Carla wandering the rock-covered wasteland that once was the Indiana University campus: “dammit, what’s the point of being so great if nobody’s around to witness it?”
Carla is great. Carla rebuilds the university. With the sheer abundance of new building material. All new freshmen (stolen from other campuses). All new cast!
DOWN WITH DOYCE! I HOPE THEY GROW TO HATE EACH OTHER BUT GET STUCK IN AN UNHAPPY MARRIAGE NEITHER WANTS TO BE THE ONW TO END! (Over exaggerating as a joke plz no kill me)
This is hard to explain, but I think that emotionally intelligent people know what level of support and what expression of support to expect from the people around them. While Sarah is not the person you’d expect to be offering any kind of aid in this situation, she’s the one there, and she can only be sincere. I think Joe appreciates her in the moment.
She’s trying, and sometimes being real with someone is a kindness. He’s holding out hope for something that’s not gonna happen. Better to deal with it sooner than later.
I’m less interested in “Danny chews out Dorothy” now and much, much more interested in “Danny and Joe have a serious talk about the whole situation”. Getting 2-3 strips of a non-toxic male friendship hashing out some stuff out of all this is one of the possible outcomes that’d make enduring all the DoJo Twee worth it for me.
Honestly I don’t want Danny to chew Dorothy out simply because Danny having an excuse to be self-righteous is Danny at her worst. At most I’d want Danny to make a sharp passing comment to Dorothy.
She has a boyfriend, right? I mean, clearly that’s not going stop people as we’ve just seen but for some reason I’m on board for a Sarah/Joe…thing. If for no other reason than I’m a goblin and want to see the ranting that would ensue.
Yeah I think at this point it should be clear that Joe isnt 100% on board with the poly suggestion and just suggested it as a way for him to not lose Joyce
I’m a bit sad. It was kinda nice to see some poly representation, especially since my couple became a polycule (It was insane timing too, I felt targeted) but it would have been nice to have one in the main cast
disagree, I think he’s just sad because Joyce didn’t say yes to his poly suggestion. Sarah of course doesn’t believe Joyce could ever be poly, but Joe had some hope for it. Probably still has some hope for it. I know I do.
I also still have hope for it. Not much time has occurred in the comic since he suggested it. Sarah is phrasing things like she has confirmation from Joyce, perhaps not intentionally, but she doesn’t have that. Until more comic-world time has passed I’m holding out hope.
I don’t think Sarah has the first idea that poly is even on the table. She hasn’t talked to Joyce since Joe and Joyce talked early, nor has she talked to Joe on panel either.
She knew Joyce and Dorothy were hooking up and that they were hiding it, so she yelled at them about telling their boyfriends, then she came back to find the newspaper on the doorknob. If I was her, I’d be reading Joe as hoping that Joyce would reject Dorothy and come back to him. That’s what she’s shooting down.
First time Joe’s admitted he’s in love with Joyce? Poor guy can’t make things work with her in any universe, I guess. At least this time it’s not his fault.
As far as I recall…in the commentary for It’s Walky, Willis talked about realizing mid-story that Joe and Joyce had such incredible chemistry and they were loads of fun to write. They were SO fun to write in fact, that Willis intentionally separated them because they were “getting in the way” of the “true” pairing of Walky and Joyce.
Can’t speak for others, but that was my rationale for cheering them on. While Dorothy and Joyce may have been in the works for a while now, I’ve been wanting to see the chemistry of Joe/Joyce since the Roomies days play out. It was fun, for the time we got
Marten was the focus of a run of strips where he had to talk Claire into going to bed, then go handle Liz (who had gotten hold of booze, and was texting Marten pictures of peanut butter because she thought it was his fetish), then make his way home and wake up with a hangover.
i think a few years ago, my wife pointblank asked me, “hey… none of your college characters have never ever cheated, have they” and I thought, nope, none of ’em
i write… completely wonderful perfect college freshmen who’ve never had a messy terrible end to a relationship
even asher, who, as walky points out early on, is “villain-coded,” makes absolutely double-sure his relationship with jennifer is over before agreeing to make out with ethan even a little
everybody always in my strip makes sure to give every relationship’s end its due diligence, to exhaustive ends, to the point that lucy has to throw shade at walky for waiting a handful of days after getting dumped before moving on, because THAT is where the narrative has set the moral event horizon
and at some point, i’m like
let freshmen be freshmen
they’re horny idiots
…and like, totally VALID.
but imma be real here, of ALL the ways to make these college freshman more realistic this way, having it done to Joe for Joyce X Dorothy to happen in particular was… probably not the best decision.
besides giving into the “cheating bi” stereotype (which is it’s own can of worms I ain’t gonna get into here),
Joyce X Joe had some pretty damn good chemistry! for all that development to be thrown under the rug for Joyce X Dorothy to have the spotlight faster is not only disappointing for Joe’s sake but like…. unusually wasteful?
imma let Willis cook as usual, but poly or no poly, for Joe to be left out of the picture *completely* would be pretty sad :(
I think a more pressing matter, as I’ve said elsewhere, is that Joyce and Dorothy were the exact wrong pairing to have get together by cheating on their partners. A lot of folks just are never going to buy into what is meant to be one of the central relationships of the series because of the circumstances under which they started dating.
I get that neither of them are supposed to be THAT like-able (as far as I can tell in the comic as a whole), but yeah this really yucks up what I can only assume is an end-game ship which was supposed to be this Mega Huge Huge Payoff that was hinted at across the entire comic
for these college freshmen to have messier ends to relationships for them to be more realistic was a good idea ON PAPER, but like
for it to happen to make Dorothy X Joyce of ALL couples was just world record in bad timing X-X
I totally agree with this. It just felt very unnatural, imo. Like the hand of the plot came in and forced things along. Hell, I feel like the cheating still could’ve been there, but we went from cheating to relationship in under 24 hrs. Joyce and Dorothy should’ve walked back the kiss and suppressed things just a little longer. That way you have your cheating (and a really good tangible powder keg to blow up Joeyce) but can still see one story arc play through a little while longer while building cracks.
Like, I’ve never met someone who cheats in a *happy* relationship without being morally bankrupt. Unhappy ones, yeah people cheat in those all the time without it meaning anything, but we weren’t given any signs of that. Hell, I’ll be honest, I feel like Walky cheating on Dorothy with Amber might’ve been slightly more broadcasted and way easier to believe than Joyce losing all object permanence.
But it is what it is, it’s here and that specific arc is almost over. Maybe I’ll get some Sarah/Joe out of it eventually, who knows.
“Without it meaning anything” being: the circumstances of the relationship are so wobbly and fricked that I can’t make a blanket judgment because one person trying to escape abuse is another person losing discretion over resentment, etc. etc. basically just “Not Really What Happened Here Actually”
I think I could have gotten behind Walky cheating on Dorothy with Amber.
Booster already claimed that Amber was trying to end their relationship so she could get with him.
It would have the added flavor of Dorothy and Amber being his shoulder Angel and devil, with one making him want to do better while the other making him want to wallow in his baser urges.
Only it wouldn’t be that black and white because Dorothy had encouraged him to quit Lucy for her while Amber and AG could go back and forth over the morality of the cheating.
Walky could be undecided on what he would do and if he should tell, causing him to talk to Sal, to Jennifer, to Booster, to Joe (it’s possible that Walky is unaware of Joe’s views on cheating).
Walky could “justify” the cheating by claiming he thought Dorothy wasn’t serious about him and/or realized she was into Joyce like Joe did.
The commenters could still have their paladins vs sickos arguments (not that it would necessarily be a good thing), with the added bonus of the “See! Walky never really felt anything for Lucy which is why he could resist her, but not Amber” people.
I think there could have been a lot of potential for “Walky the cheater”.
It’s a good idea on paper but the comments are so uncharitable to Wally on a good day that I shudder to think how they’d tear him apart in this scenario.
Joyce is a terrible person. Dorothy is in the midst of a catastrophic psychological breakdown as a result of attempting to live altruistically at all times forever, and her experiencing regressing to impulse is more understandable. But Joyce has always reasoned emotionally about all things, using emotions as a justification for believing whatever felt right to believe. At the beginning of the comic this served her well, because she had been removed from an environment of constant indoctrination in which believing the wrong things made you a bad person who was going to hell, and put in an environment of reasonable and sympathetic people who were mostly grounded in reality, and her *emotions* led her to gradually align herself with those people around her over her upbringing. But Joyce actually lacks any rational moral center of her own besides her raw empathy; she’ll reshape herself to believe whatever best supports the emotions she is experiencing in the moment.
Joyce and Dorothy is a great ship, actually, *because* Dorothy is all rational moral center and no empathy, even for herself, and Joyce is all empathy and no rational morality. I think it’s even a better ship than Joyce and Joe, and that’s saying something! The problem is as told it’s an awful story. Joe’s arc has been fantastic, better than either Joyce or Dorothy’s arcs during the time when it has been featured, and this development is dramatically derailing it and retroactively undercutting it. Joe had this whole thing about “If I stay immature, nobody really gets hurt.” That’s what he was fighting to overcome, and that’s what Joyce has embraced. Joyce cheating on him is the *anti-thesis* of Joe’s entire arc. Now, if you were writing a story about Joe and made this the pivotal point of despair and had him struggle to rebuild with people acknowledging the depth of betrayal, that could still be a great story! But that’s not what Willis is writing- Willis is writing a victory lap for his girl-on-girl OTP.
A weakness of the Joyce and Joe relationship was that it was frankly a lot better for Joe’s personal and character development than it was for Joyce. Joe was doing all the work trying to become a better person; Joyce was just trying to embrace being horny. It was asymmetrical. It would be nice if Joyce eventually tried to get on Joe’s level, but I don’t think she has the temperament for it- she is an emotionally driven creature, and it’s hard to imagine a mature Joyce who acts better because she believes in ideas rather than because she doesn’t want to feel bad in the moment for being seen by others as a bad person.
Joe X Joyce seemed destined to end eventually, it’s just HOW it ended that really stifled the appetite I can only guess we were supposed to have for Joyce X Dorothy :/
Too me it just feels like going way too far in the opposite direction, from “cheating is so horrible you shouldn’t even write fictional stories about it” to “cheating is fine actually and if this makes you dislike Joyce and Dorothy then you’re the weird one”
Yeah, ‘If you don’t like the way I shoehorned my OTP through several other, more interesting, storylines, you’re actually the same as the Puritanical villagers from The Scarlet Letter’ is one of the takes of all time
Wait, we’re supposed to take the polls seriously?
Anyway, there’s also only one answer for people who are into DoJo, but two for people who aren’t fans (as long as said non-fans prefer Ruth and Billifer).
Well, no, it’s a joke. You can look at who or what the joke aims at, though. Willis is and has been making fun of weird bigots reading their comic regularly – I presume this just hits different because people feel like they’re compared to or lumped in with those people (and they do exist!) for not enjoying the storyline or the couple (possible without being a bigot!). Though I would say it’s not worth getting mad about. This is a really annoying thing to say, but you don’t have to care? That’s just Willis’ opinion (or joke. Again, not being fully genuine).
I mean, that’s my suspicion — the poll is aimed at bigots and causing splash damage to mere anti-shippers.
Willis made a bsky comment about how it does bother him that some folks find Dorothy/Joyce bland or boring, and I do notice the polls rarely poke fun at THAT opinion specifically.
Well hopefully that spurs them to make them more interesting, lol. I want to like them together! I’m a dyke! I like when girls kiss! You just gotta give me some meat and I’ll tear in! It’s gotta be filling, though. So far they’re just finger food.
Personally, I have nothing against Joyce/Dorothy as a theoretical couple.
The way it was made practical, however, (and the way that the author has been responding to criticism) has had me go from reading the comic first thing every morning to this being the first time I’ve gone ‘Oh yeah, that’s a thing’ since last week.
On the other hand, like, if they’re poking fun at some of their audience, it’s remarkably gentle considering the kind of stuff being said directly to them sometimes.
I think it is important to remember that Sarah is a pessimist and is not always correct in her gloomy prophecies. For example, while Joyce has snapped, she appears to be wildly off of the predicted trajectory of blowing a billion shlongs.
Therefore, I agree that we should let Willis “cook.” God I hate that phrase. Why? Because despite my best efforts, I am an insufferable kill joy. In a regular fun-vampire way and not in the cool space-bounty hunter way of the eponymous and nonsensical Canadian 2010s tv show on the syfy channel.
I dunno,the problem with letting Willis cook is that dude isn’t making a cake (which would take a couple of hours) or slow smoking some brisket over 12-24 hours, Willis is dry aging beef over months. It takes over a year of IRL time to go over a two week period in-comic.
“I haven’t done [tropey plotline] yet so I guess I’d better throw one in” seems like an odd way to approach writing.
Idk, Willis is way more prolific and talented than me, they clearly know what they’re doing, but this is by far the least confident I’ve ever felt about the story since its beginning.
We have had both Dorothy and Joyce try to steal someone from their partner, though. I guess it figures they’d be the ones to eventually do it with one another.
I love Joyrothy enormously, but I really do feel bad for Joe. If I ever found myself in a love triangle somehow, I would absolutely be the Joe. I really admire his selfless commitment to Joyce’s happiness when it would be entirely understandable for him to be angry and bitter.
Yeah I’m happy for Joyce & Dorothy and I don’t think they’re the worst people ever, but Joe and Walky are getting a really raw deal and I don’t think polyamory is gonna fix it.
Meanwhile, I don’t think Joe’s choices here are positive, even if I find him the sympathetic party in all this.
He’s made it clear over and over that he doesn’t think he “deserves” Joyce. Loads of guilt and self-loathing and fear of vulnerability, plus a (un)healthy dose of thinking he’s relationship poison thanks to his own dad.
Yeah, I probably was a bit too positive in my first reaction. I don’t doubt there’s a lot of self-loathing driving him here, as well as more positive motivations coming from his love for Joyce.
In the vein of some previous discussions, I think I’m personally gonna let Joe cook a little longer before I believe this is a) selfless (as opposed to “grasping at straws”) and b) going to prevent all long-term anger and bitterness on his part.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love for him to maintain his self-improvement arc he’s been on since Joyce and a few others dragged him onto it, but I do think it’d be a copout if he didn’t have to fight for it a bit given these events. But maybe that “fighting for it” is “losing his fixation on Joyce, realizing he can just be better without it being for/with her”, too.
I think there’s probably a real mix of genuinely wanting Joyce to be happy and lack of belief in himself on Joe’s part. I agree that it would be strange if there’s no bitterness in the longer term, especially if Joyce doesn’t go for the poly option.
In my own “hey, she cheated on me in a particular kind of way that I did kind of see coming” (it was much, much stupider than what happened here in DoA) experience back in college, I ended up flipping back and forth between “bitterness”, “wishing she’d come back”, and “blaming myself for not being good enough”. That latter was exacerbated by her stated rationale for cheating being a laundry list of things I didn’t QUITE do as well as the person she cheated with despite the fact that I was in her view the better overall boyfriend, and I fortunately don’t think Joe’s going to have THAT double whammy unless Joyce also is planning to grow a goatee like Evil Universe Spock.
i wish i could bear to utilize a subscription service cuz i wanna see these ladies BONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! so for now ill just live vicariously through comments like yours . . . glad to hear that joyce is gonna need to stock up on electrolytes later
The ultimate outcome happened faster than expected, sure, but it’s not as if Joe’s constant placement of Joyce on an absurd pedestal, and willingness to allow Joyce to ignore his feelings, and trample over his boundaries, weren’t present until recently.
We still could have reasonably seen coming, that Joe would absolutely put up with just about anything Joyce could throw at him; we were just mostly focusing on this through the lens of him helping Joyce with various neuroses, as opposed to Joyce just flat-out wronging him, several times – even if some of them were without her knowledge.
A lot of us were too focused on how cute Joe could be in a positive context, to fully contemplate the idea that his permissiveness and self-sacrificing were coming from a less than healthy place in his psyche.
I will say: if Joe’s parents had ever tried any variety of polyamory, let alone one that his mom only agreed to because she feared losing his dad, I don’t think Joe would have suggested an open relationship to his dad as a way to AVOID hurting Stacy?
Do you know what is evil, above all this situation?
For all people that don’t enjoyed Joyce and Dorothy, or are feeling bad for Joe, they will have to endure all marketing Willis have to do to sell his Slipshine.
And they all will have to endure this ‘stupid’ NSFW banner, seeing Joyce and Dorothy making out, until he release another thing.
Jokes on you; two decades of being on the internet have trained me to tune out sidebar ads with precision accuracy. The Slipshine/NSFW Patreon promos have been naught but a gauzy blur in my periphery since they started.
Perfect avatar for this comment (but not 100% sure if sarcasm.)
For anyone who feels that way for real, there’s several ways to block an element in a web browser. If you’ve already got an adblocking extension, they usually have that functionality somewhere.
Yeah I’ve been waiting for the Tony situation to go bad from the moment he popped up. I am suspicious as hell about him and definitely not getting Long Haul vibes from him.
Joe/Walky(/Asher/Ethan) is where I hope things go next.
I’m not suspicious about Tony, but the relationship seems to be purely about mutual physical desire. It doesn’t feel like there is any sort of deeper emotional connection.
Sarah probably didn’t think she wanted one, but it may turn out that she does.
I disagree. There isn’t much to it because Tony barely is a real character but there are multiple strips (most of them with the 2, honestly?) of Sarah being clearly touched because Tony did something nice for her and also like, just gets her as a person. They were initially drawn to each other because of their grumpiness with other people, a trait often criticized in Sarah and one she had recently tried to suppress after getting her heart broken.So there’s definitely an emotional connection! She does also think he’s hot though.
Not to say this means they’re an forever couple, I honestly have no idea where Willis is going with this – some sort of drama re: him being the deans son, something Incelerator-involved, maybe just having a happy background relationship for Sarah? – and I honestly don’t think Tony is very interesting, but what you’re saying really isn’t the case.
See if this were a real college comic telling cheating stories, Sarah would bang Joe immediately. That’s actual drama! That’s what horny college kids do! Sarah and Joe should be sweating and staring up at the ceiling not even understanding how or why. That alone is enough to fuel the comments for years!
Believing that a particular woman’s love was not genuine is often what leads men to conclude that all women are manipulative. It’s not a very healthy response, IMO. Better to believe that the way she loved him was not with the same sort of devotion that he loved her.
I feel like the issue with that mentality lies more in assuming every single person is the same because of a single or handful of bad experiences rather than the concept that those person in particular didn’t truly love them.
You know what would be interesting?
Or at least what I think would be interesting?
If Joe actually started to think that way and it was his dad, the serial cheater, who comforted him and helped him realize that wasn’t the case.
I think the conclusion of, “A woman could genuinely love me and still do this to me because to her devotion is completely separated from love” can lead a man to a darker place than just, “This woman never liked me as much as I wanted her to.”
nobody under the age of 30 knows why they do what they do more than one time in three. by 40 or so you’re so entrenched in the narrative you’ve constructed for yourself that falsifying your entire life is less painful than admitting you’ve been wrong all this time.
like, it’s dangerous to infantilize young people to the point that you disrespect their right to their own concept of self, or otherwise disrespect their basic human agency; but, seriously, most of us should be able to remember the thousands upon thousands of things we did when we were younger, that don’t like up with what we know about our senses of self, either then or now.
yeah i have an nearly unending list of extremely stupid decisions i made from age 18 to age 38 (38 being when i got into my current 20+ year relationship). It is painful to remember how goddamn stupid i was.
So people can o nl be held to be responsible for their actions for 10 years of their lives? Everyone screws up, being a dumb kid doesn’t excuse your stupidity.
If there was ever any question about whether Joe got it re: poly I feel like this strip resolves it (he does) but also damn this fucking sucks. Like IDK if Sarah is right but… I probably wouldn’t write it this way if she was wrong. Maybe I’m about to see a stirring Joe has actual feelings about this speech tomorrow, but… I dunno. This framing feels kinda final.
I’m not sure you’ll get slings and arrows since the slipshine is already out and people can just find out for themselves if she says Joe’s name or not. If it’s that important to them.
What Nymph said. People have already read it, so anyone who’s bought it or doesn’t mind spoilers already knows whether or not the “Joyce isn’t actually into ladybits” doomsayers were correct or not. Not a lot of point in getting mad at people still trying to argue that’s gonna happen.
I’ve heard at least three versions of what happened, including “Whedon actually wanted to reveal Willow as gay much earlier (and “Doppelgängland” definitely telegraphs it, with Willow noting that Vamp Willow is “kinda gay”, Buffy telling her vampire personalities don’t have anything to do with the original human, and Angel saying, “Actually…”), but everyone loved Oz as a character, so he stuck around a lot longer than intended.
Of course, everyone involved in this story has had reason to put the most positive possible spin on it for like a decade plus, and even if Green had mostly great interactions with Whedon — well, like pretty much every abusive person ever, Whedon had his favorites and was not uniformly awful to everyone all the time, especially back before he was a Big Name and could afford to alienate more people.
(Like, I’m sure he was more pleasant to work with on Buffy by and large than he was on the set of The Justice League. Power doesn’t necessarily corrupt, but it does reveal: when someone gets enough power to do what they always wanted to do, you find out what they always wanted to do.)
My (and many other’s) beef with the Willow/Oz breakup isn’t that they broke up or why. It’s later with Willow basically saying Oz was “just a phase” and she’s always been totally gay that was the problem.
It was completely at odds with what we saw between the two of them and did a disservice to both characters.
I fear a similar line approaching from Joyce. And it would make me seriously reconsider my further readership.
Okay. I don’t know what that has to do with my comment? I didn’t say anything negative about Willow/Oz. I just contributed some further information to a discussion about the behind-the-scenes aspect of Green leaving the show. You don’t need to defend Willow/Oz to me, and politely? I will just say that I disagree with what you’ve said and I’m not interested in discussing how fair Willow’s coming out was or wasn’t to the Willow/Oz relationship. Willow/Tara was hugely important to me for personal reasons. So let’s just agree to disagree.
Part of me really feels like so many people putting Joe’s emotions over Joyce and Dorothy is slightly misogynistic. I get it. I really like Joe and Joyce as a couple too. I even liked it more than anything Joyce and Dorothy are offering and they’re currently fucking. But I also like that Joe is feeling bad and a little hurt, cause he was a real piece of shit for a long time! Longer than he’s been the reformed and repackaged new Joe.
Yeah Joe is a better guy now and he doesn’t deserve to be cheated on, but he was also only motivated to be a better guy to date Joyce. It seems like Joyce is almost framed as Joe’s reward for trying to be better. She’s not. Now that he lost her (to Dorothy a girl who had to tolerate his bullshit since before college) his character can finally get interesting by seeing if he’s actually still gonna be a good guy.
Fully on board with the idea that this could be a good arc for Joe to figure out how to keep his gains as a human being even though he just got stomped pretty hard.
I won’t deny that there’s some folks coming at their feelings from a misogynistic/homophobic bent, but (at least here) I honestly suspect the majority of folks are coming at it from “support the victim” or “root for the underdog” more than anything else.
I don’t think that motivation is really true though. He spent a long time between his initial attempt to change after the list came out and finally admitting his feelings to Joyce without doing anything to attempt to date her. Admittedly he was interested, but he was still to caught up in the “I’m bad. I’ll hurt her.” mentality.
And while I’m all about the consequences in narrative, I prefer it when they’re the result of the bad things characters do, rather than coming from a completely different angle after a character tries to change and improve.
You’re right actually. That is a bit unfair of me. Joe was really trying to change mostly as a response to his night with Liz which very likely traumatized him. He kind of internalized a belief that he ruins women and was trying to be better because Liz was also a very obvious replacement for Joyce in his head he was trying to work out of his system.
I think it’s pretty natural to worry about the emotions of someone who was cheated on over the emotions of the people who are cheated since people feel a natural inclination to worry about the person who is “wronged”.
I think I’d probably be more inclined to center Joyce and Dorothy’s emotions over Joe’s if I found them more…interesting together? Joe and Joyce had the benefit of a long slow build to the breakdown of each other’s walls. Dorothy and Joyce not only are “the bad guys” in this situation but their current behavior hasn’t done much to endear me. Joe aside but the strip where Joyce laughs in Walky’s face just kinda soured me on her as a character.
I know your thoughts on Joe so I won’t dispute that. I think it really just comes down to taste since Joe x Joyce has arguably been built up as much as Joyce x Dorothy.
This Walky laugh thing I’m real concerned about though. It feels a little like favoritism? Walky has been just as vindictive and cruel to Joyce, mocking her multiple times about being a brainwashed fundie and rubbing his relationship with Dorothy in her face while also calling her a lesbian. Walky has had to be told to backoff by Jennifer, Dorothy, by Sal. He had to apologize because Joyce didn’t trust him to come in her room without making fun of her. So how is Joyce laughing at him such a character assassination for her when it’s just another shot in their weird and toxic rivalry?
This is where it gets mighty suggestive but I can’t really think of anything Walky has done to Joyce that is as mean as taking her girlfriend and laughing cruelly in her face about it. He teasea and needles her, sure. And yes he’s crossed the line a few times I agree. I cannot think of anything of this magnitude he’s done to her. Heck you even pointed our that characters chastise Walky for going to far. Dorothy is at least meant to be walkys friend if not girlfriend in that scene and she just sorta lets that hapoen. No comment or even a jokey “that was mean”. We just move on.
Which brings me to my next point. Usually when Walky is mocking or teasing Joyce he’s doing it in sort of a Greek chorus kinda way. Either mocking Joyce’s closed minded view of the world or the situations she finds herself in. Walky rarely if ever antagonizes her over something HE has done to her. Joyce isn’t a bystander in walkys crumbling relationship with Dorothy. She’s the direct cause. She did this to him and is now laughing at him for being hurt by it.
I think it’s more the case that Joe is POLARIZING — a lot of people dismiss him as “not having done enough to make up for the shit he was pulling in the beginning”, a lot of people laud him for “wow, he turned that around pretty effectively once he got seriously called out”, not a lot of neutrals speaking up.
Yup. Truth be told, might even be “was always about consent in situations he thought were consent-based” as long as you acknowledge “got his fuckin’ eyes opened about what constitutes harassment, because he was REALLY BAD about that”.
Joe usually can’t become a topic of conversation more than two days in a row without a “what did he even do that was so wrong, it’s not his fault his list got leaked” thread.
Yeah, I file that under “man, a lot of people have strong opinions about a comic that is apparently from the Mandala effect universe but is not THIS Dumbing of Age”.
@thejeff I think of it more as an indictment of the way we STILL kinda have a collective boys-will-be-boys mindset that even in a place like this there are a lot of people who DIDN’T see it as a villain arc, just a “dumbass man being kinda dumbass, ain’t he funny with his list” arc.
Joe’s Jewish but it’s still a bit of a background detail, however much Willis is clearly trying to gently pull it more to the foreground for both him and Dorothy, so most of the comment section is still gonna see him as white, and subconscious bias is a hell of a thing.
That’s likely some of it, but I think a lot of it is that the things people excused old Joe for are actually typical “boys will be boys” things, while Walky tends to get shit on for not being manly enough.
I’m aware he could’ve been out & about in the meantime (it’s been a whole day! ) but I much prefer the thought that he was standing in the same exact spot the entire time, thinking about love related aphorisms. It’s just too goofy
I compared the mental image of Joe just waiting for hours for Joyce to get back to him to that of “a sad little unwanted mangy dog who was left all alone on his birthday” yesterday and I stand by that
I get feeling bad for Joe like, conceptually, but this delivery is fully so silly I can’t get there.
I don’t think we’re staying with him either, so I wonder who we’re cutting to next. Walky probably wouldn’t get anything substantial, so I’m hoping for Dina and/or Becky.
Not that this is substantial either, I guess, so maybe we’ll see Walky still laying on the floor next to his bed, having also not moved the whole day. Which is a little less funny and more real, honestly.
Every strip of this relationship seems written with the intention of being as mean spirited towards the rest of the cast as they could think of in that moment.
Yep. There’s a world out there where, despite me being a huge Joe/Joyce fan, I got onboard with this relationship because its introduction was well written and it was compelling in a fun to read way. This sadly is not that world. This is the one where the comic just feels mean and spiteful towards characters who didn’t really do anything to deserve it.
Yeah, I’ll believe that when I see it. Joyce hasn’t been impressing me with her empathy or care for others recently. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out she meant ‘we’ll talk later’ as ‘bye see you never’.
Casting my vote for “Joyce is stuck in Romance Novel Brain, causing loss of object permanence, and will remember that she promised to talk to Joe the next time she sees him and then feel guilty about not remembering sooner.”
But you see, that promise doesn’t mean anything if she’s willing to focus on the woman in front of her while having the sex that they’ve both wanted for so long. Joyce only cares about Joe for real if she makes his feelings her number one priority over everything else until they’re resolved. /s
I have full confidence that Joyce will be having a conversation with Joe and Dorothy about things, and I seriously doubt it’ll be as simple as “Sorry, Joe, never mind; I don’t actually have any interest in continuing things with you.” We’ve seen several moments that clearly indicate that Joyce still cares for Joe (the most obvious being her hesitance to call Joe her ex when talking to Daisy), and I think Sarah being wrong about Joyce’s capacity for love is honestly a very common trend in this comic, so it would honestly be fitting if she were wrong.
I think you’re being unfair. Some people clearly have the position that if Joyce is considering Joe’s poly idea, she should not have sex with Dorothy until she has had a discussion with her about it. And therefore that *gestures vaguely at the comic* means she was never considering it, because getting back to Joe with anything but a flat “no” would wrong Dorothy. Which would then mean she should have just said no way back then and not left him hanging, for reasons that have more to do with Dorothy’s feelings than Joe’s.
I’ve been waiting for a good strip to ramble about this, but for a while now I’ve been thinking about a very specific interaction relating to this fallout, which is specifically one between Joe and Rachel. We know she doesn’t trust him, we know she doesn’t think people can change, so unless she sees the newspaper herself… I can see Rachel assuming that Joe and Joyce split (if they do) because of him cheating on her, rather than vice versa. Either way, maybe realizing that Joe was cheated on will be the impetus for Rachel’s views changing?
Oh, hmm. I just realized what Joyce/Dorothy reminds me of: Korra/Asami from Legend of Korra. I want to like them, for the same reasons. They’re cute! They’re sweet! In a universe of disaster relationships, both queer and straight, let there be ONE saccharine-sweet pairing as a treat!
But I’m not sold – again, for the same reasons. In both cases, from a writing standpoint, it just feels very obvious that the decision to switch the trajectory to Joyce/Dorothy was made later in the story (i.e. similar to Korra with Asami). So to me – YMMV – that trajectory feels clunkily done, no matter how much buildup was attempted to be squeezed in after the decision was made.
I also feel like – and this is just a personal opinion – the type of sugary-sweet relationship where the couple gets along too well for there to be room for conflict or complication are probably ideal to actually be in, but are not that…compelling to read about. It’s why Ruth and Billie, for all their shenaniganry, are a lot more stirring as a couple than Joyce and Dorothy could ever be.
Again, it’s nice and all that there’s one, so-far mostly frictionless couple in a comic where almost every other relationship is a shitshow in some way. It’s just kind of a bummer that it’s gotta be the main couple that we’ll presumably be doing the most reading about from here on out.
But, who knows! Perhaps delicious disaster drama is on the horizon for Joyce and Dorothy and there’s just no hint of it yet (Becky’s and Joe’s hurt feelings don’t feel like they count in the context of the relationship – Joyce & Dorothy come across as mostly unconcerned about those feelings, as long as the hurt parties aren’t directly in front of their faces).
But, maybe I’ll end up eating my words and the pair will end up being the most interesting and emotionally compelling fictional couple ever. I hope that’ll be the case. I’m definitely going to keep reading to find out, anyway. 🤪
The Slipshine title is a reference to a panel in Book 4.
As early as Book 1, Joyce is awkwardly talking to Dorothy, specifically when asking her out to dinner.
Dorothy calls Joyce’s behavior adorable in Book 1.
You gotta remember that Korra and Asami happened before She-ra, it even happened a couple of months before Ruby and Sapphire kissed in Steven Universe. I would have loved to get more build up with Korra and Asami in the show, but honestly what little slipped by the censors was enough to sell me on them and when they held hands in the finale… I still remember feeling so seen. I already adored the way book 4 handled Korra’s PTSD, but then to cap it off with the reveal that she was bi? Unheard of for animated shows at that time, particularly shows that weren’t adult animated sitcom shows.
I mean yeah Korra changed trajectories mid-series, but that’s only because the creators realized (to their credit) that Mako is a wet blanket and they needed to abandon ship.
Everyone in the main cast improves (or at least gets more neutral) after Mako stops being a romantic partner. XD
Even Mako improves when Mako stops being a romantic partner. The moment they embraced him being a lil fuddy duddy dork instead of a bad boy, he grew on me.
They’ve been together for half a day. Of course they’re still in the honeymoon phase! I’m sure there is room for drama later. Like when Joyce reveals Joe’s polyamory idea when Dorothy thinks this is a monogamous relationship…
We already have a saccharin-sweet relationship, it’s Danny/Sal (and until recently, Dina/Becky, but that may about to go into a bit of a spiral, so I’m temporarily not counting it), where we get conflict out of the fact that Sirksome Sal doesn’t really trust people being sweet at her without it being somehow transactional.
And let me tell you, I got more enjoyment out of reading the like two strips where they get a music room than I did out of the entire current storyline, total.
Its worth noting with KorrAsami that *weren’t* actually in a romantic relationship in the show. The writers outright said that the end of the series, where they go into the spirit world, is when they started their relationship. They had romantic feelings before that, but they didn’t start dating til the very end.
Also very much worth noting that the censors were much, much more conservative about queer relationships back then, and they weren’t allowed to be too overt about their relationship.
-hits the “Korra wasn’t supposed to get more than one season, so Bryke (Bryan and Michael) had to scramble a season 2 which is why it’s not as good, and season 3 and 4 have better writing. And Asami and Korra were set up in season 3” button-
I’m gonna have to hit this things until the day I die, aren’t I?
Like it’s been almost 11 years. We should all know how badly nickelodeon messed with Korra, by now. How Bryan and Mike had to get things past the censors. How they’ve said they would have done more if it had been allowed.
Season 4 of the legend of Korra is some of the worst television I have ever seen. The audacity to have the revanchist fascist be the one antagonist Korra expresses sympathy for is simply galling, and I don’t care how much the creators wanted to put Korra and Asami together or for how long, the plain fact is that they failed to adequately establish romantic tension between them and it is genuinely insulting as a lesbian that I am expected to accept and celebrate this absolute slop of a couple. To say nothing of the fact that Asami is a canonical war profiteer!
I dunno, as a sapphic woman myself, I felt like Asami and Korra had as much romantic tension as they could do, considering the censors they were working against. But it’s fine that you don’t personally feel that way. You don’t have to celebrate them. I will, though. And I think I should be allowed to.
What do you mean “Joyce & Dorothy come across as mostly unconcerned about those feelings, as long as the hurt parties aren’t directly in front of their faces?”
There were something like a half dozen comics entirely about Joyce and Dorothy stressing about how to break it to Becky and how she’d take it. In some ways, her desires and feelings were more central to the transition in their relationship transition than anyone else’s despite the fact that the only stake she had in the situation was her once having a crush on Joyce.
Like, I can see this complaint with regards to Walky. To some extent it’s true of Joe, but he’s clearly been on Joyce’s mind a few times while navigating the day even when he wasn’t present (such as when talking to Daisy). However, I don’t see how you can possibly think that Becky wasn’t on their minds. Honestly, I feel like she was far, far too central for my tastes, as having a crush on your best friend should in no way make you a central figure to their future relationships.
I feel sympathy for her pain, but it’s pain that should be taken to a therapist or another person for comfort, not pain that should demand different treatment from people who have not in any way wronged her.
Well, if we take Willis’ word for it, he’s been planning for Joyrothy to happen for about a decade. You’re entitled to feel that it wasn’t set up well, (though I heartily disagree), but it wasn’t a last-minute swerve.
As for being too sugary-sweet and low-conflict, that’s a matter of taste, but I don’t see that Joyrothy is more saccharine than Becky/Dina or Sal/Danny, neither of which provoke anywhere near the same level of bile in the comments. As for lacking conflict between them, again, that’s not unusual for relationships in the comic, Billie/Ruth being the one major exception, and they’re still in the first 24 hours of the relationship. I doubt Willis plans for their entire future relationship to conflict-free, but the honeymoon period is a thing.
So, you made this argument yesterday (? I think?), and I do feel obligated to say now what I said then:
Sal and Danny are kind of a footnote? We only get them in small bursts, so their sweetness doesn’t overstay its welcome or turn saccharine in its insistence. They’ve also had to deal with internal tensions, namely Sal’s uncertainty over whether she actually wants to be with Danny since he’s basically everything her racist parents could want for her in a partner – straight-laced, squeaky clean, and most importantly, white.
Also, and I know you’re going to roll your eyes at this, they didn’t get together by cheating on their partners. I am aware, of course, that DoJo is your OTP and you don’t consider the circumstances under which they got together a mark against them at all, but you have to accept that this is not the case for a lot of people. Of *course* they’re going to be more controversial. I’m genuinely sorry about that because it does seem like a source of legitimate frustration for you, but that’s just how the chips fell for Joyce and Dorothy.
Becky and Dina, meanwhile, were so sugary sweet for so long because everything else in Becky’s life was absolute crap for the longest time and Dina represented essentially the only oasis she had from that. With the timeskip, and with Ross, the greatest source of external conflict in Becky’s life, thoroughly deceased, there has been a shift to focus on more internal tension within Becky and Dina’s relationship – namely, Becky’s fear of change and Dina’s willingness to experiment with labels and presentation, and more recently the DoJo bombshell which has highlighted the already-existing tension of Becky’s lingering romantic love for Joyce and Dina’s insecurities about being second place in her girlfriend’s affections.
So like, yeah, Sal/Danny and Becky/Dina don’t get as much crap from the commentariat, but there are reasons for that other than simple hypocrisy. Those relationships serve different narrative purposes for the characters involved, and DoJo is always going to be more controversial because of the circumstances under which the ship sailed.
Probably about things abruptly hitting PG-13+ when that’s not typical, given Thing 2’s historically not the type of person to be uncomfortable with ladies who like ladies generally.
Normally I’m very in favor of g/g ships, but I can’t help but hate this one. As happy as they currently seem together, Dorothy and Joyce just left three broken hearts in the wake of their flank speed rush to lustville. Not sure how much it hurt Walky. Maybe not at all? But it drove Becky to suddenly start questioning her faith and God only knows how hard it’s going to hit Joe when he realizes it’s permenant. He didn’t deserve this. Hope he finds solid happiness in the end with someone who is more stable than Joyce. As for Dorothy and Joyce… Not going to openly hope the ship burns and sinks horribly, but I’m not going to support it either.
Becky’s feelings are not a thing Joyce and Dorothy did. They are absolutely responsible for the way Joe and Walky feel right now, but neither of them were in a relationship with Becky. While she’s hurt and that’s very real for her, that doesn’t make it their fault or something they should have been considering before they got together.
most people can’t decide how they feel about things.
Joyce and Dorothy had enough awareness about Becky to have considered that this would be painful for her, and that it wasn’t worth it to them to change course. It’s fair to feel sore if a friend decides that their happiness is worth your discomfort.
It’s not out of line for Becky to feel hurt by this, but it’s complete bullshit to think that Joyce has to repress her sexuality to avoid hurting Becky.
…. you know, I’ve reread my comment a few times and I don’t see anywhere where I said anything about them repressing their sexuality to avoid hurting her.
Becky is hurt, and that’s sad, but Joyce didn’t hurt her. Joyce didn’t owe it to Becky to stay out of a relationship with another woman any more than she would have owed it to [any man who finds Joyce attractive but isn’t dating her] not to date other men.
Frankly, in this case, your friend’s happiness IS worth your discomfort. It’s gross to make that their problem.
And I think it counts in the sense that they should talk to her, check in on her, etc. I do not think it counts when deciding whether or not to date each other. Becky’s crush on Joyce does not entitle her to be a part of Joyce’s romantic decisions or put any responsibility on Joyce to not date women.
Just going to copy+paste this:
“While she’s hurt and that’s very real for her, that doesn’t make it their fault or something they should have been considering before they got together.”
It’s too early to say for sure, but I don’t think Becky’s actually questioning her faith, she’s probably just exhausted by the Hank incident. Walky is hurt in the specific way where you’ve been so beaten down emotionally by multiple events that your body and mind just stop registering the pain. Without some kind of intervention, that dull ache will settle into how you view yourself, like how Walky is already talking about being somebody else’s rebound down the line. This never ends well. Ironically, I was in a mix of Joe and Walky’s position around the time I first started reading Dumbing of Age (2015) and it got so fucking dire it cost me a scholarship and years of my life.
I can understand feeling upset for Joe and Walky! That is so incredibly valid and both men got done incredibly dirty.
BECKY doesn’t get any sway OR Say in Dorothy OR Joyce’s relationship. She does not own Joyce, she does not own ‘The only woman Joyce is allowed to love romantically” rights.
Becky is in a loving relationship with her girlfriend, and while Becky is allowed to feel however she wishes (and I feel for her, I’m sure what she’s experiencing is absolutely terrible) Joyce and Dorothy aren’t responsible, and Joyce doesn’t have to never show attraction to women just because she’s not sexually attracted to the girl she’s always seen as her sister.
This sentiment is so weird I’m sorry, but it’s so weird that some readers care way more about Becky’s feelings than anyone elses.
The comments discourse has missed nuance on Becky for a while.
Yes, she did not deserve a relationship with Joyce. Everyone gets that.
What did Becky deserve?
When Becky came out to Joyce with her crush, Joyce told the (at the time?) most important person in her life that, “No, it wasn’t anything about YOU, I just don’t do THAT.”
Identities change. Joyce thought she didn’t do that, but she does now. OK. Things happen. Joyce unintentionally had said the wrong thing to Becky. Now, that error is unraveling, and it’s hurting Becky a lot.
What Becky deserves is not a relationship. It’s Joyce acknowledging her error. Joyce putting her foot out there to say this switch-up, where she said something in a sensitive situation that is now clearly wrong, wasn’t want she wanted, and it’s sad that she accidentally hurt Becky through it. This error was an accident, but it’s still her responsibility, her words she said.
-Joyce knows- that Becky deserves closure. But she stalls and stalls on providing it, because she’s scared, and overly deferential to Dorothy who is also scared, until Becky finds them herself. She has the opportunity to approach Becky, to show she’s willing to bite the bullet for her best friend, to show how much she wants to be -honest- with Becky, but instead she’s discovered and -has- to talk.
Then, once Becky finds her, Joyce is too busy fawning over her girlfriend to provide Becky the closure she deserves. Dorothy is the one to try. Joyce should not just be joining Dorothy, but taking the lead.
I’m not Scarlet Lettering Joyce here. Her mistakes are understandable in the circumstances, and they don’t make her some kind of -bad person-. She’s not. But they’re still mistakes.
This take kind of upsets me. The argument Becky somehow deserves better than how Joyce handled coming out to her. People are talking a lot about what people deserve without considering what Joyce and Dorothy deserve. Like that doesn’t matter because I guess they’re winning right now.
For my opinion I think Joyce deserved a better friend than Becky. She doesn’t have a claim to Joyce, she had a crush, and worse than just having a crush it manifested in toxic ways, at the expense of Joyce’s now girlfriend.
Even if you totally buy the performative rivalry thing, Becky would literally push Dorothy away from Joyce. I can’t agree with this idea Becky has a right to be treated better in some perfect moment of closure when she’s been the one actively stifling Joyce and Dorothy since she came back from Anderson.
I do feel like Becky is a good person and moments like going back and trying to protect Joyce and Dorothy from being outed to Hank is the type of friend she should’ve been the entire time. I think Becky deserves to get over it and realize the reason she’s miserable isn’t because Joyce doesn’t love her. It’s because she doesn’t love herself.
And frankly Dina deserves better too. It’s interesting to me people are mad at Joyce for breaking Becky’s heart like Dina her girlfriend never even mattered.
You should reread the comics around when Becky came out to Joyce. At no point does Joyce say she’s straight. She says she doesn’t feel the same about Becky. That’s it. Becky infers that Joyce is straight and goes on to say so. Joyce doesn’t correct her, but I could find no point at which Joyce ever says that she’s straight. She says she doesn’t reciprocate the feelings, that she considers Becky a sister, that she doesn’t want Becky to make out with her, and other things that clearly make a lack of romantic/sexual attraction to Becky clear, but she never tells Becky that she’s straight.
Joyce is not responsible for Becky’s inference that the only reason Joyce doesn’t romantically love Becky is because she’s straight. Yes, Joyce could handle things better, but Becky could also have handled things better (like, I don’t know, not acting romantically possessive of Joyce when they aren’t in a relationship). I hope they mend their friendship, as it’s been seriously tested, but frankly, Becky has as much or more to apologize for here. The only difference is that people have more immediate ire for someone “breaking someone’s heart” than they have for someone attempting to sabotage their loved one’s friendship with a perceived “threat,” especially when it’s played for laughs.
“When Becky came out to Joyce with her crush, Joyce told the (at the time?) most important person in her life that, “No, it wasn’t anything about YOU, I just don’t do THAT.””
Also, I feel like you’re putting far too much expectation on Joyce to come out perfectly for Becky and no expectation on Becky to support her friend. I don’t think that’s fair. Looking for Becky to talk to her about it the morning after it happened is hardly dragging her feet. Nor is it Joyce’s fault that Becky found out from the newspaper or that she was waiting in Joyce’s room in the dark instead of her own room where Joyce & Dorothy were looking for her.
I sympathize with Becky because of a simple situation that she had a crush, she poured her feelings out and hoped for the best, got turned down, and then her crush goes off with someone else. That’s a pain I think most people have experienced, myself included. You’re right that she doesn’t have any sort of claim on Joyce’e, but it’s still stings when you find out that your crush and your rival are hankying and pankying.
Here’s to hoping this whole thing doesn’t adversely affect Becky and Dina’s relationship and Dina helps her get over this.
Three broken hearts and two collateral hearts, too. Sarah never really liked Joe but is taking his side and is just as angry with Joyce as Becky is, and Dina’s horrified expression upon realizing that Joyce broke Becky’s heart AGAIN and, no matter how good of a girlfriend she is, she’ll never be Joyce, is just… it’s almost as heartbreaking as seeing Walkyverse Dina’s inner monologue during the last few moments before the bomb went off.
I have been cheated on and it sucks so i feel bad for Joe but narrative wise i am more concerned about what is going to happen with Becky and Dina over this. Also i’d like to see Carla and Charlie not that they have much stake in this particular but i’d like to see a happy absurdist couple.
Joe finally answers the question of “why the hell would you intentionally set up your romantic rival to realize she’s in love with your girlfriend who has the potential to love her back?”
The answer seems to be deep self sabotage/self loathing =(
Interesting parallel in how Joe and Walky both believe they’re not worth any long-term affection from others, but they express it in different but equally damaging ways
Maybe they’ll help each other deal with the aftermath.
Joe is probably Walky’s closest male friend, if not only male friend – I don’t think one “bro clone” brunch with Asher counts, and since Booster is they/them, they would be a friend, but not a male friend (I assume, but it’s probably better not to try to categorize Booster in this context).
I kept seeing the opinion that Joe was actually pointing Dorothy at Joyce out of love, or selflessness, or some sort of awareness from on high that Joyce “needed” to be with Dorothy.
It becomes clearer to me with every Joe appearance that the poor dude is just BROKEN and he doesn’t think he deserves to be anything but a last resort.
He doesn’t have anyone who’d do that other than Sarah, sadly. His only other friend (Danny) didn’t believe he was actually attached to Joyce so he wouldn’t bother even asking if Joe’s okay.
I’ll argue Joe pulling this was more self-respecting in some ways than anyone gives him credit for. Once Joe was aware of the possibility, ripping the bandaid off NOW and discussing the situation was healthier than living in limbo and fear of Joyce leaving him. That kind of shit will absolutely poison a relationship, even if the thing you feared happening never comes to pass. I’ve had exes who stewed in their fears until they tried to sabotage the relationship by taking it out on me, and that shit is not ok.
I do respect him ripping the band-aid off, and moreso it makes me respect Joyce and Dorothy even less than I otherwise would have since he practically gift-wrapped the ethical path for those two and set it on a platter in front of them.
I just don’t know whether I yet think it was coming from a place of self-respect or from a place of deep insecurity — he’s certainly reacting to the outcome in a way I perceive as “begging for scraps” or, in this strip’s case, “trying to convince himself this was an acceptable outcome of his attempt to prevent something like this from happening to him.”
Wow. It’s so lovely to see a very blatant “I love the person, so their happiness is more important to me than being with them” is interpreted as self sabotage and self loathing.
Obviously the only way to healthily approach a romantic relationship is greedily putting your desires and needs above everyone else’s! Unless you’re Joyce and Dorothy, of course. Then you should put your relationship on hold until you’ve obtained an affidavit of approval from everyone who every made googly eyes at you.
I mean, everyone in a relationship needs to advocate for themselves to a certain extent. If for no other reason than one’s partner(s) aren’t mind readers. If all one person in a relationship says is “whatever you want, dear”, at some point it starts to become the truth.
This is true. It doesn’t change the fact that romantic love that isn’t jealous and possessive is perfectly healthy. Joe’s words throughout this arc have been loving, hopeful, and a bit worried. They have not been self hating or self sabotaging just because he isn’t making his number one priority keeping Joyce to himself.
OK, this took me about an hour of mulling over how I want to say this, but I finally found a metaphor that works.
It’d be one thing if Joe was content with being downgraded from co-lead to supporting actor in the soap opera that is Joyce’s love life. You can get some amazing work out of supporting actors*, and you can’t tell a good story without them.
But this? The way this is framed? The way Joyce left him 3 crises ago and has now decided to have sex with Dorothy instead of returning to something she promised she’d get back to?
That’s not Joe being content to be a supporting actor, that’s Joe content with being an extra with a few lines here and there. It’s a very different conversation to one where Joe is still being given a small fraction of Joyce’s total consideration.
*I love Season 1 of Andor, for example (haven’t had the gumption to watch S2- my mental health is a fucking roller coaster) and Diego Luna is excellent, but I’ll be damned if Skaarsgard and Serkis don’t steal the show.
Hey, my attempt at a reconciliation of conflicting facts yesterday is further validated here. Joyce may not have officially 100% broken up with Joe, but he assumes (reasonably & correctly) from the totality of the situation that he’s been broken up with until he hears otherwise – he doesn’t really think Joyce is considering the idea.
It’s a holdover from the Roomies! days, when her poster was prominently displayed in Joe and Danny’s room because Willis was still a fundie at the time. Its continued presence nearly 30 years later is a lot harder to justify in-universe, as she’s firmly a Christian artist, while Joe is Jewish and Danny has never been seen to be particularly devout, or at least the kind of Christian who’s into Christian contemporary music to have her poster on his wall.
I genuinely don’t get why it would be so bad if something interesting happened in the story (like miscommunication about a breakup). That’s just me tho
No. I don’t think most of us were saying what you think we were saying. We’re talking about what’s going on in Joyce’s head, not about Joe thinking he still has a claim.
Joyce should have talked to Dorothy about the poly idea if she has any intention of taking that route.
Except saying that she’ll talk to Joe later and hesitating to call him her ex when she was talking to Daisy. I think there have been other subtle nods to the fact that things aren’t entirely resolved.
It’s been at most a few hours since Joe and Joyce talked. Joe is clearly still open to it, and the fact that Joyce didn’t put everything with Dorothy on hold until it was resolved also doesn’t mean that Joyce isn’t open to it. Sarah is the only person who seems sure, and she’s often been dead wrong on how Joyce will respond in situations.
That’s subjective at best.
If you’re right then she’s in the clear.
Regardless, my point is more that if that’s what someone’s talking about, this strip changes nothing. Joe doesn’t think they’re still together, but that wasn’t the point.
The last few weeks I’ve seen at least a few comments about not understanding why people like Joe now, saying it’s even a cover for their anti-queer bigotry, saying Joe outright deserves to get fucked over for being a sex pest last semester.
Hell, I’ve said myself that his redemption was a little too easy because he’s hunky.
So yeah, maybe “Joe gets fucked over and has to figure out how not to let it turn him back into a sex pest (or into the Incelerator or whatever he was called)” is a good arc for Joe to get. BUT, two wrongs don’t make a right, and I was always going to think less of whoever did the fucking over. So I suppose I wish it’d been some new girl I didn’t mind thinking less of.
Totally agreed on “I want there to be a good arc for Joe to grow some more here, so he can keep the gains he’s had despite the hurt that’s just been dealt to him.”
I’m still gonna be vaguely sad that of the two people I identified with pretty strongly in this comic, I can’t really identify with one anymore because she pulled this nonsense.
I mean. If that bit about “even saying” is about my comment specifically, I definitely was not claiming anything sweeping. In fact, I was specifically saying it’s NOT true of everyone or even a significant portion of anti-Joyce/Dorothy people, and that I feel terrible for all the perfectly reasonable people who have to deal with the fact that there are some bigots who are, yes, using this whole divide as an excuse to say thinly veiled queerphobic stuff in a public forum.
If you haven’t seen any of those comments, consider yourself lucky! It’s been getting better, but they do keep cropping up.
I admit I am not 100% happy here because I wanted all sorts of horribly hurt feelings, ruined relationships, and misery. Oddly, I also felt that the biggest drama being Becky made no sense and she should have been the ONLY person okay with it because she moved on.
With all the word “cheating” still going around in the comments… you know what?
I’d love for Dorothy and Joyce to full on cheat.
First the Slipshine comes and then for a couple of weeks (months for us) they constantly get more crazy in secret… and then they are found out by Sarah.
Hmm. I wonder if, after some time has passed, Joyce and Joe will have sex after all. Mutually enjoyable sex, with enthusiastic consent and explicitly stated desire from both parties, even.
In college, my girlfriend disappeared mysteriously for several hours one day and came back in love with one of our friends.
On the one hand, in my case, it wasn’t with a woman; it was another man.
On the other hand, we hadn’t been dating for one week, either: We had been living together for more than a year by then. We had a joint bank account. She had started using my last name informally.
I’m not going to pretend I didn’t try to get her to stay, to change her mind, to come back; but — although I always hated that aphorism of Joe’s, even before Sting made a hit single out of it — I always recognized the basic truth that you can’t hold on to someone who doesn’t want you any more.
I was crushed, of course, but I was never even .0001 percent as angry as the folks in this comment section seem to want Joe to be about his one week relationship. Angry why? It’s not like she set out that day determined to fall in love with someone else. It’s not like she woke up thinking how she could hurt me.
I was, like Joe, happy for her, despite being hurt. I wished her all the best. I went to their wedding when it happened. And I kept any minor gloating to myself when they got divorced, or when she got divorced again, and then again and maybe again, I don’t know, I lost count? Whereas I’ve now been happily married for forty years. She has a daughter, and I hope she has had a great life, on the balance. She’s a great person.
I was never not a feminist, so there was never any real chance of me “backsliding” into misogyny, but I didn’t turn into The Joker, and I seriously doubt that Joe will, either.
Given that Joe is a fictional character, I think a lot of us are angry FOR him in a way that might be too much in real life, but it doesn’t hurt anyone real.
I don’t think Joyce is the Whore of Babylon, but I do think it sucks that she carelessly tosses someone aside so easily.
I guess there’ve been a few comments saying he might go back to his old misogynistic ways, but that’s not common and I don’t think for most it’s really a want.
Thing is, I’ve been Joe too, twice. Not everyone reacts with as much equanimity as you did, let’s say.
Frankly, I couldn’t even get to “happy for you” for either of ’em, as far as I’m concerned I sincerely hoped they both got their respective hearts stomped flat by someone who lied to them in turn. Twenty years later, I’m just happy to not think about either of ’em.
I even tried to stay friends with one, and she was perfectly happy to do that until a couple of months later when she wanted something that would be easier to get if she exaggerated stories of our breakup to make HER the victim and me the big scary dude who she just couldn’t safely say no to (the irony perhaps being that I lost zero friends due to this, because she exaggerated things past believability).
There was no chance of me backsliding into misogyny, either, but I did absolutely turn into a kind of literal incel (of the “it’s not worth it to trust anyone too far, guess I’ll be alone forever” type) for a bit there.
Yeah, not getting mad at someone who built up those expectations and then just tossed you aside doesn’t seem like normal behavior. People don’t just fall in love with someone new in a single day. Even if some feelings come up, good people stop things before they get too far and realize that it’s a bad idea.
Being discarded like this isn’t just something that happened, as if it was a random act of nature. It’s a deliberate choice by someone to selfishly disregard what they built up with you because they want immediate gratification with some new person.
Joe and Joyce may only have been together for a week, but they’ve been talking for a long time. Joyce has been trying to address Joe’s insecurities about relationships for a long time. She’s probably the first person he’s actually allowed himself to be vulnerable around for a long, long time. And she knows all that. Cheating on him is going to do some serious hurt to him – and she knows that, too.
Shamelessly acting completely lovesick over Dorothy even as she watches it hurt people she cares about is just gross. I realize she had a stronger friendship with her than anyone else, but damn.
There is a saving grace, kinda, in that she hasn’t done a full-on “look at Dorothy and forget what I was doing due to Hornt” in FRONT of Joe yet, but I also suspect that if that happens he’ll be particularly hurt.
… granted, I still think there’s a fair chance that having all three of them in a room will cause Joyce to actually do some serious soul-searching, too, given the “romantic object permanence” theory of Joyce’s actions post-kiss.
As kind of a side note, maybe even pre-kiss. I think the first clear example was when she and Dorothy were having their moment in bed and Joe showed up for the date. Some read that as guilt for what she was (almost) doing with Dorothy, but in retrospect it seems very much the same kind of thing to me.
Joe seems so crippled with self-hatred and fear from his parents’ divorce that he’s practically shoving Joyce out the door and HOPING she remembers him as an afterthought.
Dorothy hates Joe and hated that he “got” Joyce (like she was a goddamn carnival prize) so I can’t fathom the idea she’ll want to share.
And Joyce *used to be* a super caring and considerate friend, but these days she’s got the empathy and emotional intelligence of a rabid weasel, so the odds of her not fucking up a polycule instantly are astronomical.
It always does, though. No healthy relationship out there doesn’t take introspection and work from all involved. Honestly, I’d love to see that kind of effort and complexity in the comic.
Yea, Joyce has spent so long restrained by her religion, that once free from it, she’s forgotten general self-restraint. It honestly a dangerous time for any new atheist.
As a hater, it’s very weird for me to say that at least part of this is an artifact of the Webcomic Time Dilation Field: being unpleasantly selfish for the first twenty-four hours of a new relationship is something you can come back from, once you realize that’s what you were doing.
They suuuper do. I think it’s just a general discomfort with the unknown in a lot of cases. People aren’t used to seeing polyamory in general, specifically not in main characters, and certainly only in the dichotomy of “bad, unhealthy, cautionary tale” or “good, perfect, no issues here!”.
I’m hoping for this, too. Honestly, it’s pretty on brand for Sarah to make a cynical prediction about Joyce’s behavior only for Joyce to do things totally differently. So if anything, I think Sarah’s words increase my hope.
And Joe continuing to be selflessly caring about Joyce rather than possessive also gives me hope.
Joe should listen to Sarah here. It’s been pretty clear to me for a while now that Joyce is too into Dorothy right now to care about Joe’s suggestion of a poly relationship, and I doubt Dorothy would want that given her history with Joe. He deserves better than trying to stay with someone who cheated on him anyway.
In the Slipshine comic where Joe hooked up with Malaya she turned into Joyce after they were finished. Joyce was in Joe’s subconscious the entire time. I haven’t read the new Slipshine but I think, while Joyce is too in the moment to care about anyone other than Dorothy, HalluciJoe might appear, finally showing Joyce that leaving Joe hanging while she gleefully has sex with Dorothy is a Richard Relocation and she needs to figure out what she actually wants- Joe, Dotty, or a polycule. Because if Dotty finds out she DIDN’T do a clean break, Joyce could potentially have nothing at all.
The thing that I feel the most bad for Joe for is the fact that Joyce was the person who finally convinced him that, hey, maybe forming emotional attachments and actually LOVING somebody is a good thing and WORTH it… And then she turns around and cheats on him and abandons him for someone else. What kind of lesson does that send him about the value of relationships? If I were Joe, I’d honestly have to be trying VERY hard not to be nursing some “So Father was right after all…” grudges.
“Joe the person you love and cherish is currently fucking someone else and not thinking about you at all, even though two days ago she was very excited to lose her virginity to you and talked about how much she trusted you”
and we’re supposed to cheer for Joyce?
…Okay I’m not a fan of how Joyce has behaved towards Joe and I do not like Joyce/Dorothy at all but like what do you think happens in open relationships? Do y’all expect that when one is having sex with partner A they must be thinking about partner B? Do you think being fully in the moment with one of your partners is like a problem? This is the kind of shit polyamory EXPECTS to happen. The bad behavior is the running off on him, not finishing the conversation, being broadly pretty thoughtless and callous towards him. It is not, post being given explicit permission, letting herself self get fully into the act of intimacy and sex with Dorothy.
People be reading this as Joe hating himself. I think Joe is genuinely afraid she will decide not to keep him. I think that’s the nervesy facial expressions. I do not think Joe is lying to us about what he’s okay with.
You’re 100% right about open/poly situation. It’s honestly insane to me that people think Joyce having sex with Dorothy and being fully present and focused on it is somehow a nail in the coffin for her promise to Joe.
Like, yeah, I’d personally have preferred things get resolved with Joe first, particularly with Dorothy as part of the conversation. But the fact that the two new girlfriends are going to fuck before they dive into the messiness that is the poly discussion doesn’t mean that said discussion isn’t happening.
The COMIC is superimposing a panel of Joyce fucking Dorothy, into this strip about Joe pining after her, with narration from Sarah saying “Joyce chose Dorothy, not you.”
Possibly. You could interpret is the comic superimposing a few panels of Joe on top of Joyce and Dorothy having sex. Also, Sarah has often been very, very wrong about Joyce.
I can see both readings.
Narrative framing aside, person A having sex with person B does not necessarily imply that A’s feelings for C are any less than they were before. People can love multiple people, even romantically and sexually, without that love being any less than it would be if they were monogamous. Honestly, if Willis’s intentions are that this is the nail in the coffin, it’s pretty shitty for this reason. I don’t think he’d do that, though.
It’s very much a question of whether you read this as an authorial statement, which I agree the framing suggests, or as just Sarah giving her personal opinion, with the last panel as basically the punchline.
And remember that Sarah doesn’t even know about the poly suggestion.
Jon – I agree that the comic feels like it is communicating that Joe is gonna get his heart broken. I think I even commented further up, if I were planning on going poly this is not a strip I would write/draw like this. I could conceive of it happening still, and I think if the scene stays with Joe it’s more likely. But. Yes. I think this framing feels very nails in coffin and I’m sad about it.
I am frustrated (and I think a little too aggressively so, sorry Derek for coming in that hot) at the idea that being fully engaged with the moment during intimacy and sex is Joyce doing anything wrong. Joyce has done many things wrong! Joyce has been a huge dick this arc! But having the sex and not worrying about Joe during the sex is really not one of her crimes, even if they’re still going to be together! He proposed poly, your partner doing that is part of how poly works.
I don’t think they are in an open relationship. I think Joe suggested it and then was left hanging.
Also my comment was more about how it sucks for Joe that he’s thinking about her but she’s not thinking about him at all.
Joyce can do what she wants, but I’m not taking her side on anything, I’m taking Joe’s. I’m not happy for Joyce.
Hmm. The poly thing could still happen. It’s not impossible. But I agree with another commenter above; I would not write this specific strip if I was planning on Joyce “returning”. So I won’t be holding my breath.
Hey, on the note of the cheating discourse, I’m having trouble understanding why people are so upset about this specific instance. Like I get that the problem with cheating is deception, but here there wasn’t any? The girls kissed, and then they fessed up and broke up with their boyfriends in a reasonably timely manner. If they had broken up with the boyfriends first and then kissed, then the outcome is the same isn’t it? Either way relationships are over, hearts are broken, but there was no false pretense, no carrying on under a lie.
It’s hard for me to grasp the nuances in these kinds of things because I don’t experience sexual jealousy at all. For me sex isn’t any different from any other activity people might do together for fun, so my partner having sex with a friend carries about as much emotional weight as them playing Street Fighter with a friend. I’m vaguely glad they had a good time, but it’s not really important.
For a lot of people, cheating isn’t just about deception but about betrayal.
And for me specifically, it looks like Joyce’s was a case of premeditated betrayal, given the strips preceding her date with Joe having her go all in on testing the waters with Dorothy (Apparently! The lack of thought bubbles is hell for someone with body language and social cues issues)
To me, Joyce is cheating on Dorothy more than Joe. Joe KNEW that Joyce and Dorothy kissed and let it slide, then offered to be a side piece instead of the #1 boyfriend. Joyce didn’t respond with a yes or a no, so Joe is holding out on that. HOWEVER, because Joyce rather cruelly made Dorothy’s breakup with Walky concrete, going so far as to laugh in Walky’s face when he seemed unfazed by the declaration, Dorothy assumes that Joyce did the same “rip the bandaid off” strategy with Joe. Remembrer- Dotty declared that they BOTH dumped their boyfriends for each other, to which Joyce just shifted around nervously and said “uhhhh…”
Joyce has become a female Scott Pilgrim.
Dotty: You cheated on me? You cheated on both of us?
Joe: You cheated on me with Dotty?
Joyce: No, I cheated on Dotty with… you…
Joe: Is there a difference??
Joyce: You… weren’t wronged?
(Dina appears and stabs Joyce with a cyber-sword)
Dina: Game… over!
Yep, it’s exactly this. And if you asked me who’d be the Scott Pilgrim, it obviously would have been Walky(with… Lucy and Amber probably), not Joyce.
Similar to that, throughout the whole movie the relationship with Ramona is tainted with distractions and infighting until the truth comes out and everyone talks things through. I imagine Joyce’s friends will treat Dotty better than Scott’s friends treated Ramona.
I’d argue that’s a misconception and the problem with cheating is more generally breaking boundaries set by one’s partners.
With the (like it or not, approve of it or not) severe complication that a lot of relationships NEVER EXPLICITLY DISCUSS THOSE BOUNDARIES and simply assume that everyone has the same exact set of culturally-mediated boundaries.
Oh, that actually that makes a lot of sense! For a lot of people Joyce and Dorothy have broken boundaries that seem obvious to them, whereas for others they don’t have those boundaries or don’t consider them important. This in turn gives us the disagreement we’ve been having in the comments section where some people think there’s been a big breach of trust and others don’t think it’s a big deal, and there’s no way to resolve it because the boundaries in question were never actually explicitly discussed, so we only have our preconceptions.
Heya! I can’t offer much in the way of explanation, but I can offer solidarity.
I’ve also never really understood what the big deal was (re: Joyce is now a “horrible person”) because it just isn’t the kind of thing that hits me that way. Joyce and Dorothy weren’t in control of the feelings they developed for each other, and once they developed those it was a matter of time before they figured it out and ended their relationships anyway. A kiss happening three hours before rather than three hours after doesn’t make me bat an eye at all.
I do feel bad for Walky and Joe, because getting broken up with fucking sucks and hurts and I hope they get lots of friends checking in on them both. But I’ve never felt the rage toward Dorothy and Joyce, or even annoyance at how it went down. They’re young and stupid and it doesn’t scandalize me that their timing sucked and they retreated from consequences longer than half an hour.
It wasn’t kind of them, but I will just never view it through the lens that other people seem to where they’re struggling to even give a shit about the characters anymore.
This is q lot of what I was getting at up above. She wasn’t in control of her feelings and I didn’t particularly blame her for discovering them , because what would be the point? We were both hella young, and I guess she didn’t know herself as well as she thought she did when she moved in with me.
I find it kind of weird for people to be getting vastly more upset at fictional teenagers for screwing up one week-long relationships than I did at one screwing up a real life year-long relationship with me
Yeah I totally get you. As for it being weird, meh. I’m very sure people who are massively upset about this think you and I are weird for not seeing the problem. Just different opinions, personal boundaries, and levels of tolerance for things. I’ll never get why this particular situation bugs so many people so much (to the point of rage and personal attacks) but that’s fine.
It was your post Ray that inspired mine! You were making sense and many others weren’t, so I thought it would be good to ask for some clarification. Also thanks Nymph for the solidarity. It’s good to know there are others who feel like the situation is messy but not some kind of betrayal.
Sure, I was giving an example because I didn’t immediately remember all the details of when each thing happened. So I’ll address the specifics: She went to tell him the next day. He’d already seen it in a newspaper that involuntarily outed two queer women, a newspaper she did not consent to be in, so I don’t think it’s reasonable to hold that over her head either tbh.
I understand that for many people this scenario poses a huge moral upset, but I was explaining that (for me) it doesn’t and I’ve never really understood why it’s so heinous to people. I’ve accepted that I’m never going to understand, because it has been explained ad nauseum, and that it’s fine I don’t agree with people on the severity of this kind of thing.
It hadn’t occurred to me until now, but there is another reason to be upset about cheating other than deception. That’s being upset that someone violated the agreed upon set of rules and boundaries in a relationship. Even if there’s no deception, breaking rules you’ve agreed upon is bad.
Since we have no on panel discussion of such rules between Joe and Joyce, I think people are projecting their own default expectations. For you and me, there are no default expectations. Until there have been explicit rules made, it’s impossible to break any rules. So the worst you can say is that the order of operations was messy, since full disclosure beforehand is preferable, but there’s no serious harm or foul unless there’s some kind of serious deception.
However, many assume standard social expectations of sexual and romantic monogamy. So for them, a lack of clear rules means the rules are “never do anything remotely romantic or sexual with anyone else.” Based on those rules, Joyce did break a rule, which is grounds to be upset.
I don’t think that’s a fair set of expectations to project onto Joyce and Joe’s relationship, especially since it’s been very clear that Joe did not expect monogamy and actually wanted the opposite. However, that is the lens people are applying. And damn, what a depressing way to view the world and love… It puts such huge limits on how one can understand love. Amatonormativity sucks.
Yeah; “cheating is bad” is a tautology, but not all bad things are equally bad. I’d argue that there’s an enormous moral gulf between a sustained, intentional infidelity on one hand, and “serial monogamy but someone forgot to file the proper paperwork at the correct time” on the other.
Two close friends realized they’ve been in love for their entire adult lives after kissing in the heat of a literal life-or-death situation and went to break up with their week-long partners the very next morning. *Plus* the friends had very justifiably believed the other to have an incompatible orientation prior to the epiphany, *plus* the life-or-death situation only happened because they were suppressing their attraction in deference to existing relationships. On the cheating spectrum, that’s so far on the understandable side that it could be seen as a bit too tidy narratively.
Some people got hurt. But if they had suppressed this for a few more months, those same people would have gotten hurt eventually, likely even more so. And if they had suppressed this forever, Joyce and Dorothy would be the ones who got hurt. If they had done everything the right way -realized their attraction, broke up with their boyfriends, and then waited a socially-acceptable amount of time before starting a relationship- those same people would have still gotten hurt. The path to finding someone special enough to spend years with is not always a straight line. It’s true for Joyce and Dorothy, it was true for Becky, and it will be true for Joe and Walky.
I think actually this isn’t really the case, though!
If we presume Joe’s offer of poly is genuine or at least genuinely meant, then we can also assume that his pre-Kiss attempts to nudge Joyce and Dorothy together were meant to pre-empt the whole situation by getting it out in the open. It seems to be relatively obvious that if Joe had shown up to pick up Joyce that date night and the two ladies had said something more like “Actually, Joe, you were right and we are actually kinda into each other”, they could have had a halfway decent discussion about poly or not and then moved along either way with much less potential for hurt feelings. Joe would get to keep his complete trust and friendship with Joyce and get some good feelings for successfully helping friends realize something and navigating it well, Dorothy might actually respect him more, Joyce wouldn’t be in the position where she feels like she HAS to make a hard choice, etc.
Instead we now have a Joe who’s clinging to an increasingly dire hope and telling himself that it’s worth it somehow while Sarah of all people pushes sympathy at him.
Sure, the Dorothy and Walky situation would still have been complicated, but TBH Dorothy’s treated him like a convenient ambulatory sex doll before and as such I was NEVER of the opinion that their latest romantic collision would end in any way that made Walky feel good.
Let’s be frank – Dorothy has treated Walky like crap even before all of this and things between them were never going to end well as long as she kept up her routine of realizing she treats him unfairly, chastising herself for it, and then doing nothing to change her behavior.
Would like to see this actually adressed in the story soon!
“If they had broken up with the boyfriends first and then kissed, then the outcome is the same isn’t it?”
I think this is the key about why people are very upset and maybe why you don’t understand. (and I’m not judging you for not understanding, everyone has different standards and approaches to relationships)
for a lot of people breaking off the currently relationship before starting the new one makes all the difference in the world. It’s about respecting your partner as a person and keeping them informed about things that affect them (like your relationship!!)
the difference between cheating and consensual healthy polyamory is clear communication and consent from all parties involved.
OTGH, they’re right that is basically about as mild as cheating can get. Which for me makes this even more frustrating. It was mild. It doesn’t need a grandiose reaction or a feud that tears the entire dorm apart as people choose sides.
Just one of the boys going, to steal from Raidah way back when:”a) fuck you and b) whoops, guess I deserved better all along.” I think that would have satisfied a lot of us.
To be clear, I do think that as a rule people should break off any existing relationship before doing anything that would invalidate that relationship, that’s just good sense. However, Joyce and Dorothy got caught up by a swell of emotion in the heat of the moment, and to me it seems unreasonable to expect the girls in that circumstance to put their feelings aside and go file the requisite paperwork before having their kiss. The whole time they have been trying to be honest, to themselves and to their boyfriends, and so I feel like they have acted in good faith even though the circumstances have not allowed an ideal order of operations.
I don’t think there’s been such a moment when I’ve been moved to post a whole bloody song…..
But I think this encapsulates it all…. Goddamit.
If time were not a moving thing
And I could make it stay,
This hour of love we share
Would always be.
There’d be no coming day
To shine a morning light –
make us realize our night
is over
When you walk away from me
There is no place to put my hand
Except to shade my eyes against the sun
That rises over land
I watch you walk away
Somehow I have to let you go
Now it’s over
If you knew just how I really feel
You might return and yet
There are so many times
That people have to love and then forget
There might have been a way
somehow I have to force myself
to say it’s over
So I turn my back
I turn my collar to the wind
I move along in silence
Trying not to think at all
I set my feet before me
Walk the silent street before me
‘Cos it’s over
It’s over….
I think Joe is banking on Joyce wanting a polycule so she can date both him and Dorothy (given Joyce ended up giving Joe a BJ instead of flat-out breaking up with him.) BUT, given that Dotty despises Joe, I think ultimately she’ll feel betrayed that Joyce didn’t break up with him (unlike her, where Joyce told Walky straight up that his relationship with Dotty is over and then laughed in his face.) and create an ultimatum- her or Joe. I’m fairly confident that Joyce will pick Dorothy, but lose pretty much every other friend she has because of her decision.
But, hey, all you need is one girlfriend, right? It worked out with Zii and Didi in the Canadian comic “Menage a 3,” so why not now?
That would be satisfying at least. I’d like to see Joyce and Dorothy having burnt all the bridges around themselves, and eventually have a moment of clarity about how everybody now thinks about them.
I doubt, very sincerely, that the main character of a college/relationship drama is going to lose every other friend she has (i.e. connections to all the other main characters in the story). Or, if she does, it’ll be suuuuper temporary.
Um… Given the fact that pretty much everyone other than Walky, Becky, Dina, Sarah, and sort of Raidah have been cheering them on and congratulating them, I seriously doubt Joyce choosing Dorothy given an ultimatum would burn many bridges.
Honestly, the only person with any on-panel stake in Joyce/Joe is Sarah. Walky is probably the opposite where he’d be more upset with a polycule he was excluded from than a simple matter of both him and Joe getting dumped.
I immediately thought of Amber when you said everyone was cheering them on. Amber DID encourage Dotty to be more aggressive when wooing her crush, but in the most recent strip she is showing signs of guilt because Dotty and Joyce blew up everything around them to be together and Becky and to a lesser extent Dina were collateral damage.
I mean I think she also feels guilty because Booster asked her if she helped Dorothy send the cleavage pic as part of a Machiavellian plot to get Walky for herself again.
Oh the comments, the comments!!!!
TIL that soft serve is ice cream. Full of chemicals.
Yesterday I said “OK, so Mac n cheese comes out of a packet if you are a student, but if your mom makes it, she starts from scratch right?” YIL Mac n cheese comes out of a packet.
Thank you to the people who pointed out that people wanted Karma because this is fiction. I learn somethng new every day.
It’s a pity I have to wade thru so much swamp to find it, so much same ol mud, but that’s life, I guess.
Speaking as someone who still is rooting for a triad, I am of a mind to caution everyone to remember that this is not a genre that really has ‘endgame’ ships in the way that It’s Walky (Sci-Fi epic) & Shortpacked (workplace comedy/pop-culture commentary) do.
No matter which ships win out in the short term, the very structure of an ongoing slice of life/coming of age series like this will inevitably mean that the common currency of shifting relationships will continue to rotate. They may cycle back around, but they cannot be held in amber (much as she might wish >.>) for the rest of the strips run.
That said, I’m canvasing for Fuckpile 2044. Let them get ahead of the game on the ‘disappear into the wilderness & form a commune’ phase of the countercultural revolution. Joyce can be cult leader and be horrified when someone suggests that she has to form an actual Dogma.
Oh can I have a link to that quote? I know they talked about how the kiss was a wedding, but marriages end so I didn’t take that as a tacit “they are endgame” so much as “they are ferally devoted to one another”. I’d be so interested to know if they truly are just set in stone now.
No one I’ve talked to has been able to offer a source so far. AFAICT, it’s an extrapolation from Willis commenting on “wedding imagery” in the protest scene, which yeah, I also do not in any way take as “they will never break up”, because a.) it was not a literal wedding, b.) literal marriages aren’t permanent either.
Man I know the world doesn’t work this way and Karmas just a nice idea but this just makes me hope Joe’s got a win coming somewhere in the near future.
The world doesn’t, but stories very often do. As this isn’t real life at all, I think hoping for a win for Joe after such a big loss is more than reasonable.
It would be a quick repeat, but this is almost what just happened with Lucy and Walky – Lucy definitely upgraded right after that heartbreak, and fast.
As much as I like the Joyce/Dorothy couple and its cuteness/lewdness, I do still feel really bad for Joe, given that the concept of a polycule between Joyce, Dorothy and him is looking less and less likely by the minute…
The market opens to uncertainty as Sarah pours cold water on the chances polyamory. Sarah’s established pessimism produces a confused and unstable response as investors are unable to determine whether she should be considered reliable in this strip; cut-away to blonde girls boinking further confuses the market. Stocks are highly volatile; invest at your own risk.
This is interesting because technically this strip really adds no new information that makes poly less likely. It’s really just Joe is waiting and they’re having sex now, all of which we already knew.
Sarah doesn’t even know about the possibility of poly having been raised, so she’s just saying “No, she’s serious about Dorothy. They’re doing it right now. She’s not leaving her to return to you.”
But it still seems to shift the vibes. Is this meant as an authorial comment on the chances? Or is it just Sarah’s mistaken assessment?
It feels like it. Like I think the fact that no new information is added here combined with the framing of cutting to the girls makes this feel like a strip that’s telling us about the narrative.
My one like. Grain of hope really stems from I don’t think Sarah is aware polyamory is proposed and I could see this be a tension building move in relation to that, reminding a reader (bc let’s remember Willis did not write these looking at the comments section) that Joe is still a loose thread hanging over the Joyce Dorothy relationship and everything isn’t quite so fuzzy and beautiful as it’s looked. Obviously the commenters have absolutely not forgotten that shit, but I could see as a writer shifting focus for a long time, repeatedly emphasizing how in love they are, and then reminding the audience they should be worried.
To me, Sarah’s line is kind of giving the same vibes as Sarah saying “You’re a good kid. I’ll be sad when the world breaks you.”
I could be wrong, but I’m interpreting this strip as a reminder that Joe is still in the picture while contrasting his selfless love and hope it’ll be reciprocated with Sarah’s cynicism.
Yeah I’d go with that one. Poly doesn’t have to be everyone into everyone equally but
Dorothy and Joe both 100% on Joyce and Joyce being like 90/10 Dorothy/Joe just isn’t a set up that’s all that likely to be stable/healthy especially for people this inexperienced.
Joyce being 90/10 on Dorothy/Joe feels uncharitable. It’s not a 50/50 split by any means but I’d put it more in the range of 60/40, or 70/30 at worst. She cares a lot about Joe and is really into him… when he’s in front of her.
Yeah, I don’t think in-universe it’s clear at all how Joyce splits on these two, given the circumstances and Joyce’s particular proclivities with regard to romance and the storyline of her own life.
However! I think, out-of-universe, it’s somewhat closer to what Opinion says, based on every scrap of commentary from Willis I’ve seen.
My true sicko take is I want Joe to somehow end up in the Mandy/Sierra/ grace polycule as a walkyverse referencr but instead of it just being nonstop fucking like was implicit in that comic he just a big emotionally supportive teddy bear that the genuinely like having around.
To be perfectly frank, this is the most I’ve been into the comic in awhile. It’s HONEST, yes, it sucks for Joe and what not, but like….this stuff happens, long lasting loving relationships have been built on someone cheating on someone else. And a lot of times, especially in college, the cheatee eventually moves on. These are very very young adults, literally not even old enough to drink. They are literally FUCKING IDIOTS WHO WILL MAKE SO MANY MISTAKES. MISTAKES WORSE THAN THIS. And maybe it’s because I’ve moved from a dumbass 19 year old myself when the comic began to someone who is pushing 35, but I don’t get why people are so….I don’t even know, upset? Cynical? Acting this plot point in a comic justifies their weird “the world is terrible” mindset?
So much truth. I’ve really enjoyed the arc. It’s unfortunate that my excitement lead me to want to discuss it, leading me to the comments section only to find out that it’s a quagmire filled with haters.
Like, people can make mistakes and still be lovable. Sometimes people’s mistakes and flaws are why they’re lovable.
These characters are so very real, and their messiness is a huge part of that. Let the characters be messy. Let them learn, grow, make more mistakes, and repeat.
This arc would have been so much more boring if it would have been a clean, diplomatic shift from Joe/Joyce and Walky/Dorothy to Dorothy/Joyce or even Dorothy/Joyce/Joe. This messiness is so much more interesting and makes the characters much more relatable and real.
I think the issue is its messy in some ways and way too clean in others. If it’s gonna be a mess I want it messier. If it’s gonna be clean I want it cleaner.
This, right here, that’s where I’m at. It doesn’t FEEL messy at all, because so far none of the mess is actually sticking to the mess-makers.
And to go back to Liarock411’s post, Joyce and Dorothy may be fucking idiots who make so many mistakes, but why then are so many of the rest of the cast mostly being pretty adult and understanding about it instead of ALSO reacting like fucking teenage idiots and exploding in turn?
If willis wanted to write a cheating arc he forgot to add the drama involved in a cheating arc. This arc has actually been so fucking bland outside of Joyce and Dorothy just being gay
Which in and of itself isnt an interesting concept to me? Like, two people being gay with each other and just constantly flaunting their love (to me) cant carry an entire arc
Had no way to predict how this poll would go. QC got 1st place so far? Huh. I’m just here for the donuts. (really like the slipshine too)
Why are you here?
refreshing the page every five minutes to see if there’s a Slipshine (19%, 585 Votes)
trying to scrub off the scarlett letter on my monitor i tried to sharpie joyce with (5%, 168 Votes)
shit i thought this was questionable content, where am i (33%, 1,006 Votes)
i was told there’d be donuts (23%, 714 Votes)
if i stare hard enough at today’s strip it might turn into one about billie and ruth (19%, 595 Votes)
Total Voters: 3,068
That’s a distinction without a difference to the point Acebender was making, honestly. The only difference between a loft and a bunk is if it’s a desk or another bed underneath.
The one time I got up to funny business in a college loft I was struck by how cramped it was once we had finished up the hanky-panky and tried to actually sleep.
Heh, and now I’m having dumb memories about how cuddling in the loft to sleep was pretty okay when I was a 6′ ~190lbs nerd entering college, but significantly more fraught by the end of college when I was a 270lb weightlifter with a linebacker build — especially since one of the ladies I dated was 6’4″ and 250+ herself. (and a black belt, on top of that. Everyone should date a lady who could COMPREHENSIVELY kick their ass at least once, IMHO)
(thankfully, my dad, with more foresight than I’d’ve credited for a no-hankypanky-before-marriage Catholic, custom-built me a loft+desk frame where the corners were an L-bracket made out of 2x6s — we could’ve had an entire orgy up there and not collapsed it.)
Yeah, this was some (in hindsight) ill-advised activities around 2nd base with a woman I had been nursing a crush on for a couple of years when she was in the process of breaking up with a boyfriend.
She proceeded to ghost me and the one other person I stayed in touch with about a year after I graduated for no reason that we could discern.
In a funny coincidence, someone else in that friend group that I very much did *not* stay in touch with turns out to have gone to high school with my current gf. My girlfriend asked me one day how I knew someone I hadn’t thought about in years and I had to dig deep to remember lol
Joyce, at seventy: “It was wonderful! And at the same time I can’t change the fact that I hurt the young man.”
Regrets are seldom pure; they are often mixed with the memory of joy so you don’t know how to feel about either. Although Willis isn’t getting a lot of support on this storyline, it rings true to me. Viewed through the clutter of my own dumb choices, driven by fundamentalism and undiagnosed autism.
If you love someone you set them free because otherwise your love is just a prison. There wasn’t much Joe could have done to prevent this. Maybe delay but not prevent. Once Dorothy said no to transferring this was gonna happen. Both story logic and teen hormone logic.
Can’t say imagine this will end up poly. It would eat up all the storyline to create a giant fuckpile.
Yeah, I think the phrase “if you love someone, set them free” is sorta creepy, because it implies it’s up to you to decide if they’re free or not. Love shouldn’t be chains.
I definitely feel like it’s more like…breaking a social contract? Like usually I hear this used more for a metaphor for like a pet or something but in the confines of a relationship I guess it’s more “I want you to be able to do what you’d want to do if you didn’t feel obligated to fulfill some version of monogamy with me.” Less of a “setting you free from my own confinement” and moreso setting you free of the social contract of a monogamous western relationship?
I mean, isn’t the whole idiom something like “If you love something, set it free and see if it comes back to you”?
I always interpreted it as “the person I love will, given the freedom to choose anyone in the world, choose me every time because they love me back.”
It’s very much an idiom that’s steeped in monogamy in that monogamy presumes that said choice needs to be made, but in that context I think there’s something worthwhile there. Certainly I continue to appreciate how much my SO thinks of me compared to so many other people out there.
I agree. I think a lotta people just get a bit turned off by how a lot of romantic language tends to be kinda possessive in nature. Mostly due to how a lot of patriarchal and abusive relationships have functioned historically. I can see why many people hear things like “set free” or “she’s yours” and think “ok so do you own this person?”
So much romantic language sounds like the most beautiful, wonderful thing you’ve ever heard when it’s being said to you by someone you adore, and the creepiest most off-putting bullshit in the world in any other context.
Yeah, now that we’re at the getting busy part of the Doyce relationship (I know people like using Joyrothy, but I just like the sound of Doyce, and it really does fit the feeling of their relationship for me), I’m ready to move on to other things – and I think that Joe is in prime position to do some growing and changing, which I am here for! Let’s give the girls some time to (lose their) breath, and give someone else the spotlight for a bit.
Even though he does it with a platitude, this is the first Joe has admitted to another person that he loves Joyce. I don’t think Joyce even knows it. Came close to it with Jocelyne by agreeing that he’s “…got it bad”.
Not quite what I had in mind when I asked to go somewhere else yesterday, but I’ll still take this. Head pats for Joe and hope he can find someone who knows what they would be missing out on.
I buy that Joe is in love with Joyce. I am obligated to accept that Dorothy and Joyce are in love with each other because the strip continues to insist that that’s what it is. I would find it more convincing if the ratio of romantic affection to blatantly impatient to fuck was skewed a little more in one direction. Hopefully post-nut clarity will help with this.
Lit last night I had this huge wall post talking about Joe and Sarah and how I know how much pain Joe must be going through and that’s why I cant stand doyce and yadda yadda.
But no, that doesn’t get posted, my snarky comment after reading comment chains basically going “lol get fucked people who think this is poorly handled” does.
Genuinely thought Willis like, banned me or something I was so genuinely sad. I’ve been replying to people endlessly hoping one of my comments would go through 😭
The discussions in the comments are 2/3rds the reason I read the comic atm as my feelings on this arc and how its being handled are pretty plain haha
Fuck Joyce for literally all of this. Idc what anyone says this is a pure fucking douchebag move to Joe AND Dorothy. No. She didn’t have to immediately fuck her new girlfriemd before actually properly breaking up with Joe and I really cant wait to read the next few pages between Sarah and Joe.
I don’t think he’s gonna backslids but I definitely think we’re about to see Joe at his lowest in terms of emotional stability. God I’M just glad we’re finally getting to something that isnt these two just smashing their faces together (metaphorically) for page after page.
My new hope is Joyce and Joe have a heart to heart after this and Joyce starts feeling like shit over this all but given how selfish she’s been this whole arc i doubt it
This is wonderfully written in terms of realism. It heart-breaking to see Joe and Joyce both evolve so dramatically from their original forms that they are as diametrically opposite as they were at the start of the strip. It’s hard not to feel anger at Joyce as she is the cause of the pain. And it’s hard not to justify that anger as she moved across Joe’s feeling so quickly without much consideration for the damage. She is doing nothing wrong – and yet what she is doing is very hurtful – and that fact that she gave Joe a blowjob probably less than 12 hours before this and then ran away without seeing things to the point of closure (while still prioritizing another over Joe) hasn’t helped.
Joyce is a very realistic portrayal of a low-grade narcissist with deep empathic tendencies – she cares, but she doesn’t give much weight or attention to anything outside of her worldview or personal needs for very long.
But that’s people. Joe and Joyce are very compatible people who are not in sync with each other at all. Joe needed to be this Joe months ago, and for Joyce to accept being with him she needed to be her current Joyce months ago – but that would lead to her not really wanting Joe. Because this version of Joyce doesn’t really want him. She never really did – she just really believed she did. And that’s not her fault. Or Joe’s fault. Or Dorothy’s fault. But you can still have no-fault and tremendous injury.
I’d argue she’s doing a ton wrong, it’s just the actual relationship with Dorothy isn’t a part of it, only a symptom of it.
You can have no fault and tremendous injury, but this is definitely Joyces fault. The way she’s handled all of this just goes to show how selfish she is. She cares more about not being hurt herself (I.E. not breaking up with Joe the first time) than she does hurting others (I.E. leaving this boy on read to go have sex with her new partner)
Maybe. But either way it rings very real and very human. The fact that the dynamics are producing such polarized and such emotional responses is a strength to the story and characters. Good characters are interesting and they make you feel – but they don’t always make you feel good.
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Sorry dude, but it looks like the Joementum has been Rosenstalled
nailed it! XD
(only those who’ve read the slipshine will know why this is so funny)
What’s funny is that I actually haven’t read the Slipshine yet !!!
oh no I was talking about “nailed it” XD
OH bet ok, genuinely thought I was a part of some kind of insane cosmic coincidence for a second there, lol
Filefilefilefilefilefilefilefilefile
meanwhile dotty doing research…this was hilarious
Those who have read Something Positive will find it funny for possibly different reasons.
Oh Jesus! 😉
This pun…. I don’t know what to say.
WARNING! WARNING! SLIPSHINE IS LEAKING! I REPEAT…
But then… “rocks fall and everyone dies” (except Carla) so it ends okay?
Coming next week: David’s NEW comic: “It’s Carla!”
Carla wandering the rock-covered wasteland that once was the Indiana University campus: “dammit, what’s the point of being so great if nobody’s around to witness it?”
See? You get it! It’s sure to be David’s next big hit!
Carla is great. Carla rebuilds the university. With the sheer abundance of new building material. All new freshmen (stolen from other campuses). All new cast!
Dumbing of Age: School of Rock!
Ah, the Devilman ending where one character is literally the last person on Earth… I dig it!
Oh that’s beautiful.
……..
……… yes.
It’s Joever.
You’re a poet.
It is rather Poetic
I wonder how Joe feels about this? Trusting Joyce that is. Seems like he should’ve listened to me.
+1
“They’re not out yet.”
Big sad.
Oh boy. I don’t think the containment thread is gonna work this time.
Tread lightly, folks. See you on the other side.
No, wait! Please!!
I have rage and despair! Don’t leave me writhing alone!
Ultimately we’re all just looking for someone we can writhe with.
My hater energy, I can feel it being released!
DOWN WITH DOYCE! I HOPE THEY GROW TO HATE EACH OTHER BUT GET STUCK IN AN UNHAPPY MARRIAGE NEITHER WANTS TO BE THE ONW TO END! (Over exaggerating as a joke plz no kill me)
The fact that Sarah is the one offering Joe emotional support is so insane to me. He seriously deserves so much better
She may be trying to offer emotional support, but I’m not sure I would say that’s what she’s actually doing.
She’s trying to, but as we’ve seen/known for a long time now, “emotional” is not her forte.
Judging from his reaction, I think Joe realizes that she’s doing her best (bad as that may be)
This is hard to explain, but I think that emotionally intelligent people know what level of support and what expression of support to expect from the people around them. While Sarah is not the person you’d expect to be offering any kind of aid in this situation, she’s the one there, and she can only be sincere. I think Joe appreciates her in the moment.
She’s trying, and sometimes being real with someone is a kindness. He’s holding out hope for something that’s not gonna happen. Better to deal with it sooner than later.
He deserves friends who care about him and don’t just assume the worst all the time. Hopefully Sarah can be the first.
A college guy? Having close male friendships?
Let’s try to focus on more believable things. Like Galasso/Mary, for instance
I will be shocked if Danny doesn’t chew Dorothy out over backstabbing his best friend, especially after she approached him and effectively asked for permission to do so.
I’m less interested in “Danny chews out Dorothy” now and much, much more interested in “Danny and Joe have a serious talk about the whole situation”. Getting 2-3 strips of a non-toxic male friendship hashing out some stuff out of all this is one of the possible outcomes that’d make enduring all the DoJo Twee worth it for me.
Honestly I don’t want Danny to chew Dorothy out simply because Danny having an excuse to be self-righteous is Danny at her worst. At most I’d want Danny to make a sharp passing comment to Dorothy.
Think you’re jumping the pronoun gun a tad there, my friend. =P
I have an agenda to push and I will stop at nothing to push it.
Isn’t that a Salt-N-Pepa song?
I fear I only know that song from the Geico commercials that used it for nostalgia pandering… which does give an idea of the age gap between us.
Lord, yes, I am an Old.
Oh god I’m catching strays. I’m not old I’m not ooollld
She has a boyfriend, right? I mean, clearly that’s not going stop people as we’ve just seen but for some reason I’m on board for a Sarah/Joe…thing. If for no other reason than I’m a goblin and want to see the ranting that would ensue.
Sarah’s seeing Tony, yes.
Joe!Beatrice or Joe!Rachel when?
Ugh, more like No!Rachel, amirite?
Honestly I am beginning to feel like Joe just dodged a bullet.
her providing emotional support is an example of her growth, much how Joe’s handling of this also is an example of his growth.
🙁
Yeah I think at this point it should be clear that Joe isnt 100% on board with the poly suggestion and just suggested it as a way for him to not lose Joyce
I’m a bit sad. It was kinda nice to see some poly representation, especially since my couple became a polycule (It was insane timing too, I felt targeted) but it would have been nice to have one in the main cast
if you don’t want willis targeting your personal life you need to close your curtains more
disagree, I think he’s just sad because Joyce didn’t say yes to his poly suggestion. Sarah of course doesn’t believe Joyce could ever be poly, but Joe had some hope for it. Probably still has some hope for it. I know I do.
I also still have hope for it. Not much time has occurred in the comic since he suggested it. Sarah is phrasing things like she has confirmation from Joyce, perhaps not intentionally, but she doesn’t have that. Until more comic-world time has passed I’m holding out hope.
I don’t think Sarah has the first idea that poly is even on the table. She hasn’t talked to Joyce since Joe and Joyce talked early, nor has she talked to Joe on panel either.
She knew Joyce and Dorothy were hooking up and that they were hiding it, so she yelled at them about telling their boyfriends, then she came back to find the newspaper on the doorknob. If I was her, I’d be reading Joe as hoping that Joyce would reject Dorothy and come back to him. That’s what she’s shooting down.
First time Joe’s admitted he’s in love with Joyce? Poor guy can’t make things work with her in any universe, I guess. At least this time it’s not his fault.
As far as I recall…in the commentary for It’s Walky, Willis talked about realizing mid-story that Joe and Joyce had such incredible chemistry and they were loads of fun to write. They were SO fun to write in fact, that Willis intentionally separated them because they were “getting in the way” of the “true” pairing of Walky and Joyce.
Time is a flat circle
Can’t speak for others, but that was my rationale for cheering them on. While Dorothy and Joyce may have been in the works for a while now, I’ve been wanting to see the chemistry of Joe/Joyce since the Roomies days play out. It was fun, for the time we got
And then he did it again here for the “true” pairing of Joyce and Dorothy. 🙂
You think there should have been a healthy platonic female friendship here? Don’t talk crazy.
I didn’t say that.
I now live in fear of the hypothetical *third* webcomic timeline where these two get shafted in favor of the endgame ship
One of my fav polls in DOA memory. Is there a collection of the past ones anywhere?
Where is Marten anyway? Haven’t seen him or Pintsize in weeks
He’s gone to Cuuuubetown in a luleelurah
In sugar he’s goin’ down swingin’
He’ll beer another one with a bullet
A lonely dark codpiece, cock it and pull it
that was physically painful
To find the archive of polls. after voting look for the red link in the lower left of the poll results. The link that says Polls Archive.
Marten was the focus of a run of strips where he had to talk Claire into going to bed, then go handle Liz (who had gotten hold of booze, and was texting Marten pictures of peanut butter because she thought it was his fetish), then make his way home and wake up with a hangover.
you really must not be checking the site then…
Yep. I only just found them!
They’re here:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/pollsarchive
Awe, now I REALLY cant help but feel bad for Joe. ;-;
And like, to be fair there’s a perfectly valid reason someone in the main cast was gonna be cheated eventually.
From Willis’ Tumblr:
i think a few years ago, my wife pointblank asked me, “hey… none of your college characters have never ever cheated, have they” and I thought, nope, none of ’em
i write… completely wonderful perfect college freshmen who’ve never had a messy terrible end to a relationship
even asher, who, as walky points out early on, is “villain-coded,” makes absolutely double-sure his relationship with jennifer is over before agreeing to make out with ethan even a little
everybody always in my strip makes sure to give every relationship’s end its due diligence, to exhaustive ends, to the point that lucy has to throw shade at walky for waiting a handful of days after getting dumped before moving on, because THAT is where the narrative has set the moral event horizon
and at some point, i’m like
let freshmen be freshmen
they’re horny idiots
…and like, totally VALID.
but imma be real here, of ALL the ways to make these college freshman more realistic this way, having it done to Joe for Joyce X Dorothy to happen in particular was… probably not the best decision.
besides giving into the “cheating bi” stereotype (which is it’s own can of worms I ain’t gonna get into here),
Joyce X Joe had some pretty damn good chemistry! for all that development to be thrown under the rug for Joyce X Dorothy to have the spotlight faster is not only disappointing for Joe’s sake but like…. unusually wasteful?
imma let Willis cook as usual, but poly or no poly, for Joe to be left out of the picture *completely* would be pretty sad :
(I think a more pressing matter, as I’ve said elsewhere, is that Joyce and Dorothy were the exact wrong pairing to have get together by cheating on their partners. A lot of folks just are never going to buy into what is meant to be one of the central relationships of the series because of the circumstances under which they started dating.
yeah that’s somethin too
I get that neither of them are supposed to be THAT like-able (as far as I can tell in the comic as a whole), but yeah this really yucks up what I can only assume is an end-game ship which was supposed to be this Mega Huge Huge Payoff that was hinted at across the entire comic
for these college freshmen to have messier ends to relationships for them to be more realistic was a good idea ON PAPER, but like
for it to happen to make Dorothy X Joyce of ALL couples was just world record in bad timing X-X
Now I see the relationship as less of a cute couple and more of a Quarantine. By dating each other they’ve now saved anyone else from dating them.
quarantined… because they’re love-sick :p
(last pun for tonight, I SWEAR)
You ended with a good one.
Unfortunate, but at least if that should be your final pun, it was a fantastic one.
I totally agree with this. It just felt very unnatural, imo. Like the hand of the plot came in and forced things along. Hell, I feel like the cheating still could’ve been there, but we went from cheating to relationship in under 24 hrs. Joyce and Dorothy should’ve walked back the kiss and suppressed things just a little longer. That way you have your cheating (and a really good tangible powder keg to blow up Joeyce) but can still see one story arc play through a little while longer while building cracks.
Like, I’ve never met someone who cheats in a *happy* relationship without being morally bankrupt. Unhappy ones, yeah people cheat in those all the time without it meaning anything, but we weren’t given any signs of that. Hell, I’ll be honest, I feel like Walky cheating on Dorothy with Amber might’ve been slightly more broadcasted and way easier to believe than Joyce losing all object permanence.
But it is what it is, it’s here and that specific arc is almost over. Maybe I’ll get some Sarah/Joe out of it eventually, who knows.
“Without it meaning anything” being: the circumstances of the relationship are so wobbly and fricked that I can’t make a blanket judgment because one person trying to escape abuse is another person losing discretion over resentment, etc. etc. basically just “Not Really What Happened Here Actually”
I think I could have gotten behind Walky cheating on Dorothy with Amber.
Booster already claimed that Amber was trying to end their relationship so she could get with him.
It would have the added flavor of Dorothy and Amber being his shoulder Angel and devil, with one making him want to do better while the other making him want to wallow in his baser urges.
Only it wouldn’t be that black and white because Dorothy had encouraged him to quit Lucy for her while Amber and AG could go back and forth over the morality of the cheating.
Walky could be undecided on what he would do and if he should tell, causing him to talk to Sal, to Jennifer, to Booster, to Joe (it’s possible that Walky is unaware of Joe’s views on cheating).
Walky could “justify” the cheating by claiming he thought Dorothy wasn’t serious about him and/or realized she was into Joyce like Joe did.
The commenters could still have their paladins vs sickos arguments (not that it would necessarily be a good thing), with the added bonus of the “See! Walky never really felt anything for Lucy which is why he could resist her, but not Amber” people.
I think there could have been a lot of potential for “Walky the cheater”.
God now I really really wish this had happened.
It’s a good idea on paper but the comments are so uncharitable to Wally on a good day that I shudder to think how they’d tear him apart in this scenario.
If walky has 100 fans I’m one of them
If Walky has 1 fan I’m one of them
If Walky has 0 fans it means I am dead.
You and me both!
Joyce is a terrible person. Dorothy is in the midst of a catastrophic psychological breakdown as a result of attempting to live altruistically at all times forever, and her experiencing regressing to impulse is more understandable. But Joyce has always reasoned emotionally about all things, using emotions as a justification for believing whatever felt right to believe. At the beginning of the comic this served her well, because she had been removed from an environment of constant indoctrination in which believing the wrong things made you a bad person who was going to hell, and put in an environment of reasonable and sympathetic people who were mostly grounded in reality, and her *emotions* led her to gradually align herself with those people around her over her upbringing. But Joyce actually lacks any rational moral center of her own besides her raw empathy; she’ll reshape herself to believe whatever best supports the emotions she is experiencing in the moment.
Joyce and Dorothy is a great ship, actually, *because* Dorothy is all rational moral center and no empathy, even for herself, and Joyce is all empathy and no rational morality. I think it’s even a better ship than Joyce and Joe, and that’s saying something! The problem is as told it’s an awful story. Joe’s arc has been fantastic, better than either Joyce or Dorothy’s arcs during the time when it has been featured, and this development is dramatically derailing it and retroactively undercutting it. Joe had this whole thing about “If I stay immature, nobody really gets hurt.” That’s what he was fighting to overcome, and that’s what Joyce has embraced. Joyce cheating on him is the *anti-thesis* of Joe’s entire arc. Now, if you were writing a story about Joe and made this the pivotal point of despair and had him struggle to rebuild with people acknowledging the depth of betrayal, that could still be a great story! But that’s not what Willis is writing- Willis is writing a victory lap for his girl-on-girl OTP.
A weakness of the Joyce and Joe relationship was that it was frankly a lot better for Joe’s personal and character development than it was for Joyce. Joe was doing all the work trying to become a better person; Joyce was just trying to embrace being horny. It was asymmetrical. It would be nice if Joyce eventually tried to get on Joe’s level, but I don’t think she has the temperament for it- she is an emotionally driven creature, and it’s hard to imagine a mature Joyce who acts better because she believes in ideas rather than because she doesn’t want to feel bad in the moment for being seen by others as a bad person.
honestly, you might be right,
Joe X Joyce seemed destined to end eventually, it’s just HOW it ended that really stifled the appetite I can only guess we were supposed to have for Joyce X Dorothy :/
Good comment.
Too me it just feels like going way too far in the opposite direction, from “cheating is so horrible you shouldn’t even write fictional stories about it” to “cheating is fine actually and if this makes you dislike Joyce and Dorothy then you’re the weird one”
I think it’s a certain group of commenters that’s responsible for that attitude more than the comic itself…
Look at the polls, the author isn’t exactly not taking a side.
Yeah, ‘If you don’t like the way I shoehorned my OTP through several other, more interesting, storylines, you’re actually the same as the Puritanical villagers from The Scarlet Letter’ is one of the takes of all time
Wait, we’re supposed to take the polls seriously?
Anyway, there’s also only one answer for people who are into DoJo, but two for people who aren’t fans (as long as said non-fans prefer Ruth and Billifer).
IDK if it’s serious, I just don’t think you can say Willis doesn’t have a horse in this race.
Well, no, it’s a joke. You can look at who or what the joke aims at, though. Willis is and has been making fun of weird bigots reading their comic regularly – I presume this just hits different because people feel like they’re compared to or lumped in with those people (and they do exist!) for not enjoying the storyline or the couple (possible without being a bigot!). Though I would say it’s not worth getting mad about. This is a really annoying thing to say, but you don’t have to care? That’s just Willis’ opinion (or joke. Again, not being fully genuine).
that’s a general you by the way not a deliverything you. who doesn’t sound like they gaf, that’s the right attitude
I mean, that’s my suspicion — the poll is aimed at bigots and causing splash damage to mere anti-shippers.
Willis made a bsky comment about how it does bother him that some folks find Dorothy/Joyce bland or boring, and I do notice the polls rarely poke fun at THAT opinion specifically.
Well hopefully that spurs them to make them more interesting, lol. I want to like them together! I’m a dyke! I like when girls kiss! You just gotta give me some meat and I’ll tear in! It’s gotta be filling, though. So far they’re just finger food.
Personally, I have nothing against Joyce/Dorothy as a theoretical couple.
The way it was made practical, however, (and the way that the author has been responding to criticism) has had me go from reading the comic first thing every morning to this being the first time I’ve gone ‘Oh yeah, that’s a thing’ since last week.
https://bsky.app/profile/avistel.bsky.social/post/3m3m2ix6fwk2p
On the other hand, like, if they’re poking fun at some of their audience, it’s remarkably gentle considering the kind of stuff being said directly to them sometimes.
I think it is important to remember that Sarah is a pessimist and is not always correct in her gloomy prophecies. For example, while Joyce has snapped, she appears to be wildly off of the predicted trajectory of blowing a billion shlongs.
Therefore, I agree that we should let Willis “cook.” God I hate that phrase. Why? Because despite my best efforts, I am an insufferable kill joy. In a regular fun-vampire way and not in the cool space-bounty hunter way of the eponymous and nonsensical Canadian 2010s tv show on the syfy channel.
I dunno,the problem with letting Willis cook is that dude isn’t making a cake (which would take a couple of hours) or slow smoking some brisket over 12-24 hours, Willis is dry aging beef over months. It takes over a year of IRL time to go over a two week period in-comic.
a good whiskey needs to age at least 2 years
“I haven’t done [tropey plotline] yet so I guess I’d better throw one in” seems like an odd way to approach writing.
Idk, Willis is way more prolific and talented than me, they clearly know what they’re doing, but this is by far the least confident I’ve ever felt about the story since its beginning.
We have had both Dorothy and Joyce try to steal someone from their partner, though. I guess it figures they’d be the ones to eventually do it with one another.
When a cheater moves on to the new partner, they create a job opening.
This is one of (in my opinions) the worst handled “cheating” arcs I’ve ever seen because the cheating feels like a footnote
Joe shouldn’t be getting treated as a fucking footnote
Dorothy ’bout to enjoy some good eatin’.
The comments section is on fire tonight.
Straight banger after banger.
“Straight”?
The gays will be banging too.
Can’t spell “consummate” without “consume”.
Wow, he really has just been standing there the whole time. (/j)
I love Joyrothy enormously, but I really do feel bad for Joe. If I ever found myself in a love triangle somehow, I would absolutely be the Joe. I really admire his selfless commitment to Joyce’s happiness when it would be entirely understandable for him to be angry and bitter.
All that said, the last panel is insanely hot.
Yeah I’m happy for Joyce & Dorothy and I don’t think they’re the worst people ever, but Joe and Walky are getting a really raw deal and I don’t think polyamory is gonna fix it.
i mean sometimes you date a closeted person and they come out and break up with you, that’s a thing that absolutely happens, particularly in college
Sure, the problem isn’t *what* they’re doing, it’s *how*.
Joyce basically blew off both of their breakup talks and now they’re very publicly displaying the fact that they’re currently fucking.
Meanwhile, I don’t think Joe’s choices here are positive, even if I find him the sympathetic party in all this.
He’s made it clear over and over that he doesn’t think he “deserves” Joyce. Loads of guilt and self-loathing and fear of vulnerability, plus a (un)healthy dose of thinking he’s relationship poison thanks to his own dad.
Yeah, I probably was a bit too positive in my first reaction. I don’t doubt there’s a lot of self-loathing driving him here, as well as more positive motivations coming from his love for Joyce.
In the vein of some previous discussions, I think I’m personally gonna let Joe cook a little longer before I believe this is a) selfless (as opposed to “grasping at straws”) and b) going to prevent all long-term anger and bitterness on his part.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love for him to maintain his self-improvement arc he’s been on since Joyce and a few others dragged him onto it, but I do think it’d be a copout if he didn’t have to fight for it a bit given these events. But maybe that “fighting for it” is “losing his fixation on Joyce, realizing he can just be better without it being for/with her”, too.
I think there’s probably a real mix of genuinely wanting Joyce to be happy and lack of belief in himself on Joe’s part. I agree that it would be strange if there’s no bitterness in the longer term, especially if Joyce doesn’t go for the poly option.
In my own “hey, she cheated on me in a particular kind of way that I did kind of see coming” (it was much, much stupider than what happened here in DoA) experience back in college, I ended up flipping back and forth between “bitterness”, “wishing she’d come back”, and “blaming myself for not being good enough”. That latter was exacerbated by her stated rationale for cheating being a laundry list of things I didn’t QUITE do as well as the person she cheated with despite the fact that I was in her view the better overall boyfriend, and I fortunately don’t think Joe’s going to have THAT double whammy unless Joyce also is planning to grow a goatee like Evil Universe Spock.
P A I N
S U F F E R I N G
C H E E SE
Emergency telewarp activation — voice code: “choregus.”
Read that in Wallace’s (wallace & Grommit) voice.
I read it in James May’s.
The C H E E S E is dead.
And so is Mike. Coincidence? You decide.
The Cheese Stands Alone, but Mike Just Lays There
With your mom…first a nickel.
a surprising lack of a massive wet spot, unless the underwear as a whole is usually a lighter color
Not from this distance.
The Slipshine zooms in, and it is *very* visible, to the point Dorothy comments about it.
i wish i could bear to utilize a subscription service cuz i wanna see these ladies BONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! so for now ill just live vicariously through comments like yours . . . glad to hear that joyce is gonna need to stock up on electrolytes later
😩 joeeeee. The rebounding crashout is going to be so bad.
I really hope he doesn’t double down on his own ways as a coping strategy for his first “real” relationship blowing up through no fault of his own.
Oh hell yeah are we gonna get some Sarah comforting Joe? That’ll honestly be a nice character moment for both of them
Circumstances could be better, but I’m still happy for the couple
HUGE WIN FOR CUNNILINGUS
Condolences to Joe
Cunnilingus does need the win; it is its own win
I can’t remember who said this but it stuck with me.
Joe’s worked so hard trying to not become his dad that he’s become his mom.
Is it possible to find a midterm?
a midwife ya mean? HAHA, good one! XD
Imagining you high fiving yourself
what’s wild to me is that i don’t think anybody predicted this outcome, when looking back at it, it maybe should have felt so obvious?
Not really; the story took a sudden exit from the high speed lane on an impulse.
The ultimate outcome happened faster than expected, sure, but it’s not as if Joe’s constant placement of Joyce on an absurd pedestal, and willingness to allow Joyce to ignore his feelings, and trample over his boundaries, weren’t present until recently.
We still could have reasonably seen coming, that Joe would absolutely put up with just about anything Joyce could throw at him; we were just mostly focusing on this through the lens of him helping Joyce with various neuroses, as opposed to Joyce just flat-out wronging him, several times – even if some of them were without her knowledge.
A lot of us were too focused on how cute Joe could be in a positive context, to fully contemplate the idea that his permissiveness and self-sacrificing were coming from a less than healthy place in his psyche.
I for one can’t believe we’ve reached a point where Danny is having much better luck with women than Joe is.
I can, those kind of flips happen between high school and maturity all the time!
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-8/01-face-the-strange/doing/
I will say: if Joe’s parents had ever tried any variety of polyamory, let alone one that his mom only agreed to because she feared losing his dad, I don’t think Joe would have suggested an open relationship to his dad as a way to AVOID hurting Stacy?
Look at how they massacred my boy 🙁
Do you know what is evil, above all this situation?
For all people that don’t enjoyed Joyce and Dorothy, or are feeling bad for Joe, they will have to endure all marketing Willis have to do to sell his Slipshine.
And they all will have to endure this ‘stupid’ NSFW banner, seeing Joyce and Dorothy making out, until he release another thing.
True madness. Satanic. Cthonic, even …
Jokes on you; two decades of being on the internet have trained me to tune out sidebar ads with precision accuracy. The Slipshine/NSFW Patreon promos have been naught but a gauzy blur in my periphery since they started.
Perfect avatar for this comment (but not 100% sure if sarcasm.)
For anyone who feels that way for real, there’s several ways to block an element in a web browser. If you’ve already got an adblocking extension, they usually have that functionality somewhere.
Not a Hero Oh Hero reader, I take it?
This is nothing to the Morty fanart collection banner.
Speaking personally I don’t really care.
Yeah, no, the problem was never “these ladies are having sex”, so seeing a preview panel of these ladies having sex isn’t a big deal.
Sarah/Joe now?
Like I don’t get long lasting vibes from Tony I’m ngl, I’m down for Sarah/Joe
Yeah I’ve been waiting for the Tony situation to go bad from the moment he popped up. I am suspicious as hell about him and definitely not getting Long Haul vibes from him.
Joe/Walky(/Asher/Ethan) is where I hope things go next.
I’m not suspicious about Tony, but the relationship seems to be purely about mutual physical desire. It doesn’t feel like there is any sort of deeper emotional connection.
Sarah probably didn’t think she wanted one, but it may turn out that she does.
I disagree. There isn’t much to it because Tony barely is a real character but there are multiple strips (most of them with the 2, honestly?) of Sarah being clearly touched because Tony did something nice for her and also like, just gets her as a person. They were initially drawn to each other because of their grumpiness with other people, a trait often criticized in Sarah and one she had recently tried to suppress after getting her heart broken.So there’s definitely an emotional connection! She does also think he’s hot though.
Not to say this means they’re an forever couple, I honestly have no idea where Willis is going with this – some sort of drama re: him being the deans son, something Incelerator-involved, maybe just having a happy background relationship for Sarah? – and I honestly don’t think Tony is very interesting, but what you’re saying really isn’t the case.
See if this were a real college comic telling cheating stories, Sarah would bang Joe immediately. That’s actual drama! That’s what horny college kids do! Sarah and Joe should be sweating and staring up at the ceiling not even understanding how or why. That alone is enough to fuel the comments for years!
Been reading for years now. Never wanted to say “Damnit Willis” until now.
Joe got the fuzzy end of the lollipop.
So… is Joe gonna come to the conclusion that Joyce never actually loved him?
Because I think that could be good in the long run.
Granted, they weren’t together for even a month…
Believing that a particular woman’s love was not genuine is often what leads men to conclude that all women are manipulative. It’s not a very healthy response, IMO. Better to believe that the way she loved him was not with the same sort of devotion that he loved her.
I feel like the issue with that mentality lies more in assuming every single person is the same because of a single or handful of bad experiences rather than the concept that those person in particular didn’t truly love them.
Sure, but it’s *very* difficult to be objective about things when you’ve been emotionally wounded.
You know what would be interesting?
Or at least what I think would be interesting?
If Joe actually started to think that way and it was his dad, the serial cheater, who comforted him and helped him realize that wasn’t the case.
I think the conclusion of, “A woman could genuinely love me and still do this to me because to her devotion is completely separated from love” can lead a man to a darker place than just, “This woman never liked me as much as I wanted her to.”
I feel like if someone loves you. Truly loves you. They’d probably avoid doing stuff like what Joyce has done to him.
But who knows. I can’t say for sure I’ve ever been in love or been loved before.
nobody under the age of 30 knows why they do what they do more than one time in three. by 40 or so you’re so entrenched in the narrative you’ve constructed for yourself that falsifying your entire life is less painful than admitting you’ve been wrong all this time.
fuckin hell so much this
like, it’s dangerous to infantilize young people to the point that you disrespect their right to their own concept of self, or otherwise disrespect their basic human agency; but, seriously, most of us should be able to remember the thousands upon thousands of things we did when we were younger, that don’t like up with what we know about our senses of self, either then or now.
yeah i have an nearly unending list of extremely stupid decisions i made from age 18 to age 38 (38 being when i got into my current 20+ year relationship). It is painful to remember how goddamn stupid i was.
I disagree with your sweeping brush.
So people can o nl be held to be responsible for their actions for 10 years of their lives? Everyone screws up, being a dumb kid doesn’t excuse your stupidity.
It wouldn’t be true.
I think thats where this is going and Joe is going to fall into “im an unlovable monster” rabbit hole
Think I said before, if anything now could cause Joe to plan to go to another school to become a chef…
Only someone as diabolical as Willis could engineer a situation in which I’m conflicted about the yuri because I feel bad for Joe fucking Rosenthal
Oh Joe… D:
If there was ever any question about whether Joe got it re: poly I feel like this strip resolves it (he does) but also damn this fucking sucks. Like IDK if Sarah is right but… I probably wouldn’t write it this way if she was wrong. Maybe I’m about to see a stirring Joe has actual feelings about this speech tomorrow, but… I dunno. This framing feels kinda final.
I’m throwing a monkey wrench into this and prophesying that Joyce says Joe’s name during passions and has a sudden realization.
Bring on the slings and arrows.
I’m not sure you’ll get slings and arrows since the slipshine is already out and people can just find out for themselves if she says Joe’s name or not. If it’s that important to them.
What Nymph said. People have already read it, so anyone who’s bought it or doesn’t mind spoilers already knows whether or not the “Joyce isn’t actually into ladybits” doomsayers were correct or not. Not a lot of point in getting mad at people still trying to argue that’s gonna happen.
I actually believe that Joyce did love Joe; she just loves Dorothy more.
Of course, as I’ve stated earlier, I still get the whiff of Willow/Tara/Oz here. Which throws a wet blanket over the whole situation.
Joss Whedon wrote Oz out because he was annoyed Seth Green asked for time off to do a movie.
Joss treated the cast so badly…
Well, I love Tara, so we got that out of it
Seth Green asked out because he felt the character wasn’t getting enough to do and he wanted to take advantage of movie offers.
I’ve heard at least three versions of what happened, including “Whedon actually wanted to reveal Willow as gay much earlier (and “Doppelgängland” definitely telegraphs it, with Willow noting that Vamp Willow is “kinda gay”, Buffy telling her vampire personalities don’t have anything to do with the original human, and Angel saying, “Actually…”), but everyone loved Oz as a character, so he stuck around a lot longer than intended.
Of course, everyone involved in this story has had reason to put the most positive possible spin on it for like a decade plus, and even if Green had mostly great interactions with Whedon — well, like pretty much every abusive person ever, Whedon had his favorites and was not uniformly awful to everyone all the time, especially back before he was a Big Name and could afford to alienate more people.
(Like, I’m sure he was more pleasant to work with on Buffy by and large than he was on the set of The Justice League. Power doesn’t necessarily corrupt, but it does reveal: when someone gets enough power to do what they always wanted to do, you find out what they always wanted to do.)
My (and many other’s) beef with the Willow/Oz breakup isn’t that they broke up or why. It’s later with Willow basically saying Oz was “just a phase” and she’s always been totally gay that was the problem.
It was completely at odds with what we saw between the two of them and did a disservice to both characters.
I fear a similar line approaching from Joyce. And it would make me seriously reconsider my further readership.
Full disclosure: I had no idea of the backstage beef between Whedon and Green.
Okay. I don’t know what that has to do with my comment? I didn’t say anything negative about Willow/Oz. I just contributed some further information to a discussion about the behind-the-scenes aspect of Green leaving the show. You don’t need to defend Willow/Oz to me, and politely? I will just say that I disagree with what you’ve said and I’m not interested in discussing how fair Willow’s coming out was or wasn’t to the Willow/Oz relationship. Willow/Tara was hugely important to me for personal reasons. So let’s just agree to disagree.
Absolutely love Joyrothy but yeah I still feel really, really bad for Joe here. These two feelings can, in fact, coexist.
Wise words of the commenters says: “DAMN YOU WILLIS!!!!”
It still absolutely stuns me how the perception around Joe has taken a complete 180 from where he was at the start of this comic.
“when the facts change, i change. what do you do, sir?”
I choose not to trust.
Did it though?
Lots of people always dismissed Joe’s problems.
Part of me really feels like so many people putting Joe’s emotions over Joyce and Dorothy is slightly misogynistic. I get it. I really like Joe and Joyce as a couple too. I even liked it more than anything Joyce and Dorothy are offering and they’re currently fucking. But I also like that Joe is feeling bad and a little hurt, cause he was a real piece of shit for a long time! Longer than he’s been the reformed and repackaged new Joe.
Yeah Joe is a better guy now and he doesn’t deserve to be cheated on, but he was also only motivated to be a better guy to date Joyce. It seems like Joyce is almost framed as Joe’s reward for trying to be better. She’s not. Now that he lost her (to Dorothy a girl who had to tolerate his bullshit since before college) his character can finally get interesting by seeing if he’s actually still gonna be a good guy.
Fully on board with the idea that this could be a good arc for Joe to figure out how to keep his gains as a human being even though he just got stomped pretty hard.
I won’t deny that there’s some folks coming at their feelings from a misogynistic/homophobic bent, but (at least here) I honestly suspect the majority of folks are coming at it from “support the victim” or “root for the underdog” more than anything else.
I don’t think that motivation is really true though. He spent a long time between his initial attempt to change after the list came out and finally admitting his feelings to Joyce without doing anything to attempt to date her. Admittedly he was interested, but he was still to caught up in the “I’m bad. I’ll hurt her.” mentality.
And while I’m all about the consequences in narrative, I prefer it when they’re the result of the bad things characters do, rather than coming from a completely different angle after a character tries to change and improve.
You’re right actually. That is a bit unfair of me. Joe was really trying to change mostly as a response to his night with Liz which very likely traumatized him. He kind of internalized a belief that he ruins women and was trying to be better because Liz was also a very obvious replacement for Joyce in his head he was trying to work out of his system.
He was changing long before then.
I think it’s pretty natural to worry about the emotions of someone who was cheated on over the emotions of the people who are cheated since people feel a natural inclination to worry about the person who is “wronged”.
I think I’d probably be more inclined to center Joyce and Dorothy’s emotions over Joe’s if I found them more…interesting together? Joe and Joyce had the benefit of a long slow build to the breakdown of each other’s walls. Dorothy and Joyce not only are “the bad guys” in this situation but their current behavior hasn’t done much to endear me. Joe aside but the strip where Joyce laughs in Walky’s face just kinda soured me on her as a character.
I know your thoughts on Joe so I won’t dispute that. I think it really just comes down to taste since Joe x Joyce has arguably been built up as much as Joyce x Dorothy.
This Walky laugh thing I’m real concerned about though. It feels a little like favoritism? Walky has been just as vindictive and cruel to Joyce, mocking her multiple times about being a brainwashed fundie and rubbing his relationship with Dorothy in her face while also calling her a lesbian. Walky has had to be told to backoff by Jennifer, Dorothy, by Sal. He had to apologize because Joyce didn’t trust him to come in her room without making fun of her. So how is Joyce laughing at him such a character assassination for her when it’s just another shot in their weird and toxic rivalry?
This is where it gets mighty suggestive but I can’t really think of anything Walky has done to Joyce that is as mean as taking her girlfriend and laughing cruelly in her face about it. He teasea and needles her, sure. And yes he’s crossed the line a few times I agree. I cannot think of anything of this magnitude he’s done to her. Heck you even pointed our that characters chastise Walky for going to far. Dorothy is at least meant to be walkys friend if not girlfriend in that scene and she just sorta lets that hapoen. No comment or even a jokey “that was mean”. We just move on.
Which brings me to my next point. Usually when Walky is mocking or teasing Joyce he’s doing it in sort of a Greek chorus kinda way. Either mocking Joyce’s closed minded view of the world or the situations she finds herself in. Walky rarely if ever antagonizes her over something HE has done to her. Joyce isn’t a bystander in walkys crumbling relationship with Dorothy. She’s the direct cause. She did this to him and is now laughing at him for being hurt by it.
That comes across as really cruel to me.
Subjective not suggestive oops
This basically gets to the crux of why I didn’t like that strip.
I think it’s more the case that Joe is POLARIZING — a lot of people dismiss him as “not having done enough to make up for the shit he was pulling in the beginning”, a lot of people laud him for “wow, he turned that around pretty effectively once he got seriously called out”, not a lot of neutrals speaking up.
And a lot of people still saying “Joe was always a good guy, just liked casual sex, he was all about consent.”
Yup. Truth be told, might even be “was always about consent in situations he thought were consent-based” as long as you acknowledge “got his fuckin’ eyes opened about what constitutes harassment, because he was REALLY BAD about that”.
Might be, but it’s really hard to tell because we never actually saw old Joe challenged on that. Just an awful lot of red flags.
Joe usually can’t become a topic of conversation more than two days in a row without a “what did he even do that was so wrong, it’s not his fault his list got leaked” thread.
Yeah, I file that under “man, a lot of people have strong opinions about a comic that is apparently from the Mandala effect universe but is not THIS Dumbing of Age”.
Oh for sure.
It doesn’t make me like Joe any less to be clear, it’s just a thing I can’t help having noticed haha.
It pisses me off partly because it rips away Joe’s entire character growth arc.
And partly because it confirms my belief that Willis didn’t go hard enough with Joe’s villain arc in the first place.
@thejeff I think of it more as an indictment of the way we STILL kinda have a collective boys-will-be-boys mindset that even in a place like this there are a lot of people who DIDN’T see it as a villain arc, just a “dumbass man being kinda dumbass, ain’t he funny with his list” arc.
But only for certain types of boy behavior. Walky doesn’t get the same leeway, because his flaws aren’t coded as proper “boys will be boys” flaws.
Walky is also Black.
Joe’s Jewish but it’s still a bit of a background detail, however much Willis is clearly trying to gently pull it more to the foreground for both him and Dorothy, so most of the comment section is still gonna see him as white, and subconscious bias is a hell of a thing.
That’s likely some of it, but I think a lot of it is that the things people excused old Joe for are actually typical “boys will be boys” things, while Walky tends to get shit on for not being manly enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfWnmxUP-PI
“It’s still a bit too early for you. It’s called Love is over. It’s called that because it’s a song about the end of an adult’s love”
I remember being familiarized with this song when you recommended “shiori experience” to me.
Feel like the westerner equivalent of this “the rose” by Bette Midler, but that’s just my opinion.
Hehe good eye. The quote I wrote is actually from shiori experience.
It’s like Willis is trying to get me to hate it more. You crazy S.O.B., I’m already all in!
I’m aware he could’ve been out & about in the meantime (it’s been a whole day! ) but I much prefer the thought that he was standing in the same exact spot the entire time, thinking about love related aphorisms. It’s just too goofy
I compared the mental image of Joe just waiting for hours for Joyce to get back to him to that of “a sad little unwanted mangy dog who was left all alone on his birthday” yesterday and I stand by that
Same.
I get feeling bad for Joe like, conceptually, but this delivery is fully so silly I can’t get there.
I don’t think we’re staying with him either, so I wonder who we’re cutting to next. Walky probably wouldn’t get anything substantial, so I’m hoping for Dina and/or Becky.
Not that this is substantial either, I guess, so maybe we’ll see Walky still laying on the floor next to his bed, having also not moved the whole day. Which is a little less funny and more real, honestly.
Every strip of this relationship seems written with the intention of being as mean spirited towards the rest of the cast as they could think of in that moment.
Yep. There’s a world out there where, despite me being a huge Joe/Joyce fan, I got onboard with this relationship because its introduction was well written and it was compelling in a fun to read way. This sadly is not that world. This is the one where the comic just feels mean and spiteful towards characters who didn’t really do anything to deserve it.
I mean, Willis *did* say he wanted to write something much more terrible than the usual stuff.
joyce did promise to talk with joe later
Yeah, I’ll believe that when I see it. Joyce hasn’t been impressing me with her empathy or care for others recently. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out she meant ‘we’ll talk later’ as ‘bye see you never’.
Casting my vote for “Joyce is stuck in Romance Novel Brain, causing loss of object permanence, and will remember that she promised to talk to Joe the next time she sees him and then feel guilty about not remembering sooner.”
And go for another blow job to make up for it. 🙂
Some of it is also the autism and Joyceness. She’s always been a hopeless romantic and insanely horny and reckless.
Or we could give her more than six hours before writing her off completely.
But you see, that promise doesn’t mean anything if she’s willing to focus on the woman in front of her while having the sex that they’ve both wanted for so long. Joyce only cares about Joe for real if she makes his feelings her number one priority over everything else until they’re resolved. /s
I have full confidence that Joyce will be having a conversation with Joe and Dorothy about things, and I seriously doubt it’ll be as simple as “Sorry, Joe, never mind; I don’t actually have any interest in continuing things with you.” We’ve seen several moments that clearly indicate that Joyce still cares for Joe (the most obvious being her hesitance to call Joe her ex when talking to Daisy), and I think Sarah being wrong about Joyce’s capacity for love is honestly a very common trend in this comic, so it would honestly be fitting if she were wrong.
I think you’re being unfair. Some people clearly have the position that if Joyce is considering Joe’s poly idea, she should not have sex with Dorothy until she has had a discussion with her about it. And therefore that *gestures vaguely at the comic* means she was never considering it, because getting back to Joe with anything but a flat “no” would wrong Dorothy. Which would then mean she should have just said no way back then and not left him hanging, for reasons that have more to do with Dorothy’s feelings than Joe’s.
I’ve been waiting for a good strip to ramble about this, but for a while now I’ve been thinking about a very specific interaction relating to this fallout, which is specifically one between Joe and Rachel. We know she doesn’t trust him, we know she doesn’t think people can change, so unless she sees the newspaper herself… I can see Rachel assuming that Joe and Joyce split (if they do) because of him cheating on her, rather than vice versa. Either way, maybe realizing that Joe was cheated on will be the impetus for Rachel’s views changing?
Oh, hmm. I just realized what Joyce/Dorothy reminds me of: Korra/Asami from Legend of Korra. I want to like them, for the same reasons. They’re cute! They’re sweet! In a universe of disaster relationships, both queer and straight, let there be ONE saccharine-sweet pairing as a treat!
But I’m not sold – again, for the same reasons. In both cases, from a writing standpoint, it just feels very obvious that the decision to switch the trajectory to Joyce/Dorothy was made later in the story (i.e. similar to Korra with Asami). So to me – YMMV – that trajectory feels clunkily done, no matter how much buildup was attempted to be squeezed in after the decision was made.
I also feel like – and this is just a personal opinion – the type of sugary-sweet relationship where the couple gets along too well for there to be room for conflict or complication are probably ideal to actually be in, but are not that…compelling to read about. It’s why Ruth and Billie, for all their shenaniganry, are a lot more stirring as a couple than Joyce and Dorothy could ever be.
Again, it’s nice and all that there’s one, so-far mostly frictionless couple in a comic where almost every other relationship is a shitshow in some way. It’s just kind of a bummer that it’s gotta be the main couple that we’ll presumably be doing the most reading about from here on out.
But, who knows! Perhaps delicious disaster drama is on the horizon for Joyce and Dorothy and there’s just no hint of it yet (Becky’s and Joe’s hurt feelings don’t feel like they count in the context of the relationship – Joyce & Dorothy come across as mostly unconcerned about those feelings, as long as the hurt parties aren’t directly in front of their faces).
But, maybe I’ll end up eating my words and the pair will end up being the most interesting and emotionally compelling fictional couple ever. I hope that’ll be the case. I’m definitely going to keep reading to find out, anyway. 🤪
“Later in the story”?
The Slipshine title is a reference to a panel in Book 4.
As early as Book 1, Joyce is awkwardly talking to Dorothy, specifically when asking her out to dinner.
Dorothy calls Joyce’s behavior adorable in Book 1.
You gotta remember that Korra and Asami happened before She-ra, it even happened a couple of months before Ruby and Sapphire kissed in Steven Universe. I would have loved to get more build up with Korra and Asami in the show, but honestly what little slipped by the censors was enough to sell me on them and when they held hands in the finale… I still remember feeling so seen. I already adored the way book 4 handled Korra’s PTSD, but then to cap it off with the reveal that she was bi? Unheard of for animated shows at that time, particularly shows that weren’t adult animated sitcom shows.
I mean yeah Korra changed trajectories mid-series, but that’s only because the creators realized (to their credit) that Mako is a wet blanket and they needed to abandon ship.
Everyone in the main cast improves (or at least gets more neutral) after Mako stops being a romantic partner. XD
Even Mako improves when Mako stops being a romantic partner. The moment they embraced him being a lil fuddy duddy dork instead of a bad boy, he grew on me.
Same!
They’ve been together for half a day. Of course they’re still in the honeymoon phase! I’m sure there is room for drama later. Like when Joyce reveals Joe’s polyamory idea when Dorothy thinks this is a monogamous relationship…
With the pacing of this comic “later” could be as long as years from now. I can’t even say with confidence I’ll still be alive by then!
We already have a saccharin-sweet relationship, it’s Danny/Sal (and until recently, Dina/Becky, but that may about to go into a bit of a spiral, so I’m temporarily not counting it), where we get conflict out of the fact that
SirksomeSal doesn’t really trust people being sweet at her without it being somehow transactional.And let me tell you, I got more enjoyment out of reading the like two strips where they get a music room than I did out of the entire current storyline, total.
Its worth noting with KorrAsami that *weren’t* actually in a romantic relationship in the show. The writers outright said that the end of the series, where they go into the spirit world, is when they started their relationship. They had romantic feelings before that, but they didn’t start dating til the very end.
Also very much worth noting that the censors were much, much more conservative about queer relationships back then, and they weren’t allowed to be too overt about their relationship.
-hits the “Korra wasn’t supposed to get more than one season, so Bryke (Bryan and Michael) had to scramble a season 2 which is why it’s not as good, and season 3 and 4 have better writing. And Asami and Korra were set up in season 3” button-
I’m gonna have to hit this things until the day I die, aren’t I?
Like it’s been almost 11 years. We should all know how badly nickelodeon messed with Korra, by now. How Bryan and Mike had to get things past the censors. How they’ve said they would have done more if it had been allowed.
Season 4 of the legend of Korra is some of the worst television I have ever seen. The audacity to have the revanchist fascist be the one antagonist Korra expresses sympathy for is simply galling, and I don’t care how much the creators wanted to put Korra and Asami together or for how long, the plain fact is that they failed to adequately establish romantic tension between them and it is genuinely insulting as a lesbian that I am expected to accept and celebrate this absolute slop of a couple. To say nothing of the fact that Asami is a canonical war profiteer!
I dunno, as a sapphic woman myself, I felt like Asami and Korra had as much romantic tension as they could do, considering the censors they were working against. But it’s fine that you don’t personally feel that way. You don’t have to celebrate them. I will, though. And I think I should be allowed to.
Gentle +1 on this. I cried when I first watched the series finale. Sorry my standards were that low, but they really really were, heh.
What do you mean “Joyce & Dorothy come across as mostly unconcerned about those feelings, as long as the hurt parties aren’t directly in front of their faces?”
There were something like a half dozen comics entirely about Joyce and Dorothy stressing about how to break it to Becky and how she’d take it. In some ways, her desires and feelings were more central to the transition in their relationship transition than anyone else’s despite the fact that the only stake she had in the situation was her once having a crush on Joyce.
Like, I can see this complaint with regards to Walky. To some extent it’s true of Joe, but he’s clearly been on Joyce’s mind a few times while navigating the day even when he wasn’t present (such as when talking to Daisy). However, I don’t see how you can possibly think that Becky wasn’t on their minds. Honestly, I feel like she was far, far too central for my tastes, as having a crush on your best friend should in no way make you a central figure to their future relationships.
I feel sympathy for her pain, but it’s pain that should be taken to a therapist or another person for comfort, not pain that should demand different treatment from people who have not in any way wronged her.
Well, if we take Willis’ word for it, he’s been planning for Joyrothy to happen for about a decade. You’re entitled to feel that it wasn’t set up well, (though I heartily disagree), but it wasn’t a last-minute swerve.
As for being too sugary-sweet and low-conflict, that’s a matter of taste, but I don’t see that Joyrothy is more saccharine than Becky/Dina or Sal/Danny, neither of which provoke anywhere near the same level of bile in the comments. As for lacking conflict between them, again, that’s not unusual for relationships in the comic, Billie/Ruth being the one major exception, and they’re still in the first 24 hours of the relationship. I doubt Willis plans for their entire future relationship to conflict-free, but the honeymoon period is a thing.
So, you made this argument yesterday (? I think?), and I do feel obligated to say now what I said then:
Sal and Danny are kind of a footnote? We only get them in small bursts, so their sweetness doesn’t overstay its welcome or turn saccharine in its insistence. They’ve also had to deal with internal tensions, namely Sal’s uncertainty over whether she actually wants to be with Danny since he’s basically everything her racist parents could want for her in a partner – straight-laced, squeaky clean, and most importantly, white.
Also, and I know you’re going to roll your eyes at this, they didn’t get together by cheating on their partners. I am aware, of course, that DoJo is your OTP and you don’t consider the circumstances under which they got together a mark against them at all, but you have to accept that this is not the case for a lot of people. Of *course* they’re going to be more controversial. I’m genuinely sorry about that because it does seem like a source of legitimate frustration for you, but that’s just how the chips fell for Joyce and Dorothy.
Becky and Dina, meanwhile, were so sugary sweet for so long because everything else in Becky’s life was absolute crap for the longest time and Dina represented essentially the only oasis she had from that. With the timeskip, and with Ross, the greatest source of external conflict in Becky’s life, thoroughly deceased, there has been a shift to focus on more internal tension within Becky and Dina’s relationship – namely, Becky’s fear of change and Dina’s willingness to experiment with labels and presentation, and more recently the DoJo bombshell which has highlighted the already-existing tension of Becky’s lingering romantic love for Joyce and Dina’s insecurities about being second place in her girlfriend’s affections.
So like, yeah, Sal/Danny and Becky/Dina don’t get as much crap from the commentariat, but there are reasons for that other than simple hypocrisy. Those relationships serve different narrative purposes for the characters involved, and DoJo is always going to be more controversial because of the circumstances under which the ship sailed.
Erm, yea, deffo getting a bit of slipshine crossover there. Enough to make me slightly uncomfortable for the fist time in this comic.
Uncomfortable about what?
Probably about things abruptly hitting PG-13+ when that’s not typical, given Thing 2’s historically not the type of person to be uncomfortable with ladies who like ladies generally.
I guess I’m having trouble looking at that ”PG-13” frame, as you put it, and imagining how it would make anybody uncomfortable.
I dunno, I know a lot of people who are just not comfortable with any depiction of obviously sexual content in unexpected places.
Normally I’m very in favor of g/g ships, but I can’t help but hate this one. As happy as they currently seem together, Dorothy and Joyce just left three broken hearts in the wake of their flank speed rush to lustville. Not sure how much it hurt Walky. Maybe not at all? But it drove Becky to suddenly start questioning her faith and God only knows how hard it’s going to hit Joe when he realizes it’s permenant. He didn’t deserve this. Hope he finds solid happiness in the end with someone who is more stable than Joyce. As for Dorothy and Joyce… Not going to openly hope the ship burns and sinks horribly, but I’m not going to support it either.
Becky’s feelings are not a thing Joyce and Dorothy did. They are absolutely responsible for the way Joe and Walky feel right now, but neither of them were in a relationship with Becky. While she’s hurt and that’s very real for her, that doesn’t make it their fault or something they should have been considering before they got together.
Yeah that’s one I really don’t understand. I get it if you really enjoyed Joe or Walky, but Becky is in a hell of her own making.
most people can’t decide how they feel about things.
Joyce and Dorothy had enough awareness about Becky to have considered that this would be painful for her, and that it wasn’t worth it to them to change course. It’s fair to feel sore if a friend decides that their happiness is worth your discomfort.
It’s not out of line for Becky to feel hurt by this, but it’s complete bullshit to think that Joyce has to repress her sexuality to avoid hurting Becky.
…. you know, I’ve reread my comment a few times and I don’t see anywhere where I said anything about them repressing their sexuality to avoid hurting her.
Yeah, this is an absolutely ridiculous take.
Becky is hurt, and that’s sad, but Joyce didn’t hurt her. Joyce didn’t owe it to Becky to stay out of a relationship with another woman any more than she would have owed it to [any man who finds Joyce attractive but isn’t dating her] not to date other men.
Frankly, in this case, your friend’s happiness IS worth your discomfort. It’s gross to make that their problem.
Point of order: both of them do have a relationship with Becky. It’s not a romantic (or physical) one.
You might not think that sort counts. I do.
It does count, in a sense. They certainly care about Becky and can and should be concerned about how she feels about this.
But it’s not a betrayal of Becky.
I did mean romantic relationship.
And I think it counts in the sense that they should talk to her, check in on her, etc. I do not think it counts when deciding whether or not to date each other. Becky’s crush on Joyce does not entitle her to be a part of Joyce’s romantic decisions or put any responsibility on Joyce to not date women.
Just going to copy+paste this:
“While she’s hurt and that’s very real for her, that doesn’t make it their fault or something they should have been considering before they got together.”
It’s too early to say for sure, but I don’t think Becky’s actually questioning her faith, she’s probably just exhausted by the Hank incident. Walky is hurt in the specific way where you’ve been so beaten down emotionally by multiple events that your body and mind just stop registering the pain. Without some kind of intervention, that dull ache will settle into how you view yourself, like how Walky is already talking about being somebody else’s rebound down the line. This never ends well. Ironically, I was in a mix of Joe and Walky’s position around the time I first started reading Dumbing of Age (2015) and it got so fucking dire it cost me a scholarship and years of my life.
I can understand feeling upset for Joe and Walky! That is so incredibly valid and both men got done incredibly dirty.
BECKY doesn’t get any sway OR Say in Dorothy OR Joyce’s relationship. She does not own Joyce, she does not own ‘The only woman Joyce is allowed to love romantically” rights.
Becky is in a loving relationship with her girlfriend, and while Becky is allowed to feel however she wishes (and I feel for her, I’m sure what she’s experiencing is absolutely terrible) Joyce and Dorothy aren’t responsible, and Joyce doesn’t have to never show attraction to women just because she’s not sexually attracted to the girl she’s always seen as her sister.
This sentiment is so weird I’m sorry, but it’s so weird that some readers care way more about Becky’s feelings than anyone elses.
The comments discourse has missed nuance on Becky for a while.
Yes, she did not deserve a relationship with Joyce. Everyone gets that.
What did Becky deserve?
When Becky came out to Joyce with her crush, Joyce told the (at the time?) most important person in her life that, “No, it wasn’t anything about YOU, I just don’t do THAT.”
Identities change. Joyce thought she didn’t do that, but she does now. OK. Things happen. Joyce unintentionally had said the wrong thing to Becky. Now, that error is unraveling, and it’s hurting Becky a lot.
-Joyce knows- that Becky deserves -something-. Not a relationship, but something else. She repeatedly says that they need to talk to her, after all. (Quickest one I could find was https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-16/01-not-so-smooth-criminals/thatd-be-nice/).
What Becky deserves is not a relationship. It’s Joyce acknowledging her error. Joyce putting her foot out there to say this switch-up, where she said something in a sensitive situation that is now clearly wrong, wasn’t want she wanted, and it’s sad that she accidentally hurt Becky through it. This error was an accident, but it’s still her responsibility, her words she said.
-Joyce knows- that Becky deserves closure. But she stalls and stalls on providing it, because she’s scared, and overly deferential to Dorothy who is also scared, until Becky finds them herself. She has the opportunity to approach Becky, to show she’s willing to bite the bullet for her best friend, to show how much she wants to be -honest- with Becky, but instead she’s discovered and -has- to talk.
Then, once Becky finds her, Joyce is too busy fawning over her girlfriend to provide Becky the closure she deserves. Dorothy is the one to try. Joyce should not just be joining Dorothy, but taking the lead.
I’m not Scarlet Lettering Joyce here. Her mistakes are understandable in the circumstances, and they don’t make her some kind of -bad person-. She’s not. But they’re still mistakes.
This take kind of upsets me. The argument Becky somehow deserves better than how Joyce handled coming out to her. People are talking a lot about what people deserve without considering what Joyce and Dorothy deserve. Like that doesn’t matter because I guess they’re winning right now.
For my opinion I think Joyce deserved a better friend than Becky. She doesn’t have a claim to Joyce, she had a crush, and worse than just having a crush it manifested in toxic ways, at the expense of Joyce’s now girlfriend.
Even if you totally buy the performative rivalry thing, Becky would literally push Dorothy away from Joyce. I can’t agree with this idea Becky has a right to be treated better in some perfect moment of closure when she’s been the one actively stifling Joyce and Dorothy since she came back from Anderson.
I do feel like Becky is a good person and moments like going back and trying to protect Joyce and Dorothy from being outed to Hank is the type of friend she should’ve been the entire time. I think Becky deserves to get over it and realize the reason she’s miserable isn’t because Joyce doesn’t love her. It’s because she doesn’t love herself.
And frankly Dina deserves better too. It’s interesting to me people are mad at Joyce for breaking Becky’s heart like Dina her girlfriend never even mattered.
You should reread the comics around when Becky came out to Joyce. At no point does Joyce say she’s straight. She says she doesn’t feel the same about Becky. That’s it. Becky infers that Joyce is straight and goes on to say so. Joyce doesn’t correct her, but I could find no point at which Joyce ever says that she’s straight. She says she doesn’t reciprocate the feelings, that she considers Becky a sister, that she doesn’t want Becky to make out with her, and other things that clearly make a lack of romantic/sexual attraction to Becky clear, but she never tells Becky that she’s straight.
Joyce is not responsible for Becky’s inference that the only reason Joyce doesn’t romantically love Becky is because she’s straight. Yes, Joyce could handle things better, but Becky could also have handled things better (like, I don’t know, not acting romantically possessive of Joyce when they aren’t in a relationship). I hope they mend their friendship, as it’s been seriously tested, but frankly, Becky has as much or more to apologize for here. The only difference is that people have more immediate ire for someone “breaking someone’s heart” than they have for someone attempting to sabotage their loved one’s friendship with a perceived “threat,” especially when it’s played for laughs.
“When Becky came out to Joyce with her crush, Joyce told the (at the time?) most important person in her life that, “No, it wasn’t anything about YOU, I just don’t do THAT.””
Again, this is not what Joyce said. It’s entirely reasonable for Becky to make that inference, but that’s not what Joyce said to her, then or later. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/hindsight/
Also, I feel like you’re putting far too much expectation on Joyce to come out perfectly for Becky and no expectation on Becky to support her friend. I don’t think that’s fair. Looking for Becky to talk to her about it the morning after it happened is hardly dragging her feet. Nor is it Joyce’s fault that Becky found out from the newspaper or that she was waiting in Joyce’s room in the dark instead of her own room where Joyce & Dorothy were looking for her.
I sympathize with Becky because of a simple situation that she had a crush, she poured her feelings out and hoped for the best, got turned down, and then her crush goes off with someone else. That’s a pain I think most people have experienced, myself included. You’re right that she doesn’t have any sort of claim on Joyce’e, but it’s still stings when you find out that your crush and your rival are hankying and pankying.
Here’s to hoping this whole thing doesn’t adversely affect Becky and Dina’s relationship and Dina helps her get over this.
Three broken hearts and two collateral hearts, too. Sarah never really liked Joe but is taking his side and is just as angry with Joyce as Becky is, and Dina’s horrified expression upon realizing that Joyce broke Becky’s heart AGAIN and, no matter how good of a girlfriend she is, she’ll never be Joyce, is just… it’s almost as heartbreaking as seeing Walkyverse Dina’s inner monologue during the last few moments before the bomb went off.
When does the flying pooping butt show up?
I have been cheated on and it sucks so i feel bad for Joe but narrative wise i am more concerned about what is going to happen with Becky and Dina over this. Also i’d like to see Carla and Charlie not that they have much stake in this particular but i’d like to see a happy absurdist couple.
Joe finally answers the question of “why the hell would you intentionally set up your romantic rival to realize she’s in love with your girlfriend who has the potential to love her back?”
The answer seems to be deep self sabotage/self loathing =(
Interesting parallel in how Joe and Walky both believe they’re not worth any long-term affection from others, but they express it in different but equally damaging ways
Maybe they’ll help each other deal with the aftermath.
Joe is probably Walky’s closest male friend, if not only male friend – I don’t think one “bro clone” brunch with Asher counts, and since Booster is they/them, they would be a friend, but not a male friend (I assume, but it’s probably better not to try to categorize Booster in this context).
I kept seeing the opinion that Joe was actually pointing Dorothy at Joyce out of love, or selflessness, or some sort of awareness from on high that Joyce “needed” to be with Dorothy.
It becomes clearer to me with every Joe appearance that the poor dude is just BROKEN and he doesn’t think he deserves to be anything but a last resort.
Joe should absolutely be on some kinda…low-key friendly watch for a while.
He doesn’t have anyone who’d do that other than Sarah, sadly. His only other friend (Danny) didn’t believe he was actually attached to Joyce so he wouldn’t bother even asking if Joe’s okay.
I mean seeing Joe clearly heartbroken is liable to change her mind.
I’ll argue Joe pulling this was more self-respecting in some ways than anyone gives him credit for. Once Joe was aware of the possibility, ripping the bandaid off NOW and discussing the situation was healthier than living in limbo and fear of Joyce leaving him. That kind of shit will absolutely poison a relationship, even if the thing you feared happening never comes to pass. I’ve had exes who stewed in their fears until they tried to sabotage the relationship by taking it out on me, and that shit is not ok.
I do respect him ripping the band-aid off, and moreso it makes me respect Joyce and Dorothy even less than I otherwise would have since he practically gift-wrapped the ethical path for those two and set it on a platter in front of them.
I just don’t know whether I yet think it was coming from a place of self-respect or from a place of deep insecurity — he’s certainly reacting to the outcome in a way I perceive as “begging for scraps” or, in this strip’s case, “trying to convince himself this was an acceptable outcome of his attempt to prevent something like this from happening to him.”
Wow. It’s so lovely to see a very blatant “I love the person, so their happiness is more important to me than being with them” is interpreted as self sabotage and self loathing.
Obviously the only way to healthily approach a romantic relationship is greedily putting your desires and needs above everyone else’s! Unless you’re Joyce and Dorothy, of course. Then you should put your relationship on hold until you’ve obtained an affidavit of approval from everyone who every made googly eyes at you.
/s
Lol, very good!
I mean, everyone in a relationship needs to advocate for themselves to a certain extent. If for no other reason than one’s partner(s) aren’t mind readers. If all one person in a relationship says is “whatever you want, dear”, at some point it starts to become the truth.
This is true. It doesn’t change the fact that romantic love that isn’t jealous and possessive is perfectly healthy. Joe’s words throughout this arc have been loving, hopeful, and a bit worried. They have not been self hating or self sabotaging just because he isn’t making his number one priority keeping Joyce to himself.
OK, this took me about an hour of mulling over how I want to say this, but I finally found a metaphor that works.
It’d be one thing if Joe was content with being downgraded from co-lead to supporting actor in the soap opera that is Joyce’s love life. You can get some amazing work out of supporting actors*, and you can’t tell a good story without them.
But this? The way this is framed? The way Joyce left him 3 crises ago and has now decided to have sex with Dorothy instead of returning to something she promised she’d get back to?
That’s not Joe being content to be a supporting actor, that’s Joe content with being an extra with a few lines here and there. It’s a very different conversation to one where Joe is still being given a small fraction of Joyce’s total consideration.
*I love Season 1 of Andor, for example (haven’t had the gumption to watch S2- my mental health is a fucking roller coaster) and Diego Luna is excellent, but I’ll be damned if Skaarsgard and Serkis don’t steal the show.
No, Sarah, no. Let Joe construct an increasingly elaborate delusion where he’s actually still dating Joyce. I wanna see how far this goes.
Depending on their next conversation and Joyce’s future blowjob capacity, I could see him riding this wave for the rest of the semester
Well, according to half the comments section, he is still dating Joyce!
Hey, my attempt at a reconciliation of conflicting facts yesterday is further validated here. Joyce may not have officially 100% broken up with Joe, but he assumes (reasonably & correctly) from the totality of the situation that he’s been broken up with until he hears otherwise – he doesn’t really think Joyce is considering the idea.
Completely unrelated, but who’s that on the poster next to Batman? Sort of looks like a vinyl cover (??)
I believe that’s Rebecca St. James, aka, Becky’s unintentional fetish.
It’s a holdover from the Roomies! days, when her poster was prominently displayed in Joe and Danny’s room because Willis was still a fundie at the time. Its continued presence nearly 30 years later is a lot harder to justify in-universe, as she’s firmly a Christian artist, while Joe is Jewish and Danny has never been seen to be particularly devout, or at least the kind of Christian who’s into Christian contemporary music to have her poster on his wall.
It’s Joever 🙁
Yoohoo Joe is gonna be sad!
Also does that now get the “Joe and Joyce haven’t broken up” people to stop?
I genuinely don’t get why it would be so bad if something interesting happened in the story (like miscommunication about a breakup). That’s just me tho
No, why? Joe is expressing a fear here, not some kind of known fact.
No. I don’t think most of us were saying what you think we were saying. We’re talking about what’s going on in Joyce’s head, not about Joe thinking he still has a claim.
Joyce should have talked to Dorothy about the poly idea if she has any intention of taking that route.
Joyce has given zero indication of any intent to take a poly route
Except saying that she’ll talk to Joe later and hesitating to call him her ex when she was talking to Daisy. I think there have been other subtle nods to the fact that things aren’t entirely resolved.
It’s been at most a few hours since Joe and Joyce talked. Joe is clearly still open to it, and the fact that Joyce didn’t put everything with Dorothy on hold until it was resolved also doesn’t mean that Joyce isn’t open to it. Sarah is the only person who seems sure, and she’s often been dead wrong on how Joyce will respond in situations.
That’s subjective at best.
If you’re right then she’s in the clear.
Regardless, my point is more that if that’s what someone’s talking about, this strip changes nothing. Joe doesn’t think they’re still together, but that wasn’t the point.
The last few weeks I’ve seen at least a few comments about not understanding why people like Joe now, saying it’s even a cover for their anti-queer bigotry, saying Joe outright deserves to get fucked over for being a sex pest last semester.
Hell, I’ve said myself that his redemption was a little too easy because he’s hunky.
So yeah, maybe “Joe gets fucked over and has to figure out how not to let it turn him back into a sex pest (or into the Incelerator or whatever he was called)” is a good arc for Joe to get. BUT, two wrongs don’t make a right, and I was always going to think less of whoever did the fucking over. So I suppose I wish it’d been some new girl I didn’t mind thinking less of.
Totally agreed on “I want there to be a good arc for Joe to grow some more here, so he can keep the gains he’s had despite the hurt that’s just been dealt to him.”
I’m still gonna be vaguely sad that of the two people I identified with pretty strongly in this comic, I can’t really identify with one anymore because she pulled this nonsense.
Ive had ppl call me homophobic because i dislike this arc but lit all my fav ships (beckina and rully? Are thise ship names) are queer.
I mean. If that bit about “even saying” is about my comment specifically, I definitely was not claiming anything sweeping. In fact, I was specifically saying it’s NOT true of everyone or even a significant portion of anti-Joyce/Dorothy people, and that I feel terrible for all the perfectly reasonable people who have to deal with the fact that there are some bigots who are, yes, using this whole divide as an excuse to say thinly veiled queerphobic stuff in a public forum.
If you haven’t seen any of those comments, consider yourself lucky! It’s been getting better, but they do keep cropping up.
I admit I am not 100% happy here because I wanted all sorts of horribly hurt feelings, ruined relationships, and misery. Oddly, I also felt that the biggest drama being Becky made no sense and she should have been the ONLY person okay with it because she moved on.
With all the word “cheating” still going around in the comments… you know what?
I’d love for Dorothy and Joyce to full on cheat.
First the Slipshine comes and then for a couple of weeks (months for us) they constantly get more crazy in secret… and then they are found out by Sarah.
Now, THAT”S cheating. 😛
Who is cheated on in this scenario you’ve described? Sarah?
Sarah’s being cheated out of a quiet dormroom she can study in peace to not lose her scholarship, OBVIOUSLY.
(I am not being serious)
Joyce and Dorothy are literally going to make Sarah flunk out.
Especially when they start stealing her study notes while going, “nyeh nyeh nyeh”.
I can’t believe they’re using Sarah’s study notes as a dental dam.
Well, they can’t use Dorothy’s notes, that’s where all the educational diagrams are.
Hmm. I wonder if, after some time has passed, Joyce and Joe will have sex after all. Mutually enjoyable sex, with enthusiastic consent and explicitly stated desire from both parties, even.
The thing is, I’ve been Joe.
In college, my girlfriend disappeared mysteriously for several hours one day and came back in love with one of our friends.
On the one hand, in my case, it wasn’t with a woman; it was another man.
On the other hand, we hadn’t been dating for one week, either: We had been living together for more than a year by then. We had a joint bank account. She had started using my last name informally.
I’m not going to pretend I didn’t try to get her to stay, to change her mind, to come back; but — although I always hated that aphorism of Joe’s, even before Sting made a hit single out of it — I always recognized the basic truth that you can’t hold on to someone who doesn’t want you any more.
I was crushed, of course, but I was never even .0001 percent as angry as the folks in this comment section seem to want Joe to be about his one week relationship. Angry why? It’s not like she set out that day determined to fall in love with someone else. It’s not like she woke up thinking how she could hurt me.
I was, like Joe, happy for her, despite being hurt. I wished her all the best. I went to their wedding when it happened. And I kept any minor gloating to myself when they got divorced, or when she got divorced again, and then again and maybe again, I don’t know, I lost count? Whereas I’ve now been happily married for forty years. She has a daughter, and I hope she has had a great life, on the balance. She’s a great person.
I was never not a feminist, so there was never any real chance of me “backsliding” into misogyny, but I didn’t turn into The Joker, and I seriously doubt that Joe will, either.
oh, and I didn’t get a consoltion blowie out of the whole thing, either
Given that Joe is a fictional character, I think a lot of us are angry FOR him in a way that might be too much in real life, but it doesn’t hurt anyone real.
I don’t think Joyce is the Whore of Babylon, but I do think it sucks that she carelessly tosses someone aside so easily.
How angry do you think people want Joe to be?
I guess there’ve been a few comments saying he might go back to his old misogynistic ways, but that’s not common and I don’t think for most it’s really a want.
Thing is, I’ve been Joe too, twice. Not everyone reacts with as much equanimity as you did, let’s say.
Frankly, I couldn’t even get to “happy for you” for either of ’em, as far as I’m concerned I sincerely hoped they both got their respective hearts stomped flat by someone who lied to them in turn. Twenty years later, I’m just happy to not think about either of ’em.
I even tried to stay friends with one, and she was perfectly happy to do that until a couple of months later when she wanted something that would be easier to get if she exaggerated stories of our breakup to make HER the victim and me the big scary dude who she just couldn’t safely say no to (the irony perhaps being that I lost zero friends due to this, because she exaggerated things past believability).
There was no chance of me backsliding into misogyny, either, but I did absolutely turn into a kind of literal incel (of the “it’s not worth it to trust anyone too far, guess I’ll be alone forever” type) for a bit there.
Yeah, not getting mad at someone who built up those expectations and then just tossed you aside doesn’t seem like normal behavior. People don’t just fall in love with someone new in a single day. Even if some feelings come up, good people stop things before they get too far and realize that it’s a bad idea.
Being discarded like this isn’t just something that happened, as if it was a random act of nature. It’s a deliberate choice by someone to selfishly disregard what they built up with you because they want immediate gratification with some new person.
Joe and Joyce may only have been together for a week, but they’ve been talking for a long time. Joyce has been trying to address Joe’s insecurities about relationships for a long time. She’s probably the first person he’s actually allowed himself to be vulnerable around for a long, long time. And she knows all that. Cheating on him is going to do some serious hurt to him – and she knows that, too.
Shamelessly acting completely lovesick over Dorothy even as she watches it hurt people she cares about is just gross. I realize she had a stronger friendship with her than anyone else, but damn.
There is a saving grace, kinda, in that she hasn’t done a full-on “look at Dorothy and forget what I was doing due to Hornt” in FRONT of Joe yet, but I also suspect that if that happens he’ll be particularly hurt.
… granted, I still think there’s a fair chance that having all three of them in a room will cause Joyce to actually do some serious soul-searching, too, given the “romantic object permanence” theory of Joyce’s actions post-kiss.
As kind of a side note, maybe even pre-kiss. I think the first clear example was when she and Dorothy were having their moment in bed and Joe showed up for the date. Some read that as guilt for what she was (almost) doing with Dorothy, but in retrospect it seems very much the same kind of thing to me.
You did your best Joe.
Please become a healthy poly situation, please become a healthy poly situation, please please please 🥺
I can’t imagine how, is the problem.
Joe seems so crippled with self-hatred and fear from his parents’ divorce that he’s practically shoving Joyce out the door and HOPING she remembers him as an afterthought.
Dorothy hates Joe and hated that he “got” Joyce (like she was a goddamn carnival prize) so I can’t fathom the idea she’ll want to share.
And Joyce *used to be* a super caring and considerate friend, but these days she’s got the empathy and emotional intelligence of a rabid weasel, so the odds of her not fucking up a polycule instantly are astronomical.
Right. I’m not even gonna say Poly is impossible. Healthy though? That’ll take some serious work and introspection from everyone involved.
It always does, though. No healthy relationship out there doesn’t take introspection and work from all involved. Honestly, I’d love to see that kind of effort and complexity in the comic.
Yea, Joyce has spent so long restrained by her religion, that once free from it, she’s forgotten general self-restraint. It honestly a dangerous time for any new atheist.
Sympathy and empathy aren’t the same thing. Joyce has always had plenty of the former and difficulties with the latter.
Sadly I have to agree. This storyline has turned both Joyce and Dorothy into deeply unpleasant, supremely self centred people.
As a hater, it’s very weird for me to say that at least part of this is an artifact of the Webcomic Time Dilation Field: being unpleasantly selfish for the first twenty-four hours of a new relationship is something you can come back from, once you realize that’s what you were doing.
Slowly-Told-Story Syndrome strikes again!
Right so they’ll start unhealthy and have to work through it. Like some kind of character arc.
I’m also happy if it stays unhealthy and weird.
People sure do have a lot of explanations for why poly wouldn’t work for these three, and a lot fewer for why they wouldn’t try it anyway
They suuuper do. I think it’s just a general discomfort with the unknown in a lot of cases. People aren’t used to seeing polyamory in general, specifically not in main characters, and certainly only in the dichotomy of “bad, unhealthy, cautionary tale” or “good, perfect, no issues here!”.
Hopefully we all get to watch it happen anyway!
I’m hoping for this, too. Honestly, it’s pretty on brand for Sarah to make a cynical prediction about Joyce’s behavior only for Joyce to do things totally differently. So if anything, I think Sarah’s words increase my hope.
And Joe continuing to be selflessly caring about Joyce rather than possessive also gives me hope.
Joe should listen to Sarah here. It’s been pretty clear to me for a while now that Joyce is too into Dorothy right now to care about Joe’s suggestion of a poly relationship, and I doubt Dorothy would want that given her history with Joe. He deserves better than trying to stay with someone who cheated on him anyway.
In the Slipshine comic where Joe hooked up with Malaya she turned into Joyce after they were finished. Joyce was in Joe’s subconscious the entire time. I haven’t read the new Slipshine but I think, while Joyce is too in the moment to care about anyone other than Dorothy, HalluciJoe might appear, finally showing Joyce that leaving Joe hanging while she gleefully has sex with Dorothy is a Richard Relocation and she needs to figure out what she actually wants- Joe, Dotty, or a polycule. Because if Dotty finds out she DIDN’T do a clean break, Joyce could potentially have nothing at all.
The thing that I feel the most bad for Joe for is the fact that Joyce was the person who finally convinced him that, hey, maybe forming emotional attachments and actually LOVING somebody is a good thing and WORTH it… And then she turns around and cheats on him and abandons him for someone else. What kind of lesson does that send him about the value of relationships? If I were Joe, I’d honestly have to be trying VERY hard not to be nursing some “So Father was right after all…” grudges.
Don’t know about grudges, but learning bad lessons for sure.
”Not worth it, nothing but heartache as a result”
“Joe the person you love and cherish is currently fucking someone else and not thinking about you at all, even though two days ago she was very excited to lose her virginity to you and talked about how much she trusted you”
and we’re supposed to cheer for Joyce?
…Okay I’m not a fan of how Joyce has behaved towards Joe and I do not like Joyce/Dorothy at all but like what do you think happens in open relationships? Do y’all expect that when one is having sex with partner A they must be thinking about partner B? Do you think being fully in the moment with one of your partners is like a problem? This is the kind of shit polyamory EXPECTS to happen. The bad behavior is the running off on him, not finishing the conversation, being broadly pretty thoughtless and callous towards him. It is not, post being given explicit permission, letting herself self get fully into the act of intimacy and sex with Dorothy.
People be reading this as Joe hating himself. I think Joe is genuinely afraid she will decide not to keep him. I think that’s the nervesy facial expressions. I do not think Joe is lying to us about what he’s okay with.
One character is showing moral progression and increasing empathy.
The other is Joyce.
You’re 100% right about open/poly situation. It’s honestly insane to me that people think Joyce having sex with Dorothy and being fully present and focused on it is somehow a nail in the coffin for her promise to Joe.
Like, yeah, I’d personally have preferred things get resolved with Joe first, particularly with Dorothy as part of the conversation. But the fact that the two new girlfriends are going to fuck before they dive into the messiness that is the poly discussion doesn’t mean that said discussion isn’t happening.
The COMIC is doing it.
The COMIC is superimposing a panel of Joyce fucking Dorothy, into this strip about Joe pining after her, with narration from Sarah saying “Joyce chose Dorothy, not you.”
That feels like a pretty damn clear message.
Possibly. You could interpret is the comic superimposing a few panels of Joe on top of Joyce and Dorothy having sex. Also, Sarah has often been very, very wrong about Joyce.
I can see both readings.
Narrative framing aside, person A having sex with person B does not necessarily imply that A’s feelings for C are any less than they were before. People can love multiple people, even romantically and sexually, without that love being any less than it would be if they were monogamous. Honestly, if Willis’s intentions are that this is the nail in the coffin, it’s pretty shitty for this reason. I don’t think he’d do that, though.
the problem is I do think he (Willis) would do that, because that has been the tone set both in the comic and in his social media posts.
It’s very much a question of whether you read this as an authorial statement, which I agree the framing suggests, or as just Sarah giving her personal opinion, with the last panel as basically the punchline.
And remember that Sarah doesn’t even know about the poly suggestion.
Jon – I agree that the comic feels like it is communicating that Joe is gonna get his heart broken. I think I even commented further up, if I were planning on going poly this is not a strip I would write/draw like this. I could conceive of it happening still, and I think if the scene stays with Joe it’s more likely. But. Yes. I think this framing feels very nails in coffin and I’m sad about it.
I am frustrated (and I think a little too aggressively so, sorry Derek for coming in that hot) at the idea that being fully engaged with the moment during intimacy and sex is Joyce doing anything wrong. Joyce has done many things wrong! Joyce has been a huge dick this arc! But having the sex and not worrying about Joe during the sex is really not one of her crimes, even if they’re still going to be together! He proposed poly, your partner doing that is part of how poly works.
I don’t think they are in an open relationship. I think Joe suggested it and then was left hanging.
Also my comment was more about how it sucks for Joe that he’s thinking about her but she’s not thinking about him at all.
Joyce can do what she wants, but I’m not taking her side on anything, I’m taking Joe’s. I’m not happy for Joyce.
Aaaaaand Joyce’s heel-turn is complete.
Weird choice to make your POV character so unlikeable.
Yup. How to face turn from this?
How does this complete Joyce’s heel-turn? In any way that wasn’t complete many strips ago?
Speak for yourself. Joyce is still the best character. (Carla is second.)
Hmm. The poly thing could still happen. It’s not impossible. But I agree with another commenter above; I would not write this specific strip if I was planning on Joyce “returning”. So I won’t be holding my breath.
I’d interpret it as a way to remind us that Joe is still involved and important to the situation, even while the “A story” is the two ladies fucking.
Sarah’s words remind me of many of her other past predictions about Joyce’s behavior and how wrong Sarah often is when it comes to Joyce.
He’s not important to the situation, the situation is important to him. He’s completely uninvolved with Joyce and Dorothy
Hey, on the note of the cheating discourse, I’m having trouble understanding why people are so upset about this specific instance. Like I get that the problem with cheating is deception, but here there wasn’t any? The girls kissed, and then they fessed up and broke up with their boyfriends in a reasonably timely manner. If they had broken up with the boyfriends first and then kissed, then the outcome is the same isn’t it? Either way relationships are over, hearts are broken, but there was no false pretense, no carrying on under a lie.
It’s hard for me to grasp the nuances in these kinds of things because I don’t experience sexual jealousy at all. For me sex isn’t any different from any other activity people might do together for fun, so my partner having sex with a friend carries about as much emotional weight as them playing Street Fighter with a friend. I’m vaguely glad they had a good time, but it’s not really important.
I think some are bothered by how Joyce never got back to Joe. Sort of still in a relstionship until she delivers her verdict to him
For a lot of people, cheating isn’t just about deception but about betrayal.
And for me specifically, it looks like Joyce’s was a case of premeditated betrayal, given the strips preceding her date with Joe having her go all in on testing the waters with Dorothy (Apparently! The lack of thought bubbles is hell for someone with body language and social cues issues)
To me, Joyce is cheating on Dorothy more than Joe. Joe KNEW that Joyce and Dorothy kissed and let it slide, then offered to be a side piece instead of the #1 boyfriend. Joyce didn’t respond with a yes or a no, so Joe is holding out on that. HOWEVER, because Joyce rather cruelly made Dorothy’s breakup with Walky concrete, going so far as to laugh in Walky’s face when he seemed unfazed by the declaration, Dorothy assumes that Joyce did the same “rip the bandaid off” strategy with Joe. Remembrer- Dotty declared that they BOTH dumped their boyfriends for each other, to which Joyce just shifted around nervously and said “uhhhh…”
Joyce has become a female Scott Pilgrim.
Dotty: You cheated on me? You cheated on both of us?
Joe: You cheated on me with Dotty?
Joyce: No, I cheated on Dotty with… you…
Joe: Is there a difference??
Joyce: You… weren’t wronged?
(Dina appears and stabs Joyce with a cyber-sword)
Dina: Game… over!
Yep, it’s exactly this. And if you asked me who’d be the Scott Pilgrim, it obviously would have been Walky(with… Lucy and Amber probably), not Joyce.
Similar to that, throughout the whole movie the relationship with Ramona is tainted with distractions and infighting until the truth comes out and everyone talks things through. I imagine Joyce’s friends will treat Dotty better than Scott’s friends treated Ramona.
I get that the problem with cheating is deception
I’d argue that’s a misconception and the problem with cheating is more generally breaking boundaries set by one’s partners.
With the (like it or not, approve of it or not) severe complication that a lot of relationships NEVER EXPLICITLY DISCUSS THOSE BOUNDARIES and simply assume that everyone has the same exact set of culturally-mediated boundaries.
Oh, that actually that makes a lot of sense! For a lot of people Joyce and Dorothy have broken boundaries that seem obvious to them, whereas for others they don’t have those boundaries or don’t consider them important. This in turn gives us the disagreement we’ve been having in the comments section where some people think there’s been a big breach of trust and others don’t think it’s a big deal, and there’s no way to resolve it because the boundaries in question were never actually explicitly discussed, so we only have our preconceptions.
Heya! I can’t offer much in the way of explanation, but I can offer solidarity.
I’ve also never really understood what the big deal was (re: Joyce is now a “horrible person”) because it just isn’t the kind of thing that hits me that way. Joyce and Dorothy weren’t in control of the feelings they developed for each other, and once they developed those it was a matter of time before they figured it out and ended their relationships anyway. A kiss happening three hours before rather than three hours after doesn’t make me bat an eye at all.
I do feel bad for Walky and Joe, because getting broken up with fucking sucks and hurts and I hope they get lots of friends checking in on them both. But I’ve never felt the rage toward Dorothy and Joyce, or even annoyance at how it went down. They’re young and stupid and it doesn’t scandalize me that their timing sucked and they retreated from consequences longer than half an hour.
It wasn’t kind of them, but I will just never view it through the lens that other people seem to where they’re struggling to even give a shit about the characters anymore.
This is q lot of what I was getting at up above. She wasn’t in control of her feelings and I didn’t particularly blame her for discovering them , because what would be the point? We were both hella young, and I guess she didn’t know herself as well as she thought she did when she moved in with me.
I find it kind of weird for people to be getting vastly more upset at fictional teenagers for screwing up one week-long relationships than I did at one screwing up a real life year-long relationship with me
Yeah I totally get you. As for it being weird, meh. I’m very sure people who are massively upset about this think you and I are weird for not seeing the problem. Just different opinions, personal boundaries, and levels of tolerance for things. I’ll never get why this particular situation bugs so many people so much (to the point of rage and personal attacks) but that’s fine.
It was your post Ray that inspired mine! You were making sense and many others weren’t, so I thought it would be good to ask for some clarification. Also thanks Nymph for the solidarity. It’s good to know there are others who feel like the situation is messy but not some kind of betrayal.
“Told him three hours later” is very different than “found out by reading a newspaper article the next day.”
Sure, I was giving an example because I didn’t immediately remember all the details of when each thing happened. So I’ll address the specifics: She went to tell him the next day. He’d already seen it in a newspaper that involuntarily outed two queer women, a newspaper she did not consent to be in, so I don’t think it’s reasonable to hold that over her head either tbh.
I understand that for many people this scenario poses a huge moral upset, but I was explaining that (for me) it doesn’t and I’ve never really understood why it’s so heinous to people. I’ve accepted that I’m never going to understand, because it has been explained ad nauseum, and that it’s fine I don’t agree with people on the severity of this kind of thing.
Except she had a chance to tell him mere hours after the fact remember?
Instead she blowed him.
I do remember that, yes.
It hadn’t occurred to me until now, but there is another reason to be upset about cheating other than deception. That’s being upset that someone violated the agreed upon set of rules and boundaries in a relationship. Even if there’s no deception, breaking rules you’ve agreed upon is bad.
Since we have no on panel discussion of such rules between Joe and Joyce, I think people are projecting their own default expectations. For you and me, there are no default expectations. Until there have been explicit rules made, it’s impossible to break any rules. So the worst you can say is that the order of operations was messy, since full disclosure beforehand is preferable, but there’s no serious harm or foul unless there’s some kind of serious deception.
However, many assume standard social expectations of sexual and romantic monogamy. So for them, a lack of clear rules means the rules are “never do anything remotely romantic or sexual with anyone else.” Based on those rules, Joyce did break a rule, which is grounds to be upset.
I don’t think that’s a fair set of expectations to project onto Joyce and Joe’s relationship, especially since it’s been very clear that Joe did not expect monogamy and actually wanted the opposite. However, that is the lens people are applying. And damn, what a depressing way to view the world and love… It puts such huge limits on how one can understand love. Amatonormativity sucks.
Yeah; “cheating is bad” is a tautology, but not all bad things are equally bad. I’d argue that there’s an enormous moral gulf between a sustained, intentional infidelity on one hand, and “serial monogamy but someone forgot to file the proper paperwork at the correct time” on the other.
Two close friends realized they’ve been in love for their entire adult lives after kissing in the heat of a literal life-or-death situation and went to break up with their week-long partners the very next morning. *Plus* the friends had very justifiably believed the other to have an incompatible orientation prior to the epiphany, *plus* the life-or-death situation only happened because they were suppressing their attraction in deference to existing relationships. On the cheating spectrum, that’s so far on the understandable side that it could be seen as a bit too tidy narratively.
Some people got hurt. But if they had suppressed this for a few more months, those same people would have gotten hurt eventually, likely even more so. And if they had suppressed this forever, Joyce and Dorothy would be the ones who got hurt. If they had done everything the right way -realized their attraction, broke up with their boyfriends, and then waited a socially-acceptable amount of time before starting a relationship- those same people would have still gotten hurt. The path to finding someone special enough to spend years with is not always a straight line. It’s true for Joyce and Dorothy, it was true for Becky, and it will be true for Joe and Walky.
I think actually this isn’t really the case, though!
If we presume Joe’s offer of poly is genuine or at least genuinely meant, then we can also assume that his pre-Kiss attempts to nudge Joyce and Dorothy together were meant to pre-empt the whole situation by getting it out in the open. It seems to be relatively obvious that if Joe had shown up to pick up Joyce that date night and the two ladies had said something more like “Actually, Joe, you were right and we are actually kinda into each other”, they could have had a halfway decent discussion about poly or not and then moved along either way with much less potential for hurt feelings. Joe would get to keep his complete trust and friendship with Joyce and get some good feelings for successfully helping friends realize something and navigating it well, Dorothy might actually respect him more, Joyce wouldn’t be in the position where she feels like she HAS to make a hard choice, etc.
Instead we now have a Joe who’s clinging to an increasingly dire hope and telling himself that it’s worth it somehow while Sarah of all people pushes sympathy at him.
Sure, the Dorothy and Walky situation would still have been complicated, but TBH Dorothy’s treated him like a convenient ambulatory sex doll before and as such I was NEVER of the opinion that their latest romantic collision would end in any way that made Walky feel good.
Let’s be frank – Dorothy has treated Walky like crap even before all of this and things between them were never going to end well as long as she kept up her routine of realizing she treats him unfairly, chastising herself for it, and then doing nothing to change her behavior.
Would like to see this actually adressed in the story soon!
Yeah, to be clear when I say “Dorothy treated Walky like a doll” I mean that in a very “Granny Weatherwax explaining what sin is” kind of way.
“If they had broken up with the boyfriends first and then kissed, then the outcome is the same isn’t it?”
I think this is the key about why people are very upset and maybe why you don’t understand. (and I’m not judging you for not understanding, everyone has different standards and approaches to relationships)
for a lot of people breaking off the currently relationship before starting the new one makes all the difference in the world. It’s about respecting your partner as a person and keeping them informed about things that affect them (like your relationship!!)
the difference between cheating and consensual healthy polyamory is clear communication and consent from all parties involved.
The outcome is literally different because the outcome is now their relationship isnt founded on a betrayal of trust
OTGH, they’re right that is basically about as mild as cheating can get. Which for me makes this even more frustrating. It was mild. It doesn’t need a grandiose reaction or a feud that tears the entire dorm apart as people choose sides.
Just one of the boys going, to steal from Raidah way back when:”a) fuck you and b) whoops, guess I deserved better all along.” I think that would have satisfied a lot of us.
To be clear, I do think that as a rule people should break off any existing relationship before doing anything that would invalidate that relationship, that’s just good sense. However, Joyce and Dorothy got caught up by a swell of emotion in the heat of the moment, and to me it seems unreasonable to expect the girls in that circumstance to put their feelings aside and go file the requisite paperwork before having their kiss. The whole time they have been trying to be honest, to themselves and to their boyfriends, and so I feel like they have acted in good faith even though the circumstances have not allowed an ideal order of operations.
Now on to the sapphic main course; Billie, Ruth and Alice.
Don’t forget Asma!
But are we quite sure that they’re gay for each other and not just good friends?
(making fun of myself here, don’t feel attacked peeps!)
hmm
I don’t think there’s been such a moment when I’ve been moved to post a whole bloody song…..
But I think this encapsulates it all…. Goddamit.
If time were not a moving thing
And I could make it stay,
This hour of love we share
Would always be.
There’d be no coming day
To shine a morning light –
make us realize our night
is over
When you walk away from me
There is no place to put my hand
Except to shade my eyes against the sun
That rises over land
I watch you walk away
Somehow I have to let you go
Now it’s over
If you knew just how I really feel
You might return and yet
There are so many times
That people have to love and then forget
There might have been a way
somehow I have to force myself
to say it’s over
So I turn my back
I turn my collar to the wind
I move along in silence
Trying not to think at all
I set my feet before me
Walk the silent street before me
‘Cos it’s over
It’s over….
(Best version… Glen Campbell Live)
I think Joe is banking on Joyce wanting a polycule so she can date both him and Dorothy (given Joyce ended up giving Joe a BJ instead of flat-out breaking up with him.) BUT, given that Dotty despises Joe, I think ultimately she’ll feel betrayed that Joyce didn’t break up with him (unlike her, where Joyce told Walky straight up that his relationship with Dotty is over and then laughed in his face.) and create an ultimatum- her or Joe. I’m fairly confident that Joyce will pick Dorothy, but lose pretty much every other friend she has because of her decision.
But, hey, all you need is one girlfriend, right? It worked out with Zii and Didi in the Canadian comic “Menage a 3,” so why not now?
That would be satisfying at least. I’d like to see Joyce and Dorothy having burnt all the bridges around themselves, and eventually have a moment of clarity about how everybody now thinks about them.
I doubt, very sincerely, that the main character of a college/relationship drama is going to lose every other friend she has (i.e. connections to all the other main characters in the story). Or, if she does, it’ll be suuuuper temporary.
Joyce did break up with him. And I don’t think everyone else in the comic are such enormous assholes as you seem to think they are.
Um… Given the fact that pretty much everyone other than Walky, Becky, Dina, Sarah, and sort of Raidah have been cheering them on and congratulating them, I seriously doubt Joyce choosing Dorothy given an ultimatum would burn many bridges.
Honestly, the only person with any on-panel stake in Joyce/Joe is Sarah. Walky is probably the opposite where he’d be more upset with a polycule he was excluded from than a simple matter of both him and Joe getting dumped.
I immediately thought of Amber when you said everyone was cheering them on. Amber DID encourage Dotty to be more aggressive when wooing her crush, but in the most recent strip she is showing signs of guilt because Dotty and Joyce blew up everything around them to be together and Becky and to a lesser extent Dina were collateral damage.
I mean I think she also feels guilty because Booster asked her if she helped Dorothy send the cleavage pic as part of a Machiavellian plot to get Walky for herself again.
welp. now im sad
Oh the comments, the comments!!!!
TIL that soft serve is ice cream. Full of chemicals.
Yesterday I said “OK, so Mac n cheese comes out of a packet if you are a student, but if your mom makes it, she starts from scratch right?” YIL Mac n cheese comes out of a packet.
Thank you to the people who pointed out that people wanted Karma because this is fiction. I learn somethng new every day.
It’s a pity I have to wade thru so much swamp to find it, so much same ol mud, but that’s life, I guess.
[Cross-posting from yesterday’s Patreon]
Speaking as someone who still is rooting for a triad, I am of a mind to caution everyone to remember that this is not a genre that really has ‘endgame’ ships in the way that It’s Walky (Sci-Fi epic) & Shortpacked (workplace comedy/pop-culture commentary) do.
No matter which ships win out in the short term, the very structure of an ongoing slice of life/coming of age series like this will inevitably mean that the common currency of shifting relationships will continue to rotate. They may cycle back around, but they cannot be held in amber (much as she might wish >.>) for the rest of the strips run.
That said, I’m canvasing for Fuckpile 2044. Let them get ahead of the game on the ‘disappear into the wilderness & form a commune’ phase of the countercultural revolution. Joyce can be cult leader and be horrified when someone suggests that she has to form an actual Dogma.
I mean, Willis word-for-word said Joyce/Dorothy was endgame on his tumblr
I can only hope Willis was lying, or that his plans change. This is a very boring endgame. Does it mean the comic is coming to a close then?
Oh can I have a link to that quote? I know they talked about how the kiss was a wedding, but marriages end so I didn’t take that as a tacit “they are endgame” so much as “they are ferally devoted to one another”. I’d be so interested to know if they truly are just set in stone now.
I vaguely remember the word endgame being thrown around but I could not give you the link to where it was used, unfortunately.
No one I’ve talked to has been able to offer a source so far. AFAICT, it’s an extrapolation from Willis commenting on “wedding imagery” in the protest scene, which yeah, I also do not in any way take as “they will never break up”, because a.) it was not a literal wedding, b.) literal marriages aren’t permanent either.
Ah yes, the Charles solution.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-13/04-but-dont-give-yourself-away/mysake/
Man I know the world doesn’t work this way and Karmas just a nice idea but this just makes me hope Joe’s got a win coming somewhere in the near future.
The world doesn’t, but stories very often do. As this isn’t real life at all, I think hoping for a win for Joe after such a big loss is more than reasonable.
And I hope you get your wish.
It would be a quick repeat, but this is almost what just happened with Lucy and Walky – Lucy definitely upgraded right after that heartbreak, and fast.
As much as I like the Joyce/Dorothy couple and its cuteness/lewdness, I do still feel really bad for Joe, given that the concept of a polycule between Joyce, Dorothy and him is looking less and less likely by the minute…
Oh, whoops, forgot to put a closing on the italics.
The market opens to uncertainty as Sarah pours cold water on the chances polyamory. Sarah’s established pessimism produces a confused and unstable response as investors are unable to determine whether she should be considered reliable in this strip; cut-away to blonde girls boinking further confuses the market. Stocks are highly volatile; invest at your own risk.
This is interesting because technically this strip really adds no new information that makes poly less likely. It’s really just Joe is waiting and they’re having sex now, all of which we already knew.
Sarah doesn’t even know about the possibility of poly having been raised, so she’s just saying “No, she’s serious about Dorothy. They’re doing it right now. She’s not leaving her to return to you.”
But it still seems to shift the vibes. Is this meant as an authorial comment on the chances? Or is it just Sarah’s mistaken assessment?
Good observation and question thejeff. Is Sarah speaking with the author’s voice here?
It feels like it. Like I think the fact that no new information is added here combined with the framing of cutting to the girls makes this feel like a strip that’s telling us about the narrative.
My one like. Grain of hope really stems from I don’t think Sarah is aware polyamory is proposed and I could see this be a tension building move in relation to that, reminding a reader (bc let’s remember Willis did not write these looking at the comments section) that Joe is still a loose thread hanging over the Joyce Dorothy relationship and everything isn’t quite so fuzzy and beautiful as it’s looked. Obviously the commenters have absolutely not forgotten that shit, but I could see as a writer shifting focus for a long time, repeatedly emphasizing how in love they are, and then reminding the audience they should be worried.
To me, Sarah’s line is kind of giving the same vibes as Sarah saying “You’re a good kid. I’ll be sad when the world breaks you.”
I could be wrong, but I’m interpreting this strip as a reminder that Joe is still in the picture while contrasting his selfless love and hope it’ll be reciprocated with Sarah’s cynicism.
I DIDN’T ASK FOR YOUR CAUTIOUS OUTLOOK I SAID PUT EVERY DIME I HAVE INTO POLYAMORY STOCKS.
(though I’m willing to diversify into Joe-gets-an-unrelated-polycule without Joyce or Dorothy involved)
Yeah I’d go with that one. Poly doesn’t have to be everyone into everyone equally but
Dorothy and Joe both 100% on Joyce and Joyce being like 90/10 Dorothy/Joe just isn’t a set up that’s all that likely to be stable/healthy especially for people this inexperienced.
Joyce being 90/10 on Dorothy/Joe feels uncharitable. It’s not a 50/50 split by any means but I’d put it more in the range of 60/40, or 70/30 at worst. She cares a lot about Joe and is really into him… when he’s in front of her.
Yeah, I don’t think in-universe it’s clear at all how Joyce splits on these two, given the circumstances and Joyce’s particular proclivities with regard to romance and the storyline of her own life.
However! I think, out-of-universe, it’s somewhat closer to what Opinion says, based on every scrap of commentary from Willis I’ve seen.
My true sicko take is I want Joe to somehow end up in the Mandy/Sierra/ grace polycule as a walkyverse referencr but instead of it just being nonstop fucking like was implicit in that comic he just a big emotionally supportive teddy bear that the genuinely like having around.
To be perfectly frank, this is the most I’ve been into the comic in awhile. It’s HONEST, yes, it sucks for Joe and what not, but like….this stuff happens, long lasting loving relationships have been built on someone cheating on someone else. And a lot of times, especially in college, the cheatee eventually moves on. These are very very young adults, literally not even old enough to drink. They are literally FUCKING IDIOTS WHO WILL MAKE SO MANY MISTAKES. MISTAKES WORSE THAN THIS. And maybe it’s because I’ve moved from a dumbass 19 year old myself when the comic began to someone who is pushing 35, but I don’t get why people are so….I don’t even know, upset? Cynical? Acting this plot point in a comic justifies their weird “the world is terrible” mindset?
So much truth. I’ve really enjoyed the arc. It’s unfortunate that my excitement lead me to want to discuss it, leading me to the comments section only to find out that it’s a quagmire filled with haters.
Like, people can make mistakes and still be lovable. Sometimes people’s mistakes and flaws are why they’re lovable.
These characters are so very real, and their messiness is a huge part of that. Let the characters be messy. Let them learn, grow, make more mistakes, and repeat.
This arc would have been so much more boring if it would have been a clean, diplomatic shift from Joe/Joyce and Walky/Dorothy to Dorothy/Joyce or even Dorothy/Joyce/Joe. This messiness is so much more interesting and makes the characters much more relatable and real.
I think the issue is its messy in some ways and way too clean in others. If it’s gonna be a mess I want it messier. If it’s gonna be clean I want it cleaner.
This, right here, that’s where I’m at. It doesn’t FEEL messy at all, because so far none of the mess is actually sticking to the mess-makers.
And to go back to Liarock411’s post, Joyce and Dorothy may be fucking idiots who make so many mistakes, but why then are so many of the rest of the cast mostly being pretty adult and understanding about it instead of ALSO reacting like fucking teenage idiots and exploding in turn?
If willis wanted to write a cheating arc he forgot to add the drama involved in a cheating arc. This arc has actually been so fucking bland outside of Joyce and Dorothy just being gay
Which in and of itself isnt an interesting concept to me? Like, two people being gay with each other and just constantly flaunting their love (to me) cant carry an entire arc
Right, exactly. “Let my freshmen be freshman” cuts both ways.
Had no way to predict how this poll would go. QC got 1st place so far? Huh. I’m just here for the donuts. (really like the slipshine too)
Why are you here?
refreshing the page every five minutes to see if there’s a Slipshine (19%, 585 Votes)
trying to scrub off the scarlett letter on my monitor i tried to sharpie joyce with (5%, 168 Votes)
shit i thought this was questionable content, where am i (33%, 1,006 Votes)
i was told there’d be donuts (23%, 714 Votes)
if i stare hard enough at today’s strip it might turn into one about billie and ruth (19%, 595 Votes)
Total Voters: 3,068
sidenote, any funny business in the top bunk seems daunting to me, but then again I get scared when I have to use the ladder to change a lightbulb so
They’re loft beds, not bunks.
That’s a distinction without a difference to the point Acebender was making, honestly. The only difference between a loft and a bunk is if it’s a desk or another bed underneath.
The one time I got up to funny business in a college loft I was struck by how cramped it was once we had finished up the hanky-panky and tried to actually sleep.
Heh, and now I’m having dumb memories about how cuddling in the loft to sleep was pretty okay when I was a 6′ ~190lbs nerd entering college, but significantly more fraught by the end of college when I was a 270lb weightlifter with a linebacker build — especially since one of the ladies I dated was 6’4″ and 250+ herself. (and a black belt, on top of that. Everyone should date a lady who could COMPREHENSIVELY kick their ass at least once, IMHO)
(thankfully, my dad, with more foresight than I’d’ve credited for a no-hankypanky-before-marriage Catholic, custom-built me a loft+desk frame where the corners were an L-bracket made out of 2x6s — we could’ve had an entire orgy up there and not collapsed it.)
Yeah, this was some (in hindsight) ill-advised activities around 2nd base with a woman I had been nursing a crush on for a couple of years when she was in the process of breaking up with a boyfriend.
She proceeded to ghost me and the one other person I stayed in touch with about a year after I graduated for no reason that we could discern.
In a funny coincidence, someone else in that friend group that I very much did *not* stay in touch with turns out to have gone to high school with my current gf. My girlfriend asked me one day how I knew someone I hadn’t thought about in years and I had to dig deep to remember lol
English is not my first language so, there is that
Joyce’s panties are…suggestive.
And is Dorothy going to remove her glasses?
According to the Slipshine, no.
Joyce, at seventy: “It was wonderful! And at the same time I can’t change the fact that I hurt the young man.”
Regrets are seldom pure; they are often mixed with the memory of joy so you don’t know how to feel about either. Although Willis isn’t getting a lot of support on this storyline, it rings true to me. Viewed through the clutter of my own dumb choices, driven by fundamentalism and undiagnosed autism.
I kinda wish Willis would adjust his style for sexual encounters. Joyce’s pubic area looks so unappealing with the blocky shapes
Poor Joe.
Really hoping he doesn’t backslide from this.
unlimited jakey violence
If you love someone you set them free because otherwise your love is just a prison. There wasn’t much Joe could have done to prevent this. Maybe delay but not prevent. Once Dorothy said no to transferring this was gonna happen. Both story logic and teen hormone logic.
Can’t say imagine this will end up poly. It would eat up all the storyline to create a giant fuckpile.
Yeah, I think the phrase “if you love someone, set them free” is sorta creepy, because it implies it’s up to you to decide if they’re free or not. Love shouldn’t be chains.
I definitely feel like it’s more like…breaking a social contract? Like usually I hear this used more for a metaphor for like a pet or something but in the confines of a relationship I guess it’s more “I want you to be able to do what you’d want to do if you didn’t feel obligated to fulfill some version of monogamy with me.” Less of a “setting you free from my own confinement” and moreso setting you free of the social contract of a monogamous western relationship?
I mean, isn’t the whole idiom something like “If you love something, set it free and see if it comes back to you”?
I always interpreted it as “the person I love will, given the freedom to choose anyone in the world, choose me every time because they love me back.”
It’s very much an idiom that’s steeped in monogamy in that monogamy presumes that said choice needs to be made, but in that context I think there’s something worthwhile there. Certainly I continue to appreciate how much my SO thinks of me compared to so many other people out there.
Oh hey Joe even said that part.
I agree. I think a lotta people just get a bit turned off by how a lot of romantic language tends to be kinda possessive in nature. Mostly due to how a lot of patriarchal and abusive relationships have functioned historically. I can see why many people hear things like “set free” or “she’s yours” and think “ok so do you own this person?”
So much romantic language sounds like the most beautiful, wonderful thing you’ve ever heard when it’s being said to you by someone you adore, and the creepiest most off-putting bullshit in the world in any other context.
Right? I cannot describe how…happy the concept of “belonging to someone” in a romantic sense makes me.
And why obviously as a black guy I kinda wouldn’t like it in any other context.
So I should throw boomerangs, got it.
you don’t think she’s returning? oh she might come… soon™…
I’m proud of Sarah. Even she’s rolling her eyes at first pannel, she’s here to really help Joe.
Yeah, now that we’re at the getting busy part of the Doyce relationship (I know people like using Joyrothy, but I just like the sound of Doyce, and it really does fit the feeling of their relationship for me), I’m ready to move on to other things – and I think that Joe is in prime position to do some growing and changing, which I am here for! Let’s give the girls some time to (lose their) breath, and give someone else the spotlight for a bit.
I like DoJo because it makes them sound like martial artists
History will say they were really good friends
Also rip Joe all that character development just for the girl he liked to turn out gay
I’m exaggerating, it’s not all like that, i just thought it was funny
Even though he does it with a platitude, this is the first Joe has admitted to another person that he loves Joyce. I don’t think Joyce even knows it. Came close to it with Jocelyne by agreeing that he’s “…got it bad”.
Not quite what I had in mind when I asked to go somewhere else yesterday, but I’ll still take this. Head pats for Joe and hope he can find someone who knows what they would be missing out on.
All of the “love” being thrown around by these kids is pretty authentic behavior for a bunch of mostly-actually-horny college freshmen at least.
I buy that Joe is in love with Joyce. I am obligated to accept that Dorothy and Joyce are in love with each other because the strip continues to insist that that’s what it is. I would find it more convincing if the ratio of romantic affection to blatantly impatient to fuck was skewed a little more in one direction. Hopefully post-nut clarity will help with this.
This!
It is what it is. I just hope Joe doesn’t fall back into his old ways
I hope they get hit by a bus 🩵
I DIDNT MEAN FOR THIS COMMENT TO POST OMG I THOUGHT IT WOULDNT GO THROUGH CAUSE NOTHING I’VE POSTED HAS GONE THROUGH THE PAST 2 DAYS
Kinda funny breakthrough post though, all considered.
Lit last night I had this huge wall post talking about Joe and Sarah and how I know how much pain Joe must be going through and that’s why I cant stand doyce and yadda yadda.
But no, that doesn’t get posted, my snarky comment after reading comment chains basically going “lol get fucked people who think this is poorly handled” does.
Genuinely thought Willis like, banned me or something I was so genuinely sad. I’ve been replying to people endlessly hoping one of my comments would go through 😭
The discussions in the comments are 2/3rds the reason I read the comic atm as my feelings on this arc and how its being handled are pretty plain haha
Quick while my comments are going through.
Fuck Joyce for literally all of this. Idc what anyone says this is a pure fucking douchebag move to Joe AND Dorothy. No. She didn’t have to immediately fuck her new girlfriemd before actually properly breaking up with Joe and I really cant wait to read the next few pages between Sarah and Joe.
I don’t think he’s gonna backslids but I definitely think we’re about to see Joe at his lowest in terms of emotional stability. God I’M just glad we’re finally getting to something that isnt these two just smashing their faces together (metaphorically) for page after page.
My new hope is Joyce and Joe have a heart to heart after this and Joyce starts feeling like shit over this all but given how selfish she’s been this whole arc i doubt it
This is wonderfully written in terms of realism. It heart-breaking to see Joe and Joyce both evolve so dramatically from their original forms that they are as diametrically opposite as they were at the start of the strip. It’s hard not to feel anger at Joyce as she is the cause of the pain. And it’s hard not to justify that anger as she moved across Joe’s feeling so quickly without much consideration for the damage. She is doing nothing wrong – and yet what she is doing is very hurtful – and that fact that she gave Joe a blowjob probably less than 12 hours before this and then ran away without seeing things to the point of closure (while still prioritizing another over Joe) hasn’t helped.
Joyce is a very realistic portrayal of a low-grade narcissist with deep empathic tendencies – she cares, but she doesn’t give much weight or attention to anything outside of her worldview or personal needs for very long.
But that’s people. Joe and Joyce are very compatible people who are not in sync with each other at all. Joe needed to be this Joe months ago, and for Joyce to accept being with him she needed to be her current Joyce months ago – but that would lead to her not really wanting Joe. Because this version of Joyce doesn’t really want him. She never really did – she just really believed she did. And that’s not her fault. Or Joe’s fault. Or Dorothy’s fault. But you can still have no-fault and tremendous injury.
I’d argue she’s doing a ton wrong, it’s just the actual relationship with Dorothy isn’t a part of it, only a symptom of it.
You can have no fault and tremendous injury, but this is definitely Joyces fault. The way she’s handled all of this just goes to show how selfish she is. She cares more about not being hurt herself (I.E. not breaking up with Joe the first time) than she does hurting others (I.E. leaving this boy on read to go have sex with her new partner)
Maybe. But either way it rings very real and very human. The fact that the dynamics are producing such polarized and such emotional responses is a strength to the story and characters. Good characters are interesting and they make you feel – but they don’t always make you feel good.
Whatever you may think of the storyline, “Friend of Dorothy” is a pretty slick Slipshine title.
It’s very funny. It makes me think that this must have been the plan all the way from the get-go
oh fuck I was not ready for that last panel
I am so jelly of Joyce right now (1 for the situation, 2 because I love those panties)
We are just about ten weeks out from the Ominous Joe&Dina panel. I continue to hope it’s not him lashing out at her.
I do like this new interaction/possible direction for Joe and Sarah as friends (or maybe more, someday, if it doesn’t work out with Tony).
The server clock has a nap.
Holdout! Server Clock!
Thought to yell at Willis to put that away but then remembered he gave us THIS way back when, and though “well ok fine I guess”
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/hmph/