me a bit on the relationship.
And that’s not even mentioning the issues with the not-Palestine protest and the issues surrounding the handling of the (lack of) Muslim characters.
The people who think Dorothy was like Joyce’s “mom” are always gonna be kinda strange for me, I’m not gonna lie. There’s suggesting it in a mom friend way, which is fine, and then there’s this idea you seem to be suggesting, that Dorothy is her mom in a similar found family way that Sarah and Joyce are sisters and. I mean. That’s weird. It’s one thing for Becky and Leslie to see each other as pseudo child-parent in a found family way, they’re different ages and Leslie has definitely tried to take a mentor-ish role for Becky.
Dorothy may be micromanaging, and a bit meddlesome one might say, but she has never tried to actually mentor Joyce from a position of authority. They’re the same damn age. Joyce is not a child and Dorothy is not ‘so mentally mature she might as well be 50 years old’. She tries to be mature, but I feel like this very storyline shows that no matter how much she tries, she is still very much a young adult in over her head. Joyce and Dorothy are peers. They have never and will never be “found family mother and daughter”.
Now, I don’t think this makes you homophobic or anything. You can disagree with the ship for many reasons. I just think the “Dorothy is literally Joyce’s mom and thus it is incest” route is incredibly strange.
I wouldn’t say she’s “literally Joyce’s mom. But I definitely get the feeling she “mothers” Joyce. Usually since Joyce’s naivete and sheltered upbringing makes it so that any character she meets is usually teaching or showing her something unfamiliar and Joyce is usually aprehensive or hesitant to try anything new. And since Dorothy appears the most often she just sticks outbin my head as more if a guidance role than a peer.
Pondering it further, I think sometimes it is difficult to divorce having a more guiding role for someone from being parental. For example, for a year my cousin and her son moved in with me. The first time I met her son, he was 6 months old and I was about 14 or 15. So the gap between our ages was about 14 years. When he lived with me, he was 14 and I was about 28/29.
I will admit, it was tricky sometimes to balance what role I was meant to play in his life. I was too old to be a ‘friend’, but too young to be his parent. His mom made choices I disagreed with but I felt it wasn’t my place to argue or impede. He and I had always regarded each other as simply ‘cousins’, but sharing a house did put me in a new role. Especially because I was smack dab in the middle age-wise between him and his mom, so sometimes I had to mediate. It was a weird role to juggle, especially being the only person in the house working for a significant period of that time, and the main bill handler. I’ve never had a kid before and still don’t have a kid. It definitely wasn’t perfect but I wanna think I did a good job trying to help give him advice and be his “cool, older cousin” without forcing a parental role onto him or his mother.
Which is a lot of yapping to say I think I get it a bit more now.
See, my objection here — and you’re totally free to disagree ofc — is that Dorothy isn’t actually that much less sheltered or that much more worldly. A lot of the time, when Joyce asks Dorothy for guidance, Dorothy doesn’t know any better than Joyce does.
I see them more as helping each other and learning from each other.
Hilarious thought just occurred to me. All their friends are sneaking around to throw them a, “Finally you’re out and dating” surprise party. Not likely to happen, but that would be very silly.
Reading through the comments today puts me in mind of an anecdote of the danger of commiting to a relationship with a “romantic” man who says he cares about love (/following his heart): promises you the world when he’s in love with you, then later when he’s gotten used to you falls in love with someone else new and interesting, and after he’s let you down by following his heart there he later get used to and lets that person down too in favour of someone else new and perhaps younger, et cetera. In romance, “I have to follow my heart” painting it as something external and involuntary is a blank cheque for recurrent untrustworthiness.
AI think everybody you’ve made a romantic commitment to is owed the basic decency and respect of not being cheated on (whoops 1) and being forthcoming about it if you do (we know based on the archive title that she does not succeed in telling him tomorrow- whoops 2) no matter how long the relationship has been explicitly romantic. Especially given her current partner was a close friend and confidant for a long time prior to them dating. Them only being official for 10 days doesn’t diminish the shittiness of it all.
Huh. The former. Well folks, please look forward to the ramblings of “Wrong 7” where I cop to getting hyperfixated and way too confident in where I thought the story was going just as soon as mods approve my post.
I think Joyce would be fine dating multiple people.
And Joe would probably acquiesce knowing he’s only sharing Joyce with Dorothy
Since he already was
So it might happen that way.
But one person wouldn’t be ok with it.
Dorothy.
2 people. Becky.
Maybe 3 people Dina when Becky gets jealous.
Maybe 4 people when Joyce gets crazy jealous at Joe with someone else.
And that might break up Dorothy.
Dorothy still in the middle of an identity crisis. A relationship will just paper it over till it rips open.
Who are you really Dorothy? How soon till you put on a superhero costume?
Dorothy has been a mess for a while. When she heals a bit and comes to terms with her new self, she’ll be a new person. How will this change her relationship with Joyce?
Instead of being all possibly joyful and instantly polycule-y/open relationship-y in response to their girlfriends cheating on them, I’m kind of hoping Joe and/or Walky pull an Ethan and just completely disappear from the strip entirely (or, at least, completely withdraw from the current friend groups), for a while, to attempt to recover from this and to get their shit back together again. (And maybe do a slightly better job of it than Ethan himself has done, so far, though that part is optional.)
And, yes, I’m fully aware “my best friend since childhood died as a result of physical violence” has more magnitude than “my girlfriend kissed somebody else” but still.
Everyone involved joining hands, dancing in a circle, singing hallelujah, and instantaneously being completely and unreservedly open to a polycule/open relationship would seem far too neat and tidy a solution to this situation. Not nearly enough Drama Tag involved there. There should be at least some consequences to this more than none at all whatsoever.
I’m baffled by this constant refrain that a poly relationship would be neat and tidy and involve no drama. Like, seriously, have you ever met</em. poly people?
Jennifer solves problems the way a Molotov cocktail solves problems. When you have a problem you throw Jennifer at it and boom right away you have a different problem.
I don’t think Joe is going to take it well. I actually think it might break him.
We know cheating is a very sore subject for Joe due to it being the reason for his parents’ messy divorce. We’ve also seen this frankly nihilistic and self-deprecating side of him where he refused to care and let people care. By his own admission, his relationship with Joyce is motivating him to finally open up and try to be a better person.
So, the first time he actually does try and puts effort into committing and being the best version of himself, the end result is that the person he’s doing it for is the one to put him in the very situation he dreads? Call me pessimistic but this has potential to just make him give up entirely on himself.
think i’m becoming an anti-joyce/joe person outta spite. everyone’s like “these two get exactly one (1) extra partner” and if that’s the case i’d far rather it’d be walky! i like their dynamic better and think that just at base non-cheating level the comic gets better drama out of them. but consensus seems to be the third arm on this gotta-be-a-triangle has to be joe, and it’s turning me into the joe-ker
Personally I do think that the Dorothy/Walky relationship, while really cute, has basically run it’s course – however, I definitely prefer Walky over Joe as a third to Joyce and Dorothy, and am happy to welcome you aboard the Joe/Joyce hate train. May the bubble-butt twink vanquish the rectangle man forevermore!
I shipped Joyce and Joe pretty much from their interactions in those Roomies! flashback strips right up until they actually got together in DoA and all of the things that made their interactions interesting just… stopped.
Raw passion vs a reasonable and stable romance. On paper Joe is perfect for Joyce, but her heart is on fire for Dorothy right now.
And to everyone that says “she should date them both!” That may be good for JOYCE but Dorothy LOATHES Joe and every time she sees them together she has flashbacks of Blaine kidnapping Joyce and driving off, so there would be absolutely no way Dorothy would be up for a Menage a Tres. Dotty wants Joyce to herself. That’s the big problem.
On paper Joe is perfect for Joyce, but her heart is on fire for Dorothy right now.
We’re seeing her being really fond of Joe in this very strip.
Dorothy LOATHES Joe
That’s because 1) she hasn’t seen most of his change (while we and Joyce have), and 2) the following.
every time she sees them together she has flashbacks of Blaine kidnapping Joyce and driving off
That’s because she’s scared of losing Joyce – to death or to Joe is the same for her. And that’s exactly the problem a ménage à trois would solve (…while potentially creating all sorts of others, of course).
I don’t think it would solve Dorothy’s possessiveness of Joyce at all, to be perfectly honest. I think she’d feel as though there was a sword hanging above her head – what if she changes her mind? what if she goes back to them? what if this slips through my fingers like everything else good that i’ve gotten? I don’t see any scenario where Dorothy wants anything other than a clean break on both their parts from their current partners.
Granted, I also have a hard time imagining Dorothy having any kind of a functional reaction to getting what she wants, given how self-sabotaging she’s been on previous occasions that’s happened.
Her reaction to getting into Yale, a lifelong goal of hers, was to bury her head in the sand about it for (probably) months. What’s she gonna do now that she has what she gave up Yale for?
The zaniest possible answer is “throw herself into causes to prove to Raidah that she’s not just a stupid white freshman and actually DOES belong at demonstrations etc, neglecting Joyce in the process”.
Actually, that’d be kinda in-character, wouldn’t it?
I don’t know anything about Nash besides the general Forest Hall vibes which I do not really enjoy. Perhaps we will see more Nash and I will acquire a real opinion.
unfortunately for one of the males to give birth it would mean he received the heavenly rod, and therefor is less than a woman as she has no choice but to have a receptacle for a dick, but for a man to willingly take penetration means he wants to be female,
there is a greek legend of a prince murdering his father for suggestion he was taking his tutors dick
Only when it came to slaves. Homosexual sex with another citizen was highly frowned upon and technically punishable by death under the Republic, though we don’t know of any cases where that law was enforced.
For the Athenians, at least, (and almost all our evidence comes from Athens), it was acceptable on both sides for an adult man to have a relationship with an adolescent boy, but not acceptable for two grown men to have a relationship.
And the adult man had to take the active role. Anything else was shameful.
It’s all awkward to talk about because they didn’t think of it at all in our terms. In terms of personal sexual orientation, but in terms of active and passive roles and who they were appropriate for.
Well with how both sides of American politics are desperate for a Certain List not to come out right now… I imagine it was the same back then, with a portion of the elites doing that shit while regular people didn’t.
As a matter of professional pride, I think it’s not only possible but plausible to moderate a space effectively without that moderation being inherently censorious.
That said, I was mostly wanting a block button for my own view of the thread, not a universal block.
Oh yeah, that would be very neat. Nothing wrong about wanting to shut off idiots from your perception.
I miss forums, even if moderators would get a bit power mad it was still a nicer and more organized system than the social media we have now.
It’s one of the way the Patreon comments are better. And that except for the kast week or so there isn’t as many dhit stirrers. If allowed i would block a good chunk of people here.
Welp, panel 4-5 Joyce is exactly what I was imagining — there stands a woman who got carried away in the True Romance of it all, and just managed to slap herself in the face with a dose of “meanwhile back in the real world…”
And you’re not jollying anyone out of this thing, girl, least of all yourself.
If it wasn’t for the apparent Word of Willis, I’d actually think we could see some drama with Joyce bouncing back and forth between Joe and Dorothy (internally, at least) and having a solid in-comic week or two of drama about it, but I feel like that’s less likely now.
A lot of people take the “sorry Joe” aside from Willis’ Patreon post to mean that this is the end for Joe/Joyce. Nothing confirmed of course, but it’s a reasonable inference.
She’s indulged herself in a space where she has both Joe and Dorothy and neither of them have to be hurt by the choices she’s made and will go on to make. That’s over now, and it’s hitting her all at once. Every step takes her closer to the hurt.
I think he’ll care if someone he dated and came out to now comes out as queer. I don’t know to what degree, but I imagine he’ll have some kind of feeling about it.
That’s valid! I want him to hear the edges of it, think it’s a great thing, turn up to congratulate Joyce and Dorothy… and find that actually everyone in the main group is Big Mad at them lmao.
“Yes, two girls kissing is hot. But, what? You and Dorothy? I totally don’t believe you. I need to see this. C’mon, we’re going to do science.”
(Joe, channeling some Dina)
My apologies if this has already been brought up before… (I scanned the comments but didn’t notice it…)
But I noticed one thing that Joyce did not mention in her planned “explanations” to Joe are “I love you… but”. Instead its “your wonderful” and “you make me feel good”. I wonder if that might be a hint that maybe Joyce wasn’t as invested in the relationship as we thought?
She’s never told him she loved him before and telling it to him for the first time as she’s breaking up with him in part because she cheated on him is such a colossal dick move that surely Joyce’s autistic ass would understand it.
That said, yeah, Joe has always been more in love with her than she is with him. And he knows it, I’m sure.
I don’t wanna disappoint your trust in humanity but someone actually did say “I love you but” to me when breaking up. In a letter. And then he praised all the good stuff for a whole fucking page.
That was sort of the goofus/gallant thing between Joe+Joyce and Lucy+Walky. Joe and Joyce both knew that Joe felt stronger romantically than Joyce. That was the whole deal behind, “you’re my anxiety” and Joyce taking a few days to think about what she wanted to happen.
As opposed to Walky who knew they weren’t on the same page, and avoided clearing it up. I imagine an alternate timeline where they communicated better, and started dating with a better understanding of each other’s feelings, from some combination of Walky being a little more attentive, Lucy summoning up the nerve, and Dorothy not intervening for her own purposes. That’s the timeline where the Walky and Lucy sex art is from.
Dorothy has always used Walky as an emotional support dog. There when she needs him and to be patted on the head the rest of the time. Affectionate but would she have given up Yale for him? Not a chance. Danny was the same thing.
Joyce and Joe is more complicated because they both wanted romance, not just comfort sex. Tristan and Ethan didn’t prepare her for real affection. If Dorothy had left for Yale she might have happily spent her life with Joe.
Alright, 7 hours later and these comments are still awaiting moderation and I want folks to see them, so:
Without having read the strip, I was on here at 3:15 AM because, to an extent I’ve almost never experienced before, and certainly never over a webcomic, I’ve hyperfixated on commenting here. I don’t know why, but making thse comments has become the single thing my brain cares about to the detriment of my sleep cycle.
And I came here to say, even before I read today’s strip, that I was wrong yesterday. I got so fixated on a notion that I didn’t consider how I was coming across, and I was deservedly mocked for it. I shall take the L.
Reading today’s strip does a lot to reassure me that my concerns are unfounded. That Joyce *is* giving sufficient weight to the betrayal that she made.
I still have my problems with this arc. It’s not all fixed just with one strip. But I was way too confident in how I was sure this story would go, and once again I’ll take the L there.
I think a big part of my mistake is that I don’t do social media anymore and I’ve forgotten the way people engage with each other on it. I gave too much credence to hyperbole when everything on social media has to be breathless exaggeration or else it doesn’t get views. That’s one of the big reasons I stay off social media in the first place- just fucking say what you mean- but I forgot myself.
Lastly, and maybe now I can get some sleep, I will continue to think that Leslie Knope and Ann Perkins work much better as friends than lovers. So many times when I thought about why I was so grumpy, I kept coming back to that. Silly, I know. But it kept eating at me. It was the notion that any platonic explanation for their behavior was “a volcano of lies” to quote Becky that I was so hung up on. Because as a straight guy, that relationship, and to a lesser extent Turk & JD, is what I strive for in my friendships. To say nice things about each other while simultaneously having nondesire to kiss. If there’s “no heterosexual explanation for this” (a phrase I’ve picked up recently from my girlfriend that I’m now going to have to deploy a lot more carefully) then that means that my own platonic relationships should also be viewed in that regard. And while you might expect what is a now 4 AM revelation to be that I’m in love with my best friend of more than 30 years, I’m going to disappoint you. Still don’t want to smooch him in the slightest. But my brain decided that if you ship Leslie and Ann, if you knew my situation you’d encourage me to try it out. If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.
I REALLY appreciate you saying this. I also value closeness and intimacy in my nonromantic relationships. I say “I love you” to my friends. I am hurt by people framing all emotional intimacy and love as inherently sexual/romantic for the same reasons you shared here. I don’t want to live in a world where everyone but one’s partner is held at emotional arm’s length. I have been deeply moved be profound friendships between characters that do not become romantic, while being completely attacked in fandoms by the shippers.
I have read this all the way through, and I’ll say that people shipping close friends in media/fiction has nothing to do (with obvious fringe cases) with how they feel about people being close platonic friends IRL.
Other people reading friendships in fiction a way that differs from yours isn’t something it’s reasonable to take serious offense about. I know that doesn’t stop you from feeling how you feel, but they have their own lives and experiences, and it’s often coming from a place of being very seriously marginalized and treated like they don’t (or shouldn’t) exist. They want to see themselves in fiction, and that includes in “platonic” friends who realize that, actually, they were such close friends because they were in love and dealing with comphet.
The friends-to-lovers storyline is common as hell in hetero media, and really only seems to get (imo) this kind of pushback when it’s a queer couple. I’m not saying that’s YOUR motivation, you’ve explained your views very well, so this isn’t an accusation. I’m just explaining why the disconnect and the ferocious statements of certainty happen. (Like “There’s no heterosexual explanation for this”)
I am a very gay nonbinary person who is deeply in platonic love with my best friend. I’d die for them, but I wouldn’t smooch them. Still, I’m very excited when those kind of friendships in the media are a prelude to romance. It’s sweet, it’s safe, and it upends a lot of established dynamics in the narrative.
People can hold space for both ideas (that deep and meaningful platonic relationships exist irl and aren’t secret yearning AND that fictional examples of the same thing totally should be because it’s adorable.)
The friends-to-lovers storyline is common as hell in hetero media, and really only seems to get (imo) this kind of pushback when it’s a queer couple.
I get this. Which is why I’m complaining *specifically* about Parks & Recreation, because it’s a show that straight-up didn’t do that. The longest, firmest male/female relationship, the thing that honestly the show was built around, was Leslie & Ron. And their relationship was *never* romantic. Leslie and Ben’s romance was much more “Enemies to Lovers”. And if you dig into the supporting cast, you don’t see any of that either. You have April & Andy’s “puppy love” storyline, which is probably the closest thing to “friends to lovers, but you also have the inimitable Donna Meagle, who got along with everyone in the office in her own way (she even was the first to appreciate Jerry!) with nary a hint of romantic interest in any of the men, even Tom, who if we’re looking at typical sitcom pairings, would have made sense as her eventual “one she settled down with”- and yet there’s nary a spark between them.
My favorite episode of Parks & Rec is “Two Parties”, and while Leslie’s storyline is funny (“You guys, the penis hats cut your digging time in half. I’m serious. Don’t be afraid. Use the penises.”), Ben’s is really poignant. It gives each “bachelor” their perfect party- Ben’s is board games and drinks at home (100% me), Tom’s is a “chiq” bar that Ron considers a practical joke (“May I chisel your aromasphere?”), Jerry’s is getting ice cream at the place he met his wife, Ron’s is whiskey & steaks at his favorite restaurant, and then Chris calls in a favor and gets Andy the chance to throw footballs around with his favorite sports team. And then the bachelors get together to get Chris a nice gift for being the organizer for all of that. It’s perfect and completely, sincerely platonic.
I skimmed this rather than reading it because I just really don’t care about Parks & Rec, and that seemed to be the main topic of your reply.
In general, I just think it’s a good idea to leave room for others to have wants/needs/feelings too without getting upset that those don’t agree with your wants/needs/feelings necessarily.
It’s fine to dislike the arc, but taking people’s enjoyment of fiction as a real-life suggestion that you can’t have close platonic friends seemed a bit over the top. Either way, have a better day!
First of all, cheers. I’ve got my cat on my lap while typing this, undoubtedly a better day.
Second: Once again, I agree 100%. Specifically, the idea of “leaving room for others to disagree” on how to interpret fictional relationships is *entirely* where my hackles got raised. And it’s specifically because, down to the exact words, “a volcano of lies” doesn’t, in my mind, leave room for someone to disagree. Particularly when the rebuttal offered by Joyce turned out to be foreshadowing that people who interpreted her and Dorothy’s relationship as platonic turned out to be dead wrong.
I also want to add that: Shipping characters is actually part of queer culture (it started with slashfic of Kirk/Spock back in the day) so there is just the fact that a lot of the tropes will have more to do with the way queer people realized their feelings about someone vs the way hetero people traditionally have. Maybe that will help you hold a little space for people having opposing wants/needs from a fictional pairing than you do! Maybe it won’t, idk, I just wanted to explain <3
Heh, on another (incredibly queer) space I frequent, the running joke is that you can tell the health of a community that includes both queer and hetero folks by whether they have “discussions about same-sex shipping vs. strong platonic friendships” or “discussions about same-sex shipping vs. strong platonic friendships (hostile)”.
I’ve noticed some increased pushback about specifically keeping close MALE friendships as platonic rather than as ships in spaces that are also trying to help hetero men deal productively/non-toxic-ly with the so-called “male loneliness epidemic”, which in itself is definitely homophobia-adjacent since the implication is “men aren’t going to want role models for close male friendships if those role models inspire fans to think they’re secretly gay”.
See, that second paragraph I really deeply take issue with, because it’s such a clear case of “attacking the people I can reach” (queer kids writing fanfic) instead of “attacking the root of the actual problem” (societal homophobia).
And it’s done with absolutely zero regard for the queer men caught in the middle, who are also suffering from male loneliness, but certainly don’t benefit from everyone “protecting” them from gay ships.
I’ve had excellent luck with “look, YOUR interpretation of Sam and Frodo is just as valid as J. Random Shipper, now are we going to pretend you DON’T want friends that supportive just because someone else likes writing the universe where they’re something else?” as a first step to leading folks towards Right Paths.
RE your second paragraph, we’ve come a long way in some senses: I’ve known some lonely queer men (back when I was in college two decades ago) who absolutely could have used a splash of the “you can be close to a guy without wanting to fuck him” cold water — they had plenty of “companionship”, but not the kind that offered the emotional support they ALSO needed. I’m not actually sure if that’s still a major issue.
Re: the second paragraph — I think that’s kind of a separate issue, honestly. Not completely separate, but the issue of “you can be close to someone of the gender you’re attracted to without wanting to fuck them” is ABSOLUTELY also an issue with male-female friendships between straight people, you know? It’s part of toxic masculinity, but it’s broader.
I think there’s more nuance to the topic of your second paragraph, particularly when it comes to representation.
They want to see themselves in fiction,
Is the salient point. If we can agree that close, healthy male platonic friendships, ones that should serve as “role models” for men who need them are too rare in fiction, and that the men who need them are generally straight, I think in spaces clearly targeted towards those men it’s not problematic to prioritize their feelings.
Because a lot of these guys are straight-up told things like “psh, sharing your feelings? What are you, queer?” by many in their peer groups. And while it’s not *ideal* that the pushback to that can’t be “and so what if he is?”, I don’t think it’s helpful to pretend that it’d actually work.
Sometimes shows where the male friendship stays platonic still has a bunch of “people think they’re queer” anyway, so you get both not actual representation *and* messaging that people will think you’re queer for having close male friends. (Such is the case with Scrubs.) The homophobia is issue, not the shippers.
I’m not going to pretend there’s not a real issue with the interplay between”how to dismantle structural homophobia and toxic masculinity structures” and “how to lead men who’ve already been socialized badly away from toxicity”, but “surrender completely to the toxicity in this instance” isn’t going to work as a solution in either the short or the long term.
Who said anything about “surrender completely”? This is all predicated on there being specific spaces whose explicit focus is “how to lead men who’ve been socialized badly away from toxicity”. It’s only in those spaces, where the focus is on these folks, where a degree of caution should be applied.
Like, if you’re in a discord whose primary purpose is to discuss issues of toxic masculinity and its effect on men specifically, maybe you hold off on discussing NarutoXSasuke on the off-topic boards.
Anywhere else that *isn’t* explicitly that sor of space, I 100% agree that that ends up in “What about the Menz” type territory *really* fast.
I’ll be honest, I feel like you’re deliberately reading what I’m saying uncharitably.
I didn’t feel it at all necessary to add on “instead, talk about it on a fanfiction or Naruto/Boruto server” because I thought it was self-evident that most people here have a general idea of how Discord works.
I think you keep, subconsciously, removing queer men from your definition of “men”, or assuming that toxic masculinity doesn’t impact them, and that they couldn’t possibly also need to access the spaces you’re talking about.
You’re also assuming that a discord server that had a rule against talking about m/m shipping wouldn’t have any other, related problems with queerness. That it wouldn’t bleed over. That it wouldn’t foster an environment of additional hostility towards queerness, because now this “safe space for talking about men’s issues” has a rule against discussing m/m ships.
Not all ships. Not m/f ships, even though those can, again, just as easily promote the idea that men can’t be friends, that men must always be sexually attracted to and pursuing the people around them. Just m/m ships.
The presumption that that rule wouldn’t drive out queer men and make them feel unsafe, even in a total vacuum…. is, I’m going to say, not something you’ve thought through.
That can and should be the push back. If that can’t be the push back then the problem is homophobia, and the solution is not going to be to keep perpetuating it.
I actually feel quite strongly that it’s very much not the *only* pushback that can be made without perpetuating homophobia.
Because “Only queer talk about their feelings. Real men just suck it up” is such a multi-headed dickhydra of shittery. If you try and tackle it without cutting it into individual pieces you’re going to end up losing the fight.
The homophobic head requires a different argument to take down than the head that hurts straight guys by making them bottle up their feelings. If you try to take on both without the right weapons, you’re just going to get eaten by the head you didn’t prepare for, and then, even if you did manage to take out one head, it grows back.
Instead, you’ve got to use the right tool for the right time and cauterize the stump once you’ve defeated that particular head, then move on to the next one.
And in this metaphor, I think unfortunately the “hurts straights” head has a lot less HP and deals less bite damage than the homophobic head. Simply because self-interest is a lot easier for humans than empathy. If you want to start folks like this on the right path, it’s a whole lot easier to get your foot in the door by saying “repressing your emotions like that hurts *you* and the people you care about” rather than saying “you need to be more empathetic to the plight of queer folks” when they might live in a very sheltered bubble without much exposure.
I’ve actually heard that first bit framed more often as “only women talk about their feelings, what are you a woman?” than as “only gay people talk about their feelings.”
Like you said yesterday, it’s an issue of gender-nonconformity, not so much an issue of specifically being gay.
And no, I still think it makes more sense to tackle societal misogyny and homophobia instead of focusing your energy on trying to police what shippers are shipping.
I think, if straight men want more fiction where there are close straight male friendships that aren’t preludes to sexuality realizations – they are free to go write those. But coming into a primarily queer community (shippers) and insisting that this marginalized community offers more rep to straight white guys… Nah. Pass on that. Male friendships don’t seem rare to me, they happen in a ton of media, and people shipping them doesn’t hurt anyone.
I’m still very confused that people are taking this tack when this conversation started with Big Z saying ” in spaces that are also trying to help hetero men deal productively/non-toxic-ly with the so-called “male loneliness epidemic” ”
In the context of people invading queer communities to demand more straight representation, I couldn’t agree more! (I am well aware that I’ve been more critical of a WLW ship than the heterosexual one that preceded it and that there is irony there. The difference is, importantly, that I (along with many self-identified members of the LGBT+ community) liked Joe & Joyce together because of the character dynamics, not out of a desire for more representation)
But I had thought that it was obvious that we were talking about shipping talk that came up in the context of a community centered around detoxifying masculinity.
Supporting/celebrating a m/m ship regardless of if one is queer or not seems absolutely like something that would be fitting in a space centered around detoxifying masculinity.
When executed well I don’t think there is any problem. The issue is when a writer uses the fact that two characters are really close as the foreshadowing that they have some repressed romantic feelings for each other. It happens just as much in straight pairings as gay ones.
I think a lot of the discussion on this stuff also omits the fact that there are still plenty of examples of non-toxic male friendships in media that have nothing to do with this.
Could be! But I do think it’s a factor that should be taken into account when folks complain about the death of platonic friendships only when they’re talking about queer relationships, you know?
Most definitely, it’s pretty obvious that almost all of the whinging about it comes from a place of being uncomfortable with homosexuality being shown or talked about.
Congratulations on realizing how you sounded and that then doubling down was even weirder, genuinely that takes some a lot of maturity and i applaud you for that. Though could had gone without that last part about those characters, fell out of topic and uncessary to add.
Honestly, I also think today might be too soon to reassure ourselves! The next storyline is called “Not-So Smooth Criminals”, and the one after it is “Fools’ Spring” (which is when you’re tricked by a period of mild weather into thinking winter is over before it’s actually over).
Could be about something else entirely, but there’s still room for the girls to chicken out on telling anyone.
You’re also misremembering the strip you keep referencing. Robin doesn’t want the class to write an essay on why Ann and Leslie are “better off as friends”, she wants them to write an essay about how “it’s actually totally okay to casually admire the female form” and Leslie Knope isn’t “necessarily” bisexual for the way she talks about Ann.
And like I said to you yesterday, Michael Schur clearly also has regrets about how the last season of Parks & Recreation had Leslie call herself and Ann “tragically both heterosexual”, and opted instead to have Eleanor of The Good Place embrace identifying as bisexual even though she and Tahani remain friends.
And while you might expect what is a now 4 AM revelation to be that I’m in love with my best friend of more than 30 years, I’m going to disappoint you. Still don’t want to smooch him in the slightest. But my brain decided that if you ship Leslie and Ann, if you knew my situation you’d encourage me to try it out.
…I often see this sort of thought expressed online, this “I’m so much like this fictional character that if a reader wants xyz to happen to them, they must also want it to happen to me”, usually distressed.
And I just. I really do feel the need to say: Rogue 7, I don’t know you. I don’t know your friend. Of course I don’t “ship” you with your friend. Of course I’m not “disappointed” that you didn’t come to any kind of personal revelations at 4am. You’re… you’re not a fictional character. You’re not a friend. I am not invested in your life.
You’re also misremembering the strip you keep referencing. Robin doesn’t want the class to write an essay on why Ann and Leslie are “better off as friends”, she wants them to write an essay about how “it’s actually totally okay to casually admire the female form” and Leslie Knope isn’t “necessarily” bisexual for the way she talks about Ann.
I’m sorry, but I don’t see how what you’re saying is any different from what I’ve been saying. Becky, in a moment the author joked was “unsubtle”, called that “a volcano of lies”. So we have “Leslie Knope isn’t necessarily bisexual” being called “a volcano of lies”, which means that, in the context of the strip, we’re supposed to understand that the opposite is the intended message- essentially saying “there is no heterosexual explanation” for Leslie’s behavior. And that’s where I run into a problem. There’s certainly room for interpreting their dynamic as a bisexual Leslie who nevertheless retains a platonic relationship with Ann. But there’s *also* room for “Leslie Knope is straight but recognizes an attractive woman when she sees one”. And that comic *explicitly* calls such an interpretation “a volcano of lies”. And where I have a problem with that is “a straight person who can recognize when folks of their non-preferred genders are hot” is precisely how I define my own sexuality. Around when I was 18, I noticed myself having a preference for shows on TV with good-looking dudes in them. I even wore a fedora occasionally because I wanted to emulate Matt Bomer in White Collar. So I sat down and asked myself “am I attracted to men?” And I contemplated the notion of intimacy with a man and it held absolutely no appeal. And 18 years later (goddamn, half my life ago I was an adult), that still holds. I recognize when men are attractive, but I don’t *feel* that attraction the same way I do for my girlfriend. And quite frankly, it feels invalidating to my identity when someone who I see as feeling the *exact same way* is called “necessarily bisexual” in that being “not necessarily bisexual” is called “a tower of lies”
And like I said to you yesterday, Michael Schur clearly also has regrets about how the last season of Parks & Recreation had Leslie call herself and Ann “tragically both heterosexual”, and opted instead to have Eleanor of The Good Place embrace identifying as bisexual even though she and Tahani remain friends.
Do you have a citation or quote for that? I did a quick google of “Michael Schur Leslie Knope bisexual” and the top hits were all reddit speculation. I didn’t see anyting where Mr. Schur said that he regretted it. If he wrote a different character in a different work a different way…I don’t really see how that means he regretted how he wrote Leslie. Particularly when from a brief glance at Eleanor’s TV Tropes page she doesn’t seem to be anything like Leslie.
It’s different because bisexual people can still have platonic friendships.
So saying “Leslie Knope is bisexual” isn’t the same thing as saying “she and Ann can’t be friends”.
And I do not know what you expect in terms of a “citation”, I literally just pointed out that Eleanor talks about Tahani the same way that Leslie talked about Ann, but instead of doing that as “just a joke” for another four years where the character eventually declares herself to be heterosexual, Michael Schur opted this time to have the character declare herself to be bisexual.
The two don’t have to have more in common than that. Schur doesn’t need to explicitly say they have regrets about Parks & Recreation.
I liked it! And then I was sad, because I recognized it as Schur telling me gently that yeah, that could’ve happened, and I was free to imagine it, but they weren’t gonna go there in any kind of meaningful way within the story.
The Good Place‘s take is still 800,000,000 times better than Parks & Recreation, which in addition to having Leslie conclude that she’s just completely straight in its final season, also slowly chipped away at all of the non-traditional relationships the series had started with.
I like most of the individual relationships, but we still started with several contented single people, one queer poly relationship (April’s boyfriend who also has a boyfriend), one very happy woman not interested in any type of commitment (Donna), and one happy married couple (Jerry and his wife), and then at the end of the series… everyone’s in a serious monogamous relationship, almost everyone’s married, almost everyone has kids.
Parks & Rec *does* end up being pretty darn heteronormative, even with the introduction of Craig & Typhoon, fair dinkum.
But I’m not seeing where the final season is such a cutoff point for you. The only thing I can think of is that Rashida Jones & Rob Lowe left, and so you didn’t have Leslie constantly paying Ann compliments. Because…she was involved in monogamous heterosexual relationships throughout the show. She and Ben got together in season 3, got married in season 5.
“which in addition to having Leslie conclude that she’s just completely straight in its final season, also slowly chipped away at all of the non-traditional relationships the series had started with.”
Assuming you read this as “in the final season, the show got rid of its non-traditional relationships”, but that’s not what I said.
Anyway, my objection about what happened in the final season continues to be that Leslie declared herself to be 100% heterosexual. She didn’t need to break up with Ben or start dating Ann. She could’ve been bi and went on her merry way.
This is what I continue to see Eleanor’s writing as course-correcting.
I am getting the sense that you either keep missing this part of what I’m saying, or else don’t believe it, but “my ship becoming canon” is actually a separate thing I sometimes want, not the only thing I ever want, from media I consume.
Leslie just acknowledging that she was bi and declaring that her attraction to Ann was real would have been plenty for me to feel good about that part of the show, even if I was still a little sad, as a Leslie/Ann shipper.
Leslie *can* be bi. Certainly, that’s a valid read on her character. Did you miss where I agreed with that? Because that’s not my issue. My issue is that that comic held it up as the *only* read on her character.
To give another example of what I mean: Naoto Shirogane from Persona 4 is a young woman whose story is *very* easy to read as being a transmasculine awakening. Honestly, I wish it were canon, it would be a much, much more interesting take on her (already pretty decent!) character. But back in the day I remember seeing a few posts and blogs from people who would block you if you didn’t use “he/him” pronouns when talking about Naoto. That the *only* valid way to read her character was that she’s FTM and any other interpretation is actively misgendering this character.
That’s the exact same sort of insistence. Not that Leslie Knope *can* be bi. That Leslie Knope *must* be bi.
And I do not know what you expect in terms of a “citation”, I literally just pointed out that Eleanor talks about Tahani the same way that Leslie talked about Ann, but instead of doing that as “just a joke” for another four years where the character eventually declares herself to be heterosexual, Michael Schur opted this time to have the character declare herself to be bisexual.
The two don’t have to have more in common than that. Schur doesn’t need to explicitly say they have regrets about Parks & Recreation.
So first off, because that is *absolutely* you making assumptions. It could just as easily be that he wanted to write a different dynamic the second time.
But, actually more importantly, why on earth are you calling Leslie’s compliments towards Ann “just a joke”? They weren’t. They were 100% sincere, whether or not you see Leslie as bi or straight.
“But back in the day I remember seeing a few posts and blogs from people who would block you if you didn’t use “he/him” pronouns when talking about Naoto.”
So? So what? They’re allowed to decide who they speak to and why and what about. I think it’s silly, but it isn’t harmful to the people they block. They are allowed whatever boundaries they want, for whatever reason. If you wanted to block people for talking about Just Really Good Friends as queer ships, I would also think that was silly, but it’s also your right.
But as with the people who blocked others for not using he/him pronouns for that character, there is no amount of doubling and tripling down on this that is going to make other people stop shipping characters. And it will never make those ships about you personally.
You went on kind of a long ramble about Naoto, where you complained about “people online” blocking folks who use she/her pronouns for the character.
First: please understand that that… is not a real problem. That’s not a problem at all. These people are presumably not friends of yours. You are not being cut out of anyone’s life. In fact, from the way you talk about this, I don’t think you’re even someone who’s been blocked over Naoto’s pronouns.
The “block” button is not a weapon, it’s a tool, and it’s a completely neutral tool to use when you just… don’t want to see someone in your social media feed. “Being blocked” is not a harm that is being done to anyone. Nobody actually needs to stop and rethink whether they’re using their “block” powers responsibly on Tumblr, or wherever.
It’s also completely fine for what I’m gonna go ahead and assume are young people who strongly identify with Naoto to not want to interact with people who, from their perspectives, are misgendering a character they identify with.
That’s okay.
It’s not a real problem.
It’s certainly not a problem comparable with real-life structural queerphobia.
Second: Naoto’s pronouns are literally within the player’s control. In the Japanese version, Naoto uses “masculine” pronouns, and you, the player, have the opportunity to tell them you prefer them to use “feminine” pronouns. If you do this, Naoto comes over to the player’s house in a dress and becomes the PC’s girlfriend.
If you tell Naoto that you prefer “masculine” pronouns, Naoto comes over to the player’s house in their regular clothing and becomes the PC’s partner.
The English version tried to convey something similar with letting you request Naoto use a deeper or higher voice. It doesn’t completely work, but the effort was made.
So: whether Naoto is transmasc or not is literally up to the player. People like you who insist on calling Naoto a woman are not being more accurate than people who consider them transmasc.
Third: good grief, when I first brought it up I said “maybe”! I’m sorry I was more flippant when I reminded you of it, but I was not making a literal claim. Just an obvious inference.
But, actually more importantly, why on earth are you calling Leslie’s compliments towards Ann “just a joke”? They weren’t. They were 100% sincere, whether or not you see Leslie as bi or straight.
Rogue 7. Is this a serious objection? Are you not being deliberately disingenuous right now?
You know what “just a joke” is talking about. You know what the people who have been claiming for years that the way Joyce talked about Dorothy, and the way Walky talked about Joyce/Dorothy, were “just jokes”… meant was the joke.
No one is claiming the compliments weren’t real. We are talking about the fact that the joke around the intensely effusive nature of the compliments was “haha, Leslie’s got a crush on Ann”.
OK, I’m going to skip commenting on whether or not it’s OK to refuse to interact with someone just because they don’t interpret characters the same way as you. I don’t think that’s a productive use of our time.
But with regards to Naoto & pronoun usage: Firstly and most importantly, Atlus are cowards. They did not canonically have trans rep in a game released for Japanese otaku audiences in 2009. They couldn’t even commit to making Kanji canonically gay, and his dungeon is literally a manifestation of his internalized homophobia.
Naoto is, (again, sadly), not canonically trans. Personal pronoun usage in Japan is complicated, and it’s not nearly so neat and tidy as to say “if a person uses this personal pronoun, they identify as male, but if they use that pronoun they identify as female”. I think Naoto’s story, regardless of whether or not she romances the MC, would be better if it committed to her being transmasculine. But sadly it’s something we have to headcanon.
But getting back to Parks & Rec:
My interpretation of the compliments was never that the joke was “haha Leslie’s got a crush on Ann”. It was *always* “haha, Leslie sure picks weird ways to say nice things about her friends”. Like, there’s one time where she compliments how Ann’s “ambiguous ethnic blend perfectly captures the dream of the American melting pot”. That’s not a normal-ass compliment, gay or straight.
1.) No, I’m not really going to agree to disagree over whether or not it’s a real problem that some people online block other people. It’s absolutely not a real problem or in any way comparable to structural queerphobia. “Oppression” is not “when someone blocks me on tumblr”. It’s just not.
2.) I know personal pronouns aren’t strictly gendered. You’ll notice the way I called them masc/femme and also put quotes around them.
3.) But, you know, Japanese also doesn’t have third-person pronouns in the same way. So, unlike here, where you’re using she/her to describe the character, the actual game, in Japanese, didn’t.
4.) It’s both weird and kind of ugly how you’re insisting on using she/her pronouns and also continuing to complain about fans who are “too” attached to he/him pronouns, and then shifting the blame for your adherence to and insistence on she/her pronouns to Atlus. It’s Atlus’s fault, apparently, that you’re so fussed about people being attached to transmasc Naoto.
5.) IDK, you’re welcome to that opinion, I guess, but there’s literally a scene where the cast stands around, looking at a tag map created from how often Leslie mentions loving various things, and the “Ben” bubble is pretty big, but the “Leslie” bubble is like 3x bigger, and then everyone agrees, “Leslie loves Ben, but she REAAAAAALLY loves Ann.”
I don’t think there’s another reasonable interpretation of that.
But like. I haven’t seen the show in literally years at this point.
6.) Fun as it is talking about these random pieces of media with you, do you realize that you’ve still yet to in any way demonstrate that “romantic queer relationships are destroying platonic friendship” is an actual problem? Or…
1) No, it’s not oppression. It’s just a phenomenon I don’t think is beneficial to anyone. I think social media is overreliant on hyperbole and sarcasm to make points, which harms communication. That’s not in any way oppression, it’s just…something I don’t like.
2-4. I hope I can clear this up by saying I’d be just as critical of someone who blocked anyone who used he/him pronouns for Naoto. I think, even in the 2010s, that sort of person would have been run out of these communities on a rail for their explicit transphobia, coupled with the fact that using she/her was and is the default when folks talk about Naoto.
Because in literally *every single comment* I have made about Shirogane Naoto, I have said how much I would appreciate seeing/reading Trans Naoto. Heck, if you could point me to a good fanfiction about it, I’ll happily do a little book report (Bonus points, but obviously unnecessary, for MCXYukiko because I had such a big crush on her back in the day that I even named my cat Yukiko).
5. I think you’re right about that particular scene. The episode where Ben & Ann have to work together to manage Leslie’s compulsive holiday planning & amazing gift-giving would also fit right in there. My confusion came from me thinking you said “Leslie was just joking” when what you meant was “the writers were just joking”.
6. It’s not at all a problem. Please ignore anything I said yesterday.
1) Well, the world is full of harmless behaviors we don’t like. It’s important to recognize the difference.
2) It honestly feels like it’s very, very important to you that you not appear queerphobic, that no one think you’re queerphobic… but there are more important things, like not accidentally advancing or lending legitimacy to queerphobic arguments.
I really, genuinely think you should sit for a little while and think about… well, a little bit about some of the examples you picked, but mostly why you invested this much time and energy into trying to “both sides” the issue of representation, often pointing to what you consider to be bad behavior from fans to counter points behind made about the overwhelming cisheteronormativity of actual, canon media.
Quite simply, I think a very large part of our disagreement stems from our different views on social power. In my view, the norms, views, and politics of individual groups hold more power over interactions within those groups than the power society as a whole does, and that power means that members of those communities are not immune to criticism. Fans are fair game to criticize to me because in their own niches, they hold more power than society does. Sometimes, as overall in this comment section, that power is used for good- to shape productive conversations. But it can also be used to create echo chambers, to reinforce ideas that are harmful.
I will do my level best to make sure that I think critically about my arguments.
But while we’re criticizing people, I used to look forward to seeing you in the comments, but these days, even if you aren’t responding to me, I find that you tend to look for flaws in what people say and then pick at those flaws to an extent where the overall points the person wanted to make get completely lost in the sauce as we respond back and forth over minutae.
I also think we’re both flawed here in that we both *really* want to get the last word in in an argument.
Okay. I thought I was answering questions and addressing concerns. I also think I’ve been pretty gentle and patient! I’ve definitely given you the benefit of the doubt on your phrasing and your digressions.
This wasn’t me being all that picky! I’ve really only been any kind of stickler a couple of times here.
I’m sorry you feel picked on anyway. I was genuinely trying to avoid that.
I’m also totally fine with dropping this though, because while some of this has been interesting, it’s also been really exhausting, and increasingly this comment section has felt like the wrong place for it, heh, though I did keep trying to bring it back to the comic.
@Li: That last comment from Rogue 7 was the kind that would make me feel really shitty to read about myself, and I just want to say that I don’t see your comments that way.
(I do have experiences with commenters that feel that way, but it still only really bothers me when they’re talking directly to me, and I still like seeing their comments overall.)
@Yumi: This was really super kind of you to say and I appreciate it ❤️ RSD definitely magnifies it too. But my meds really really help with that, so I was okay. But gosh, thank you.
You’ve gone out of your way a few times to make me feel better, and I’ve appreciated it each time. I bet I’m not the only one you do that for, either. You seem like a very kind person ❤️
Please forgive me if I’m misunderstanding (very possible), but… is there somewhere that David Willis says that he agrees with Becky on that subject? Because she’s been known to insist on her own interpretations of things as though they’re indisputable fact (and she was the most logical person to counter Robin’s thinly-veiled attempt to assert, via analogy, that she could totally be straight despite everything that happened with Leslie Bean).
Not disagreeing with your main point about being able to admire someone’s appearance without having sexual interest in them. I haven’t seen enough Parks & Rec to judge how plausible that is for Leslie and Ann, but there’s a lot of overlap between “remarks someone might make about a girl she’s attracted to” and “remarks someone without sexual insecurity might make about a girl she’s just friends with”. Unfortunately, a lot of society is too insecure about sexuality to be able to accept the latter might be platonic, and besides… well, ships have been taken as confirmed based on lesser evidence.
Ok. Please feel free to disregard my tired and uninformed comment, then.
And, to Li: considering that reading this thread reminded me of girls I’ve known to act more physically intimate with each other than with their boyfriends and yet still be regarded as entirely heterosexual… well, my only excuses are the aforementioned tiredness and the fact that I was thinking of fiction and shipping, not real world stuff.
I disagree with your last point, I think wlw are alternately desexualized and hypersexualized. Anything a known lesbian or bi woman says about platonic friends in the real world gets viewed with suspicion by homophobic society, but straight girls can say the gaaaayest stuff about each other and no one bats an eye.
I agree with you overall, Li, I’m just a little confused on what you’re referring to with as Leslie’s declaration in the final season. When she said the line, “Tragically, we are both heterosexual,” that was in season 5 (of 7). Is there another point you’re referring to as well, or are timelines mixed up?
(Also, my personal preference with Parks and Rec– I was fine with Leslie being straight, but I would have loved it if Ann realized she was a lesbian.)
I don’t wanna mean to you since you actually did recognize that you weren’t very cool yesterday but seriously i think you shoild just not care about this. It is just a not issue.
“And I just. I really do feel the need to say: Rogue 7, I don’t know you. I don’t know your friend. Of course I don’t “ship” you with your friend. Of course I’m not “disappointed” that you didn’t come to any kind of personal revelations at 4am. You’re… you’re not a fictional character. You’re not a friend. I am not invested in your life.”
People’s opinions on a fictional character have NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU. You are choosing to take them as some kind of personal interaction, but they aren’t. Someone’s opinion on a piece of media is about them, not you, and I’m sorry if queer people viewing media through a queer lens is upsetting to you but… no, I’m actually not that sorry.
Straight men are well represented just about everywhere. You don’t get to insist on equal representation in someone’s private thoughts and fantasy life. That’s just not a reasonable request.
Really hope that our long Joe/Joyce nightmare will soon be over.
I’m sorry. After initial hatred for the ship, I did learn to tolerate them, but the moment Jorothy became a possibility I realized I just really don’t like seeing them together. I don’t like Joe, I don’t find them cute together, and their relationship is just really boring to me.
Whereas them breaking up could be pretty great. Seeing Joe trying to retain his development after this actually sounds interesting, by far the most interesting thing for his character.
So, I hate to say it but: I’m rooting against polyamory here. I don’t just want to see Joyce and Dorothy get together, I want to see Joyce and Joe break up. Fingers crossed.
Willis is a genius farmer of controversy, and they don’t even have to do anything much. This comment section is just weirdly controversial over tiny things.
So when Joyce rejects Joe, he is going to go outside, it’s going to be a downpour, and Walky finds him and gives him the “it’s the rain” speech. Another manifestation of some sort of metaphysical ideal “rejection / It’s the Rain” scenario.
You know, this does raise the point that Dorothy and Joe’s relationships in both the Walkyverse and Dumbiverse ended due to infidelity, it’s just who was doing the cheating got flipped (also their relationship status was a more ambiguous situation in IW! iirc)
I’ve seen enough sitcoms to know that the girls will go to tell their boyfriends and that one (Joe) will propose first and then say “okay, now what did you want to say?” while the other (Walky) reveals that they have butt cancer and is really happy that they have someone that can take care of them.
Joyce is overwhelmed and agrees to the marriage, but by the end of the episode they discover that Walky didn’t have butt cancer and the doctors had switched his x-ray with the dog’s. The rest of the season Dorothy pines for Joyce even harder while Joyce stays away out of feelings of obligation to Joe, until she runs crying from the altar during the season finale.
I honestly think it would be extremely funny if through a series of convoluted events we cannot possibly predict the strip ends in 15 more years with Joyce x Walky again
You know, a lot of this is drama is skipped by people who date around for a while before they get into serious relationships. Joyce didn’t do that for various other reasons; she might have learned she could be possibly into girls
Unless she’s like my relative’s wife, who is “I dont like any other girl romantically but you ” meaning if it ended, she wouldn’t have another romance with a woman
I’m starting to believe in polyamorous Joyce. Joe did nothing wrong and she fundamentally thinks this is what you do in situations like this but the story feels like we’re heading somewhere besides drama. This feels more like “Joyce learns to do relationship anarchy.”
Now I’m not saying polyamory is the solution to every shipping problem… but in THIS CASE it actually is. Granted Joe and Dorothy don’t particularly like each other so the group dynamics would be tricky… but even so.
They’re so busy stressing about who to tell and how to tell them, they haven’t bothered to figure out what they’re even telling people about. I feel like for Dorothy it’s “I love Joyce”, while for Joyce it’s “I kissed my friend a bit” (and was probably mostly due to seeing a chance to be dramatic and become the center of attention). Really don’t think they’re thinking of this the same way.
Polyamorous me wishing these situations could have an easy solution for more people but knowing how much complication they’ve already gone through ; ; i hope it turns out well…
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*monches popcorn*
🍿🌭
I’ll bring the drinks
Feelin’ hungry. Anyone got hotdogs? ^^
^^ I do!
🌭
Joyce: “You know Joe, I figure there’s a high chance you’ve fantasized about exactly this occurring, so let’s take it as a valuable lesson in being careful what you wish for.”
I laughed and then immediately felt terrible. Joe has been making so much progress and I wanna see him happy. But this is framework for crashing and whoring 🙁
Joyce and Dorothy better save the Universe with the power of love, is all I’m saying.
Part of me is assuming that now he’s gonna get together with some other lady who isn’t a fan of him… That gym workout might be foreshadowing.
it’s called dumbing of age for a reason. I honestly can’t say i expected willis to touch on this possible arc but now that its happening i’m so glad he did but also terrified.
Hah!
That would be amazing.
Old Joe would have been all for that. Current Joe however…
Kind of hitting her all at once, huh
Agatha spitting facts.
This is the kind of reaction we NEEDED to see from Joyce. The realization that her actions have very real consequences that are going to seriously damage people she cares about, people who have cared for and supported her at every point.
This is going to be messy, and I hope it’s SUPER uncomfortable for Joyce. It needs to be to reinforce that it was wrong.
As much as this whole arc is miserable to read because it feels like a high speed trail collision between two different character arcs that were going in opposite directions, I feel some confusion in response to the statement “it was wrong”. Like… the kissing can definitely be framed as cheating, if the characters want to decide that it is cheating. But I don’t think the actual kissing, the part Joyce had willful control over, is the part which is devastating to Joe. That part that is devastating to Joe is that Joyce carried on an intense emotional relationship with Dorothy for many months that preceded her relationship with him and that she has been apparently totally in denial about the romantic aspect of all this time. But that doesn’t feel like a moral failing deserving of punishment to me? That just feels like being a dumb young adult with a lack of self awareness and way too much mental baggage about discounting the possibility of queer romance.
I mean, Joyce could still choose not to break of with Joe at this point. But I don’t think either of them will be served by staying in a relationship together if Joyce is now constantly aware of her desire for Dorothy and pining for her all the time.
To put this in other terms: Yes, it should be super uncomfortable for Joyce, but that’s not because it’s a punishment for misdeeds. It should be super uncomfortable for her because she’s a decent person and decent people should be able to tell when they are ripping someone else’s heart out. That discomfort comes from *within*. That is not some external moral force punishing Joyce, that is Joyce’s own conscience making her feel bad because she agrees with it.
Or- and this just occurred to me- do you mean instead that it needs to be uncomfortable in the sense that convenient and contrived narrative events should not clean up the mess Joyce is making so she doesn’t need to make herself feel bad? Like Joe being stoic about the breakup, and then falling backwards into another ideal relationship immediately, so that Joyce doesn’t have to see him unhappy and feel guilty. The kind of story twist that creates the impression for the reader that life situations like this will just work out on their own, so that we need not worry about inadvertent consequences on others of our lack of awareness or forethought in making major life decisions, or that some people never get their happy ending and that’s not okay?
Excellent analysis 10/10 would recommend
This yes.
The problem with this IS, Joe/ Sarah was a great Ship in roomies.
And he’s more Sarah’s type, now and physically.
And it would suck narratively for Willis to casually rip up all the new ships he’s got the audience emotionally invested in ( again) prematurely.
Joyce / Dorothy ought to be amazing, it’s just unsatisfying to prematurely rip up Joe Joyce. ( Another month or two to climax would be fine),
And Sarah just found happiness for once. Of course temporary but it’s reads better to let it develop and deepen before ripping it to shreds.
Like let Leslie mess up and sleep with Conquest. Or a 3some with Robin.
Danny with Sayid. Spread this messiness around instead of musical chairs.
100% agree. I’m uncomfortable with people calling what she’s done with Dorothy “wrong” (if, indeed they’re talking in moral terms condemning her actions). This is hard. This is life. She’s a good person who doesn’t want to hurt others, and she went into this situation with Joe in good faith, but she has to be true to herself now with the self-knowledge she has now. Making the right choices for herself means she can’t just make everyone happy at her own expense.
Maybe Joyce and Dorothy will crash and burn; maybe Joe would’ve been a good future for her. Maybe she’ll always regret whatever path she doesn’t follow here. That doesn’t make her “wrong” then… she doesn’t have access to Willis’ buffer to know how this all goes in the future.
This whole storyline is really hitting close to home for me. I remember the doomed realization that I had been in a relationship that wasn’t right for me, and I’d been there for too long and I was going to have to end it, even in that meant hurting people I cared about. The pit-in-the-stomach feeling of going to go have the awful, inevitable conversation. It sucks hard. You could say I was a bad person. Even if I thought it was for a good reason. Even if I look back, understanding how precious a thing trust is and understanding the pain that breaking it can cause, and coming out on the other side of that with a clarity about who I was and a real understanding of the power individuals have and the responsibility we have to each other. I think it’s how someone grows up. At least, that’s what I tell myself.
For whatever it may be worth, I’m not angry at Joyce for breaking up with Joe. That’s the mature, adult thing to do. What I’m mad at her for are her actions this story line.
By her OWN ADMISSION, sex is ‘somebody you love making you orgasm’, which she then immediately realized qualified to Dorothy. The next thing she did was demand they go do it again. By her own admission, that is cheating. She’s dating one individual while having sex with another without prior consent/permission from the person she’s dating.
And she can’t even hide behind the excuse that she was afraid Joe would judge her. Joe has been nothing but patient, supportive and understanding of her various hang ups. It’s one thing to make mistakes while in a relationship due to ignorance and hormones. Joyce acknowledged that something would make her unfaithful while she was in a stable state of mind and then INSTANTLY went to do it and didn’t give it a second thought all day.
That is why I say this needs to be painful for her, because that kind of behavior is NOT ok.
Oof, I had forgotten about that part because they didn’t get to go through with it. But yeah that’s messed up.
@Lumino Yeah okay that’s 100% valid. Joyce was definitely *attempting* to cheat, by a definition she had just made up herself, in a flurry of horny realization. She absolutely needed to slam on the brakes at that point and have a serious talk with Dorothy about both of their feelings before she made any more major decisions, and instead it turned into a gag about “let’s go do laundry” that was mercifully aborted with another smash cut gag before it had a chance to get any more horrifying. That incident had slipped my mind as well. The girl is not okay.
A lot of people seem to have forgotten that Joyce defined sex that way, and shortly after she went with Dorothy to the laundry room fully intending to do a thing she considers sex, while still dating Joe. And that only got stopped because a bunch of other students were in the room when they got there. She’s already tried to cheat on Joe once before the big kiss at the protest.
It’s the weirdest thing though and it’s really hard to get a feel for her mental state then, since right before suggesting that, she said that what she’d almost done the night before was just “surplus misdirected horny”.
Was she still in denial somehow? Or just knowingly lying?
I’m what universe is kissing not a form of cheating, and in what universe is cheating not “wrong”?
Keep in mind that if all parties consent, make outs with third parties to the relation are not cheating because there is consent.
It’s technically cheating, but a few kisses and then going to break up is about as mild as cheating gets.
I mean something can be wrong and an understandable mistake at the same time. My last partner cheated on me at the end of our relationship when he could have just broken up with me. I get what happened and I forgave him (it was a situation that ended when they kissed once, not like a month’s long secret relationship) but he still did something wrong. I don’t think it’s wrong (hardy har) to point that out.
I really appreciate your analysis here…but it does bring me to question something that seems…kind of assumed, either one way or another, by most of the commentors:
If the issue is that Joyce is romantically (and clearly, vocally physically/sexually) attracted to Joe…
…and Joyce is also romantically (although it’s not as clear to me about physically/sexually, probably due to being somewhere in the ace/demi zone [and very het] myself) attracted to Dorothy…
Which of those two is the “wrong” attraction? Which is the “cheating”? Who has “first claim” on Joyce’s affection (to be “cheated against”), if either?
In both cases, it seems pretty clear that Joyce was dealing with all kinds of layers of repression about her attraction(s)…are some of those more “excusing/excusable” than others? Does her sexual repression give her more/less license to make mistakes under partial ignorance than her romantic-orientation repression?
To be clear, I have absolutely no answers here myself. Just…a lot of questions and curiosity. Also to be clear, I can absolutely understand the argument (while believing it’s by no means universal) that Joyce kissing Dorothy could constitute cheating. But the emotional/attraction stuff seems…much less potentially clear cut.
Who had “first claim”?
The one she agreed to date. I’m not even sure what the argument is otherwise.
Having a crush on someone, even for a long time, doesn’t give anyone a claim unless they act on it.
I agree, but I’m dreading the future. Hello, I’m a Relationship Paladin, and I am feeling very sorry for poor Joe. Walky’s time is coming…
Your comment is sooooooooo much funnier when we remember Joyce in DOA is the assigned Author Avatar.
Damn you, WiJoyce.
This wAs to luminos “This is the kind of reaction we NEEDED to see from Joyce. The realization that her actions have very real consequences that are going to seriously damage people she cares about, people who have cared for and supported her at every point. “
Relationship Paladin, meet Relationship Blood Knight.
[hijacks the hacked Muzak and plays “One Promise Too Late”]
Y’all are projecting a lot of your own biased judgement on the morality of what’s happening, and allowing a puritanical skewing of a social construct dictate your response and judgement of Joyce and Dorothy. Hoping for someone’s misery, especially when their “crime” is having LOVE for people, is just a disgusting layer of icing on a religiously judgemental cake.
Yeah, Joe and Walky may be hurt, or they may be chill, but also, neither of them can give Joyce or Dorothy what Joyce and Dorothy give each other. They all love differently, and that doesn’t meant any of them are doing it wrong. Lastly, I don’t recall any of them having conversations stipulating that they were exclusive, but even if they had Joyce and Dorothy are heading back to Joe and Walky directly to disclose what happened and how their feelings aren’t fitting within that box.
Life is messy, and this will be too, but they aren’t being horrible people. Don’t let residual christian extremism bait you into relishing hatred. It’s not a good look.
A thousand times this.
Mm, it should go both ways, though.
Which, yes, anyone who’s simultaneously being viciously judgmental about other commenters and asserting that what we like in fiction must reflect our real-life morals, while ALSO loudly fantasizing about awful things happening to fictional characters… by their own logic, that’s bad!
But by our logic, where it’s fine to hope for fictional mess and tears, it needs to also be fine to hope for fictional comeuppance and misery.
Yes, some of the things people have said they hope happen to Joyce and Dorothy kind of creep me out, too. Especially when it comes from someone who’s been insisting that I view Joe and Walky as real people with feelings instead of characters.
But isn’t the whole point of “our side” that… it’s okay to want creepy stuff in fiction? And that whether or not something creeps us out isn’t a solid basis for morality?
The standard should still be “does this harm real people”, and the answer should still be “feeling creeped out isn’t a form of harm”.
Because cheating is wrong you doofus.
The order you do things in is important.
If you want to make out with someone besides your partner, you either need their approval first or you need to break up. It’s not just a moral puritanical thing, it’s a socially responsible thing.
Ugh, this mix of moralizing and sadism in the comments is really getting gross. Feels very Republican.
Re: Hovertext Plato I think. Unless I have the order wrong.
Yes Aristotle was a student of Plato at his Academy.
Aristotle was also a married man.
In Classic Greek society, that’s not much of an indicator. Aristotle tutored Alexander III, who had three great loves, none of them women, but quite definitely got married.
Hell, it doesn’t really mean much today, either.
pretty much as long as you were not the one being penetrated it really didn’t matter, hell married sex was expected to be with the woman face down so she looked more masculine.
It’s also a The Good Place meme!
If finding out doesn’t break his heart Joe might actually be ok with dating Joyce at the same time Dorothy is dating Joyce.
Will it be that simple? Gods above I wish it would be that simple, but no gods stop the Willis train.
Polycules would be the perfect solution! Dorothy and Joe could both date Joyce, and Walky can still date Dorothy and everyone wins!
And Joe and Walky can date Joe and Walky.
and then Walky could technicality date Joyce!
Walky seems to be poly-curious, but appears to have no interest in Joyce, though.
He’s also bi curious. Or at least curious enough to consider it for free pizza.
*Insert Walky’s dad comment about a Fuck Pile here*
Here you go:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-13/04-but-dont-give-yourself-away/mysake/
Dumbing of Age Pornographique: Everyone Gets In A Fuckpile and Gets It Over With
obligatory “Thank you for inserting the Fuck Pile here”
I mean, for free pizza, who wouldn’t at least go to second base?
Also to suggest Ethan grope his ass.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/03-when-it-crumbles/forks/
There have been more than a few comments from Walky along these lines, really. I think he especially noticed Asher is hot, maybe also Jacob (though he might also have just been feeling super intimidated by Lucy’s rebound “upgrade”). Part of me expects that SOME of his reaction to Dorothy’s bi awakening — perhaps one of the comedy beats that Walky especially is prone to in the middle of tense moments — will involve some sort of “oh is that a thing we’re supposed to announce? Me too, then. ‘Cept without the cheating on you part.”
Fun fact – not everyone in a polycule has to fuck everyone else. My wife’s other husband and I are both straight.
Other hand, if it turns out that Joe and Walky are both into it…
Something I’ve often brought up myself when people point out Dorothy’s dislike of Joe. I just think it would be funny to increase the degree to which the friendship’s smoochy chart is an ouroboros. And it’s a good opportunity for Walky to explore his almost as obvious as Joyce’s was bisexuality. Not sure about Joe being down for it though which is why it’s mostly a joke when I bring up Joe and Walky.
Now, Walky, Ethan, Asher might have some legs . . .
Weren’t Joe and Walky married at one point? I mean, not literally, but during their Gender Studies class they were assigned as a married couple and apparently did pretty good in balancing their marital duties. In fact, their assigned marriage was probably the most stable relationship Walky was ever in in this series.
A slippery slope that has prepared the way for them to enter into the polycule.
It was completely dysfunctional so… yep, standard Walky relationship.
There are some guys who are always in and out of relationships, and there’s a reason.
I was unsure about Team Poly but this strip has pretty convincingly persuaded me that, if she can find the words to vocalize it, joyce might be interested in it. I don’t know if Joe would be as well, given the circumstances. The sticking point, though, is that Dorothy absolutely would not be open to it. She is far too possessive of Joyce for that, and Joe is the last person she would want to be sharing Joyce’s affections with.
Yay! Welcome to Team Polyamory!
Haha, I just think it’s something Joyce would like. As I said, I’m not sure the other people in the equation would be as open to.
one of us! one of us!
I can think of a good reason for each one of them, because this is my true ship, but I definitely agree that Joyce seems interested.
I think Dorothy would struggle with jealousy, but I also think she would rather Joyce date her and Joe than Joyce date Joe and not her.
I think she would rather Joyce date her and nobody else.
Well, yes, but Proxiehunter was assuming that wasn’t an option in the hypothetical.
(Also? Maybe not.
The first time I attempted to date anyone, it was because a bi woman I knew had just gotten engaged to a man and she wanted to date another woman first, something she’d never done before either.
It appealed to me specifically because I was very very nervous and new at this whole thing, and the whole scenario took the pressure off in some ways.
It didn’t work out! But I can imagine Dorothy doing the same sort of mental math where she thinks maybe having Joyce also date someone else who already makes her happy(?) might make this first-time-with-another-woman scenario less intimidating.)
Dorothy learning to get over her jealousy would be very good for her.
Plus think of how her mom would react 😀
My fingers are SO CROSSED.
I’m okay with heartbreak and confusion and miscommunication in the meantime but GOSH do I want the poly at least someday with these three. I’ve felt like they give Joyce different things, both good, and I reallly liked what I saw as the start of a Joe-Dorothy friendship in their last conversation…
Mess and chaos and miscommunications and all of that but… ultimately happy??? Maybe? Please?
Yeah I… Don’t think it’s likely (“Sorry Joe” phrasing and all that) but I do want it as an outcome when there are glimmers of it seeming plausible. In particular because this specific set of thoughts… Is one of the things that good polyamory is about as a very intensely bonding hinge person? Is finding the people who make you better and help you grow as a person and manage your dumbass brain. I dunno. I don’t expect it but I would really really like it.
That said I’m trying not to build up strong investment in something unlikely and get it crushed again. Right now that means I operate from a place of pretty extreme hedging and uncertainty.
Oh I was firmly in “long term hopes and dreams” mode there. 🥲
I think Joe could want to do it, for Joyce, but it won’t go well for him. Saw a post on tumblr today, with panels from Flush that convinced me.
Joyce I figured probably would be ok with it, but now that her heart is no longer missing from her sleeve, I’m a lot more certain.
Pretty easy to justify it becoming Poly narratively, just it would be toxic and miserable, which I guess would make for good DRAMA
Joe feels hurt but he goes back to blaming himself and feeling unworthy. He still loves Joyce and thinks “I can’t blame her considering what I’ve done“. He agrees to Poly as a way to keep his relationship with Joyce, since it is pretty clear that if it were a choice Joyce would choose Dorothy.
Dorothy isn’t keep about “sharing” Joyce, but she already worked on coming to terms with the Joe/Joyce relationship. She feels guilty about cheating and so agrees to Polyamory as “the least she can do”.
Joyce kind of wants polyamory, but only because it lets her keep her relationship with Joe. Yes she loves and cares for both Joe and Dorothy, but if she had been with just Dorothy she wouldn’t have felt compelled to seek a relationship with Joe. She would be happy just as friends.
But when she goes the poly route instead she quickly learns that it is a heck of a lot of work, and she doesn’t have the chops to do it well. She doesn’t manage communicating openly and honestly with both Dorothy and Joe very well, and the relationships end up imploding. The bridges are burned and we move on to an arc where Joyce and Dorothy try to heal their relationship.
Assuming of course that Joe is actually fully down and open to a polycule, which many people aren’t. Having casual hookups in the past doesn’t mean he is open to that in a more committed relationship.
If he is just saying yes because he thinks its the only way he can stay together with Joyce then that doesn’t lead to a happy relationship.
Well, it would be a solution to the fact that both Joyce and Dorothy have feelings for multiple people, who feel the same way about them. It would not be a solution to their current state of breaking agreements, not communicating, and not being up front and honest with their partners about what they want.
Sure it would! It just wouldn’t be a simple solution free of any bumps or needing to figure things out/apologize.
Plus, can you imagine how gratifying this would all be for Amber? She’s the real winner in this hypothetical situation.
Given Joe’s history with cheating and relationships, he absolutely strikes me as a strict monogamous.
And “oh we can just be poly!” to resolve an affair after the fact isn’t cool. If Joe and Joyce switched places for this arc, the comments would crucify him for making the suggestion.
I think it would be cool, and I would support Joe making the suggestion if the situation was reversed.
“The comments would credit Joe if” imma stop you there, the comments have pretty much never crucified Joe for anything. At best there have been deep divides with some of us mad at him, some of us defending him.
*crucify thanks autocorrect sigh
Hi! You can be poly and not approve of cheating/want your relationships to be happy and healthy. A history of having cheating trauma is actually common enough in polyamorous circles.
Also it’s okay if it’s messy polyamory.
On the one hand I like when this comic is light and comedic, but on the other hand it’d feel weird if this was resolved that simply.
… you think open dating multiple people is simple?
Oh my goodness, no. It is very complicated.
That’s why I’m hoping for it. Anyone who thinks that poly will RESOLVE this is out of their mind.
What poly would do is make things more interesting. More complicated. More chaotic.
And yes, Agatha, more gay.
This. This. THIS.
Yes. Yes. YES.
Well, how could it not be simple? Dating one person requires at least some degree of balancing that person’s emotional and mental satisfaction with you, and all dating two people requires is doing exactly that but twice at the same time.
Wait a minute
Why do people keep thinking that “Everybody bangs” is the proper, easy solution to CHEATING?
Polycules require way more work than a one on one relationship, they aren’t just a cheat code for when you can’t make a decision.
1. I personally don’t want a polycule because I think it will be “easy, proper, or a solution”. I want it to be messy, and I want them to have to figure it out or explode.
2. Poly relationships do require extra work. Agreed. That’s why it’ll be fun to watch them struggle through it.
3. I want polyamory rep in the main cast.
I like the phrasing of “figure it out or explode”. Yes please, give me the bomb defusal stress levels in the messy teenage throuple.
I’d been trying to figure out how best to describe how I’m hoping things would go with their relationship, but clearly it was wasted effort; Nymph and Taffy have summarized it perfectly.
Yes, agreed, this is what I want! Also it would piss off a lot of people who hate DoA for being “woke” or whatever they call it this week, and that would be funny
Especially that last part.
My problem is that I’d love poly rep in the main cast, but I just hate hate hate the trope of “I cheated, but I’m going to make it all right by retroactively opening the relationship!”
I would have been tentatively okay with a “team poly” resolution right up until those two idiots kissed first, kissed second, etc. and thought about their actions around twenty-third or so.
Is that a trope? Man some folks keep saying they’re sick of seeing a thing in media that I’ve never seen and it makes me feel like I’m watching the wrong media entirely!
Yeah I’d also like to know what media this is common in. Maybe fanfiction?
It was in Dawson’s Creek and… I don’t think anything else I’ve seen.
Honestly, the place I see it the most is r/relationship_advice.
Fanfiction is definitely the most common.
Or, as we see here, the fandom suggestion for handling love triangles.
I’m not sick of seeing it in MEDIA, to be clear, I’m sick of seeing it in “both poly and mono relationship advice communities”.
As in, it’s not a MEDIA trope, it’s to some extent and in some places on ye olde internet a “Trope in Real Life”.
(I don’t think there’s enough poly representation in non-poly-focused media for there to BE any real poly tropes aside from possibly “Isekai harem”)
That was part of my surprise, yeah.
For the record, “trope” when it’s used to talk about a pattern IS fiction-specific. But I get why frequenting stuff like r/AITA might make it feel appropriate for the surreal parasocial situation, too.
(I’m thinking also of about a week ago when multiple people said they were sick of the “sapphic media trope” of two women finding love by cheating on a good man, and I asked where that’s commonly happening, and someone made a reference to Friends. Which bewildered me on two levels, because first of all since when is that show “sapphic media”, didn’t they have a minor lesbian character briefly, and second, are we pretending Ross is a good man??)
Mmmm, surreal parasocial situations.
Haha! I mean, I too have had an exasperated reaction for a moment to something that is super common in Reddit stories on the YouTube channel RSlash. “Not this again!”
It feels a little bit like watching reality TV. And you also have the knowledge that some of the stories are completely made up for clicks, while most others are fictionalized to some degree to make the poster look better… and sometimes the same poster comes back with other stories…
I genuinely think it kind of blurs a line where the stories might involve real people, but they’re certainly not people you or I know, and there’s more distance in some ways than even folks get when they follow celebrity gossip,
I can absolutely understand starting to use words like trope, storyline, theme…
In all honestly, this entire comic and many folks reaction to it is also kinda functioning like a surreal parasocial situation in some senses.
I also would fucking hate this idea in real life. I would never suggest to people who had broken their partner’s trust to try polyamory, but this isn’t real life. I’m tired of people comparing the crowd’s wants/interests for a fictional story to what they’d want/be interested in IRL.
In story: yay cheating! yay messy poly! yay dumb-bongo-juice bisexuals
IRL: ya’ll, get a grip.
It’s been noted on previous comics’ threads that there’s definitely a contingent among the “relationship paladin” side who are actually on the “hate this IRL so much that it ruins the story when fictional people do it, too” place. Reasonable people can disagree about the types of mess they like in fiction, I think.
Sure, and I didn’t say they couldn’t. Feel free to read through what I said again just to check.
What I did say was that “I’m tired of people comparing the crowd’s wants/interests for a fictional story to what they’d want/be interested in IRL” In other words, I’m bored with people being upset at those who are enjoying this drama and treating it like a real life moral failing.
Literally, there have been people in the comments saying anyone who enjoys a cheating storyline are actually immoral.
I really don’t mind people disliking this story for whatever reasons they have. I just personally don’t dislike it and I want it to be messy af.
Yeah, I think I got to the point where I’m consciously filtering out most of the “if you like/dislike X you’re a bad person” posters. These threads feel like they’re 50% shit-stirring by weight.
Sometimes that leads me to say semi-obvious things just to make conversation with people who aren’t that. =P
You want media with polyamorous characters? Here’s some books for you. https://lcmawson.com/psst-free-story-here/ I linked to her free starter books collection but all of the series have more books in them. Somewhere around above 90% of her protagonists are either autistic, adhd or both, either bisexual or lesbian, and end up in a polyamourous relationship.
Her biggest series is the snow-verse with currently – well somewhere over 40 books. Hard to keep count when I’m keeping track of the number of books in various omnibus editions and short story collections available as separate books and at least one of the collections also included in one of the omnibus editions. Sounds like a lot of reading but they’re mostly novella length rather than full novel length. The series is urban fantasy and at the start the spinoffs can be difficult to keep track of chronologically because she wrote three separate spinoffs (four if you count the single book that’s a different characters perspective on one of the main books – five if you count the books she wrote before the main series that also connect to it) of the main series taking place during the same time period with the characters interacting. Once those intertwined series are done she’s stuck to sequels following new characters in the same universe that are just one series at a time because that was a bit of a nightmare for her as well as readers. There’s a guide I can locate if anyone needs it.
There’s also a space opera series and a steampunk trilogy, and a newer series focusing on vampires that I’m 99% sure is it’s own separate universe.
That’s fine, we can disagree. I don’t want them to make the cheating alright by retroactively opening the relationship. I want them to have hard conversations about how much that sucked and decide to try polyamory and then CONTINUE to have hard conversations, be messy, struggle with it, etc.
I don’t want it to be an easy path. I want real poly rep with REAL struggles that people in polycules have (including conversations about jealousy, hierarchies, and different ways to show love to different people in your life). I fucking want to see Joe feel compersion when he sees Dorothy and Joyce together, relaxing and loving each other.
Totally fair that you want less complicated rep, but I super don’t.
I mean, I would even like complicated rep, I just kinda feel like the cheating puts it in on a wrong foot for me.
There does remain an outside chance that Joyce had thought she more or less had permission from what Joe said in that one strip, that’d be about the only place where I think I’d be okay with a poly situation showing up (whether it be nice or messy, to be clear — I only dislike a specific messy origin story for it. 😀 )
Totally fair! I just don’t think, even if it comes from cheating, that it necessarily has to “make it all right by retroactively opening the relationship”. They can open the relationship now and still treat what happened previously with the understanding that it sucked and was not alright.
That seems to me like it’d require more maturity than our protagonists have been demonstrating, but oddly I’d kinda be in favor of our two sapphic lovebirds pumping the brakes and actually doing some more serious thinking instead of acting.
It would require more maturity for it to go well, yes. Definitely. They have exactly the right amount of maturity for it to start off messy and a bad idea, plus room to grow – which is what most narratives are about. An arc of character growth and change, and the catalysts for causing that.
At no point did I say “Everybody bangs,” because it is a ridiculous way of solving the situation that would never actually work.
I merely said that there is a small chance that Joe would accept sharing Joyce with Dorothy. My comment only had 2 points: Joe may, or may not be interested in sharing Joyce as a significant other with Dorothy.
It won’t be that simple because even if Joe agrees to it there is still Walky, and Becky to consider; not that Becky is in the relationship, but she might have some unresolved issues.
Why did you decide “We’d like a polycule”= everyone banging????
No, no. *EVERYBODY* bangs. As in the whole cast. Anyone with the slightest sexual interest in anyone else, that is reciprocated, bangs. Words like the c word and the f word and the m word become awful swears. It is all normalised, like talking to one another.
Or perhaps the other way round. Talking to someone other than your monogamous partner, to whom, and only to whom, you show fidelity is cheating…
Not just the whole cast. Batman, Mallard Fillmore, everyone.
If Dorothy wAs ok with it ( I think she won’t be , that’s why she was acting out )
If Joyce was ok with Joe having anyone else
( she will be crazy jealous which will bother Dorothy more )
If Becky was OK with it ( nope)
If dina was OK with Becky being jealous ( nope)
If Willis was OK with it. ( I wonder if this was a post election break all ships reaction)
And if Coloring Book Jesus was OK with it ( nope)
Isn’t it time for someone to get abducted by Aliens yet?
…what?
(And why do you put spaces after opening parentheses?)
To be fair it really doesn’t MATTER to the relationship what Becky thinks of it..it’s not her girlfriend and she doesn’t ACTUALLY get a say in if Dorothy and Joyce date.
Why does Becky get input on Joyce’s romantic relationships here?
Because BECKY loved Joyce FIRST and thus gets the say in if Joyce gets to actually be bi or not I guess?
Like it’s 100% possible for Joyce to be both Bi AND not attracted sexually to Becky…the person she see’s as a sister…
She’s doing her best.
Also, Agatha’s comment had me actually burst out laughing. My housemates did not appreciate but I refuse to apologize. That joke was fire.
“not to one up you girls” Faye in QC today
I read DoA before QC, and so I popped over there, and HOLY SHIT
NO SPOILERS!
Ah no now I gotta run over there! (Yay!)
MWRUUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
spoiler: Yay still hasn’t shown up again.
EVIL!
I SAID NO SPOILERS!
So what’s the fucking point of reading the comic then?
Antici-
SAY IT
<3
-pation
PA-
to enjoy it for oneself and post cryptic comments here!
To paraquote Fesh Pince, “BRING THEM BACK”
Huh. I hadn’t noticed that QC had disappeared from my RSS feed.
lol Faye in panel 2, she KNOWS what’s coming (unless you’re talking site not patreon, then disregard what I said) ~<3
Agatha has been sitting on that nugget for years waiting for the right opprotunity to use it
Joe knew Dorothy wanted Joyce’s booty before she did.
This. Joyce is expecting that every bit of what’s happened will be shocking news. Joe is already pretty clued in. He’s also way more scared of being unfaithful than he is of being cheated on. There’s a fair possibility that he doesn’t see this as a reason that the relationship has to end – at which point, Joyce is left with the decision of acutely, knowingly hurting him by ending it, or making use of her newfound knowledge of what a polycule is.
Who tf is Agatha??
Some Mormon
Who’s in a three-way with two other girls. Grace and Other Rachel, IIRC.
Nope, neither Agatha or Other Rachel are in a “3-way” (throuple) with anyone (as far as we know).
Right. It was Amanda, Grace, and the girl with the Veronica Lake hairstyle who’s not on the Cast page. I don’t know that Agatha has bumped ugly with anyone, but I do know my memory seems to be fading.
Grace and Sierra.
And Mandy.
Evidence here:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/03-the-thing-i-was-before/unraveling/
She was all along-
hahahaha YES! ~<3
that girl with bright yellow hair?
or am I understanding the question right?
It was her all along?
A cutie with a smile that could light up a joint.
Good thing too, I lost my zippo and was looking for something to light one up with.
+1
I don’t have much experience with weed, but isn’t it the joint that lights up your smile?
Please do not consume burning marijuana.
Don’t consume… Got it.
This took me a minute. For anyone else as slow as me, think of a jack-o-lantern.
Everybody wants to know who tf is Agatha. No one asks how tf is Agatha.
She seems to be doing alright, all things considered!
Seems to exist in a state of perpetual bliss.
Secretly the Heterodyne!
(oh, and, uh, spoilers I guess)
I mean, it’s the first two words in the title of the novelization, so I think you’re good.
Heterodyne?
The protagonist of the webcomic Girl Genius is Agatha Heterodyne. Often called by other characters “the Heterodyne” since she’s the only one of her family around.
Ah. Ta!
Two doors away from Joyce and Sarah. Sierra’s current nominal roommate.
Mike reincarnated
Tags exist for a reason.
I legit thought “What is the gender studies teacher doing here?”
I went through all her 57 tagged appearances and we don’t know a ton about her!
– Very sunny
– Practicing Mormon (at least as of fall semester)
– Not homophobic (on top of today, gave out an “awwww” on learning of Ruth and Billie’s relationship)
A lot of her lines are just the everywoman in the corridor.
I know it’s not the hot issue, but I never realized how tall Agatha was.
Dorothy is not particularly tall. Little of column A, little of column B.
Going through some of her prior strips, she is often with Carla, Ruth, and Sierra. I found one of her with just Becky, and it’s more obvious there.
Also, my first time hitting Report instead of Reply. Not intended.
Oh, it’s hot alright. Tall women are extremely attractive.
Amen.
Well, if it helps, ♀ . , from Pokémon Yellow, is 80’3″ and has her own music.
Agatha is the hot issue
Eyyyy
There she is. I appreciate getting a glimpse at Joyce’s perspective.
Yeah, that was one of the things I wished we had gotten more of immediately prior to the start of the protest events.
“Dorothy, Joe, what are your thoughts on polycules?”
Pull a Fans – Joe gets both girls.
The most Rikk-like cast member is probably Danny, though, not Joe.
Rikk could play a ukulele unironically.
Wow hey, she’s doing the think the impatient babies have been scream-crying about while they roll around on the floor in a pile of Bibles they ripped apart with their teeth.
Made me giggle. Thanks.
Not Supporting Cheating = Throwing a Tantrum?
Not playing that stupid-ass game tonight. I got a disco ninja frog rabbit man to dance with.
Ride the Rhythm!
One of the best tracks in the entire game, right there. I’ve been groovin’ out to it when I’m walking home from game nights. I’m usually still a little bit stoned after a session, and the streets are obscenely dark in places, so it keeps me from yiiking out. Nobody’s gonna fuck with the “guy” disco dancing down the sidewalk at midnight, carrying large black case. (It’s just my guitar, but it’s been mistaken for a gun case before and if that keeps people from jumpin’ my queer ass, I’m not gonna go announcing what’s in there.)
Throwing a tantrum = throwing a tantrum, don’t put words in Taffy’s mouth, silly.
Don’t be obtuse, there were a bunch of people just a few days ago Insisting they were scheming to keep everything secret from Walky and Joe
I think this is pretty damning evidence against the folks who were saying Joyce doesn’t have any feelings for Joe.
Polycule stocks are highly volatile at the moment.
Supposedly this is actually evidence in favor of that read.
As one of the folks who raised the possibility that maybe Joyce isn’t in love with Joe as one of three possible theories — I at no point said “she has no feelings for Joe”. 🙂
No, but others definitely have. Using everything from the fact that the kiss between her and Dorothy happened and the fact that she hasn’t been in a panic spiral about Joe ever since the kiss as evidence that she doesn’t care about him and never did.
I mean, she definitely has feelings for Joe, she just chose to disregard him. And the natural consequence when you treat people like shit is that they don’t want to hang out with you anymore.
possible consequence
This is probably not going to go well for Joe or Joyce.
I hope Joe, gets through this and doesn’t back slide into “Old Joe”.
not impossible. Breaking up can lead to making bad conclusions and if you made a lot of self improvement only to have it blow up in your face regression is a high possibility. Especially since it’s been established that Dorothy does NOT like Joe and is very suspicious of his intentions Joe may interpret it as Dorothy convinced Joyce that he was bad and to toss him aside. It wouldn’t be true but when you get hurt that way rational thought isn’t always the first item on the menu.
Dorothy’s antagonism with Joe is another thing I am curious to see if it will change or not? Like how much if it was exacerbated by Dorothy’s repressed feelings (and then later thinking that they will never be reciprocated), and how much will or will not remain now.
Ehhh… its fine if he goes back to being a playboy, so long as he stays away from the misogeny.
We see from Liz that in his actual hookups he cares about consent and the wellbeing of his partners.
The main reason why he (maybe) shouldn’t go back to just having more casual hookups is that it seemed like it was bad for his own self-esteem, reinforcing his perception that he is unworthy of deep love.
This is a pretty good launchpad for the next phase of Joe’s arc. Can he stick to his new principles after getting pantsed by the universe? If I had to predict, I’d say he’s gonna try and go back to being a philanderer, only to realize he can’t because he’s just not that person anymore.
I hope you’re right. The “new” Joe was someone I was really pulling for. If he craters because of this? Damn.
With electricity just, pouring through me, you’re a habit–
Gotta love Willis’ The Good Place references.
I wonder if Joyce will actually seriously consider polyamory, or is she likely still too steadfastly monogamous to be willing to consider it (or perhaps she assumes Joe is too steadfastly monogamous for her to even consider the chance he’d be okay with it)?
If you go back and look at her interactions with Sierra and crew, you can spot the moment she adds polyamory to her personal “I like that idea” list.
Seems like being steadfastly monogamous is the opposite of the problem she has D;
Her heart is in the right place but I could set my clock to Joyce putting her foot in her mouth. We’ll see how she does in this highly volatile and emotionally-charged situation!
I don’t think I realized whose reaction I wanted to see first and foremost until this. So Joe is first. That’s actually satisfying.
Anyway, I see we have a sense of awareness of the gravitas of this situation. It’s about time. They were awfully casual about everything, even with being worried about Becky and Dorothy being a coward about Walky.
Based on this… it also looks like poly isn’t in the cards or at least Joyce doesn’t appear to be interested.
Well, we’ve only heard two attempts at coming up with what to say to Joe. No one knows what’s going to come out of her mouth once she’s actually there. Especially not her.
I suggest,”Bad news,Joe.” Big breath. “I’m dumping you for Dorothy. I’m real sorry.”
Yep. Joyce doesn’t want to dump her boyfriend.
Dorothy will absolutely dump Walky.
Awkward.
Yeah, this uncomfortable just to watch. And Joyce said there was no such thing as hell.
Hell was the friends we made along the way.
No hell but what we make.
She walks in to Joe’s room.
“So, you and Dottie finally kissed. How was it?”
Entire brain explodes.
“How’d you know?”
“You smell like a person who’s kissed a woman.”
“I saw it on the news.”
yeah its really hard to constantly wash out the tear gas smell from kissing my girlfriends
Is that implying that Becky is waiting in Joe’s room? (since Joe’s never called Dorothy “Dottie” before, right?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Perfect!
also walky’s with him
And he’s in the Captain America meme pose with the chair and everything
This just makes me sad. I feel bad for Joe. He’s done all the work, yes, but even before that, he was actually a good friend to Joyce and to Danny. He’s always been sensitive and people don’t see it because they don’t look too hard at his facade. And hearing Joyce say this stuff, knowing that he made her feel this way and it still wasn’t enough, just…fucking oof.
I think Joyce is in a place right now where she has equally strong feelings for two people and she feels pulled in two directions at once. For a little while she’s been operating under Well Dorothy Is My One True Love Now mode, but now as she’s walking off to face the music and vocalizing how she feels about Joe, doubt comes in.
I don’t necessarily think it will go this route, but I do wonder if Joyce’s religious trauma upbringing may have resulted in her having a permanent specific complex about penis-in-vagina sex?
I’m betting the sexual assault didn’t help her either. But then that’s never been addressed ever so who knows.
Willis went that route with Leslie Bean in Shortpacked. I don’t know if they would use that same exact trauma for a second character, even if this is a different universe.
I’m thinking about way back at the beginning, when Joyce said she could swing with Sal if she didn’t have to touch anything below the neck. Is that going to come back when Dorothy takes her top off?
Sometimes, it’s not really about “enough”. Feelings come into conflict, and they’re filling separate bars on our HUD, not the same one.
I actually paused and considered the word choice there for those reasons, but went with “enough” because I think it’s how Joe is likely to feel. The way he thinks about Joyce and what he thinks she deserves, plus his own self-loathing, makes me fairly certain he’s going to think, great, I did my absolute best and I still fell short of what this perfect woman needs. So yeah it’s not fundamentally about that, but I think it’s where we’re headed with regards to Joe.
[Flashbacks to How I Met Your Mother and Barney immediately loosing all his character growth because if being in a real relationship with Robin didn’t work then it was never going to work with anyone]
Though it only lasted a few minutes in the show because then he had a daughter. (Ughughugh, thinking about the HIMYM finale…) (Even though I actually just watched it two weeks ago as I finished up a series rewatch.)
This is a great way to explain that feeling and I’mma steal it.
Housing and Urban Development?
Heads Up Dismay.
Yeah, this is painful to watch and not just for Joe: this seems to be breaking Joyce’s heart too, hurting him like this. I wonder if she can really go through with it?
Joe deserves better than this. He’s been doing a lot to become a much better person than he was at the beginning of this comic. I hope he can find someone who won’t cheat on him in the future.
Did everyone already assume they were a couple (or at least all the women did)?
Would be complete great, in fact all the girls in the dorm have had a pool going on when it would happen……….Becky wins
Dorothy had her money on another month and Joyce was off by two days.
except the pool was on when joyce and dorothy kiss
And that’s when Dorothy and Joyce had their money on in the pool.
i have never encountered a person being invited to participate in a pool regarding themselves taking an action that until this point had been a subconscious thing. having been the subject of a lot exclusionary bullshit and rumour in school and workplaces, to be invinted into a pool regarding when i would do something would cause me to cut those people from my life, and question why i ever involved them in my life. i havenever understood why someone would think it funny, now if one of the 2 had sneakily participated in the pool because they were not as closeted as they were presenting just to take everyone money sure fucking hilarious, bit of a trope, but both of these girls feelings were so far buried that this doesnt work.
i think the other commenter was joking???
Headcanon: for the last 2 months or so, most of the women’s half of Read Hall has utterly convinced that Joyce is secretly cheating on Joe with Dorothy, but nobody’s told Joe in all that time because they see it as his comeuppance for being a horrible misogynist.
So, are they going to be a couple? Or friends with benefits?
we are so fucking back
Agatha is emanating real Osaka energy right now.
Do people from Osaka tend to act like cheery Mormons?
I think they mean the girl Osaka from Azumanga Daioh <3
Ding ding, ya got it.
Hilariously Osaka is the complete opposite of a stereotypical Osakan.
That I did not know.
My money is on this going poorly and then at some point Joe finds himself in a strip with Rachel again and he’s like “See, you were wrong. People do change. They get worse”
And then they hate fuck or something
Oh, man, it’s been so long since I’ve had a hate fuck. Hate fucks are the hottest.
your gravatar (amber) makes this so much funnier
Dorothy surely saying I love you is one of the things you can’t do until you get through the list
They’ve said it a couple of times before The Incident™, though. In front of Joe, no less.
Yes but this was before The List came into force
The List is more of a handshake agreement right now, it hasn’t been ratified by all parties.
Underestimate the authority of The List at your own peril!
The Incident™? Did someone cause a beaver genocide? Again??
A beaver genocide? Is that what the kids are calling it now?
Number of people Dorothy thinks have inadvertently learned she was gay today: 5
Percentage of those who already knew: 80. (Jocelyne, I think, had no clue until she saw them kiss at the protest.)
It’s a fact that the vast majority of the comic’s cast will react with “yes, and?” to the news.
I find it hilarious (and not just a little life affirming) that (so far) everyone’s either “I am very okay with this” or “Whatevs.”
And it just occurred to me that a confrontation with Mary is surely inevitable. Hope they get through the list first.
Mary will be the least surprised of all, of course the liberals are degenerate lesbians, that’s what leftists do. XD
While she’s new on the scene, she might suspect stuff. Too little data to have a firm opinion, though:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/02-the-one-where-jocelyne-returns/thebubble/
Jan 19: (Jocelyne) I can see why you became atheist for this one.
Jan 20: (Joyce) Queerness was… inside all along.
And the look Jocelyne gives her – she knew, that smile when they finally kissed was vindication. 🙂
YAYYY! CONSEQUENCES CONSEQUENCES CONSEQUENCES !!
And all we had to do was wait a few days!
yeeeuuup. I think in-time it was. What. A single 10 minute giddy run across campus before it kicked in.
The time lapse there was weird because the protest stuff was midday, and by the time they were back at their dorm, it was like 8pm and they had talked about nothing. But viewing it as a ten to thirty minute (pausing at places and taking a round about way, maybe) giddy run makes a lot more sense in multiple ways.
I imagine winter days get dark around five or six in Indiana.
Based on the couple of months I lived there, which were “conveniently” in the winter, it’s about 4 or 5.
Yeah, but I was basing this in part on the clock we see in the strip with Asma in the strip before Dorothy and Joyce show back up.
But you cannot see which hand is which, on the clock, because the top is not in panel. So lunch time-ish or evening, or the clock always shows that time because the battery is stuffed?
We also do not know if it is dark or light out when Asma gets back. So, all in all, I would say we know very little about how long the interval between escaping the kettling and the getting back was, other than it was light when they escaped and dark when Joyce and Dorothy got back.
If it were lunch time by the clock, that would still mean that Joyce and Dorothy ran for hours. The more likely reasoning about the clock not being accurate, rather than all this nitpicking, would be that Willis didn’t really think about it. And it really doesn’t matter because for the light to change as much as it did, it would have been longer than getting back to the dorm should have taken. Time lapse was still weird.
The clock says seven. It’s a little tough to read, but the long hand is pointing to the 12.
Laundry happened early afternoon. Billie and Alice were eating lunch late-ish. Then Dorothy and Joyce took the long way home. For avoidance reasons.
To me it looks closer to 8pm, but it could be meant to be 7pm. Or not meant to be anything. Alice and Billie could have been having a late lunch as their second meal of the day– it does look like they hung out all day. At the time, it seemed like an early (or right at 12pm) lunch, since they met up in the morning to go get food at Read.
With how the pacing of events seemed to be, it seems like there are hours between seeing Joyce and Dorothy. Which is fine, and the comic often moves at jumps throughout the day to keep things going. Usually it seems less “Hey what happened in those hours where you were running around holding hands” though. (Also, Dorothy and Joyce *could have* been running off into the sunset… missed opportunity imo. Also we could get some pretty colors from things that weren’t tear gas.)
Yet still Zero signs the really regret their decisions.
It’s not that I think there wouldn’t be consequences at least for Joyce and Joe’s relationship, but rather that I kinda dislike Joyce and Dorothy now.
And they don’t come across as cute when they are acting with so little regard for others. It’s like how I don’t think Amber stabbing Sal was “cool” or “heroic”.
That stabbing wasn’t meant to be cool or heroic, was it?
No, it wasn’t. Which is a good thing because if it had been framed as cool or heroic then the story would be treating it as basically OK. Maybe something with consequences, but not actually bad.
I’ve kind of been feeling the same way about the Dorothy/Joyce relationship. It seems like there has been a lot of emphasis on it being “cute”, “New Relationship Feelings”, or Dramatic and Fearless declarations of love. If Joyce/Dorothy felt any regret, it was less important than kisses.
Even now it seems like while Joyce wants to protect Joe’s feelings, I don’t see her actually regretting her decision.
She shouldn’t regret it. She was true to herself and her feelings.
Technically, we’re still building up to the consequences…
It’s the calm before the storm, if you will.
We haven’t really gotten to the consequences yet, but I hope there are some.
What if they’re not the ones you want?
They won’t be. Because Willis. But the worst consequences will be none.
“Act with integrity … hooo boy.”
dang she managed to preempt blurting out the dumbest thing, she really is improving. slowly.
Woo, let’s have some pain!
Also, thank you Agatha for your input.
(Personal note, one of my closest friends from high school, who I remained really close to the first two years of college– roomed together sophomore year– no longer talks to me, and while I don’t know why (because of the not talking to me part), I imagine that part of it is we went to college and she became Mormon and I got queerer. So it does make me happy to see the Mormon character here with Happy Gay Facts.)
Solid Plato joke, Agatha.
The Good Place reference was good and all but the Plato joke made me choke on my tea. A++
yes, Platon was very gay
Honestly Joyce? I feel like he might respond better to that one.
Wow, it’s been four years since the last time we saw Agatha.
“Listen, Joe,
if you could only see the way she loves me,
then maybe you would understand
why I feel this way about our love
and what I must do…”
Is this what it takes to get more Agatha?
Sacrifices must be made
I hope Joe doesn’t take this too badly, but I wouldn’t blame him if he doesn’t take it well.
Was looking for another strip and .
Lol where did my html go!!!!
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/03-answers-in-hennessy/endupgay/
…but How suddenly Joyce get attracted to Dorothy? Whyyy?
“Suddenly”?
I think Amos is suggesting that the posted link suggests that Joyce should have fallen for Billie.
It turned in to a dot at the end of your first comment.
Anyway, at this point, one should as well create a database of every strip were Joyce was gay.
This is what I was referring to the other day when I said “we’ve already HAD Joyce do a big freak out over maybe being bi”. She decided she wasn’t, because her attraction to men felt different than her attraction to women, which is an incredibly common reason for bi people to stay in denial when younger.
For the record, Willis got asked on BlueSky whether they already knew Joyce was bi by this point (2015, one book later, the storyline immediately after Becky’s reappearance — specifically the last panel), and they said “not quite yet, but this is a very good example of how I kept accidentally pratfalling into explanations […] that just made her sound gayer”.
(Which is about what I would have guessed, much as it’s been fun to tinfoil about how maybe it was the plan from the first strip.)
Ugh, HTML comes for us all. But I only meant to link the two things! So it’s okay! Just ugly to read.
Did Joe and Joyce just have an intimate date like… last night?
This is going to destroy Joe’s self-esteem.
No one’s asking the real question: how would Danny feel about Walky and Joe dating? Can you imagine the double date…
Math-lady-dot-gifing about whether Jacob’s observation that Danny and Joe are “a little married, huh” early on is enough for Danny to feel like Walky dating Joe is once again going after one of his exes.
“How about we just don’t be monogamous?”
“Uh…”
“Look, you wanna explore your wants and needs, fine. I also know I can’t grow a vagina. So we can compromise by me being the boyfriend and Dorothy can be the girlfriend. I am fine with that.”
Paraphrase a conversation I said to a girlfriend/friend/whatever when she said she wanted to ask out a friend of ours who had recently become single. I encouraged her, caught in that “I want her to be happy even if it is not with me; I hope she and I can stay together; and our friend also being bi and seemingly attracted to both of us maybe do some kind of thruple situation?”
Did that work out for y’all? Compersion works for some of us, but there are those who don’t find fulfillment in their partners’ happiness.
WILL POLYAMORY SAVE THEM???
Tune in next time to Dragon Ball Z Kai
i mean Dumbing of Age XD
“Oh, hi, Joe, did you watch, uh, any videos of the protest?”
https://www.itswalky.com/comic/oh-oh-hi-dina/
Oh god. It’s happening. I can’t look!
…at least not for another 24 hours or so…
Lots of “sorry for Joe” but not that many seem to have any faith in him.
I have complete faith in Joe. Doesn’t make it suck any less for him
That’s not what AGV/Ruby is talking about — there’s been a vocal segment of the commenters for months now, talking about how Joe is going to be so broken by this conversation that he backslides on his entire character arc and starts mistreating women.
Oh I’ve seen them, I’m saying I have faith that Joe won’t regress
Joe’s not an idiot. He had to see this as a possible consequence of encouraging Dorothy to embrace her feelings for Joyce. I seriously doubt this is going to take him by surprise, and I’m almost positive that he’s not going to backslide.
Not directly related to today’s strip, but in reaction to some commenters who say they were surprised of Dorothy turning out to actually be in love with Joyce:
A little issue I had about the comic for a little while was that It felt to me like Joyce was starting to have a “Main protagonist” syndrome: i.e. everyone stopping everything they were doing at the drop of an hat for Joyce the moment she was facing some problems, even when they had realistically more important priorities. And it only looked to me that they were doing that for no other reason that Joyce is the Main Protagonist and she need help, so now the plot is about her.
In retrospect, I realise now that “Everyone” was actually mainly Dorothy (and to a lesser degree, Sarah, but mostly because she is her roomate and she kinda developed a big-sis affection toward Joyce). And seeing that Dorothy actually had romantic feeling toward Joyce recontextualise a lot of what I used to see as an issue.
Yeah, there are things Dorothy has done for Joyce that wouldn’t make sense for a friend she has known for less than a year, (or would at least be unusual), but for someone you might actually be in love with? Yeah, it all fit perfectly.
So it turns out my “issues” were just foreshadowing I never picked on (I never do).
I think you were on to something though. It felt like for awhile every character was talking about Joyce constantly. Even Lucy, Billie and Walky in the other quad having discussions about her. Ruth too. That was all a long time ago though.
Talking about someone you know is rather normal, though.
With multi-year webcomics it’s always hard to know what is clever foreshadowing and what is the artist making it all up as they go and the retroactive foreshadowing being a pleasant coincidence
insert the brooklyn 99 meme “i have only known this dog for 5 minutes, but i would kill everyone in this room and then myself for this dog”
sometimes you meet someone and just click, even platonically (which my spell check is having a siezure over), one of my closest friends we spent the night we met in a perkins (literally there from 11pm to 7 am, would’ve killed for him that morning) 22years later we watched Sinners in my back yard on a projector this past sat) it can happen and i hope all you here get to enjoy such a connection.
The only thing I don’t like about Joyce and Dorothy is that I have to destroy this entire plot I have daydream for months.
– When Dorothy leaves to go to Yale.
– It’s Year Two of college.
– New colleagues to the same floor where Joyce lives. A hindi, someone from eastern Europe, and of course, one from Brazil. And finally one that are missing.
– The missing one is from Korea. And she is a giant girl. (you will say that it sounds like Bubbles from QC, but it’s just a coincidence).
– One month after, Joyce find her, walking to IU. They soon befriend each other. Instant connection. Joyce doesn’t know, but the first 3 girls are looking for this new girl.
– In the end of the day, they are reunited, by surprise. The big girl embraces the other 3 girls, because they are like sisters, that made a promise to stay together in College, and they thought that korean girl were lost forever. And Joyce suddenly is involved in this friendship.
– Yes, the big girl starts to have feelings about Joyce, and history goes on…
But, sadly, Willis
finallysetup Joyce and Dorothy to stay together. And now I have to drop my entire storyline I have written in my mind for months! Damn you, Willis!That’s all. You can keep going with Dorothy and Joyce.
She might as well push him in front of that sniper with that second one lol
Anyway, about the comic itself: I don’t see how this will not turn ugly. Things are going to get worse before they get better.
A lo of people are going to be miserable and this isn’t something that will be easily solved. I am not even sure it can actually be solved. There are rifts that cn be so bad they can never be fixed back. But at least they are taking the honest past.
Ironically enough, I think that Becky is the one who will actually take and roll with it the best. (at least I hope so. The last thing I want is this new development also creating a hurtful rift between Becky and Dina)
This strip makes me so sad
Surely Joyce won’t wimp out and then do something even worse to avoid telling him though- right, viewers? Because is obviously where everyone comes clean and tells the truth. Pay no attention to the title of the next storyline shshshhh
Oh look, Joyce is sad and sympathetic about breaking Joe’s heart, the thing everybody complained about that she wasn’t for the last couple days. It’s almost like she just needed two fucking minutes to come down off the high of realizing she’s in love with somebody so that she could process the negatives that come with that feeling.
Yeah, no. If she didn’t feel even a smidge sad at this point, when she was walking to do the deed, then we’d have to wonder when she turned sociopath.
I’m not sure about others, but I never said that she didn’t care about Joe. She just doesn’t really care about him as much as Joe cares about her. Or Dorothy cares about Walky. It wasn’t a relationship that was going to last, anyways.
I wouldn’t be surprised if on that panel, with the crumpled lip, was the first moment that she *really thought* about how this might affect him, and empathized with that pain.
That’s kind of my point. She’s been wrapped up in the realization of her love for Dotty and while she was aware, in concept, that this involved breaking up with Joe, she’s been avoiding thinking about it because she knows it’s gonna hurt. To listen to some of the commenters for the last few days, Joyce was clearly a character-assassinated robot shell of her former self who didn’t care about Joe’s feelings at all.
You expecting people to wait?! For a story to develop before jumping to conclusions and getting mad about it?! Are you out of your mind!
Yeah, I think she’s been subconsciously putting off the part where she has to deal with this emotionally. She knows this part is gonna suck for Joe and for her, and she’s trying to be brave about it now by going to Joe first because she can tell Dorothy’s gonna handle it even worse than her, but I really think she just wanted to spend a little longer in the version of the world where neither Dorothy nor Joe are hurt yet by the fact that she wanted it to work with Joe but just loves Dorothy more. I think she’s mostly afraid of hurting him and losing him as a friend. I think she’s been distantly aware for a while that this is gonna be the Bad Part, even if it was also inevitable.
Chidi Anagonye would appriciate that alt text
“Look, Joe. You’ve been absolutely wonderful to me, and you’ve done nothing to deserve this. But the fact is, earlier today, I kissed someone else. *I* kissed *them.* I really like you, and I wish that things had worked out differently, but I know it’s impossible for me to commit myself to you when my heart’s somewhere else. You deserve better.”
Simple. Straightforward. Acknowledge what happened. Apologize. Make it clear that it was not their fault, that they were wonderful, and that they deserve someone who won’t cheat on them. And that’s harsh, but it’s also true.
That would certainly the mature and snart wat of going about it. Which is why it will absolutely not happen.
The only thing missing here, I think, is an explicit acknowledgement of the betrayal’s moral element. This confession and apology does contain all of the facts, but it’s missing (I think) an explicit statement of ‘I have transgressed-I regret it and I’m very sorry, but at the same time I can’t wish I hadn’t. You deserve better.’
Yes, needs more self-flagellation. /s
Not self-flagellation but an acknowledgement that Joyce has specifically wronged Joe and violated his trust.
The steps in front of the building are going to see a lot of use in short order.
I haven’t spoken much on it but I think I’ll talk about about my feelings on Jorothy.
Personally, I have a hard time seeing it only because Dorothy has always felt like Joyce’s school “mom” so I can’t say I ever saw them romantically. In the same way it feels weird shipping Sarah and Joyce. Cuz Sarah seems so sister-coded to me. Dorothy’s in a similar boat, though I will admit that recently that dynamic feels like it’s changed somewhat.
The other issue is that Joe and Joyce has been an unexpected but incredibly enjoyable dynamic for me. Like an all time highlight of the comic has been their slowly budding relationship and growth of both their characters. So I’m feeling a bit like I’m having the rug pulled and that this was all setup to get this other couple together. Especially since I was worried Joyce would basically feel no conflict over the cheating. Glad that’s not the case at least!
The downside is I feel like because this relationship is Sapphic there’s a chance any gripes I have with it will be dismissed as me being heteronormative in favor of Joeyce. Which I don’t feel is the case (I say think cuz we all have subconscious biases). I feel like Joe is being reduced to just “the man in the way” of this lesbian couple when I feel like his dynamic with Joyce was SO much more than that. I wasn’t a very big fan of Walky and Lucy in favor of Amber/Walky. But I also wasn’t under the impression that their coupling would last since there wasn’t a lotta fanfare with it. Unlike this relationship which based on the framing is probably endgame (If there is such a thing). I’m not too big on yucking somebody’s yum. If Jorothy is your fave then far be it from me to ruin it for anybody. But man, outside the slim slim chance this goes the Polyamory route I feel like it just sorta built me up only to tear me down and what’s worse feel like I’m being regressive for not being super jazzed about the new couple. But like always, I’ll wait and see how it plays out.
I agree with you. I was rooting for Joyrothy to happen eventually, but the speed with which it occurred and the circumstances surrounding it make me not like it anymore. Plus I don’t really want it at the EXPENSE of Joece. I do think it’s great personal drama to conflict with Joe having grown for Joyce, but other than that… yeah I’m not a fan.
The whole concept of this ship being endgame has poisoned it for me a bit as well like… it takes the wind out of the sails of not knowing what’ll happen next. Maybe they’d break up or date other people, but they’ll get back together in the end. I really wish it had stayed a drawn-out slow burn, feels like digging into a bag of candy you were saving to eat bit by bit over a long time, and instead binging the whole thing in one night and not liking the taste anymore.
Yeah the endgame thing is weird for me too. They’re in college. I guess some people met their life partners in college, but I can’t relate to that. I can relate to *thinking* I met my life partner as a young adult multiple times, and being mistaken.
I dunno, I know this isn’t super common but a bunch of folks I know met their life partners as kids and got together in high school or college. This is the case for me with both of mine. My parents met in college, I think my mom was my dad’s first girlfriend. None of the referenced people were in like small towns or anything.
Anyway. I don’t know what the dating scene looks like when you don’t just date your friends but marrying someone you started dating in college seems really normal to me. Not universal by any means, but not weird.
Either way, I’m typically much more interested in watching people navigate the problems that actually exist with in a relationship than watching a lot of getting together and breaking up and will they won’t they and all that. Despite not liking this ship in particular, having a sense of whether something is intended to last tends to increase my enjoyment of it, not decrease it, since it makes it easier to take the narrative for what it is intended to be.
This is fiction. In one sense, “endgame” just means lasts throughout the comic.
In another, it would be weird narratively to build up a relationship and then end the comic with a note saying “Yeah, they broke up a couple years later and both wound up marrying different people we haven’t met.” Even if that would be more realistic.
You are not alone.
You’ve put a lot of my feelings into words here, Yoto
Eh, for what it’s worth while I don’t agree with some of your points, I don’t think anybody that frequents these comment sections is going to accuse *you* of all people of being heteronormative or regressive.
I too was rooting for Joe and Joyce, and I’m kinda disappointed that’s probably not gonna continue now. The idea of a poly relationship seems unlikely to me, and while I like gay couples I can’t bring myself to like Joyce and Dorothy as a couple since they started with cheating. At this point I’m just waiting to see if there will be any negative consequences for those two cheating.
Like I said on a previous strip, we are talking about two girls who were holding hands while masturbating beforehand (and at a point where they were still single).
We have only ourselves to blame to have emotionally invested ourself in the separate hetero relationship that emerged afterwards.
Honestly I wasn’t a fan of that either. Less the masturbation itself and more the framing of it. Prior to that strip Joyce had been mad at everyone micromanaging her life and then Dorothy shows up and INSISTS she masturbate right now because she’s only attracted to Joe because she’s repressed and horny. That really rubbed me the wrong way.
That sequence squicked some people, and was actively triggering for others, and I will never try to tell anyone how to feel about it.
I will say: I think Joyce’s total mood shift was talked about, but not really fully acknowledged. A lot of people talked about how it didn’t make sense, but I don’t think I saw a ton of “oh, right, she’s got, like, PMDD.” Hard mood swings are kind of part of the diagnosis, though, and I feel like we could have assumed she was in pain earlier when she was shouting at people, and the pain had passed and brought her back into a more Joyce-typical level of “yay! Dorothy had come to visit me!” by the time Dorothy showed up.
Willis could’ve helped us out by having Dorothy be surprised by the change, but I also think Dorothy was in a very specific mode, where she wasn’t in the right state of mind to have been expecting a frostier reception — she was still too much in her own head over Roz and Jennifer’s criticisms of the way in which she was helping (or not helping) Joyce, as well as regret over Walky being with Lucy, and extremely confused and confusing feelings over Joyce’s mutual attraction to Joe.
So neither girl commented on the change, which made it feel stranger to readers than I think it was meant to, and some readers started to feel like Joyce just goes along with anything Dorothy asks of her — even though we’ve definitely seen Joyce ignore Dorothy’s advice and opinions, and we’d even seen her tell Dorothy to fuck off earlier — and that added to the sense that some folks had of Dorothy as the Mom Friend, plus Roz’s accusations that she was being sex-negative, plus Dorothy’s untrue (but not, in-universe, wholly unfair) view of Joe…
It all came together in a big mess that I think really soured the scene versus what Willis had intended it to be, which was largely positive, with only a BIT of a shadow cast by Dorothy’s unclear mental state (that this was obviously somehow a reaction to her bitterness wrt Walky, that she muttered a retort to Roz while explaining what they were going to do…) — but becamr something where a bunch of readers were at the very least calling Joyce’s consent into question.
I think the framing is absolutely my issue. And it’s sorta something this arc suffers from to. Willis’ eyes get bigger than his stomach when it comes to the shipping and he jumps right to the critical moment without taking the surrounding scenario into account.
“I want Joyce and Dorothy to have an intimate moment in a laj dry room, but instead of it happening organically, say they’re already in the laundry room and Joyce and Dorothy start discussing masturbation or something, Dorothy instead comes to Joyce’s dorm room with the explicit purpose to have her masturbate in a laundry room (which…the publicness of that could easily squick people out so having her TAKE Joyce there rather than them already being there feels a bit…weird.) And Dorothy has to have a “motivation” for that scene that isn’t explicitly “I just wanna watch Joyce cum” cuz that would be more inherently sexual and might give the game away. So she is doing it as a “preventative measure” against Joyce feeling attraction to Joe. Which…is kinda ew. Like even if it’s a lie Dorothy is telling herself it’s a pretty regressive view of both sex and honestly, Joyce as an autonomous being. It’s like telling someone “you’re just confused.” And what’s worse Dorothy vocalizes this mission statement to Joyce and Joyce just goes ” Oh ok”. There’s a reason people claim it feels very “porn-y”. Everyone involved basically is written in such a way to bring us to the sexy parts, at the risk of feeling rushed and uncomfortable. I can’t say taking Joyce’s personality shift into account really helps that much for me.
This is basically my take on the laundry scene. It has never sat right with me.
I hear you for sure. I think a lot of us have that feeling of a rug pulled out from under us given how subtly Joe/Joyce was built up for such an incredibly long time.
Okay, first of all: you’re fine!! I read through this whole comment for a specific eye to any kinda queerphobia because you said you were worried about it, and I don’t think there’s any in here.
Like, I don’t actually see the “Dorothy is kinda Joyce’s mom” angle, but I know myself, and I would definitely be icked out if I saw it! So I have full sympathy to people for whom the ship is just kind of, irrevocably poisoned by that.
Second of all: fully valid to have gotten really invested in Joe/Joyce! I think they’ve been cute, too, aside from a few moments that made me cringe a bit. And we know Willis also shipped them, and didn’t want to cut them off at the knee, and already pushed this storyline back several times in part to spend more time with Joe/Joyce.
(I’m still hoping for poly, but it’s in an “eventually” way at this point. I like all three of the dynamics between them, and I would like to see Dorothy and Joe develop an actual friendship, unlike when she spent years dating Danny and the two of them never really clicked.)
Third of all: I completely get worrying that you’d get kinda lambasted for just… not wanting the two girls to get together, but for what it’s worth, while I have definitely seen a few people painting with much too broad a brush and saying everyone who’s not on board just, like, hates lesbians…
…it’s moooostly that there have been some very queerphobic takes in the comments.
Sometimes more subtle, like the much higher proportion of “Dorothy’s just horny for Joyce” “Dorothy just wants to fuck Joyce” “everyone who ships this just wants Dorothy and Joyce to fuck”-type comments from people, pretty much the instant they stopped being able to argue that Dorothy was just confused and not really bi.
Sometimes with an appeal to completely imaginary society-wide trends: “why can’t two girls just be friends, what happened to platonic relationships!”
(Even if we just consider DoA, this is actually the ONLY strong platonic friendship between two people of the same gender that’s turned into a romance. Sal/Marcie and Joyce/Becky both ended with rejection; Becky/Dina spoke for like five minutes before romantic interest became clear; Jennifer/Ruth was more of an “enemies to lovers” trajectory; and even for Danny/Ethan, which never became an actual romance, their interest in one another was established before they’d actually spent enough time together to be considered a strong platonic friendship.)
Sometimes by complaining that “it just doesn’t make sense” for Joyce and/or Dorothy to be bi, so Willis is just “forcing an agenda” (sometimes even using the word “agenda”).
And then there’s the stuff that’s definitely also getting posted but not making it through the moderation filter, or comments that have actually been deleted.
These comments are not in the majority! But they’re definitely happening, and those of us who see them are getting rankled.
So: if you see someone complaining about queerphobes getting pressed over this development, please know that you’re not queerphobic just for not shipping something!! Those people aren’t, or shouldn’t be, talking about you.
Internet gesture of support!
Yeah, the “it’s just doesn’t make sense” comments in regards to Dorothy and Joyce being bi and having feelings for each other don’t hold much water, and do typically have a queerphobic underlying vibe to them.
I (and I imagine others in good faith) just wish the when and how of Dorothy and Joyce getting together had been different/done differently.
Yeah, this basically describes my feelings about the current relationship forecast, both on how invested I was in Joe and Joyce’s relationship and the specific when and how of Dorothy and Joyce acting their feelings played out kinda souring me a bit on the relationship.
And that’s not even mentioning the issues with the not-Palestine protest and the issues surrounding the handling of the (lack of) Muslim characters.
The people who think Dorothy was like Joyce’s “mom” are always gonna be kinda strange for me, I’m not gonna lie. There’s suggesting it in a mom friend way, which is fine, and then there’s this idea you seem to be suggesting, that Dorothy is her mom in a similar found family way that Sarah and Joyce are sisters and. I mean. That’s weird. It’s one thing for Becky and Leslie to see each other as pseudo child-parent in a found family way, they’re different ages and Leslie has definitely tried to take a mentor-ish role for Becky.
Dorothy may be micromanaging, and a bit meddlesome one might say, but she has never tried to actually mentor Joyce from a position of authority. They’re the same damn age. Joyce is not a child and Dorothy is not ‘so mentally mature she might as well be 50 years old’. She tries to be mature, but I feel like this very storyline shows that no matter how much she tries, she is still very much a young adult in over her head. Joyce and Dorothy are peers. They have never and will never be “found family mother and daughter”.
Now, I don’t think this makes you homophobic or anything. You can disagree with the ship for many reasons. I just think the “Dorothy is literally Joyce’s mom and thus it is incest” route is incredibly strange.
I wouldn’t say she’s “literally Joyce’s mom. But I definitely get the feeling she “mothers” Joyce. Usually since Joyce’s naivete and sheltered upbringing makes it so that any character she meets is usually teaching or showing her something unfamiliar and Joyce is usually aprehensive or hesitant to try anything new. And since Dorothy appears the most often she just sticks outbin my head as more if a guidance role than a peer.
Pondering it further, I think sometimes it is difficult to divorce having a more guiding role for someone from being parental. For example, for a year my cousin and her son moved in with me. The first time I met her son, he was 6 months old and I was about 14 or 15. So the gap between our ages was about 14 years. When he lived with me, he was 14 and I was about 28/29.
I will admit, it was tricky sometimes to balance what role I was meant to play in his life. I was too old to be a ‘friend’, but too young to be his parent. His mom made choices I disagreed with but I felt it wasn’t my place to argue or impede. He and I had always regarded each other as simply ‘cousins’, but sharing a house did put me in a new role. Especially because I was smack dab in the middle age-wise between him and his mom, so sometimes I had to mediate. It was a weird role to juggle, especially being the only person in the house working for a significant period of that time, and the main bill handler. I’ve never had a kid before and still don’t have a kid. It definitely wasn’t perfect but I wanna think I did a good job trying to help give him advice and be his “cool, older cousin” without forcing a parental role onto him or his mother.
Which is a lot of yapping to say I think I get it a bit more now.
See, my objection here — and you’re totally free to disagree ofc — is that Dorothy isn’t actually that much less sheltered or that much more worldly. A lot of the time, when Joyce asks Dorothy for guidance, Dorothy doesn’t know any better than Joyce does.
I see them more as helping each other and learning from each other.
This feels like getting two comics in one strip.
We need more Agatha..
Hilarious thought just occurred to me. All their friends are sneaking around to throw them a, “Finally you’re out and dating” surprise party. Not likely to happen, but that would be very silly.
Reading through the comments today puts me in mind of an anecdote of the danger of commiting to a relationship with a “romantic” man who says he cares about love (/following his heart): promises you the world when he’s in love with you, then later when he’s gotten used to you falls in love with someone else new and interesting, and after he’s let you down by following his heart there he later get used to and lets that person down too in favour of someone else new and perhaps younger, et cetera. In romance, “I have to follow my heart” painting it as something external and involuntary is a blank cheque for recurrent untrustworthiness.
That last sentence is really good
So Joyce should treat this 10 day long relationship as a lifetime commitment, regardless of how her feelings change?
AI think everybody you’ve made a romantic commitment to is owed the basic decency and respect of not being cheated on (whoops 1) and being forthcoming about it if you do (we know based on the archive title that she does not succeed in telling him tomorrow- whoops 2) no matter how long the relationship has been explicitly romantic. Especially given her current partner was a close friend and confidant for a long time prior to them dating. Them only being official for 10 days doesn’t diminish the shittiness of it all.
Why so sad, Panel 5 Joyce? Isn’t this what you wanted?
I think that’s the problem. She didn’t want This™, but since she acted without thinking it through, it’s what she’s got, and she’s processing that.
No, she wanted Dorothy, not to hurt someone she cares about. This is a painful but necessary consequence.
Testing- does changing my username back to what I used previously mean I don’t get modflagged, or is it tied to my email?
Huh. The former. Well folks, please look forward to the ramblings of “Wrong 7” where I cop to getting hyperfixated and way too confident in where I thought the story was going just as soon as mods approve my post.
First-time posters always have to have their first comment mod-approved; apparently that applies to usernames rather than email addresses.
Odd.
I’m on my work laptop right now, and I can still see the comments that are awaiting moderation.
(Chidi gesturing at the blackboard) PLATO
I think Joyce would be fine dating multiple people.
And Joe would probably acquiesce knowing he’s only sharing Joyce with Dorothy
Since he already was
So it might happen that way.
But one person wouldn’t be ok with it.
Dorothy.
2 people. Becky.
Maybe 3 people Dina when Becky gets jealous.
Maybe 4 people when Joyce gets crazy jealous at Joe with someone else.
And that might break up Dorothy.
Dorothy still in the middle of an identity crisis. A relationship will just paper it over till it rips open.
Who are you really Dorothy? How soon till you put on a superhero costume?
Dorothy has been a mess for a while. When she heals a bit and comes to terms with her new self, she’ll be a new person. How will this change her relationship with Joyce?
Unless they’re invited into the polycule, Becky and Dina don’t get a vote.
Joe isn’t dating Becky. Joyce isn’t dating Becky. Dorothy isn’t dating Becky. Why do people keep acting like Becky’s opinion on this is relevant?
Instead of being all possibly joyful and instantly polycule-y/open relationship-y in response to their girlfriends cheating on them, I’m kind of hoping Joe and/or Walky pull an Ethan and just completely disappear from the strip entirely (or, at least, completely withdraw from the current friend groups), for a while, to attempt to recover from this and to get their shit back together again. (And maybe do a slightly better job of it than Ethan himself has done, so far, though that part is optional.)
And, yes, I’m fully aware “my best friend since childhood died as a result of physical violence” has more magnitude than “my girlfriend kissed somebody else” but still.
Everyone involved joining hands, dancing in a circle, singing hallelujah, and instantaneously being completely and unreservedly open to a polycule/open relationship would seem far too neat and tidy a solution to this situation. Not nearly enough Drama Tag involved there. There should be at least some consequences to this more than none at all whatsoever.
There are a world of possibilities between those two extremes.
I’m baffled by this constant refrain that a poly relationship would be neat and tidy and involve no drama. Like, seriously, have you ever met</em. poly people?
Gah. Noticed the typo in the closing tag between when I hit Post and when the page reloaded.
Everyone’s all about Joe, but for me, it’s all about Billie’s reaction.
On the one hand, idiots cheating on one another is ABSOLUTELY something Billie dealt with back when she was head cheerleader.
On the other, her track record with ‘problem solving’ has not been great so far.
Jennifer solves problems the way a Molotov cocktail solves problems. When you have a problem you throw Jennifer at it and boom right away you have a different problem.
Which one specifically? That she completely missed a big Amazi Girl Event out of her own laziness?
I don’t think Joe is going to take it well. I actually think it might break him.
We know cheating is a very sore subject for Joe due to it being the reason for his parents’ messy divorce. We’ve also seen this frankly nihilistic and self-deprecating side of him where he refused to care and let people care. By his own admission, his relationship with Joyce is motivating him to finally open up and try to be a better person.
So, the first time he actually does try and puts effort into committing and being the best version of himself, the end result is that the person he’s doing it for is the one to put him in the very situation he dreads? Call me pessimistic but this has potential to just make him give up entirely on himself.
think i’m becoming an anti-joyce/joe person outta spite. everyone’s like “these two get exactly one (1) extra partner” and if that’s the case i’d far rather it’d be walky! i like their dynamic better and think that just at base non-cheating level the comic gets better drama out of them. but consensus seems to be the third arm on this gotta-be-a-triangle has to be joe, and it’s turning me into the joe-ker
…you mean a throuple of Joyce, Joe and Walky without Dorothy???
That’s what Dorothy sees in her nightmares.
Personally I do think that the Dorothy/Walky relationship, while really cute, has basically run it’s course – however, I definitely prefer Walky over Joe as a third to Joyce and Dorothy, and am happy to welcome you aboard the Joe/Joyce hate train. May the bubble-butt twink vanquish the rectangle man forevermore!
Amen.
yeah what janet weiss said with irony i say with conviction: “i don’t like men with too many muscles”
I shipped Joyce and Joe pretty much from their interactions in those Roomies! flashback strips right up until they actually got together in DoA and all of the things that made their interactions interesting just… stopped.
Raw passion vs a reasonable and stable romance. On paper Joe is perfect for Joyce, but her heart is on fire for Dorothy right now.
And to everyone that says “she should date them both!” That may be good for JOYCE but Dorothy LOATHES Joe and every time she sees them together she has flashbacks of Blaine kidnapping Joyce and driving off, so there would be absolutely no way Dorothy would be up for a Menage a Tres. Dotty wants Joyce to herself. That’s the big problem.
We’re seeing her being really fond of Joe in this very strip.
That’s because 1) she hasn’t seen most of his change (while we and Joyce have), and 2) the following.
That’s because she’s scared of losing Joyce – to death or to Joe is the same for her. And that’s exactly the problem a ménage à trois would solve (…while potentially creating all sorts of others, of course).
I don’t think it would solve Dorothy’s possessiveness of Joyce at all, to be perfectly honest. I think she’d feel as though there was a sword hanging above her head – what if she changes her mind? what if she goes back to them? what if this slips through my fingers like everything else good that i’ve gotten? I don’t see any scenario where Dorothy wants anything other than a clean break on both their parts from their current partners.
Granted, I also have a hard time imagining Dorothy having any kind of a functional reaction to getting what she wants, given how self-sabotaging she’s been on previous occasions that’s happened.
Her reaction to getting into Yale, a lifelong goal of hers, was to bury her head in the sand about it for (probably) months. What’s she gonna do now that she has what she gave up Yale for?
The zaniest possible answer is “throw herself into causes to prove to Raidah that she’s not just a stupid white freshman and actually DOES belong at demonstrations etc, neglecting Joyce in the process”.
Actually, that’d be kinda in-character, wouldn’t it?
Ouch, this hurts.
No no no, all of that happens BEFORE she’s allowed to date Joyce, not during.
(Somewhat joking.)
Doing all of that before dating Joyce ABSOLUTELY falls under “neglecting Joyce”.
Checkmate, sickos!
off: I’m sad because of pool vote: do you people really hate Nash?
I don’t think anyone has particularly strong feelings about Nash because she barely shows up (part of the problem).
i thought hash was rthe guy with the stash in the strip where they flee the protest
I don’t know anything about Nash besides the general Forest Hall vibes which I do not really enjoy. Perhaps we will see more Nash and I will acquire a real opinion.
Forest Hall has blue walls that I don’t like.
Agatha and Sierra should both be there. We need a Greek chorus.
He was Greek, Agatha, they all were. If they could have babies with other men they’d probably exile all the women or something.
unfortunately for one of the males to give birth it would mean he received the heavenly rod, and therefor is less than a woman as she has no choice but to have a receptacle for a dick, but for a man to willingly take penetration means he wants to be female,
there is a greek legend of a prince murdering his father for suggestion he was taking his tutors dick
Oh yeah, I think the Romans had the same belief? Okay to penetrate, degrading to be penetrated.
Only when it came to slaves. Homosexual sex with another citizen was highly frowned upon and technically punishable by death under the Republic, though we don’t know of any cases where that law was enforced.
Thanks again Agatha XD
Seems like ancient greek men found a way to be simultaneously gay and homophobic.
This is common in many cultures, actually.
For the Athenians, at least, (and almost all our evidence comes from Athens), it was acceptable on both sides for an adult man to have a relationship with an adolescent boy, but not acceptable for two grown men to have a relationship.
Ah, so not homosexuality but pedophilia.
And the adult man had to take the active role. Anything else was shameful.
It’s all awkward to talk about because they didn’t think of it at all in our terms. In terms of personal sexual orientation, but in terms of active and passive roles and who they were appropriate for.
I wonder if the “ancient greeks were all gay pedophiles” meme was just a racist caricature that got turned into a fun fact.
Well with how both sides of American politics are desperate for a Certain List not to come out right now… I imagine it was the same back then, with a portion of the elites doing that shit while regular people didn’t.
OMG what if the reason socrates was killed was because he threatened to release his list??
It wasn’t. And it wasn’t really just the Greeks. Similar attitudes were common and well documented throughout the area.
Actually someone in the Patreon comments wrote a thingie on how he was actually a based asexual (paraphrasing, with my own unabashed bias)
Aristotle? He was aristotally gay too.
Not for the first time, I wish this place had a way to just block the trolls and shit-stirrers (and, apparently, closet homophobes).
Same, always.
Sadly you take one step in that direction and before long you’ve got Mastercard bullying companies into banning content.
As a matter of professional pride, I think it’s not only possible but plausible to moderate a space effectively without that moderation being inherently censorious.
That said, I was mostly wanting a block button for my own view of the thread, not a universal block.
Oh yeah, that would be very neat. Nothing wrong about wanting to shut off idiots from your perception.
I miss forums, even if moderators would get a bit power mad it was still a nicer and more organized system than the social media we have now.
That isn’t how that works. Blocking people it’s absolutely not the same as censorship i think we been over this
It’s one of the way the Patreon comments are better. And that except for the kast week or so there isn’t as many dhit stirrers. If allowed i would block a good chunk of people here.
I would be fine with just having a button to click to mute or minimize on my end comments from other commenters if I don’t like something they say.
As an actual thought on the comic:
Welp, panel 4-5 Joyce is exactly what I was imagining — there stands a woman who got carried away in the True Romance of it all, and just managed to slap herself in the face with a dose of “meanwhile back in the real world…”
And you’re not jollying anyone out of this thing, girl, least of all yourself.
If it wasn’t for the apparent Word of Willis, I’d actually think we could see some drama with Joyce bouncing back and forth between Joe and Dorothy (internally, at least) and having a solid in-comic week or two of drama about it, but I feel like that’s less likely now.
What word of Willis?
A lot of people take the “sorry Joe” aside from Willis’ Patreon post to mean that this is the end for Joe/Joyce. Nothing confirmed of course, but it’s a reasonable inference.
She’s indulged herself in a space where she has both Joe and Dorothy and neither of them have to be hurt by the choices she’s made and will go on to make. That’s over now, and it’s hitting her all at once. Every step takes her closer to the hurt.
I wonder how ethan will react
Ethan is too busy fucking Asher to care. He and Joyce don’t talk much anymore.
I think he’ll care if someone he dated and came out to now comes out as queer. I don’t know to what degree, but I imagine he’ll have some kind of feeling about it.
That’s fair, but also he’s so removed from the friend group at this point that I have to wonder how long it’ll take him to hear about it.
That’s valid! I want him to hear the edges of it, think it’s a great thing, turn up to congratulate Joyce and Dorothy… and find that actually everyone in the main group is Big Mad at them lmao.
Ha, actually that would be really funny, you’ve convinced me. Imagining Amber texts him about it but leaves out some very pertinent details.
This is officially the worst timeline.
I don’t think Joyce will be able to end it with Joe, the second thoughts are already creeping in. I love the Joe/Joyce connection.
“Yes, two girls kissing is hot. But, what? You and Dorothy? I totally don’t believe you. I need to see this. C’mon, we’re going to do science.”
(Joe, channeling some Dina)
My apologies if this has already been brought up before… (I scanned the comments but didn’t notice it…)
But I noticed one thing that Joyce did not mention in her planned “explanations” to Joe are “I love you… but”. Instead its “your wonderful” and “you make me feel good”. I wonder if that might be a hint that maybe Joyce wasn’t as invested in the relationship as we thought?
Hey I just notice I got Agatha as my avatar. Kind of fitting given her appearance in this strip.
She’s never told him she loved him before and telling it to him for the first time as she’s breaking up with him in part because she cheated on him is such a colossal dick move that surely Joyce’s autistic ass would understand it.
That said, yeah, Joe has always been more in love with her than she is with him. And he knows it, I’m sure.
I don’t wanna disappoint your trust in humanity but someone actually did say “I love you but” to me when breaking up. In a letter. And then he praised all the good stuff for a whole fucking page.
That’s horrific, I’m so sorry!
That was sort of the goofus/gallant thing between Joe+Joyce and Lucy+Walky. Joe and Joyce both knew that Joe felt stronger romantically than Joyce. That was the whole deal behind, “you’re my anxiety” and Joyce taking a few days to think about what she wanted to happen.
As opposed to Walky who knew they weren’t on the same page, and avoided clearing it up. I imagine an alternate timeline where they communicated better, and started dating with a better understanding of each other’s feelings, from some combination of Walky being a little more attentive, Lucy summoning up the nerve, and Dorothy not intervening for her own purposes. That’s the timeline where the Walky and Lucy sex art is from.
anyways, “Oops all goofuses”
ha, repressed Christian discovers she’s actually a polyamorous bisexual in her first year of college, it’s almost TOO on the nose
Dorothy has always used Walky as an emotional support dog. There when she needs him and to be patted on the head the rest of the time. Affectionate but would she have given up Yale for him? Not a chance. Danny was the same thing.
Joyce and Joe is more complicated because they both wanted romance, not just comfort sex. Tristan and Ethan didn’t prepare her for real affection. If Dorothy had left for Yale she might have happily spent her life with Joe.
Alright, 7 hours later and these comments are still awaiting moderation and I want folks to see them, so:
Without having read the strip, I was on here at 3:15 AM because, to an extent I’ve almost never experienced before, and certainly never over a webcomic, I’ve hyperfixated on commenting here. I don’t know why, but making thse comments has become the single thing my brain cares about to the detriment of my sleep cycle.
And I came here to say, even before I read today’s strip, that I was wrong yesterday. I got so fixated on a notion that I didn’t consider how I was coming across, and I was deservedly mocked for it. I shall take the L.
Reading today’s strip does a lot to reassure me that my concerns are unfounded. That Joyce *is* giving sufficient weight to the betrayal that she made.
I still have my problems with this arc. It’s not all fixed just with one strip. But I was way too confident in how I was sure this story would go, and once again I’ll take the L there.
I think a big part of my mistake is that I don’t do social media anymore and I’ve forgotten the way people engage with each other on it. I gave too much credence to hyperbole when everything on social media has to be breathless exaggeration or else it doesn’t get views. That’s one of the big reasons I stay off social media in the first place- just fucking say what you mean- but I forgot myself.
Lastly, and maybe now I can get some sleep, I will continue to think that Leslie Knope and Ann Perkins work much better as friends than lovers. So many times when I thought about why I was so grumpy, I kept coming back to that. Silly, I know. But it kept eating at me. It was the notion that any platonic explanation for their behavior was “a volcano of lies” to quote Becky that I was so hung up on. Because as a straight guy, that relationship, and to a lesser extent Turk & JD, is what I strive for in my friendships. To say nice things about each other while simultaneously having nondesire to kiss. If there’s “no heterosexual explanation for this” (a phrase I’ve picked up recently from my girlfriend that I’m now going to have to deploy a lot more carefully) then that means that my own platonic relationships should also be viewed in that regard. And while you might expect what is a now 4 AM revelation to be that I’m in love with my best friend of more than 30 years, I’m going to disappoint you. Still don’t want to smooch him in the slightest. But my brain decided that if you ship Leslie and Ann, if you knew my situation you’d encourage me to try it out. If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.
God I need a cup of tea.
I REALLY appreciate you saying this. I also value closeness and intimacy in my nonromantic relationships. I say “I love you” to my friends. I am hurt by people framing all emotional intimacy and love as inherently sexual/romantic for the same reasons you shared here. I don’t want to live in a world where everyone but one’s partner is held at emotional arm’s length. I have been deeply moved be profound friendships between characters that do not become romantic, while being completely attacked in fandoms by the shippers.
I have read this all the way through, and I’ll say that people shipping close friends in media/fiction has nothing to do (with obvious fringe cases) with how they feel about people being close platonic friends IRL.
Other people reading friendships in fiction a way that differs from yours isn’t something it’s reasonable to take serious offense about. I know that doesn’t stop you from feeling how you feel, but they have their own lives and experiences, and it’s often coming from a place of being very seriously marginalized and treated like they don’t (or shouldn’t) exist. They want to see themselves in fiction, and that includes in “platonic” friends who realize that, actually, they were such close friends because they were in love and dealing with comphet.
The friends-to-lovers storyline is common as hell in hetero media, and really only seems to get (imo) this kind of pushback when it’s a queer couple. I’m not saying that’s YOUR motivation, you’ve explained your views very well, so this isn’t an accusation. I’m just explaining why the disconnect and the ferocious statements of certainty happen. (Like “There’s no heterosexual explanation for this”)
I am a very gay nonbinary person who is deeply in platonic love with my best friend. I’d die for them, but I wouldn’t smooch them. Still, I’m very excited when those kind of friendships in the media are a prelude to romance. It’s sweet, it’s safe, and it upends a lot of established dynamics in the narrative.
People can hold space for both ideas (that deep and meaningful platonic relationships exist irl and aren’t secret yearning AND that fictional examples of the same thing totally should be because it’s adorable.)
I get this. Which is why I’m complaining *specifically* about Parks & Recreation, because it’s a show that straight-up didn’t do that. The longest, firmest male/female relationship, the thing that honestly the show was built around, was Leslie & Ron. And their relationship was *never* romantic. Leslie and Ben’s romance was much more “Enemies to Lovers”. And if you dig into the supporting cast, you don’t see any of that either. You have April & Andy’s “puppy love” storyline, which is probably the closest thing to “friends to lovers, but you also have the inimitable Donna Meagle, who got along with everyone in the office in her own way (she even was the first to appreciate Jerry!) with nary a hint of romantic interest in any of the men, even Tom, who if we’re looking at typical sitcom pairings, would have made sense as her eventual “one she settled down with”- and yet there’s nary a spark between them.
My favorite episode of Parks & Rec is “Two Parties”, and while Leslie’s storyline is funny (“You guys, the penis hats cut your digging time in half. I’m serious. Don’t be afraid. Use the penises.”), Ben’s is really poignant. It gives each “bachelor” their perfect party- Ben’s is board games and drinks at home (100% me), Tom’s is a “chiq” bar that Ron considers a practical joke (“May I chisel your aromasphere?”), Jerry’s is getting ice cream at the place he met his wife, Ron’s is whiskey & steaks at his favorite restaurant, and then Chris calls in a favor and gets Andy the chance to throw footballs around with his favorite sports team. And then the bachelors get together to get Chris a nice gift for being the organizer for all of that. It’s perfect and completely, sincerely platonic.
I skimmed this rather than reading it because I just really don’t care about Parks & Rec, and that seemed to be the main topic of your reply.
In general, I just think it’s a good idea to leave room for others to have wants/needs/feelings too without getting upset that those don’t agree with your wants/needs/feelings necessarily.
It’s fine to dislike the arc, but taking people’s enjoyment of fiction as a real-life suggestion that you can’t have close platonic friends seemed a bit over the top. Either way, have a better day!
I missed this in my transition from work to home.
First of all, cheers. I’ve got my cat on my lap while typing this, undoubtedly a better day.
Second: Once again, I agree 100%. Specifically, the idea of “leaving room for others to disagree” on how to interpret fictional relationships is *entirely* where my hackles got raised. And it’s specifically because, down to the exact words, “a volcano of lies” doesn’t, in my mind, leave room for someone to disagree. Particularly when the rebuttal offered by Joyce turned out to be foreshadowing that people who interpreted her and Dorothy’s relationship as platonic turned out to be dead wrong.
One opinion. One story. That’s plenty of room for other people’s opinions to exist.
I also want to add that: Shipping characters is actually part of queer culture (it started with slashfic of Kirk/Spock back in the day) so there is just the fact that a lot of the tropes will have more to do with the way queer people realized their feelings about someone vs the way hetero people traditionally have. Maybe that will help you hold a little space for people having opposing wants/needs from a fictional pairing than you do! Maybe it won’t, idk, I just wanted to explain <3
Heh, on another (incredibly queer) space I frequent, the running joke is that you can tell the health of a community that includes both queer and hetero folks by whether they have “discussions about same-sex shipping vs. strong platonic friendships” or “discussions about same-sex shipping vs. strong platonic friendships (hostile)”.
I’ve noticed some increased pushback about specifically keeping close MALE friendships as platonic rather than as ships in spaces that are also trying to help hetero men deal productively/non-toxic-ly with the so-called “male loneliness epidemic”, which in itself is definitely homophobia-adjacent since the implication is “men aren’t going to want role models for close male friendships if those role models inspire fans to think they’re secretly gay”.
See, that second paragraph I really deeply take issue with, because it’s such a clear case of “attacking the people I can reach” (queer kids writing fanfic) instead of “attacking the root of the actual problem” (societal homophobia).
And it’s done with absolutely zero regard for the queer men caught in the middle, who are also suffering from male loneliness, but certainly don’t benefit from everyone “protecting” them from gay ships.
I’m right there with you on that.
I’ve had excellent luck with “look, YOUR interpretation of Sam and Frodo is just as valid as J. Random Shipper, now are we going to pretend you DON’T want friends that supportive just because someone else likes writing the universe where they’re something else?” as a first step to leading folks towards Right Paths.
RE your second paragraph, we’ve come a long way in some senses: I’ve known some lonely queer men (back when I was in college two decades ago) who absolutely could have used a splash of the “you can be close to a guy without wanting to fuck him” cold water — they had plenty of “companionship”, but not the kind that offered the emotional support they ALSO needed. I’m not actually sure if that’s still a major issue.
Exactly, re: the first paragraph.
Re: the second paragraph — I think that’s kind of a separate issue, honestly. Not completely separate, but the issue of “you can be close to someone of the gender you’re attracted to without wanting to fuck them” is ABSOLUTELY also an issue with male-female friendships between straight people, you know? It’s part of toxic masculinity, but it’s broader.
I think there’s more nuance to the topic of your second paragraph, particularly when it comes to representation.
They want to see themselves in fiction,
Is the salient point. If we can agree that close, healthy male platonic friendships, ones that should serve as “role models” for men who need them are too rare in fiction, and that the men who need them are generally straight, I think in spaces clearly targeted towards those men it’s not problematic to prioritize their feelings.
Because a lot of these guys are straight-up told things like “psh, sharing your feelings? What are you, queer?” by many in their peer groups. And while it’s not *ideal* that the pushback to that can’t be “and so what if he is?”, I don’t think it’s helpful to pretend that it’d actually work.
Well, I think it’s actively making the problem worse to respond with “no, no, don’t worry, he’s not queer”, so.
Sometimes shows where the male friendship stays platonic still has a bunch of “people think they’re queer” anyway, so you get both not actual representation *and* messaging that people will think you’re queer for having close male friends. (Such is the case with Scrubs.) The homophobia is issue, not the shippers.
Yep!
Yeah.
I’m not going to pretend there’s not a real issue with the interplay between”how to dismantle structural homophobia and toxic masculinity structures” and “how to lead men who’ve already been socialized badly away from toxicity”, but “surrender completely to the toxicity in this instance” isn’t going to work as a solution in either the short or the long term.
Who said anything about “surrender completely”? This is all predicated on there being specific spaces whose explicit focus is “how to lead men who’ve been socialized badly away from toxicity”. It’s only in those spaces, where the focus is on these folks, where a degree of caution should be applied.
Like, if you’re in a discord whose primary purpose is to discuss issues of toxic masculinity and its effect on men specifically, maybe you hold off on discussing NarutoXSasuke on the off-topic boards.
Anywhere else that *isn’t* explicitly that sor of space, I 100% agree that that ends up in “What about the Menz” type territory *really* fast.
NoCorrelationDotGif.
People can, in fact, ship Naruto with Sasuke and still care about toxic masculinity.
I’ll be honest, I feel like you’re deliberately reading what I’m saying uncharitably.
I didn’t feel it at all necessary to add on “instead, talk about it on a fanfiction or Naruto/Boruto server” because I thought it was self-evident that most people here have a general idea of how Discord works.
I don’t think I am?
I think you keep, subconsciously, removing queer men from your definition of “men”, or assuming that toxic masculinity doesn’t impact them, and that they couldn’t possibly also need to access the spaces you’re talking about.
You’re also assuming that a discord server that had a rule against talking about m/m shipping wouldn’t have any other, related problems with queerness. That it wouldn’t bleed over. That it wouldn’t foster an environment of additional hostility towards queerness, because now this “safe space for talking about men’s issues” has a rule against discussing m/m ships.
Not all ships. Not m/f ships, even though those can, again, just as easily promote the idea that men can’t be friends, that men must always be sexually attracted to and pursuing the people around them. Just m/m ships.
The presumption that that rule wouldn’t drive out queer men and make them feel unsafe, even in a total vacuum…. is, I’m going to say, not something you’ve thought through.
That can and should be the push back. If that can’t be the push back then the problem is homophobia, and the solution is not going to be to keep perpetuating it.
I actually feel quite strongly that it’s very much not the *only* pushback that can be made without perpetuating homophobia.
Because “Only queer talk about their feelings. Real men just suck it up” is such a multi-headed dickhydra of shittery. If you try and tackle it without cutting it into individual pieces you’re going to end up losing the fight.
The homophobic head requires a different argument to take down than the head that hurts straight guys by making them bottle up their feelings. If you try to take on both without the right weapons, you’re just going to get eaten by the head you didn’t prepare for, and then, even if you did manage to take out one head, it grows back.
Instead, you’ve got to use the right tool for the right time and cauterize the stump once you’ve defeated that particular head, then move on to the next one.
And in this metaphor, I think unfortunately the “hurts straights” head has a lot less HP and deals less bite damage than the homophobic head. Simply because self-interest is a lot easier for humans than empathy. If you want to start folks like this on the right path, it’s a whole lot easier to get your foot in the door by saying “repressing your emotions like that hurts *you* and the people you care about” rather than saying “you need to be more empathetic to the plight of queer folks” when they might live in a very sheltered bubble without much exposure.
I’ve actually heard that first bit framed more often as “only women talk about their feelings, what are you a woman?” than as “only gay people talk about their feelings.”
Like you said yesterday, it’s an issue of gender-nonconformity, not so much an issue of specifically being gay.
And no, I still think it makes more sense to tackle societal misogyny and homophobia instead of focusing your energy on trying to police what shippers are shipping.
Heavy on aaaallll of this.
I think, if straight men want more fiction where there are close straight male friendships that aren’t preludes to sexuality realizations – they are free to go write those. But coming into a primarily queer community (shippers) and insisting that this marginalized community offers more rep to straight white guys… Nah. Pass on that. Male friendships don’t seem rare to me, they happen in a ton of media, and people shipping them doesn’t hurt anyone.
I’m still very confused that people are taking this tack when this conversation started with Big Z saying ” in spaces that are also trying to help hetero men deal productively/non-toxic-ly with the so-called “male loneliness epidemic” ”
In the context of people invading queer communities to demand more straight representation, I couldn’t agree more! (I am well aware that I’ve been more critical of a WLW ship than the heterosexual one that preceded it and that there is irony there. The difference is, importantly, that I (along with many self-identified members of the LGBT+ community) liked Joe & Joyce together because of the character dynamics, not out of a desire for more representation)
But I had thought that it was obvious that we were talking about shipping talk that came up in the context of a community centered around detoxifying masculinity.
I didn’t realize that, at some point, you stopped talking about your feelings and started talking about a hypothetical scenario. Fair enough.
Supporting/celebrating a m/m ship regardless of if one is queer or not seems absolutely like something that would be fitting in a space centered around detoxifying masculinity.
+1
When executed well I don’t think there is any problem. The issue is when a writer uses the fact that two characters are really close as the foreshadowing that they have some repressed romantic feelings for each other. It happens just as much in straight pairings as gay ones.
I think a lot of the discussion on this stuff also omits the fact that there are still plenty of examples of non-toxic male friendships in media that have nothing to do with this.
Oh, it happens WAAAAAY more often with straight relationships. Because straight relationships still dominate all forms of media, heh.
Well yeah but I think if we normalize by the total number of relationships of each type portrayed in media it’ll be about the same. Maybe.
Could be! But I do think it’s a factor that should be taken into account when folks complain about the death of platonic friendships only when they’re talking about queer relationships, you know?
Most definitely, it’s pretty obvious that almost all of the whinging about it comes from a place of being uncomfortable with homosexuality being shown or talked about.
Congratulations on realizing how you sounded and that then doubling down was even weirder, genuinely that takes some a lot of maturity and i applaud you for that. Though could had gone without that last part about those characters, fell out of topic and uncessary to add.
Honestly, I also think today might be too soon to reassure ourselves! The next storyline is called “Not-So Smooth Criminals”, and the one after it is “Fools’ Spring” (which is when you’re tricked by a period of mild weather into thinking winter is over before it’s actually over).
Could be about something else entirely, but there’s still room for the girls to chicken out on telling anyone.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/04-hompk/classdismissed/
You’re also misremembering the strip you keep referencing. Robin doesn’t want the class to write an essay on why Ann and Leslie are “better off as friends”, she wants them to write an essay about how “it’s actually totally okay to casually admire the female form” and Leslie Knope isn’t “necessarily” bisexual for the way she talks about Ann.
And like I said to you yesterday, Michael Schur clearly also has regrets about how the last season of Parks & Recreation had Leslie call herself and Ann “tragically both heterosexual”, and opted instead to have Eleanor of The Good Place embrace identifying as bisexual even though she and Tahani remain friends.
…I often see this sort of thought expressed online, this “I’m so much like this fictional character that if a reader wants xyz to happen to them, they must also want it to happen to me”, usually distressed.
And I just. I really do feel the need to say: Rogue 7, I don’t know you. I don’t know your friend. Of course I don’t “ship” you with your friend. Of course I’m not “disappointed” that you didn’t come to any kind of personal revelations at 4am. You’re… you’re not a fictional character. You’re not a friend. I am not invested in your life.
I wish I felt like I understood the direction here enough to even TRY to prognosticate based on chapter titles. 😀
I’m sorry, but I don’t see how what you’re saying is any different from what I’ve been saying. Becky, in a moment the author joked was “unsubtle”, called that “a volcano of lies”. So we have “Leslie Knope isn’t necessarily bisexual” being called “a volcano of lies”, which means that, in the context of the strip, we’re supposed to understand that the opposite is the intended message- essentially saying “there is no heterosexual explanation” for Leslie’s behavior. And that’s where I run into a problem. There’s certainly room for interpreting their dynamic as a bisexual Leslie who nevertheless retains a platonic relationship with Ann. But there’s *also* room for “Leslie Knope is straight but recognizes an attractive woman when she sees one”. And that comic *explicitly* calls such an interpretation “a volcano of lies”. And where I have a problem with that is “a straight person who can recognize when folks of their non-preferred genders are hot” is precisely how I define my own sexuality. Around when I was 18, I noticed myself having a preference for shows on TV with good-looking dudes in them. I even wore a fedora occasionally because I wanted to emulate Matt Bomer in White Collar. So I sat down and asked myself “am I attracted to men?” And I contemplated the notion of intimacy with a man and it held absolutely no appeal. And 18 years later (goddamn, half my life ago I was an adult), that still holds. I recognize when men are attractive, but I don’t *feel* that attraction the same way I do for my girlfriend. And quite frankly, it feels invalidating to my identity when someone who I see as feeling the *exact same way* is called “necessarily bisexual” in that being “not necessarily bisexual” is called “a tower of lies”
Do you have a citation or quote for that? I did a quick google of “Michael Schur Leslie Knope bisexual” and the top hits were all reddit speculation. I didn’t see anyting where Mr. Schur said that he regretted it. If he wrote a different character in a different work a different way…I don’t really see how that means he regretted how he wrote Leslie. Particularly when from a brief glance at Eleanor’s TV Tropes page she doesn’t seem to be anything like Leslie.
It’s different because bisexual people can still have platonic friendships.
So saying “Leslie Knope is bisexual” isn’t the same thing as saying “she and Ann can’t be friends”.
And I do not know what you expect in terms of a “citation”, I literally just pointed out that Eleanor talks about Tahani the same way that Leslie talked about Ann, but instead of doing that as “just a joke” for another four years where the character eventually declares herself to be heterosexual, Michael Schur opted this time to have the character declare herself to be bisexual.
The two don’t have to have more in common than that. Schur doesn’t need to explicitly say they have regrets about Parks & Recreation.
I always liked the one reboot/possibility/path thing where Tahani and Eleanor were soulmates and both of them seemed pretty into it.
I liked it! And then I was sad, because I recognized it as Schur telling me gently that yeah, that could’ve happened, and I was free to imagine it, but they weren’t gonna go there in any kind of meaningful way within the story.
The Good Place‘s take is still 800,000,000 times better than Parks & Recreation, which in addition to having Leslie conclude that she’s just completely straight in its final season, also slowly chipped away at all of the non-traditional relationships the series had started with.
I like most of the individual relationships, but we still started with several contented single people, one queer poly relationship (April’s boyfriend who also has a boyfriend), one very happy woman not interested in any type of commitment (Donna), and one happy married couple (Jerry and his wife), and then at the end of the series… everyone’s in a serious monogamous relationship, almost everyone’s married, almost everyone has kids.
Parks & Rec *does* end up being pretty darn heteronormative, even with the introduction of Craig & Typhoon, fair dinkum.
But I’m not seeing where the final season is such a cutoff point for you. The only thing I can think of is that Rashida Jones & Rob Lowe left, and so you didn’t have Leslie constantly paying Ann compliments. Because…she was involved in monogamous heterosexual relationships throughout the show. She and Ben got together in season 3, got married in season 5.
“which in addition to having Leslie conclude that she’s just completely straight in its final season, also slowly chipped away at all of the non-traditional relationships the series had started with.”
Assuming you read this as “in the final season, the show got rid of its non-traditional relationships”, but that’s not what I said.
Anyway, my objection about what happened in the final season continues to be that Leslie declared herself to be 100% heterosexual. She didn’t need to break up with Ben or start dating Ann. She could’ve been bi and went on her merry way.
This is what I continue to see Eleanor’s writing as course-correcting.
I am getting the sense that you either keep missing this part of what I’m saying, or else don’t believe it, but “my ship becoming canon” is actually a separate thing I sometimes want, not the only thing I ever want, from media I consume.
Leslie just acknowledging that she was bi and declaring that her attraction to Ann was real would have been plenty for me to feel good about that part of the show, even if I was still a little sad, as a Leslie/Ann shipper.
Leslie *can* be bi. Certainly, that’s a valid read on her character. Did you miss where I agreed with that? Because that’s not my issue. My issue is that that comic held it up as the *only* read on her character.
To give another example of what I mean: Naoto Shirogane from Persona 4 is a young woman whose story is *very* easy to read as being a transmasculine awakening. Honestly, I wish it were canon, it would be a much, much more interesting take on her (already pretty decent!) character. But back in the day I remember seeing a few posts and blogs from people who would block you if you didn’t use “he/him” pronouns when talking about Naoto. That the *only* valid way to read her character was that she’s FTM and any other interpretation is actively misgendering this character.
That’s the exact same sort of insistence. Not that Leslie Knope *can* be bi. That Leslie Knope *must* be bi.
So first off, because that is *absolutely* you making assumptions. It could just as easily be that he wanted to write a different dynamic the second time.
But, actually more importantly, why on earth are you calling Leslie’s compliments towards Ann “just a joke”? They weren’t. They were 100% sincere, whether or not you see Leslie as bi or straight.
“But back in the day I remember seeing a few posts and blogs from people who would block you if you didn’t use “he/him” pronouns when talking about Naoto.”
So? So what? They’re allowed to decide who they speak to and why and what about. I think it’s silly, but it isn’t harmful to the people they block. They are allowed whatever boundaries they want, for whatever reason. If you wanted to block people for talking about Just Really Good Friends as queer ships, I would also think that was silly, but it’s also your right.
But as with the people who blocked others for not using he/him pronouns for that character, there is no amount of doubling and tripling down on this that is going to make other people stop shipping characters. And it will never make those ships about you personally.
Okay. So.
You went on kind of a long ramble about Naoto, where you complained about “people online” blocking folks who use she/her pronouns for the character.
First: please understand that that… is not a real problem. That’s not a problem at all. These people are presumably not friends of yours. You are not being cut out of anyone’s life. In fact, from the way you talk about this, I don’t think you’re even someone who’s been blocked over Naoto’s pronouns.
The “block” button is not a weapon, it’s a tool, and it’s a completely neutral tool to use when you just… don’t want to see someone in your social media feed. “Being blocked” is not a harm that is being done to anyone. Nobody actually needs to stop and rethink whether they’re using their “block” powers responsibly on Tumblr, or wherever.
It’s also completely fine for what I’m gonna go ahead and assume are young people who strongly identify with Naoto to not want to interact with people who, from their perspectives, are misgendering a character they identify with.
That’s okay.
It’s not a real problem.
It’s certainly not a problem comparable with real-life structural queerphobia.
Second: Naoto’s pronouns are literally within the player’s control. In the Japanese version, Naoto uses “masculine” pronouns, and you, the player, have the opportunity to tell them you prefer them to use “feminine” pronouns. If you do this, Naoto comes over to the player’s house in a dress and becomes the PC’s girlfriend.
If you tell Naoto that you prefer “masculine” pronouns, Naoto comes over to the player’s house in their regular clothing and becomes the PC’s partner.
The English version tried to convey something similar with letting you request Naoto use a deeper or higher voice. It doesn’t completely work, but the effort was made.
So: whether Naoto is transmasc or not is literally up to the player. People like you who insist on calling Naoto a woman are not being more accurate than people who consider them transmasc.
Third: good grief, when I first brought it up I said “maybe”! I’m sorry I was more flippant when I reminded you of it, but I was not making a literal claim. Just an obvious inference.
Ugh, formatting. Anyway, “Rogue 7” and onward weren’t part of the quote, they are me responding to the quote. As is probably fairly obvious.
OK, I’m going to skip commenting on whether or not it’s OK to refuse to interact with someone just because they don’t interpret characters the same way as you. I don’t think that’s a productive use of our time.
But with regards to Naoto & pronoun usage: Firstly and most importantly, Atlus are cowards. They did not canonically have trans rep in a game released for Japanese otaku audiences in 2009. They couldn’t even commit to making Kanji canonically gay, and his dungeon is literally a manifestation of his internalized homophobia.
Naoto is, (again, sadly), not canonically trans. Personal pronoun usage in Japan is complicated, and it’s not nearly so neat and tidy as to say “if a person uses this personal pronoun, they identify as male, but if they use that pronoun they identify as female”. I think Naoto’s story, regardless of whether or not she romances the MC, would be better if it committed to her being transmasculine. But sadly it’s something we have to headcanon.
But getting back to Parks & Rec:
My interpretation of the compliments was never that the joke was “haha Leslie’s got a crush on Ann”. It was *always* “haha, Leslie sure picks weird ways to say nice things about her friends”. Like, there’s one time where she compliments how Ann’s “ambiguous ethnic blend perfectly captures the dream of the American melting pot”. That’s not a normal-ass compliment, gay or straight.
1.) No, I’m not really going to agree to disagree over whether or not it’s a real problem that some people online block other people. It’s absolutely not a real problem or in any way comparable to structural queerphobia. “Oppression” is not “when someone blocks me on tumblr”. It’s just not.
2.) I know personal pronouns aren’t strictly gendered. You’ll notice the way I called them masc/femme and also put quotes around them.
3.) But, you know, Japanese also doesn’t have third-person pronouns in the same way. So, unlike here, where you’re using she/her to describe the character, the actual game, in Japanese, didn’t.
4.) It’s both weird and kind of ugly how you’re insisting on using she/her pronouns and also continuing to complain about fans who are “too” attached to he/him pronouns, and then shifting the blame for your adherence to and insistence on she/her pronouns to Atlus. It’s Atlus’s fault, apparently, that you’re so fussed about people being attached to transmasc Naoto.
5.) IDK, you’re welcome to that opinion, I guess, but there’s literally a scene where the cast stands around, looking at a tag map created from how often Leslie mentions loving various things, and the “Ben” bubble is pretty big, but the “Leslie” bubble is like 3x bigger, and then everyone agrees, “Leslie loves Ben, but she REAAAAAALLY loves Ann.”
I don’t think there’s another reasonable interpretation of that.
But like. I haven’t seen the show in literally years at this point.
6.) Fun as it is talking about these random pieces of media with you, do you realize that you’ve still yet to in any way demonstrate that “romantic queer relationships are destroying platonic friendship” is an actual problem? Or…
1) No, it’s not oppression. It’s just a phenomenon I don’t think is beneficial to anyone. I think social media is overreliant on hyperbole and sarcasm to make points, which harms communication. That’s not in any way oppression, it’s just…something I don’t like.
2-4. I hope I can clear this up by saying I’d be just as critical of someone who blocked anyone who used he/him pronouns for Naoto. I think, even in the 2010s, that sort of person would have been run out of these communities on a rail for their explicit transphobia, coupled with the fact that using she/her was and is the default when folks talk about Naoto.
Because in literally *every single comment* I have made about Shirogane Naoto, I have said how much I would appreciate seeing/reading Trans Naoto. Heck, if you could point me to a good fanfiction about it, I’ll happily do a little book report (Bonus points, but obviously unnecessary, for MCXYukiko because I had such a big crush on her back in the day that I even named my cat Yukiko).
5. I think you’re right about that particular scene. The episode where Ben & Ann have to work together to manage Leslie’s compulsive holiday planning & amazing gift-giving would also fit right in there. My confusion came from me thinking you said “Leslie was just joking” when what you meant was “the writers were just joking”.
6. It’s not at all a problem. Please ignore anything I said yesterday.
1) Well, the world is full of harmless behaviors we don’t like. It’s important to recognize the difference.
2) It honestly feels like it’s very, very important to you that you not appear queerphobic, that no one think you’re queerphobic… but there are more important things, like not accidentally advancing or lending legitimacy to queerphobic arguments.
I really, genuinely think you should sit for a little while and think about… well, a little bit about some of the examples you picked, but mostly why you invested this much time and energy into trying to “both sides” the issue of representation, often pointing to what you consider to be bad behavior from fans to counter points behind made about the overwhelming cisheteronormativity of actual, canon media.
One more for the road, then.
Quite simply, I think a very large part of our disagreement stems from our different views on social power. In my view, the norms, views, and politics of individual groups hold more power over interactions within those groups than the power society as a whole does, and that power means that members of those communities are not immune to criticism. Fans are fair game to criticize to me because in their own niches, they hold more power than society does. Sometimes, as overall in this comment section, that power is used for good- to shape productive conversations. But it can also be used to create echo chambers, to reinforce ideas that are harmful.
I will do my level best to make sure that I think critically about my arguments.
But while we’re criticizing people, I used to look forward to seeing you in the comments, but these days, even if you aren’t responding to me, I find that you tend to look for flaws in what people say and then pick at those flaws to an extent where the overall points the person wanted to make get completely lost in the sauce as we respond back and forth over minutae.
I also think we’re both flawed here in that we both *really* want to get the last word in in an argument.
Okay. I thought I was answering questions and addressing concerns. I also think I’ve been pretty gentle and patient! I’ve definitely given you the benefit of the doubt on your phrasing and your digressions.
This wasn’t me being all that picky! I’ve really only been any kind of stickler a couple of times here.
I’m sorry you feel picked on anyway. I was genuinely trying to avoid that.
I’m also totally fine with dropping this though, because while some of this has been interesting, it’s also been really exhausting, and increasingly this comment section has felt like the wrong place for it, heh, though I did keep trying to bring it back to the comic.
@Li: That last comment from Rogue 7 was the kind that would make me feel really shitty to read about myself, and I just want to say that I don’t see your comments that way.
(I do have experiences with commenters that feel that way, but it still only really bothers me when they’re talking directly to me, and I still like seeing their comments overall.)
@Yumi: This was really super kind of you to say and I appreciate it ❤️ RSD definitely magnifies it too. But my meds really really help with that, so I was okay. But gosh, thank you.
You’ve gone out of your way a few times to make me feel better, and I’ve appreciated it each time. I bet I’m not the only one you do that for, either. You seem like a very kind person ❤️
Please forgive me if I’m misunderstanding (very possible), but… is there somewhere that David Willis says that he agrees with Becky on that subject? Because she’s been known to insist on her own interpretations of things as though they’re indisputable fact (and she was the most logical person to counter Robin’s thinly-veiled attempt to assert, via analogy, that she could totally be straight despite everything that happened with Leslie Bean).
Not disagreeing with your main point about being able to admire someone’s appearance without having sexual interest in them. I haven’t seen enough Parks & Rec to judge how plausible that is for Leslie and Ann, but there’s a lot of overlap between “remarks someone might make about a girl she’s attracted to” and “remarks someone without sexual insecurity might make about a girl she’s just friends with”. Unfortunately, a lot of society is too insecure about sexuality to be able to accept the latter might be platonic, and besides… well, ships have been taken as confirmed based on lesser evidence.
Recently, he made a tumblr post where he compared writing Dorothy & Joyce together to Ann & Leslie, and posted a picture of the strip in question saying “seriously I was not subtle”.
https://www.tumblr.com/itswalky/789059877175705600/dumbing-of-age-what-if-turk-and-jd-eventually?source=share
Ok. Please feel free to disregard my tired and uninformed comment, then.
And, to Li: considering that reading this thread reminded me of girls I’ve known to act more physically intimate with each other than with their boyfriends and yet still be regarded as entirely heterosexual… well, my only excuses are the aforementioned tiredness and the fact that I was thinking of fiction and shipping, not real world stuff.
@deliverything: it’s fine, the topic’s definitely jumping around somewhat and equating the two at points.
I disagree with your last point, I think wlw are alternately desexualized and hypersexualized. Anything a known lesbian or bi woman says about platonic friends in the real world gets viewed with suspicion by homophobic society, but straight girls can say the gaaaayest stuff about each other and no one bats an eye.
The moment Naoto comes up in one of these arguments, it’s an immediate red flag and a sign that nothing productive will occur from that point on.
I agree with you overall, Li, I’m just a little confused on what you’re referring to with as Leslie’s declaration in the final season. When she said the line, “Tragically, we are both heterosexual,” that was in season 5 (of 7). Is there another point you’re referring to as well, or are timelines mixed up?
(Also, my personal preference with Parks and Rec– I was fine with Leslie being straight, but I would have loved it if Ann realized she was a lesbian.)
Oh! Well, my bad, haha. Season 5, then. It’s definitely what I’m referring to.
I don’t wanna mean to you since you actually did recognize that you weren’t very cool yesterday but seriously i think you shoild just not care about this. It is just a not issue.
I want to underline this part, Rogue:
“And I just. I really do feel the need to say: Rogue 7, I don’t know you. I don’t know your friend. Of course I don’t “ship” you with your friend. Of course I’m not “disappointed” that you didn’t come to any kind of personal revelations at 4am. You’re… you’re not a fictional character. You’re not a friend. I am not invested in your life.”
People’s opinions on a fictional character have NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU. You are choosing to take them as some kind of personal interaction, but they aren’t. Someone’s opinion on a piece of media is about them, not you, and I’m sorry if queer people viewing media through a queer lens is upsetting to you but… no, I’m actually not that sorry.
Straight men are well represented just about everywhere. You don’t get to insist on equal representation in someone’s private thoughts and fantasy life. That’s just not a reasonable request.
Exceptionally well-said, thank you, Nymph.
A lot better put together that i could.
Alright folks, I’ve said my *many* pieces. I need to shut off my brain for the evening.
Please just, try to actually absorb what other people told you alright?
Really hope that our long Joe/Joyce nightmare will soon be over.
I’m sorry. After initial hatred for the ship, I did learn to tolerate them, but the moment Jorothy became a possibility I realized I just really don’t like seeing them together. I don’t like Joe, I don’t find them cute together, and their relationship is just really boring to me.
Whereas them breaking up could be pretty great. Seeing Joe trying to retain his development after this actually sounds interesting, by far the most interesting thing for his character.
So, I hate to say it but: I’m rooting against polyamory here. I don’t just want to see Joyce and Dorothy get together, I want to see Joyce and Joe break up. Fingers crossed.
Polyamory can happen without Joe. Joe is not a crucial ingredient.
Or it can happen with Joe/Walky/Asher/Ethan as the prophecies foretold.
Rooting for polyamory specifically so Dorothy/Amazigirl can happen.
(Joyce/Sal would be nice, but alas, I don’t think Sal’s interested.)
Look, I like you.
Yeah, that’s all.
Don’t even really need to cross any fingers or knock on any wood, it’s practically a foregone conclusion.
In fact, if they DIDN’T break up, I think this comment section would light on fire again. Though I suppose that would be great for website metrics.
Willis is a genius farmer of controversy, and they don’t even have to do anything much. This comment section is just weirdly controversial over tiny things.
So when Joyce rejects Joe, he is going to go outside, it’s going to be a downpour, and Walky finds him and gives him the “it’s the rain” speech. Another manifestation of some sort of metaphysical ideal “rejection / It’s the Rain” scenario.
You know, this does raise the point that Dorothy and Joe’s relationships in both the Walkyverse and Dumbiverse ended due to infidelity, it’s just who was doing the cheating got flipped (also their relationship status was a more ambiguous situation in IW! iirc)
My only disappointment here is that I can Ctrl+F “poly” and see comments that aren’t highlighted.
lmao
I’ve seen enough sitcoms to know that the girls will go to tell their boyfriends and that one (Joe) will propose first and then say “okay, now what did you want to say?” while the other (Walky) reveals that they have butt cancer and is really happy that they have someone that can take care of them.
Joyce is overwhelmed and agrees to the marriage, but by the end of the episode they discover that Walky didn’t have butt cancer and the doctors had switched his x-ray with the dog’s. The rest of the season Dorothy pines for Joyce even harder while Joyce stays away out of feelings of obligation to Joe, until she runs crying from the altar during the season finale.
These things really write themselves huh
I feel like Willis is pushing an agenda here. And it’s the agenda of having more girls smooch with each other. An agenda I approve of.
His agenda is: Have no straight characters in this comic.
I approve! I want to see a huge bi orgy at slipshine!
I read it after Willis post in BlueSky, and I have a big smile in my face.
Y’know, now that I’m on this ship I’m going to be piiiiissed if these two aren’t endgame.
Ah you jined it. Look as now, JoexJoyce gets reinforced.
Or maybe my perfect ship: Dorothy and Lucy
I honestly think it would be extremely funny if through a series of convoluted events we cannot possibly predict the strip ends in 15 more years with Joyce x Walky again
complete with the plot somehow pivoting back to Sci-Fi Superhero Shenanigans
A strange thunderstorm causes the Head Alien and Monkey Master to leap from the TV screen into real life, and all bets are off after that.
You know, a lot of this is drama is skipped by people who date around for a while before they get into serious relationships. Joyce didn’t do that for various other reasons; she might have learned she could be possibly into girls
Unless she’s like my relative’s wife, who is “I dont like any other girl romantically but you ” meaning if it ended, she wouldn’t have another romance with a woman
Yeah, suspecting Joyce may be a 1 on the kinsey scale. Straight with the rare exception
But Joyce’s Dorothy scale is off the charts.
Yeah, her only exception: Dorothy, and Sal.
Her two exceptions: Dorothy, Sal, and Billie.
Among her exceptions… I’ll come in again.
Jennifer, Sal, Dorothy how many exceptions before they stop being rare?
Rachel… Grace… Mandy…
Alice…
(Sorry, Joyce, you’re going to have to fight Billie for that one.)
I’m starting to believe in polyamorous Joyce. Joe did nothing wrong and she fundamentally thinks this is what you do in situations like this but the story feels like we’re heading somewhere besides drama. This feels more like “Joyce learns to do relationship anarchy.”
Her expression in the last panel gives me hope.
Now I’m not saying polyamory is the solution to every shipping problem… but in THIS CASE it actually is. Granted Joe and Dorothy don’t particularly like each other so the group dynamics would be tricky… but even so.
70 Minutes to Comment-geddon
Last Minute Prediction: Joyce goes in and Joe breaks up with her for a completely unrelated reason
“Joyce I kissed Walky and we realized we love each other, he’s going to break the news to Dorothy right now”
I want this. Please let me have this lmao.
They’re so busy stressing about who to tell and how to tell them, they haven’t bothered to figure out what they’re even telling people about. I feel like for Dorothy it’s “I love Joyce”, while for Joyce it’s “I kissed my friend a bit” (and was probably mostly due to seeing a chance to be dramatic and become the center of attention). Really don’t think they’re thinking of this the same way.
Joyce seems an awful lot like she is trying to figure out how to break up with Joe in this strip.
ok are we having a server issue, the update hasnt happened
Clock drift. It gets a little later every night, until someone resyncs it. Not sure why they don’t have it running NTP.
Polyamorous me wishing these situations could have an easy solution for more people but knowing how much complication they’ve already gone through ; ; i hope it turns out well…
These feel like voicemail messages, Joyce
holy misnomer, Batman