That’s more or less what I was thinking. She doesn’t say anything about what’s bothering her, she doesn’t want to fix anything, she just wants Joyce to feel bad and maybe, possibly, doubt her relationship. Which again makes me question if this is really about Joyce and Dot doing protesting wrong or if it’s about Sarah.
Probably has more to do with Joyce trying to seduce Jacob while he and Raidah were dating. She already hated Joyce on Joyce’s own merit, independent of Sarah.
Yeah, I forgot that happened. Maybe it would also take Joyce a moment to connect the dots. Raidah has waited six months for her to present a weakness she could attack in revenge for her insult? She couldn’t just let Joyce know she thought what Joyce did was wrong and showed some defects of character she should work on, or something? Nope just gotta hurt her feelings.
She can, in fact, die mad about it. Especially once Joyce figures out what it is she wants to do now instead of homeschooling her cult children and changes her major.
which I guess makes it even pettier if she’s holdin a grudge about her ex being crushed on by some repressed virgin, enough to threaten her in a pretty homophobic way. So I guess the exact kind of person we were thinking of lol
To be fair, that’s not a threat. She’s just observing “homophobia is real and it’ll keep you out of that job you said you wanted. Sucks to be you.” Cause, as she explains, the only point is to hurt Joyce and the only way to do that (thinks Raidah) is taking away something she wants.
haha damn you’re right, I actually did not consider this from the perspective of “ha ha nerd i have kompromat over you forever, never cross me again or i will ruin your entire life out of spite” angle. I was just assuming she was being as hurtful as possible, because that’s been her MO in nearly every one-on-one character interaction we’ve witnessed her in.
Oh it’s a threat. Someone doesn’t need to say, “or else,” for a threat to be communicated. Unsaid in the above interaction is:
“I know you. I’m watching you. I’m tracking your career. I know this will take years to bear fruit. I have the information needed to destroy your job in the future.”
None of that was said explicitly, but it was all communicated.
But if she was going to do that, why would she warn her about it now? …Maybe it’s silly of me to expect people to be smart about their dumbass revenge schemes.
Because by doing it now, she hopefully destabilizes Joyce, and therefore keeps Joyce from ever making anything of herself. Like, she downgraded Dorothy’s entire life’s dream in one carefully-delivered sentence, with deliberate intent.
Because her view on the social ladder is exactly the same as Littlefinger from freaking Game of Thrones, anybody who has shown any ability to oppose her, or to keep any associations that are opposed to her sphere of influence, can be proactively dealt with by restricting them from climbing to higher rungs on the social ladder, in any way possible. If you give someone a mental breakdown, they start making dumb-ass decisions, and you don’t have to worry about them ever punching in your weight class, ever again.
When you mention Dorothy, it is pretty funny picturing Raidah going around all smug like “muahaha I’m the best at manipulation, I ruined her life with one sentence” when Dorothy was deep in the process of reexamining her life goals before Raidah got involved. (Just like Joyce.)
Maybe her intervention even sped up the process and led directly to making that big front page kiss happening! Pity to be a social climber trying to climb over people who care more about building relationships with each other. They may not even realize the things you do to hurt them are supposed to hurt.
Eh, even if it’s not a threat, it’s still “haha, you’re going to be discriminated against and it will impact your job prospects!” So I’m comfortable calling Raidah homophobic for this even if she genuinely didn’t mean she’ll do anything about it.
Raidah is the definition of performative woke because the moment she encounters even the slightest push of unpleasantness she goes out of her way to be bigoted instead of being mean in the literal hundreds of ways that exist.
There is this theory the comments section fielded that she’s actually invested in freeing Bulmeria and had real reasons to be mad about the girls (and the paper’s reporting) derailing the protest, but yeah, I’m not sure what that is based on.
I’ve a vague memory of her previously stating intentions to work in favour of social justice issues in her future legal career, but searching back through the strips, what little there is, aside from being buried in social climbing and pettiness, is likely to be primarily because she views it as part of her future career.
As an example: when she mentions Harrison being part of a team that struck down anti-trans laws in Indiana — https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/laws/ — that could be read as her approving of his helping people, but she could just as well be thinking about how the feat would enhance his future prospects… and context from other strips makes the latter seem more likely.
Note also the last three panels of the following strip.
To be fair, though: I’d rather have someone who works to better society for the sake of their own career than… well, people who worsen it for similar reasons (e.g. certain Greedy Old Politicians I’ll avoid naming).
Far too many to name. But you’re right, of course. I have said in the past your reasons for helping people don’t matter, as much as it pains me to be (actually) fair to Raidah. . .
Remember this is Raidah. It’s at least plausible that she’s talking up Harrison because Jacob idolizes him, regardless of what she thinks of trans people or those civil rights cases. Or partly as well in that case, to see how the fundie Joyce reacts to the mention of trans people.
Yeah, it’s like, Raidah isn’t exactly written to be likeable, but she has every reason to see Joyce as a selfish monster – Because every interaction with Joyce has involved Joyce either attempting to manipulate things her way, or seeming like she is manipulating things bigger than her to be about her
She only chose Elementary Education because she wanted to homeschool her kids. She’d be far from the first Freshman to change her major. Raidah is lobbing softballs.
I think Raidah might be more complicated than that. She seems to have a conscience, but she’s also very prone to rationalizing. Aside from her “Human cost” interaction with Dorothy, she definitely thinks that everything she’s doing is for everyone’s benefit, and that the fact that it’s to her benefit more than anyone else’s is just a fun little perk.
Actually, come to think of it, that last part describes pretty much anyone who’s good at rationalizing.
I was thinking that too. “You only care about yourself” and “You have no shame” both sound more like things Raidah would say to a mirror than anything anyone who’s met Joyce would say.
In this case, it’s valid. Remember, the bulk of Raidah’s interactions with Joyce have been either Joyce turning Jacob against Raidah for her own purposes, or a photo that without deeper context seems like attempting to steal the limelight of the protest for herself. Even if Raidah wasn’t a manipulator, she’d probably say something similar to this to Joyce
I moved from the Deep Midwest to New York, and I gotta say, Joyce would be fine. Parts of upstate New York are more aggressively rural American than places in the Midwest. Also, if Joyce wants to be an elementary school teacher in Indiana, she can do it, there are plenty of liberal pockets. I worked as an openly lesbian educator in the Midwest for four years recently and nobody ever stopped me in a way that mattered. Had to have some talks with some kids about not using “gay” as an insult, and explain to another teacher that my being a gay person wasn’t “inappropriate for children,” also got shamed by another lesbian faculty member for being too openly gay (I mentioned that I have a partner who is a woman in front of the kids), but overall, the vast majority of people and kids were completely and entirely chill. A lot even learned something about gay people being normal. Fuck Raidah.
My child tells me that this is a terrible fate to befall someone. I don’t know what Ohio did to the 7 year olds of the world, but she feels very strongly about it.
My significant other’s from Cinci, and they say that the reason why so many astronauts and pilots come from Ohio is because they want to get as far away from it as possible.
Plenty of good folks in OH but the state’s been gerrymandered from purple to arterial red, allowing well-documented one-party corruption to flourish. It’s now, like neighboring WV, a good state to be from. Dunno what they’ve done to 7 year olds in particular but public school funding’s been cut in favor of vouchers for private schools and charter schools. Ice cream’s still legal, though.
This.
The entire north east of Ohio, like from Columbus to Cleveland, has an extremely high LGBT+ population and lots of very liberal people – and we’re surrounded on all sides, our voting districts turned into insane gigsaw puzzles specifically to make certain that none of our votes count for shit.
She’d probably be fine in lots of places! But to do that, she’d have to accept that the state she’s lived in her whole life so far isn’t the place she WILL live in her whole life, which seems like it might be tough for Joyce in particular.
i mean, technically she is wrong, indiana does have laws against discrimination against gay people, particularly state employees. she couldn’t get a job at a private or christian school, maybe, but she could still be an elementary school teacher.
I envy your naive belief that discrimination being illegal means it can’t happen.
Any state with “at-will” employment (aka Right to Work states) means any employer can terminate you at any time without a reason, so they just don’t write “because she has a girlfriend” on the paperwork and fire Joyce anyway.
In projecting that this particular goal might be a problem for her in many years, she’s technically right.
She’s wrong in:
– Assuming Joyce cares deeply about elementary education as a career
– Assuming Joyce cares deeply about staying in Indiana (heck, she may will be fine in
– Acting like that’s a reasonable thing for Joyce to self-limit on practically – love often changes your perspective and plans
– Acting like this is some kind of moral defect on Joyce’s part – “how dare you limit yourself based on how future homophobes might retaliate against you!”
She’s also tendentious in assuming Indiana will be at least as homophobic in public policy terms in four years.
Honestly, dissecting her rant here I see something that I missed the first time.
“If you’re still dating this girl SOMEHOW” – attacking Joyce’s infidelity and rapidly swapping partners. Something that DIRECTLY injured her.
The last part is her, plain text, calling out Joyce for being a selfish bongo. She’s saying “I have to hit you like this, because asking you to have empathy for other people clearly wouldn’t work.”
Which is kind of rich coming from HER, of all people, but it doesn’t mean she’s wrong. Appealing to Joyce’s morality or sense of empathy has continually failed, so perhaps she has the right of it. Perhaps this IS the only way to get through to her.
I think the hiccup here is that Joyce doesn’t actually have a great idea of what Raidah is actually mad about. She doesn’t actually know that Raidah thinks she’s a serial cheater (interestingly, Raidah doesn’t seem to know that Joyce was dating Joe), she doesn’t know that Raidah is mad about the protest being upstaged in the newspaper (not actually Joyce or Dorothy’s fault) and the emphasis is in a weird and confusing place. It’s not “I don’t expect this to last because you keep cheating”, it’s “if you’re still together in years, you might have a hard time finding a job in Indiana” which is a very strange insult and Joyce even points that out. Yeah, Joyce is really self-centered but this was absolutely not the way to get through to her because “okay, I’ll just move three hours away to Illinois” is the obvious rebuttal.
Raidah immediately went for the homophobic low blow and didn’t actually talk about any of the problems she had, which kind of points at one of Raidah’s issues. She doesn’t talk about the issues she has with people directly. She either talks around them or just insults the person enough that they’re like “yeah, no, I’m done.” A person with functional conflict resolution skills doesn’t switch out friends as often as she does.
Yup, she can’t just make the (100% accurate) observation that Joyce is self-centered to a fault, she has to make it about societal homophobia so I’m STILL unhappy with the fact it’s more about “gay” than “cheater”.
Raidah practices the Sith art of breaking one’s opponent by talking. I looked it up on Wookieepedia but couldn’t find it but this is a real thing that undoubtedly has a clever name.
Yes, the Sith have a formal name for trash talk during lightsaber fights.
it’s simple: Raidah said it herself that she thinks Joyce only cares about what she wants. If she brings up complaints about how she didn’t like the way Joyce was behaving then Joyce would just come up with reason after reason why it’s ok she did it. So since she wants Joyce to be hurt the best way to do it is to hit her right in the only avenue she sees Joyce care about by telling her that by having one thing she wants she can’t have another.
Except, of course, she’s wrong. Joyce could move to freakin’ Chicago (or any of the more liberal suburbs here), still be able to visit her dad on the weekends, and be lauded as a brave hero. Hell, there may even be progressive enclaves within the state of Indiana itself.
Raidah’s ignoring facts not convenient for hurting her target. It’s her default mode, and it’s just ugly, as well as ultimately self-defeating. (Hell, if she hadn’t gotten into Dotty’s head with the ‘war crimes’ BS, Ms. Keener might have already gone to Yale, and Joyce would’ve been much more isolated as a result–way to own goal, Raidah!)
but is that something Joyce would think about initially? I don’t think she will and she’s going to tear herself up about this knowledge without thinking of the obvious alternatives. Or being Joyce she’s going to stubbornly insist there’s a way to get everything.
Actually Joyce might think about it and decide she doesn’t even want to be a teacher. She chose her major back when her plan was to find Prince Charming and become a housewife who homeschooled their kids, and I don’t think that’s ever been adressed?
it’s possible but as of right now since it hasn’t been addressed we have to go under the assumption that it’s still her planned path in life. The issue that I was pointing out is that Raidah’s words are going to cut extremely deep right now because she is right that Joyce is being short sighted and seeing things in the immediate now and solely focused on her own self interest. This means that when she hears the “you have to choose because you can’t have both” it’s going to trigger a major stress response because she’s only thinking about the here and now and not really addressing concequences for her actions. She’s so high up in her “perfect world” that being pulled down is gonna hurt.
I think Raidah is projecting that Joyce’s career path is important to her because it’s so important to Raidah, but I don’t think that’s the case. Joyce basically never talks about career plans and when she came up with an ideal fantasy career in Gender Studies it was totally unrelated to being a teacher. If Joyce takes what Raidah says seriously at all, I expect she’ll probably just shrug and think, “Fine, I’ll do something else.” Professional cartoonist, perhaps.
Pretty sure this is what she’s mad about, we were shown nothing to suggest that she paid any attention to or cared about the protest itself until she found out someone she hated was there and then was given something about it she can use it to stir shit about Joyce.
I think the fact that she also confronted Daisy does suggest that this is at least a little bit from a place of genuinely being offended at what happened with the protest and not purely using it opportunistically as a way of targeting Joyce.
To be fair we haven’t been shown much of Raidah in general. She isn’t a main cast member so who knows how much she cared about the protest independent of Joyce and Dorothy’s spectacle.
It was kinda neat with her basically saying “this is the best way I could find out to hurt you,” which tells you what the motive was, which was to hurt her.
Which, if anything, I’d expect to hurt Joyce more than everything that came before. Someone disliking her, personally, enough to go out of their way to find what they think is the perfect angle of attack to hurt her? That seems like something Joyce would find excruciating.
There were dozens of other ways she could do it but didn’t and automatically went for the one with the homophobic undertones, because under everything Raidah is the definition of performative, including her “progressiveness”.
Hm… So was Mike an Amber hallucination, a ghost, a zombie, or did he just emerge from witness protection, proving Walky was right all along? (I know, probably not answered in the dream, but let’s face it, it’s an important question.)
Raidah has never been more correct than in this moment– it’s not that joyce is a bad person, it’s that she’s let falling in love lead her to treat other people poorly and at least one of them is still waiting to be officially dumped. Like, it’s mean and it sucks that indiana is homophobic but raidah isn’t wrong about the selfishness.
That’s a very generous interpretation of what she’s saying here.
Personally I’d say there are multiple instances where she is considerably more correct than this in ways that don’t require her statements to be basically rewritten to say things she didn’t say. Her angle on Dorothy’s presidential ambitions was pretty cutting and pretty accurate.
The accusation is that she “never cared about anything beyond what she wants for herself”. But that’s not quite true.
For example, she willingly took in Becky after Becky was kicked out of school and tried to place herself between Becky and her gun-toting father. She “encouraged” walkey and Dorothy to get together in her first term after they broke up after the “pajama pants” incident.
Yeah, her current actions regarding personal relationships might be causing her to treat others poorly, but its incorrect to say that she never cares about others.
It would be more accurate to say that “Joyce doesn’t care about people Joyce doesn’t care about,” which sounds tautological, I know, but it’s actually got a bit of meaning in there.
People who aren’t on Joyce’s ‘list’ aren’t really important to her, in terms of empathizing. If you ARE on the list, however, you not only get empathy, but she actually puts you above herself. So Jocelyne, Becky and Dorothy all get selfless acts. Really, the only time she’s violated this principle was cheating on Joe.
Also talking about how magical it was the first time she laid eyes on Dorothy IN THE MIDDLE of trying to apologize to Becky. Then calling her her wife in front of her five minutes later when Becky actually came back in spite of her own feelings in order to protect Joyce by distracting Hank.
From which one can infer she doesn’t care about Joe. She cared about having a hot boyfriend, not about Joe, specifically, and now that she DOESN’T care about having a hot boyfriend, Joe isn’t relevant.
Even her treatment of Joe doesn’t really violate the principle if you add the simple assumption that part of your rank ordering on Joyce’s list is defined by simple proximity. Joyce’s habit of living-in-the-moment to a fault applies.
this is the part that I feel like confuses some people. She really just doesn’t have any fucking object permanence. The next time she sees Joe, it’s probably 2/3 chance she blows him again in the middle of trying to break up with him. The first night that Dorothy feels like she can go back to her dorm, and not stay at Joyce’s, she could just as easily lay under the blanket and cry about how much she hurt Joe…and then try to fix things with him…and then not actually do it in any adequate or sensible way, and just hurt him more, because she actually just completely sucks at relationships.
> It would be more accurate to say that “Joyce doesn’t care about people Joyce doesn’t care about,”
I don’t think you can make that claim, for the simple reason that the comic does not give a complete description of a person’s life, only small (incomplete) segments.
Joyce could be the most empathetic person in the world, but the comic might not show it because, at its heart, it is focused on a small group of university students and probably won’t waste space showing things that are not relevant to the story.
Yeah, but you could also apply that logic to Raidah. For all we know she could spend 100% of her offscreen time volunteering at various charities, participating in grassroots movements, etc. girl could’ve not been at the protest because she was off doing a habitat for humanity thing on the bad side of town and just spent a lot of time rebuilding someone’s condemned home for free (idk if that’s everywhere, that’s what HFH does in my town, they rebuild south side.)
We kind of have to make inferences off of what we see on screen because anything that happens offscreen doesn’t matter until it affects what we actually see.
My actual expectation for what the more complex explanation of Raidah’s character and behavior is, is likely that she’s simply observed that the only way you actually affect change, is to actually take control of the power structures, and she just internally judges everybody so harshly, because she (correctly) has internalized that that’s how the system actual works, and that achieving a life of impenetrable moral integrity is literally the only way to keep yourself from being gated out of the system.
She acts the way she does, because it’s actually the best and only way to get a normal citizen like her into a position where she can actually accomplish any moral good under the system, and so anybody who has any aspiration of ever improving the world, should be doing exactly what she is, and thinking exactly how she does; and, she judges anybody who doesn’t embody her perspective, of morally failing at achieving the only means to actually improve society, and therefore judges them as a less serious person, not worthy of equal mutual respect.
Which, I mean, I definitely knew a few 19 and 20 year olds in my life who, at least temporarily, fit those descriptions.
Honestly, I don’t think it’s about the morality. Raidah has likely clocked that, since she’s a minority in Indiana, she’s at a pretty bad disadvantage in some ways so is using the ruthless social climbing as a way to try and counteract that, but she doesn’t really seem to understand how incredibly unpleasant it makes her, which in the long run would undo most of her effort. Because she’ll get remembered as “that lady who had nine distinct friend groups in four months”.
She’s angry at Joyce for a completely understandable reason, but she’s doing a weird facsimile of what social engineering looks like if you’re a kid who can only see parts of what the adults are doing where she’s just waiting around for excuses to attack and isn’t actually checking to make sure people are actually vulnerable to what she’s saying. She was kind of right with Dorothy, but Joyce really doesn’t seem to get why Raidah cares about her career.
You are of course assuming she is the way she is because she has “aspiration of improving the world”. So far we have seen no evidence of her doing so. (She may recognize the flaws in the world and is dealing with them in her way, but the goal is likely for personal benefit.)
Take her treatment of Sarah. Were Riadah actually interested in “making things better” she would at least make an attempt at understanding the real issue (her former friend in a death spiral), but instead seems intent on carrying on a petty grudge.
You are right, we don’t see any part of Riadah’s life off-screen.
I think it is more reasonable to assume she lacks empathy while Joyce does not because, well, Joyce DOES show concern for others. (Yes, its largely those she is friends with, but at least its something. And I can point to other situations where she has expressed concern for those outside her friend group.) And when she fails to show concern, it seems to be more a case of blindness rather than maliciousness.
With Riadah, its ALL scheming and manipulation. Not even a hint that she actually has concerns outside of “what does this mean for me”. Plus you have her petty grudge with Sarah. (If she had any real empathy, she might have recognized the problems her friend was having.)
Raidah doesn’t know jack shit about Joyce, and she’ll never care to learn. She got weird practically at first sight just for Joyce being in public with Sarah. Sure, Joyce intentionally broke up Raidah’s relationship later, but Joyce’s goal was to gift Jacob to Sarah, not steal him for herself.
That scheme results in her pretending to be Jacob’s girlfriend to Jacob’s brother. It almost results in her getting Jacob, but fails because she used skullduggery and subterfuge to achieve it. Her reaction isn’t that she Just As Planned him breaking up with Raidah so Sarah can have him, but instead she feels like she screwed up. See this and the next three comics: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/rushed/
It’s pretty clear her aim at that point was to get Jacob. Hell in the comic I linked to she almost says, “She doesn’t have to know”, which is practically the siren call of the homewrecker. Joyce is someone who is willing to burn the world for love, and as much as I love her to pieces, I also have to acknowledge that it’s kind of a toxic trait.
My original comment got stuck in moderation because of too many links again, so I’m going to try to be briefer. After Joyce learned that both Sarah and Joe thought she had a shot at having Jacob, she changed her goal to stealing Jacob for herself. Dorothy even calls her out on it in this comic and Joyce admits it: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/whaddya/
Joyce is someone who fundamentally believes that love justifies anything. Whether that makes her a hero or a villain depends entirely on where you are standing.
To be fair to Joyce, for us she and Joe have been dating for over a year, but for her they’ve been dating for like 2 weeks at most.
It’s not really nice, but also “college kids break up after 2 weeks of dating” doesn’t scratch the barest surface in the shitty things that cab happen department.
This argument continues to be bad, because the important part of “Agreeing to date someone who’s been a friend and confidant for months and who is on his first time actually dating someone because of lifelong trauma around his father’s cheating ways, dating him for about a week and a half, and then cheating on him” is not “about a week and a half”.
“You’ve clearly never cared about anything beyond what you want for yourself” and “You are currently acting selfishly” are two WILDLY different statements.
WHO WILL WIN: the comment section’s desire for joyce brown to be strung up in the town square for her sins against men, or the comment section’s burning hatred for women of color???
Asma’s cool, Nash was alright if kind of shallow. Raidah just sucks ass because she’s always been kind of awful. Intriguing villain sometimes, but not when she’s crossing her fingers that bigotry will punish her enemy for her because she lacks the means to do it herself.
People can definitely bring bigotry into things, like the fanbase as a whole does have a contingent that have shown racism towards Sal and some others, tacitly or not, or getting awfully heated at Becky or Carla at times in ways that certainly pointed to implicit queerphobia, though I’ve admittedly not specifically ran into Islamophobia towards Raidah. I certainly wouldn’t be hugely shocked, since yeah, it’s a very common thing, and DoA has a large fanbase, some of whom are not great folks (albeit I mostly see that on like Reddit), but I tend to see people rag on Raidah for other things.
Honestly, Raidah’s salient points on the topic of Islamophobia actually are often where I see people give her the most credit, and historically speaking, rightfully so, like when she brought up bringing Joyce to a mosque after Joyce’s suspicious church visit with Jacob, knowing it would give her pause, or calling out Dorothy for the same kinds of truths about Dorothy’s ethical weaknesses she would end up later having to face head on at the protest.
i used “sins” because that’s how people by-and-large speak of her actions down here! their views do not necessarily reflect my own, hence my comment here about two awful threads of discourse beautifully intersecting!
The comment section’s badness is directly proportional to the size of the last big feeling it gave me, divided by how long ago it gave me that big feeling. Every time it makes me sad or mad, it’s the worst thing ever, but with enough distance from the day that it was awful, it’s very obviously not as bad as everyone makes it out to be.
It’s also moderately amusing, but only in the concept of this thread, that the comments section is kinda weird and wrong in a wildly different way than the thread’s starter was implying.
Talking about “the USA” in this kind of context is, frankly, getting the wrong end of the horse. We have at least 5 or 6 different meta-regions within the country, and they’ve all got different cultural mindsets. Joyce happens to hale from the rural/small-town portion of the Midwest, which… I’d put overall at the lower end of the scale, but definitely not rock-bottom, when it comes to this subject.
The Deep South (essentially, the former Confederate States) is the worst overall. Then in ascending order, I’d put Rural Midwest, The West, Urban Midwest & North Atlantic (two regions, but relatively similar positions on gay rights, etc), and then the West Coast. (Florida is its own beast, and tends to be all over the place.) I’d put those last three up against Canada on most issues, esp. when talking about Canada on the average, rather than the most progressive bastions.
One thing to remember is that in the US, empty land votes (that is to say, the Senate is based on states, not on population, and the Electoral College that determines the Presidency is, in turn, based on both the House and the Senate apportionment). This means our government is heavily distorted to match the views of minority voters who happen to live in big, empty states like Wyoming, Iowa, Texas, etc. A lot of the states have similar distortions in their own legislatures, as a result of being modeled at least somewhat on the federal government set-up. And the whole thing dates back to concerns that were prevalent in the immediate post-Colonial period, as opposed to the Information Age, which has largely resulted in a level of cultural homogenity amongst rural states that simply didn’t exist at the Founding.
Pretty much. If I recall the original plan it was supposed to be what people call a MRS Degree. She was there to meet a husband mostly, probably the teaching degree because it’s about working with children which is acceptably “womanly” to her mother and also can be used for homeschooling.
It is not hearsay or bias to acknowledge that gay people face greater struggles with gaining and maintaining employment in conservative jurisdictions, especially employment in fields working with children
Indiana has multiple school districts, though. Bloomington/Monroe County is relatively gay friendly, though I don’t know if this extends to openly gay teachers.
Also, private schools exist; there was a hippie one in Bloomington that would probably be just fine with a gay teacher, though I bet it doesn’t pay well.
It’d be wild and frankly humanizing if Raidah isn’t exactly straight herself, but considers coming out to be incompatible with the Master Plan because she thinks it’s professional suicide.
Yeah, exactly! She’s not saying “hey, I was thinking about you coming out, and how this is going to be difficult with your intended major. Do you know about how homophobic elementary education can be?” She’s saying “hey, you’re going to get discriminated against, loser! I’m telling you this because you only care about yourself! Haha, OWNED!”
Pointing out that bias exists isn’t the issue, reveling in it is. Raidah is reveling in it.
It seems like a reasonable assumption that a significant majority of people who go to the local “state school” are expecting to not go far after graduation, either because they’re a homebody or because moving is expensive.
I mean, that’s obviously part of it, but it’s also that even aside from Joyce being Joyce there are also additional structural factors just by virtue of this being IU and not say Notre Dame or even Illinois.
Resisting making Mike ghost type took some willpower, I imagine.
I am sure I’d have picked differently for some of these, but Dragon is an inspired choice for Jennifer. I am sure some of it is because Billie was a cheerleader for the Dragons, her highschool’s team, but it also definitely fits for her pride and temper, and having a weakness to Alice’s Ice.
He was on Ghost for SO long before I finally switched to Dark. And yeah Billie’s was partially the sports team and partially her grandiose personality, which dragons tend to evoke. Her being weak to Alice’s ice is a fun bonus haha.
(Alice is ice cuz of her blue lipstick and because she’s Al-ice)
What’s the normal way to say “Alice having Ice Pokémon makes sense because Alice is hot as fuck and so are like 43% of all Ice-types”? Pretend I said that.
For a long time I had her in poison because of the idea of slowly poisoning someone through a drawn out match. But one of my friends said she could also heal stall with ingrain and that felt very in-character.
Nice. I like a lot of them. Is Danny just a normal type trainer because he’s boring? I guess Sal does call him whitebread. Why Ice for Alice? Because “ice” is in her name?
I’d argue Normal isn’t inherently boring. Like, some of the quirkiest pokemon, like Snorlax, Lickitung, etc, are normal types.
I think it’s more just he’s a grounded guy, a supporter that likes boosting people. That’s my own stance, anyway, I can’t speak for Yotomoe’s decision process.
I know virtually nothing about Pokemon (for instance, I didn’t know trainers even had types) but Danny is definitely a Normal type all the way, well done.
Oh for the most part they don’t, technically. But trainer types tend to have pokemon they favour just for gameplay reasons. Like bug catchers use bug pokemon and hikers tend to use pokemon found in mountainous areas ect.
But there’s skilled trainers called gym leaders who you need to defeat for badges, plus the Elite 4 (who you have to defeat to face the champion) that do specialise in training pokemon of a specific type. Typically because they have an idolisation for the pokemon of the type itself or because it fits their temperament as a person.
So glad someone noticed that Dina was rock type so she could use fossil types.
Also Asher smokes so you can argue he often has fire and billowing smoke surrounding him.
Also yeah I always intended to separate Amber and Amazi-girl. Ghost strangely works super well with Amber. Likes dark places, Quiet isolation, gloomy and her projecting the “ghost” of people she’s lost.
I would personally switch Joyce and Jocelynn. Not sure why exactly Jocelynn feels water-type to me, it’s just a vibe thing. As for Joyce, the way she thoughtlessly treats people when she fixates on something feels extremely fey-coded to me.
Ethan feels more ghost than dark to me, dark type is typically more aggressive than gloomy.
Not really sure what your criteria are for steel types, all the characters there feel a bit off to me, though I suppose Jason has similar vibes to Molayne… If I were to put anyone in steel type it would probably be Asma?
And I’m not sure why Sal fits in bug type but seeing her with a bunch of badass looking bug types does make for a kickass mental image so I approve even if it’s confusing to me.
Mary doesn’t deserve Pokemon. I approve of her keeping poison types only because it feels likely to backfire upon her. Poison types are too good for her.
Jocelynn feels she has more of the natural mischievousness of fairy types while Joyce is more incidental. Water works when you remember its more destructive nature.
Also dark types definitely have gloomy as well as mean. Darkrai for example doesn’t want to hurt anyone.
Joyce is water mostly cuz I needed a water type and her big Baby blue eyes are just so damn prominent. Not the best reason but yeah. Fairy for Jocelynne cuz she can be a bit mischeivous with her ribbing but also there’s a “embracing femininity angle I just really like for her being fairy type. (You could even make a metaphor with how Clefairy was considered normal type until it became it’s true type, a fairy type)
Ethan could’ve been either Ghost or Dark but I went with Dark cuz his whole aesthetic just feels very Dark. Like he’s not just gloomy, he’s a bit venomous right now.
So!
Dorothy is a steel type because steel type is the best defensive typing. And someone like dorothy would absolutely take that to mean it’s the best type. Plus she would care a lot about protecting herself which steel is good at.
–
Jason is steel because he’s hardy, steadfast and inflexible. Same for Raidah. She’s very cold, practical and Rigid, like steel.
Sal has a spider Tattoo. I know that’s a simple reason but It was the best argument for a bug type trainer and honestly yeah, she’d be so badass with a bunch of cool ass bugs.
I also remember Sal saying she liked bugs when playing Mario Kart on the DS w/ Danny for the first time — Sal = Bugs is definitely an established trait of canon. (I bet she’d really like Gen 9’s bugs. Spidops, Lokix, Flutter Mane, all super cool.)
The only one that sticks out to me is Sarah as a poison trainer. Sarah is extremely direct and has a lot of walls up around herself; her ‘weakness’ is her inability to handle earnestness (in herself or others). I know poison is a good defensive typing but its main weaknesses (psychic and ground) don’t fit Sarah’s profile and it’s very unlike Sarah to be so indirect on offence. I’m almost tempted to put her in Ground because that’s what her weaknesses (Joyce and Lucy) cover, and Ground has the Bone Club move which is *almost* a baseball bat.
So for Sarah my thought process was her negativity translating to poison. Basically how she can come off as toxic to others. But also how she gets joy out of bad things happening to others. Which I kinda interpreted as Poison types healing with Black Sludge or like Toxic Orb Gliscor or something.
Also Sarah just tends to include a lot of purple in her color palette so she fit the poison typing aesthetically pretty well too.
Interesting that this is where Raidah goes with this. It feels like a deliberate callback to her shattering Dorothy’s dreams of becoming president. Same case of wrong motives but accurate observation, even if this time it’s mixed up in some valid reasons to dislike Joyce. She’s not in any way wrong that Joyce being openly queer in a red state doesn’t bode well for her chances of working with children. Is it a nice thing to say? Obviously not. But it’s true, and Joyce should be aware of it. Unlike Dorothy’s career plans though, Joyce could always leave Indiana, though that would mean leaving her family behind.
I mean it makes sense considering Raidah’s whole thing is she’s a psychologically manipulative alpha bongo. Of course she would know her target enough to know where her words will cut deepest.
Joyce doesn’t want to be a school teacher, she’s sticking with a major she originally picked to fit into her family’s plan for her out of momentum.
If Dorothy has a future, and Dorothy will take care of her financially, than her degree is serving it’s intended purpose.
I think Raidah is taking the place of Mike in the narrative with these interactions – harsh truths delivered in the most unfriendly way possible.
Although with Mike it seems like he wanted people to grow, and with Raidah she would be surprised and disappointed to know that e.g. givig Dorothy a breakdown led her to hooking up with Joyce, and now telling Joyce this and making her re-think her Major – well that will probably actually benefit Joyce in the long run, too.
But I don’t think Raidah will be happy to see either of them thriving, she is too bitter.
I honestly think it’s simpler than that: Raidah has always struck me as one of those folks who fundamentally assumes everyone either does or should see the world the same way she does, and since she’s laser-focused on her career to the point of cultivating contacts now, she throws insults based on how badly she feels OTHER people’s long-term plans are put together.
This is my take as well. I even buy the idea that, somewhere underlying, Raidah actually has some good, non-selfish intentions, and is just approaching her goals from an extremely rigid perspective, which to her justifies anything bad she does in the process.
Actually, shit, I just realized…that’s the exact thing that makes Raidah and Joyce entirely alike. That’s the way they’re the same. They pursue the one ideal that is, to them, the ultimate purpose, with complete wanton disregard for how they may achieve their goals. It’s just that Joyce’s ideal is romantic love, whereas Raidah’s goal is her career success.
This analysis, while accurate, also ignores a key element–spite. Raidah is very much motivated by spite, I’d argue even above and beyond her ambition. This is why so often she makes maneuvers that ultimately weaken her own goals (like snipping at Dorothy in a way that’d only work on a naive freshman)–she’s too busy looking for instant schadenfreude to actually sit back and play the long game.
Also, in a lot of ways, she strikes me as the archetypal sophomore–having learned a few things in her freshman year, she’s now more convinced than ever that she knows how it all works, and as noted above, simply cannot comprehend how these things aren’t obvious to everyone else. If she were a physics major, she probably would be the one who obsesses over the ‘meaning’ of quantum theory.
They don’t even need to move all the way to California. Chicago (one of the first areas to call Trump on his shit back in 2015) is just a short drive away!
This honestly feels like pretty low-quality hating. She’s assuming everyone else has as much identity tied up in their choice of major as she does, which she has zero reason to assume Joyce does.
If I can allow myself to be a hater for a second as well: I’m genuinely not expecting a lot from Raidah as a character anymore. I don’t think Willis writes particularly nuanced villains, which is, to an extend, their strength (the characters who suck REALLY suck!). But I think I can have a better time with her if I accept that, even if I think it’s sort of a waste (the highschool mean girl thing is so one-note! And it’s funny in that way but also tiring sometimes). And of course always happy to be proven wrong lol
On the front page, of a newspaper, that somehow failed to identify either of subjects of the photo, despite one of them being one of their own reporters (Daisy needs glasses).
So we’re literally just assuming that her potential employers will recognize her from the photo. It’s not gonna come up when they google her name or anything.
4 years from now, Joyce job hunting. “Hey! I recognize you! I saw half your face obscured by teargas in a four year old news article in a college paper that no one read, and why yes, I do believe you were kissing a woman in that photograph! Banned from academia forever!”
Guess she’ll have to teach outside of Indiana, which is truly a fate worse than death.
“That you are not closeted about” is a crazy assumption to make though.
That’s just like, common sense, even in a lot of blue states, that you don’t go telling your employers about that sort of thing.
She’s probably not gonna tell them she’s autistic either. Any job hunting seminar will basically open with that. If it’s something that the employer can discriminate against, and it’s at all within your ability to be discrete about it, then the employer straight out does not need to know.
Raidah would actually be the character with more difficulty in this department, since she can’t just pretend to be white when the boss is around.
I mean that absolutely is something Joyce could not manage because she struggles not to out her sister in casual conversation. Dorothy also wants to be a public figure.
It’s not only an option, it’s basically the only option that’s remotely feasible, if she plans to work with small children in much of the country.
Joyce “Struggles” not to out her sister. But did she out her sister? No. Quite the opposite in fact. She protected her sister’s ability to stay in the closet because she understands the value of the protection it brings, even against their own father.
And we’re talking about an employer. Employers simply do not need to know. They are not entitled to information about your personal life. They are not your friend or family. Joyce can keep a secret from her dad, she can keep a secret from her boss. Not telling your boss about your girlfriend is only being “in the closet” in the most technical sense. A basic separation between your personal life and your professional life is a fundamental skill of existing in the modern workplace, which she will have to learn, no matter what job she ends up working where.
This is just incredibly naive. First of all, a lot of employers will search social media, so it goes far beyond just not mentioning it in the interview.
Or how about if her wife needs health insurance? Can’t really put her on the work family plan without revealing it. Emergency contact?
Beyond that, you have to censor every conversation at work for ever. No mention of family. No talk about what you’re doing after work or over the weekend. It’s being closeted and the vast majority of people don’t have or need that level of separation between personal life and profession life. It’s not a fundamental skill of the modern workplace and it shouldn’t have to be.
Hmm perhaps the requirement for those multiple things to happen for it to matter – at least one of which it is, in principle, in Raidah’s power to facilitate – has led some people to interpret her statement as a threat rather than a mere warning, which would make calling this line of discussion on her part homophobic a lot more justifiable than it already was.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Raidah’s gonna be showing up at Joyce’s workplace with newspaper clippings.
That would be an enourmous amount of time and effort and by then she’ll probably have developed new grudges.
Joyce is already kind of distracting her from her grudge against Sarah. She still hates Sarah but she’s not really thinking about her too much while she’s distracted with this protest situation.
But yeah, if she did that Joyce truly would be helpless to pursue a career working with children, and the implicit threat of that may be intentional. It could be she wants Joyce to know she has this level of power over her. That every stranger with a grudge has that power.
I certainly hope that won’t be the case for Joyce and this is by far the shittiest thing that Raidah has ever done (and that includes the abelism). On the other hand, this might mean that Julia Gray, Fighter Pilot is possible. A college degree is something many people in the Air Force have.
Also, it would actually lead to an uncomfortable conversation with Dorothy.
Dorothy: But you’d have to KILL people.
Joyce: Yes, bad ones from countries like…uh…
Dorothy: You were going to say Bulmeria, weren’t you?
I don’t now if you’ve seen the way the US government is taking its military, but that’s a direction that very definitely doesn’t end up with a woman in it as a pilot, just as a stewardess.
I don’t think that’s the shittiest thing she’s done. Saying/Insinuating Dina is developmentally disabled is FAR worse than going “you’re self centered, so here’s a reminder that homophobia affects you now :)” which, let us be real, IS very shitty but not on that level.
I completely forgot that was her Major, has she even mentioned it once since she became an Atheist? Her interests seem more towards making comics and the like, so maybe she should switch her major to writing or something, since she isn’t stuck in the mindset she had about “A Woman’s role in the church/home”.
Im actually very curious about how she is actually doing in the “School” part of being in college and if she actually still wants to pursue a major in education. We got Dorothy questioning her major, but we havent even heard much of that for a while now.
I think it’d be cool if she did decide to change her major. The ‘elementary education’ major seems to be part of the fundy fast track for having the daughters of the community be teachers so they can go on to homeschool their kids rather than being because the girls are actually interested in it: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/aspirations/
Not since the atheism, but she did bring it up on the pretend date with Jacob where she was like “oh actually I would like to teach kids, crisis resolved”.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Joyce change majors. She’s never seemed particularly interested in or committed to education.
We know she’s good at math, so she did well in calculus, though Dorothy thinks she would have done better with glasses. I don’t think we have any information on how she did in any other classes.
Ugh, Raidah is just the worst. Weaponizing homophobia in pursuit of her petty grudges now? The comic would be better if she were hit by a meteor tomorrow.
Well, that’s all right. Now she can be a pilot!
In all seriousness, Joyce hasn’t reexamined her major since becoming an atheist; might as well give it some thought now.
Can confirm — if you want to be anything other than a trash hauler (er, cargo pilot), you have to have no worse than 20/40 uncorrected and/or I think US Navy pilots are allowed one specific kind of corrective surgery that isn’t LASIK.
It looks like they might accept it now, but it used to be that LASIK and SMILE techniques, as they involve an incision in the eye, were considered less stable under impact and G-force than something like Photorefractive Keratectomy.
Except, of course, she can. She just couldn’t do it in rural or small-town Indiana. Chicago, NYC or SoCal wouldn’t even blink at a gay teacher, and a lot of the schools would look at the photo (if someone sent it in trying to stir up trouble) as just fine and dandy, arguably even laudable.
Honestly, for all her self-styled worldliness, Raidah is at LEAST as provincial in her views as Joyce.
Both? She herself probably isn’t actually homophobic, but she’s absolutely weaponizing homophobia to make Joyce feel shitty as revenge for breaking her and Jacob up, which I don’t think is any better. But yes, red states in America really ARE this homophobic.
Our country is really purple across the board – some states definitely lean very far one way or the other, but even the most biased have a very large percentage of dissenters. Additionally, an (often large) majority of Americans in nearly every state, even deep red ones, support gay marriage (and its a pretty close thing in the very remaining few states). Furthermore, it is illegal to (explicitly) discriminate against a job applicant based on their sexuality.
I therefore posit that what Raidah is referring to is somewhat less a result of the Midwest being entirely overrun by some sort of raving hoard of neo-Nazis in cowboy boots more a result of two larger problems in American – gerrymandering and the craziest voices shouting the loudest. The former creates two problems:
1) our state legislatures tend to be far more proportionally Republican (or Democrat) than their actual constituency.
2) In a gerrymandered district a politicians only real threat is a challenger from their own party and only the most fanatic members of a party tend to vote in a primary (which for Republicans is often evangelical Christians). This means that elected officials of both parties tend to pander to their most extreme, and thus least tolerant, supporters.
Therefore, in more conservative states you can potentially get school systems dealing with politicians and appointed officials that are very eager to gain political points with the zealots by trying to attack LGBTQ people (or even the knowledge of their existence) in the schools. At the very least, they may have have a strong incentive to not stick up for their state’s employees when confronted by the second major problem – a oft minority of very loud bigots.
It is very hard to run an American school under the best of circumstances (see the flaming train wreck that is my nations educational system). It has been made worse in recent years an uptick of both helicopter parents trying to peer into and micromanage every facet of their children’s education and media companies of both sides that are willing to use kids as the increasingly frayed rope in their unending game of profit-driven, no-holes-barred, cultural tug-of-war. It is therefore not surprising that in some areas, the school principals might choose the easy path and seek to preemptively avoid potentially controversial topics and teachers rather than risk a confrontation with a few angry moms willing to use social media and Fox News (or inversely MSMBC) to turn a small classroom disagreement about appropriate literary material or a teacher’s private life into an overblown national scandal. The media learned long ago that nothing sells attention like insinuations the other side is using the education system to indoctrinate your ten year old against you – as though the local elementary school is a dystopian reeducation camp run by either hard-core fascists or transgender Marxists and not just a bunch of underpaid, overworked, coffee addicts just trying to keep their passion for teaching basic geometry alive.
Raidah seems to be gloating about how America is homophobic, and that’s a good thing, because it hurts Joyce.
Raidah has no personal power over whether or not Joyce can get a job in her chosen field, but choosing this as her stone to sling at Joyce still reflects poorly on her.
To put it another way, she’s basically saying she’d rather ally with homophobes against Joyce, than ally with Joyce against against the enemies of the Bulmerian people. I guess Joyce being occasionally misguided is the worse of two evils here, in her eyes.
I would say trying to upset a queer person by telling them about the homophobic prejudice that they’ll be a victim of is homophobic in most of the ways which matter.
I don’t think it’s homophobia so much as Raidah doing to cruelest thing she can—telling Joyce what to expect. It’s not weaponizing homophobia so much as being like:
“Congratulations—now that you’ve put yourself squarely in the same broad brush that assholes will brush us with, let me inform you of what so many of us had to grow up being aware of.”
Oh, you mean like when a trans woman get harassed and cis women say “welcome to womanhood” instead of commiserating with and comforting her the way they would with another cis woman.
I don’t care what you call it, that’s pretty fucking shitty.
Billie getting hit by a car would be kind of a rehash of her backstory car crash, so if it’s between the two, I’d say Raidah is the more novel option. Not sure what good it would do for the story, though.
Idk about quickly, but certainly on her trail. Mary is still UP THERE in terms of being the most horrible living person in this comic. After Mary you got Joyce’s Mom being a very close second. Radiah is a massive bongo, but she isn’t as bad as Mary and Joyce’s mom, but a wider margin then some might think.
I hope everyone is celebrating Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory against right-wing oppression today instead of getting mad at commenters! Peace and love on planet New York, we should all be making better uses of our time today!
My mayor made all ambulance rides in my city free this year and the previous one made ER visits free to the main hospital if you make less than $65k/year—and having used that recently, they give you the form to fill out in the mail with the bill to apply for the waiver, it’s not even hidden. Mayors can do a helluva lot more than I thought.
the entire country has been hit with a massive blue wave, with democrats taking seat after seat! It’s been a really great day to exemplify that building a pro-trans, anti-genocide world is what voters genuinely want, and that conservative extremism has no hope of surviving! keep your chin up!
Just never forget, that feeling is what the fascists want you to feel. They are inculcating that feeling, with the strongest propaganda machines ever devised and unleashed upon the human race. That feeling is their greatest weapon, and it’s the thing they’re counting on, to give them the best chance of winning.
I’m…not pointing this out, to make you feel better, per se; I don’t think that awareness of the psychic torment nexus, actually decreases the amount of pain that it puts us all in. I don’t think we can actually make it hurt less. All we can do is remember that, coming from the enemy we are fighting, The Hurt is The Point, because they need to blunt every shred of resistance they can, if they actually hope to succeed.
It’s gonna hurt until they’re gone, and we win. Hurting us is really all they’ve got, because they have no intention of actually running anything, or making anything tangibly better, ever. So, all we can do is remember not to fear the hurt, because feeling the hurt means that we haven’t lost our humanity to them, yet; the only future without hurt, is the one where we don’t lose our hope, because our hope is the only thing preventing us from being programmed into numb compliance, the way they have programmed a good 30% of total citizens, using the propaganda machines.
Even here in Georgia, Dems CRUSHED Republican incumbents in the only two statewide races today, for Public Service Commissioner. 62% to 38%, a TWENTY-FOUR POINT WIN.
No Democrat had won any non-federal statewide office here in nineteen years.
I’m mortified at many of the ballot propositions that passed in my state (Texas), but Mamdani’s victory is indeed sweet and I will be celebrating it. There is power in the people yet.
As for Dick Cheney, I am deeply, deeply sad that he died without being brought before the Hague for his atrocities.
I, for one, am looking forward to no longer having to have an opinion about a mayoral candidate in a city I where I don’t live in a state that is literally on the other side of the country.
He seems fine and junk, but FFS it is extremely obvious that our media has NYC bias. Mayor of NYC is not a national office fergawdsakes.
So does LA, and I don’t have an opinion on the mayor of LA because I don’t live there. I shouldn’t have to, outside of generic “Blue team, go!”
I’m glad that Mamdani won, I’m just begging the media and the internet at large to stop acting like his was the most consequential election in the history of the nation.
They’re not going to.
It’s a thing where they can fearmonger about socialism and antisemitism taking over the Democratic party. We’re in for the long haul here.
Yeah, there are a multitude of reasons that some are putting heavy emphasis on the race, but the one that’s relevant to non-NYC Americans, is that Mamdani provides concrete evidence to the DNC that if you want to landslide elections in your favor, the key is actual socialist policies, not any of the other bullshit.
Dems won across the board, though. If he’d been the only one who won, or if only the leftist candidates won you could make that argument. A sweep this big is harder to parse beyond “Donald Trump is radioactive.”
Actually, there is a second message. Namely, Have A Message. While the Dems who won weren’t walking in lockstep, the majority of the big races were won by Dems who mixed Trump-hate with a positive message for their intended constituency, mostly around economic issues. Their approaches for fixing those issues vary, but they aren’t pretending that people aren’t hurting, and they’re trying to come up with solutions rather than whining about the other side. This, i think, has as much to do with their victories as Orange Man Bad.
It was definitely the most important election of 2025 given NY’s size, his status as a pro-trans muslim, and the amount of work that establishment democrats and republicans underwent in an attempt to sabotage his victory!
This victory is an important landmark for the entire country because it shows that no matter what the government tells us, and no matter how much money they pour into the contrary, being militantly anti-trans and kidnapping people from their homes is NOT what the people of the united states actually want, and that the people who are making such things happen will not succeed long term! It gives people of color, religious minorities, and everyone on the LGBT spectrum hope because a man who prioritized our wellbeing over the status quo has come out on top for what feels like the first time in modern history, and that WILL reverberate across the states in the immediate future!
It already helped several other democrats in NJ and Virginia win, those campaigns gaining footing in no small part because they were able to see the kind of momentum Mamdani was able to build with progressive policies. I think it goes far beyond NY-centrism, I think people are focusing on it because it gives so many of us hope for a safe future.
It’s not at all clear to me that more establishment centrist Democrats in other states were helped by Mamdani’s campaign.
Dems did incredibly well across the board – even to little things like clean sweeps of the municipal elections in my long moderate Republican town. It’s backlash to Trump, but I don’t think Mamdani was the driver anywhere beyond his own campaign.
Except that he drove media talking about the midterms, which are often neglected, and highlighted how local elections matter. This is generally a good thing, even if he didn’t drag the DNC into his way of doing things.
It is absolutely a case of media bias. Los Angeles is every bit as big and important as NYC, but in 41 years of life I have never seen the race for mayor of LA described as the most important election in the country. The biggest difference is that the Networks and most other big media outlets are based in NY. If it’s not happening on the East Coast then it’s an afterthought.
I admit, as someone who spent a large portion of my life in Philadelphia I am mostly just telling everyone else the lies that sustain me. At least LA gets a decent amount of cred in entertainment media, it feels like even places like Chicago and Miami both punch above their weight class relative to Philly. (and honestly I’m kinda STILL salty that Comcast NBC Universal didn’t move most of the operations down here — couple of my buddies worked for Comcast around the time of the merger and there was a long-running joke about how the best sentence in the world would be “Live from Philadelphia, it’s Saturday Night”.)
(and, if we’re being REALLY honest, I suspect it’s as much driven by “financial sector” bias as “media” bias — which explains more why the STATE government in NY is as big in the news as CA most of the time despite the economic disparities)
Also, PA state supreme court AND one of the Philly suburb counties that’s a perpetual testing ground for culture-war shit kicked out their pro-ICE sheriff and put all Democrats on two big school boards while throwing out the last of the Moms For Liberty trash.
Raidah’s goal here is to hurt Joyce and chooses the difficulties she’ll face as a queer woman to do so in her chosen field.
Which is a homophobic microaggression.
She’s not trying to warn Joyce about the problem. If she wanted to hurt her, she’d just point out Joyce’s selfishness. But she chose the method and that was to shame her for her queerdom and make her feel it is something to make her life more difficult.
I’m glad that even with the brief moment of sympathetic raidah we got recently she’s still just as much of a highschool mean girl as she’s always been, I don’t even mean this as a joke when I say I genuinely hope she never changes, because she’s wayyyyyy to much fun to watch as a vullain
some have also begun to point out that quite a lot of the traits Raidah uses to character-assassinate people to their faces, actually reek of possible projection on her part. which, I’m not uniformly sure about, yet, but it’s a good hypothesis.
I was gonna say ‘same poison, different flavor,’ but no, Raidah’s not awful because of religious fundamentalism. She’s a narcissist. Casually sneering about systemic homophobia is just synergy.
Why was she mad again? Oh right, because the fight against systemic obstacles she values was mildly inconvenienced.
ok yeah not sure if it’s still mary i dislike the most or if raidah just took that spot cuz that was just malice and vitriol purely for the sake of it. mary hasn’t had a say in a while so maybe she’ll make an appearance to spew her unsolicited opinion, too. guess we’ll see.
oh she definitely went and sought joyce out. mary is just always the worst shitty little hypocritical gremlin all the time. to her credit, she is at least consistent in that regard, whereas raidah plays politics and will be just as happy pretending to be your friend as she is stabbing you in the face with word-shivs and in both cases only so long as she thinks she’s getting something out of it.
Mary’s still worse in my book. They both make hateful comments to people, but Raidah’s held herself back from destroying anybody’s stuff, or blackmailing anyone. For now, anyway. The only thing in Mary’s corner is she tends to receive comeuppance more. And gave out free door decorations, I guess.
Mary also like, bullied her boyfriend into performing naked in front of a bunch of people, and he was clearly uncomfortable, and she didn’t care at all.
You can be evil and correct! Raidah is doing something awful, but she’s right that joyce is selfish– she’s just choosing to use it as an excuse to be cruel instead of trying to confront her, which makes sense cuz she’s like a jerk and hates joyce specifically.
But she *is* selfish. Raidah’s last interaction with joyce included joyce trying to seduce jacob; and joyce cheated on joe and laughed at walky about making out with dorothy! Raidah being a homophobe does not make joyce a better person
Yes though! If a murderer says “global warming is bad” while doing muders, that doesn’t, like, undo global warming????
people are complicated. Raidah is an asshole. She is also not saying anything untrue, even if she is clearly not upset that joyce will experience bigotry.
By refusing to accept that evil people can be correct you are ending up in a position where you never can acknowledge that someone can be correct and also evil. Then you end up with people who will agree with absolutely vile shit only because it’s tenuously connected to something true.
So yes, she can be evil and correct.
No, Raidah is not 100% correct. Calling Joyce just selfish is hilariously incorrect, though tbf Raidah doesn’t know Joyce all that well so has a skewed and limited perspective.
Joyce has been nothing BUT selfish for the last two story lines! Like, this entire escapade has been about Joyce doing whatever feels good to her in the moment and to Hell with anybody else.
With Joe. With Dorothy. With Becky. With Walky. Hell, even with Joycelyn! Her coming out was more about her being a ‘savior for her sister’ than Joycelyn’s autonomy.
I think there is a lot of debate about Joyce’s morality as she isn’t what we stereotypically think of as “selfish”. She isn’t evil, and in fact appears to be generally very kind-hearted and compassionate, but often has poor judgement and impulse control. She doesn’t wake up in the morning and dream of scamming orphans out their pocket change for a quick buck. She won’t just abandon her friends when the going gets tough or, as we have seen, even potentially lethal. Just this chapter she outed herself to her dad to cover for her sibling. She wants to do good in the world. However, especially when it comes to her romantic passions, she does not always either think things through or care enough to listen to her normally dominant conscience.
Joyce is the kind of person that would take a bullet for you without even thinking about it, and then just as impulsively seduce your wife when she comes to visit her in the hospital.
Joyce would take a bullet for you without thinking, and then when your wife visits Joyce in the hospital to thank her for saving you, if Joyce has a crush on her she will totally seduce her with the same thoughtless with which she saved your life. Joyce is equally capable of impulsively sacrificing herself for others, and of impulsively sacrificing other’s relationships for herself.
Joyce has never been anything BUT selfish. The only people that ever mattered to her are the people that she’s personally connected to and everyone else can take a hike. Everything “good” that she does is motivated by how it impacts the people she personally cares about. It’s like when Cheney (ding dong, the fucker’s dead) suddenly pivoted on gay rights when his daughter came out as gay.
Raidah is 100% in the wrong here (i say this knowing what I’ve commented, i dont agree with raidahs take as much as im just glad more people are making joyce feel like ass atm)
The “You?” part of that makes me think you’re emphasizing my specific reaction as one you didn’t expect. Or that you’re being sarcastic and absolutely expected me to react that way. Could you elaborate?
Usually you can find signs next to the road. Try to go for the rectangular ones. People get really mad if you take the others, especially the octagons.
There’s a bunch of little rectangle ones that say stuff about the fire department, and a bunch that just have some numbers on them. I don’t think anyone will mind if I take those.
Raidah: “Hey, faggot, don’t you wanna teach kids? If you and your faggot girlfriend are still faggots together in a few years, our homophobic state might not let you teach kids on account of you being a faggot.”
I’m an open-and-noisy faggot myself, but yeah she’s being more than a micro level of aggressive here.
Eh two wrongs don’t make a right and what raidah is doing here is pretty obvious homophobia, Joyce has done a lot of shitty things lately, things raidah has a right to be mad about, but that doesn’t make what she’s doing right now okay either
Yeah, like if Raidah just called Joyce a hussy or whatever, fine, I wouldn’t care. Raidah’s allowed to be mad at Joyce for breaking her up with Jacob. But “haha, I’m gonna remind you gay people are oppressed, FEEL BAD ABOUT IT” is indefensible.
Yeah I dunno if reinforcing homophobic rhetoric as an existential way to cut down Joyce’s dreams for the future is an appropriate punishment for
*checks notes*
Being unwillingly outed by a newspaper.
You picked the ONE motherfucker I just can’t agree with on a spiritual level. That got a genuine ugly laugh out of me and now the cat is giving me a weird look.
We support gay wrongs here, I just don’t fuck with his invalid and incomprehensible worldview of “Bad stuff happens, so I’m gonna give a bird anxiety and do Bad Science™ about it for thousands of years, instead of just inventing the PS2 like a normal person”
To be clear i’m talking SPECIFICALLY about the modern incarnation that was wearing someone elses skin like a suit. The one who sashayed around in the gayest way i’ve ever seen
True. Though so far, I’ve managed to avoid spending a single cent on the actual cards. I had so much fun using a friend’s Y’shtola precon, they bought me one of my own, and then set me up with a deck based on Quina Quen, plus sleeves and a deck box. And I already had a Mana Moon deck box and sleeves from a couple Christmases ago. For some reason, Magic people have been very generous about their indoctrination.
I feel like Raidah’s a pretty terrible person, but I don’t think she’s in like, Mary’s league, who isn’t in Ryan’s league. Raidah’s like more in Penny’s league of being a shithead, though we’ve at least seen there are some things Raidah believes in, which puts her ahead of Penny, who was just kind of a hedonist.
Joyce also has a history of punching men, so I wonder if that helps or hurts her chances of being a teacher? She could also, like, move to a more progressive area and become a teacher.
Also the number of times I’ve seen the word “Bongo” tonight reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend when we were discussing how dudes kept saying “Females”
She was like “It’s faster if they would just call me a bongo like they want to”
Yeah, THAT particular filter was implemented when people were using it VERY abundantly re.: Roz for, and you WOULD NEVER GUESS, calling out the pretty blonde white christian girl.
The sliding timescale mention in the alt text made me check, and yep, back at the beginning of the semester, same-sex marriage was not yet legal in Indiana. It makes one wonder what will be legal in the year 2130 when Willis’ great-grandchild draws Joyce and Dorothy graduating.
You’re talking about 2010, and I have bad news for you about the vast majority of the country back then.
Like. Massachusetts and Virginia had something, CA very briefly and technically had something, but for most of the country it was a Supreme Court ruling in 2016.
It doesn’t much matter, but it twigged for me because I lived abroad in 2015 and was back in the states by 2016. Also the ruling dropped on my birthday, which is nice when previouslt the most significant historical event to happen on June 25th was the start of the Korean War.
SCOTUS is going to hear a case about overturning Obergefell (something Thomas has been asking for an opportunity to do since Dobbs) this Friday, so there’s a non-zero chance that Raidah could drop that “In Indiana.” from her speech and still be correct.
In fact, there’s a non-zero chance this administration will outright illegalise gay relationships, sooooo… :grimacing:
With the “Respect for Marriage” act Congress passed in 2022, overturning a previous court ruling wouldn’t suddenly make gay marriage illegal federally. And I just checked, I don’t see anything about people challenging that law.
The preview panels suggest we should see Carla soon. In fact, it seems like the plot originally went right from Walky/Amber to Carla before the Big Rewrite.
Personally, I think Raidah should be honest about what’s bothering her, instead of stewing over the best way to emotionally destroy people who barely know she exists.
Flags are accidentally distributed evenly across all comments under normal circumstances, right?
Those accidents are now happening all in one place because more commenters than usual are all aiming for the same site button when they try to make a reply
…Is there maybe some kind of upstreaming behavior? Like, it’s gotta be comment by comment, not something where there’s a setting of “if X number of replies get reported, axe the whole thing”? I have no idea how this comments section is coded or by whom/what.
I mean, if indiana’s the ‘kinsey state/bisexual state’ or so i imagine there prolly are gay married teachers but either wayh i never rly heard about any of my straight teachers partners other than the fact that they may have had one or saw wedding rings lol
Wooooooooow, this strip is layered. I can see people are being incredibly normal about both Raidah’s comments and the wider, both fictional and real world, social contexts that lend complexity to the interactions between her and Joyce.
Interpretation of this longform narrative and, indeed, the short-panel comic strip format on a metatextual level, is DEFINITELY not in any way compromised by the deep bigotries and unspoken assumptions coming to light in our wider society due to the need, socially engineered into us over decades by literal technofascists, to sort every bite of interaction into short, punchy Hot Takes to which everyone must ascribe moral as well as narrative weight.
There are no winners and losers in our world and no teleological determinism stating that humanity must survive itself. Can we all just fucking admit Raidah is hot and gives 2020s Regina George and I am, on some level, giddy to have her as an antagonist, SHE’S the new Mike, all y’all are haters and I love it.
Did we lose the containment thread? *reads comments* Apparently, yes. Well, that’s lame. What did I say before?
Ah yes.
On one hand, we have sad looking Joyce. More! Give me more! Yes, I do believe people who cheat without remorse deserve to be unhappy. Why do you ask?
On the other hand, Raidah… said a bad thing. She says lots of bad things but this is a particularly nasty thing to say. And I probably shouldn’t cosign that.
man, if only it was possible to narratively enjoy the beats of a story, without necessarily morally condoning all the actions contained therein. if only reading the comic was something other than a moral exercise to get a High Score on the Morality Test by Judging which characters are and are not morally correct. if only we could live in such a world, but alas, it is our responsibility as readers to make absolutely sure that we virtue signal as hard as possible, that we continue to understand that Bad Things Are Bad.
(if it’s not clear, I’m commiserating with your desire to enjoy a story unfolding, without having to be irrationally held responsible for every conceivable ill contained within, because enjoying a story is an expression of moral assent, somehow)
Just trying to gauge where we’re at here, cause to my understanding for weeks as this Joyce x Dorothy story developed the major complaint has essentially boiled down to “Joyce and/or Dorothy are not sad enough.” That has been framed in different ways with the widely used comment buzz word “CONSEQUENCES”. Now that someone has sought one of them out and purposefully made them feel bad we’re instead mad at the person for being an asshole. (Which they definitely are.) But why are we mad?:
1. Because Raidah isn’t Joe or Walky? Or someone else we’ve possibly decided isn’t reacting with the immediately cathartic righteous indignation at being directly slighted by them?
2. Raidah is just being too mean here in a way disproportionate to her perceived investment in Joyce and Dorothy as a couple (None of her business)
3. This is blatant homophobia
4. Some other reason I can’t think up because we’re all individuals with unique opinions.
I’m just asking because for my understanding this what a lot of folks wanted, just not the way they wanted it.
See my argument for that would be Raidah has been directly affected by her behavior. Is there a statute of limitations on being mad at Joyce for her bad behavior? Last I checked Raidah is minus one boyfriend because of Joyce unapologetically lying to her exe’s older brother and purposefully undermining that relationship. Basically a lot of the reasons we’re mad at Joyce right now. Which has always bern why Raidah is mean to her.
I do personally think Raidah has crossed a line here and is disproportionately mad at Joyce and Sarah when she should be mad at Jacob.
But if we’re saying Raidah has no reason to be mad at Joyce that’s just not true.
“Consequences” and “feeling bad” aren’t synonymous here. Becky having a meltdown, or her mom disowning her, or no longer being able to have a career in education, are all things that would make her feel bad, but none of those are happening because she was selfish and inconsiderate of the people around her. All of those things would happen when people found out she was dating a woman, regardless of how or when she went about it.
One of the consequences I want is for Joyce to feel remorseful about how she’s been treating the people around her. I don’t want an anvil to drop from the sky on her head.
This one’s a little weird, since it’s almost certainly a consequence of Joyce’s previous bad behavior with Jacob, but it’s framed as if it’s just for her being queer.
Also that any justified causal link here is tied to that arc months ago (years ago in our terms), not to the recent events that people wanted consequences for.
I think part of this continued consequences debate is just that characters didn’t immediately respond in a way a section of readers wanted them to and granted that immediate, cathartic reprimand for Joyce and Dorothy’s actions.
I don’t think this is intentional framed as Raidah cutting at Joyce for being queer. I think readers just have short term memory. Raidah may be upset about the protest photo but her motivation for her cruelty to Joyce has always been because Joyce stole Jacob. Her finally potentially finding a way to hurt her is just a long term payoff that happens to coincide with Joyce’s current bad behavior.
I think if people really want immediate consequences from people hurt by their recent actions that’s just not going to happen one in comic day out from events. Not from Raidah, not for Joe or Walky, and the consequences we expect would be totally out of character from the people we want them from.
Joe and Walky aren’t gonna pop off. Raidah will pop off but not for the reasons we want and we won’t like her for it. That’s the cards being dealt here.
I don’t think it’s framed that way, and I guess I phrased that badly: Raidah’s framing it that. Raidah’s making a homophobic slash at Joyce. She’s doing it in a way that preserves plausible deniability, but she’s still doing it. She’s doing it because of her (partly justified) grudge against Joyce.
Beyond that though, I don’t think it would have been out of character for either Joe or Walky to have been upset at the cheating rather than just losing their girlfriends. Not necessarily “pop off”, whatever exactly that means to you, but something on the level of what Sarah said to Joyce earlier.
Even Raidah could easily have taken the “hussy” approach she used when she first saw the photo and heard that Dorothy had been dating Walky, but she didn’t. I think something along those lines would have been perfectly in character. But Willis chose to have her use homophobia instead.
.I mean, Raidah is being a bit hypocritical in the last panel. She does not really care about anything except what she wants. A recent example was when Jennifer asked her to help with Alice, and all Raidah cared about was her grudge against Sarah. She is also not self aware about her own self centered behavior. Both Joyce and Raidah are kind of the same in this situation.
Point two is where it sticks for me. Raidah says cruel things simply to be cruel, even if she is right sometimes. And yes, Indiana has not fully adopted a homophobic stance toward LGBTQIA teachers yet, but it is a realistic concern. She is right that Joyce is being selfish.
To conclude my word salad: I do not like how Joyce is acting, and I do not like how Raidah is acting. They are both selfish and cruel, just in different ways.
I get Raidah’s a hate sink character, but I’m not sure how to feel about like her being homophobic. She has interesting insights packaged in like her caustic way of talking and toxic outlook, but like
I guess I’m feeling I’m supposed to hate when I’m feeling more confused at what her meta reason for being in the story is.
I don’t know if I believe Raidah is truly homophobic. I mean, she might be, but it seems more like she’s using the existence of homophobia to hurt Joyce more than actually judging her for being gay. I think the fact that she may weaponize something she doesn’t believe in to attack her enemies speaks to something much deeper than if she just didn’t like gay people.
I was gonna like have an extra sentence explaining she was weaponizing homophobia, but didn’t want to like get to technical on whether she actually is homophobic or just using rhetoric to make her point in a hurtful way.
But yeah her characterization is fascinating, if not incredibly maddening. I guess I feel weird about it cause like… I’m not sure if I’m supposed to forever hate Raidah or am i supposed to sit here and decipher past it. Maybe both…
Raidah strikes me also as the kind of person that will wield the accusation of islamophobia and racism as a shield against criticism ,as unpleasant as that may be to acknowledge such people exist.
But Id fear the reaction if Raidah does something like that. Like I said she’s a hate sink, but I feel it stifles nuance and is hard to write around without that automatic reaction (not even getting into fandom racism and sexism)
I think we need only look back to how she psyched Dorothy out about the office of the Presidency to understand what kind of person she is – it really doesn’t matter what she truly believes, what matters is, can she say something that hurts the other person.
Which is an interesting comparison, since a lot of people were nodding along with that and taking that one as not only true, but also as Raidah’s true opinion.
Until we get thought bubbles I think it can be hard to derive the true opinions of the characters on topics like this. until then we have to look at their actions and words as depicted and I think what we see if Raidah cares more about winning and looking good (to herself and whoever she’s trying to impress) than the actual truth, even if they may coincide. I mean she can believe all American presidents are war criminals,I don’t think that really changes the net effect.
This is exactly what happened and I think there should be a deeper discussion about whether weaponizing homophobic information to attack someone is itself homophobic. I don’t think it is. I think Raidah just hates Joyce and will do nearly anything to make her feel bad, which is different and possibly worse than being homophobic.
I dunno. I think a willingness to use Homophobia in order to hurt someone shows some level of homophobia regardless of actual intent. In the same way using someone’s weight as a way to critique or hurt them shows a latent idea of bigotry underneath the skin.
I don’t think we know very much of Raidah’s actual personality. I believe she hates the presidency office, and possibly other high level politicians just by inference. We also know she’s ableist, but okay enough with ant least pot. Otherwise she’s very corporate. Hell, she could’ve been more normal before Dana got sent off and that triggered her villain arc.
As far as homophobia goes, I wouldn’t be surprised if Raidah is, but not like Mary levels. I feel like she would argue what she said above isn’t homophobic, even though it very much is.
Easy. Raidah’s most sincerely held belief is that people who have wronged her, either objectively or in her own mind, should be in abject misery at all times. All things are permissible in service of that goal. Plenty of people exist like that in real life, many of them on social media
Raidah would definitely convince someone’s husband to cheat on them with her and then yell at him for going along with it. Maximum disruption to as many lives as possible, and tonight we support that.
This could interestingly lead to Joyce re-assessing what she wants her major to be. I totally forgot it was elementary education until now, and I don’t think it’s ever really been explored WHY Joyce wants to teach younger kids, but I think her fundamentalist upbringing has a lot to do with it. Which, with her rejecting basically everything about that upbringing more and more, she may ask herself if being an elementary school teacher is really what she wants.
Also would love to see Raidah just get fucking destroyed at some point. Can’t wait for the day where we get a strip where she realizes that being 19-years-old means she does not, in fact, know everything, and it puts her on the back foot in a big way.
Nagi Sanzinin, spoiled heiress for god knows how many chapters, has always had these silly little comics she works on. They’re completely incomprehensible to anybody but her and her friends, but they’re a huge source of joy for her.
At this point in the story, she’s been cut off from the family money, and she starts earnestly looking into comics as a career. She has to start asking difficult questions about how she conveys visual information, not just to herself and her buddies, but any reader that doesn’t have the context of all their late night conversations about the story.
It would be a little different for Joyce since she’s already got a comic in the paper and she’s started asking herself some of these questions, but I think it would be a cool direction for Joyce.
Basically what it got me thinking here. Like. Oh no. Nobody in the history of ever has had to reconsider changing career prospects from what they absolutely knew they would want to do when they started college. And Raidah has surely been here long enough to know that a good chunk of freshmen won’t be great at sticking to their major. This is such a shallow dig. It would really only hold up if Joyce had at any point demonstrated a true passion for the calling.
Yeah to echo others it’s clear Raidah is the type of person who will say anything if it serves her rhetorical purposes. A career in politics, if not as a politician,as a staffer awaits her. She will be despised in private but in public she will play the role a lot better than Robin did.
Setting aside whether or not you think Joyce has been acting in a self-centered way lately, the idea that Raidah actually cares that people aren’t paying enough attention to the protest is inane. If she actually cared, she would have been there, and she wasn’t. She’s just adopting a convenient moral stance in order to justify her desire to be petty and cruel.
She has a lot to say on the subject of who was in what photograph, but at the end of the day the people who get photographed are the people who show up.
Easy to come in, after all the work is over, and give your take on what should’ve been done differently. Harder to actually put the time in when there’s work to be done.
Joyce and Dorothy may not have conducted themselves perfectly at that protest, but I think they were still more useful than Raidah giving her post-game breakdown of where everybody fucked up.
Literally doesn’t matter. You can criticize their motives all day long, they were there, they were putting the work in, Raidah wasn’t.
Somebody who works a soup kitchen because they want an excuse to get out of the house is just as useful as somebody who works a soup kitchen because they care for the plight of the hungry, and both of them are more useful than somebody who shows up after the kitchen’s closed to tell them what they should’ve done better.
You can apply this to any material pursuit under the sun.
There are plenty of understandable reasons why Raidah may not have been at the protest and I’m tired of people gatekeeping it but I think it’s even worse to say Dorothy and Joyce did more for it by dint of being there. They weren’t there to protest, they weren’t there because they directly cared about what was happening, they weren’t even well-informed on the situation or what was happening around them. For all we know, Raidah may have family directly affected by the conflict in Bulmeria.
The only work Dorothy put in was holding up a sign for a minute tops when everyone else was evacuating because she was spiraling. C’mon now.
You could compare it to literally anything. When the postal service is making all those Christmas Deliveries, they need hands on packages. They need feet on the ground. They do not need Raidah showing up on December 26th telling them how they did it wrong.
If you don’t “care” about the packages your hands are still as good as anybody’s.
It. Does. Matter. It matters because you are refusing to understand that saying “well if Raidah wasn’t there she doesn’t get to have an opinion” is a very shitty thing to say. Especially regarding an issue that directly affects Raidah. Would you tell a black person they aren’t allowed to comment on something that happens at a BLM protest because they weren’t there? Or a gay person who wasn’t able to attend pride? “erm, you weren’t there, so you’re no longer allowed to have an opinion”.
Also like by their logic disabled people are inherently less “useful” if their disability prevents them from going to an on site protest.
Doesn’t matter if you did lots of pre-protest organising, arranged supplies, served as legal aid after or anything – you just gotta stand there to count. Knowing anything about the protest and its goals and following instructions from the organisers is apparently totally optional.
On one hand black people in America are directly impacted by issues in the BLM movement. On the other hand, we literally don’t even know five things about this country and protests, but are coding it as righteous and not a bunch of Americans sticking their nose into international affairs and being self-righteous hypocrites while we burn the world down (economically, environmentally, etc.).
So doing the work at home or dealing with issues at home may be wildly different than the kind of protesting that looks cool, but really doesn’t make you knowledgeable or have any path to a solution. “I’m upset” isn’t quite enough to make a protest good, especially if you consider the thousands of injustices that don’t hit that media radar.
To make it too real, some American president right now is talking about invading an African nation to defend Christian interests. Sounds kinda dangerous, huh?
While we don’t know anything specific about the situation in Bulmeria, we do know that the protest is against the US (or US arms companies) providing weapons to the country that’s being accused of committing genocide. The protest isn’t demanding US intervention – which would be the parallel to your last point, but to have the US stop intervening.
Plus, it’s Israel/Gaza. The parallels are everywhere – in the signs, the rhetoric, even the details of the protest (other than our cast specifically). There’s a fig leaf over it, but it’s disingenuous to argue it’s not meant to be the parallel.
It does matter though. The only part of the protest that they actually took part in was Dorothy going back in to make a grandstand play when the organizers had already decided to evacuate. They didn’t help at all.
Raidah couldn’t be at the protest, because it might impact her future career prospects to be seen as a radical. She seems to view every single daily thought and behavior through this lens, before anything else. If it isn’t getting her life goal ahead, it’s irrelevant at best, and toxic at worst.
Oh good, Raidah went out of her were to say something curt and callous. But she didn’t didn’t do it because she cares. Oh no, she’s above it all, she’s just making an “observation” as usual.
Right? Like, Joyce chose that major when she still thought she was going to get her MRS degree. Is elementary education even something she’s that committed to anymore?
1- I got scared, and some other mixed feelings, about how Joyce is so self aware of herself in 4th panel.
2- Raidah, as so influent and powerful, just keeps taking more and more hits by Joyce. Or some friends of her.
3 – …. Raidah will try to kill Joyce some day, won’t she?
I don’t think Raidah will try to kill Joyce, as others have said in the past. She def knows Asher is in the mob and that is somehow important to her, but I totally don’t think her ultimate goal is actual murder. She’s far too up her own ass for that.
I mean, this comic said stuff like “no main cast will ever die” and “the stakes for this strip will stay lower” for a long time, and we’ve thus far had 2 kidnappings, a brutal stabbing, a car chase complete with ramping of motorcycle, and at least 3 murders? I get what you mean, tbf, but I also don’t think it’s unreasonable to fear sudden, rapid escalations and tonal shifts in this serial, specifically. We’ve been there hella times.
…So, I’m not a fan of Raidah and I think the people defending her here are disingenuous at best. But I’m going to show some solidarity with the anti-Doyce, pro-Raidah crowd and ask:
What the actual fuck?
Like, there’s a big gap between self-centered, high-school-mentality ladder-climbing with a side of bigotry that she might grow out of with some introspection; and like, actual murder?
Much like the “war criminal” jab at Dorothy, Raidah’s not entirely wrong, but her point is laced with so much malice that you can’t help but default to “Man, fuck you!”
Exactly, she’s trying pull the same move she did on Dorothy. Painting a narrow picture designed to make her subject feel bad about themselves. She’s deliberately trying to do harm.
She’s just hypocrite. She wants to be a lawyer, but who’s to say she won’t represent the worst of the worst? She didn’t seem to care about the protest until her rivals made the front page. She gatekeeps morals and ethics. Uses people for her own ends. Acts like she’s above it all, but goes out of her way to make stink. Her words and action says very spiteful.
I dunno. At least Mary is upfront and honest about her bigotry and contempt. You know where you stand with her because she tells you. What you see is what you get.
Raidah on the other hand is more deceitful and manipulative. She usually has ulterior motives with her interactions. On top of that her words and actions are more cutting and damaging.
You can see Mary’s machinations a mile away, but you may not know Raidah stabbed you in the gut.
Raidah has superficially good politics while being too spite-driven and self-centered to ever truly act on them. Mary is a hair’s breadth from sieg heiling in the common room, but has shown she’ll act with discretion if it’ll cause more harm to her perceived enemies. They’re simply not on the same level of heinous yet.
i dunno, the war criminal comment felt FAR more “off the cuff” – like the kind of knee-jerk thing youd say without really thinking how it would hit someone. sure it’s crappy to auto-reply to someone’s goals with a shutdown, but it wasn’t actively malicious like this was
that showed us the vibe of raidah’s personality, but this shows us her *intent*
I can Raidah growing up and really making the world a better place through her career. While also being an ass. Spite is a great motivator that can often outlast hope and determination!
Oh thank goodness, for like six seconds there I had to sorta sympathize with Raidah on the protest situation and whatnot. So of course she goes and says probably the worst thing she’s ever said.
False, the real truth is that she had nothing else that would have stuck. Even this might not stick because I’m wondering if Joyce might have contemplated changing career paths a couple of times…plus if not she could just move over to Illinois right next door. They seemed to have stayed consistently blue for decades now.
I seem to remember Joyce only declared a major because she needed one. Her whole goal since the beginning of the strip was to get an MRS. degree. And it seems she’s now speedrunning to that since she found the “perfect” partner in Dorothy.
Maybe the timescale is the real reason so many people can’t be normal about this comic, lmao. I’ve never followed a story that progressed so slowly within, relative to the passage of time without.
Wow Raidah, that is… that’s quite a way to act right after prayer. “Ah yes, let me get in touch with the benevolent creator of the universe so I can attuned my mind to compassion and justice.” Ten minutes later “Time to get myself some petty revenge! After all, everybody knows two wrongs make a right!”
While that’s probably true broadly speaking, if the idea is that Raidah is trying to get ahead in her career by showing what a holy woman she is, she’s probably chosen the wrong religion for that.
Usually lawyers and politicians in America are Christian in overt, showy ways, in order to win over a Christian votership.
I suspect Raidah is sincerely islamic in her beliefs, and not just putting on airs in a cynical ploy to win over the population, somehow not having gotten the memo that a muslim woman may as well be the boogeyman to a lot of the locals here.
Fair point, I didn’t communicate it well but what I meant was the fact that she prays, and Mary even be very sincere about it, has never stopped anyone from being … flexible in their morals and ethics regardless, moreso people in the line of work Raidah seems determined to go into
I’ve long maintained that God is mostly just a rhetorical device. He’s a hypothetical external entity people assign their own beliefs and values to. Not something actually capable of voicing a dissenting opinion.
Raidah hates Joyce, so obviously, in her eyes, god hates Joyce too, and fully endorses any petty acts taken against her. God will never say anything to the contrary, and if anything did speak to the contrary she wouldn’t consider it to be god.
In the same way that for American Christians, whether God hates or loves gay people really just depends on whether the person speaking on God’s behalf hates or loves gay people. You would implicitly understand that if somebody was holding a sign saying “God hates gay people”, that they personally hated gay people, and they weren’t merely expressing one of god’s opinions which they find disagreeable.
All that basically to say that religiosity doesn’t inherently make anybody more or less moral than anybody else. It just kind of changes the way you speak about morality.
Also,I don’t think she really got to choose her religion, more likely she was born into it and i think explicitly rejecting it is a step too far even for her.
hahahaha holy shit I forgot that the last thing she professed she was doing was praying. she 100% spent the entire exercise coming up with the most cutting thing to say that she could humanly conceive of
I think I got a take here and I’m not sure people will like it. This is a consequence for cheating! Just not the cheating we think of. This is Raidah trying to get back at Joyce for stealing Jacob. Joyce is accused of stealing Dorothy from Walky which is totally untrue, Joyce actually stole Jacob but just wasn’t allowed to keep him. Raidah’s sole motivation for hating Joyce is because of her part in destroying her relationship and in my opinion it’s mostly justified.
Joyce having only ever met Raidah briefly one time, and only knowing what she was told about Raidah by Sarah, decided to steal her boyfriend. And it worked! Even after Sarah backed off because she realized she was using Joyce and being selfish. Joyce still decided that didn’t matter and hurt Raidah on a deep personal level that she has never once felt sorry about.
That’s why Raidah thinks Joyce has no shame. Seeing Joyce’s picture in the paper actively undermining a protest with the kiss is just more confirmation of Raidah’s bias. Joyce has no shame and doesn’t care about other people when it comes to games of love. And we’ve seen that with Joe and Dorothy. Everything everyone’s been saying about Joyce for weeks now about how she just stopped caring or thinking of Joe when Dorothy’s romance route unlocked. Joyce is very selfish in this way. Not even understanding that there could possibly be justifiable reasons not to kiss someone even if you really want to.
I think we can be mad at Raidah for being an asshole here but I think this only happens to Joyce specifically because Joyce has been kind of a jerk this entire time.
I agree with this take. The Jacob situation was incredibly messy and was definitely one of the first peeks into how single minded Joyce can get when it comes to romance.
Oh certainly, like raidah has a genuine reason to not like Joyce unlike most people she doesn’t like, because joyce actually did try steal Jacob (which everyone lost in that situation isn’t he end) but that was 100% a shitty thing to do, and raidah disliking her is justified.
That being said raidah is using Joyce’s sexuality to hurt her, rather than actually caring about the protest.
She doesn’t even mention she undermined it, or took away from it. She just says “you won’t get a job because you like girls”
She doesn’t care about the protest as much as she thinks she does, she barely mentioned it here.
Tho yes, joyce can be incredibly selfish when it comes to romance, and has made so many questionable decisions, but it doesn’t justify raidah using homophobia to make her feel shit.
Um… these days, even in a relatively conservative state like Indiana, two teen girls kissing would be met with a yawn or a “neat,” before flipping to the next page. I think Joyce’s future in teaching would be more in danger if she was ACTUALLY protesting the school’s connection to Evil Corporation.
Of all the negative consequences Joyce deserves for that boneheaded and selfish decision, being told “no” to a job because of a kiss four years prior is not one of them.
My experience with Indiana primarily centers around Gary, which is very close to Chicago, the city I live in, and they really don’t care about sexuality at all. POT, on the other hand…
I don’t think Raidah is a homophobe, if for no other reason than because she regarded Jacob’s brother very highly and Jacob’s brother’s main law achievement (that we’ve been informed of as the reader) is being involved with striking down anti trans laws. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/laws/ She’s out of pocket to say this to Joyce, but she said herself that she thinks Joyce would only care about a consequence that affects Joyce rather than other people, so she’s pointing out a consequence she may have in the future. During the conversation with Asma about the protest all Joyce could say is “I wanna kiss! I wanna kiss!!”.
“She’s not a homophobe. She just commits the occasional act of homophobia. She just wields homophobia in an intentional attempt to hurt gay people who displease her. But like, in her heart she’s virtuous or whatever.”
Raidah consistently proved that whatever her beliefs are, they are all secondary. She cares more about how sue is perceived and her social standing that she will drop people at the drop of a hat.
She may technically not believe she’s homophobic, but using someone’s sexuality as a weapon against them is homophobia, her previous words are irrelevant when her current actions show that.
She could have approached it as “hey kissing like that in the middle of a protest was super inappropriate because it took away from the actual protest” instead she said kissing girls means you won’t be allowed to teach kids. It was pointed and intentional use Joyce’s sexuality to make her feel like shit.
Yeah, focussing on homophobia as something to believe in, to the point that you lose sight of homophobia as something you do, is misguided.
If she’s willing to weaponize homophobia against Joyce, then she’s homophobic in her deeds, and any admiration she has for accomplished pro-trans lawyers can do nothing to diminish that.
Gonna just branch off of this: plenty of people who say they support LGBTQ+ people, and in many ways actually do, still use attacks based on homophobia. I had an interaction with someone in this comment section where they made an off-hand comment I found hurtful, and it was a long back and forth before they got my point, during which they threw in “It’s lucky that I’m an ally enough that I’m not pushed away by stuff like this; this is what turns people against supporting LGBTQ+.” Saying someone’s attitude makes it understandable that people hate them and deny them rights is homophobic, even if you yourself are such a good “ally.” Additionally, sometimes people will respond to homophobes with, “I hope your kids turn put to be gay,” which is so fucked up! Gay kids are not a punishment, and do you realize you’re also wishing for something that would likely cause those gay kids a lot of pain?
So Raidah may not agree with homophobia in general, but that doesn’t mean her arguments don’t rely on homophobia.
Your points are also reasonable and I agree. Thank you for responding. Also that person should understand that as an ally sometimes they need to be willing to bend the knee a little or otherwise just take shit on the chin sometimes, being an ally doesn’t mean having one’s ass kissed while they’re spoonfed basic information.
I feel like if someone just needs a single incident with a single person to write off the entire LGBTQ+ cause, they weren’t really much of an ally. I have had some pretty unpleasant interactions with people who also happened to be queer, but it didn’t change my stance on the issue. It just made me go “oh, wow, this individual is a jerk. I will no longer associate with them.”
Being Raidah, she may regard Harrison’s success highly, he managed to overturn a long standing precedent and recieved, we’re told, some pretty big news coverage. I would not be shocked if that’s a level of notoriety she herself hopes to achieve in her future career… potentially regardless of how she achieves it (eg. the lawyers who represented OJ Simpson.)
o3o
Gotta be honest. It’s crazy to me that even the Doyce-hatingest commenters are taking Raidah’s side. I feel like there’s a trend to people who think any punishment goes so long as they feel like the victim “deserves” it. Which is why I think people have a bad habit of falling into bigoted rhetoric when it comes to wishing ill on a person they don’t like.
Yeah if I dare say it it’s a really right-wing way of looking at things where moral code isn’t about shaping society for the better, but about deciding who gets *punished*
The line between hating gay people and mainly hating one particular gay person specifically can get so easily blurred…hatred is just a hell of a drug period.
I think there’s an important difference between “Yes Raidah, you are correct” and “She isn’t wrong, but she’s only doing this to hurt someone she dislikes.”
She does have a point that being openly queer in a red state doesn’t bode well for Joyce’s chances of working with children. If I lived in Missouri, just because I’m trans, being a teacher would be largely an impossibility. The problem is that Raidah isn’t concerned for Joyce’s future, she just wants to cut her down, and that’s not cool.
Like that’s sorta my point. Even if you HATE Doyce, I don’t think you should take Raidah’s side. In the same way where I can hate Raidah but absolutely will not stand for people being islamaphobic or racist about her.
Nah. I think if you read most of the comments are angry at Raidah. For my opinion this strip frustrates me because it really muddies the validity of Raidah’s point by having her use methods that are morally detestable. I think Joyce should feel bad here for multiple reasons but because Raidah has used homophobic rhetoric that’s all anyone can focus on. Which is pretty fair, but just makes Raidah look like a supervillain when she’s kind of correct about Joyce and justified in being angry with her.
I think this is what I was trying to get at with my comment earlier. Why was she written like this when Raidah is already a hate sink?
Not to say characters can’t be terrible, including weaponizing homophobia, but it feels weird to have the one outspoken brown girl be a complete dickweed in a way that (I hope) everyone doesn’t like. Her dialogue makes it seem like she’s chastising Joyce about being (accidentally) openly queer and not HER ACTIONS that pissed her off in the first place.
Raidah is not the only outspoken brown girl in the comic. She’s not even the only brown girl to have been critical of Joyce over her and Dorothy’s relationship.
I didn’t mean to imply it that. Just, don’t think the comments section can be normal about outspoken nonwhite women in general. Let alone one who is genuinely being a shithead and her actual motivations are partially out of spitr.
I think the problem is that Raidah, specifically, doesn’t really have a great reason to be upset with Joyce in this particular instance. Like narratively most of my issues with the protest are Doylist, not Watsonian. Raidah doesn’t KNOW that but lord is she not like…asking questions or being normal about it.
Which y’know. Bad traits for a law student.
Three: Joyce doesn’t have to be a teacher, she’s still a Freshman and could change her major. She only picked being a teacher because her original plan was to Homeschool her Children and be a Trad Wife while her husband goes out and makes all the money.
I feel like the most impressive part of Raidah’s out-of-the-blue stab here is that she was genuinely so indignated at Daisy for making the protest media story be about white girls kissing instead just a minute ago that she had to go pray about it, and then apparently spent the entire prayer time trying to decide how she could best use this new revelation about Joyce being queer to hurt her in some novel way that she figured no one else would have gotten around to yet, and landed squarely on “you’re going to be discriminated against in the workforce and not trusted with children because you’re queer, and I personally think you deserve it” because Jacob realized Raidah wasn’t really his type because of Joyce months ago and broke up with her without even choosing Joyce over her. That’s an impressive amount of mental gymnastics.
The part of me that actually likes mean but complicated characters (like Sarah and Mike) genuinely does want to find reasons to like Raidah, but she’s making that really hard when she’s being this particular flavor of asshole to someone she barely knows solely to hurt them for incredibly petty reasons. Raidah’s intent here absolutely matters to me, and the intent is very clearly “use homophobia to hurt Joyce”, and whether or not she conceptually agrees with the homophobia is actually completely irrelevant because she’s perfectly happy to use it to hurt and scare someone for her own selfish reasons. She has absolutley no leg to stand on here calling Joyce out for being selfish when this entire exchange is because Raidah only cares about herself as well and Joyce briefly hurt her social status in the past.
Let’s be real, if Joyce had been in her friend group instead, Joyce being a bit selfish and willing to claim things for herself without always fully regarding everyone else’s feelings in the process would be the one thing Raidah actually respected about her. The reason she doesn’t is because 1) she’s Sarah’s friend instead of Raidah’s and 2) Raidah caught a stray of Joyce’s selfishness once, both of which are mortal offenses to her.
What’s wild is how mean to Raidah Joyce has been, and for a while, over and over, yet always thoughtlessly or unthinkingly.
It doesn’t even register in Joyce mind as mean to Raidah. Like she doesn’t count.
And when she was upset it was about consequences to herself ( with Jacob) .
But everything Raidah does is selfish so this is unlikely to stick, except getting Joyce to consider a major she actually wants.
I think Raidah is more| prickly that she disrespects Joyce as naive and ignorant yet Joyce keeps showing her up, over and over.
She failed to keep Billy from being friends.
She failed to keep Billy with Asher ( another gay couple asher-ethan she tried to break up !
)
She guilted Dorothy over being President, which lead directly to Jorothy in the protest and kissing and getting together.
Mike was trying to teach people lessons by being an asshole. Raidah trying to social climb and demonstrate superiority,yet she keeps teaching lessons or it backfiring.
I really hope Joyce doesn’t take it to heart . Because every time she does something for the greater good peoples lives are put at risk. Raidahs gonna get Amber killed.
But it’s about time Joyce changed majors. I think maybe Engineering would be better. I laugh if she switches to Paleontology.
Every time Raidah has tried to strike back it backfires and helps Joyce ( or Sarah).
( I’m not playing Devil’s advocate here. Raidahs a giant POS. I utterly despise her naked social climbing, using people, pretend friendships meangirlusm .
It’s just that Joyce has no way of knowing any of this about her.
Or how secretly passive aggressive Raidah has been. I think only Billy should know better. Raidah just doesn’t fuly count as a person because of her conflict with Sarah. )
I am also unsure how homophobic Raidah is. I think she has standards and may be ignorant how far she crossed them. ( Or she might know, but she’s passive aggressive and doesn’t want it openly known how much )
She really crossed the line trying to break up Ethan and Asher. There may have been a homophobic undertone in keeping Billy with a man.
And Now there’s this.
Raidahs PC enough not to slut shame Joyce. Although she’s trying to hint at it heavily
She’s wise enough not to say anything overtly homophobic. But Gloating about consequences from bigotry crosses the line. ( In a way I think she deeply considered as “ok” but isn’t. She thinks it’s under the boundary but it’s over )
And if Joyce were wise about this she would report it as homophobic sexual harassment. Which it is. Tagging Raidah as a homophobe on her record would be a revenge that Raidah would respect
Even if she were to report it, would it matter? The university (in-comic) has shown they’re willing to sacrifice students. Raidah wasn’t at the protest. Joyce was.
If they were in the same dorm and it happened in that dorm then yes, Ruth would care. That’s about the extent of caring that would occur in this comic.
See I think this massively undersells what Joyce did to Raidah. Raidah has a pretty solid leg to stand on here because she didn’t just catch a stray from Joyce’s selfishness. She or more accurately Jacob was targeted by Joyce. This is after Sarah apologized for using her and backed off after Joe made her realize her motivations were terrible and destroying Jacob’s relationship and weaponizing Joyce were dick moves.
Joyce is fully responsible for destroying that relationship with either malicious intent or just callous indifference to someone else’s relationship. Worse still wasn’t even really mean to Joyce at this point. They had nothing against each other. Raidah just had a man Joyce wanted and Sarah gave her a very flimsy “Raidah doesn’t deserve Jacob because reasons” justification to go after him.
I do also think Raidah is disproportionately mad at Joyce when she should be equally mad a Jacob for his part in her relationship with him breaking down. He broke up with her after lying to his brother on a date she had been rehearsing for! She was deeply invested in him and I think it was more serious to her than a social connection. If I wanted to be really generous I would even argue that this cold, social climber version of Raidah we have post time skip is a direct response to what Jacob and Joyce did to her. Because the pre time skip Raidah that despises Sarah for sending her academic liability, depressed stoner friend home is a characterization that feels deeply in conflict with the Raidah of today.
So I think you can find real reasons to like Raidah or at least appreciate the bullshit she’s been through thanks to Joyce and her dumb pals. But also Raidah really has a horrible way of doing things that’s probably not morally justified so it’s fine if you hate her for that.
See, there’s one thing I don’t get in this entire line of reasoning (which I’ve seen repeatedly in these comments). Was Jacob supposed to be a person, or a giant Kewpie doll with absolutely no agency? Because frankly if Joyce’s rather awkward attempts at flirting with him were enough to “win him away” from Raidah, I rather think that speaks more to the weakness of his and Raidah’s relationship than to anything about Joyce, and he would have gone off with the very next person who treated him at least halfway decently.
Yet so many treat it as Joyce “stealing” him, as if Jacob couldn’t possibly make a decision of his own accord without some evil witch controlling his mind. Honestly, I see what Joyce did as more giving Jacob an escape hatch, through which he dove eagerly.
I do blame Jacob. Quite a bit actually. Framing what Joyce did as giving Jacob an escape hatch is quite insulting actually because Raidah was seemingly a great girlfriend to him. Trying her best to fit his stupid checklist of qualities. He even self described his time with Raidah as a perfect relationship. Hell Raidah even trusted him to spend time with another woman and go on dates with her! He treated Raidah like an afterthought and only keeps a shred of my respect for choosing not to date Joyce after breaking things off. We should all really be more mad at Jake and also questioning why he threw out most of his professed values to immediately sleep with a girl he’s only known for one day and had one conversation with. Raidah was rehearsing and practicing to meet Jacob’s family that means they were in a spot near where late stage Ruth and Billie were. We loved late stage Ruthless right? That didn’t mean shit to Jacob.
I still think Joyce is most to blame for making a conscious and malicious decision to steal Jacob. Jacob at least didn’t do that. He just let himself be stolen.
That’s all fine though cause Raidah’s really unlikable even back when she arguably was only really someone who had beef with Sarah.
The last line of this strip really reads like a girl that’s decided to choose evil because her boyfriend got seduced by a bubble-brained maga-ass and dumped her.
My read is that Raidah has valid reasons to be mad at Joyce, but this is not only a terrible way to deal with it, it’s also a really confusing one, because it’s got nothing at all to do with the actual problem and, on top of that, Raidah’s overall reaction to what Joyce did was basically to just stew in the background and wait for Joyce to screw up and create an opening…and then Raidah goes for a very weird and confusing angle that, at worst, might just convince Joyce to switch majors and that has nothing to do with either thing Raidah hates Joyce for.
Raidah once again acting like she’s some moral paragon while being one of the worst people on the damn campus.
One of the worst things about Raidah is she THINKS she’s “woke” (I hate the word now because of how alt right nazis use it as a buzzword but it’s the best description) but she is casually ableist and homophobic.
The way she treated dina like she was mentally unfit tk make a decision if her own friendships. She slammed her friend for using the R slur, but while she didn’t say that she still acted like dina couldn’t think for herself.
And now, she pretends like she cares about the protest, but uses the sexuality of joyce to scare her. Wether she herself actually (thinks she) views queer people in a negative light she’s still using it as weapon against her.
It’s the same kind if way some people will respect a trans person new pronouns, but then they end up hating them so start deadnaming and misgendering them on purpose. It’s surface level allyship that’s only used to make themselves look good while bit actually caring.
Like ifnyou compare her to roz who can be an asshole, but at least she actually does believe her activism and wknt specifically use someone’s sexuality against them because they don’t like what they did.
Tbf, leaving college is the best time to try it out. Freshest network connections, next to zero personal belongings, internships for other companies, schools often have programs in other states or countries over the summer you can sign up for.
I wanna leave Texas, but I have a whole apartment full of stuff, three cats, and a kid. It would take A LOT to even be able to leave.
Radiah seems to be implying they found a newspaper camera and then started making out in front of it, which is not the case and would be wildly out of character.
When it affects your career prospects, yes. It is an unfortunate reality but it doesn’t make it not true. Raidah, of course, is being a jerk about it though.
The timing of the last panel’s lines was amazing, coming shortly after the Asma conversation.
“I refuse to accept the premise that there are times I shouldn’t kiss Dorothy.”
I now imagine other situations in which others might disagree with her kissing Dorothy, such as in the middle of a funeral, or in front of a burning building full of orphans (“fiddling while Rome burns”)…
Funnily enough, Nero MIGHT have been fiddling while Rome burnt, but he wasn’t doing it IN Rome. He was several miles a way, in a completely different town, and when he was informed that Rome was, in fact, burning, he immediately left for Rome.
Joyce CARES a lot about others. Indeed, she cares very deeply about others. Her problem is that she isn’t exactly terribly wise in how she SHOWS that care about others, and between her autism and her extremely sheltered upbringing, she has a LOT of harmful habits and ideas that she doesn’t realize are harmful or off putting to others.
If you compare Joyce now to where she was at the start of the comic, or to another character with a similar ideology as the one she started with like Mary, you can see that Joyce cares about others rather a lot. She’s not exactly SMART about how she cares, and definitely takes dumb actions that don’t help others far more than she should – but that does not change the fact that she very much DOES care.
I believe actions more than I believe words of beliefs about herself. She has been very unpleasant for quite a while now. She seems practically solipsistic, and lacking object permanence.
You can care a whole lot and still treat people like garbage and the fact that you care in itself does not erase hurtful actions and neglectful tendencies. Btw.
Classic case of right point made by the wrong person. The last point is poignant but of course the rest of it is just meaningless rudeness because of her already low opinion of Joyce, but perhaps that’s exactly what she needs to actually consider it meaningful.
Was this originally the Halloween comic? Because that ice burn is worthy of the Halloween Blizzard of 1991. Raidah has never been cooler than she is right now, she is an ice witch, a frost maiden, a winter queen. I never liked her before, but damn do I love her right this moment.
I can understand why you are upset, Raidah, but there is such a thing as being way too petty.
As well as having way more people to be upset about concerning the events of those protests than those two. I don’t think their actions even caused any negative impact to the cause.
Learn to set apart your personal grievance from the llegitimate causes, you fictional character I am trying to give advice to!
Not that Raidah would have known this, but as others have said it’s not like Joyce ever actually wanted to be a teacher. She picked her major because it’d help her homeschool the future children she was planning to have, but her only real goal for attending college was finding a husband that would one day put some babies in her.
So unfortunately most of this strip isn’t as effective a callout as it could have been, but Raidah is completely correct in the final panel.
Shogo right, she probably just unknowingly helped Joyce.
She’s been on autopilot about her major.
I don’t think Raidah DOES effective callouts. She has superficial liberal standards so she can’t call Joyce a boyfriend/ girlfriend stealing hussy. ( Although she tried hard to imply it and ineffective as selfish coming from a social climbing user like her )
There’s certainly something there about how many of the comments (rightly) going into great depth at how Raidah’s opening jab is laced with casual homophobia, whether she meant it or not, but doing so while calling her a “bongo.”
Also the casual abelism of “if you didn’t physically go to a protest you don’t get to have an opinion.”
Can’t wait to see the same people say any gay person that doesn’t show up to protest on the doorfront of SCOTUS this Friday doesn’t get to have an opinion on gay marriage.
I’m disappointed in you. You were the FIRST person in the comment section that I’d expect to go, “if you can’t make anything a thing, you just don’t want it bad enough, amateur” or something along those lines.
Do better, Taffy.
*shakes head*
(“this is a joke” disclaimer, just to be sure we’re all on the same page)
Please realize that “that person in the comments you recognize” is not a public figure and furthermore that if this were Bluesky you’d be blocked for harassment at this point by people who aren’t even involved.
On one hand, even joking expectations of higher wit make me want to reflexively go straight-faced out of uncharacteristic contrarianism. On a different hand, unaffiliated with the first hand, I could totally be more aggressive with my word choices from time to time.
Community service top. It’s a thing now, deal with it.
nse, this isn’t Bluesky and nobody’s fucking harassing me. It’s fine for people to joke around, actually. Don’t take offense for someone who hasn’t been offended, it makes you look weak.
Yeah, the amount of times I’ve seen the B word get censored in these comments actually made me far more uncomfortable than anything in today’s page of the comic. Casual misogyny is alive and well in 2025, and that’s just depressing.
The thing that most bothers me about it is that so many people phrase it as something like “oh NOW I get to say it about this character for real! now it’s justified! mmmm yesssss”. Like the word is in a really weird state with regards to reclamation and/or de-fanging but some people have just gotta make absolutely sure that no, they DO mean it as a gendered misogynist insult and bygawd they’re gonna defend that.
I don’t disagree with most of this post, but I do have to disagree with the last bit. If somebody were saying *in general* that people who don’t go to the protest don’t get to have a say, I could see that being ableist. But we’re talking about why *Raidah specifically* wasn’t there, if she claims to care so much. Raidah has no disabilities that would keep her from being able to attend. Unless you’re responding to a specific attitude expressed more generally somewhere in the sea of comments, in which case, well, fair enough I guess, I’m not going to read all these threads. <_<
Come to NJ, Joyce. We always need more teachers, my district at least has a powerful union, the pay is decent, and I guarantee no one will care about your sexuality.
While Raidah is clearly trying to upset Joyce, this is also bizarrely helpful. She has brought a potential problem to Joyce’s attention early enough to explore solutions (like changing her major, or looking for jobs outside Indiana).
Uck, Raidah REALLY is just a terrible person, isn’t she? She’s just trying anything and everything she can to hurt Joyce, and while she DOES (unfortunately) have a point about Joyce being in a lesbian relationship being a significant hindrance in getting a job as a teacher in far too much of the US right now, Raidah is making it VERY clear that she’s not saying that as a way to help Joyce reevaluate her choices and help her make better decisions about her life, but to try to hit Joyce where she thinks it’ll hurt most. Which really is a vile way to go about her life.
I get it that Raidah is annoyed about Joyce (and yes, that a lot of people are annoyed with how this story played out and may feel similarly to her) – but while I used to think that it was just a case of misunderstanding between Raidah and Sarah driving the animosity between them, at this point it’s becoming pretty clear that Raidah is just a nasty person who really is just trying to see the worst in others. And takes WAY too much joy in hurting them.
I realized I wanted to be a teacher when I was twelve, realized I was queer when I was thirteen, and have lived with anxiety about the intersection of those two things ever since. So yeah, fuck Raidah for this attack, glad I don’t think Joyce actually wants to be a teacher.
But hey! Why not bring myself down to below someone else’s level to stop them when they’re minding their own business to say something to them designed to hurt them?
She’s obviously never worked in education. There are gay people everywhere being people, mostly good teachers, and teachers are at such a rare premium that nobody can bother to give a shit considering how little they’re paid. It’s the same reason you could never test coders for weed, even when it was illegal. The demand overrides a weird prejudice.
I worked ~20 years in public education in Texas (a state about as conservo as Indiana). Saw several gay people as teachers. Wasn’t a problem in the hiring. We don’t have half as many teachers as we need, so it’s unusual to not hire one for queerness. (But it does all depend on the principal doing the hiring. I’ve seen a couple evil ones who would thusly discriminate.)
Plenty of LGBTQ+ people in teaching, plenty of pushback about those people being out, in my experience. People absolutely give a shit, and many schools put caving to parents above supporting teachers.
Lots of schools are great, too! But I worked at a school where a lesbian teacher was fired for trying to support queer students, despite the fact that she was a good teacher (better than a couple other ones in the grade band) and the school was perpetually understaffed. Then I got called down to the principal’s office later that week so she could explain to me how the school wasn’t homophobic. (I wasn’t out to students/families, but I had my pronouns in the HR portal.)
Basically, it’s fine as long as no parents (/another staff member who didn’t like that she said “queer,” in this case) complain. So. That’s a fun gamble.
I’d rate Joyce’s chances of becoming a teacher as fair as Raidah’s becoming a lawyer. Normally a Muslim, woman, and person of color would be a liability in Indiana, but Raidah is a social climbing sell out so chances are she’ll find a job in the Trump administration.
I mean yeah it’s really fucking weird to say about Raidah specifically because Raidah has displayed no sort of sell-out tendencies as it regards her race, gender, or religion. Her original disdain for Joyce was partially because Joyce was a conservative Christian. Raidah’s politics are pretty firmly left-leaning, she’s just an asshole to characters we like so people lose their minds about her.
She reminds me of my congressman Abe Hamadeh who’s an Arab Muslim who supports Trump and was rewarded for his loyalty by being his nominee and the Republican majority made that wish come true. While Raidah is left leaning she befriends people on the basis of utility so it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if she sold out her supposed values. If Bulmeria means so much to her then why wasn’t she there at the protest?
There are many perfectly legitimate reasons why Raidah may not have been at the protest, and it’s honestly mindboggling to me that people have a myopic view of political activism that they think Attending A Protest is the be-all and end-all of support one can display for a cause. Irrespective of what your congressman has done Raidah has not shown any tendency toward aligning herself with conservative political interests. She is not a conservative. Abe Hamadeh is. He began his political career as a border hawk and election conspiracist. Raidah is social climber who leverages her social relationships to her advantage. That does not translate to being willing to sell out her core beliefs. Let’s have some perspective, please/
Agreed. As someone who gets equally fed up with a bunch of the comments here *and* the Reddit, I basically just scroll down til I see their pic and start my reading there
True, you make a good point there about her declared disdain for Joyce and dismissing her as someone that “believes in angels” and her appreciation for what Jacobs brother did supports that position that she will be a leftist progressive at heart even if she’s not above weaponizing rhetoric to hurt people in her crosshairs.
Fwiw I don’t think she’s really homophobic or particularly insensitive to queer people, she just doesn’t let that stop her from phrasing it the way she does if it can hurt Joyce. I don’t think she would say it in earshot of others or put it in writing either
What do you think is actually left leaning about Raidah?
She very much came across as classist in that lunch confrontation with Joyce, way back when. Which isn’t really a big left trait. She talked up Harrison for the trans rights win, but that was at least potentially just aimed at Jacob (or maybe hoping to trigger fundie Joyce), rather than being her own admiration of him.
If it makes you feel any better, my off topic diffusion thread about ice cream was also flagged out of existence, and I also assume that was by accident but still :/
Who has a problem with ice cream? Furthermore how are there so many people who have a problem with people talking about ice cream flavors, that they flag it out of existence?
From memory, a few years ago our benevolent host asked for people not to post off-topic threads early on in the comments section. And I like ice cream with cherries in
Thank you for affirming that an ice cream thread existed because I commented in it and was having a questioning-my-own-sanity moment trying to find it again to check for responses because I couldn’t imagine how talking about ice cream would have gotten moderated out of existence but hey I guess we are living in that world now.
I am starting to worry that Willis is genuinely crashing out over this whole thing. Rewriting the comic to respond to criticism is not like him at all, and it’s really telling which criticisms actually got under his skin. I am starting to wonder if Joyce freaking out in inappropriate ways over fearing she has been inappropriate is also supposed to be autobiographical as well.
Im really sad the comment thread about not judging anyone’s character by the state they grew up in or live in got deleted cuz it’s one I really deeply resonate with.
You know what, I’ll just repeat what I said here:
There are leftists in the south, there are queers in the south, and there are A LOT of PoC in the south. Most important overall, *there are good people all over the south, irrespective of those boxes*.
Gloating about ‘leaving southern states to suffer in their choices’ is evil. Telling us marginalized to ‘just move to a blue state’ is trite AT BEST.
We have homes, we have family, connectionconnections, community, roots here. Why should we have to flee that because other people are bigots? Why are we expected to sever ourselves from out homes ?to ‘earn’ the right to be considered One Of The Good Ones?
That’s without touching the risk, expense, and lonliness that comes from moving states away!
Being brown doesn’t give her a pass for being a total bongo. Sarah’s pretty brown, and managed to express her disapproval of Joyce and Dorothy’s actions without being homophobic and hateful about it. Asma’s a little less brown, but not that much, and tried to use this as a teaching moment (might have succeeded, except that she and the girls were talking past each other a lot, rather than communicating clearly).
I think people are being really weird wanting an 18/19 year old to die even with how awful she acts, and I think Dot is right that color and religion have a part to play in it (given how quickly many of the commenters just assumed Asma MUST have been homophobic the other day). Raidah’s not a lost cause, even as horrible as she is lol. She’s a kid in her sophomore year, she’s not even 20. My brother went into college a staunch Republican and left a socialist, calling for a kid’s death in a realistic setting is just very not cool.
Like it’s not even hard to imagine Raidah eventually having a change of heart. It literally only requires someone out-Raidah Raidah. She’s not actually attached to any of her beliefs, not like Mary.
You didn’t respond to earlier comments (which is fine, it’s a big comment section today) but I’m still mildly iffed at the insinuation that anyone saying Raidah is committing homophobia in this strip is because they’re prejudiced against brown women.
I don’t dislike Raidah as a whole (though she has her moments), and I think she has potential for a more nuanced arc, but if her actions in this strip are weaponizing homophobia then people should be okay to point it out without being accused of racial bias if they’re doing so in a fair manner.
Yeah…definitely find it interesting how I’ve had people call me homophobic or a Puritan for being unhappy with character reactions or plot pacing, yet I’m expected to extend a similar understanding for those who seem *reaaally* upset at Sarah/Raidah/Lucy for “reasons” <_<
We tried being weird about ice cream but it turned out that wasn’t allowed so I guess going right for the flashpoint of controversy is the only acceptable form of commenting on the comic.
Based on what we know about Raidah and her past interactions with Dorothy and Joyce, this is all very predictable and in keeping with her character. She was going to find out and she was going to do something like this. Just like Mary will at a later date. Jacob is unlikely to approve either, since he warned Joe about Joyce. Jacob will be entirely right. Raidah will be a bongo about it. Mary will be wrong and a bongo. The cascade of consequences continue.
The best part is that when you combine this with her assumption that Joyce and Dorothy planned the kiss, it implies that she literally cannot fathom that other people do not see the world in her warped, transactional view.
I love Raidah as a character so much. She’s a Dorothy who doesn’t let the ambition crumble at first contact with reality. She believes there are more important things than your personal feelings and desires and is genuinely willing to put it all on the line for her goals. I love her frustration with people who don’t have any vision. I love her practicality.
I think her version of “dumbing of age” will be realizing it’s not a sustainable way to live life, like a smarter version of Dorothy realizing her ambitions were going to be doing war crimes lol. I’d love to see her get a real arc, though who knows with this comment section/audience… Billie is the exact same except less competent at it, but she gets 1000 tries at redemption from the same audience. I wonder if there’s any reason we’d see them differently… Surely not a paper bag test situation. Surely..
And she’s also a petty asshole who can be really cruel to people against whom she holds a grudge, like here. She contains multitiude. Raidah is easily one of the best antagonist in the strip, realistically flawed, layered, and nuanced in a way that a lot of the commentariat refuses to engage with because it’s so much easier just to demonize her because she’s mean to the protagonists (wonder what about her might elicit such a disproportionately hostile response!). I’d love to see her get more focus and an arc of her own.
Not that it has to revolve around a relationship with a man of course and it’s definitely a crackship but I think Walky/Raidah would genuinely be a great vector for significant character growth on both Raidah and Walky’s part, along the lines you’re talking about here.
Show me anytime Billie has done something as cruel as this. Or calling Walky a stunted manchild behind his back after inviting him to breakfast. (Yeah, that’s a healthy ship.) Or bullying Sarah for a year with comments about hoping she chokes to death on her food. Sorry, Raidah has more than earned her reputation.
Like maybe, just maybe, I preference my ships based on potential for character growth and development, not whatever provides the most saccharine marshmallow fluff per capita.
Wally needs someone who will push him to grow and develop himself into the mature and thoughtful young man he is fully capable of being. He needs someone who will make him move beyond his comfort zone and apply himself and who doesn’t take his guff. Raidah, meanwhile, needs someone who can encourage her to chill the fuck out and find more enjoyment in life’s smaller pleasures, and who will force her to acknowledge other perspectives.
Your issue here is that you are seemingly only capable of seeing and approaching these characters as they are, as if suspended perpetually in aspic, whereas I am taking a long view and projecting out where these characters could grow and where they could take each other.
Yeah sure, Raidah was mean to Walky behind his back before she’d gotten any opportunity to know him. She often makes snap judgments like that. Maybe it’s something she might be able to grow out of with the influence a bit more down-to-earth.
Also “abuse” give me a goddamn break with this shit.
I actually disagree. I don’t think walky needs someone to lead him by the hand or be a kick in the pants like Lucy and Dorothy. I think he worked so well with Amber BECAUSE she had no expectations for him. Which made him raise his expectations for himself. He needs to want to be better, not told he has to be better.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a partner externally motivating Walky to br better – that’s one of the things I always liked about his relationship with Joyce in the Walkyverse. But I recognize you’re a big Walky/Amber shipper so on this I think we can just chalk it down to difference of opinion.
I feel like walky and Joyce worked well cuz they helped each other grow. Like I guess I feel like outside of amber most of walkys girlfriends didn’t feel like equal partnerships. Walky felt out of his league with Dorothy and Lucy kinda put him in a pedestal. Joyce and walky felt balanced.
I mean no but no in that it’s, uh, worse. Like as someone subject to both, hypothetically, someone pointing out that bigotry exists as a veiled threat because of some conflict about boyfriends would suck but having my supposed best friend since childhood actually do the oppressing by calling me a slur for not violently repressing my mental issues enough is, I’m not quite sure how to emphasize this sufficiently, Really Bad.
Right? Saying “you are now the target of institutionalized homophobia and this will affect your career prospects” in a mean way is not as bad as directly calling someone a slur!
True but she’s evoking homophobic rhetoric in order to hurt her which is…telling. It’s like when someone is making a comic to critique harmful or problematic but feel the need to make the bad guy fat or otherwise not conventionally attractive so you feel more inclined to agree with the handsome snaker. It kinda calls into question how much of an ally you are when given the opportunity you would jump at the chance to use societal bigotry as weapon.
Astariel, you’re assuming a ship has to be healthy to be worth audience investment. Some of the most fun dynamics are ones that are deeply toxic and screwed up.
I read and reread this comic and swear I could hear, loud as day, Chappelle show’s Rick James as she walked away. “That was COLD BLOODED~!”. Raidah there’s a difference between taking a swipe at someone and impaling them. I wanted the drama spicy, but whew!
A question – Has Raidah actually given a crap about anything but herself in the strip? I genuinely do not remember.
Because I think people are assigning traits to her we just haven’t seen. There’s moments I remember but they looked a lot more self-serving than anything else.
That’s what I remember. Now whether she was in the right or wrong is irrelevent, but I know her feud with Sarah was based off Sarah calling her dad and Raidah thinking that was inappropriate (which it could have been! we’ve seen dads suck in the comic before!) but also being kind of a dick to Sarah even on the first meet.
Honestly, I think Raidah just dislikes poor people.
I think that Raidah clearly seemed to be angry about what Sarah did because she had fun hanging out with Dana, and her dad (parents?) took her out of school. Hopefully to get her help, but I don’t know that we’ve been told what happened to Dana after that, or if either Sarah or Raidah even know.
Bottom line is that what Raidah saw being inappropriate in Sarah calling Dana’s dad is how it affected Raidah.
Citation needed. Seriously, as far as I can remember, we have seen *zero* followup from Raidah on what happened with Dana.
When we met Raidah, she was using Dana’s departure as a cudgel to bully and harass Sarah, but as far as we know, she hasn’t even spoken to her since she left.
The answer is probably that on the spectrum of psychopathology Raidah is a half bubble from being a malignant narcissist. All relationships are transactional, all friends are assets. Her rage is only incurred when you touch her stuff (Dana, Jacob). She is probably incapable of introspection, hence her projective statement to Joyce, ‘There’s no use in trying to shame you’, because she doesn’t understand how that would work. She doesn’t attack Joyce on any of her qualities, she attacks what she perceives as Joyce’s asset; ‘Your low paying degree major is now worth even less because of what you did’.
Sorry, long winded answer. No, she doesn’t give a crap about anyone but herself. That concept is invisible to her.
She did choose not to report Sarah for assaulting her in public (after realizing her friend group was assuming Dina was mentally handicapped and getting a bullying vibe from it). She definitely feels like she’s capable of shame and the understanding when she takes things too far – but sets the bar pretty high for that.
Telling someone she hates for trying to steal her boyfriend that she’s likely just torpedoed her long term plans because of other people’s homophobia clearly doesn’t rate as high in her eyes as participating in what became unprovoked bullying of an autistic woman.
Raidah’s less evil than Mary, but a lot more competent, so maybe in balances out? Mary’s basically been a buffoon ever since she got smacked down for her attempted blackmail of Ruth. Last we saw her she very half-heartedly tried to recruit Joyce to transphobia, (and failed completely), and showed up to counter-protest with a sign she didn’t notice had been changed to be a self-own. Raidah’s a lot smarter, and thus a lot more dangerous, even if her actual beliefs aren’t as repellent as Mary’s.
I want a storyline in which Raidah has to unpack, even a little, the pressure she’s under from her parents, real or imagined, and whether The Plan she has for herself was ever realistic.
Because that’s 100% what I get from her when she lashes out at people. They’re not planning. They’re not thinking of the future. Their plans won’t work. Raidah’s plan will work, and if you get in the way of that plan, you need to be taken apart.
It isn’t the sort of thing you do if you’re happy living in your own skin, and I’m frankly interested in seeing it a little less monolithic, if she’s going to ascend to a higher tier of character plot.
(I also don’t want similar unpacking for Mary because she’s more useful in contrast to Joyce, IE as the fundie girl who sees no need to start examining her bullshit.)
You are one of the few people in this comment section who makes a consistent effort to analyze and understand Raidah’s character and I want to thank you for that.
It’s fun to think about! Willis may have their stumbles, but very few of their characters are Just One Thing. Parsing out what went into them and where they might be going is something that really keeps my investment in these goofballs.
That would be a very fun character arc. We never see the real Raidah, imo. I don’t know if Raidah knows what the real Raidah is. All she knows is that she needs to be financially stable and successful to be worth anything, and anyone who doesn’t prioritize that is worth nothing at all because she’d be worth nothing at all.
You know, she isn’t 100% wrong about Joyce. But really, Joyce is focused on what she wants for herself in the way that any typical 18-19 year old is focused on what they want for themselves.
My take is that Raidah is displaying more projection than a 24 screen movie theater. (Assuming those haven’t gone out of business yet.) And by that, I mean that what Raidah wants for herself is find things about other people to make her mad.
IDK about 24 screens, but there are plenty with 8ish screens around here. I used to go to the theater at least a couple times a year, until they stopped showing things I wanted to see. Now it’s mostly just the latest Sonic movies.
Raidah is almost completely right based on what she knows, and sometimes sort of accidentally right, but she is not in a position ethically to set straight… MOST people. She basically only knows Joyce in a way that paints Joyce as manipulative and cynical also, so she’s not out to fix things. So yeah, that’s a threat.
Jesus, Joyce doesn’t even know Raidah has a serious grudge, or even is the grudge-holding type, or that she does the social climbing thing in a cynically analytical way. She apparently isn’t even aware she was patronizing to Raidah, let alone crossed her. Combined with Joyce’s resistance to detecting consequences and she really has no idea what’s going on.
Yeah, Raidah, deciding whether dating someone in freshmen year aligns with your post-graduation career goals is something *you* do, not normal people.
Like we can consider how Joyce got with Dorothy without thinking of consequences but “how this would affect a future career” was absolutely not even on the list of things to care about. Nor frankly should they be? She’s 18?
I mean, can you blame her? She’d lined up the best guy and they were both pre-law, and they were going to be a power couple!
And it’s not at all like some fundie girl who went to college to get her MRS degree, and majored in elementary education so she could homeschool her kids.
I’d go further and argue that most people Raidah dislikes, legitimate grievances aside, are people she dislikes because they embody aspects of herself that she’s not super comfortable with.
Yeah, I think the relationship was doomed regardless, but I think that Raidah has every right to dislike Joyce for that regardless, it is irrelevant to if Joyce wronged her, which I will freely concede that she did.
Specifically, he was only the best guy because his brother is an extremely famous, notable, wealthy lawyer. Nothing in the comic has yet portrayed her as someone who actually cares about anyone or anything beyond her success. Joyce was incredibly wrong with Jacob, but she also inadvertently saved him from two girls who were not interested in him as a complete person, which is the exact thing he fears about people wanting to get into relationships with him. He got out just in time – he even tried to warn Joe, “hey man, I don’t know if you’re colourblind, but at some point down the line this exact behavior will burn you, too.”
Lot of people blaming joyce for a picture that she did not consent to being plastered over the front page of the newspaper. Hell, the editor herself admitted that it was just there for a thirst trap (albeit her own)
Well, yeah? She fucking hates her? Do you spend a significant amount of time caring about the motivations of people you hate? From Raidah’s perspective, Joyce is a homewrecker who not only broke her and Jacob up, but is now gallivanting around sucking face with other people who are in relationships. Why should she feel she has to give this trifling white girl the benefit of the doubt?
Raidah and Jacob broke up because their relationship was a sham. Joyce did wrong for sure, but they would’ve been ok if their relationship was worth a damn in the first place.
Raidah just cares about Raidah, hence her concerns about her own social status, the status of everyone else, and her going out of her own way to insult someone on grounds of homophobia.
You seem to be caught up in people attacking women of color, but Raidah’s the only one who gets shit on regularly… because she’s an awful person. Everyone in this comic gets blasted in the comments ftr, at some point or another, but Raidah is a self-centered hypocrite, so she gets dunked on a lot.
Except, no, that’s not true, every single fucking time a woman of color pushes back on Joyce and Dorothy’s little love nest, they immediately get accused of homophobia. It happened to Raidah, it happened to Asma, it happened to Sarah. It’s a pattern, it’s racist, and I’m sick and tired of it.
And this isn’t new – the reason we even have the “female dog”->”bongo” censoring is because people were REALLY trigger happy with it when Roz gave Joyce any kind of pushback whatsoever.
I love the cognitive dissonance/whiplash of like the WORST most awful manipulative person just–dropping potentially life-changing truth bombs all over the place. Out of cruelty. But like, that parting comment, while mean as fuck and unfair on some level, has the potential to prompt some really necessary self-examination on Joyce’s part about her recent behavior. IF she takes it in, I guess we’ll see.
Yeah, I hate that Raidah is saying this, and I think she’s showing a tremendous lack of moral courage that *this* is her angle to get a dunk on Joyce, but I think it does tie into something Jocelyn tried to teach Joyce about picking her battles for the sake of people other than herself prior, back during when those two had to help Becky break into her own house, and which Joyce didn’t really get it back then. Maybe she’s closer to getting it now.
“You’ve smooched a girl and ruined your life” is a logical construct that you’d likely form if you’ve ever spent a nontrivial amount of time wondering if smooching a girl would ruin your life.
Mary will get her turn. Raidah is someone who dislikes Dorothy and outright detests Joyce, so there was basically no chance that this encounter wasn’t going to happen.
… it’s only a matter of time now before Willis decides to shut them off completely for a day or two, wouldn’t be the first time he’s done this to address scrolling walls of hate
I don’t live in Indiana (or the US) but I feel like that’s a surprisingly doomery take (while acknowledging that of course Raidah wants Joyce to feel like she doomed herself, so maybe that’s on her)? Like I know that things are consistently getting worse right now, but surely there are out gay schoolteachers there?
Willis should’ve left the comments off for this one. I really wish people would approach this scene with more compassion, instead it’s just “wow Raidah’s being a real c-word” or “Raidah is completely right here and not homophobic.” surely there’s room for both girls to be wrong without drawing and quartering one of the few Muslim characters in the strip.
like, there’s no way to say “I hope you get fired for being gay” without being a giant homophobe. it’s not giving her a cold hard truth bomb. it’s telling a gay person she deserves to be fired for being gay. it’s cruelty on the basis of Joyce’s sexuality.
and at the same time, Joyce HAS been selfish and has screwed up a handful of relationships. she broke up Jacob and Raidah because she thought she’d make a better girlfriend than her. she cheated on her boyfriend, one of the few guys on campus who takes cheating seriously and even has trauma from it. she gloated to Walky that she was dating Dorothy, while Dorothy was trying to let him down easy, leading him down a depressive spiral. and during a protest against genocide, she and Dorothy chose to center their relationship over meeting the actual needs of the protest.
no shit one of the Muslim characters would consider her selfish. they completely failed at being white allies, which is the whole reason they go apologize to Asma in the first place.
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die mad about it, Raidah
Raidah would be that kind of person to get a teacher who has to do only fans on the side fired, just because she doesn’t like them personally lol
oh absolutely she would.
but don’t forget she would also loudly proclaim her undying support of the same person’s freedoms, publicly, because it’s good for her image
Oh 100%.
That’s more or less what I was thinking. She doesn’t say anything about what’s bothering her, she doesn’t want to fix anything, she just wants Joyce to feel bad and maybe, possibly, doubt her relationship. Which again makes me question if this is really about Joyce and Dot doing protesting wrong or if it’s about Sarah.
Probably has more to do with Joyce trying to seduce Jacob while he and Raidah were dating. She already hated Joyce on Joyce’s own merit, independent of Sarah.
Yeah, I forgot that happened. Maybe it would also take Joyce a moment to connect the dots. Raidah has waited six months for her to present a weakness she could attack in revenge for her insult? She couldn’t just let Joyce know she thought what Joyce did was wrong and showed some defects of character she should work on, or something? Nope just gotta hurt her feelings.
She can, in fact, die mad about it. Especially once Joyce figures out what it is she wants to do now instead of homeschooling her cult children and changes her major.
which I guess makes it even pettier if she’s holdin a grudge about her ex being crushed on by some repressed virgin, enough to threaten her in a pretty homophobic way. So I guess the exact kind of person we were thinking of lol
To be fair, that’s not a threat. She’s just observing “homophobia is real and it’ll keep you out of that job you said you wanted. Sucks to be you.” Cause, as she explains, the only point is to hurt Joyce and the only way to do that (thinks Raidah) is taking away something she wants.
she’s just suggesting that this whole picture thing would totally come back up later, maybe used by her or not, to screw Joyce over in the future.
But totally not a threat tho /s
haha damn you’re right, I actually did not consider this from the perspective of “ha ha nerd i have kompromat over you forever, never cross me again or i will ruin your entire life out of spite” angle. I was just assuming she was being as hurtful as possible, because that’s been her MO in nearly every one-on-one character interaction we’ve witnessed her in.
there is no non-homophobic reason to use that as a weapon against someone
Yeah, it doesn’t matter if you’re motivated by hating the person or if you’re motivated by hating the homosexuality, homophobia is homophobia.
Oh it’s a threat. Someone doesn’t need to say, “or else,” for a threat to be communicated. Unsaid in the above interaction is:
“I know you. I’m watching you. I’m tracking your career. I know this will take years to bear fruit. I have the information needed to destroy your job in the future.”
None of that was said explicitly, but it was all communicated.
But if she was going to do that, why would she warn her about it now? …Maybe it’s silly of me to expect people to be smart about their dumbass revenge schemes.
Because by doing it now, she hopefully destabilizes Joyce, and therefore keeps Joyce from ever making anything of herself. Like, she downgraded Dorothy’s entire life’s dream in one carefully-delivered sentence, with deliberate intent.
Because her view on the social ladder is exactly the same as Littlefinger from freaking Game of Thrones, anybody who has shown any ability to oppose her, or to keep any associations that are opposed to her sphere of influence, can be proactively dealt with by restricting them from climbing to higher rungs on the social ladder, in any way possible. If you give someone a mental breakdown, they start making dumb-ass decisions, and you don’t have to worry about them ever punching in your weight class, ever again.
When you mention Dorothy, it is pretty funny picturing Raidah going around all smug like “muahaha I’m the best at manipulation, I ruined her life with one sentence” when Dorothy was deep in the process of reexamining her life goals before Raidah got involved. (Just like Joyce.)
Maybe her intervention even sped up the process and led directly to making that big front page kiss happening! Pity to be a social climber trying to climb over people who care more about building relationships with each other. They may not even realize the things you do to hurt them are supposed to hurt.
Eh, even if it’s not a threat, it’s still “haha, you’re going to be discriminated against and it will impact your job prospects!” So I’m comfortable calling Raidah homophobic for this even if she genuinely didn’t mean she’ll do anything about it.
Raidah is the definition of performative woke because the moment she encounters even the slightest push of unpleasantness she goes out of her way to be bigoted instead of being mean in the literal hundreds of ways that exist.
Well, other than not showing any actual signs of being woke.
There is this theory the comments section fielded that she’s actually invested in freeing Bulmeria and had real reasons to be mad about the girls (and the paper’s reporting) derailing the protest, but yeah, I’m not sure what that is based on.
I’ve a vague memory of her previously stating intentions to work in favour of social justice issues in her future legal career, but searching back through the strips, what little there is, aside from being buried in social climbing and pettiness, is likely to be primarily because she views it as part of her future career.
As an example: when she mentions Harrison being part of a team that struck down anti-trans laws in Indiana — https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/laws/ — that could be read as her approving of his helping people, but she could just as well be thinking about how the feat would enhance his future prospects… and context from other strips makes the latter seem more likely.
Note also the last three panels of the following strip.
To be fair, though: I’d rather have someone who works to better society for the sake of their own career than… well, people who worsen it for similar reasons (e.g. certain Greedy Old Politicians I’ll avoid naming).
Far too many to name. But you’re right, of course. I have said in the past your reasons for helping people don’t matter, as much as it pains me to be (actually) fair to Raidah. . .
Remember this is Raidah. It’s at least plausible that she’s talking up Harrison because Jacob idolizes him, regardless of what she thinks of trans people or those civil rights cases. Or partly as well in that case, to see how the fundie Joyce reacts to the mention of trans people.
Yeah, it’s like, Raidah isn’t exactly written to be likeable, but she has every reason to see Joyce as a selfish monster – Because every interaction with Joyce has involved Joyce either attempting to manipulate things her way, or seeming like she is manipulating things bigger than her to be about her
REAL AND TRUE
She only chose Elementary Education because she wanted to homeschool her kids. She’d be far from the first Freshman to change her major. Raidah is lobbing softballs.
yeah Raidah thinks she’s being SO MEAN here but I think Joyce is mostly just (justifiably) kind of confused
Ahaha holy shit
Wow
Good ol’ Raidah.
Jesus Christ
Every accusation a projection. Where have I heard that before?
Hitler said that.
https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/adolf-hitler-quotes
Wow! 🤯
Some of those quotes seem to be finding new life as media talking points today…
That guy had some fuckin’ problems.
Was it Goebbels?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror
Wiktionary, etc., appear to agree with you on that attribution.
Today I learned… 🤔
I think Raidah might be more complicated than that. She seems to have a conscience, but she’s also very prone to rationalizing. Aside from her “Human cost” interaction with Dorothy, she definitely thinks that everything she’s doing is for everyone’s benefit, and that the fact that it’s to her benefit more than anyone else’s is just a fun little perk.
Actually, come to think of it, that last part describes pretty much anyone who’s good at rationalizing.
I should’ve scrolled down before commenting. You said it better than I did.
You know, Quasimodo predicted all this.
I was thinking that too. “You only care about yourself” and “You have no shame” both sound more like things Raidah would say to a mirror than anything anyone who’s met Joyce would say.
I mean those are the things that have been said about Joyce frequently in the comment sections.
By people who are taking Joyce having an unusually interesting day as revealing her fundamentally evil character? I can see the connection there. . .
In this case, it’s valid. Remember, the bulk of Raidah’s interactions with Joyce have been either Joyce turning Jacob against Raidah for her own purposes, or a photo that without deeper context seems like attempting to steal the limelight of the protest for herself. Even if Raidah wasn’t a manipulator, she’d probably say something similar to this to Joyce
Oh, hey, pot! Name’s Kettle, have we met?
tragically, indiana is the only state there is, making this a devastating blow to joyce’s future
I’m not sure Joyce would survive New York. It’d be like HP Lovecraft moving there with his wife.
She’d probably be okay in suburban New York. I had a gay kindergarten teacher here in 1987 and no one had a problem with it that I ever heard.
As an additional plus, we have very few fundies.
I moved from the Deep Midwest to New York, and I gotta say, Joyce would be fine. Parts of upstate New York are more aggressively rural American than places in the Midwest. Also, if Joyce wants to be an elementary school teacher in Indiana, she can do it, there are plenty of liberal pockets. I worked as an openly lesbian educator in the Midwest for four years recently and nobody ever stopped me in a way that mattered. Had to have some talks with some kids about not using “gay” as an insult, and explain to another teacher that my being a gay person wasn’t “inappropriate for children,” also got shamed by another lesbian faculty member for being too openly gay (I mentioned that I have a partner who is a woman in front of the kids), but overall, the vast majority of people and kids were completely and entirely chill. A lot even learned something about gay people being normal. Fuck Raidah.
I mean if fiction follows reality long-term, she might end up in Ohio.
My child tells me that this is a terrible fate to befall someone. I don’t know what Ohio did to the 7 year olds of the world, but she feels very strongly about it.
I have read a lot of threads with Ohioans and mthey seem to share the sen timent though
My significant other’s from Cinci, and they say that the reason why so many astronauts and pilots come from Ohio is because they want to get as far away from it as possible.
Am an Ohioan, can confirm. Ohio is not much better than Indiana, tbh, at least the rural parts I’m from.
For once the kids are right
Plenty of good folks in OH but the state’s been gerrymandered from purple to arterial red, allowing well-documented one-party corruption to flourish. It’s now, like neighboring WV, a good state to be from. Dunno what they’ve done to 7 year olds in particular but public school funding’s been cut in favor of vouchers for private schools and charter schools. Ice cream’s still legal, though.
This.
The entire north east of Ohio, like from Columbus to Cleveland, has an extremely high LGBT+ population and lots of very liberal people – and we’re surrounded on all sides, our voting districts turned into insane gigsaw puzzles specifically to make certain that none of our votes count for shit.
Ohioan here. Can confirm.
I wouldn’t wish Ohio on my worst enemy.
“It’s all Ohio?”
“Always has been”
Since she won’t be graduating until like, 2065 at the earliest, I’m really hopeful we won’t have such horrific attitudes by then.
She’d probably be fine in lots of places! But to do that, she’d have to accept that the state she’s lived in her whole life so far isn’t the place she WILL live in her whole life, which seems like it might be tough for Joyce in particular.
Guys, I’m beginning to think Raidah’s not a great person.
She’s the literal 2nd worst. Such an egotistical bongo
Shes not wrong though
i mean, technically she is wrong, indiana does have laws against discrimination against gay people, particularly state employees. she couldn’t get a job at a private or christian school, maybe, but she could still be an elementary school teacher.
I envy your naive belief that discrimination being illegal means it can’t happen.
Any state with “at-will” employment (aka Right to Work states) means any employer can terminate you at any time without a reason, so they just don’t write “because she has a girlfriend” on the paperwork and fire Joyce anyway.
not being wrong doesn’t make you not a piece of shit
Yes she is. She’s a complete piece of shit, and wrong.
In projecting that this particular goal might be a problem for her in many years, she’s technically right.
She’s wrong in:
– Assuming Joyce cares deeply about elementary education as a career
– Assuming Joyce cares deeply about staying in Indiana (heck, she may will be fine in
– Acting like that’s a reasonable thing for Joyce to self-limit on practically – love often changes your perspective and plans
– Acting like this is some kind of moral defect on Joyce’s part – “how dare you limit yourself based on how future homophobes might retaliate against you!”
She’s also tendentious in assuming Indiana will be at least as homophobic in public policy terms in four years.
*not limit yourself
“She may well be fine in…” Doesn’t seem like you finished that parenthetical. I’m curious where you were going with that.
“…an alternate universe where she fights aliens as part of a secret quasi-governmental organization)”, perhaps?
I’m beginning to think Raidah’s the personification of R*ddit, lmao.
Honestly, dissecting her rant here I see something that I missed the first time.
“If you’re still dating this girl SOMEHOW” – attacking Joyce’s infidelity and rapidly swapping partners. Something that DIRECTLY injured her.
The last part is her, plain text, calling out Joyce for being a selfish bongo. She’s saying “I have to hit you like this, because asking you to have empathy for other people clearly wouldn’t work.”
Which is kind of rich coming from HER, of all people, but it doesn’t mean she’s wrong. Appealing to Joyce’s morality or sense of empathy has continually failed, so perhaps she has the right of it. Perhaps this IS the only way to get through to her.
I think the hiccup here is that Joyce doesn’t actually have a great idea of what Raidah is actually mad about. She doesn’t actually know that Raidah thinks she’s a serial cheater (interestingly, Raidah doesn’t seem to know that Joyce was dating Joe), she doesn’t know that Raidah is mad about the protest being upstaged in the newspaper (not actually Joyce or Dorothy’s fault) and the emphasis is in a weird and confusing place. It’s not “I don’t expect this to last because you keep cheating”, it’s “if you’re still together in years, you might have a hard time finding a job in Indiana” which is a very strange insult and Joyce even points that out. Yeah, Joyce is really self-centered but this was absolutely not the way to get through to her because “okay, I’ll just move three hours away to Illinois” is the obvious rebuttal.
Raidah immediately went for the homophobic low blow and didn’t actually talk about any of the problems she had, which kind of points at one of Raidah’s issues. She doesn’t talk about the issues she has with people directly. She either talks around them or just insults the person enough that they’re like “yeah, no, I’m done.” A person with functional conflict resolution skills doesn’t switch out friends as often as she does.
Yup, she can’t just make the (100% accurate) observation that Joyce is self-centered to a fault, she has to make it about societal homophobia so I’m STILL unhappy with the fact it’s more about “gay” than “cheater”.
No, she’s right. (Sorry, Willis)
Did you really just go “sorry, author of the situation being written, you are wrong”?
Raidah please, be mad about the thing you’re actually mad about and address that, not whatever this is
But that’s hard, being a snarky mean girl who hurts other people is easy!
Raidah practices the Sith art of breaking one’s opponent by talking. I looked it up on Wookieepedia but couldn’t find it but this is a real thing that undoubtedly has a clever name.
Yes, the Sith have a formal name for trash talk during lightsaber fights.
I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not, but it it is indeed a real thing, I’d love to know the name of the sith art of trash talk.
Google found it for me–it’s called Dun Moch.
Yes!
Dun Moch!
I wonder if it’s available as a pen name.
and Dad’s everywhere rejoiced.
Actually the correct term for villain talk is monologuing
Raidah is so tired of hearing about this Sith technique and how good Kit Fisto was at countering it, you have no idea.
it’s simple: Raidah said it herself that she thinks Joyce only cares about what she wants. If she brings up complaints about how she didn’t like the way Joyce was behaving then Joyce would just come up with reason after reason why it’s ok she did it. So since she wants Joyce to be hurt the best way to do it is to hit her right in the only avenue she sees Joyce care about by telling her that by having one thing she wants she can’t have another.
Except, of course, she’s wrong. Joyce could move to freakin’ Chicago (or any of the more liberal suburbs here), still be able to visit her dad on the weekends, and be lauded as a brave hero. Hell, there may even be progressive enclaves within the state of Indiana itself.
Raidah’s ignoring facts not convenient for hurting her target. It’s her default mode, and it’s just ugly, as well as ultimately self-defeating. (Hell, if she hadn’t gotten into Dotty’s head with the ‘war crimes’ BS, Ms. Keener might have already gone to Yale, and Joyce would’ve been much more isolated as a result–way to own goal, Raidah!)
but is that something Joyce would think about initially? I don’t think she will and she’s going to tear herself up about this knowledge without thinking of the obvious alternatives. Or being Joyce she’s going to stubbornly insist there’s a way to get everything.
Actually Joyce might think about it and decide she doesn’t even want to be a teacher. She chose her major back when her plan was to find Prince Charming and become a housewife who homeschooled their kids, and I don’t think that’s ever been adressed?
it’s possible but as of right now since it hasn’t been addressed we have to go under the assumption that it’s still her planned path in life. The issue that I was pointing out is that Raidah’s words are going to cut extremely deep right now because she is right that Joyce is being short sighted and seeing things in the immediate now and solely focused on her own self interest. This means that when she hears the “you have to choose because you can’t have both” it’s going to trigger a major stress response because she’s only thinking about the here and now and not really addressing concequences for her actions. She’s so high up in her “perfect world” that being pulled down is gonna hurt.
I think Raidah is projecting that Joyce’s career path is important to her because it’s so important to Raidah, but I don’t think that’s the case. Joyce basically never talks about career plans and when she came up with an ideal fantasy career in Gender Studies it was totally unrelated to being a teacher. If Joyce takes what Raidah says seriously at all, I expect she’ll probably just shrug and think, “Fine, I’ll do something else.” Professional cartoonist, perhaps.
Or she could go “Why do I care what YOU think of how I behave? We aren’t friends…”
And that thing just happens to be ‘not being discriminated’ for being gay. So she just had to…
Pretty sure this is what she’s mad about, we were shown nothing to suggest that she paid any attention to or cared about the protest itself until she found out someone she hated was there and then was given something about it she can use it to stir shit about Joyce.
I think the fact that she also confronted Daisy does suggest that this is at least a little bit from a place of genuinely being offended at what happened with the protest and not purely using it opportunistically as a way of targeting Joyce.
I’m pretty sure she’s mad about Joyce squeezing herself in between Raidah and Jacob, myself.
To be fair we haven’t been shown much of Raidah in general. She isn’t a main cast member so who knows how much she cared about the protest independent of Joyce and Dorothy’s spectacle.
Something something ain’t called Smarting Of Age
Sick I’m back to fully loathing Raidah rather than just mostly loathing Raidah.
It was kinda neat with her basically saying “this is the best way I could find out to hurt you,” which tells you what the motive was, which was to hurt her.
Which, if anything, I’d expect to hurt Joyce more than everything that came before. Someone disliking her, personally, enough to go out of their way to find what they think is the perfect angle of attack to hurt her? That seems like something Joyce would find excruciating.
There were dozens of other ways she could do it but didn’t and automatically went for the one with the homophobic undertones, because under everything Raidah is the definition of performative, including her “progressiveness”.
That is how you know she is well written character. I imagine it take real skill to craft a character that is just so viscerally detestable.
Looking forward to reading half the comments cheering Raidah on.
Raidah….unpleasant.
SO I had a dream last night where Mike scooped Joyce up and they made out in front of Dorothy and Ethan.
Ethan was bummed and he and I got into a discussion about Batman characters…
Hm… So was Mike an Amber hallucination, a ghost, a zombie, or did he just emerge from witness protection, proving Walky was right all along? (I know, probably not answered in the dream, but let’s face it, it’s an important question.)
He emerged wearing a badge so he was an agent of some kind? He swooped in to save her from a plane crash-
When you say her, are you referring to Amber, Dorothy, Joyce, or your mom?
Reaver didn’t mention any nickels, so i doubt it was your mom
Joyce! They then proceeded to passionately make out-
Lmao! Wrong person to deliver that message
Raidah has never been more correct than in this moment– it’s not that joyce is a bad person, it’s that she’s let falling in love lead her to treat other people poorly and at least one of them is still waiting to be officially dumped. Like, it’s mean and it sucks that indiana is homophobic but raidah isn’t wrong about the selfishness.
That’s a very generous interpretation of what she’s saying here.
Personally I’d say there are multiple instances where she is considerably more correct than this in ways that don’t require her statements to be basically rewritten to say things she didn’t say. Her angle on Dorothy’s presidential ambitions was pretty cutting and pretty accurate.
Not quite correct.
The accusation is that she “never cared about anything beyond what she wants for herself”. But that’s not quite true.
For example, she willingly took in Becky after Becky was kicked out of school and tried to place herself between Becky and her gun-toting father. She “encouraged” walkey and Dorothy to get together in her first term after they broke up after the “pajama pants” incident.
Yeah, her current actions regarding personal relationships might be causing her to treat others poorly, but its incorrect to say that she never cares about others.
It would be more accurate to say that “Joyce doesn’t care about people Joyce doesn’t care about,” which sounds tautological, I know, but it’s actually got a bit of meaning in there.
People who aren’t on Joyce’s ‘list’ aren’t really important to her, in terms of empathizing. If you ARE on the list, however, you not only get empathy, but she actually puts you above herself. So Jocelyne, Becky and Dorothy all get selfless acts. Really, the only time she’s violated this principle was cheating on Joe.
Also talking about how magical it was the first time she laid eyes on Dorothy IN THE MIDDLE of trying to apologize to Becky. Then calling her her wife in front of her five minutes later when Becky actually came back in spite of her own feelings in order to protect Joyce by distracting Hank.
From which one can infer she doesn’t care about Joe. She cared about having a hot boyfriend, not about Joe, specifically, and now that she DOESN’T care about having a hot boyfriend, Joe isn’t relevant.
Even her treatment of Joe doesn’t really violate the principle if you add the simple assumption that part of your rank ordering on Joyce’s list is defined by simple proximity. Joyce’s habit of living-in-the-moment to a fault applies.
this is the part that I feel like confuses some people. She really just doesn’t have any fucking object permanence. The next time she sees Joe, it’s probably 2/3 chance she blows him again in the middle of trying to break up with him. The first night that Dorothy feels like she can go back to her dorm, and not stay at Joyce’s, she could just as easily lay under the blanket and cry about how much she hurt Joe…and then try to fix things with him…and then not actually do it in any adequate or sensible way, and just hurt him more, because she actually just completely sucks at relationships.
> It would be more accurate to say that “Joyce doesn’t care about people Joyce doesn’t care about,”
I don’t think you can make that claim, for the simple reason that the comic does not give a complete description of a person’s life, only small (incomplete) segments.
Joyce could be the most empathetic person in the world, but the comic might not show it because, at its heart, it is focused on a small group of university students and probably won’t waste space showing things that are not relevant to the story.
Yeah, but you could also apply that logic to Raidah. For all we know she could spend 100% of her offscreen time volunteering at various charities, participating in grassroots movements, etc. girl could’ve not been at the protest because she was off doing a habitat for humanity thing on the bad side of town and just spent a lot of time rebuilding someone’s condemned home for free (idk if that’s everywhere, that’s what HFH does in my town, they rebuild south side.)
We kind of have to make inferences off of what we see on screen because anything that happens offscreen doesn’t matter until it affects what we actually see.
My actual expectation for what the more complex explanation of Raidah’s character and behavior is, is likely that she’s simply observed that the only way you actually affect change, is to actually take control of the power structures, and she just internally judges everybody so harshly, because she (correctly) has internalized that that’s how the system actual works, and that achieving a life of impenetrable moral integrity is literally the only way to keep yourself from being gated out of the system.
She acts the way she does, because it’s actually the best and only way to get a normal citizen like her into a position where she can actually accomplish any moral good under the system, and so anybody who has any aspiration of ever improving the world, should be doing exactly what she is, and thinking exactly how she does; and, she judges anybody who doesn’t embody her perspective, of morally failing at achieving the only means to actually improve society, and therefore judges them as a less serious person, not worthy of equal mutual respect.
Which, I mean, I definitely knew a few 19 and 20 year olds in my life who, at least temporarily, fit those descriptions.
Honestly, I don’t think it’s about the morality. Raidah has likely clocked that, since she’s a minority in Indiana, she’s at a pretty bad disadvantage in some ways so is using the ruthless social climbing as a way to try and counteract that, but she doesn’t really seem to understand how incredibly unpleasant it makes her, which in the long run would undo most of her effort. Because she’ll get remembered as “that lady who had nine distinct friend groups in four months”.
She’s angry at Joyce for a completely understandable reason, but she’s doing a weird facsimile of what social engineering looks like if you’re a kid who can only see parts of what the adults are doing where she’s just waiting around for excuses to attack and isn’t actually checking to make sure people are actually vulnerable to what she’s saying. She was kind of right with Dorothy, but Joyce really doesn’t seem to get why Raidah cares about her career.
You are of course assuming she is the way she is because she has “aspiration of improving the world”. So far we have seen no evidence of her doing so. (She may recognize the flaws in the world and is dealing with them in her way, but the goal is likely for personal benefit.)
Take her treatment of Sarah. Were Riadah actually interested in “making things better” she would at least make an attempt at understanding the real issue (her former friend in a death spiral), but instead seems intent on carrying on a petty grudge.
I think if that were something she believed she would not have torn down Dorothy’s presidency aspirations in the way she did.
You are right, we don’t see any part of Riadah’s life off-screen.
I think it is more reasonable to assume she lacks empathy while Joyce does not because, well, Joyce DOES show concern for others. (Yes, its largely those she is friends with, but at least its something. And I can point to other situations where she has expressed concern for those outside her friend group.) And when she fails to show concern, it seems to be more a case of blindness rather than maliciousness.
With Riadah, its ALL scheming and manipulation. Not even a hint that she actually has concerns outside of “what does this mean for me”. Plus you have her petty grudge with Sarah. (If she had any real empathy, she might have recognized the problems her friend was having.)
Raidah doesn’t know jack shit about Joyce, and she’ll never care to learn. She got weird practically at first sight just for Joyce being in public with Sarah. Sure, Joyce intentionally broke up Raidah’s relationship later, but Joyce’s goal was to gift Jacob to Sarah, not steal him for herself.
No, by the time Joyce actually broke up Jacob and Raidah she was totally trying to steal him for herself.
In this comic and the next one, Joyce realizes that people whose opinion she respects believe she has a shot at Jacob:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/03-faz-is-great/pushing/
Then a little bit later we get this comic were Joyce has already forgiven Sarah for throwing her Jacob like a cruise missile, because as a consequence of that she is scheming something:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/03-faz-is-great/sniping/
That scheme results in her pretending to be Jacob’s girlfriend to Jacob’s brother. It almost results in her getting Jacob, but fails because she used skullduggery and subterfuge to achieve it. Her reaction isn’t that she Just As Planned him breaking up with Raidah so Sarah can have him, but instead she feels like she screwed up. See this and the next three comics:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/rushed/
It’s pretty clear her aim at that point was to get Jacob. Hell in the comic I linked to she almost says, “She doesn’t have to know”, which is practically the siren call of the homewrecker. Joyce is someone who is willing to burn the world for love, and as much as I love her to pieces, I also have to acknowledge that it’s kind of a toxic trait.
Joyce’s goal changed during the process. First she wanted him for Sarah, then for herself.
My original comment got stuck in moderation because of too many links again, so I’m going to try to be briefer. After Joyce learned that both Sarah and Joe thought she had a shot at having Jacob, she changed her goal to stealing Jacob for herself. Dorothy even calls her out on it in this comic and Joyce admits it: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/whaddya/
Joyce is someone who fundamentally believes that love justifies anything. Whether that makes her a hero or a villain depends entirely on where you are standing.
Adding that Dorothy is wrong in that comic, Joyce isn’t better than that, she never has been, and I love her for it.
To be fair to Joyce, for us she and Joe have been dating for over a year, but for her they’ve been dating for like 2 weeks at most.
It’s not really nice, but also “college kids break up after 2 weeks of dating” doesn’t scratch the barest surface in the shitty things that cab happen department.
This argument continues to be bad, because the important part of “Agreeing to date someone who’s been a friend and confidant for months and who is on his first time actually dating someone because of lifelong trauma around his father’s cheating ways, dating him for about a week and a half, and then cheating on him” is not “about a week and a half”.
“You’ve clearly never cared about anything beyond what you want for yourself” and “You are currently acting selfishly” are two WILDLY different statements.
WHO WILL WIN: the comment section’s desire for joyce brown to be strung up in the town square for her sins against men, or the comment section’s burning hatred for women of color???
Asma’s cool, Nash was alright if kind of shallow. Raidah just sucks ass because she’s always been kind of awful. Intriguing villain sometimes, but not when she’s crossing her fingers that bigotry will punish her enemy for her because she lacks the means to do it herself.
Can we not act like people gate on raidah for being a POC and not because she’s a big fat bongo
People contain multitudes buddy
People can definitely bring bigotry into things, like the fanbase as a whole does have a contingent that have shown racism towards Sal and some others, tacitly or not, or getting awfully heated at Becky or Carla at times in ways that certainly pointed to implicit queerphobia, though I’ve admittedly not specifically ran into Islamophobia towards Raidah. I certainly wouldn’t be hugely shocked, since yeah, it’s a very common thing, and DoA has a large fanbase, some of whom are not great folks (albeit I mostly see that on like Reddit), but I tend to see people rag on Raidah for other things.
Honestly, Raidah’s salient points on the topic of Islamophobia actually are often where I see people give her the most credit, and historically speaking, rightfully so, like when she brought up bringing Joyce to a mosque after Joyce’s suspicious church visit with Jacob, knowing it would give her pause, or calling out Dorothy for the same kinds of truths about Dorothy’s ethical weaknesses she would end up later having to face head on at the protest.
very telling you used “sins” against men there. Kinda tellin on yourself with that one lol
i used “sins” because that’s how people by-and-large speak of her actions down here! their views do not necessarily reflect my own, hence my comment here about two awful threads of discourse beautifully intersecting!
Well, the important thing is you’ve found a way to poison the well against anyone who has any opinion at all.
i’m glad you understand my vision
Tbf ppl hate raidah b/c of her personality, not because she’s muslim/POC , same with how they hate mary b/c of her extremist views
The important thing is that you’ve found a way to feel superior to both.
WHO WILL WIN: weird assumptions about how bad “the comment section” actually is, or the actual nature of the comment section?
The comment section’s badness is directly proportional to the size of the last big feeling it gave me, divided by how long ago it gave me that big feeling. Every time it makes me sad or mad, it’s the worst thing ever, but with enough distance from the day that it was awful, it’s very obviously not as bad as everyone makes it out to be.
It’s also moderately amusing, but only in the concept of this thread, that the comments section is kinda weird and wrong in a wildly different way than the thread’s starter was implying.
It’s another example of Raidah technically being right, but going about it in a very rude and hurtful way.
I think Joyce would probably be fine in Indianapolis though.
Does joyce NEED to teach in indiana?
Idk how teacher laws work in america
I mean Joyce may not want to move away from Indiana, or have thought about that as possibly being necessary before this moment.
I def think its smth she’d have to deal with sooner or later.
The great ole U.S.A isn’t exactly known for being a welcoming place, especially to queer people.
Talking about “the USA” in this kind of context is, frankly, getting the wrong end of the horse. We have at least 5 or 6 different meta-regions within the country, and they’ve all got different cultural mindsets. Joyce happens to hale from the rural/small-town portion of the Midwest, which… I’d put overall at the lower end of the scale, but definitely not rock-bottom, when it comes to this subject.
The Deep South (essentially, the former Confederate States) is the worst overall. Then in ascending order, I’d put Rural Midwest, The West, Urban Midwest & North Atlantic (two regions, but relatively similar positions on gay rights, etc), and then the West Coast. (Florida is its own beast, and tends to be all over the place.) I’d put those last three up against Canada on most issues, esp. when talking about Canada on the average, rather than the most progressive bastions.
One thing to remember is that in the US, empty land votes (that is to say, the Senate is based on states, not on population, and the Electoral College that determines the Presidency is, in turn, based on both the House and the Senate apportionment). This means our government is heavily distorted to match the views of minority voters who happen to live in big, empty states like Wyoming, Iowa, Texas, etc. A lot of the states have similar distortions in their own legislatures, as a result of being modeled at least somewhat on the federal government set-up. And the whole thing dates back to concerns that were prevalent in the immediate post-Colonial period, as opposed to the Information Age, which has largely resulted in a level of cultural homogenity amongst rural states that simply didn’t exist at the Founding.
I think Raidah absolutely considers this a situation of “I know I’m going to make it out of Indiana, but you never will.”
Joyce has probably not reconsidered her major in light of leaving her cult.
I am not sure she ever planned to be a public school teacher.
Pretty much. If I recall the original plan it was supposed to be what people call a MRS Degree. She was there to meet a husband mostly, probably the teaching degree because it’s about working with children which is acceptably “womanly” to her mother and also can be used for homeschooling.
I i was reading MRS as M R S not MISSIS and now it makes more sense
Is Raidah actually right if she’s saying it based on hearsay and her own bias, though?
To put it clearer: is she actually right if her motives are to feel better about herself?
It is not hearsay or bias to acknowledge that gay people face greater struggles with gaining and maintaining employment in conservative jurisdictions, especially employment in fields working with children
Indiana has multiple school districts, though. Bloomington/Monroe County is relatively gay friendly, though I don’t know if this extends to openly gay teachers.
Also, private schools exist; there was a hippie one in Bloomington that would probably be just fine with a gay teacher, though I bet it doesn’t pay well.
Yeah like I said Joyce would probably be fine in Indianapolis and its suburbs
That’s not what I was referring to at all and I refuse to believe that you didn’t know that.
It’d be wild and frankly humanizing if Raidah isn’t exactly straight herself, but considers coming out to be incompatible with the Master Plan because she thinks it’s professional suicide.
It is bias to weaponize that to hurt people you dislike though.
Yeah, exactly! She’s not saying “hey, I was thinking about you coming out, and how this is going to be difficult with your intended major. Do you know about how homophobic elementary education can be?” She’s saying “hey, you’re going to get discriminated against, loser! I’m telling you this because you only care about yourself! Haha, OWNED!”
Pointing out that bias exists isn’t the issue, reveling in it is. Raidah is reveling in it.
Did Joyce at any point express an unwillingness to move to a different state ever? Because if not this is a nothing argument
It seems like a reasonable assumption that a significant majority of people who go to the local “state school” are expecting to not go far after graduation, either because they’re a homebody or because moving is expensive.
Or even just because 59% of folks stay in the state they were born. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2015/10/homegrowns-and-rolling-stones.html
I mean, that’s obviously part of it, but it’s also that even aside from Joyce being Joyce there are also additional structural factors just by virtue of this being IU and not say Notre Dame or even Illinois.
https://imgchest.com/p/924925armyn
Based on a comment Grimey made yesterday I decided to make a list of what kinda gym/trainer each of the main cast of DOA would be.
Feel free to discuss and debate my choices :3
Resisting making Mike ghost type took some willpower, I imagine.
I am sure I’d have picked differently for some of these, but Dragon is an inspired choice for Jennifer. I am sure some of it is because Billie was a cheerleader for the Dragons, her highschool’s team, but it also definitely fits for her pride and temper, and having a weakness to Alice’s Ice.
He was on Ghost for SO long before I finally switched to Dark. And yeah Billie’s was partially the sports team and partially her grandiose personality, which dragons tend to evoke. Her being weak to Alice’s ice is a fun bonus haha.
(Alice is ice cuz of her blue lipstick and because she’s Al-ice)
What’s the normal way to say “Alice having Ice Pokémon makes sense because Alice is hot as fuck and so are like 43% of all Ice-types”? Pretend I said that.
Ah yes Jynx, my beloved.
(I actually do love Jynx and will tolerate no jynx slander. )
Jynx is fantastic.
Charlie being a Grass-type makes a compelling case for Grass being the airhead type!
For a long time I had her in poison because of the idea of slowly poisoning someone through a drawn out match. But one of my friends said she could also heal stall with ingrain and that felt very in-character.
Nice. I like a lot of them. Is Danny just a normal type trainer because he’s boring? I guess Sal does call him whitebread. Why Ice for Alice? Because “ice” is in her name?
I’d argue Normal isn’t inherently boring. Like, some of the quirkiest pokemon, like Snorlax, Lickitung, etc, are normal types.
I think it’s more just he’s a grounded guy, a supporter that likes boosting people. That’s my own stance, anyway, I can’t speak for Yotomoe’s decision process.
Yep! Alice is Ice cuz she’s Al-Ice. A lot of the ice type gym leaders have Ice in their name and I wanted to pay homage to that.
Fun fact: Walky was in ground for a long time but I decided on normal so he could have pokemon like Slakoth and Snorlax.
He needs a pokemon with own tempo too. That’s just too fitting.
I would actually switch Jason and Sara…And still feel like Lucy is a psychic type gym leader but other than that?
Spot on.
I know virtually nothing about Pokemon (for instance, I didn’t know trainers even had types) but Danny is definitely a Normal type all the way, well done.
Oh for the most part they don’t, technically. But trainer types tend to have pokemon they favour just for gameplay reasons. Like bug catchers use bug pokemon and hikers tend to use pokemon found in mountainous areas ect.
But there’s skilled trainers called gym leaders who you need to defeat for badges, plus the Elite 4 (who you have to defeat to face the champion) that do specialise in training pokemon of a specific type. Typically because they have an idolisation for the pokemon of the type itself or because it fits their temperament as a person.
Oh you did give Amber and Amazi-Girl different types, excellent.
You’re right Dina has to be rock so she can use a full team of fossil pokemon.
Yep, Asher has to be a fire gym leader just because of his name, these are the rules.
Mike and Ethan does a good job covering the range of dark types, some of them are mean and brutal, some of them are just kinda gloomy.
Yeah, no notes here.
So glad someone noticed that Dina was rock type so she could use fossil types.
Also Asher smokes so you can argue he often has fire and billowing smoke surrounding him.
Also yeah I always intended to separate Amber and Amazi-girl. Ghost strangely works super well with Amber. Likes dark places, Quiet isolation, gloomy and her projecting the “ghost” of people she’s lost.
Does that mean that her (their?) Gym gives two different badges depending on who is on the steering wheel at the moment?
I like to think it’s a Larry situation where Amber and Amazi-girl don’t even have the same gym. (Larry’s elite 4 but ignoring that)
I could see Amber being a gym leader and Amazi-Girl an Elite 4 member actually.
Yeah, was the first thing that came to mind when I saw the type for Dina.
I did actually have a thought though, I think I’d move Tony to normal personally.
I would personally switch Joyce and Jocelynn. Not sure why exactly Jocelynn feels water-type to me, it’s just a vibe thing. As for Joyce, the way she thoughtlessly treats people when she fixates on something feels extremely fey-coded to me.
Ethan feels more ghost than dark to me, dark type is typically more aggressive than gloomy.
Not really sure what your criteria are for steel types, all the characters there feel a bit off to me, though I suppose Jason has similar vibes to Molayne… If I were to put anyone in steel type it would probably be Asma?
And I’m not sure why Sal fits in bug type but seeing her with a bunch of badass looking bug types does make for a kickass mental image so I approve even if it’s confusing to me.
Mary doesn’t deserve Pokemon. I approve of her keeping poison types only because it feels likely to backfire upon her. Poison types are too good for her.
Jocelynn feels she has more of the natural mischievousness of fairy types while Joyce is more incidental. Water works when you remember its more destructive nature.
Also dark types definitely have gloomy as well as mean. Darkrai for example doesn’t want to hurt anyone.
Joyce is water mostly cuz I needed a water type and her big Baby blue eyes are just so damn prominent. Not the best reason but yeah. Fairy for Jocelynne cuz she can be a bit mischeivous with her ribbing but also there’s a “embracing femininity angle I just really like for her being fairy type. (You could even make a metaphor with how Clefairy was considered normal type until it became it’s true type, a fairy type)
Ethan could’ve been either Ghost or Dark but I went with Dark cuz his whole aesthetic just feels very Dark. Like he’s not just gloomy, he’s a bit venomous right now.
So!
Dorothy is a steel type because steel type is the best defensive typing. And someone like dorothy would absolutely take that to mean it’s the best type. Plus she would care a lot about protecting herself which steel is good at.
–
Jason is steel because he’s hardy, steadfast and inflexible. Same for Raidah. She’s very cold, practical and Rigid, like steel.
Sal has a spider Tattoo. I know that’s a simple reason but It was the best argument for a bug type trainer and honestly yeah, she’d be so badass with a bunch of cool ass bugs.
I also remember Sal saying she liked bugs when playing Mario Kart on the DS w/ Danny for the first time — Sal = Bugs is definitely an established trait of canon. (I bet she’d really like Gen 9’s bugs. Spidops, Lokix, Flutter Mane, all super cool.)
Flutter Mane’s Ghost/Fairy
Shit, you’re right — I WAS thinking of Slither Wing, but got the names mixed up.
The only one that sticks out to me is Sarah as a poison trainer. Sarah is extremely direct and has a lot of walls up around herself; her ‘weakness’ is her inability to handle earnestness (in herself or others). I know poison is a good defensive typing but its main weaknesses (psychic and ground) don’t fit Sarah’s profile and it’s very unlike Sarah to be so indirect on offence. I’m almost tempted to put her in Ground because that’s what her weaknesses (Joyce and Lucy) cover, and Ground has the Bone Club move which is *almost* a baseball bat.
So for Sarah my thought process was her negativity translating to poison. Basically how she can come off as toxic to others. But also how she gets joy out of bad things happening to others. Which I kinda interpreted as Poison types healing with Black Sludge or like Toxic Orb Gliscor or something.
Also Sarah just tends to include a lot of purple in her color palette so she fit the poison typing aesthetically pretty well too.
Is Meredith not on Tiermaker? Because she’s absolutely a grass type.
Interesting that this is where Raidah goes with this. It feels like a deliberate callback to her shattering Dorothy’s dreams of becoming president. Same case of wrong motives but accurate observation, even if this time it’s mixed up in some valid reasons to dislike Joyce. She’s not in any way wrong that Joyce being openly queer in a red state doesn’t bode well for her chances of working with children. Is it a nice thing to say? Obviously not. But it’s true, and Joyce should be aware of it. Unlike Dorothy’s career plans though, Joyce could always leave Indiana, though that would mean leaving her family behind.
I mean it makes sense considering Raidah’s whole thing is she’s a psychologically manipulative alpha bongo. Of course she would know her target enough to know where her words will cut deepest.
Joyce doesn’t want to be a school teacher, she’s sticking with a major she originally picked to fit into her family’s plan for her out of momentum.
If Dorothy has a future, and Dorothy will take care of her financially, than her degree is serving it’s intended purpose.
I think Raidah is taking the place of Mike in the narrative with these interactions – harsh truths delivered in the most unfriendly way possible.
Although with Mike it seems like he wanted people to grow, and with Raidah she would be surprised and disappointed to know that e.g. givig Dorothy a breakdown led her to hooking up with Joyce, and now telling Joyce this and making her re-think her Major – well that will probably actually benefit Joyce in the long run, too.
But I don’t think Raidah will be happy to see either of them thriving, she is too bitter.
I honestly think it’s simpler than that: Raidah has always struck me as one of those folks who fundamentally assumes everyone either does or should see the world the same way she does, and since she’s laser-focused on her career to the point of cultivating contacts now, she throws insults based on how badly she feels OTHER people’s long-term plans are put together.
This is my take as well. I even buy the idea that, somewhere underlying, Raidah actually has some good, non-selfish intentions, and is just approaching her goals from an extremely rigid perspective, which to her justifies anything bad she does in the process.
Actually, shit, I just realized…that’s the exact thing that makes Raidah and Joyce entirely alike. That’s the way they’re the same. They pursue the one ideal that is, to them, the ultimate purpose, with complete wanton disregard for how they may achieve their goals. It’s just that Joyce’s ideal is romantic love, whereas Raidah’s goal is her career success.
This analysis, while accurate, also ignores a key element–spite. Raidah is very much motivated by spite, I’d argue even above and beyond her ambition. This is why so often she makes maneuvers that ultimately weaken her own goals (like snipping at Dorothy in a way that’d only work on a naive freshman)–she’s too busy looking for instant schadenfreude to actually sit back and play the long game.
Also, in a lot of ways, she strikes me as the archetypal sophomore–having learned a few things in her freshman year, she’s now more convinced than ever that she knows how it all works, and as noted above, simply cannot comprehend how these things aren’t obvious to everyone else. If she were a physics major, she probably would be the one who obsesses over the ‘meaning’ of quantum theory.
“I guess we’ll move to California. Any other drug-addicted friends you’ve tried to get killed lately?”
lol
Damn, that’d be a killer comeback.
Holy shit, that’s like conversational napalm.
They don’t even need to move all the way to California. Chicago (one of the first areas to call Trump on his shit back in 2015) is just a short drive away!
I’ve gotta say I do sort of love Raidah walking up to people & essentially going “fuck you” in a few more words. Classic move from her. What a hater.
I’m not checking the comments today but I know you’re out there fellow Raidah enjoyers.. Shoutouts… Our girl is being absolutely awful once again : )
I didn’t think I was a Raidah enjoyer, but I am in awe of the quality hating she’s serving up today.
This honestly feels like pretty low-quality hating. She’s assuming everyone else has as much identity tied up in their choice of major as she does, which she has zero reason to assume Joyce does.
If I can allow myself to be a hater for a second as well: I’m genuinely not expecting a lot from Raidah as a character anymore. I don’t think Willis writes particularly nuanced villains, which is, to an extend, their strength (the characters who suck REALLY suck!). But I think I can have a better time with her if I accept that, even if I think it’s sort of a waste (the highschool mean girl thing is so one-note! And it’s funny in that way but also tiring sometimes). And of course always happy to be proven wrong lol
On the front page, of a newspaper, that somehow failed to identify either of subjects of the photo, despite one of them being one of their own reporters (Daisy needs glasses).
So we’re literally just assuming that her potential employers will recognize her from the photo. It’s not gonna come up when they google her name or anything.
4 years from now, Joyce job hunting. “Hey! I recognize you! I saw half your face obscured by teargas in a four year old news article in a college paper that no one read, and why yes, I do believe you were kissing a woman in that photograph! Banned from academia forever!”
Guess she’ll have to teach outside of Indiana, which is truly a fate worse than death.
I think it’s more Raidah going, “if you’re still in a relationship with Dorothy. A relationship that you are not closeted about.”
“That you are not closeted about” is a crazy assumption to make though.
That’s just like, common sense, even in a lot of blue states, that you don’t go telling your employers about that sort of thing.
She’s probably not gonna tell them she’s autistic either. Any job hunting seminar will basically open with that. If it’s something that the employer can discriminate against, and it’s at all within your ability to be discrete about it, then the employer straight out does not need to know.
Raidah would actually be the character with more difficulty in this department, since she can’t just pretend to be white when the boss is around.
I mean that absolutely is something Joyce could not manage because she struggles not to out her sister in casual conversation. Dorothy also wants to be a public figure.
Basically, closeting is not an option.
It’s not only an option, it’s basically the only option that’s remotely feasible, if she plans to work with small children in much of the country.
Joyce “Struggles” not to out her sister. But did she out her sister? No. Quite the opposite in fact. She protected her sister’s ability to stay in the closet because she understands the value of the protection it brings, even against their own father.
And we’re talking about an employer. Employers simply do not need to know. They are not entitled to information about your personal life. They are not your friend or family. Joyce can keep a secret from her dad, she can keep a secret from her boss. Not telling your boss about your girlfriend is only being “in the closet” in the most technical sense. A basic separation between your personal life and your professional life is a fundamental skill of existing in the modern workplace, which she will have to learn, no matter what job she ends up working where.
This is just incredibly naive. First of all, a lot of employers will search social media, so it goes far beyond just not mentioning it in the interview.
Or how about if her wife needs health insurance? Can’t really put her on the work family plan without revealing it. Emergency contact?
Beyond that, you have to censor every conversation at work for ever. No mention of family. No talk about what you’re doing after work or over the weekend. It’s being closeted and the vast majority of people don’t have or need that level of separation between personal life and profession life. It’s not a fundamental skill of the modern workplace and it shouldn’t have to be.
Hmm perhaps the requirement for those multiple things to happen for it to matter – at least one of which it is, in principle, in Raidah’s power to facilitate – has led some people to interpret her statement as a threat rather than a mere warning, which would make calling this line of discussion on her part homophobic a lot more justifiable than it already was.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Raidah’s gonna be showing up at Joyce’s workplace with newspaper clippings.
That would be an enourmous amount of time and effort and by then she’ll probably have developed new grudges.
Joyce is already kind of distracting her from her grudge against Sarah. She still hates Sarah but she’s not really thinking about her too much while she’s distracted with this protest situation.
But yeah, if she did that Joyce truly would be helpless to pursue a career working with children, and the implicit threat of that may be intentional. It could be she wants Joyce to know she has this level of power over her. That every stranger with a grudge has that power.
abe_simpson_entering_leaving.gif
smelling a part 2
a really smarmy sliding timescale… of love (say what)
I certainly hope that won’t be the case for Joyce and this is by far the shittiest thing that Raidah has ever done (and that includes the abelism). On the other hand, this might mean that Julia Gray, Fighter Pilot is possible. A college degree is something many people in the Air Force have.
Also, it would actually lead to an uncomfortable conversation with Dorothy.
Dorothy: But you’d have to KILL people.
Joyce: Yes, bad ones from countries like…uh…
Dorothy: You were going to say Bulmeria, weren’t you?
Joyce: It has bad people, I think!
I thought Julia Grey was an astronaut.
Am I remembering incorrectly?
Space Force Captain.
Astronauts tend to start off as pilots.
I don’t now if you’ve seen the way the US government is taking its military, but that’s a direction that very definitely doesn’t end up with a woman in it as a pilot, just as a stewardess.
if that happens, there won’t be a comic. So we have to hope for the end of this nightmare.
Damn, do I need to rent a second football stadium to store the list of reasons now?
I don’t think that’s the shittiest thing she’s done. Saying/Insinuating Dina is developmentally disabled is FAR worse than going “you’re self centered, so here’s a reminder that homophobia affects you now :)” which, let us be real, IS very shitty but not on that level.
I’ve had my autism used against me like that and I think this is worse.
Oh damn, I don’t co-sign but the hater in me recognizes the hater in you.
I completely forgot that was her Major, has she even mentioned it once since she became an Atheist? Her interests seem more towards making comics and the like, so maybe she should switch her major to writing or something, since she isn’t stuck in the mindset she had about “A Woman’s role in the church/home”.
Im actually very curious about how she is actually doing in the “School” part of being in college and if she actually still wants to pursue a major in education. We got Dorothy questioning her major, but we havent even heard much of that for a while now.
I think it’d be cool if she did decide to change her major. The ‘elementary education’ major seems to be part of the fundy fast track for having the daughters of the community be teachers so they can go on to homeschool their kids rather than being because the girls are actually interested in it: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/aspirations/
at this point i wouldn’t be surprised about what it was if not teaching in a place more open about that
Not since the atheism, but she did bring it up on the pretend date with Jacob where she was like “oh actually I would like to teach kids, crisis resolved”.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Joyce change majors. She’s never seemed particularly interested in or committed to education.
We know she’s good at math, so she did well in calculus, though Dorothy thinks she would have done better with glasses. I don’t think we have any information on how she did in any other classes.
Ugh, Raidah is just the worst. Weaponizing homophobia in pursuit of her petty grudges now? The comic would be better if she were hit by a meteor tomorrow.
I think there’s still a fair bit of distance there. Less than she might like, but Mary sets the bar pretty low.
Well, that’s all right. Now she can be a pilot!
In all seriousness, Joyce hasn’t reexamined her major since becoming an atheist; might as well give it some thought now.
Pretty sure you can’t be the kind of pilot Julia Gray is if you need glasses.
I give it like 6 months before you can’t be ANY kind of pilot in the US military if you’re a woman.
Can confirm — if you want to be anything other than a trash hauler (er, cargo pilot), you have to have no worse than 20/40 uncorrected and/or I think US Navy pilots are allowed one specific kind of corrective surgery that isn’t LASIK.
Wait what do they have against LASIK?
It looks like they might accept it now, but it used to be that LASIK and SMILE techniques, as they involve an incision in the eye, were considered less stable under impact and G-force than something like Photorefractive Keratectomy.
So, Raidah wants to insult Joyce by telling her that the good thing she wants to do can’t be done because she’s gay?
And this is Joyce’s fault how?
i mean there are def gay teachers they just wouldn’t necessarily bring their partners to PTA meetings/student events or anything lol
It was more of a set up for her ending line about Joyce being incapable of shame.
That wasn’t her attempting to insult Joyce, that was her attempt to hurt Joyce in a place she would actually feel it.
“You can’t do that good thing you want to do”
Except, of course, she can. She just couldn’t do it in rural or small-town Indiana. Chicago, NYC or SoCal wouldn’t even blink at a gay teacher, and a lot of the schools would look at the photo (if someone sent it in trying to stir up trouble) as just fine and dandy, arguably even laudable.
Honestly, for all her self-styled worldliness, Raidah is at LEAST as provincial in her views as Joyce.
Is this homophobic Raidah or just America being really fucked up and homophobic? I’m not American so I’m not sure
Both? She herself probably isn’t actually homophobic, but she’s absolutely weaponizing homophobia to make Joyce feel shitty as revenge for breaking her and Jacob up, which I don’t think is any better. But yes, red states in America really ARE this homophobic.
Our country is really purple across the board – some states definitely lean very far one way or the other, but even the most biased have a very large percentage of dissenters. Additionally, an (often large) majority of Americans in nearly every state, even deep red ones, support gay marriage (and its a pretty close thing in the very remaining few states). Furthermore, it is illegal to (explicitly) discriminate against a job applicant based on their sexuality.
I therefore posit that what Raidah is referring to is somewhat less a result of the Midwest being entirely overrun by some sort of raving hoard of neo-Nazis in cowboy boots more a result of two larger problems in American – gerrymandering and the craziest voices shouting the loudest. The former creates two problems:
1) our state legislatures tend to be far more proportionally Republican (or Democrat) than their actual constituency.
2) In a gerrymandered district a politicians only real threat is a challenger from their own party and only the most fanatic members of a party tend to vote in a primary (which for Republicans is often evangelical Christians). This means that elected officials of both parties tend to pander to their most extreme, and thus least tolerant, supporters.
Therefore, in more conservative states you can potentially get school systems dealing with politicians and appointed officials that are very eager to gain political points with the zealots by trying to attack LGBTQ people (or even the knowledge of their existence) in the schools. At the very least, they may have have a strong incentive to not stick up for their state’s employees when confronted by the second major problem – a oft minority of very loud bigots.
It is very hard to run an American school under the best of circumstances (see the flaming train wreck that is my nations educational system). It has been made worse in recent years an uptick of both helicopter parents trying to peer into and micromanage every facet of their children’s education and media companies of both sides that are willing to use kids as the increasingly frayed rope in their unending game of profit-driven, no-holes-barred, cultural tug-of-war. It is therefore not surprising that in some areas, the school principals might choose the easy path and seek to preemptively avoid potentially controversial topics and teachers rather than risk a confrontation with a few angry moms willing to use social media and Fox News (or inversely MSMBC) to turn a small classroom disagreement about appropriate literary material or a teacher’s private life into an overblown national scandal. The media learned long ago that nothing sells attention like insinuations the other side is using the education system to indoctrinate your ten year old against you – as though the local elementary school is a dystopian reeducation camp run by either hard-core fascists or transgender Marxists and not just a bunch of underpaid, overworked, coffee addicts just trying to keep their passion for teaching basic geometry alive.
Raidah seems to be gloating about how America is homophobic, and that’s a good thing, because it hurts Joyce.
Raidah has no personal power over whether or not Joyce can get a job in her chosen field, but choosing this as her stone to sling at Joyce still reflects poorly on her.
To put it another way, she’s basically saying she’d rather ally with homophobes against Joyce, than ally with Joyce against against the enemies of the Bulmerian people. I guess Joyce being occasionally misguided is the worse of two evils here, in her eyes.
Ding ding ding.
Her and most of the comment section, lol.
I would say trying to upset a queer person by telling them about the homophobic prejudice that they’ll be a victim of is homophobic in most of the ways which matter.
I don’t think it’s homophobia so much as Raidah doing to cruelest thing she can—telling Joyce what to expect. It’s not weaponizing homophobia so much as being like:
“Congratulations—now that you’ve put yourself squarely in the same broad brush that assholes will brush us with, let me inform you of what so many of us had to grow up being aware of.”
Oh, you mean like when a trans woman get harassed and cis women say “welcome to womanhood” instead of commiserating with and comforting her the way they would with another cis woman.
I don’t care what you call it, that’s pretty fucking shitty.
Def both
Also Fuck you forever Raidah.
Now I dunno who I want to see get hit by a car first, Billie or Raidah
Billie getting hit by a car would be kind of a rehash of her backstory car crash, so if it’s between the two, I’d say Raidah is the more novel option. Not sure what good it would do for the story, though.
Idk about quickly, but certainly on her trail. Mary is still UP THERE in terms of being the most horrible living person in this comic. After Mary you got Joyce’s Mom being a very close second. Radiah is a massive bongo, but she isn’t as bad as Mary and Joyce’s mom, but a wider margin then some might think.
Started to write something. Stopped.
Started to write something else. Stopped that too.
I’m gonna stop starting for now.
Your avatar goes perfectly with this.
As much as I hate Raidah, especially after this strip…I don’t think she comes at all close to Mary.
Another pointless character the strip would be better without.
Unfortunately for you, Joyce is kinda the Main Character ™. It’s not really the same comic if she’s not in it.
Aren’t we all the pointless characters’ of others’ lives?
Wait that sounded far worse than I meant it.
I’m pretty sure they meant Raidah, who is a major asshole much like Mike. Being right doesn’t mean you should be a conga.
I hope everyone is celebrating Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory against right-wing oppression today instead of getting mad at commenters! Peace and love on planet New York, we should all be making better uses of our time today!
Im so excited to see what Zohran can do for NYC
can he? He’s just a mayor. I mean, how powerful a mayor can be?
My mayor made all ambulance rides in my city free this year and the previous one made ER visits free to the main hospital if you make less than $65k/year—and having used that recently, they give you the form to fill out in the mail with the bill to apply for the waiver, it’s not even hidden. Mayors can do a helluva lot more than I thought.
It’s a big-ass city, so it seems to be one of the most important mayoral races in the world, just on sheer volume.
Been pretty afraid to keep up with the news cuz I’ve been fearing the worst.
the entire country has been hit with a massive blue wave, with democrats taking seat after seat! It’s been a really great day to exemplify that building a pro-trans, anti-genocide world is what voters genuinely want, and that conservative extremism has no hope of surviving! keep your chin up!
o3o I’m at a point now where having hope just turns to bile in my stomach. Like a poison. Good things happening just makes me anxious now.
Just never forget, that feeling is what the fascists want you to feel. They are inculcating that feeling, with the strongest propaganda machines ever devised and unleashed upon the human race. That feeling is their greatest weapon, and it’s the thing they’re counting on, to give them the best chance of winning.
I’m…not pointing this out, to make you feel better, per se; I don’t think that awareness of the psychic torment nexus, actually decreases the amount of pain that it puts us all in. I don’t think we can actually make it hurt less. All we can do is remember that, coming from the enemy we are fighting, The Hurt is The Point, because they need to blunt every shred of resistance they can, if they actually hope to succeed.
It’s gonna hurt until they’re gone, and we win. Hurting us is really all they’ve got, because they have no intention of actually running anything, or making anything tangibly better, ever. So, all we can do is remember not to fear the hurt, because feeling the hurt means that we haven’t lost our humanity to them, yet; the only future without hurt, is the one where we don’t lose our hope, because our hope is the only thing preventing us from being programmed into numb compliance, the way they have programmed a good 30% of total citizens, using the propaganda machines.
Even here in Georgia, Dems CRUSHED Republican incumbents in the only two statewide races today, for Public Service Commissioner. 62% to 38%, a TWENTY-FOUR POINT WIN.
No Democrat had won any non-federal statewide office here in nineteen years.
We did? Woo-hoo!
And Dick Cheney died? Damn, that’s a top ten Tuesday.
More like Dick Chenyn’t
Rip Cheney was right there, Taffy. RIGHT THERE.
I wouldn’t want anybody thinking I want that loser to have any sort of peace in whatever afterlife exists.
Fair.
Hell yeah
Oh yeah, the Blue Wave has been incredible tonight.
I’m mortified at many of the ballot propositions that passed in my state (Texas), but Mamdani’s victory is indeed sweet and I will be celebrating it. There is power in the people yet.
As for Dick Cheney, I am deeply, deeply sad that he died without being brought before the Hague for his atrocities.
I, for one, am looking forward to no longer having to have an opinion about a mayoral candidate in a city I where I don’t live in a state that is literally on the other side of the country.
He seems fine and junk, but FFS it is extremely obvious that our media has NYC bias. Mayor of NYC is not a national office fergawdsakes.
The USA does not exist outside of its major coastal cities, except on TV.
No but NY is the heart of the states economy and has a larger population than most states
So does LA, and I don’t have an opinion on the mayor of LA because I don’t live there. I shouldn’t have to, outside of generic “Blue team, go!”
I’m glad that Mamdani won, I’m just begging the media and the internet at large to stop acting like his was the most consequential election in the history of the nation.
They’re not going to.
It’s a thing where they can fearmonger about socialism and antisemitism taking over the Democratic party. We’re in for the long haul here.
On the one hand, I strongly agree. Broadly, I do not care who the mayor of NYC is.
On the other hand, an openly SOCIALIST politician is now in charge of America’s most visible and arguably important population center.
Him succeeding — and thus (hopefully) proving socialism is viable is viable in the USA — IS important to me.
Yeah, there are a multitude of reasons that some are putting heavy emphasis on the race, but the one that’s relevant to non-NYC Americans, is that Mamdani provides concrete evidence to the DNC that if you want to landslide elections in your favor, the key is actual socialist policies, not any of the other bullshit.
Dems won across the board, though. If he’d been the only one who won, or if only the leftist candidates won you could make that argument. A sweep this big is harder to parse beyond “Donald Trump is radioactive.”
Actually, there is a second message. Namely, Have A Message. While the Dems who won weren’t walking in lockstep, the majority of the big races were won by Dems who mixed Trump-hate with a positive message for their intended constituency, mostly around economic issues. Their approaches for fixing those issues vary, but they aren’t pretending that people aren’t hurting, and they’re trying to come up with solutions rather than whining about the other side. This, i think, has as much to do with their victories as Orange Man Bad.
It was definitely the most important election of 2025 given NY’s size, his status as a pro-trans muslim, and the amount of work that establishment democrats and republicans underwent in an attempt to sabotage his victory!
This victory is an important landmark for the entire country because it shows that no matter what the government tells us, and no matter how much money they pour into the contrary, being militantly anti-trans and kidnapping people from their homes is NOT what the people of the united states actually want, and that the people who are making such things happen will not succeed long term! It gives people of color, religious minorities, and everyone on the LGBT spectrum hope because a man who prioritized our wellbeing over the status quo has come out on top for what feels like the first time in modern history, and that WILL reverberate across the states in the immediate future!
It already helped several other democrats in NJ and Virginia win, those campaigns gaining footing in no small part because they were able to see the kind of momentum Mamdani was able to build with progressive policies. I think it goes far beyond NY-centrism, I think people are focusing on it because it gives so many of us hope for a safe future.
It’s not at all clear to me that more establishment centrist Democrats in other states were helped by Mamdani’s campaign.
Dems did incredibly well across the board – even to little things like clean sweeps of the municipal elections in my long moderate Republican town. It’s backlash to Trump, but I don’t think Mamdani was the driver anywhere beyond his own campaign.
Except that he drove media talking about the midterms, which are often neglected, and highlighted how local elections matter. This is generally a good thing, even if he didn’t drag the DNC into his way of doing things.
This, but about the US as a whole.
Is it “media bias” or is it “NYC by itself as an economy that would make it the 12th-largest state”.
It is absolutely a case of media bias. Los Angeles is every bit as big and important as NYC, but in 41 years of life I have never seen the race for mayor of LA described as the most important election in the country. The biggest difference is that the Networks and most other big media outlets are based in NY. If it’s not happening on the East Coast then it’s an afterthought.
I admit, as someone who spent a large portion of my life in Philadelphia I am mostly just telling everyone else the lies that sustain me. At least LA gets a decent amount of cred in entertainment media, it feels like even places like Chicago and Miami both punch above their weight class relative to Philly. (and honestly I’m kinda STILL salty that Comcast NBC Universal didn’t move most of the operations down here — couple of my buddies worked for Comcast around the time of the merger and there was a long-running joke about how the best sentence in the world would be “Live from Philadelphia, it’s Saturday Night”.)
(and, if we’re being REALLY honest, I suspect it’s as much driven by “financial sector” bias as “media” bias — which explains more why the STATE government in NY is as big in the news as CA most of the time despite the economic disparities)
This is how I learned he won. Hurray!
Hear! Hear!
Also, PA state supreme court AND one of the Philly suburb counties that’s a perpetual testing ground for culture-war shit kicked out their pro-ICE sheriff and put all Democrats on two big school boards while throwing out the last of the Moms For Liberty trash.
Raidah’s goal here is to hurt Joyce and chooses the difficulties she’ll face as a queer woman to do so in her chosen field.
Which is a homophobic microaggression.
She’s not trying to warn Joyce about the problem. If she wanted to hurt her, she’d just point out Joyce’s selfishness. But she chose the method and that was to shame her for her queerdom and make her feel it is something to make her life more difficult.
So +1 homophobia point for Raidah.
She has internalized Homophobia as a thought in Disco Elysium. She may end up being strangled by her own tie.
I’m glad that even with the brief moment of sympathetic raidah we got recently she’s still just as much of a highschool mean girl as she’s always been, I don’t even mean this as a joke when I say I genuinely hope she never changes, because she’s wayyyyyy to much fun to watch as a vullain
Villain sorry
Ironic considering she was on Billie’s ass about wanting to keep friends from high school.
some have also begun to point out that quite a lot of the traits Raidah uses to character-assassinate people to their faces, actually reek of possible projection on her part. which, I’m not uniformly sure about, yet, but it’s a good hypothesis.
I want you to know I just misread your name as Bongoladesh.
Someone will have to search every newspaper about that and she still have right to denial its her. She will be ok
I think Raidah’s point is that Dorothy and Joyce will be together in this hypothetical scenario and not closeted.
Woof. Comments are cooking hot tonight!
No one even noticed my fun-time pokemon post.
I liked it! I don’t know enough about the Pokemons to have an informed opinion about it but it was neat
I did, but Mike should probably be using Ghost-types since he’s dead.
He was a ghost type for a looooong time before I swapped him to dark.
Dark was a good choice. More true to his character than just making a joke.
my main takeaway was i never realized how much hotter Jason’s character portrait was than his general demeanor. man is smoking in that headshot.
fairly often a person in my vicinity deserves to be treated like crap
much less often i deserve the self-indulgence of treating a person in my vicinity like crap.
I was gonna say ‘same poison, different flavor,’ but no, Raidah’s not awful because of religious fundamentalism. She’s a narcissist. Casually sneering about systemic homophobia is just synergy.
Why was she mad again? Oh right, because the fight against systemic obstacles she values was mildly inconvenienced.
ok yeah not sure if it’s still mary i dislike the most or if raidah just took that spot cuz that was just malice and vitriol purely for the sake of it. mary hasn’t had a say in a while so maybe she’ll make an appearance to spew her unsolicited opinion, too. guess we’ll see.
Mary doesn’t tend to hunt out people to be the absolute fucking worse too she just radiates an aura of bongo.
Raidah on the other hand, idk if its just me but this reads like she went and found joyve to say this too
What did I do???
Bongoplush im sorry you’re getting caught in the censorship crossfire 😭😭😭
I just picked my fursona name+species (bongo+plush dog)I didn’t know what I’d bring up on myself
in almost completely unrelated news, playing bongos on someone’s butt is fun. (obviously with their permission)
God, you’re so right for this.
This is the only kind of comment I want to see down here from now on
The censor of the website turned beach into bongo
oh she definitely went and sought joyce out. mary is just always the worst shitty little hypocritical gremlin all the time. to her credit, she is at least consistent in that regard, whereas raidah plays politics and will be just as happy pretending to be your friend as she is stabbing you in the face with word-shivs and in both cases only so long as she thinks she’s getting something out of it.
I think Raidah acts with much more malicious intent than Mary seems to.
Mary wants to feel superior to others and causes harm in doing so. Raidah wants to feel superior to others *by* harming them.
Mary’s still worse in my book. They both make hateful comments to people, but Raidah’s held herself back from destroying anybody’s stuff, or blackmailing anyone. For now, anyway. The only thing in Mary’s corner is she tends to receive comeuppance more. And gave out free door decorations, I guess.
Mary also like, bullied her boyfriend into performing naked in front of a bunch of people, and he was clearly uncomfortable, and she didn’t care at all.
Fuckin’ get her ass, Raidah.
I’m on her side now.
How are people siding with Raidah on this, GENUINELY?
She’s 100% correct in the last panel, just a butt about how she got there
She’s literally weaponizing homophobia because she has a grudge against Joyce.
You can be evil and correct! Raidah is doing something awful, but she’s right that joyce is selfish– she’s just choosing to use it as an excuse to be cruel instead of trying to confront her, which makes sense cuz she’s like a jerk and hates joyce specifically.
But she *is* selfish. Raidah’s last interaction with joyce included joyce trying to seduce jacob; and joyce cheated on joe and laughed at walky about making out with dorothy! Raidah being a homophobe does not make joyce a better person
“You can be evil and correct!”
No.
Yes though! If a murderer says “global warming is bad” while doing muders, that doesn’t, like, undo global warming????
people are complicated. Raidah is an asshole. She is also not saying anything untrue, even if she is clearly not upset that joyce will experience bigotry.
“I can excuse homophobia, but I draw the line at PDA and cheating on 2 week old relationships!”
The Raidah defense force basically lol
I’m bi lol I’m not saying raidah is a good person and never have! I just agree with the last panel
Pocky, as a fellow snack, I gotta say you’re maybe misreading what’s been said here tonight.
By refusing to accept that evil people can be correct you are ending up in a position where you never can acknowledge that someone can be correct and also evil. Then you end up with people who will agree with absolutely vile shit only because it’s tenuously connected to something true.
So yes, she can be evil and correct.
Nope. Because that requires the evil person to be saying what they are in good faith.
I’m going to be honest, I think it really matters how you get there.
No, Raidah is not 100% correct. Calling Joyce just selfish is hilariously incorrect, though tbf Raidah doesn’t know Joyce all that well so has a skewed and limited perspective.
Joyce has been nothing BUT selfish for the last two story lines! Like, this entire escapade has been about Joyce doing whatever feels good to her in the moment and to Hell with anybody else.
With Joe. With Dorothy. With Becky. With Walky. Hell, even with Joycelyn! Her coming out was more about her being a ‘savior for her sister’ than Joycelyn’s autonomy.
I think there is a lot of debate about Joyce’s morality as she isn’t what we stereotypically think of as “selfish”. She isn’t evil, and in fact appears to be generally very kind-hearted and compassionate, but often has poor judgement and impulse control. She doesn’t wake up in the morning and dream of scamming orphans out their pocket change for a quick buck. She won’t just abandon her friends when the going gets tough or, as we have seen, even potentially lethal. Just this chapter she outed herself to her dad to cover for her sibling. She wants to do good in the world. However, especially when it comes to her romantic passions, she does not always either think things through or care enough to listen to her normally dominant conscience.
Joyce is the kind of person that would take a bullet for you without even thinking about it, and then just as impulsively seduce your wife when she comes to visit her in the hospital.
I lost track a little bit. Who’s in the hospital, and who’s getting seduced?
Joyce would take a bullet for you without thinking, and then when your wife visits Joyce in the hospital to thank her for saving you, if Joyce has a crush on her she will totally seduce her with the same thoughtless with which she saved your life. Joyce is equally capable of impulsively sacrificing herself for others, and of impulsively sacrificing other’s relationships for herself.
Joyce has never been anything BUT selfish. The only people that ever mattered to her are the people that she’s personally connected to and everyone else can take a hike. Everything “good” that she does is motivated by how it impacts the people she personally cares about. It’s like when Cheney (ding dong, the fucker’s dead) suddenly pivoted on gay rights when his daughter came out as gay.
Idk this is a bit fucked up.
Raidah is 100% in the wrong here (i say this knowing what I’ve commented, i dont agree with raidahs take as much as im just glad more people are making joyce feel like ass atm)
Last panel is all I need, IDC about the rest of it.
This is a story where things happen in context, though.
I don’t care about this particular context. I like seeing the mean character call the shameless character shameless.
Literally unforgivable
You? Really?
Yeesh.
The “You?” part of that makes me think you’re emphasizing my specific reaction as one you didn’t expect. Or that you’re being sarcastic and absolutely expected me to react that way. Could you elaborate?
The former. The fuck are you doing, Taffy?
If it’s sarcasm, you missed.
I’m siding with the hot antagonist for the duration of one panel. Why is this surprising to you?
Y’all really on the side of the vindictive bongo handing out microaggressions?
Not sure I like how my name is being used lmao
This comments section automatically filters the b-word and turns it into bongo. Sorry you had to find out like this.
Lmao I just picked bongoplush cus my fursona is named bongo and he’s a plush dog, I didn’t know
Not a Bongo?
Lmao ive had a lot of sonas over the years, but never an amtelope
Raidah can aggress my micro…
Hm. 😐
No, I don’t think that’s going anywhere. All the parts are there, but they don’t assemble into anything good.
She can assemble your parts into something good.
Sounds like code for making me worse.
Where do I sign?
Usually you can find signs next to the road. Try to go for the rectangular ones. People get really mad if you take the others, especially the octagons.
There’s a bunch of little rectangle ones that say stuff about the fire department, and a bunch that just have some numbers on them. I don’t think anyone will mind if I take those.
That’s not micro, it’s just aggression.
Tonight, yes.
When you walk up and yell in someone’s face I think that’s a macroaggression.
Raidah: “Hey, faggot, don’t you wanna teach kids? If you and your faggot girlfriend are still faggots together in a few years, our homophobic state might not let you teach kids on account of you being a faggot.”
I’m an open-and-noisy faggot myself, but yeah she’s being more than a micro level of aggressive here.
Eh two wrongs don’t make a right and what raidah is doing here is pretty obvious homophobia, Joyce has done a lot of shitty things lately, things raidah has a right to be mad about, but that doesn’t make what she’s doing right now okay either
Yeah, like if Raidah just called Joyce a hussy or whatever, fine, I wouldn’t care. Raidah’s allowed to be mad at Joyce for breaking her up with Jacob. But “haha, I’m gonna remind you gay people are oppressed, FEEL BAD ABOUT IT” is indefensible.
Thing is, joyce also would not care about being called a hussy in this case, i think.
It IS cruel, but i can see why raidah would go this route. College kids are GREAT at explosive spite
Raidah doesn’t even really have a right to know about it. None of it is any of her business.
Does she even know about it on purpose? I thought she saw the news by accident.
Yeah I dunno if reinforcing homophobic rhetoric as an existential way to cut down Joyce’s dreams for the future is an appropriate punishment for
*checks notes*
Being unwillingly outed by a newspaper.
That’ll teach her.
Taffy being god’s bravest little soldier in the comments tonight
I haven’t even said anything controversial yet, wym?
You’re gonna get a lot of people thinking this means you clap and cheer for homophobia, is all i meant
It’s not illegal for them to think that, I guess. Same way it’s not illegal to think drywall is a mammal.
God forbid we stan a straight woman like they don’t hand out plenty of bullying ass shit to us irl smh sad smoking face emoji
I’m not 100% sure what you mean by this, but I like the energy.
You’re taking the side of a mean girl and bully.
A sexy cartoon mean girl and bully. That’s an important distinction, for me.
I mean i’ve liked fictional characters who have done *way* worse things, to be fair
Please name a few. I wanna compare.
I shan’t, nay, i *can’t*, or the virtue of my House will be tainted
(Fandaniel ffxiv was a fruity, flouncy little commiter of global atrocity and i miss him so much.)
You picked the ONE motherfucker I just can’t agree with on a spiritual level. That got a genuine ugly laugh out of me and now the cat is giving me a weird look.
I’m a man with low standards and terrible taste <3
(There are others i'm just not opening certain cans of worms in this blighted place.)
I don’t know what to tell you, man. I love a twink who commits acts of callous inhumanity.
We support gay wrongs here, I just don’t fuck with his invalid and incomprehensible worldview of “Bad stuff happens, so I’m gonna give a bird anxiety and do Bad Science™ about it for thousands of years, instead of just inventing the PS2 like a normal person”
To be clear i’m talking SPECIFICALLY about the modern incarnation that was wearing someone elses skin like a suit. The one who sashayed around in the gayest way i’ve ever seen
I’m salty about that version too, just because he takes up two entire cards in my Magic deck.
Fucking FANDANIEL? I’m not sure we can be friends any more. I mean, not even Emet The Ascian Blorbo?
@Big Z: Stop oppressing me. I just want to lock him in a cage and poke him with sticks.
@Donovan As a DRG main, I highly endorse poking Fandaniel with sharp sticks, preferably at high velocity from altitude.
That’s yoir fault for playing magic
True. Though so far, I’ve managed to avoid spending a single cent on the actual cards. I had so much fun using a friend’s Y’shtola precon, they bought me one of my own, and then set me up with a deck based on Quina Quen, plus sleeves and a deck box. And I already had a Mana Moon deck box and sleeves from a couple Christmases ago. For some reason, Magic people have been very generous about their indoctrination.
God, they’re getting you just like they got my coworker.
(He has progressed to dropping money in it, tho)
Liking a villain character and taking a villain’s side are different things.
Tell that to everybody who wants Thanos to snap their choker.
Ok, that’s it: give me back that gas tank.
Thanks, Raidah. If there’s one thing queer people need, it’s a reminder that we’re oppressed.
We might forget!
I mean, if you do, Raidah’s all over that like white on rice.
I feel like Raidah’s a pretty terrible person, but I don’t think she’s in like, Mary’s league, who isn’t in Ryan’s league. Raidah’s like more in Penny’s league of being a shithead, though we’ve at least seen there are some things Raidah believes in, which puts her ahead of Penny, who was just kind of a hedonist.
Joyce also has a history of punching men, so I wonder if that helps or hurts her chances of being a teacher? She could also, like, move to a more progressive area and become a teacher.
I Think Joyce Should Professionally Punch Men
“What an unpleasant thing to say” I think as I eat my popcorn and revel in the drama.
You get it
Raidah dropped the mic so hard that the comment section completely forgot to make dick jokes
My bad there’s some up here
The whiplash from the night to night reading of this webcomic is crazy.
Also the number of times I’ve seen the word “Bongo” tonight reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend when we were discussing how dudes kept saying “Females”
She was like “It’s faster if they would just call me a bongo like they want to”
Oooh, is that what happens? That’s funny.
Yeah, THAT particular filter was implemented when people were using it VERY abundantly re.: Roz for, and you WOULD NEVER GUESS, calling out the pretty blonde white christian girl.
To pharphrase the Dude
“You’re not wrong Raidah you’re just an asshole!”
The sliding timescale mention in the alt text made me check, and yep, back at the beginning of the semester, same-sex marriage was not yet legal in Indiana. It makes one wonder what will be legal in the year 2130 when Willis’ great-grandchild draws Joyce and Dorothy graduating.
Shit it might not be legal again in a few months
You’re talking about 2010, and I have bad news for you about the vast majority of the country back then.
Like. Massachusetts and Virginia had something, CA very briefly and technically had something, but for most of the country it was a Supreme Court ruling in 2016.
2015, I believe?
It doesn’t much matter, but it twigged for me because I lived abroad in 2015 and was back in the states by 2016. Also the ruling dropped on my birthday, which is nice when previouslt the most significant historical event to happen on June 25th was the start of the Korean War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obergefell_v._Hodges
Shoulda googled cuz I misremembered a few things but it’s important to remember that civili unions were not necessarily the same thing.
SCOTUS is going to hear a case about overturning Obergefell (something Thomas has been asking for an opportunity to do since Dobbs) this Friday, so there’s a non-zero chance that Raidah could drop that “In Indiana.” from her speech and still be correct.
In fact, there’s a non-zero chance this administration will outright illegalise gay relationships, sooooo… :grimacing:
With the “Respect for Marriage” act Congress passed in 2022, overturning a previous court ruling wouldn’t suddenly make gay marriage illegal federally. And I just checked, I don’t see anything about people challenging that law.
Well, there’s no point in doing it while Obergefell stands.
Where I live the 5th of November is Bonfire Night so what a day wonderful coincidence the comment section today will be a flaming heap of garbage.
Yeaaaaaaaah it’s also full moon!!!
Time to hooooowwwwwl and party!!!
Ice cream and tea and rum!!!
Right after Halloween, too. You’d think it would be better about these things.
Man we had a whole 2 days off from talking about Joyce/Dorothy
Whats Carla up to? What about Danny? Its been a while since we’ve seen either of them
I approve of More Carla and Charlie.
I called this. I said 48 hours on the comic when Walky first texted Amber, and LO AND BEHOLD!
I remember that! I saw this strip and my first thought was “yep, that was dead on”.
The preview panels suggest we should see Carla soon. In fact, it seems like the plot originally went right from Walky/Amber to Carla before the Big Rewrite.
Personally, I think Raidah should be honest about what’s bothering her, instead of stewing over the best way to emotionally destroy people who barely know she exists.
I love your summary of the situation!
That would involve Raidah self reflecting
self-reflecting doesn’t help you get a high score in Career, which is a totally real thing, and logical to want to achieve.
she’s totally unlike Dorothy and Joyce in every way, after all. she knows this. because she is cool and win, and they are cringe and fail.
Raidah? Honest?
Oh wow the hater containment thread was flagged out of existence by accident again,
I’ll say, that was FAST 😂
It did too? What the hell?
I’m gonna be real, this just made me less convinced it was an accident.
Plenty of highly-trafficed threads don’t get that volume of ‘accidental’ reports.
I mean it still COULD be. But…
Would not surprise me if it was intentional
Like think about it tho
Flags are accidentally distributed evenly across all comments under normal circumstances, right?
Those accidents are now happening all in one place because more commenters than usual are all aiming for the same site button when they try to make a reply
Inplying so many ppl are trying to reply to the containment thread but hitting report instead?
yeah that’s how reading comments tends to go on mobile devices :/
Yeaaaa im guilty of that
…Is there maybe some kind of upstreaming behavior? Like, it’s gotta be comment by comment, not something where there’s a setting of “if X number of replies get reported, axe the whole thing”? I have no idea how this comments section is coded or by whom/what.
The report link causes comments to get put into moderation automatically when a certain threshold is reached, I think 10 reports.
Oh, no, i understand what you’re saying.
My counterpoint is that plenty of threads, historically, get an equal volume of traffic of clicks without that kind of miss rate.
It’m not saying it *is* intentional, yet, but twice in a row is the *potential* start of a pattern.
I’m thinking about how you got robbed when you only got silver in mental gymnastics.
Be nice 🔪
The last one never came back either, did it?
This definitely doesn’t feel like an accident…
It didn’t come back, probably because the point of the report comment button is so that Willis DOESN’T have to constantly babysit this place
There is a middle ground between “constantly” and “any time in the last several days”, though.
I mean, if indiana’s the ‘kinsey state/bisexual state’ or so i imagine there prolly are gay married teachers but either wayh i never rly heard about any of my straight teachers partners other than the fact that they may have had one or saw wedding rings lol
Wooooooooow, this strip is layered. I can see people are being incredibly normal about both Raidah’s comments and the wider, both fictional and real world, social contexts that lend complexity to the interactions between her and Joyce.
God I love this weed.
Interpretation of this longform narrative and, indeed, the short-panel comic strip format on a metatextual level, is DEFINITELY not in any way compromised by the deep bigotries and unspoken assumptions coming to light in our wider society due to the need, socially engineered into us over decades by literal technofascists, to sort every bite of interaction into short, punchy Hot Takes to which everyone must ascribe moral as well as narrative weight.
There are no winners and losers in our world and no teleological determinism stating that humanity must survive itself. Can we all just fucking admit Raidah is hot and gives 2020s Regina George and I am, on some level, giddy to have her as an antagonist, SHE’S the new Mike, all y’all are haters and I love it.
Except this isn’t real life, it’s a comic, written by an author, with narrative intent. And on the second point, eh.
Okay but it IS real life. We sitting here consuming the comic are real people in real life, and that shapes what we see and how we react to it.
damn, you’re right, i now ALSO love your weed
I very much do not like her.
Did we lose the containment thread? *reads comments* Apparently, yes. Well, that’s lame. What did I say before?
Ah yes.
On one hand, we have sad looking Joyce. More! Give me more! Yes, I do believe people who cheat without remorse deserve to be unhappy. Why do you ask?
On the other hand, Raidah… said a bad thing. She says lots of bad things but this is a particularly nasty thing to say. And I probably shouldn’t cosign that.
*sighs* My poor heart and mind are conflicted!
man, if only it was possible to narratively enjoy the beats of a story, without necessarily morally condoning all the actions contained therein. if only reading the comic was something other than a moral exercise to get a High Score on the Morality Test by Judging which characters are and are not morally correct. if only we could live in such a world, but alas, it is our responsibility as readers to make absolutely sure that we virtue signal as hard as possible, that we continue to understand that Bad Things Are Bad.
(if it’s not clear, I’m commiserating with your desire to enjoy a story unfolding, without having to be irrationally held responsible for every conceivable ill contained within, because enjoying a story is an expression of moral assent, somehow)
Just trying to gauge where we’re at here, cause to my understanding for weeks as this Joyce x Dorothy story developed the major complaint has essentially boiled down to “Joyce and/or Dorothy are not sad enough.” That has been framed in different ways with the widely used comment buzz word “CONSEQUENCES”. Now that someone has sought one of them out and purposefully made them feel bad we’re instead mad at the person for being an asshole. (Which they definitely are.) But why are we mad?:
1. Because Raidah isn’t Joe or Walky? Or someone else we’ve possibly decided isn’t reacting with the immediately cathartic righteous indignation at being directly slighted by them?
2. Raidah is just being too mean here in a way disproportionate to her perceived investment in Joyce and Dorothy as a couple (None of her business)
3. This is blatant homophobia
4. Some other reason I can’t think up because we’re all individuals with unique opinions.
I’m just asking because for my understanding this what a lot of folks wanted, just not the way they wanted it.
A villain making a homophobic comment for no apparent reason just to be mean is different from someone affected by her behavior being angry, yes.
See my argument for that would be Raidah has been directly affected by her behavior. Is there a statute of limitations on being mad at Joyce for her bad behavior? Last I checked Raidah is minus one boyfriend because of Joyce unapologetically lying to her exe’s older brother and purposefully undermining that relationship. Basically a lot of the reasons we’re mad at Joyce right now. Which has always bern why Raidah is mean to her.
I do personally think Raidah has crossed a line here and is disproportionately mad at Joyce and Sarah when she should be mad at Jacob.
But if we’re saying Raidah has no reason to be mad at Joyce that’s just not true.
“Consequences” and “feeling bad” aren’t synonymous here. Becky having a meltdown, or her mom disowning her, or no longer being able to have a career in education, are all things that would make her feel bad, but none of those are happening because she was selfish and inconsiderate of the people around her. All of those things would happen when people found out she was dating a woman, regardless of how or when she went about it.
One of the consequences I want is for Joyce to feel remorseful about how she’s been treating the people around her. I don’t want an anvil to drop from the sky on her head.
Oops I forgot to move my response to the parent comment. That’s a response to your first comment, not this one. My bad.
This one’s a little weird, since it’s almost certainly a consequence of Joyce’s previous bad behavior with Jacob, but it’s framed as if it’s just for her being queer.
Also that any justified causal link here is tied to that arc months ago (years ago in our terms), not to the recent events that people wanted consequences for.
I think part of this continued consequences debate is just that characters didn’t immediately respond in a way a section of readers wanted them to and granted that immediate, cathartic reprimand for Joyce and Dorothy’s actions.
I don’t think this is intentional framed as Raidah cutting at Joyce for being queer. I think readers just have short term memory. Raidah may be upset about the protest photo but her motivation for her cruelty to Joyce has always been because Joyce stole Jacob. Her finally potentially finding a way to hurt her is just a long term payoff that happens to coincide with Joyce’s current bad behavior.
I think if people really want immediate consequences from people hurt by their recent actions that’s just not going to happen one in comic day out from events. Not from Raidah, not for Joe or Walky, and the consequences we expect would be totally out of character from the people we want them from.
Joe and Walky aren’t gonna pop off. Raidah will pop off but not for the reasons we want and we won’t like her for it. That’s the cards being dealt here.
I don’t think it’s framed that way, and I guess I phrased that badly: Raidah’s framing it that. Raidah’s making a homophobic slash at Joyce. She’s doing it in a way that preserves plausible deniability, but she’s still doing it. She’s doing it because of her (partly justified) grudge against Joyce.
Beyond that though, I don’t think it would have been out of character for either Joe or Walky to have been upset at the cheating rather than just losing their girlfriends. Not necessarily “pop off”, whatever exactly that means to you, but something on the level of what Sarah said to Joyce earlier.
Even Raidah could easily have taken the “hussy” approach she used when she first saw the photo and heard that Dorothy had been dating Walky, but she didn’t. I think something along those lines would have been perfectly in character. But Willis chose to have her use homophobia instead.
I think #3 is why the people upset are upset.
Raidahs a bongo
*slams the three button repeatedly*
.I mean, Raidah is being a bit hypocritical in the last panel. She does not really care about anything except what she wants. A recent example was when Jennifer asked her to help with Alice, and all Raidah cared about was her grudge against Sarah. She is also not self aware about her own self centered behavior. Both Joyce and Raidah are kind of the same in this situation.
Point two is where it sticks for me. Raidah says cruel things simply to be cruel, even if she is right sometimes. And yes, Indiana has not fully adopted a homophobic stance toward LGBTQIA teachers yet, but it is a realistic concern. She is right that Joyce is being selfish.
To conclude my word salad: I do not like how Joyce is acting, and I do not like how Raidah is acting. They are both selfish and cruel, just in different ways.
Eugh, Raidah is so disgusting.
I get Raidah’s a hate sink character, but I’m not sure how to feel about like her being homophobic. She has interesting insights packaged in like her caustic way of talking and toxic outlook, but like
I guess I’m feeling I’m supposed to hate when I’m feeling more confused at what her meta reason for being in the story is.
I don’t know if I believe Raidah is truly homophobic. I mean, she might be, but it seems more like she’s using the existence of homophobia to hurt Joyce more than actually judging her for being gay. I think the fact that she may weaponize something she doesn’t believe in to attack her enemies speaks to something much deeper than if she just didn’t like gay people.
I was gonna like have an extra sentence explaining she was weaponizing homophobia, but didn’t want to like get to technical on whether she actually is homophobic or just using rhetoric to make her point in a hurtful way.
But yeah her characterization is fascinating, if not incredibly maddening. I guess I feel weird about it cause like… I’m not sure if I’m supposed to forever hate Raidah or am i supposed to sit here and decipher past it. Maybe both…
Raidah strikes me also as the kind of person that will wield the accusation of islamophobia and racism as a shield against criticism ,as unpleasant as that may be to acknowledge such people exist.
That would be interesting to explore
But Id fear the reaction if Raidah does something like that. Like I said she’s a hate sink, but I feel it stifles nuance and is hard to write around without that automatic reaction (not even getting into fandom racism and sexism)
I think we need only look back to how she psyched Dorothy out about the office of the Presidency to understand what kind of person she is – it really doesn’t matter what she truly believes, what matters is, can she say something that hurts the other person.
Which is an interesting comparison, since a lot of people were nodding along with that and taking that one as not only true, but also as Raidah’s true opinion.
Until we get thought bubbles I think it can be hard to derive the true opinions of the characters on topics like this. until then we have to look at their actions and words as depicted and I think what we see if Raidah cares more about winning and looking good (to herself and whoever she’s trying to impress) than the actual truth, even if they may coincide. I mean she can believe all American presidents are war criminals,I don’t think that really changes the net effect.
This is exactly what happened and I think there should be a deeper discussion about whether weaponizing homophobic information to attack someone is itself homophobic. I don’t think it is. I think Raidah just hates Joyce and will do nearly anything to make her feel bad, which is different and possibly worse than being homophobic.
Honestly I think i’m with you on that.
I dunno. I think a willingness to use Homophobia in order to hurt someone shows some level of homophobia regardless of actual intent. In the same way using someone’s weight as a way to critique or hurt them shows a latent idea of bigotry underneath the skin.
I don’t think we know very much of Raidah’s actual personality. I believe she hates the presidency office, and possibly other high level politicians just by inference. We also know she’s ableist, but okay enough with ant least pot. Otherwise she’s very corporate. Hell, she could’ve been more normal before Dana got sent off and that triggered her villain arc.
As far as homophobia goes, I wouldn’t be surprised if Raidah is, but not like Mary levels. I feel like she would argue what she said above isn’t homophobic, even though it very much is.
Easy. Raidah’s most sincerely held belief is that people who have wronged her, either objectively or in her own mind, should be in abject misery at all times. All things are permissible in service of that goal. Plenty of people exist like that in real life, many of them on social media
Raidah would definitely convince someone’s husband to cheat on them with her and then yell at him for going along with it. Maximum disruption to as many lives as possible, and tonight we support that.
I don’t find it a pleasant way to be, not even in a satisfyingly-hateable-villain way, but you have fun
This could interestingly lead to Joyce re-assessing what she wants her major to be. I totally forgot it was elementary education until now, and I don’t think it’s ever really been explored WHY Joyce wants to teach younger kids, but I think her fundamentalist upbringing has a lot to do with it. Which, with her rejecting basically everything about that upbringing more and more, she may ask herself if being an elementary school teacher is really what she wants.
Also would love to see Raidah just get fucking destroyed at some point. Can’t wait for the day where we get a strip where she realizes that being 19-years-old means she does not, in fact, know everything, and it puts her on the back foot in a big way.
If I recall, when she first came to this school, she wasn’t actually planning on using her degree at all.
She just planned on using school as a way to find a man, after which she’d be a good christian stay at home mother and housewife.
Dorothy actually kind of dug into her a bit for her casual assumption that as a woman she’d never have to hold a job.
I think it’s safe to say Joyce has moved pretty far from that original plan at this point, and it may be time to reconsider her career path.
I think she could swap to art and pursue comic creation could be a fun arc.
Also further pushes the willis self insert
I loved that arc in Hayate the Combat Butler.
Nagi Sanzinin, spoiled heiress for god knows how many chapters, has always had these silly little comics she works on. They’re completely incomprehensible to anybody but her and her friends, but they’re a huge source of joy for her.
At this point in the story, she’s been cut off from the family money, and she starts earnestly looking into comics as a career. She has to start asking difficult questions about how she conveys visual information, not just to herself and her buddies, but any reader that doesn’t have the context of all their late night conversations about the story.
It would be a little different for Joyce since she’s already got a comic in the paper and she’s started asking herself some of these questions, but I think it would be a cool direction for Joyce.
Basically what it got me thinking here. Like. Oh no. Nobody in the history of ever has had to reconsider changing career prospects from what they absolutely knew they would want to do when they started college. And Raidah has surely been here long enough to know that a good chunk of freshmen won’t be great at sticking to their major. This is such a shallow dig. It would really only hold up if Joyce had at any point demonstrated a true passion for the calling.
She asked herself if it was what she really wants and decided it is, but it’s not like she was super committed to it. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/goals/
Yeah to echo others it’s clear Raidah is the type of person who will say anything if it serves her rhetorical purposes. A career in politics, if not as a politician,as a staffer awaits her. She will be despised in private but in public she will play the role a lot better than Robin did.
The irony here is that she’s not at all effective at being a bad guy. Like, at all.
Very effective at a Meta level though, judging by the comments section
While I don’t like Raidah she makes a good point about how selfish Joyce can ne
Setting aside whether or not you think Joyce has been acting in a self-centered way lately, the idea that Raidah actually cares that people aren’t paying enough attention to the protest is inane. If she actually cared, she would have been there, and she wasn’t. She’s just adopting a convenient moral stance in order to justify her desire to be petty and cruel.
She has a lot to say on the subject of who was in what photograph, but at the end of the day the people who get photographed are the people who show up.
Easy to come in, after all the work is over, and give your take on what should’ve been done differently. Harder to actually put the time in when there’s work to be done.
Joyce and Dorothy may not have conducted themselves perfectly at that protest, but I think they were still more useful than Raidah giving her post-game breakdown of where everybody fucked up.
Eh? Neither Joyce nor Dorothy were at the protest because they actually gave a crap.
Dorothy was there because she was having a self-destructive breakdown. Joyce was there because she was worried about her sister.
Literally doesn’t matter. You can criticize their motives all day long, they were there, they were putting the work in, Raidah wasn’t.
Somebody who works a soup kitchen because they want an excuse to get out of the house is just as useful as somebody who works a soup kitchen because they care for the plight of the hungry, and both of them are more useful than somebody who shows up after the kitchen’s closed to tell them what they should’ve done better.
You can apply this to any material pursuit under the sun.
There are plenty of understandable reasons why Raidah may not have been at the protest and I’m tired of people gatekeeping it but I think it’s even worse to say Dorothy and Joyce did more for it by dint of being there. They weren’t there to protest, they weren’t there because they directly cared about what was happening, they weren’t even well-informed on the situation or what was happening around them. For all we know, Raidah may have family directly affected by the conflict in Bulmeria.
The only work Dorothy put in was holding up a sign for a minute tops when everyone else was evacuating because she was spiraling. C’mon now.
Does. Not. Matter.
You could compare it to literally anything. When the postal service is making all those Christmas Deliveries, they need hands on packages. They need feet on the ground. They do not need Raidah showing up on December 26th telling them how they did it wrong.
If you don’t “care” about the packages your hands are still as good as anybody’s.
It. Does. Matter. It matters because you are refusing to understand that saying “well if Raidah wasn’t there she doesn’t get to have an opinion” is a very shitty thing to say. Especially regarding an issue that directly affects Raidah. Would you tell a black person they aren’t allowed to comment on something that happens at a BLM protest because they weren’t there? Or a gay person who wasn’t able to attend pride? “erm, you weren’t there, so you’re no longer allowed to have an opinion”.
Also like by their logic disabled people are inherently less “useful” if their disability prevents them from going to an on site protest.
Doesn’t matter if you did lots of pre-protest organising, arranged supplies, served as legal aid after or anything – you just gotta stand there to count. Knowing anything about the protest and its goals and following instructions from the organisers is apparently totally optional.
On one hand black people in America are directly impacted by issues in the BLM movement. On the other hand, we literally don’t even know five things about this country and protests, but are coding it as righteous and not a bunch of Americans sticking their nose into international affairs and being self-righteous hypocrites while we burn the world down (economically, environmentally, etc.).
So doing the work at home or dealing with issues at home may be wildly different than the kind of protesting that looks cool, but really doesn’t make you knowledgeable or have any path to a solution. “I’m upset” isn’t quite enough to make a protest good, especially if you consider the thousands of injustices that don’t hit that media radar.
To make it too real, some American president right now is talking about invading an African nation to defend Christian interests. Sounds kinda dangerous, huh?
While we don’t know anything specific about the situation in Bulmeria, we do know that the protest is against the US (or US arms companies) providing weapons to the country that’s being accused of committing genocide. The protest isn’t demanding US intervention – which would be the parallel to your last point, but to have the US stop intervening.
Plus, it’s Israel/Gaza. The parallels are everywhere – in the signs, the rhetoric, even the details of the protest (other than our cast specifically). There’s a fig leaf over it, but it’s disingenuous to argue it’s not meant to be the parallel.
It does matter though. The only part of the protest that they actually took part in was Dorothy going back in to make a grandstand play when the organizers had already decided to evacuate. They didn’t help at all.
Raidah couldn’t be at the protest, because it might impact her future career prospects to be seen as a radical. She seems to view every single daily thought and behavior through this lens, before anything else. If it isn’t getting her life goal ahead, it’s irrelevant at best, and toxic at worst.
Oh good, Raidah went out of her were to say something curt and callous. But she didn’t didn’t do it because she cares. Oh no, she’s above it all, she’s just making an “observation” as usual.
And no one changes their major in their freshman year!
Never been done. Unprecedented problem with no clear solution.
Right? Like, Joyce chose that major when she still thought she was going to get her MRS degree. Is elementary education even something she’s that committed to anymore?
1- I got scared, and some other mixed feelings, about how Joyce is so self aware of herself in 4th panel.
2- Raidah, as so influent and powerful, just keeps taking more and more hits by Joyce. Or some friends of her.
3 – …. Raidah will try to kill Joyce some day, won’t she?
I don’t think Raidah will try to kill Joyce, as others have said in the past. She def knows Asher is in the mob and that is somehow important to her, but I totally don’t think her ultimate goal is actual murder. She’s far too up her own ass for that.
Alright that’s enought comment section for me today
Try and kill joyce? Talk aviut escalation
Don’t go! I’m still developing it!
I mean, this comic said stuff like “no main cast will ever die” and “the stakes for this strip will stay lower” for a long time, and we’ve thus far had 2 kidnappings, a brutal stabbing, a car chase complete with ramping of motorcycle, and at least 3 murders? I get what you mean, tbf, but I also don’t think it’s unreasonable to fear sudden, rapid escalations and tonal shifts in this serial, specifically. We’ve been there hella times.
That seems like a huge leap
cuz she talkin like some anime student council antagonist XD
you know, the kind with some ominous theme music
Death Battle, who would win: Raidah or Light Yagami?
…So, I’m not a fan of Raidah and I think the people defending her here are disingenuous at best. But I’m going to show some solidarity with the anti-Doyce, pro-Raidah crowd and ask:
What the actual fuck?
Like, there’s a big gap between self-centered, high-school-mentality ladder-climbing with a side of bigotry that she might grow out of with some introspection; and like, actual murder?
Much like the “war criminal” jab at Dorothy, Raidah’s not entirely wrong, but her point is laced with so much malice that you can’t help but default to “Man, fuck you!”
War criminal jab lead to Dorothy spiraling and lead to this moment.
Her sucking up to Walky for Dean connection lead to breaking up Asher and Billy.
She’s the catalyst comet here, except she mostly burns herself.
Yeah, she is COMPLETELY ineffective as a villain. I love it.
as it turns out, being really manipulative to everybody around you, has destructive downstream effects! who could have known?!
Exactly, she’s trying pull the same move she did on Dorothy. Painting a narrow picture designed to make her subject feel bad about themselves. She’s deliberately trying to do harm.
She’s just hypocrite. She wants to be a lawyer, but who’s to say she won’t represent the worst of the worst? She didn’t seem to care about the protest until her rivals made the front page. She gatekeeps morals and ethics. Uses people for her own ends. Acts like she’s above it all, but goes out of her way to make stink. Her words and action says very spiteful.
And yet somehow she’s STILL better than Mary… At least her accusations have a grain of truth to them.
I dunno. At least Mary is upfront and honest about her bigotry and contempt. You know where you stand with her because she tells you. What you see is what you get.
Raidah on the other hand is more deceitful and manipulative. She usually has ulterior motives with her interactions. On top of that her words and actions are more cutting and damaging.
You can see Mary’s machinations a mile away, but you may not know Raidah stabbed you in the gut.
Raidah has superficially good politics while being too spite-driven and self-centered to ever truly act on them. Mary is a hair’s breadth from sieg heiling in the common room, but has shown she’ll act with discretion if it’ll cause more harm to her perceived enemies. They’re simply not on the same level of heinous yet.
i dunno, the war criminal comment felt FAR more “off the cuff” – like the kind of knee-jerk thing youd say without really thinking how it would hit someone. sure it’s crappy to auto-reply to someone’s goals with a shutdown, but it wasn’t actively malicious like this was
that showed us the vibe of raidah’s personality, but this shows us her *intent*
Everything else aside, this feels like a weird take from a future civil rights attorney???
What? You wouldn’t trust her to defend your civil rights? Just because she views civil injustice as a cudgel to use in petty disputes?
Weird. I can’t say I understand that way of thinking. /s
I don’t think she ever specified what side of civil rights she’d be on
+1
Do you think she wants to be a civil rights attorney for civil rights, or for being an attorney? They are not the same thing.
She’s gonna intern for Bart o’Ryan.
I mean, a very notable civil rights lawyer in the US was Fred Phelps, so like… one can pursue that and still be a terrible person.
(Not that Raidah is anywhere near Fred’s league of terrible, just, this isn’t disqualifying.)
I can Raidah growing up and really making the world a better place through her career. While also being an ass. Spite is a great motivator that can often outlast hope and determination!
Where did she specify she wanted to be a civil rights attorney? Is that just something I’ve forgotten?
I don’t think she ever did. She praised Harrison’s work in getting an anti-trans law overturned, but she never said she wanted to do that herself.
Oh thank goodness, for like six seconds there I had to sorta sympathize with Raidah on the protest situation and whatnot. So of course she goes and says probably the worst thing she’s ever said.
False, the real truth is that she had nothing else that would have stuck. Even this might not stick because I’m wondering if Joyce might have contemplated changing career paths a couple of times…plus if not she could just move over to Illinois right next door. They seemed to have stayed consistently blue for decades now.
I seem to remember Joyce only declared a major because she needed one. Her whole goal since the beginning of the strip was to get an MRS. degree. And it seems she’s now speedrunning to that since she found the “perfect” partner in Dorothy.
Well she chose education so she could homeschool her children as a good Christian housewife. But that’s not really on the cards now
Unpopular opinion but correct: Raidahs manipulations always work,
Just not as she intended.
I’d expect Joyce to switch majors. Law would be funny.
nah she’d make a terrible lawyer
I’d say she should get into animation or graphic design :p
Animation would be so good for her!
….Is this another case of “The world is a ended up being a better place when_______ stayed in art school.”
Don’t worry, Joyce. From your perspective there’s a new President every, what, six hours?
This comment deserves more visibility lol
I know this was a joke, but I decided to check, and from Joyce’s persepective, the Biden Presidency lasted 17 days.
Maybe the timescale is the real reason so many people can’t be normal about this comic, lmao. I’ve never followed a story that progressed so slowly within, relative to the passage of time without.
Wow Raidah, that is… that’s quite a way to act right after prayer. “Ah yes, let me get in touch with the benevolent creator of the universe so I can attuned my mind to compassion and justice.” Ten minutes later “Time to get myself some petty revenge! After all, everybody knows two wrongs make a right!”
Unfortunately lawyers and politicians are also well known to be diligent in being seen to pray and proclaiming they pray.
While that’s probably true broadly speaking, if the idea is that Raidah is trying to get ahead in her career by showing what a holy woman she is, she’s probably chosen the wrong religion for that.
Usually lawyers and politicians in America are Christian in overt, showy ways, in order to win over a Christian votership.
I suspect Raidah is sincerely islamic in her beliefs, and not just putting on airs in a cynical ploy to win over the population, somehow not having gotten the memo that a muslim woman may as well be the boogeyman to a lot of the locals here.
Fair point, I didn’t communicate it well but what I meant was the fact that she prays, and Mary even be very sincere about it, has never stopped anyone from being … flexible in their morals and ethics regardless, moreso people in the line of work Raidah seems determined to go into
Oh yeah, absolutely.
I’ve long maintained that God is mostly just a rhetorical device. He’s a hypothetical external entity people assign their own beliefs and values to. Not something actually capable of voicing a dissenting opinion.
Raidah hates Joyce, so obviously, in her eyes, god hates Joyce too, and fully endorses any petty acts taken against her. God will never say anything to the contrary, and if anything did speak to the contrary she wouldn’t consider it to be god.
In the same way that for American Christians, whether God hates or loves gay people really just depends on whether the person speaking on God’s behalf hates or loves gay people. You would implicitly understand that if somebody was holding a sign saying “God hates gay people”, that they personally hated gay people, and they weren’t merely expressing one of god’s opinions which they find disagreeable.
All that basically to say that religiosity doesn’t inherently make anybody more or less moral than anybody else. It just kind of changes the way you speak about morality.
Also,I don’t think she really got to choose her religion, more likely she was born into it and i think explicitly rejecting it is a step too far even for her.
hahahaha holy shit I forgot that the last thing she professed she was doing was praying. she 100% spent the entire exercise coming up with the most cutting thing to say that she could humanly conceive of
I think I got a take here and I’m not sure people will like it. This is a consequence for cheating! Just not the cheating we think of. This is Raidah trying to get back at Joyce for stealing Jacob. Joyce is accused of stealing Dorothy from Walky which is totally untrue, Joyce actually stole Jacob but just wasn’t allowed to keep him. Raidah’s sole motivation for hating Joyce is because of her part in destroying her relationship and in my opinion it’s mostly justified.
Joyce having only ever met Raidah briefly one time, and only knowing what she was told about Raidah by Sarah, decided to steal her boyfriend. And it worked! Even after Sarah backed off because she realized she was using Joyce and being selfish. Joyce still decided that didn’t matter and hurt Raidah on a deep personal level that she has never once felt sorry about.
That’s why Raidah thinks Joyce has no shame. Seeing Joyce’s picture in the paper actively undermining a protest with the kiss is just more confirmation of Raidah’s bias. Joyce has no shame and doesn’t care about other people when it comes to games of love. And we’ve seen that with Joe and Dorothy. Everything everyone’s been saying about Joyce for weeks now about how she just stopped caring or thinking of Joe when Dorothy’s romance route unlocked. Joyce is very selfish in this way. Not even understanding that there could possibly be justifiable reasons not to kiss someone even if you really want to.
I think we can be mad at Raidah for being an asshole here but I think this only happens to Joyce specifically because Joyce has been kind of a jerk this entire time.
Good take
I agree with this take. The Jacob situation was incredibly messy and was definitely one of the first peeks into how single minded Joyce can get when it comes to romance.
I like this!
yep totally agree
Oh certainly, like raidah has a genuine reason to not like Joyce unlike most people she doesn’t like, because joyce actually did try steal Jacob (which everyone lost in that situation isn’t he end) but that was 100% a shitty thing to do, and raidah disliking her is justified.
That being said raidah is using Joyce’s sexuality to hurt her, rather than actually caring about the protest.
She doesn’t even mention she undermined it, or took away from it. She just says “you won’t get a job because you like girls”
She doesn’t care about the protest as much as she thinks she does, she barely mentioned it here.
Tho yes, joyce can be incredibly selfish when it comes to romance, and has made so many questionable decisions, but it doesn’t justify raidah using homophobia to make her feel shit.
Whoah calm down there kettle
Um… these days, even in a relatively conservative state like Indiana, two teen girls kissing would be met with a yawn or a “neat,” before flipping to the next page. I think Joyce’s future in teaching would be more in danger if she was ACTUALLY protesting the school’s connection to Evil Corporation.
Of all the negative consequences Joyce deserves for that boneheaded and selfish decision, being told “no” to a job because of a kiss four years prior is not one of them.
Re: your first paragraph, that…. depends. It really, really depends.
My experience with Indiana primarily centers around Gary, which is very close to Chicago, the city I live in, and they really don’t care about sexuality at all. POT, on the other hand…
not remotely tru unfort
Furthermore, neither Joyce nor Dorothy were credited in this photo as the women in the pic.
I don’t think Raidah is a homophobe, if for no other reason than because she regarded Jacob’s brother very highly and Jacob’s brother’s main law achievement (that we’ve been informed of as the reader) is being involved with striking down anti trans laws. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/laws/ She’s out of pocket to say this to Joyce, but she said herself that she thinks Joyce would only care about a consequence that affects Joyce rather than other people, so she’s pointing out a consequence she may have in the future. During the conversation with Asma about the protest all Joyce could say is “I wanna kiss! I wanna kiss!!”.
“She’s not a homophobe. She just commits the occasional act of homophobia. She just wields homophobia in an intentional attempt to hurt gay people who displease her. But like, in her heart she’s virtuous or whatever.”
This is a good faith comment. You’re such a great person and I hope you’re very proud of yourself.
Raidah consistently proved that whatever her beliefs are, they are all secondary. She cares more about how sue is perceived and her social standing that she will drop people at the drop of a hat.
She may technically not believe she’s homophobic, but using someone’s sexuality as a weapon against them is homophobia, her previous words are irrelevant when her current actions show that.
She could have approached it as “hey kissing like that in the middle of a protest was super inappropriate because it took away from the actual protest” instead she said kissing girls means you won’t be allowed to teach kids. It was pointed and intentional use Joyce’s sexuality to make her feel like shit.
Thanks for actually engaging with my comment unlike Gangler. You’ve turned me. I can agree that she’s doing a homophobia.
Yeah, focussing on homophobia as something to believe in, to the point that you lose sight of homophobia as something you do, is misguided.
If she’s willing to weaponize homophobia against Joyce, then she’s homophobic in her deeds, and any admiration she has for accomplished pro-trans lawyers can do nothing to diminish that.
Gonna just branch off of this: plenty of people who say they support LGBTQ+ people, and in many ways actually do, still use attacks based on homophobia. I had an interaction with someone in this comment section where they made an off-hand comment I found hurtful, and it was a long back and forth before they got my point, during which they threw in “It’s lucky that I’m an ally enough that I’m not pushed away by stuff like this; this is what turns people against supporting LGBTQ+.” Saying someone’s attitude makes it understandable that people hate them and deny them rights is homophobic, even if you yourself are such a good “ally.” Additionally, sometimes people will respond to homophobes with, “I hope your kids turn put to be gay,” which is so fucked up! Gay kids are not a punishment, and do you realize you’re also wishing for something that would likely cause those gay kids a lot of pain?
So Raidah may not agree with homophobia in general, but that doesn’t mean her arguments don’t rely on homophobia.
Your points are also reasonable and I agree. Thank you for responding. Also that person should understand that as an ally sometimes they need to be willing to bend the knee a little or otherwise just take shit on the chin sometimes, being an ally doesn’t mean having one’s ass kissed while they’re spoonfed basic information.
I feel like if someone just needs a single incident with a single person to write off the entire LGBTQ+ cause, they weren’t really much of an ally. I have had some pretty unpleasant interactions with people who also happened to be queer, but it didn’t change my stance on the issue. It just made me go “oh, wow, this individual is a jerk. I will no longer associate with them.”
If you were to write off every group that had at least one unpleasant member, would there be anyone left once you were done?
That’s a generic “you”, by the way. Not specific to Tequila Mockingbird. Wasn’t sure if that was clear.
Also, this is Raidah.
Do we actually know she regarded Harrison highly? Or did she just know Jacob did and used that to motivate him?
Being Raidah, she may regard Harrison’s success highly, he managed to overturn a long standing precedent and recieved, we’re told, some pretty big news coverage. I would not be shocked if that’s a level of notoriety she herself hopes to achieve in her future career… potentially regardless of how she achieves it (eg. the lawyers who represented OJ Simpson.)
o3o
Gotta be honest. It’s crazy to me that even the Doyce-hatingest commenters are taking Raidah’s side. I feel like there’s a trend to people who think any punishment goes so long as they feel like the victim “deserves” it. Which is why I think people have a bad habit of falling into bigoted rhetoric when it comes to wishing ill on a person they don’t like.
Don’t be a Raidah.
Yeah if I dare say it it’s a really right-wing way of looking at things where moral code isn’t about shaping society for the better, but about deciding who gets *punished*
The line between hating gay people and mainly hating one particular gay person specifically can get so easily blurred…hatred is just a hell of a drug period.
Yeah the fact that people are siding with Raidah here is making me legitimately uncomfortable, tbh.
Wait, what does “siding with Raidah” look like
I think there’s an important difference between “Yes Raidah, you are correct” and “She isn’t wrong, but she’s only doing this to hurt someone she dislikes.”
She does have a point that being openly queer in a red state doesn’t bode well for Joyce’s chances of working with children. If I lived in Missouri, just because I’m trans, being a teacher would be largely an impossibility. The problem is that Raidah isn’t concerned for Joyce’s future, she just wants to cut her down, and that’s not cool.
I’m not sure if it’s just an internet thing, or just a twitter thing, where people really love to find a “valid target” to be hateful towards.
Is this a mis comment?
Did you mean Doyce loving
( why wouldn’t the Doyce hating commenters be the first to take Raidahs side? )
Because she’s an awful person saying an awful thing?
Like that’s sorta my point. Even if you HATE Doyce, I don’t think you should take Raidah’s side. In the same way where I can hate Raidah but absolutely will not stand for people being islamaphobic or racist about her.
Nah. I think if you read most of the comments are angry at Raidah. For my opinion this strip frustrates me because it really muddies the validity of Raidah’s point by having her use methods that are morally detestable. I think Joyce should feel bad here for multiple reasons but because Raidah has used homophobic rhetoric that’s all anyone can focus on. Which is pretty fair, but just makes Raidah look like a supervillain when she’s kind of correct about Joyce and justified in being angry with her.
I think this is what I was trying to get at with my comment earlier. Why was she written like this when Raidah is already a hate sink?
Not to say characters can’t be terrible, including weaponizing homophobia, but it feels weird to have the one outspoken brown girl be a complete dickweed in a way that (I hope) everyone doesn’t like. Her dialogue makes it seem like she’s chastising Joyce about being (accidentally) openly queer and not HER ACTIONS that pissed her off in the first place.
Raidah is not the only outspoken brown girl in the comic. She’s not even the only brown girl to have been critical of Joyce over her and Dorothy’s relationship.
I didn’t mean to imply it that. Just, don’t think the comments section can be normal about outspoken nonwhite women in general. Let alone one who is genuinely being a shithead and her actual motivations are partially out of spitr.
(To be honest, women in general, given ummmm. Well you’ve seen the comments regarding Joyce and Dorothy.)
Meant to write “one of the outspoken brown girls”
I think the problem is that Raidah, specifically, doesn’t really have a great reason to be upset with Joyce in this particular instance. Like narratively most of my issues with the protest are Doylist, not Watsonian. Raidah doesn’t KNOW that but lord is she not like…asking questions or being normal about it.
Which y’know. Bad traits for a law student.
One: Joyce could still be a teacher
Two: Raidah fuuuuuuucken sucks.
Three: Joyce doesn’t have to be a teacher, she’s still a Freshman and could change her major. She only picked being a teacher because her original plan was to Homeschool her Children and be a Trad Wife while her husband goes out and makes all the money.
Four: Raidah SUCKS
I feel like the most impressive part of Raidah’s out-of-the-blue stab here is that she was genuinely so indignated at Daisy for making the protest media story be about white girls kissing instead just a minute ago that she had to go pray about it, and then apparently spent the entire prayer time trying to decide how she could best use this new revelation about Joyce being queer to hurt her in some novel way that she figured no one else would have gotten around to yet, and landed squarely on “you’re going to be discriminated against in the workforce and not trusted with children because you’re queer, and I personally think you deserve it” because Jacob realized Raidah wasn’t really his type because of Joyce months ago and broke up with her without even choosing Joyce over her. That’s an impressive amount of mental gymnastics.
The part of me that actually likes mean but complicated characters (like Sarah and Mike) genuinely does want to find reasons to like Raidah, but she’s making that really hard when she’s being this particular flavor of asshole to someone she barely knows solely to hurt them for incredibly petty reasons. Raidah’s intent here absolutely matters to me, and the intent is very clearly “use homophobia to hurt Joyce”, and whether or not she conceptually agrees with the homophobia is actually completely irrelevant because she’s perfectly happy to use it to hurt and scare someone for her own selfish reasons. She has absolutley no leg to stand on here calling Joyce out for being selfish when this entire exchange is because Raidah only cares about herself as well and Joyce briefly hurt her social status in the past.
Let’s be real, if Joyce had been in her friend group instead, Joyce being a bit selfish and willing to claim things for herself without always fully regarding everyone else’s feelings in the process would be the one thing Raidah actually respected about her. The reason she doesn’t is because 1) she’s Sarah’s friend instead of Raidah’s and 2) Raidah caught a stray of Joyce’s selfishness once, both of which are mortal offenses to her.
What’s wild is how mean to Raidah Joyce has been, and for a while, over and over, yet always thoughtlessly or unthinkingly.
It doesn’t even register in Joyce mind as mean to Raidah. Like she doesn’t count.
And when she was upset it was about consequences to herself ( with Jacob) .
But everything Raidah does is selfish so this is unlikely to stick, except getting Joyce to consider a major she actually wants.
I think Raidah is more| prickly that she disrespects Joyce as naive and ignorant yet Joyce keeps showing her up, over and over.
She failed to keep Billy from being friends.
She failed to keep Billy with Asher ( another gay couple asher-ethan she tried to break up !
)
She guilted Dorothy over being President, which lead directly to Jorothy in the protest and kissing and getting together.
Mike was trying to teach people lessons by being an asshole. Raidah trying to social climb and demonstrate superiority,yet she keeps teaching lessons or it backfiring.
I really hope Joyce doesn’t take it to heart . Because every time she does something for the greater good peoples lives are put at risk. Raidahs gonna get Amber killed.
But it’s about time Joyce changed majors. I think maybe Engineering would be better. I laugh if she switches to Paleontology.
Every time Raidah has tried to strike back it backfires and helps Joyce ( or Sarah).
( I’m not playing Devil’s advocate here. Raidahs a giant POS. I utterly despise her naked social climbing, using people, pretend friendships meangirlusm .
It’s just that Joyce has no way of knowing any of this about her.
Or how secretly passive aggressive Raidah has been. I think only Billy should know better. Raidah just doesn’t fuly count as a person because of her conflict with Sarah. )
I am also unsure how homophobic Raidah is. I think she has standards and may be ignorant how far she crossed them. ( Or she might know, but she’s passive aggressive and doesn’t want it openly known how much )
She really crossed the line trying to break up Ethan and Asher. There may have been a homophobic undertone in keeping Billy with a man.
And Now there’s this.
Raidahs PC enough not to slut shame Joyce. Although she’s trying to hint at it heavily
She’s wise enough not to say anything overtly homophobic. But Gloating about consequences from bigotry crosses the line. ( In a way I think she deeply considered as “ok” but isn’t. She thinks it’s under the boundary but it’s over )
And if Joyce were wise about this she would report it as homophobic sexual harassment. Which it is. Tagging Raidah as a homophobe on her record would be a revenge that Raidah would respect
Even if she were to report it, would it matter? The university (in-comic) has shown they’re willing to sacrifice students. Raidah wasn’t at the protest. Joyce was.
If they were in the same dorm and it happened in that dorm then yes, Ruth would care. That’s about the extent of caring that would occur in this comic.
See I think this massively undersells what Joyce did to Raidah. Raidah has a pretty solid leg to stand on here because she didn’t just catch a stray from Joyce’s selfishness. She or more accurately Jacob was targeted by Joyce. This is after Sarah apologized for using her and backed off after Joe made her realize her motivations were terrible and destroying Jacob’s relationship and weaponizing Joyce were dick moves.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/02-this-is-the-way-that-we-love/respecting/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/03-faz-is-great/sniping/
Joyce is fully responsible for destroying that relationship with either malicious intent or just callous indifference to someone else’s relationship. Worse still wasn’t even really mean to Joyce at this point. They had nothing against each other. Raidah just had a man Joyce wanted and Sarah gave her a very flimsy “Raidah doesn’t deserve Jacob because reasons” justification to go after him.
I do also think Raidah is disproportionately mad at Joyce when she should be equally mad a Jacob for his part in her relationship with him breaking down. He broke up with her after lying to his brother on a date she had been rehearsing for! She was deeply invested in him and I think it was more serious to her than a social connection. If I wanted to be really generous I would even argue that this cold, social climber version of Raidah we have post time skip is a direct response to what Jacob and Joyce did to her. Because the pre time skip Raidah that despises Sarah for sending her academic liability, depressed stoner friend home is a characterization that feels deeply in conflict with the Raidah of today.
So I think you can find real reasons to like Raidah or at least appreciate the bullshit she’s been through thanks to Joyce and her dumb pals. But also Raidah really has a horrible way of doing things that’s probably not morally justified so it’s fine if you hate her for that.
See, there’s one thing I don’t get in this entire line of reasoning (which I’ve seen repeatedly in these comments). Was Jacob supposed to be a person, or a giant Kewpie doll with absolutely no agency? Because frankly if Joyce’s rather awkward attempts at flirting with him were enough to “win him away” from Raidah, I rather think that speaks more to the weakness of his and Raidah’s relationship than to anything about Joyce, and he would have gone off with the very next person who treated him at least halfway decently.
Yet so many treat it as Joyce “stealing” him, as if Jacob couldn’t possibly make a decision of his own accord without some evil witch controlling his mind. Honestly, I see what Joyce did as more giving Jacob an escape hatch, through which he dove eagerly.
I do blame Jacob. Quite a bit actually. Framing what Joyce did as giving Jacob an escape hatch is quite insulting actually because Raidah was seemingly a great girlfriend to him. Trying her best to fit his stupid checklist of qualities. He even self described his time with Raidah as a perfect relationship. Hell Raidah even trusted him to spend time with another woman and go on dates with her! He treated Raidah like an afterthought and only keeps a shred of my respect for choosing not to date Joyce after breaking things off. We should all really be more mad at Jake and also questioning why he threw out most of his professed values to immediately sleep with a girl he’s only known for one day and had one conversation with. Raidah was rehearsing and practicing to meet Jacob’s family that means they were in a spot near where late stage Ruth and Billie were. We loved late stage Ruthless right? That didn’t mean shit to Jacob.
I still think Joyce is most to blame for making a conscious and malicious decision to steal Jacob. Jacob at least didn’t do that. He just let himself be stolen.
That’s all fine though cause Raidah’s really unlikable even back when she arguably was only really someone who had beef with Sarah.
The last line of this strip really reads like a girl that’s decided to choose evil because her boyfriend got seduced by a bubble-brained maga-ass and dumped her.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/bubblebrained/
My read is that Raidah has valid reasons to be mad at Joyce, but this is not only a terrible way to deal with it, it’s also a really confusing one, because it’s got nothing at all to do with the actual problem and, on top of that, Raidah’s overall reaction to what Joyce did was basically to just stew in the background and wait for Joyce to screw up and create an opening…and then Raidah goes for a very weird and confusing angle that, at worst, might just convince Joyce to switch majors and that has nothing to do with either thing Raidah hates Joyce for.
Raidah once again acting like she’s some moral paragon while being one of the worst people on the damn campus.
One of the worst things about Raidah is she THINKS she’s “woke” (I hate the word now because of how alt right nazis use it as a buzzword but it’s the best description) but she is casually ableist and homophobic.
The way she treated dina like she was mentally unfit tk make a decision if her own friendships. She slammed her friend for using the R slur, but while she didn’t say that she still acted like dina couldn’t think for herself.
And now, she pretends like she cares about the protest, but uses the sexuality of joyce to scare her. Wether she herself actually (thinks she) views queer people in a negative light she’s still using it as weapon against her.
It’s the same kind if way some people will respect a trans person new pronouns, but then they end up hating them so start deadnaming and misgendering them on purpose. It’s surface level allyship that’s only used to make themselves look good while bit actually caring.
Like ifnyou compare her to roz who can be an asshole, but at least she actually does believe her activism and wknt specifically use someone’s sexuality against them because they don’t like what they did.
Wait, hold on, I feel like there was sort of an arc about Roz doing exactly that?
Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point (at least in that last panel)
Why would Joyce be confined to Indiana? She and Dorothy can live anywhere else.
Yeah, and lot of people are just too broke to move, but I don’t get the impression these two are.
Heck, Joyce moved here. That’s like, page 1.
She… moved to the dorms. Like, y’know, Sarah. The cost to move to a different actual home, let alone one in a different state is CONSIDERABLY higher.
Which makes her comment even worse tbh: “You’re too damn broke to live anywhere else” is some classist shit.
Tbf, leaving college is the best time to try it out. Freshest network connections, next to zero personal belongings, internships for other companies, schools often have programs in other states or countries over the summer you can sign up for.
I wanna leave Texas, but I have a whole apartment full of stuff, three cats, and a kid. It would take A LOT to even be able to leave.
I like that Joyce straight up acknowledges how horrible Raidah is.
wowzers that’s a lot of comments on this one.
Did the Joyce haters or the Raidah haters win?
I won, by 200 Life Points.
You tasted the sweet taste of victory, clawed from the hands of fate?
[Normal Response To That]
the vibe seems to be “ok yes raidah has a point but dear god is she being a jerk in how she’s making it”
What the hell, how dare people have reasonable points!
Also, aren’t you the horse from horsin’ around?
Radiah seems to be implying they found a newspaper camera and then started making out in front of it, which is not the case and would be wildly out of character.
Raidah’s still a jerk, but she once again is making a good point.
Homophobia is a good point?
When it affects your career prospects, yes. It is an unfortunate reality but it doesn’t make it not true. Raidah, of course, is being a jerk about it though.
You think Raidah was trying to help Joyce?
The timing of the last panel’s lines was amazing, coming shortly after the Asma conversation.
“I refuse to accept the premise that there are times I shouldn’t kiss Dorothy.”
I now imagine other situations in which others might disagree with her kissing Dorothy, such as in the middle of a funeral, or in front of a burning building full of orphans (“fiddling while Rome burns”)…
Funnily enough, Nero MIGHT have been fiddling while Rome burnt, but he wasn’t doing it IN Rome. He was several miles a way, in a completely different town, and when he was informed that Rome was, in fact, burning, he immediately left for Rome.
This is true, but also the fiddle wouldn’t be invented for over a thousand years after Nero. He might have been playing the lyre.
LEARNING!!!!!!! Thank you! ^_^
Also: Isn’t Raidah in one of Leslie’s classes?
Not that we’ve ever seen. They’ve never been in a strip together.
An accurate burn from Raidah. I wonder if we’ll see any kind of realisation qbout the ”care about anything other than yourself” from Joyce now.
I hope not. Joyce cares plenty about her friends.
And maybe clueless about the wider world.
I don’t want Joyce to do any more stunts that will risk her or Ambers life because she cares even more about others.
Nor do I want Joyce opinion to change about Love and Sex. Not until she unlearns her shame.
Joyce CARES a lot about others. Indeed, she cares very deeply about others. Her problem is that she isn’t exactly terribly wise in how she SHOWS that care about others, and between her autism and her extremely sheltered upbringing, she has a LOT of harmful habits and ideas that she doesn’t realize are harmful or off putting to others.
If you compare Joyce now to where she was at the start of the comic, or to another character with a similar ideology as the one she started with like Mary, you can see that Joyce cares about others rather a lot. She’s not exactly SMART about how she cares, and definitely takes dumb actions that don’t help others far more than she should – but that does not change the fact that she very much DOES care.
I believe actions more than I believe words of beliefs about herself. She has been very unpleasant for quite a while now. She seems practically solipsistic, and lacking object permanence.
She cares a lot about a small group of people. Other people are lucky to be “that guy who had a hat”.
Not really. Joyce is probably the most caring character in the comic.
You can care a whole lot and still treat people like garbage and the fact that you care in itself does not erase hurtful actions and neglectful tendencies. Btw.
Classic case of right point made by the wrong person. The last point is poignant but of course the rest of it is just meaningless rudeness because of her already low opinion of Joyce, but perhaps that’s exactly what she needs to actually consider it meaningful.
This fucking asshole has clearly never seen a fucking mirror, what a piece of shit, I hope she gets the Mike treatment but without the heroic part.
Fuck you, Raidah
Was this originally the Halloween comic? Because that ice burn is worthy of the Halloween Blizzard of 1991. Raidah has never been cooler than she is right now, she is an ice witch, a frost maiden, a winter queen. I never liked her before, but damn do I love her right this moment.
I don’t like Raidah.
That’s the post.
….oh no
I can understand why you are upset, Raidah, but there is such a thing as being way too petty.
As well as having way more people to be upset about concerning the events of those protests than those two. I don’t think their actions even caused any negative impact to the cause.
Learn to set apart your personal grievance from the llegitimate causes, you fictional character I am trying to give advice to!
Not that Raidah would have known this, but as others have said it’s not like Joyce ever actually wanted to be a teacher. She picked her major because it’d help her homeschool the future children she was planning to have, but her only real goal for attending college was finding a husband that would one day put some babies in her.
So unfortunately most of this strip isn’t as effective a callout as it could have been, but Raidah is completely correct in the final panel.
Shogo right, she probably just unknowingly helped Joyce.
She’s been on autopilot about her major.
I don’t think Raidah DOES effective callouts. She has superficial liberal standards so she can’t call Joyce a boyfriend/ girlfriend stealing hussy. ( Although she tried hard to imply it and ineffective as selfish coming from a social climbing user like her )
Holy lack of self-awareness, Batman!
There’s certainly something there about how many of the comments (rightly) going into great depth at how Raidah’s opening jab is laced with casual homophobia, whether she meant it or not, but doing so while calling her a “bongo.”
Also the casual abelism of “if you didn’t physically go to a protest you don’t get to have an opinion.”
Can’t wait to see the same people say any gay person that doesn’t show up to protest on the doorfront of SCOTUS this Friday doesn’t get to have an opinion on gay marriage.
In order to be an approved member of the LGBT you need to have your card stamped to show you have attended five protests or pride rallies.
Does the “+” need extra rallies, or do you get that from community service?
Oh community service, absolutely.
Community service top? Is that anything?
I’m disappointed in you. You were the FIRST person in the comment section that I’d expect to go, “if you can’t make anything a thing, you just don’t want it bad enough, amateur” or something along those lines.
Do better, Taffy.
*shakes head*
(“this is a joke” disclaimer, just to be sure we’re all on the same page)
Please realize that “that person in the comments you recognize” is not a public figure and furthermore that if this were Bluesky you’d be blocked for harassment at this point by people who aren’t even involved.
On one hand, even joking expectations of higher wit make me want to reflexively go straight-faced out of uncharacteristic contrarianism. On a different hand, unaffiliated with the first hand, I could totally be more aggressive with my word choices from time to time.
Community service top. It’s a thing now, deal with it.
nse, this isn’t Bluesky and nobody’s fucking harassing me. It’s fine for people to joke around, actually. Don’t take offense for someone who hasn’t been offended, it makes you look weak.
…I don’t fucking remember who I thought this was.
Ignore me. Sorry.
Yeah, the amount of times I’ve seen the B word get censored in these comments actually made me far more uncomfortable than anything in today’s page of the comic. Casual misogyny is alive and well in 2025, and that’s just depressing.
100% and I feel people are even more reluctant to so much as accept that such language even “might” be a problem.
(even more reluctant regarding misogyny than racism, is what I tried to say)
I also wonder if knowing it’s gonna be censored also plays into that a little.
The thing that most bothers me about it is that so many people phrase it as something like “oh NOW I get to say it about this character for real! now it’s justified! mmmm yesssss”. Like the word is in a really weird state with regards to reclamation and/or de-fanging but some people have just gotta make absolutely sure that no, they DO mean it as a gendered misogynist insult and bygawd they’re gonna defend that.
I wasn’t censored; I actually typed the word “bongo”.
I don’t disagree with most of this post, but I do have to disagree with the last bit. If somebody were saying *in general* that people who don’t go to the protest don’t get to have a say, I could see that being ableist. But we’re talking about why *Raidah specifically* wasn’t there, if she claims to care so much. Raidah has no disabilities that would keep her from being able to attend. Unless you’re responding to a specific attitude expressed more generally somewhere in the sea of comments, in which case, well, fair enough I guess, I’m not going to read all these threads. <_<
Come to NJ, Joyce. We always need more teachers, my district at least has a powerful union, the pay is decent, and I guarantee no one will care about your sexuality.
What a bongo
While Raidah is clearly trying to upset Joyce, this is also bizarrely helpful. She has brought a potential problem to Joyce’s attention early enough to explore solutions (like changing her major, or looking for jobs outside Indiana).
Uck, Raidah REALLY is just a terrible person, isn’t she? She’s just trying anything and everything she can to hurt Joyce, and while she DOES (unfortunately) have a point about Joyce being in a lesbian relationship being a significant hindrance in getting a job as a teacher in far too much of the US right now, Raidah is making it VERY clear that she’s not saying that as a way to help Joyce reevaluate her choices and help her make better decisions about her life, but to try to hit Joyce where she thinks it’ll hurt most. Which really is a vile way to go about her life.
I get it that Raidah is annoyed about Joyce (and yes, that a lot of people are annoyed with how this story played out and may feel similarly to her) – but while I used to think that it was just a case of misunderstanding between Raidah and Sarah driving the animosity between them, at this point it’s becoming pretty clear that Raidah is just a nasty person who really is just trying to see the worst in others. And takes WAY too much joy in hurting them.
Well.. least we know Raidah will do great as a lawyer, cuz she always finds the one argument that’ll absolutely kill her opposition…
Yeah, arguments that contain personalities regarding the opposing counsel tend not to do that well in most courts.
that is also true
Crazy possible scenario: imagine if Raidah ever minds her own business.
Cue Lionel Hutz’s vision of a world without lawyers.
I realized I wanted to be a teacher when I was twelve, realized I was queer when I was thirteen, and have lived with anxiety about the intersection of those two things ever since. So yeah, fuck Raidah for this attack, glad I don’t think Joyce actually wants to be a teacher.
Fuck Raidah’s point. I hope the next panel is a cow falling on her from out of the clear blue sky.
It’s always bad to prophesy disaster. Dashing people’s hopes is never a constructive thing to do, and it’s almost impossible to do in good faith.
This sort of cruelty is common, regardless of the bully’s stance on other issues. I’ve seen it from left, right and center.
Just don’t predict someone’s future. You really don’t know, and it can’t possibly come out well.
I hate that I don’t particularly disagree with Raidah.
Oh no! Idiot children did something stupid in their first year of college? Who has ever seen that happen before?
But hey! Why not bring myself down to below someone else’s level to stop them when they’re minding their own business to say something to them designed to hurt them?
She’s obviously never worked in education. There are gay people everywhere being people, mostly good teachers, and teachers are at such a rare premium that nobody can bother to give a shit considering how little they’re paid. It’s the same reason you could never test coders for weed, even when it was illegal. The demand overrides a weird prejudice.
I worked ~20 years in public education in Texas (a state about as conservo as Indiana). Saw several gay people as teachers. Wasn’t a problem in the hiring. We don’t have half as many teachers as we need, so it’s unusual to not hire one for queerness. (But it does all depend on the principal doing the hiring. I’ve seen a couple evil ones who would thusly discriminate.)
Plenty of LGBTQ+ people in teaching, plenty of pushback about those people being out, in my experience. People absolutely give a shit, and many schools put caving to parents above supporting teachers.
Lots of schools are great, too! But I worked at a school where a lesbian teacher was fired for trying to support queer students, despite the fact that she was a good teacher (better than a couple other ones in the grade band) and the school was perpetually understaffed. Then I got called down to the principal’s office later that week so she could explain to me how the school wasn’t homophobic. (I wasn’t out to students/families, but I had my pronouns in the HR portal.)
Basically, it’s fine as long as no parents (/another staff member who didn’t like that she said “queer,” in this case) complain. So. That’s a fun gamble.
For real, lesbians are the backbone of education in Indiana. Source: my many lesbian Indiana teacher friends. 😁
you can tell a lot about a person’s insecurities by paying attention to what they think a really cutting personal insult sounds like
“Guess she still doesn’t like me” said Joyce, returning to her ice cream.
Raidah isn’t wrong. But also: takes one to know one.
It’s good to see that Raidah’s over what happened with Jacob.
+1! Raidah never will, and hopefully Joyce learns there’s no value there in worrying about it.
I’d rate Joyce’s chances of becoming a teacher as fair as Raidah’s becoming a lawyer. Normally a Muslim, woman, and person of color would be a liability in Indiana, but Raidah is a social climbing sell out so chances are she’ll find a job in the Trump administration.
This is a really weird thing to say tbh
Is it? People like Kash Patel, Clarence Thomas, Vivek Ramasamy and Condi Rice exist after all. Though granted they aren’t Muslim and Rice isn’t MAGA
I mean yeah it’s really fucking weird to say about Raidah specifically because Raidah has displayed no sort of sell-out tendencies as it regards her race, gender, or religion. Her original disdain for Joyce was partially because Joyce was a conservative Christian. Raidah’s politics are pretty firmly left-leaning, she’s just an asshole to characters we like so people lose their minds about her.
She reminds me of my congressman Abe Hamadeh who’s an Arab Muslim who supports Trump and was rewarded for his loyalty by being his nominee and the Republican majority made that wish come true. While Raidah is left leaning she befriends people on the basis of utility so it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if she sold out her supposed values. If Bulmeria means so much to her then why wasn’t she there at the protest?
There are many perfectly legitimate reasons why Raidah may not have been at the protest, and it’s honestly mindboggling to me that people have a myopic view of political activism that they think Attending A Protest is the be-all and end-all of support one can display for a cause. Irrespective of what your congressman has done Raidah has not shown any tendency toward aligning herself with conservative political interests. She is not a conservative. Abe Hamadeh is. He began his political career as a border hawk and election conspiracist. Raidah is social climber who leverages her social relationships to her advantage. That does not translate to being willing to sell out her core beliefs. Let’s have some perspective, please/
Dot just want to say love all your comments on this thread. This comment section is driving me bananas lol
Agreed. As someone who gets equally fed up with a bunch of the comments here *and* the Reddit, I basically just scroll down til I see their pic and start my reading there
Thank you, but please use she/her pronouns for me.
True, you make a good point there about her declared disdain for Joyce and dismissing her as someone that “believes in angels” and her appreciation for what Jacobs brother did supports that position that she will be a leftist progressive at heart even if she’s not above weaponizing rhetoric to hurt people in her crosshairs.
Fwiw I don’t think she’s really homophobic or particularly insensitive to queer people, she just doesn’t let that stop her from phrasing it the way she does if it can hurt Joyce. I don’t think she would say it in earshot of others or put it in writing either
What do you think is actually left leaning about Raidah?
She very much came across as classist in that lunch confrontation with Joyce, way back when. Which isn’t really a big left trait. She talked up Harrison for the trans rights win, but that was at least potentially just aimed at Jacob (or maybe hoping to trigger fundie Joyce), rather than being her own admiration of him.
Can yall stop nuking the containment thread please
Not that it’s going to be especially effective on any strip where Raidah gets to speak, but still
It’s gotta be some kind of stupid spite, since damn it sure is the opposite of effective at making there be fewer haters in the comments.
If it makes you feel any better, my off topic diffusion thread about ice cream was also flagged out of existence, and I also assume that was by accident but still :/
Who has a problem with ice cream? Furthermore how are there so many people who have a problem with people talking about ice cream flavors, that they flag it out of existence?
You may or may not have noticed that there are a LOT of joyless people in this commetariat.
Joyless and insecure. They probably think you’re talking about them specifically, right here.
And I’m probably some kind of bigot for assuming they’re unhappy, too.
You’re being really cruel right now. Ice cream killed their parents, and you’re mocking that.
I am and I’ll do it again. (“Mock them, or kill their parents?” “We’ve tried it both ways!”)
Never underestimate the comments thread to make wildly personal assumptions about other users.
From memory, a few years ago our benevolent host asked for people not to post off-topic threads early on in the comments section. And I like ice cream with cherries in
Joyce was consuming cream of the iced variety thus it was on topic.
Good Day!
Thank you for affirming that an ice cream thread existed because I commented in it and was having a questioning-my-own-sanity moment trying to find it again to check for responses because I couldn’t imagine how talking about ice cream would have gotten moderated out of existence but hey I guess we are living in that world now.
I am starting to worry that Willis is genuinely crashing out over this whole thing. Rewriting the comic to respond to criticism is not like him at all, and it’s really telling which criticisms actually got under his skin. I am starting to wonder if Joyce freaking out in inappropriate ways over fearing she has been inappropriate is also supposed to be autobiographical as well.
Im really sad the comment thread about not judging anyone’s character by the state they grew up in or live in got deleted cuz it’s one I really deeply resonate with.
yeah :/
awe well, I guess the comments are basically writings in beach sand when it comes right down to it,
it’s not like we could ever treat this place like the center of the universe, and for many reasons this is actually a *good* thing
*plays “Tapha Niang” by Toumani Diabaté on hacked muzak*
YEAH i’m so pissed its gone. I had shit to say, there!
You know what, I’ll just repeat what I said here:
There are leftists in the south, there are queers in the south, and there are A LOT of PoC in the south. Most important overall, *there are good people all over the south, irrespective of those boxes*.
Gloating about ‘leaving southern states to suffer in their choices’ is evil. Telling us marginalized to ‘just move to a blue state’ is trite AT BEST.
We have homes, we have family, connectionconnections, community, roots here. Why should we have to flee that because other people are bigots? Why are we expected to sever ourselves from out homes ?to ‘earn’ the right to be considered One Of The Good Ones?
That’s without touching the risk, expense, and lonliness that comes from moving states away!
Can she just die already holy shit.
Can we really cut it out with the “I dislike them so they must die lol it’s only fiction” stuff?
This is a step up for Raidah, who last was purity testing Joyce for protesting wrong.
No, homophobic harassment is definitely worse than purity testing. Neither is good, but this is absolutely worse.
Whoof, that alt text hits hard
Yeah I think I’m bouncing out of the comment section for today. So many of you can’t help but be really weird about brown women
Being brown doesn’t give her a pass for being a total bongo. Sarah’s pretty brown, and managed to express her disapproval of Joyce and Dorothy’s actions without being homophobic and hateful about it. Asma’s a little less brown, but not that much, and tried to use this as a teaching moment (might have succeeded, except that she and the girls were talking past each other a lot, rather than communicating clearly).
I think people are being really weird wanting an 18/19 year old to die even with how awful she acts, and I think Dot is right that color and religion have a part to play in it (given how quickly many of the commenters just assumed Asma MUST have been homophobic the other day). Raidah’s not a lost cause, even as horrible as she is lol. She’s a kid in her sophomore year, she’s not even 20. My brother went into college a staunch Republican and left a socialist, calling for a kid’s death in a realistic setting is just very not cool.
Like it’s not even hard to imagine Raidah eventually having a change of heart. It literally only requires someone out-Raidah Raidah. She’s not actually attached to any of her beliefs, not like Mary.
You didn’t respond to earlier comments (which is fine, it’s a big comment section today) but I’m still mildly iffed at the insinuation that anyone saying Raidah is committing homophobia in this strip is because they’re prejudiced against brown women.
I don’t dislike Raidah as a whole (though she has her moments), and I think she has potential for a more nuanced arc, but if her actions in this strip are weaponizing homophobia then people should be okay to point it out without being accused of racial bias if they’re doing so in a fair manner.
Yeah…definitely find it interesting how I’ve had people call me homophobic or a Puritan for being unhappy with character reactions or plot pacing, yet I’m expected to extend a similar understanding for those who seem *reaaally* upset at Sarah/Raidah/Lucy for “reasons” <_<
We tried being weird about ice cream but it turned out that wasn’t allowed so I guess going right for the flashpoint of controversy is the only acceptable form of commenting on the comic.
I’m sorry about that. Take your time.
it was likely flagged out by accident, but ah well fun while it lasted
@Dot mood for REALS, im also gonna take a break
woops this was meant to be a reply to Strain Of Thought’s comment just above, ah well
Based on what we know about Raidah and her past interactions with Dorothy and Joyce, this is all very predictable and in keeping with her character. She was going to find out and she was going to do something like this. Just like Mary will at a later date. Jacob is unlikely to approve either, since he warned Joe about Joyce. Jacob will be entirely right. Raidah will be a bongo about it. Mary will be wrong and a bongo. The cascade of consequences continue.
Raidah actively going out of her way to be a jerk. Shocking.
A moment of silence for the cruel shattered remains of every window in Raidah’s glass house.
Well, the comments section today if nothing else proves that any given way of deciding who the “sides” are in this comment section is nonsense.
My side is that everybody showing up in the strip today sucks ass, but I’m willing to give it a pass because I’m riding the “Cheney’s dead” high.
It kind of fell flat for me because I definitely thought he was already dead.
Damn, you’ve been living in a reality better than the rest of us have for a while, then. 🙂
I was on the ice cream side. Apparently we were the real villains all along.
So, we better brace for tomorrow.
The best part is that when you combine this with her assumption that Joyce and Dorothy planned the kiss, it implies that she literally cannot fathom that other people do not see the world in her warped, transactional view.
Wow, Raidah is a breath of fresh air???
No, it’s still the same stale narcissistic homophobia we’ve gotten a thousand times before in both real and fictional worlds.
You’re right. It’s amazing that this storyline has been so bad that I’m excited about homophobia
Man, seriously, *Fuck you,* Raidah.
Sustaining bigotry is the same thing as just being a bigot, you know, you homophobic brat.
Raidah’s an arse. Joyce can teach somewhere else if one place is too backward.
I love Raidah as a character so much. She’s a Dorothy who doesn’t let the ambition crumble at first contact with reality. She believes there are more important things than your personal feelings and desires and is genuinely willing to put it all on the line for her goals. I love her frustration with people who don’t have any vision. I love her practicality.
I think her version of “dumbing of age” will be realizing it’s not a sustainable way to live life, like a smarter version of Dorothy realizing her ambitions were going to be doing war crimes lol. I’d love to see her get a real arc, though who knows with this comment section/audience… Billie is the exact same except less competent at it, but she gets 1000 tries at redemption from the same audience. I wonder if there’s any reason we’d see them differently… Surely not a paper bag test situation. Surely..
And she’s also a petty asshole who can be really cruel to people against whom she holds a grudge, like here. She contains multitiude. Raidah is easily one of the best antagonist in the strip, realistically flawed, layered, and nuanced in a way that a lot of the commentariat refuses to engage with because it’s so much easier just to demonize her because she’s mean to the protagonists (wonder what about her might elicit such a disproportionately hostile response!). I’d love to see her get more focus and an arc of her own.
Not that it has to revolve around a relationship with a man of course and it’s definitely a crackship but I think Walky/Raidah would genuinely be a great vector for significant character growth on both Raidah and Walky’s part, along the lines you’re talking about here.
Show me anytime Billie has done something as cruel as this. Or calling Walky a stunted manchild behind his back after inviting him to breakfast. (Yeah, that’s a healthy ship.) Or bullying Sarah for a year with comments about hoping she chokes to death on her food. Sorry, Raidah has more than earned her reputation.
Wow, she insulted Walky behind his back? That’s totally dissuading to me, the girl whose OTP is Billie/Ruth.
Like maybe, just maybe, I preference my ships based on potential for character growth and development, not whatever provides the most saccharine marshmallow fluff per capita.
I’m not sure what kind of character development Walky would get out of being abused, but if that’s what you’re into, enjoy, I guess.
Let me spell it out for you then:
Wally needs someone who will push him to grow and develop himself into the mature and thoughtful young man he is fully capable of being. He needs someone who will make him move beyond his comfort zone and apply himself and who doesn’t take his guff. Raidah, meanwhile, needs someone who can encourage her to chill the fuck out and find more enjoyment in life’s smaller pleasures, and who will force her to acknowledge other perspectives.
Your issue here is that you are seemingly only capable of seeing and approaching these characters as they are, as if suspended perpetually in aspic, whereas I am taking a long view and projecting out where these characters could grow and where they could take each other.
Yeah sure, Raidah was mean to Walky behind his back before she’d gotten any opportunity to know him. She often makes snap judgments like that. Maybe it’s something she might be able to grow out of with the influence a bit more down-to-earth.
Also “abuse” give me a goddamn break with this shit.
I actually disagree. I don’t think walky needs someone to lead him by the hand or be a kick in the pants like Lucy and Dorothy. I think he worked so well with Amber BECAUSE she had no expectations for him. Which made him raise his expectations for himself. He needs to want to be better, not told he has to be better.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a partner externally motivating Walky to br better – that’s one of the things I always liked about his relationship with Joyce in the Walkyverse. But I recognize you’re a big Walky/Amber shipper so on this I think we can just chalk it down to difference of opinion.
I feel like walky and Joyce worked well cuz they helped each other grow. Like I guess I feel like outside of amber most of walkys girlfriends didn’t feel like equal partnerships. Walky felt out of his league with Dorothy and Lucy kinda put him in a pedestal. Joyce and walky felt balanced.
Someone pointed this out a couple of comics ago, but it’s a big difference between:
– Walky+Dorothy, where he was trying to get better because she was bullying him to and/or he wanted to be “worthy” of her; and
– Walky+Amber, where he just felt better about stuff in general and tried to get better just to be better.
Billie did call Walky the R-word, early on.
yuuuup
Yeah, that sucks. Not on the same level as what Raidah does.
I mean no but no in that it’s, uh, worse. Like as someone subject to both, hypothetically, someone pointing out that bigotry exists as a veiled threat because of some conflict about boyfriends would suck but having my supposed best friend since childhood actually do the oppressing by calling me a slur for not violently repressing my mental issues enough is, I’m not quite sure how to emphasize this sufficiently, Really Bad.
Right? Saying “you are now the target of institutionalized homophobia and this will affect your career prospects” in a mean way is not as bad as directly calling someone a slur!
True but she’s evoking homophobic rhetoric in order to hurt her which is…telling. It’s like when someone is making a comic to critique harmful or problematic but feel the need to make the bad guy fat or otherwise not conventionally attractive so you feel more inclined to agree with the handsome snaker. It kinda calls into question how much of an ally you are when given the opportunity you would jump at the chance to use societal bigotry as weapon.
Astariel, you’re assuming a ship has to be healthy to be worth audience investment. Some of the most fun dynamics are ones that are deeply toxic and screwed up.
De gustibus non disputandum. Personally, I think that would veer too close to abuse for me to stomach.
I read and reread this comic and swear I could hear, loud as day, Chappelle show’s Rick James as she walked away. “That was COLD BLOODED~!”. Raidah there’s a difference between taking a swipe at someone and impaling them. I wanted the drama spicy, but whew!
Hey Raidah — Herman Munster called.
He wants his flattop haircut back
A question – Has Raidah actually given a crap about anything but herself in the strip? I genuinely do not remember.
Because I think people are assigning traits to her we just haven’t seen. There’s moments I remember but they looked a lot more self-serving than anything else.
No, never. She’s only concerned with maximizing her own power and taking revenge on the people she hates.
That’s what I remember. Now whether she was in the right or wrong is irrelevent, but I know her feud with Sarah was based off Sarah calling her dad and Raidah thinking that was inappropriate (which it could have been! we’ve seen dads suck in the comic before!) but also being kind of a dick to Sarah even on the first meet.
Honestly, I think Raidah just dislikes poor people.
*her roommate’s dad.
I think that Raidah clearly seemed to be angry about what Sarah did because she had fun hanging out with Dana, and her dad (parents?) took her out of school. Hopefully to get her help, but I don’t know that we’ve been told what happened to Dana after that, or if either Sarah or Raidah even know.
Bottom line is that what Raidah saw being inappropriate in Sarah calling Dana’s dad is how it affected Raidah.
According to Raidah, Dana is not doing well.
Citation needed. Seriously, as far as I can remember, we have seen *zero* followup from Raidah on what happened with Dana.
When we met Raidah, she was using Dana’s departure as a cudgel to bully and harass Sarah, but as far as we know, she hasn’t even spoken to her since she left.
The answer is probably that on the spectrum of psychopathology Raidah is a half bubble from being a malignant narcissist. All relationships are transactional, all friends are assets. Her rage is only incurred when you touch her stuff (Dana, Jacob). She is probably incapable of introspection, hence her projective statement to Joyce, ‘There’s no use in trying to shame you’, because she doesn’t understand how that would work. She doesn’t attack Joyce on any of her qualities, she attacks what she perceives as Joyce’s asset; ‘Your low paying degree major is now worth even less because of what you did’.
Sorry, long winded answer. No, she doesn’t give a crap about anyone but herself. That concept is invisible to her.
She did choose not to report Sarah for assaulting her in public (after realizing her friend group was assuming Dina was mentally handicapped and getting a bullying vibe from it). She definitely feels like she’s capable of shame and the understanding when she takes things too far – but sets the bar pretty high for that.
Telling someone she hates for trying to steal her boyfriend that she’s likely just torpedoed her long term plans because of other people’s homophobia clearly doesn’t rate as high in her eyes as participating in what became unprovoked bullying of an autistic woman.
“Projecting, however. That’s something I will NEVER not find a reason to do.”
Ha! Beat me to it!
Raidah’s less evil than Mary, but a lot more competent, so maybe in balances out? Mary’s basically been a buffoon ever since she got smacked down for her attempted blackmail of Ruth. Last we saw her she very half-heartedly tried to recruit Joyce to transphobia, (and failed completely), and showed up to counter-protest with a sign she didn’t notice had been changed to be a self-own. Raidah’s a lot smarter, and thus a lot more dangerous, even if her actual beliefs aren’t as repellent as Mary’s.
I want a storyline in which Raidah has to unpack, even a little, the pressure she’s under from her parents, real or imagined, and whether The Plan she has for herself was ever realistic.
Because that’s 100% what I get from her when she lashes out at people. They’re not planning. They’re not thinking of the future. Their plans won’t work. Raidah’s plan will work, and if you get in the way of that plan, you need to be taken apart.
It isn’t the sort of thing you do if you’re happy living in your own skin, and I’m frankly interested in seeing it a little less monolithic, if she’s going to ascend to a higher tier of character plot.
(I also don’t want similar unpacking for Mary because she’s more useful in contrast to Joyce, IE as the fundie girl who sees no need to start examining her bullshit.)
You are one of the few people in this comment section who makes a consistent effort to analyze and understand Raidah’s character and I want to thank you for that.
It’s fun to think about! Willis may have their stumbles, but very few of their characters are Just One Thing. Parsing out what went into them and where they might be going is something that really keeps my investment in these goofballs.
That would be a very fun character arc. We never see the real Raidah, imo. I don’t know if Raidah knows what the real Raidah is. All she knows is that she needs to be financially stable and successful to be worth anything, and anyone who doesn’t prioritize that is worth nothing at all because she’d be worth nothing at all.
You know, she isn’t 100% wrong about Joyce. But really, Joyce is focused on what she wants for herself in the way that any typical 18-19 year old is focused on what they want for themselves.
My take is that Raidah is displaying more projection than a 24 screen movie theater. (Assuming those haven’t gone out of business yet.) And by that, I mean that what Raidah wants for herself is find things about other people to make her mad.
IDK about 24 screens, but there are plenty with 8ish screens around here. I used to go to the theater at least a couple times a year, until they stopped showing things I wanted to see. Now it’s mostly just the latest Sonic movies.
Don’t worry Joyce, leaving Indiana is almost universally a win. Get out as quickly as you can, your life will improve tenfold. 😐
Raidah is almost completely right based on what she knows, and sometimes sort of accidentally right, but she is not in a position ethically to set straight… MOST people. She basically only knows Joyce in a way that paints Joyce as manipulative and cynical also, so she’s not out to fix things. So yeah, that’s a threat.
Jesus, Joyce doesn’t even know Raidah has a serious grudge, or even is the grudge-holding type, or that she does the social climbing thing in a cynically analytical way. She apparently isn’t even aware she was patronizing to Raidah, let alone crossed her. Combined with Joyce’s resistance to detecting consequences and she really has no idea what’s going on.
…which Joyce IS arguably manipulative, but we forgive her more because main character syndrome and because she’s demonstrably a dumbass.
“You’ve never cared about anything other than what you want for yourself”
Sure that’s not just projection, Raidah?
I don’t think she could be projecting more without turning herself inside out.
I mean its projection but its also not entirely wrong
She’s seizing the means of projection
Yeah, Raidah, deciding whether dating someone in freshmen year aligns with your post-graduation career goals is something *you* do, not normal people.
Like we can consider how Joyce got with Dorothy without thinking of consequences but “how this would affect a future career” was absolutely not even on the list of things to care about. Nor frankly should they be? She’s 18?
I mean, can you blame her? She’d lined up the best guy and they were both pre-law, and they were going to be a power couple!
And it’s not at all like some fundie girl who went to college to get her MRS degree, and majored in elementary education so she could homeschool her kids.
Worlds apart. No comparison.
I mean, yes, this is the most delicious part of Raidah and Joyce being foils for each other.
I’d go further and argue that most people Raidah dislikes, legitimate grievances aside, are people she dislikes because they embody aspects of herself that she’s not super comfortable with.
Like it’s definitely true of Dorothy.
Sarah may be an exception. Both want to be lawyers, but beyond that and perhaps a vindictive streak, the two don’t have a ton in common.
Well this Fundie girl tried to steal her man and did contribute to them breaking up so Raidah is understandably annoyed with Joyce XD
Yeah, I think the relationship was doomed regardless, but I think that Raidah has every right to dislike Joyce for that regardless, it is irrelevant to if Joyce wronged her, which I will freely concede that she did.
Specifically, he was only the best guy because his brother is an extremely famous, notable, wealthy lawyer. Nothing in the comic has yet portrayed her as someone who actually cares about anyone or anything beyond her success. Joyce was incredibly wrong with Jacob, but she also inadvertently saved him from two girls who were not interested in him as a complete person, which is the exact thing he fears about people wanting to get into relationships with him. He got out just in time – he even tried to warn Joe, “hey man, I don’t know if you’re colourblind, but at some point down the line this exact behavior will burn you, too.”
Lot of people blaming joyce for a picture that she did not consent to being plastered over the front page of the newspaper. Hell, the editor herself admitted that it was just there for a thirst trap (albeit her own)
Raidah *does not know* that Joyce didn’t mean to get the attention she did.
Raidah also *does not care* that Joyce didn’t mean to get the attention she did.
Well, yeah? She fucking hates her? Do you spend a significant amount of time caring about the motivations of people you hate? From Raidah’s perspective, Joyce is a homewrecker who not only broke her and Jacob up, but is now gallivanting around sucking face with other people who are in relationships. Why should she feel she has to give this trifling white girl the benefit of the doubt?
Raidah and Jacob broke up because their relationship was a sham. Joyce did wrong for sure, but they would’ve been ok if their relationship was worth a damn in the first place.
Raidah just cares about Raidah, hence her concerns about her own social status, the status of everyone else, and her going out of her own way to insult someone on grounds of homophobia.
You seem to be caught up in people attacking women of color, but Raidah’s the only one who gets shit on regularly… because she’s an awful person. Everyone in this comic gets blasted in the comments ftr, at some point or another, but Raidah is a self-centered hypocrite, so she gets dunked on a lot.
Except, no, that’s not true, every single fucking time a woman of color pushes back on Joyce and Dorothy’s little love nest, they immediately get accused of homophobia. It happened to Raidah, it happened to Asma, it happened to Sarah. It’s a pattern, it’s racist, and I’m sick and tired of it.
And this isn’t new – the reason we even have the “female dog”->”bongo” censoring is because people were REALLY trigger happy with it when Roz gave Joyce any kind of pushback whatsoever.
I love the cognitive dissonance/whiplash of like the WORST most awful manipulative person just–dropping potentially life-changing truth bombs all over the place. Out of cruelty. But like, that parting comment, while mean as fuck and unfair on some level, has the potential to prompt some really necessary self-examination on Joyce’s part about her recent behavior. IF she takes it in, I guess we’ll see.
Yeah, I hate that Raidah is saying this, and I think she’s showing a tremendous lack of moral courage that *this* is her angle to get a dunk on Joyce, but I think it does tie into something Jocelyn tried to teach Joyce about picking her battles for the sake of people other than herself prior, back during when those two had to help Becky break into her own house, and which Joyce didn’t really get it back then. Maybe she’s closer to getting it now.
Ambrose Bierce’s very cynical dictionary satire.
“Egotist
(n.) A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.”
Of course, Raidah was the first to lecture Joyce, what an hypocrite.
LOVE THE COMIC, SINCE 20 years!!! congratulations on character development
“You’ve smooched a girl and ruined your life” is a logical construct that you’d likely form if you’ve ever spent a nontrivial amount of time wondering if smooching a girl would ruin your life.
best interpretation, closeted raidah is tragic & perfect
You’re literally so smart
I’d say that this would be my last post in comments for a while, but that would be a dirty lie.
Go Raidah! Except, why bother? Guess you found a hill you want to die on. (I agree with you on this one, personally.)
god it has not been great to read the comments section (both here and on the patreon) whenever a brown muslim women is on screen these last few weeks.
Im so sorry
mood
just
I’ve had a fucking enough
👀
You know what I just realized? This arc could have been Mary. It *should* have been Mary.
Mary will get her turn. Raidah is someone who dislikes Dorothy and outright detests Joyce, so there was basically no chance that this encounter wasn’t going to happen.
this
Trip and fall, Raidah. 👀
1000+ comments holy FU–
… it’s only a matter of time now before Willis decides to shut them off completely for a day or two, wouldn’t be the first time he’s done this to address scrolling walls of hate
Good news: its not really about dojo this time!
Bad news: its something Worse
At least engagement is high?
yeah, I just wanted to catch up with what got posted today/late last night, before the new comic, and… wtf??
I don’t live in Indiana (or the US) but I feel like that’s a surprisingly doomery take (while acknowledging that of course Raidah wants Joyce to feel like she doomed herself, so maybe that’s on her)? Like I know that things are consistently getting worse right now, but surely there are out gay schoolteachers there?
I’ve been reading DoA since the beginning, and I think this has enraged me more than any strip Willis has ever made.
So I’m going to unpack that, and also well done, I guess.
Is Pre-Law not hard enough, Raidah?
Do you not have any hobbies, any relationships you’d like to pursue?
Even Mary likes to draw and make out with her boyfriend sometimes
when she’s not being a bigot.
I just don’t get how people have the energy and time management
to go out of their way to be a bongo to someone.
I can barely muster the energy to maintain my corporeal form,
and spend time/social energy on people I do care about,
much less intentionally be in the same space and wasting
time/energy/oxygen on someone I dislike.
Willis should’ve left the comments off for this one. I really wish people would approach this scene with more compassion, instead it’s just “wow Raidah’s being a real c-word” or “Raidah is completely right here and not homophobic.” surely there’s room for both girls to be wrong without drawing and quartering one of the few Muslim characters in the strip.
like, there’s no way to say “I hope you get fired for being gay” without being a giant homophobe. it’s not giving her a cold hard truth bomb. it’s telling a gay person she deserves to be fired for being gay. it’s cruelty on the basis of Joyce’s sexuality.
and at the same time, Joyce HAS been selfish and has screwed up a handful of relationships. she broke up Jacob and Raidah because she thought she’d make a better girlfriend than her. she cheated on her boyfriend, one of the few guys on campus who takes cheating seriously and even has trauma from it. she gloated to Walky that she was dating Dorothy, while Dorothy was trying to let him down easy, leading him down a depressive spiral. and during a protest against genocide, she and Dorothy chose to center their relationship over meeting the actual needs of the protest.
no shit one of the Muslim characters would consider her selfish. they completely failed at being white allies, which is the whole reason they go apologize to Asma in the first place.